It Could Happen Here Weekly 189

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool 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 (00:27):
Welcome it could happen here. A podcast that is in
many cases about organizing. I AnGR host MEA Wong and
with me is one of the most experienced organizers I know,
Margaret Kiljoy.

Speaker 4 (00:36):
Oh no, hi, I'm a little out of practice, but
I have done it a lot.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
You know, Margaret says this and also has been doing
shit for like one bazillion years. This is and I
will say this, the sign of you that you are
running into a good organizer is when you talk to
them about their organizing and they immediately start downplaying it.
That's when you know you haven't captured a good organizer.
If they started immediately going, I'm the best fucking organizer

(01:04):
in the world. Run like hell, this is an asshole
who sucks. Somebody's like, ah, like I did this a
million years ago, I'm not good at it. Yeah it
did matter, blah blah blah blah. Very good organizer, thank you. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:17):
I remember once I went to a thing wait that
was put on and there was this, uh they were
kind of turfy people who are coming through and we
didn't totally know that right away, and their their pitch
about why they were such a good experienced organizers, as
one of them was like, and this person has been
organizing for more than three years, and it was just like, Okay,

(01:38):
every person you are giving this talk to has done
this for at least three times as.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
Long as that.

Speaker 4 (01:46):
And don't get me wrong, if you're listening and you've
been organizing for three years, you've learned a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
I'm not trying to tell you you're a bad organizer.

Speaker 4 (01:51):
You might be a better organizer and someone's been doing
it longer, but don't use that as your selling point.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Oh anyway, that's very funny. Yeah, So okay, this episode,
we are asking you a very very important question. Okay,
you want to change something about the world. I don't
know what that thing is that is up that is
for you to determine the question that you need to
be asking is are you organizing because you want to
feel cool? Or are you organizing because you want whatever
you're doing to fucking work? And if you want you're

(02:19):
organizing to work, literally no matter what it is, you
actually need to listen to this episode and you need
to have some rudimental knowledge of the thing we are
about to talk about, because if you do not, your
organizing will fail. If you cannot do this, the thing
we're going to talk about in this episode, if you
cannot do this, everything else you know, all of your experience,
all of your knowledge, all of your passion, all of
it is fucking useless because the actual work of organizing

(02:43):
is incredibly unglamorous. It is un sexy, a lot of
it is very time consuming, a lot of it is
not cool. It is you sitting there and talking to
a bunch of people. Yeah, And if you want your
movement to succeed, you have to be able to do
this kind of like groundwork, logistical work, because if you don't,
it won't work. So what we are going to teach

(03:05):
you the very very very very basics of in this
episode is a social technology that has been developed over
the course of literal centuries of movements. Right, this is
something that has been passed down and refined, like through
generations and generations of organizers. I mean, I could do
a genealogy of this. A lot of the modern stuff
sort of came through the Quakers, moved through the civil

(03:27):
rights movements, moved through the anti war movements, moved through
like in Vietnam, moved to a whole bunch of other movements.
Like to be passed out to you today, this is
a complicated social technology. It does not sound complicated. If
you do not know how to do this, it is
impossible to try to replicate on the fly. And that
is we are going to explain to you the very
basis of how to run a meeting. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:50):
I really like this way of phrasing it, that it's
a technology, Like it's a way of applying ideas to
get something to happen, even if a lot of it
is instead there is an art to it, but like, yeah, no,
there's there's stuff you can like learn and apply and
it's Yeah, technology is a good way of framing it.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah, And it's one of these things where you know
you can kind of if you don't know how to
do this, and you have people you can kind of
sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit functional,
and the moment it runs into a stress point, it
will collapse completely. And this is a thing that like,
you know, I have talked to I have done a

(04:29):
lot of these. I have talked to a lot of
people who've done this. I have like I have been
in a rooms of people knew how to run meetings.
I've been in rooms people didn't know how to run meetings.
I have talked with a bunch of people who have
been in rooms who don't know how to run meetings,
and like there are rooms of people with collectively hundreds
of PhDs and because nobody in the room knew how
to fucking run a meeting, complete disaster there. Organizing didn't work. Yeah, right,

(04:50):
you have to be able to do this, And it
doesn't really matter. You know, we're not gonna get that
much into like what mechanism are using to make decisions
because this is this is like even like a layer
below that and so this is not that you can
use it, you know, regardless of whether you're doing consensus
and like, you know, like and I think that like
if you're trying to make a decision as a group, right,

(05:11):
and you're trying to get everyone to want to do
the thing and do it. I think that some version
of consensus is a good idea. But this can be
for a sort of just like a you know, like
a majority of world democratic process, whatever process you were
using to decide things. You need some kind of structure
thing there. Otherwise it's just not going to function, Like
none of it will. What's wild to me is that

(05:32):
it's almost like the important thing is that there is
a structure. There's so many different structures you can use.
Like when we come at this, I don't actually know.
I'm the podcast idiot on this episode, and me is
going to explain some to me. But like there's a
lot of different ways to do this, and the important way,
the important thing is is that you do one of them.
Like there are ways that I think are better or worse, right,

(05:52):
but you do actually need to create a structure and
move forward with that structure in order to get anything done,
which is the whole secret of all organizing. Like that
is what organizing is is you actually have to say,
not only do I want something to get done, but
I'm going to figure out the steps by which to
get that done. And it also applies to meetings. Yeah yeah,
and like that kind of undergirting thing of figuring out

(06:13):
how how you're going to do it, right, like that
that's the part of organizing that as you're saying, it's
like nothing works without it, because it is like half
of what organizing is. And otherwise you were just saying
things into the wind. And admittedly my job is to
say things into the wind, so I hope you do
it so like, you know, I have a little bit
of respect to that. But also you need to have

(06:34):
some way of getting other people to do things.

Speaker 4 (06:37):
Yeah, it's like a when you sit around with your
friends and like, oh, someone should do this. No one's
actually named someone. Yeah you know, I mean somewhere, there's
a non binary person.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Somewhere, but shout outs to someone.

Speaker 4 (06:48):
Yeah yeah, if you're listening to someone, congratulations you're a
master level troll.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
But like my friend, don't ask their name was don't ask.

Speaker 4 (06:56):
It's great anyway, whatever, but but someone needs to get
something done. And if you leave a thing being like ah,
someone should do this, you didn't organize. You have to say, yeah,
this is what the following people are doing.

Speaker 5 (07:10):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (07:10):
Also shout out also to everyone who has been in
meetians with me and are like Mark, I'm insufferable in meetings.
I try really hard, but anyway, whatever.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
Oh god, okay, okay. So this largely is going to
be like how to run a meeting? What a one.
We're going to start at like zero zero zero, which
is you need a place to meet, and that place
to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying
to go to the meeting. This is a thing that
people screw up a lot. It is not that hard
to find the place as accessible for everyone to go.

(07:43):
You can do this. There are lots of places you
can have meetings, depending on how sensitive the meeting is,
you know, how formal and formal it is. I've done
meetings and restaurants and meetings and bars of them in libraries,
people use churches sometimes like queer centers, union halls, parks.
I want to shit talk bars really quickly.

Speaker 5 (08:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
I don't think bars is a great idea, but.

Speaker 4 (08:04):
I don't think it's accessible to people who are under
twenty one, and I don't think it's accessible to people
who have problems being around drinking.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
That said they happen there.

Speaker 4 (08:12):
And I'm not trying to say you're bad for having
had meetings there, but I just want to say that.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, Bars is one that like people go to a
lot and like, yeah, there's definitely issues with it, right,
But I don't know, like you can have them people's houses. Yeah,
sometimes you can like go into like a mesa or whatever.
You can go have a meeting there. You can get
people to just like go out somewhere and do it.
You know, I don't know, like you you are capable

(08:37):
of thinking of lots of places where you could have meetings,
but you actually do need to have a location. And
this is actually again I've talked about this before, but
it's like one of the organizing things is actually really important,
is like knowing how to get a room for a
meeting or get it room for something to happen. You
have to be able to do this. This is like
zero o zero, like okay, you know, okay, so you've
now achieved this, and congratulations, you clowns have now achieved

(08:58):
a location. I'm going to stick a provisional thing in here,
which is this has jumping the gun a little bit,
but I need to put in here. Do not use
Robert rules of Order. One of the things you will
be told, and if you have been in organizations before,
a lot of them use the thing called Robert Tools
of Orders, which is this old, like incredibly elaborate set

(09:22):
of parliamentary procedures. Do not use them. They suck. And
this gets into before we can even talk about what
a meeting is right and how you do it. You
really really do not want your meetings to get bogged
down in everyone having to learn one million lines of
parliamentary procedure. And this is a problem for any meeting

(09:43):
technology that you use, because they all do involve a
little bit of technical stuff because you have to get
people to be able to do things. But one thing
with Robert rules of Order is that like it's like
hundreds of pages, right, and in those hundreds of pages
are the recipe for one asshole to derail your entire
meeting by doing a whole bunch of unhinged parliamentary shit.

(10:06):
I have seen this happen. It sucks. This is something
that you can technically do in any meeting structure, but
the mora paque, the rules of the meeting are the
easier the shit is to do, and the harder it
is to be like please stop.

Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yeah, there's you have to have a certain amount of
flexibility in the way that you do things. Because every system,
it's the problem with law as a concept, right, is
every system can you can find loopholes. And anyone who's
been in a lot of meetings has seen people learn
how to abuse the process in order to get their
position to win by making everyone else too tired to continue,

(10:44):
or to use up all of the space in the room,
or you know whatever. But I think that, yeah, this
idea that the rules that are used in your meeting,
I think that a very a good facilitator, which is.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
Something that I tend to believe in for meetings.

Speaker 4 (11:00):
Is capable of explaining the process in such a way
that even when a lot of people come who are
not familiar with the process, they will leave familiar with
the process.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah. Yeah, Like to that sort of end, if you
need a like, okay, we need a written procedure thing,
the thing I would recommend is called Rusty's Rules of Order,
which is an unbelievably paired down version of Roberts Rules
of Order that was like specifically developed to be used
in like union circles in activist circles, and it's like

(11:34):
the total PDF of it is twenty five pages. That
makes it sound way longer than it actually is. Like
several of those pages are like a glossary, and like
the cover, it's very easy to read. It's easy to
understand if you have to use a like this is
a formalized procedure. Do rusties, don't do Roberts. This is
just a I need to do this before we say
anything else because a bunch of people are going to
push you to use this and it sucks. So having

(11:57):
gotten that out of the way, we can now get
into okay things from meetings.

Speaker 4 (12:02):
I was supposed to make a joke about at the
top of all this. I'm sorry everyone. Everyone has been
waiting for me to make this joke. I'm certain, but Mia,
which one of us is going to keep stacked during
this meeting so that we know who can.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Talk products and services support this podcast? Are gonna keep
stack and we're gonna go to the right the funt.
Now we are.

Speaker 4 (12:31):
Back, and I really just want to say, as timekeeper,
I'm a little bit upset about how much time that
those ads used during the meeting and if we can.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
Not fucking damn Okay, we will explain what a stack
is and sorry it is in a second. However, COMMA,
So things you need to do at the very short
of a meeting. You need to take like two minutes
to do this, but you need to explain how the
meeting fucking works, and you need to assign everyone rolls.

(13:00):
And you can't assume that everyone who is going to
be in this meeting understands how the rules work, like
you cannot. And this is something I've run into, is
like you can't assume that everyone understands what your hand
signals are or even just basic like everyone has been
in a thing before and understands what a stack is, Right,
you can't assume that unless you know everyone in the
room and more than that, like unless you know everyone's

(13:21):
level of experience in the room and you've been in
meetings with them before, Like you can't assume the level
of knowledge that everyone has. And I have watched these
processes not work because people just did that and then
a bunch of people in the room were like, what
the fuck is going on? So you need to at
the start of the meeting explain how the meeting is
going to work like at least a little bit. It
doesn't have to be super formal. This can be like
fucking two minutes of like we're gonna have a stack

(13:43):
blah blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 4 (13:44):
And for anyone just say, you know what we're saying
right now, we'll explain stack more. That is the order
in which people talk. It is a way of like
keeping track of the line of who's gonna talk when.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, I'm realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit.
But you need to make sure that everyone understands how
the meeting is supposed to work. And you know, usually
that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something
and then okay, you explain it to them and that's
like fine and chill, and like I don't know. I
remember being a little tiny baby anarchist and like not
knowing anything and going to my first meeting and like

(14:14):
people were talking about restorative justice and I was like, Hi,
what's your storative justice. I'm like a little tiny child,
I don't know anything. And they explained it and it
was like chill and good and you can just do
this and it helps people feel included and yeah, totally okay.
So general meeting facilitation things you need. You need one
an agenda. An agenda is what the fuck are you doing?

(14:38):
And generally speaking, secondarily, you want to try to have
time planned out because one of the failure modes of
a meeting is the meeting goes for fucking thirty hours
and everyone's miserable. So you generally want to have an
agenda that has what you're going to talk about and
then kind of guidelines roughly for how long you think
it'll take to talk about the thing.

Speaker 5 (14:55):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
We'll get more into that in a second. Sometimes people
create the agenda of beforehand. Sometimes you start you set
the agenda at the beginning of the meeting. But like
you do want an agenda so people know what you're doing.

Speaker 4 (15:06):
And it should be similar that everyone can see a
whiteboard or like I guess in a zoom meeting notes
or a dock that everyone has open.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, yeah, you want to make sure everyone has it. Okay,
and this this is the point where we need to
talk about roles. So part of the technology for this
right and the stack is a big piece of technology
to keep track of who's talking. But a big part
of what the technology of this is is a bunch
of roles that you assign people and that ideally everyone

(15:34):
rotates through so you learn how to do all of them,
and so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power
by like monopolizing one role. So the first role we
need to talk about, and this is I don't know
if the big one is the right one, but this
is the one that I think people know kind of
I don't know if intuitively understand is the right word,
but like this is the one that there are usually

(15:55):
versions of in a meeting, and a lot of those
versions are bad. Is a facilitator? Yeah, so okay my
explanation of what a facilitator is, and Margot, I'm going
to ask you for yours too, because I don't know. So,
as a facilitator, your job is to like point to
the agenda and go, okay, we're talking about this. Your
job is to move people through discussions. Your job is
to try to get people to a consensus on what

(16:17):
you're doing, and your job is to stop people from
giving speeches. And this is I'm gonna take a little
digrestuona here, which is, Okay, we've been talking about Way's
meetings fail right. Number One, no one can go to it.
That's way meeting fails. Two, you don't have an agenda
and everyone it just goes off the rails and no

(16:37):
one has any idea what you're supposed to be meeting about. Three,
and this is a huge one, is that one of
the biggest ways of meetings fail. And I have seen
this in every single context I've ever worked in, is
that someone and it is usually a dude. It's almost
always a dude. It cannot be a dude, but it's
usually a dude just keeps talking and keeps talking and
keeps talking and will not shut the fuck up, and

(16:58):
nothing gets done because the entire meeting is one hour
of this guy just yabbering. Yep. And one of your
most important jobs as the facilitator, and this is genuinely
a huge part for social technology of the structure of
meetings is to make sure that your meeting is not
one person talking. Yeah. This is why this exists. Yeah.

(17:19):
And you know, if you want to get into the
sort of dire part of this, right, if you do
not stop all of your meetings from being one annoying
guy talking, your projects will fail. You must do this.
This is the one thing here that is like, you absolutely,
positively must get this guy to stop talking.

Speaker 4 (17:37):
I think that the important thing to think about a
facilitator is that most people come from a background of
assumed authoritarian politics. Yeah, assumed politics where someone is in charge.
Even our democracies are built around this idea that you
elect someone to tell you what to do. When we
talk about meetings, we are talking about building bottom up structures,

(18:00):
and we later I think, will end up talking maybe
a different episode or something about larger structures you can
build up out of these sort of local assemblies or meetings.
The idea is that everyone is empowered. And so because
we're really used to this competitive decision making around who
is in charge, we struggle a little bit adapting to
egalitarian meetings and also to consensus. Isn't the only way

(18:23):
to make decisions, but people struggle with consensus because they'll
think of that at meaning one hundred percent vote where
everyone votes for the same thing, and that's a mistake.
And so we think of the facilitator accidentally as the leader,
and they are a leader in the sense.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
Of a whatever.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
You could use the word leader in a lot of ways,
and some of them are positive and not authoritarian, and
so in that context they are leading people through the meeting,
but they are absolutely not only not the decision maker,
they are less the decision maker than everyone else. Choosing
to be a facilitator of a meeting is choosing to
go in and say, I'm not actually even going to

(19:00):
push for my side unless you are in a like
tight knit enough group where everyone knows each other and
everyone kind of knows. Oh, in this group, Margaret's opinion
is always going to be this, and so and so's
opinions always gonna be this. If you know people really well,
you can kind of still be both facilitator and a participant.
But by and large, when you are the facilitator, your

(19:20):
job is to help the decision form. It is to
help take what people are saying and say, Okay, this
seems like what we're saying. Is this the Is this
the proposal? And not say I think this is the proposal,
but say is this the proposal?

Speaker 3 (19:37):
And yeah?

Speaker 4 (19:37):
It is to keep people on track, and every meeting
is going to have different I really like a strong facilitator.
I really like someone who's going to shut me up.
I really like someone who's like, yeah, that's not what
we're talking about right now. And it's hard because your
feelings get hurt, like especially, for example, someone says a
joke and then someone else is a joke, and then
you're the third person and you say the joke too,

(19:59):
and the facilitator like, yeah, that's enough of that. We
got to keep going. You're the third person who said
the joke, and you're like, why am I getting yelled
at and the other two people didn't. Yeah, And that's
the wrong way to look at it. We're not yelling
at anyone. We're trying to keep things moving forward. And
you're absolutely right also about the people grandstanding. And you know,
a particular habit that men often have, especially since men,

(20:21):
is that they'll come in and be like they'll listen
to what someone else says and then repeat it louder
and then be like yeah, yeah, right, and as if
it's their idea and they don't even realize they're doing it.
It's kind of cute, but there's a lot of that
you can learn about yourself by going into these meetings
and learning about your own habits and what you've been
and culturated to do. And it shouldn't be about shaming

(20:42):
people around this as long as people are able to
like kind of get called in and listen to it.
And one of the things that I think when you
teach the meeting, at the beginning of the meeting, you
also explain some of this social stuff and you say, like,
you know, we believe in a step up step back thing.
If you're someone who generally feels comfortable talking in large groups,
you to step back a little bit. And if you're

(21:02):
not someone who generally feels comfortable expressing your opinion in groups,
we invite you to step up. Do you know what
also needs to learn to step up? Is I actually
think we don't get enough advertising in our lives. I
think that the people who are afraid to take up
space are the people who pay a lot of money
block All right, babe, isn't consensus, here's ads.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
We are back. I think this is also you know,
as we've talked about sort of in some way in
a lot of ways, like how important the role the
facilitator is. This is a role you need to rotate
because that is a role. It's like those are skills
that everyone needs. Like if everyone knows did you just
do the I did?

Speaker 4 (21:58):
I did I don't know whether people still do it
metal hands versus twinkle fingers.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
Sorry, okay, this is completely unfortunately podcasting is an audio medium.
So all of you just missed me losing my mind
because Margaret, Margaret did one of my hand signs for agreement.
It's like, shit, God damn it.

Speaker 4 (22:17):
Okay, we're talking about meetings that just came naturally.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
Well, we'll get the hand signes later, but like you know,
you actually do you all of these things should be
road hitting, and you should be teaching everyone to be
able to do all of the facilitation roles because a okay,
there's there's lots of reasons for this, right one. Facilitation
in particular can be kind of dangerous because there's a
real risk of someone who is facilitating deciding that they

(22:43):
are the leader and they're going to steer how everything
goes and there and they're going to make their decisions.
And by rotating that around, it becomes a lot easier
to not have that happen. Yeah, and also doing a
role makes you a more active participant in the meeting.
A lot of times it depends on the role obviously,
but like it's a way to get people to keep
everyone in gain the thing. That's a good point. Thank you.
This is I stole this from my friend, who is

(23:04):
going to remain nameless. But if you're out there, I
love you. Your friend's name is nameless, I understand. Yeah,
friend's name is the nameless child.

Speaker 4 (23:12):
To somewhere there's someone whose name is the whole lost
kid and anyway whatever, anyway, okay.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Okay, yeah. But the other thing about it, right is
the more everyone knows about these skills, the more effective
of a participant, and the more effective you can be
making decisions in the meeting like that, the more everyone
understands how the process works and knows how to do
it and knows how to because like being in a
meeting and being in community with other people and making

(23:40):
decisions together is a skill and we don't have it.
There's this great David Graeber, the anthropologist David Graeber, who
actually spent a lot of time like writing about these
meetings in a way that doesn't usually happen, as like
as as an anthropologist. Yeah yeah, as an anthropologist, right,
because he was both both an activist and an anthropologist.
And he has this great line where he says, American
they are great at communism and terrible at democracy, which

(24:02):
is that they're really really good at like doing things
each according to their need and from each according through ability.
Like if you try to organize a barbecue, everyone can
do the things to do the barbecue, but no one
knows how to make decisions together, because that's a skill.

Speaker 5 (24:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
And the more you're rotating through all the roles and
the more you understand how everything works, the more you understand,
you know, how to do the facilitation stuff of like
getting everyone to figure out what the thing that they
want is and how to express that and how to
like how to work together. The more you understand that
as like a person who's not facilitating, the more you
can understand like how to actually do democracy. Yeah, and

(24:38):
it rules.

Speaker 4 (24:39):
And it's also the fact that like if you are
indispensable to your group, you've actually failed your group. Yeah,
especially when you're talking about stuff like activism, that has
a certain risk. If you are the only medic in
your affinity group, that is a problem because if you
get arrested, now there's no medic. If you're the only
facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator. Happens when you're

(25:00):
sick or in jail, and you all have a very
intense meeting that you have to do, and you need
a skilled facilitator. Not that everyone needs to be equal
in all skills within in a given group, but you
you need to learn to If you are very good
at something, your job is to make someone else very
good at it too.

Speaker 3 (25:20):
That's the thing both for meetings in the way it
was explained to me, and this is a more kind
of I don't know what term beat us for, but
it was taught to me as your job is to
organize yourself out of a job. Yeah, totally. Okay, So
we're going to move on to the second roll, which
is the stack taker. So okay, the stack this when

(25:40):
I first started talking about this as a social technology,
the thing I specifically met was the stack, and then
eventually I was like, no, it's actually the whole process is.
But the stack very very simple invention, but if you
don't have it, it's a disaster. The stack, as we
said before, is just literally a list of names of
who's going to talk in what order. Someone raises their hand,
they could add to the stack.

Speaker 5 (26:00):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
That is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to
making sure a meeting runs at all. Most groups tend
to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack,
where you know, this is part of we were talking
about earlier, like step forward and step back, But when
you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people
who speak less in front. And this works sort of

(26:24):
in two ways, right. One is it's okay, so if
there's someone who's not like a cis white dude and
who was trying to say something, you probably want them
to say something because they are less likely to be
the one who says something, yeah, just because of the
way that sort of whiteness is structure, because of the
way that like masculinity structure, because of the way that
these things work. So you want to give opportunities to

(26:44):
speak to people who like don't usually get heard. And
then also if someone just like hasn't been talking in
a meeting and they want to say something, and that's
also a part of the sort of facilitation. And sometimes
I know this is the thing that like a role
I've seen passed out between a bunch of different roles,
and I guess everyone kind of has a responsibility to

(27:04):
do this. But if there's someone in a meeting who
has not been saying anything. It's generally a good idea
to be like, hey are you okay? And also like
more important lead to some extent than there are you okay?
Of like what do you think about this?

Speaker 4 (27:18):
Yeah, although I do think that there's a little bit
of a like some people don't want to specifically be
called on in that way. Yeah, and so that's kind
of a like learning to read the room skill definitely
about when you want to encourage people to step up
versus other people are like no, I don't have anything
particular to say, and I don't want to get you know,
singled out. I think that in smaller meetings sometimes the
facilitator can keep stack. Larger meetings, that's a terrible plan.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
But yeah, it's large meetings you need to you can't.

Speaker 4 (27:43):
Yeah, I've been both to be doing it, Yeah, because
you need someone keeping track of who's raising their hands
when and things like that. Sometimes you're actually even writing
the stack on a whiteboard so people can see.

Speaker 3 (27:52):
Yeah, yeah, you've like a piece of paper. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (27:54):
I have been in meetings that sort of self facilitate
fairly effectively in smaller groups, where a thing that people
can do is if they have a thing they want
to say, they hold up one finger and they keep
that finger up, and if someone else is something that
they want to say, they put up two fingers, and
then if someone else is something they want to say,
they put up three fingers. And so you can have
this method by which people track their own stack. But

(28:18):
this is a small group thing. This is not a
and this is a people who know each other and
know how to do the balancing that we're talking about
about making sure everyone gets heard.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
Yeah, And I think part of this also it's important
to remember, is like this is like one oh one,
oh yeah sorry, as an advanced skill kind of And
I'm introducing some things that are probably more advanced than
one on one, like like like they're like, okay, figuring
out why someone is uncomfortable talking on a like this
person wants to talk, doesn't feel comfortable to and if
you ask them, they will say something. And this person
doesn't feel comfortable talking because they don't want to talk.

(28:49):
That's kind of a more advanced thing. Fair enough, I
guess we should talk about hand gestures here, which is
that Okay, over the course of these beings, one of
over the course of like movements one of the things
that is built up is hand gestured because they can
be a very effective way of, you know, someone expressing
something without having to talk over someone else. This is

(29:09):
I don't know, this is the one on one I'm
not going to teach hand gestures because everyone has different ones,
and there are some that are pretty universal. But like
the number of different gestures I've seen for like direct
response and ship like it is the thing that like,
like hand gestures can work and can be really Yeah,
you're doing one of the head you're doing one of

(29:29):
the make a triangle in your hands. Fuck, I forgot
about point a process. Oh no, well there's all of
this very very complicated stuff. It's not that complicated, but
like like point up process sucks like that, she's actually complicated.

Speaker 4 (29:44):
I'm actually derailing again. I'm so sorry. This is an example.
If there was a facilitator in this call, they would
be making me shut up.

Speaker 6 (29:50):
That is what's happening.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah no, but but but this is actually like this
this this is this is the one time I've ever
wished there was like videos you could see the hand
gestures because like the thing about this, right is, once
you are good at meetings and like if you have
people who do this and you talk about what the
handjesters are beforehand, that's also important. You can't even if
if you're very good at meetings and you're still listening
to this episode for some reason. I mean, I don't

(30:11):
know it's a good episode, but like, you can't assume
that everyone knows what your hand gestures are. Yeah, and
sometimes people have different hand gestures for different things. Sometimes
you have contextual hand gestures for like like there are
like okay, like you're if you are trying to meet
in the dark. Yeah, your your hand gestures don't work right.
This is also stolen from another friend, right, Like sometimes

(30:33):
you need to use snaps for that, because so that
you can hear, right, Like what all of us is
to say that like the stuff with hand gestures, it
can make your meetings a lot more effective. This is
the thing you can do if everyone in the group
understands how they work. I'm not gonna be like teaching
you sets of hand gestures here because I can't guarantee
that any gesture I teach you will be the one
that people use. Can I can?

Speaker 4 (30:53):
I though, like speed run the concepts of some of them,
because I think they are useful to understand. Yeah, yeah,
because it's hard to imagine when you amagine meetings. I
think about this a lot because I write meetings into fiction,
which is a very hard thing to do and make
them entertaining, because they're also hard to be entertained and
by when you're in them, unless they're contentious. But there
are certain things that you learn derail meetings, and there

(31:14):
are ways in which by using hand gestures you can
avoid having more people speak, And the single most important
and common one is a way of saying I agree,
and so that way people when they really want to
say something but they're not on stack and they get
really frustrated, they can do that hand gesture, which you
know is very easy to make fun of. You know,

(31:36):
when I was coming up, it was twinkle fingers, where
you waggle your fingers, and then we were like punk,
so we did metal fingers instead, which was literally the
same thing but reverse kind of like the look that
you do when you really like music, and it's actually
sort of like mimicking playing a guitar. And so that's
a very important concept. And sometimes people use snaps, although
sometimes people prefer not audio and other people prefer audio.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
Yeah, yeah, and that's likely and that's a that's possure.
While I was talking about like like that's that's dependent
on who's in the room and what the room is
and like.

Speaker 4 (32:07):
But I think that a a I agree without needing
to say anything is essential.

Speaker 3 (32:11):
Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Speaker 4 (32:13):
Other ones to just know of is that there are
things like people will say like please move this along.

Speaker 3 (32:18):
It's a way of saying, hey.

Speaker 4 (32:19):
Facilitator, please shut this person up usually, or can we
talk about something else. There's ones that are direct response,
which is saying I would like to jump stack because
this person has just insulted the honor of my family
or whatever, and it's like it's up to the facilitator
to decide whether to do these. Another one is point
of process, which is saying like, hey, I actually don't
want to talk about the thing we're talking about. I

(32:40):
want to talk about how the meeting is going. Meetings
get real meta and it's real frustrating anyway, So it's
worth knowing that that this is part of the technology.
It seems cringey from the outside, but like, are other options.
I mean, there are other technologies about decision making that
people have developed. But like, actually, I mean democratic lives

(33:01):
in which we all have a say in our decisions
sometimes means that we go to meetings and uh, and
we can actually kind of learn to I'm talking shit
on meetings, but that's meetings are also a ways to
get to know your friends and express yourself and get
things done.

Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yeah. You know, as much as I've been talking about
being boring, like, I've had things that were technically organizing
meetings that were like some of the most transformational experiences
in my life totally because me and a bunch of
people who you know, a bunch of people really close
to me, like came together and we figured out how
to do something, and there is a beauty there that
is and this is personal to why it's hard to

(33:37):
talk about these things, right because like the technical process
of it, like the technical description of what we're saying,
is at the same time being used to do something
that can only be described in stead of poetic terms. Yeah, Like,
the the actual experience of like you and a bunch
of other people coming together to do something and figure
out how to do it and fucking doing it is

(33:59):
it is a transit active creation. Yeah, And these are
like you know, yeah, like it doesn't like the fucking
hammers and shovels and like fucking slide rules that you
use to construct something don't look very pretty. And then
at the end of it, you've built something together and
it's beautiful.

Speaker 5 (34:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (34:17):
No, it's it's the other side of the coin of
the first time you watch the police run away from you.
It is a way of coming together with other people
to accomplish something and make something powerful. Is meetings, and
it is also it's interesting because we talk about how
men will often take up too much space in meetings.
This is not a universal thing anytime we say this

(34:37):
kind of thing, but it is actually often feminized labor
because it's this invisibilized labor that happens behind the scenes
that is not as sexy, right, and is about just
actually hearing people out. It is like conflict resolution speed run. Anyway,
I accidentally went off on the meta of meetings also.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
But no, it's good. Well, and I think there's a
new important thing here too, because like we're talking about
the politics of like meetings themselves, right of like the
the you know, the actual political angle of what it
means to have a democracy, where what democracy means you
make decisions together. Yeah, and this is something there's there's
also a very important actual procedural meeting note here, which

(35:18):
is that one of the things you will learn over
the course of doing meetings is that a lot of
times people wage battles over the content of political ideology
in the form of fighting over how a meeting works. Yeah, totally.
And you can see this everywhere from like your fucking
local organizing meeting and people yelling about who's on stack

(35:38):
or whatever, all the way up to like, you know,
when like when like the Democrats are saying that, like
like in Congress that like the parliament the budget parliamentarian
won't let them like raise the minimum wage. That's what
they're doing. They're using an argument over procedure to like
disguise the fact that what they're really arguing about is,
like it is an actual political argument.

Speaker 5 (35:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
Yeah, but this is also a thing where like the
way you structure a meeting is political. It doesn't seem
like it, right, but you can have a meeting where,
you know, it's like the fucking plentipotentiary meeting of like
the executive committee of I don't know, the People's Congress,
the Chinese companies, party or whatever. Those are not the
right words. I'm on five hours of sleep. But you

(36:21):
can have a meeting where it's just like, yeah, the
way the meeting works is one guy stands out there
and he gives a speech and he tells everyone what
to say and then everyone votes.

Speaker 5 (36:27):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Yeah, that's the way you can do a meeting, right,
And that's political and it fucking sucks. And we're trying
to teach you how to do a meeting where, you know,
we do democracy, where everyone comes together and we like
do a thing. Yeah, and we will get to more
roles next week. This was originally planned to be one episode.
It is not one episode. It is now two episodes.
But the upside is that we solved a bunch of

(36:49):
the fundamental logistical problems about how to build a free society.
So stay tuned for that, stay tuned for more roles
you want in your meetings. And yes, they could happen here.
And thank you Mark for coming on the show. Welcome

(37:24):
to it could happen here a podcast about organizing. I
am your host, Mia Long And in a moment we
will be continuing our episode about how to run a meeting,
which is one of the fundamental tools of building democracy
and free societies. Here we go, okay, so other roles.
So we talked about that. That was a long digression
about the concept of a stack taker, which is at

(37:46):
a very simple level. You write the names down, you
call the names in order. Yep. Yeah, we're gonna move
on to some of the other ones. Those are like
the two I don't know if most important is the
right word. Funnily enough, stack takers not the one I
thought that digression was going to happen on that was.
I thought that was gonna be the last one we're
gonna get to. But oh no taker, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no,

(38:08):
no, no no, this is vibes checker.

Speaker 4 (38:10):
Oh shit, the vibes checker is okay, okay, okay, please continue.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
Okay, let's do timekeeper. Timekeeper extremely important person. You want
someone with like a watch or something, and the timekeeper's
job is to give people reminders of like how much
time things are taking. So you know a thing you
can do is like, okay, so we know we have
this much time allocated for something, right, so we have
twenty minutes to talk about this, okay, So like ten
minutes and you go, we have ten minutes left, we

(38:36):
have five minutes left, we have like fifteen minutes left. Yeah,
this is really important. And at the end of it,
the timekeeper's job is to go like, hey, this is
our allotted time. Do we want to keep talking about
this and use more time or do we want to
move on? Yeah, And that's a really important role. It's
also kind of why you want to generally have like
an idea of how long you want to talk about
something in the agenda. It's also worth noting that like

(38:58):
this is all guidelines, right, Like these are role.

Speaker 4 (39:00):
MIA's guidelines of order. Is that what you're calling this?

Speaker 3 (39:02):
Oh god, no, we'll take it. We'll take you.

Speaker 5 (39:04):
What more?

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Digression digression, which is that the anarchy symbol, the A
with the circle around it is from a per dawned
phrase that's the circle is actually an o because the
original thing was anarchy. The original saying is anarchy is
the mother of order. Yeah, and that's that's where that
comes from. So I was gonna make it like me
a's MEA's like procedure disorder whatever joke, but it's like no, no, no,

(39:26):
this is actually like anarchy is order. Baby.

Speaker 4 (39:29):
I believe in an organized society. I just believe in
an organically organized society. That is from the to use
the Zapatista phrase from the bottom and the left.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yep, okay, So that that's timekeeper the note taker. Sometimes
you need to decide whether you want notes of your meeting. Yeah,
it depends on how crime you are. Yeah. I hear
this all the time from people making jokes about the
scene for the Wire that I've never seen the wire,
but everone's making jokes as the scene for the Wire
where guy goes, are you taking notes of the criminal continency?

(39:58):
So okay, are are you going to have a note taker?
And then secondly, like, okay, the note taker takes notes
on what's being talked about. I actually this is also
mea going into a little bit more advance stuff. I
actually like the practice of kind of rotating this throughout
the meeting because the problem with being the note taker.
So if you're the timekeeper, right, you can be involved
in the conversation. Stack taker is also hard to but

(40:21):
the thing about the note taker, and you know, if
you get good enough at this, you can rotate all
of these roles during the meeting so that everyone has
a chance to participate, so you don't just have a
group of people who perpetually can't be in a meeting.
And so note taker is a thing that you can
pretty easily just like pass to someone else and be like, hey,
you're not the note taker. So the person who's being

(40:43):
the note taker can like say.

Speaker 4 (40:45):
Things yeah, although okay, So there's two weird funny things
about this one. Sometimes people who tend not to want
to talk much in a meeting but also maybe have
an attention span where they would prefer to be doing
something at all times prefer to be notea yeah. But famously,
the International Workingman's Association or whatever, the the First International

(41:08):
was an organization of a lot of different stripes of leftists.
And someone went to someone's friend's apartment. This anarchists went
to this anarchist friends apartment and was like, Hey, I
want to invite my friend to this meeting. And this
guy answers the door and his name's Carl Marx, and
he's like, oh, well, did so and so's not here,
and he's like, all right, well you can come too.
So an anarchist invites Marx to the International. I don't

(41:30):
have my notes in front of me, don't at me.
But then Marx goes and he becomes the note taker,
and by means of that takes a minority position which
within the group and makes it the majority position by
controlling the way that a lot of the media and
expression and stuff around this was because Marx was a

(41:51):
good writer and for better or worse, I have my
opinion about whether it's for better or worse, And so
there's a power within note taker that it actually is
a reason to rotate this task.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
Yeah. On the other hand, if you're like not worried.

Speaker 4 (42:05):
About that, you can just have a person who's like,
I just really want to be the one who takes notes.
It really depends on everything's going to be contextual. I
just wanted to tell that story about Marx.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
No, like this is this is the story of how
Marx became Marx by taking a note taking job and
then becoming the person who could wh would write the
declarations for the organization. Yeah, we should note like this
is also kind of how Stalent took power was by
being the person in the back of the room he
didn't say anything and keeping track of what everyone was
doing and saying, and you being able to manipulate like
the inner workings of these sort of parliamentary procedures that

(42:36):
the Bolsheviks reusing.

Speaker 4 (42:37):
That's what the Robert not of the rules of order,
but of the behind the bassards was saying about, Oh,
the Cambodia man, the horrible de man and killed everyone.
Oh Paul Pott was that he he was the quiet
guy at the back.

Speaker 3 (42:51):
Yep, same kind of guy can be extremely dangerous. The
guy who says everything all the time can be dangerous.
Quiet person also can be very dangerous and just never
trust anyone. That's the answer. Wait now, oh, hold on,
hopefully we're not producing pullpot in these meetings. Okay. So
the last like official role that I want to talk about,
and there's a lot, there's like a million other roles
that people use. I want to talk about the vibes checker.

(43:15):
So this is the one that's kind of not obvious
from like the name, but the vibe checker is someone
who actually has a really really important role. And your
role is to figure out like, is everyone in the
group okay, does this meeting feel okay?

Speaker 5 (43:30):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (43:30):
And is just something we need to do about it?
And some of this is like okay, everyone is clearly
really tired, let's go get lunch. And that's like a
pretty easy sort of vibe checker thing. But then also
like I don't know, this is partially a facilitation job.
Like I don't know, if someone says something racist in
a meeting and a bunch of people are uncomfortable, it's
like now you're suddenly glad you have the person whose
job it is to be like, hey, what the fuck like,

(43:51):
And that's also that's like obviously like that's a blatant
enough thing that everyone can be like hold on, hold on,
like don't like say a slur or whatever. But like,
you know, the vibe checker's job is if there's a
lot of people who are uncomfortable with something or if
something like they're kind of there, if something is going wrong,
or if people are checked out, or if like stuff's happening.

(44:13):
Sometimes this is behind the scene things. Sometimes this is
like explicit, like you make it, you bring it to
the group to be like, hey, this is okay, we
need to address this. Yeah kind of thing. I don't know.
It's a hard role to sort of like explain. It's fuzzy, yeah, I.

Speaker 4 (44:31):
Mean, but it's it's in the name how are the
vibes And vibe is a fuzzy word, and you know
it's the word that people are going to interpret in
different ways.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
Yeah, and like I as a very sort of materialist,
godless atheist, I it's like, okay, this is how people
are feeling.

Speaker 5 (44:47):
Right.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
People also take this in sort of more new agy directions.
People take it in like but like you know, like
the important thing about this is right you can feel
in a meeting when it's really tense or when things
like just weird, everything feels off. Everyone is like kissed
off or tired or like just grossed out or like

(45:09):
you know, and that's this person's job. This is why
I'm putting it in here because it's it's one of
these roles that like I deally, I guess this person
doesn't do anything for a whole meeting, but they're just
they're sort of watching it. I mean, like it it
can't be good at the interviewing, but like it's especially
important if something is going wrong in ways the group
isn't addressing totally.

Speaker 4 (45:31):
It is good to have someone who's ready to step
up and say, yeah, this is this is what's going on.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
Can I make a pitch for another role. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I don't have a name for this role.

Speaker 4 (45:41):
The very first activist meeting I went to when the
world was young, during the ultra globalization movement. I went
into a meeting for New York City indie media and
I had no idea what was happening. But it was
a public, open meeting and I was a young activist
anarchist or whatever. And I went to this thing and
someone sat next to me, knew that I was new,

(46:01):
and sat next to me and explain what the fuck
was happening.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
That's a good role.

Speaker 4 (46:06):
And I don't know if I would have become an
activist if that person hadn't done that, because I went
in and it was the middle of a contentious meeting
about people talking about some stuff that was pretty important,
and I had no idea what was happening, and someone
explained it to me. I think it is very important
to have someone know who is new and help them

(46:27):
feel comfortable. You could call it like an usher if
I was going to have a word, But that's like,
because I'm really into this idea that our movements don't
need gatekeepers, we need ushers. We need people to help
people figure out find their seats and figure out how
to plug in onboarding. But then the other thing I
want to say is that with roles, the larger and
more formal a meeting, the more likely you need these
to be formalized roles. But I also think that these

(46:49):
as generalized skills can be dispersed through Like I think
that a lot of groups, especially if they're kind of
comfortable with each other, you maybe have a rotating facility.
You maybe have a stack taker, and you maybe are
like who's taking notes right now, But stuff like timekeeper
and vibes check might be a thing that everyone feels
empowered to do. I think that understanding these as roles

(47:12):
is different than saying at the top of the meeting,
this is the way it is done. You must assign
these things. It is always contextual based on the meeting.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
Yeah, the range inside of the meeting structure of like
how formal and informal it is changes a lot. And
that yeah, that like changes you know, that changes the roles,
That changes how all of this stuff works totally. And
that's one of the most important things about this is
like being flexible, because the point of a meeting is
not everyone followed the exact parliamentary procedures. The point of

(47:45):
a meeting is we did the thing we came there
to do, or sometimes we did we did a different thing, right,
But it's like we all did something together and that
thing happened, but we figured out how to make that
thing happen. And that's the actual important part. The content
the meeting is what's important. Not all of the structure
is to enable the content. It's not the other way

(48:05):
around it. Yeah, totally, right, totally and like yeah, I
don't know, like if you have a timekeeper and someone
does sen, they're doing time stuff too, right, Like that's
a significantly better result.

Speaker 5 (48:14):
Then.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
Yeah, we just kept talking, So.

Speaker 4 (48:29):
Okay, can I make one more pitch about the thing
that's important at a meeting?

Speaker 5 (48:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (48:32):
Yeah. Food.

Speaker 4 (48:34):
I think that it's not always going to be appropriate
in every specific situation, and there's a lot of things
around dietary restrictions and all of these things, but making
the meeting feel like a place that is worth going
to and a thing that like I think food is
basically like hosting and good hospitality and these sort of
again invisibilized feminine labor things goes a really long way

(48:57):
towards making everyone feel comfortable. It also helps people's attend
spans and blood sugar, like whether every meeting's a pot
luck or whether everyone just brings snacks, or whether it's
at someone's house and they're like, fuck ya, I'm hosting.
I'm going to make a bunch of food and you
know whatever it is.

Speaker 3 (49:11):
Yeah, I've been theorizing this for a while that like
we need because like obviously a lot of this technology
has been worked out already, but also we have so
much further to go in order to like be able
to make decisions together in a free society, and like,
I think we need to just have an initiative of
like how do we make meetings fucking rip. One of
my ideas has always been, like you have a meeting

(49:34):
that's just like the standing barbecue meeting that happens like
every like it's like the endless meeting, and it's like, okay,
you have it at like yeah this time, and there's
just like a barbecue and everyone does barbecue.

Speaker 4 (49:45):
Stuff and yeah, it's just a standing thing where if
you want to come and like and then okay, just
to keep talking about some of the stuff childcare, childcare,
you think when you mentioned at the beginning being like
making sure that the space is accessible to everyone. And
there's a lot of stuff that gets forgotten about. In particular,
I would say that single parents are often forgotten about,
and I think that having or parents in general, or

(50:07):
children in general are often forgotten about. And I think
that having a plan in place for accessibility of all
kinds of different people often includes childcare.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
I used to do this. Oh that's cool. Yeah, that's
like one of the things that I did for some meetings,
and like, yeah, there are like meetings that happened. They're
like tens meetings that happened because like people stayed and
played with everyone's kids. It was a good time.

Speaker 4 (50:29):
And yeah, there's also this idea where sometimes meetings people
can come in and out of the society that I
want to live in has neighborhood assemblies that then move
up to larger structures and make decisions right. And in
those there's also this thing where it's like you don't
always have to go to meetings. Yeah, there's a thing
that about democracy that people don't quite always get, which
is that sometimes the most beautiful thing we can do

(50:50):
for each other is give our agency freely to other
people to make decisions for us that we trust. Working
groups are actually a good, big part of this where
I'm like, I don't actually want to have a say
in every single decision that affects me. I want to
be able to have a say in every single decision
that affects me. Anyway, I'm again going kind of meta
on this.

Speaker 3 (51:09):
Sorry, no, no, both this is important, right, you know.
And also, like doing the childcare was part of that,
because like, yeah, it meant like, you know, I was
kind of I was like trusting my people in the
group to like do the meeting without me while I
was just sort of like taking care of like just
taking care of kids. And that was a really beautiful

(51:29):
thing and it worked really well. It fucking ripped.

Speaker 4 (51:34):
Yeah, and you can build multi generational movements, which are
the only movements that accomplish That's not true.

Speaker 3 (51:40):
Sudden movements also accomplish things.

Speaker 4 (51:41):
But when I look at some of the real high
water marks from the bottom and the left organizing around
the world, you're talking about people who are drawn from
hundreds of years of radical legacies, or at least a
couple of generations.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
Yeah, speaking of generations, I don't know, I don't have
a good pivot into this. But okay, so we've been
talking a lot of about a lot of the technology
that's been used for meetings. I want to talk about
a couple of other kinds of meetings that you can have.
When I originally was writing this, I was like, Oh,
I could fit this whole, this whole section of how
to run a meeting. This will be like, this will

(52:15):
be like twenty minutes, and I can have twenty minutes
about like the spokes councils, of twenty minutes about general assemblies.
And we're not like an hour. We're not This is
like this episode in market On and we have not
even started talking. So okay, that's going to be another
The general assembly episode is going to be another episode
completely in and of itself. But I do want to
talk about spokes councils because this is the thing that
I've been finding really really useful that I think people

(52:37):
just don't know about anymore. And because people have lost
the knowledge of this, a really valuable organizational tactic has
been lost. So okay, the thing that a meeting is
there to do is so a group of people can
come together and make decisions. But how do you make
decisions between groups or and this is also often more
important less than having like because you know a lot

(52:58):
of spokes countles are usually supposed to be like we're
all making like we're all sort of like this is
like a binding decision handed down by like spokes council. Right,
this is also a really useful coordinating tool. Yeah, and
this is what it's you know, what it's like actually
designed for is how do you get groups to sort
of talk to each other and work with each other

(53:18):
in a way that also lets them continue to be
like their own groups and not you know, a sort
of like subservient to the larger coalition.

Speaker 5 (53:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:26):
Yeah, and you know, the answer to this turns out
as a technology that was developed. Actually don't know the
history of the spokest council. I mean it's been around
for like a long time. I don't either, like at
least like thirty forty years in anarchist circles, but it
has really made it out of them. And so spokes
council is a meeting of groups, and so it's it's
it's a meeting of spokespeople.

Speaker 5 (53:46):
Right.

Speaker 3 (53:46):
So your group sends like one or two people to
a thing. You send like a couple of people and
all of the other groups send some people and you
come talk about a thing. Yeah, And this is really
useful for a number of reasons. One, it's a way
for different kinds of groups to interface with each other
in ways that they usually don't. So this can be

(54:07):
anything from like an affinity group to like an NGO
to like a union. Ye, it can scale between different
kinds of things. It can theoretically you can do this
with like you you're like fucking spokes council could theoretically
send a person to another spokes council totally right, And
this is you know, we'll get more to this a second, right,

(54:27):
but like, like, like, this is a way for a
bunch of different types of organizations to come together and
do something. And it's a way for them to coordinate
with each other. It's way for other share information. It's
a way for them to and this is like one
of the sort of secrets of organizing is that, like
actual organizing is built through personal relationships with people knowing
each other. And so this is a way for like
people to like meet each other and get to do things.

(54:49):
There are different kinds of these. A traditional one is like, Okay,
there's like a thing happening right, Like, there is a
there is a giant protest, and like a bunch of
people who are going to be a bunch of the
different groups and organizations in diffinity groups and whatever we're
going to be at this thing come together and they're like, Okay,
how what are we doing? How are we going to
sort of do this and how do we coordinate this
with each other?

Speaker 5 (55:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (55:11):
And yeah, Mark, I assume you've been in like a
million of these.

Speaker 5 (55:14):
You know.

Speaker 4 (55:15):
I have been in a lot of spokes Council meetings.
I've been in a fewer of them, and I think
you're right, there's been a bit of a drop off.

Speaker 3 (55:21):
Yeah, it's funny.

Speaker 4 (55:22):
When we were talking earlier, I was like, oh, I
haven't done this in a while. I actually do go
to meetings every week, but I like, but I used
to go to meetings specifically for direct action protests, and
that is a thing that I used to have more
direct experience with. Yeah, and so I don't want to
be like all people stop doing it because I don't
totally know because I'm not totally plugged in. But I

(55:43):
do think the alder globalization movement of like nineteen ninety
nine to two thousand and three or so, is where
a lot of modern protest tactics and stuff were developed,
or rather it came to a head. The tactics have
been developed for decades by various different groups. Yeah, and
actually a lot of the technologies around spokes, councils and stuff,
they come from a lot of different sources, including I

(56:05):
think anarchists and the Spanish Civil War, but I'm not
one hundred percent certain about that. But a lot of
the alter globalization movement stuff comes from the zappoutisas in Chiapas.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
I know you didn't ask for history lesson and I'll
speed run it. No, no, no, no, this is good though.

Speaker 4 (56:15):
You know, the folks in Chiapas and the Zapatisas have
developed a lot of different ideas about how to have
bottom up democracy, and they've been moving through different ones.
They actually moved to a more decentralized model than they
were doing about two years ago, in twenty twenty three.
But they went around the world and built organizations by

(56:36):
saying everyone, send your people, We're getting together, the People's
Global Alliance like all of these like you know, Global South,
and were putting in air quotes. Here we're getting together
and we're building direct action movements together, and that is
where the ault globalization movement comes from, at least as
much as anything else. And some of that is that
technology of saying, send your representatives and do this thing.

(56:58):
But it's interesting because in some ways it's actually just
an upside down version of parliamentary democracy, right, where theoretically
we elect a politician and they go speak for us.

Speaker 3 (57:11):
They don't.

Speaker 4 (57:12):
That is the concept behind a democracy, right, And so
theoretically you can send a delegate, and there's two ways
of doing it. There's a decision making larger body and
there's a coordinating larger body. And if you want to
maintain every group's autonomy, it is a coordinating body. You
get together and at the spokes council you say, the
ten people I represent who will remain nameless, are all

(57:35):
willing to get arrested tomorrow, and we're all willing to
lock ourselves down. And someone else will say, we don't
want to get arrested. The fourteen people that I'm representing
kind of want to break shit. And then other people
will be like, the fifteen people that I represent kind
of wish you all wouldn't break shit, and you can
get together and coordinate, and then the breakshit people can
be like, oh, okay, well we'll make sure we break

(57:55):
shit somewhere else than where you are and all of
this stuff. And whereas a decision making body would get
together and your spoke would have a mandate from your group,
they would be empowered to make decisions for everyone, knowing
that the decision has to be within a certain framework.
And then basically when they're done, you'd be like, Okay,

(58:16):
you did or didn't succeed at your mandate. We're going
to send someone else next time, or whatever. So there's
two different ways of doing spokes council meetings. I think
one of the reasons that they fell out of favor
is that by and large, open organizing of direct action
has diminished in the movement because it may or may
not be legal to show up somewhere and say, well,
the fifteen people I represent want to break shit, or

(58:39):
even the fifteen people that I represent want to lock
ourselves down into big puppets with lock boxes right and
disrupt global trade. Because of the ramping up of repression,
people have backed off of certain types of open organizing Yeah,
I have opinions about that, but that's kind.

Speaker 3 (58:54):
Of I'm actually not trying to tell anyone what to
do about it.

Speaker 4 (58:56):
But so I think that that's part of why the
spokes Council has a little bit demas and I actually
think that we just need to adapt the spokes Council
to the modern context. And I'm sure people do still
do them.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
So this is where we're getting this is this is
what I'm calling them via technology, which is there have
been spokes councils recently that are not like that are
not this, that are using the idea of the spokes
Council but are kind of a different thing. Okay, because
there's another thing that you can do with this organizational form,

(59:27):
right of everyone sends their delegates together or whatever, like
everyone sends their like spokespeople and everyone meets each other.
You can also do this for like not planning a
direct action. Yeah, totally. And you can do this as
a way to get all of the different organizations and
like affinity groups and shit in a city talking to
each other. Yeah, and this turns out to be extremely useful.

Speaker 5 (59:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
I've seen this a lot recently in sort of trans organizing,
where like all the trans different groups of the city
will be like, fuck it, we're showing up to a thing. Yeah,
this is a different thing that we will be talking
hopefully to some people who run this soon. This was
originally supposedly part of this episode before I realized that
it was impossible to fit this into this episode, which
is had two episodes. But there's a really really cool

(01:00:10):
thing in Portland that was called the Trans General Assembly,
where they people were just like fuck it, were running
a general assembly for like all of the trans people come.
You can say things and everyone meets at the end,
and that was awesome. But you can do this on
a very very on a targeted level with like Okay,
I know a bunch of different orgs that like, for example, okay,
we need we need to coordinate a response to like

(01:00:31):
the situation of trans people in the US. Yeah, So
you can go through all of your networks. You can
be like, okay, I know this person who is in
this org that does this thing right, and you can
bring all of those resources together and then you can
turn that into a spokes council. That's not quite the
same thing exactly as as the kind of like direct
actions spokes constles that have been organized.

Speaker 4 (01:00:52):
Right, it is closer to a general assembly maybe, but
maybe that's a pedantic difference or semantic difference.

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
Yeah, it kind of is, but it's well, so okay.
The way I've been conceiving of it is like, if
you're specifically getting people together who are there as organizations,
it's a spokes council. Yeah, totally. If they're there as themselves,
it's a general assembly. Oh that makes sense, even even
if they are sort of like representing a thing. But
like yeah, like like the scopes and who shows up
to them were very different, I think. Oh, and there's

(01:01:20):
also fishballs. Well, what's a fishball? Actually, I've heard this
one before.

Speaker 4 (01:01:23):
A fish bull is a spokes council where everyone can
come and only the spoke can speak. Hm, so you
can look in on the fish Oh that's what that's called.
Interesting Okay, Yeah, anyway, which is a way to do it.
It maintains transparency. It's a way to have a still
open meeting, but only but if only one person from
the group has empowered to speak, then it's not a
nightmare of trying to have six thousand people in a

(01:01:46):
room talk.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
The basic beating technology all these things can be used
for a whole bunch of different things in a whole
bunch of different ways that like we haven't thought of yet.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
You could arrange trash pick up in a neighborhood. You
can make the government obsolete with meetings and spokes councils
and general assemblies and federations and all of these levels
of bottom up organizing. And there are places in the
world where people have done this.

Speaker 3 (01:02:19):
Yeah. And you know, if we want to close on
sort of like this is the political angle of this, right,
Like a free society is one that is structured like this,
where a bunch of where things happen by people coming
together to do them. Yeah. Right, And you can take
the sort of like I don't know, I guess you'd
call it the workerri'st angle of like I don't know,

(01:02:41):
we need to run a waste treatment plant, yeah right.
So the way the race treatment plant is run is
that the people who do waste treatment have their own
like workers counselor or whatever, and they decide how they're
going to do it and they go do it. Right.

Speaker 4 (01:02:55):
Almost every I would say, every real revolution and revolution
utionary movement in history is doing a version of this.
You can even look at the Soviet concept. The Soviet
was the decision making body, it was the assembly and
all power to the Soviets with this slogan that literally

(01:03:15):
was inverted by the Bolsheviks, where the entire idea was
a democratic but revolutionary movement. And this happens constantly even
when societies break down on some level naturally and a
ton not all, a ton of indigenous societies, this is
the default model. And so you know in Chiapas with

(01:03:36):
the Zapatistas, what happened was is that you had this
like Marxist Leninist army and they were like, oh, we're
going to do this thing this way, and the indigenous
people who lived in Chapas were like, that's not how
we do things.

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
And they're like, this is how we do things.

Speaker 4 (01:03:46):
And then those Appatistas, who are good people, were like,
you're right, that's how we do things, you know, and
they like built up this model. And you have a
similar thing happening with the area called Rojeva in north
east Syria, where like basically people were like, actually, the
indigenous Kurdish model of doing things is much more this
egalitarian method and democratic method.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
And then okay.

Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
And the other thing is you can do it in
the workers's model, but there's also people who've messed around
with it and done things like you know what, maybe
the school isn't run by the teachers. Maybe the school
is run by the teachers, the parents and the students,
you know. And maybe the food distribution center is a
combination of the workers of the food distribution center and
the people who make use of it. So maybe the

(01:04:26):
trash pickup is both the workers and the people who
need the services. But the specifics almost they do matter,
and we can but we don't know. We don't know
the actual formulation. But this is the core of bottom
left organizing and it is a beautiful thing. And it
is funny how it all comes down to meetings and

(01:04:46):
making sure that there's food and childcare and not one
person taking up all the time, which is really hard
when you podcast for a living.

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
I will tell you that. Yeah, but this is like,
you know, I have had to learn to shut the
fuck up in meetings. Yeah, me to, but doing it
has made meetings better. It's great. You can learn to
shut the fuck up. Someone else says the thing and
you don't have to say yeah. But then also, I
do want to put this out right, the things that
we're describing here, Right, it's okay, like how do you
do to beat or you need food, you need child care,
you need structure that make sure one person isn't running

(01:05:15):
the thing. This is the entire political situation of the
modern United States, right. We are trying to get food,
we are trying to get childcare, we are trying to
have a place to do our thing, and we're trying
to have to not be ruled by like a fucking king. Totally. Again,
this all seems like very very basic, like shit, right,
But if you don't have this, and this is a
problem that the US has constantly, your protest movements, it's

(01:05:37):
like most Americans don't have a democratic tradition, right, and
so when shit happens and there's suddenly riots and they're
suddenly like mass protest movements break out, Right, people don't
know how to make democratic decisions, so they don't, right,
and that means that nobody's talking to each other. That
means that everyone is locked in these very small circles
of extremely violent paranoia. That sucks. And we can avoid

(01:06:03):
that by knowing how to do democracy. Because that's fundamentally
what running and meeting is. This is what democracy looks like. Yeah,
And I also want to say one more thing. This
is a podcast and would that would probably could I
could have used the facilitator, especially on my end right now,
because unmedicated mia is a fucking trip. But like you know,

(01:06:24):
when we talk about sort of are how do you
apply this to your sort of broad vision of society?

Speaker 5 (01:06:28):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:06:29):
And it's like, okay, anarchists, how do you run USAID?

Speaker 5 (01:06:32):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
Because like, yeah, like the destructure of USAID is going
to kill an unbelievable number of people because people are
getting HIV vaccines right right. And the way you run
that is the way that you run a meeting.

Speaker 6 (01:06:42):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:43):
The workers who produce ye to act, who are the
people who actually figure out how to make an HIV vaccine,
distribute it, distribute information about it. Those people form fucking
form fucking councils, and they form fucking meeting groups. They
and they work in collaboration with the people who need them,

(01:07:03):
and that is how you build a society, right. It's
like David Gabor's thing was was like the ultimate hidden
truth of this world is that it is something we
make and we could just as easily make differently. And
when he says something we make, he was talking about
in a more abstract sense, but like we do literally
make it. Like all of this stuff is the product
of stuff that we did, right, Like we all physically

(01:07:23):
built every aspect of this world, right, everything, Everything that
you see and touch and hear right now are things
that we designed and engineered and built. And we don't
lose the capacity when we cease to be ruled. We
can still do that. And as long as we have
the ability to do democracy right and we have the
ability to make decisions with each other, we can fucking

(01:07:45):
do those things. And we can do them for each
other and not for a king.

Speaker 4 (01:07:49):
Yeah, It's like people ask, how would you make a
distributed insulin in anarchist society or an anti capitalist society
or a bottom up society, And you're like, well, we
know how to make and distribute insulin, and we just
need to change some of the social technologies that are
doing it. And I think we could probably do it
better because it's currently not working great, you know. And

(01:08:12):
my other like go to quote I love the graver
quote is the Derudi quote anarchist general in Spanish of war.
Probably didn't actually say this. It was probably a journalist
put these words in his mouth, but we're not actually certain.
And he says like the boot I'm paraphrasing the BOUCHOAISI
can blast and ruin the world on their way out
of history. That's fine. Yeah, we the workers built all

(01:08:33):
of these cities. We can build, we know how to
do that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
The part of that always stuck with me is like,
I think the exact quote that I got was we
are not in the least afraid of ruins.

Speaker 7 (01:08:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:44):
Ever, the ones who built this world and we'll do
it again. Yeah and yeah. So I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:08:51):
I don't know these these episodes are gonna be called.
But if they're called, the answer as meetings comma, Sorry,
I think.

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):
Okay, I don't know who is good end to be
the provisional title right now is the most important organizing skill?
You don't know, because unfortunately we do need people to
click on this and they won't. If it's a meaning
things as.

Speaker 4 (01:09:12):
Well, then that's the monster at the end of the book,
is that, Uh, it's meetings all the way down.

Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
Yeah, Margaret, thanks for thanks for talking with me about
the actual fundamental building blocks and tools of democratic life.

Speaker 5 (01:09:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:28):
Thanks, thanks for having me and thanks for talking about
this stuff. Yeah, and this has been It can happen here.
You can go out in your community and you can
do these things. You can force pos councils, you can
form assemblies, you can go work with the people around
you to do things, and you can use structures to
do it, and you can change the world. The secret
is to really begin.

Speaker 2 (01:09:47):
Hell yeah, ah, welcome back to It could happen here.

(01:10:13):
A podcast that is normally about the terrors, but today
today we're talking about I mean, technically still the terrors,
but we're talking about a more fun part of the terrors.
We're talking about the liver King. Thank God, Thank God.

Speaker 6 (01:10:30):
Gods and kings, two things we famously appreciate on this podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
With me today is James Stout and Meil Wong. What
do y'all know about the liver King? I thought you
were gonna give us cool titles.

Speaker 6 (01:10:42):
Just if we could just go back and you could
each give us some kind of some kind of nobility
and of food stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:10:49):
Yeah, sure, James, you are the tea leaf salad that
made you really say that one time.

Speaker 3 (01:10:56):
King's true.

Speaker 6 (01:11:00):
I think that Tea leave settle room me Atina.

Speaker 3 (01:11:02):
Yeah, it's good to him.

Speaker 6 (01:11:04):
It made me subject.

Speaker 3 (01:11:08):
And I you know, you and I haven'ty and a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
Of meals together. We need to do more of that, right,
we need to do more of that. You're the You're
the I have not eaten many meals with me yet,
but hopefully will Queen. Incredible, incredible, incredible. Now, the Liver
King is the King of liver, as you're all, I'm
certain well aware, and I did.

Speaker 3 (01:11:26):
We did a bastards.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):
This was a live episode I did a couple of
years ago with doctor cave Hoda. And in case you're
not aware, the Liver King is a guy who like
three two or three years ago started to get really
famous very suddenly and obtained millions of followers I think
up to like six at one point on Instagram.

Speaker 3 (01:11:44):
By getting super jacked.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
He was this huge, shredded guy, or he's not he's
not actually very tall, but he was shredded and he
would He was always perpetually shirtless, usually wearing very little
and talking about his different primal rules how mainly you
need to eat nothing but liver and testicles, often raw,
and that's all you need to do in order to
get huge. That and then you can just lift hundreds

(01:12:07):
and hundreds of pounds and you'll get swollen and gigantic.
Totally natty because we're just we're supposed to eat like
primal cavemen who only ate testicles and livers. Enough the
rest now accepting the how none of this is accurate.
It came out very soon after that because the liver King,
prior to becoming the liver King, had been a series

(01:12:27):
of petty grifters of lower nobility and had written an
email to a guy who was like an expert on
performance enhancing drugs, asking like what kind of regiment he
could take in order to get the size that he
eventually became. Anyway, it came out that he's been spending
like thirteen thousand dollars a month on steroids like that.
That's how he got huge. It's not the testicles, it's
not the livers. It's not these absurd videos of him

(01:12:49):
eating different organ meats or making his kids eat different
organ meats. It's not his his weird workout tactics. It's
the fact that he's taking thirteen thousand dollars worth of
gear a month.

Speaker 3 (01:12:59):
Right now.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
One of the first people to call him out before
this came out was Joe Rogan who saw the And
you know, I'll give Joe Rogan credit for one thing.

Speaker 3 (01:13:07):
He knows when someone's on steroids. Yeah, So Joe.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
Rogan had called him out initially, being like, there's no
way this guy's natural, right, Like, he's taking fucking steroids.
It's very obvious now, to be fair, everyone knew that
because it's very like, I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:13:23):
Know shit about steroids. And I looked at that guy,
like his belly button pushes out.

Speaker 6 (01:13:29):
Yes, isn't like Robert's not talking about an AUTI no, No,
I'm talking about it's.

Speaker 3 (01:13:35):
A Gulf bowl. So it's protrusion, like the Organs are
trying to escape. This man is so clearly eighty percent
steroids volume. That is the highest volume of steroids to
body mass that has ever existent.

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
Yeah, it's nuts stuff. So he lost a shitload of
his followers and he's still got like three million on Instagram,
but his videos, he's lucky to get a couple of
thousand like likes and share these days on an Instagram video.
And you know, before that all came out, he was
doing much more he had to do Ama Kolpa. He
claims he's all natty now and he has just over
the last couple of years, just continually degraded.

Speaker 3 (01:14:11):
Right now.

Speaker 2 (01:14:11):
This guy's business, which he made millions doing, or one
of his businesses was selling different supplements. He's very expensive supplements.
And he's built kind of a little cult at his
compound in Texas around you know, listening to fucking dance
music from the mid aunts a lot of like Mike
Posnor remixes and weird shit rands about being a caveman

(01:14:33):
and like pulling trapped your equipment and shit. He likes
to always walk around with fucking a with a plate
carrier on which he calls his exoskeleton in order to like,
you know, build up muscle.

Speaker 3 (01:14:46):
Mass or whatever. And anyway, he's he's continually.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
Degenerated to the point where those of us who call
ourselves liver king watchers have all kind of been saying
for a while now, Oh, he's not just on gear anymore,
like he's doing he's he he's doing other drugs and
they have had they are really having a negative effect
on his mental health. Yeah, he doesn't seem well, He
does not seem well, so I'm gonna put a video
play video on. This is a video that started at all.
He started a couple of weeks ago, increasingly threatening Joe Rogan.

(01:15:14):
And he doesn't live that far away from Austin. He
started posting a series of videos trying to threaten Joe
Rogan to a fight, and I'm gonna I'm gonna post
to you the one. This is kind of like the
key video that gets this series of events started. It's
the video that is the inciting incident video for everything
that's happening now, right, So that's that's what I'm gonna
play for you guys. You see the Instagram. Okay, So
in this video, listeners, you're gonna hear him talk. In

(01:15:37):
this video, he's got again like music playing in the background.
He's wearing a badly taxidermide wolfhead that's like a cap
over his icular head.

Speaker 5 (01:15:49):
It's like.

Speaker 3 (01:15:53):
He's shirtless.

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
He's wearing shorts and as one user noted in the comments,
his pants are vibrating as he talks and he is
carrying in each hand. He has a gold plated AR
fifteen shirt barreled rifle with a fucking.

Speaker 3 (01:16:06):
Blast for yes, in my entire life. I have never
seen a man look less intimidating well, holding a gun,
wearing a wolf pelt. Two guns, Man, two guns, the
second gun. Two guns. Yeah, holy ship, you blunder buds.

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
Those are two gold plated AR fifteen SBRs.

Speaker 6 (01:16:25):
With a gold eotech on talking in case he hadn't
spent enough money.

Speaker 3 (01:16:29):
Yeah, yeah, and I think a gold wood on the other.

Speaker 2 (01:16:31):
So anyway, I'm gonna listen to this man, Joe Rogan,
I'm calling you out.

Speaker 5 (01:16:36):
My name is Leberty Man to man, I'm picking a
fight with you. Yeah, I have still training. If you
just to your black belt, you should just man tell me.
But I'm picking a fight with you. Fund rule. Whatever
you want me to wait, I'll wait. I'll wait one night,

(01:16:57):
this morning, I'll wait. I'm you whenever you're ready, whenever
you're ready to go at my brains.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
And then he get starts dancing, So I'm on a
vibration blate. By the way, that's a healthy man. That's
a guy who's doing well. Right, we can all agree.

Speaker 6 (01:17:25):
It's a literally buzzy.

Speaker 3 (01:17:27):
I saw a video one time where someone was reacting
to a Drake video and his response was those are
the least intimidating goons I've ever seen in my entire life.
And that is the entire vibe of watching him trying
to like brain a place. It's something else, it's it's
it is special. Uh, it is special.

Speaker 2 (01:17:46):
And if you couldn't quite make out the audio over whatever,
the fuck that music was what he says, and that
is Joe Rogan. I'm calling you out. My name's Liver King,
man the man. I'm picking a fight with you. I
have no training in jiu jitsu. You're a black belt.
You should just dismantle me. But I'm picking a fight
with you.

Speaker 3 (01:18:00):
Your rules. I'll come to you whenever you're ready.

Speaker 6 (01:18:02):
Holding the AARs does give that a slightly slightly more
terroristic threatn vibe?

Speaker 3 (01:18:08):
Right, why are the ars?

Speaker 2 (01:18:10):
Because he goes on to say at another post, you
never come across something like this willing to die, hoping
that you'll choke me out, because that's a dream come true,
which makes it sound.

Speaker 3 (01:18:18):
Like a sex thing. Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes
it sound like a sex thing.

Speaker 5 (01:18:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:18:26):
He closed out Pride months so.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
This video comes out and then Liver King starts making
a series of videos in Austin, Right, he drives to Austin.
He's making videos on the way. He makes videos when
he gets there, and he keeps saying he wants to
fight Joe Rogan. Now he's just saying he wants to
fight him.

Speaker 3 (01:18:42):
Right, He's not.

Speaker 2 (01:18:43):
Saying I'm going to kill you. He's not saying like
I'm going to assault you. He's like he's asking for
a consensual fight. But he's also posing with weapons, and
he has now traveled to Austin and he's clearly unwell.
So Joe Rogan has a security team. He's got a
bunch of like former operators and shit that he pays
to watch over his security and whatnot and sometimes go
on his podcast if I'm not mistaken, And they do

(01:19:05):
their job, which is, oh, there's a guy threatening our boss,
holding guns and photos and he's traveled to Austin.

Speaker 3 (01:19:11):
We'll probably call the cops, which probably do something about this.
So they give.

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
A call to the police and they're like, hey, we
consider this to be like numerous threats, right, he's traveled
to Austin, Like this seems like a guy who might
actually act seriously on his threats.

Speaker 3 (01:19:27):
We're concerned about this.

Speaker 2 (01:19:29):
So the police wind up talking to Joe Rogan himself,
and Rogan says, yeah, I was, you know, my security
team told me about this. I consider these to be threats, like,
and I'm willing to file a police report.

Speaker 6 (01:19:41):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:19:41):
He tells the police that Brian Johnson has a drug issue,
which is, again it's weird to be like, yeah, Joe
Rogan so far not wrong about an AFIS, And he's like,
he's unstable, he probably needs help, which again probably accurate. Right,
I don't think I don't think there's much to argue
with here. So the police side these crossed the line
into terroristic threats and they file charges. The Liver King

(01:20:05):
is arrested. He's not in jail long. He's released within
a day on twenty thousand dollars bond. There's a restraining order.
He's not allowed to have guns anymore for a while.
He's got to stay two hundred yards away from Rogan.
So the Liver King does exactly what a guy like
the you'd expect a guy like the Liver King to do,
right in the wake of something like this happening, which is,

(01:20:27):
he immediately gets out of jail and starts making more videos.
Right of course, Yeah, from his hotel room in Austin.
And again, these are just the videos of a really
healthy guy who's doing well, whose brain is not has
not liquefied, and isn't coming out of his ears, just
a man who seems healthy.

Speaker 5 (01:20:47):
Thank you for all the prayers.

Speaker 8 (01:20:48):
By the way, people praying for me, you should also
pray for yourself.

Speaker 5 (01:20:51):
Pray for your family.

Speaker 9 (01:20:52):
Lock that down, fifth bump pound, lock it down.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):
You should do all that.

Speaker 8 (01:20:56):
I am going to the Capitol. I'm already in the Capital,
but We're going to like capital capital, the location, and
I've been given the gift of a restraining order just recently.

Speaker 5 (01:21:09):
And so if.

Speaker 8 (01:21:10):
Anybody knows, if someone else whose first name rhymes with blow,
whose last name is Rogan, I'm not.

Speaker 9 (01:21:19):
Allowed to say it for a copyright, I might sue
you about it. I'm not allowed to laugh. I'll see
you have put you in Joe on that one too.

Speaker 2 (01:21:27):
Okay, So first off, he starts this, he admits in
another video he falls a little earlier, that he hasn't
slept in days, and he hasn't been eating, and he
is slurring his words.

Speaker 3 (01:21:40):
At the start of this. He is not well.

Speaker 2 (01:21:43):
I don't think he's sober but it could just be
sleep deprivation and the fact that something else is awry
and he's like going to the capitol. He says, he
wants to go to the capital to like start a
legal precedent. He says, Liver King v. Joe Rogan is
going to be like one of the great legal battles
of our centurion terms of setting press, what kind of
resident it's gonna be the new dread Scott. I gotta

(01:22:06):
play you guys another video from right after his arrest
in terms of like seeing how well this man is doing.
This is the one where he talks about having not
slept the days. It's gonna zoom it on his eyes
and I need you to look at his pupils, Okay,
because this is this seems like a man who's had
a serious head injury to me because his his one

(01:22:27):
of his pupils is a very different size from the others.

Speaker 5 (01:22:31):
Good born in prime.

Speaker 10 (01:22:33):
Oh wow, from the Vibration play that the greatest home
state in the world.

Speaker 8 (01:22:41):
Often Texas.

Speaker 5 (01:22:43):
Texas is the state.

Speaker 8 (01:22:45):
Just to be clear, bags under my eyes haven't slept
a whole lot and it's been an amazing gift.

Speaker 3 (01:22:53):
Uh what do you what do you see there people
with medical training.

Speaker 6 (01:22:58):
Yeah, the human I shouldn't do that. That is like, yeah,
then I'm supposed to look like that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:03):
That's one of the bad side, like twenty times bigger
than the other people. It's bad.

Speaker 2 (01:23:12):
Like it's if I cared about this man, I would
get him to a hospital immediately.

Speaker 3 (01:23:18):
Yeah, And to be clear, I don't.

Speaker 6 (01:23:23):
I kind of wonder the liver a filtering organ, right,
it takes the bad stuff out.

Speaker 3 (01:23:28):
I feel like if that's all you eat, you're going
to concentrate the bad You're going to poisoning. She almost
certainly did do someone like slip him a bear liver
or something polar bear liver, Like what's going on here? Yeah?

Speaker 6 (01:23:41):
Yeah, yeah, he went up the food chain until he
ate that wolf's liver and then put it on his head.

Speaker 3 (01:23:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23:47):
It's very unclear to me. Is he actually eating that
much liver? Like there's videos where he does, but like
on a daily basis. He's also taking gear, so maybe
he has a normal diet in order to like, you know,
outside of it and this is just for show. There's
been a lot of feorizing about that and we just
don't know. But either way, I think it's safe to
say this is a sick man, right, this is not

(01:24:07):
a well person.

Speaker 5 (01:24:09):
Yea.

Speaker 6 (01:24:10):
His Instagram comments are not helping. Just give this man
a gun immediately. Keep trying to fight Joe Rogan. But
I believe you can do it right now.

Speaker 3 (01:24:22):
If someone is putting out a casting call for deranged
man and like profit in the desert, he looks exactly
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
Absolutely the incredible added before we went completely looks amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:24:33):
He looks incredible.

Speaker 6 (01:24:34):
Yeah, he's got like two fun his haism can like.

Speaker 3 (01:24:39):
He looks like if you know the.

Speaker 6 (01:24:40):
Mural of John Brown, John Brown is like joke, That's
what he looks like.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
He does.

Speaker 6 (01:24:48):
Different vibes.

Speaker 2 (01:24:49):
Speaking of different vibes, let's change off the vibes and
play some hands.

Speaker 3 (01:25:05):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (01:25:06):
So, friends, I got to play you this next video,
which is after he gets out of jail, he goes
to the Capitol, And this is him going through security
at the Capitol as.

Speaker 3 (01:25:13):
Best I can tell, and he is.

Speaker 2 (01:25:16):
He's wearing like fucking waiting length pants, like pants that
cut off just below your knee, so like they're high
water smoke pants. He's wearing like a sleeveless green hoodie.
And he has the hood up over his head, and
then he's wearing a plate carrier and he's trying to
It's just it's just really funny. It's just two ladies

(01:25:49):
and like security informs. They're letting him try to go through.
And I think this proves that he's If he was
wearing ceramic plates, I don't think it would set off
the metal detective. He's got be wearing those cheap AR
five hundred metal plates. While yeah, yeah, I mean it's possible.
This doesn't look like just a weight vest. That looks
like just a normal plate carrier, although it'syeah, it's a.

Speaker 6 (01:26:10):
Five eleven TAC Tech.

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
Yeah, yeah, it looks like yeah, Carr, So I think
you just got AAR five hundred plates in there.

Speaker 6 (01:26:17):
Of course, I mean they're probably just white plates. They
may it may not even be a five.

Speaker 2 (01:26:20):
They may may not even be dying. He tells them
it's his exoskeleton, so he has to keep it on.
I don't think he gets in wearing this. Oh man,
I love I love the liver cake.

Speaker 3 (01:26:36):
I was really not expecting him to turn into a lobster.
But apparently that's where we're at.

Speaker 6 (01:26:40):
Now, that's where we're at Yeah, you're right, given his radness.

Speaker 2 (01:26:44):
So there's one more video from his time in Austin
before we'll get back to the Liver King compound and
see the liver Queen a little little oh no that
that person is.

Speaker 6 (01:26:53):
Going through like the mental health equipment of the Q
course right now, watching their one source of income.

Speaker 3 (01:27:01):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:27:03):
I have to hope if you're the liver queen, you
have pretty good like insurance for the liver King.

Speaker 3 (01:27:08):
Yeah, you hope.

Speaker 6 (01:27:09):
So I don't know how long they've been living monarch together,
whether she was with him before he went completely fucking bongers, or.

Speaker 3 (01:27:15):
I don't know how much time there was before that happened,
to be honest. Was it an arranged marriage like previous monarchies.

Speaker 6 (01:27:24):
Yeah, she's actually from the Lung family, but they had
to marry her off to forge alliance. I'm gonna have
to demand that we watch is Lk's back vulnerable if
he only stands to strike, because I need to see that.

Speaker 2 (01:27:40):
There's a lot of Liver King fighting videos, and okay,
none of them are are all that impressive.

Speaker 6 (01:27:48):
So one way, he fights like a horse sized duck
or one hundred duck sized horses.

Speaker 2 (01:27:51):
There's a video where he goes hunting with his kid
and he's talking about how it's like a prival experience.
But all that happens is he pays a guy to
take him into the woods. It's like forty feet away
from a deer, and then they just shoot the deer
outside where his Native American guy is like, okay, you
can shoot it now.

Speaker 3 (01:28:12):
It's really funny. It's pretty good. Okay what.

Speaker 2 (01:28:19):
He's just cram walking like a gorilla down like the
hull of his hotel.

Speaker 3 (01:28:26):
It's beautiful stuff. It's good.

Speaker 4 (01:28:30):
Somebody.

Speaker 2 (01:28:30):
Now he's doing fake martial ice booths and it comes
out of the duor straight.

Speaker 11 (01:28:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
Yeah, he's just turned his girl and crab walk that
he does is like fist pump. He has like a
little chant that he makes people say, lock it down.
He pays to me wearing an ankle monitor. Yeah, he
is wearing an ankle monitor. Yes, that's my favorite part
of the video. He does have to wear an ankle monitor.

Speaker 3 (01:28:55):
Now someone's coming.

Speaker 6 (01:28:56):
To it's not an ancestral ankle monitor.

Speaker 3 (01:29:03):
That is not a normal crowd walk. I don't know
how to describe what that is. It genuinely defies description.
It is the weird, weird forms a bush. I've ever
seen the cube of undertake imagine if Rita was drunk.
So we're gonna go back.

Speaker 2 (01:29:23):
To ads real quick, and then when we come back,
we're going to finally see the Liver Queen and him
back in his compound talking to his fellow friends about
how how things are really good, how he wanted to
get arrested for threatening Joe Rogan, how it's blessing to
have a restraining order against him and to not be
able to be in possession of his guns anymore. And

(01:29:54):
we're back, and I'm gonna play that video for you
guys once again. So he is standing in the yard
of the Liver King compound. His wife is drinking a
glass of wine next to him, and Appointed this kind
of reluctantly takes his hand. They are listening to a
like I think it's a I think you'd call it
a trance remix of Mike Posner's I Took a Bill
in a Pisa, So I don't know what it's just

(01:30:18):
blasting over the yard. As he talks, he rants about
his arrest.

Speaker 5 (01:30:24):
There's zero race, there's zero I really understand. I really
get it, really and I'm not asking for it. I
don't need it. But it's it's hard.

Speaker 10 (01:30:37):
It's the hardest parts over, the hardest parts over, that's great,
that's really good.

Speaker 2 (01:30:46):
The hardest parts over getting arrested. His wife really doesn't
want to take his hand.

Speaker 5 (01:30:54):
He has a.

Speaker 6 (01:30:54):
Caffea draped around his shoulders, a tactical caffa.

Speaker 2 (01:30:59):
He's where a tactical cafea. He loves his tactical kafea. Okay,
it's good stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:31:05):
Yeah, he's he's just doing he's just doing really really healthy.

Speaker 8 (01:31:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:31:09):
He seems to have like added mag pouches for this one,
which he suggests that he removed them his trip to
the capital.

Speaker 3 (01:31:16):
He to remove the mag pouches to go to the capitol.

Speaker 6 (01:31:19):
So he already throwed it through And so I bet
I could wear it if I take the mag pouches off.

Speaker 3 (01:31:24):
Yeahinating fish, it's incredible fish.

Speaker 6 (01:31:30):
It looks like he's taken so many steroids and he
is literally inflated and they are trying to get out.

Speaker 12 (01:31:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:31:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:36):
So in this last video that we're going to play,
he's sitting on a throne. He's got a throat, he
talks about how he thinks the throne is silly now
and how he wouldn't have liked past liver King, and
how people talk about how he's lost it and he
thinks that's a compliment because I think he's making a
point about ego death here, but it's not very coherent.
So here's the liver King talking about how it's good

(01:31:58):
to lose your mind.

Speaker 9 (01:31:59):
Walking through the foyer and I saw these old thrones
and I just kind of laughed, and I was like,
oh god, you know, kind of a little bit embarrassed.
And I thought, oh, you know what, I don't think
I made a video today. I said I was going to,
so I better, I better deliver on it. But it
was Sunday, Family Day, God's Day, Capital g Day, and

(01:32:23):
we did that then, Man, it was that was good.
And so I'm walking by this one, this throne, old throne,
and I thought.

Speaker 8 (01:32:31):
Buffalo is real.

Speaker 9 (01:32:32):
That's that's legit. That's gonna stay. But I thought, oh
my god, you know the predecessor me, I would have
hated me too. I read some comments today or yesterday,
and I saw he's losing it a lot. And this

(01:32:54):
is says it on my desk, lose yourself.

Speaker 8 (01:32:59):
That is like when you actually lose yourself though, and
you lose the ego, you can't really tell people, you know,
because then it's like, hey, yeah, I actually shed my
ego and now I'm better.

Speaker 5 (01:33:14):
You know, that's the ego talking.

Speaker 8 (01:33:16):
So if other people are seeing it, whoa thank you,
thank you, or I can also go back to the egomaniac.

Speaker 2 (01:33:25):
So here's the thing, folks, the new DSM that's coming out,
I think they're going to increase the age at which
you could be diagnosed as a schizophrenic for the male
up to like forty or something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:33:37):
And boy, howdy, no, real, truly like real Ross putin
vibes from this one. He's got like a hood on.

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
He really is obsessed with because he's his hair. He's
got less and less of it every day.

Speaker 6 (01:33:52):
That'll happen if you put the testosterone, would you're taking
nothing but pure test yes?

Speaker 5 (01:33:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 6 (01:33:57):
Yeah, when you pour a testosterone on your Syrian the morning.

Speaker 3 (01:34:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:01):
So anyway, that's that's my update for everyone on the
liver King. He's doing well. I'll be shocked if he's
alive at a year.

Speaker 6 (01:34:08):
What a fantastic man.

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
He's got kids, but he also makes the meat raw testicle,
so I don't know if they're going to be worse off.

Speaker 6 (01:34:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that he's probably one of
those rare station intervene moments.

Speaker 3 (01:34:19):
Yeah, something should have something should be done here.

Speaker 6 (01:34:22):
Yeah, yeah it is. It doesn't seem like a healthy guy.
I know, if you should eat just organ meats.

Speaker 3 (01:34:28):
No, Apparently, like eating a diet that is entirely consists
of raw organs, random pharmaceuticals and gear makes you like
talk exactly the same as like a nineteen year old
art student. Yeah, like another enough kennemine to like traquilize
a horse. These are apparently equivalent states of being.

Speaker 5 (01:34:49):
This is what I've learned from this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
Yeah, I think kenymine is one possible explanation because some
of his some of his behavior is definitely like ketamine goaded.

Speaker 5 (01:34:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:35:01):
But I also think there's a good chance that this
is just like he's been abusing drugs for such a
long period of time that he's just suffering permanent brain
damage now at this point, right like he's he's not
able to like he's not very cogent anymore. And I
don't know, I feel like the people who are still
around him are largely taking advantage of him for money,

(01:35:23):
Like he was good at making money at one point,
they're still cash flooding in and that's that's kind of
what's happening here. But on the other hand, like this
is this guy made his own hell, he made his
own bed. He's getting exactly what he wants. Yeah, he
liked people about the health, which is a pretty fucked
up thing to do. Like, yeah, I didn't have a
lot of sympathy for the living King. No, I don't
have a lot of sympathy for the liver King anyway,

(01:35:45):
any questions about the Liver King before we roll out?

Speaker 6 (01:35:48):
I mean so many, Robert, more than you can ever imagine.

Speaker 3 (01:35:53):
But okay, on on a scale of like point oh
one to one, Godafi, how or is golden rs?

Speaker 2 (01:36:03):
I mean they're golden ars. Like they're fine, like they are,
like they're definitely like dictator great ars.

Speaker 3 (01:36:09):
I'll give them that.

Speaker 2 (01:36:10):
Like if if you if you saw that and like
some fucking junta leader, you know, carrying it around and
screaming about executing his enemies, you'd be like, yeah, that
fits that said, I do think if you are going
to be carrying a gold plated weapon. An AR is
just inherently less impressive than an AK forty seven, like
a golden a golden a AK forty seven says something

(01:36:31):
about you, and a golden AR just says that you
have like fifteen thousand dollars to light on fire for
no good reason, whereas a gold plate at AK forty
seven says you've probably mixed cocaine and gunpowder, you know. Yeah, well, yeah,
that's some advice for LIVI king for free. Yeah, you
have to you have to be sending positive messages out
into the world with your apparel, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 6 (01:36:54):
Yeah's just why I'm wearing the duppiest wolf. You guys
have to just find the fucking wolf. Like the indignity
of it being killed is not it's final indignity, as
it turns out.

Speaker 3 (01:37:08):
Yeah, no, that's that's as bad as it can go
for a wolf.

Speaker 6 (01:37:12):
Yeah, pretty much. You go from the top of the
food chain to this guy's bolding hu crania. Yeah, I know,
have a fucking vegetable everyone, That's what I have for you.

Speaker 3 (01:37:24):
Yeah, I have have vegetables. Eat more vegetables. We haven't
talked about how he squawks.

Speaker 6 (01:37:28):
He doesn't squat with the body, squats with the ragh.

Speaker 5 (01:37:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:37:36):
Now we forgot to mention that that is very funny.

Speaker 6 (01:37:39):
Yeah, God, everyone go on this. It's a terrible fucking
time to be I've gone into Instagram.

Speaker 3 (01:37:44):
It's funny. Yeah, it's really funny.

Speaker 2 (01:37:46):
Have some fun, enjoy the liver Kings Instagram while he's
still alive for another like four to six months.

Speaker 3 (01:37:52):
I'm not taking any pleasure in this. I don't want
him to die.

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):
I'm just looking at a man and being like, well,
that's not gonna last much longer.

Speaker 3 (01:37:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:37:59):
It is like watching a car without breaks. Yeah, traveling
down hill.

Speaker 3 (01:38:02):
Let's speed. Yeah, all right, everyone, have a good night.

Speaker 5 (01:38:07):
Trim.

Speaker 13 (01:38:30):
This is it could Happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garson Davis. Today
I am joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and later
a special report by Robert Evans. This episode, we are
covering the week of June twenty fifth to July second.
It is the end of Pride month. It was Canada Day.

(01:38:53):
Fourth of July is coming up. I will say no
one in our team wished me a happy Canada Day,
not that I noticed.

Speaker 3 (01:38:59):
That's correct. I hate the Trump administration because I can't
do my death the Canada jokes anymore.

Speaker 13 (01:39:04):
It sucks terrible Canada. Welcome to the Resistance. I'm gonna
start with a brief news round up because there's been
so many news stories this past week that we cannot
do big sections on all of them. We already have
three main stories, but there's some mini stories that I
didn't want to get forgotten. I'm gonna start by talking

(01:39:24):
about the Supreme Court, which has now limited the ability
of lower court judges to use nationwide injunctions. So now
Trump's order to end a birthright citizenship can be enforced,
if even temporarily, for those who are not affiliated with
the actual court cases on the constitutionality of ending birthright citizenship.

(01:39:46):
What this means on a broader scale is that Trump's
very obviously illegal executive orders can now be enforced in
a lot of states because the injunctions that judges are
putting on only apply to the people in those specific cases,
so enforcement of the orders can start before the final
order on if it's legal or not gets gets issued.

(01:40:07):
So this is really bad because it will cause some intense,
if temporary, like short term headaches for many people who's
now citizenship is in a big question mark. But this
also affects many other cases regarding judge's ability to actually
issue injunctions that affect things across the whole country.

Speaker 3 (01:40:29):
Yeah, there is some sort of like weird hack shit
you can do where like there's been some stuff the
judges have been trying to do and to be like
everyone in the country is a plaintive or whatever the fuck. Yeah,
and I don't know how long that's gonna hold up,
and and like the fuck thing about this is again
it's just like what this means is shroup administration can

(01:40:51):
kind of do whatever the fuck they want and it's
just legal until this free court like looks at it,
and that's completely unhinged.

Speaker 13 (01:40:59):
Yeah, Agreediously, illegal orders can now be enforced for a
period of months to years, as the court cases eventually
will churn their way up to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 (01:41:09):
Yeah, and this is a particularly egregious one too, because
the birthday citizenship is so obviously it's just literally in
the constitution. It's literally the Constitution just says, if you're
born here, you're a citizen.

Speaker 6 (01:41:19):
Yeah, well it says that section of the Amendment that
is under question is subject to the authority thereof which
is what is being litigated here. There is a section
there that I guess is perceived by some people to
be debateable. It doesn't seem very debatable to me, right, No,
it's completely insane. It's like unhinged shit. Like it's like,
it's like stuff you wouldn't have seen even from like

(01:41:41):
unhinged conservative legal cranks fifteen years ago. You absolutely would
have seen this particular case.

Speaker 3 (01:41:47):
Unfortunately, well I guess the absolute most unhinged baby, but
like you wouldn't have seen even like, I don't know,
the normal person on Fox News kind of unhinged arguing
this even like fifteen years ago.

Speaker 6 (01:41:59):
And now this was like on the blogs that have,
you know, the GeoCities era web design.

Speaker 5 (01:42:05):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:42:07):
Trying to restrict and quantify citizenship is going to be
probably the main theme of this episode, as we will
get to in the future, and if even temporarily, trying
to strip the citizenship of already thousands, one hundred thousands
of people who are who live in this country is
incredibly worrying considering the massive amount of increased funding that
ICE is about to receive. Speaking of ICE, second little

(01:42:28):
mini story in explosive ICE raid in Huntington Park, California. Yeah,
or attack and ICE agents used explosives to breach and
raid the home of US citizens. A drone was sent
into the home after explosives shattered the windows, sending glass
yards flying into the home occupied by a mother and
two young children. The target of the raid was not
in the home. Border Patrol was looking for a man

(01:42:50):
that got into a car accident during a previous ICE raid,
who was questioned at the scene and was allowed to leave.
But now the DHS alleges the man was obstructing the
actions of ICE when he rammed his car into a
vehicle carrying CBP agents, though witnesses at the scene say
that the FEDS break checked, leading to a rear ending.
The man turned himself in on Friday after the raid.

(01:43:13):
So what actually happened here is that ICE caused a
car accident and in response, they blew up the home
of US citizens.

Speaker 6 (01:43:20):
Yeah, well, they dynamically breached, Yeah, at home with a
little child in right, like you see in the video.

Speaker 13 (01:43:26):
Two young kids. I think, like a six year old
and a two year old.

Speaker 6 (01:43:29):
Yeah, you see them presumably the mother of the two mother, Yeah,
with the child in her arms leaving.

Speaker 13 (01:43:34):
They sent a fucking drone in there. They're acting the
house full of like active combatants. You have like dozens
dozens of people in military fatigues raiding this home.

Speaker 6 (01:43:43):
Yeah, except that they didn't do it in such a
fashion as you would if you if you were actually worried, right,
Like they didn't. There wasn't a flashbang, right that they breached,
stood around for a while, sent a drone in. They
didn't dynamically breach in a dynamic way right like they
would if they were expecting a real threat.

Speaker 3 (01:43:58):
No, they just wanted to blow up this person's fucking
house because they were pissed off that they that that
they caused a car accident. Yes, these are These are
the tiniest fucking baby secret police I have ever seen
in my entire goddamn life. Fucking Christ.

Speaker 13 (01:44:12):
It runs me of that one like picture of like
a police raid in the nineties that conservatives used to
use in terms of like like the government's taking over
of this, of this of this, like you know, retro
nineties swat cop like pointing a gun at like a family.
It's like hiding in like a closet. And the Elian
Gonzales ray, do you mean yeah? And how much this

(01:44:33):
was used as like fear of like federal overreach, like
used by conservatives and now this is like their entire
platform is raiding the home of US citizens.

Speaker 3 (01:44:42):
Yeah, it's pretty worth noting.

Speaker 6 (01:44:43):
I believe Huntington part that mayor has directed their police
to enforce the California law which requires law enforcement offices
to identify themselves.

Speaker 11 (01:44:52):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:44:53):
It's been very common to the ICE agents refuse to
identify themselves and wear masks, right, And I believe this
was passed by their count and then their mayor, whose
name is Arturo Flores, released statement calling the ICE abductions
mass abductions and directing his police to intervene if what
was happening was unlawful or unauthorized. And I can't help

(01:45:15):
but think that that is why we saw this happen here, right,
I think it may not be so m sicar crash
as a chance to do something in this city, which
has yeah, been one of the very few that has
taken meaningful action to prevent.

Speaker 13 (01:45:28):
This absolutely because people don't like ice. There's new ice
approval ratings that came out by Quinnipiac on a June
twenty fourth, twenty five net approval of ice negative seventeen percent,
Democrats negative eighty Independence negative thirty two. This is this
centrist position, independence negative thirty two percent.

Speaker 6 (01:45:47):
Oh yeah, you've got like bushadmin staff as saying abolish eyes.
It's a win for me.

Speaker 13 (01:45:51):
Oh yeah, GOP is up sixty but that's it. This
is like the centrist position now. And also sixty percent
is nearly just half the GOP. Like, people don't like ice.
The majority of people in this country don't like ice
negative seventeen percent. Yeah, candidates that need to run on
abolishing ice. This is like one of the most important
issues facing the country right now, and they are wildly unpopular,
including for independence. For this is this set abolishing ice

(01:46:14):
should be the centrist position.

Speaker 3 (01:46:16):
Yeah, well but this but this is this is sort
of the problem, right, which is that the Democrats did this, like, well,
a least some of them, at least AOC did so
some of that. A Democratic wave ran on that in
twenty eighteen, and then the Democrats were just like each
shit we're never going to do that again. And like
AOC never fucking mentioned it again. Like they all came
into power and we're like, Okay, we got to deal
with super border crackdown. Shit. It's like they need to
they fucking need to do this.

Speaker 13 (01:46:37):
Yeah, but people should bring it back. I think that
the data here is in support. Yeah, and like ICE
is younger than I am. ICE is younger than all
of us, Like yeah, ICE is a is a fucking
fake agency.

Speaker 6 (01:46:48):
Yeah, and DHS is younger than most of us.

Speaker 5 (01:46:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:46:50):
I like the ICE as an agency should be like
disappear and we should like try to be forgiven for
it over the course of hundreds of years.

Speaker 6 (01:46:56):
Like yeah, Yeah, people want to learn more about the
history of DHS. I did a series about title forty
two where I talk about it a whole lot.

Speaker 13 (01:47:04):
Speaking of agencies that shouldn't exist. The BBC cut the
feed of the glass Frey Music Festival during Kneecap's performance
to block pro Palestinian messaging, but they failed to stop
Bob Villain from leading a death to the idf chant.

Speaker 3 (01:47:22):
Bob Dylan.

Speaker 13 (01:47:25):
Villain what.

Speaker 3 (01:47:29):
Bob Dylan based on Villain.

Speaker 13 (01:47:32):
They are a punk rap group and they were leading
death to the IDF chance broadcast live on the stage.
Both of these music groups, Kneecap and Bob Villain, are
now an investigation by the British police from their political
comments at this music festival, and the US State Department
has revoked Bob Villain's work visa ahead of an upcoming

(01:47:54):
US tour as punishment for criticizing the military of a
foreign country. The Party of Free Speed each strikes once again.

Speaker 6 (01:48:01):
Yeah, I do want to say that, like as as
a consumer of Glastonbrie music festival content, right, I guess
as a British process Yeah, and at the target like
age demographic, I guess what this has overshadowed is the
massive amount of support for the Palestinian cause that you saw. Like,
go watch a glaston Bree video and you will not
not see Palestinian flagged in the crowd most of them.

(01:48:22):
You will hear the artists acknowledging that there is a
genocide in Palestine.

Speaker 5 (01:48:27):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:48:28):
I don't know if anyone at the BBC is familiar
with Bob Villain, Like, I'm sure they've played their music,
but whoever made the choice to stream them and not
stream Kneecap clearly had not done like a fucking like
a Wikipedia level research, because you know what you're getting
into with these guys, Like both the people in the
band are called Bobby Villain, right, No, that's sirs, staging
that they use in order to have a little bit

(01:48:50):
of privacy. But there's an interview with him a while
ago where he's like, Yeah, I just like pisching people
off because it's the only thing that brings me joy
in this miserable fucking country.

Speaker 8 (01:49:00):
Ah. Incredible.

Speaker 6 (01:49:02):
Yeah, they've been very aspoken about a large number of
things that the.

Speaker 3 (01:49:05):
British police have been going completely unhinged with this too.
The Parliament's currently I don't know what the result. I
think they may have voted to do it already. They've
been trying to vote to make it illegal for like
Palestinian action to exist after they did it after they
did a pretty big action at a Britis Din action year. Yeah,
after Parson Action did a pretty big like action at
a like fucking British arms manufacturer that's also Israel. So

(01:49:27):
they're going so unhinged on all of this shit.

Speaker 13 (01:49:30):
And they've been going after Kneecap for years. There's multiple
investigations into Kneecap. Now you should check out Neecaps new movie.
It's pretty good for our first main story. I guess
I'll throw to James to discuss denaturalization.

Speaker 6 (01:49:44):
Yeah so yeah, a less exciting than Glassery music festival.
So the naturalization if you're not familiar, rate the movement
of US citizenship from people who became US citizeners at
some point in their life. The DOJ has issued instructions
to its Civil Division employees to pursue denaturalization proceedings against
naturalized US citizens quote in all cases permitted by law

(01:50:06):
and supported by the evidence.

Speaker 3 (01:50:09):
It goes on to lists some categories.

Speaker 6 (01:50:11):
These include some of the things you might expect, including
being in access to terrorism and organized crime, people who
engaged in war crimes, people who committed violent crimes or
failed to disclose felonies on their application for naturalization. But
they also include fraud both against private individuals and against Medicaid, Medicare,
and the pay Check Protection Plan maybe program, the PPP

(01:50:35):
COVID era government bailout right. The last one, however, is
the most concerning. Quote any cases referred to the Civil
Division that the Division considers officially important to pursue.

Speaker 13 (01:50:46):
Any cases that area found to be sufficient sufficiently important.

Speaker 6 (01:50:52):
Just people aren't familiar rates. Civil and criminal law are distinct. Right,
civil law has a lower burden of proof and crucially,
the accused person is not entitled to legal representation. In addition,
this could have trickle down effects. Right, children of naturalized
citizens are also citizens, so their citizenship derives from their

(01:51:14):
parent citizenship. So it's possible that children who are not
even accused of doing anything wrong could be the natural
or not naturalized, de citizenized and left stateless. Right, many
of these children will not be dual nationals. This is
another big problem with like ending birthright citizenship. Yeah, so
it will lead people so like this is something that

(01:51:35):
I do feel like, much like I feel like in
the UK people should have pushed back against the government
prosecuting people for saying shit that was fucking hateful and
disgusting about migrants when there was a stabbing attack last year.
I still feel people should have pushed back because it's
not a good situation when the government gets to decide
what you can and can't think. Likewise, in this instance,

(01:51:57):
nations in the global North have been leaving people who
fought for the or people who are accused of fighting
for the Islamic state or joining the Islamic state. Stateless
for a long time, and I think that was a
bad precedent and they were able to As we'll get
into they will always use an odious person as the
first example, right to set the precedent and then go
from there.

Speaker 5 (01:52:16):
Yep.

Speaker 6 (01:52:17):
So in the odious person example in this case is
someone called Elliott Duke. They have been denaturalized. Duke was
a UK citizen served in the United States military. While
serving in Germany, they received and distributed child sex abuse material,
according to the DOJ. They were later contacted by the

(01:52:38):
FBI about this and prosecuted. The DOJ stated that their
case was identified as part of Operation Prison Lookout, which
aims to identify sex offenders who have naturalized. I haven't
seen any reporting on Prison Lookout. It's in the press release,
but I think maybe people don't read to the bottom.
But it appears that the DOJ this case has been
going on for months. The Duke case, right, and so

(01:52:58):
the DOJ as early as February this year was looking
through prosecution records to find and find naturalized citizens who
have been convicted of sex crimes. Duke was not able
to get an attorney to represent them. They also it
appears to renounce a UK citizenship, and it's not very
clear what happens now, right, like in another stateless person cases,

(01:53:21):
where does this person go? Denaturalization has been used before,
right that The time when the United States did the
most denaturalization was during the Second Red Scare second rates
gay kay and McCarthyism.

Speaker 13 (01:53:33):
Right, and oh boy, are they trying to bring it back.

Speaker 6 (01:53:36):
Yeah, yep, twenty thousand cases a year in the McCarthy era.
For references, stats I could find suggest about twenty five
million naturalized citizens in the United States both Obama. Obama
had something called Operation Janus identified people who were eligible
for denaturalization, and Trump one also at higher rates of denaturalization,

(01:53:58):
but nothing on this McCarthy eras scale. Right, people will
be familiar with the naturalization also before that, that happened.

Speaker 3 (01:54:04):
To Emma Goldman for example.

Speaker 5 (01:54:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:54:06):
One other story from this week that's kind of related
is it was announced that whol to check the citizenship
status of all Americans. This is the first time we've
had a centralized tool like this, or we've attempted to
the US has for a while has resisted creating like
a dossier of like official citizens because this is like
a kind of problematic thing to have. There's a lot

(01:54:29):
of issues with this concept. Actually verifying that this list
is accurate is very tricky. You have to add people
who have been naturalized how they've been naturalized. There's other
people who acquire citizenship through other means than the standard
like naturalization process, like including like through through your parents.
There's the Child Citizenship Act of two thousand where if
one of your parents is a US citizen and you

(01:54:51):
are not a US citizen, but you live with your
US citizen parent while being a legal permanent resident, that
then gives you automatic citizenship. But you don't need to
apply for the naturalization process. So this is like a
really weird thing to prove. You have to apply for
a certificate or apply for a passport as proof of citizenship.
How would those cases be added to this list? This

(01:55:12):
is an incredibly problematic thing to have, and it's going
to be used mainly just to hunt people down and
try to deport them.

Speaker 6 (01:55:19):
Yeah, massive information security risk.

Speaker 13 (01:55:22):
It's really problematic and tied in with these other denaturalization programs.
It's a really worrying sign of where things are going
to be going.

Speaker 6 (01:55:30):
Yeah, talking of worrying signs, this is a worrying sign
that we have to pivot to advertisements.

Speaker 13 (01:55:48):
All right, we are back, James. You do have one
piece of good news in the immigration front, Well, I
do you, Garson. I've gotta hate you some bad news first, buddy.
That's the way this show works.

Speaker 6 (01:55:59):
That's how we do it here. Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (01:56:01):
It can happen here.

Speaker 6 (01:56:02):
Special Immigrant Defenders Law Center i llegal nonprofit says one
of their clients, Julie Calderon, was abducted by armed men
in Los Angeles and taken to Santy Cedro. People are
not familiar. Santit Caedro is the border that you might
call San Diego border, right, the town that actually has
the physical excess of Tijuana. Santi Suedro. The city of

(01:56:23):
San Diego also has some land down there. She was
told at Santi Sudro that she was to sign voluntary
deportation papers. She very reasonably refused to ask to see
a Laura and a judge, and at this point she
was taken and returned to the armed men. And it's
now being detained in a warehouse with no beds, blankets,
or food. She was able to make a call to

(01:56:43):
her family from a blocked number. She described the people
as bounty hunters, and at this point she said she
has not seen any uniformed offices in her detention right.
She's being detained in an area where men and women
are mixed, which is not usual in border patrol attention,
and according to Deaf. According to im Deaf, she has
not been able to shower and the only water source

(01:57:04):
is a sink. The Mexican Consulate has been informed and
thinks that she might now be in the O Ti
Meca Dettention Center, but because she's not showing up on
the ice detainee locator, they don't know that for sure,
and they are therefore still a little bit unclear on
where this lady has gone. I have seen reports of
bounty hunters, many of you have sent them to me.

(01:57:26):
I have seen none that I find to be credible
before this. IM Deaf are an established group. They are
not people who I've found to be prone to making
things up or exaggerating like I trust.

Speaker 3 (01:57:40):
Them as a source. And this is deeply, deeply worrying.

Speaker 6 (01:57:45):
I don't know why it's not getting more coverage other
than most people on the migration and border beat perhaps
don't speak Spanish or have actually just turned up on
this beat a few weeks ago and have have no
notion of like who the actors and these groups are,
and they tend to go off government press releases. This
is like shit that we haven't seen in the United

(01:58:07):
States since I know, the Fugitive Slave Act.

Speaker 3 (01:58:10):
Like it's appalling. Yeah, this is like the most just actual,
straight up nineteen thirty is Nazi shit that we've seen
from them.

Speaker 6 (01:58:18):
Like, yes, it's hideous, Yeah, it's happening here in San Diego,
but it's also of course like as Californian as we
are entering this time with the most cowardly and like
pathetic governor that we've had in a long time, like
Arnolds Tortenego is a Republican, But I bad you'd have

(01:58:38):
handled this better than Nuisance, who is just a slime ball.

Speaker 3 (01:58:42):
Yeah, but the fact that Newsom isn't like like, if
this was happening in fucking Illinois, Pritscrew would have swat
teams like these, these these people would be like dead
right now, but like this is this is completely fucking unhinged.

Speaker 13 (01:58:56):
Yeah, no, this is the fuck. Yeah, James, I was,
I was muster good news after the break.

Speaker 3 (01:59:01):
You're right, Garrison and I do have some lucky you.

Speaker 6 (01:59:06):
Finally, a judge has ordered that Trump's sweeping asylum ban
exceeds his authority as president and granted broad class protection.
So we're going to see, like literally this happened maybe
thirty minutes before before we started recording. I'm going to
read over the court documents I've linked them in the
notes here until what this means. But it suggests that

(01:59:27):
Trump's authority under the Immigration Naturalization Act doesn't allow him
to just say we're not doing asylum anymore, and therefore
that could mean that it's possible for people to once
again apply for asylum in the United States. I don't
know how that will look. The Biden administration had great
success dating asylum through CBP one right and making it

(01:59:49):
practically impossible for many people, people who have darker skin,
people who don't have fancy as cell phone, people don't
have access to Wi Fi et cetera, et cetera, to
apply for asylum. That was a Biden administration. The people
who we're supposed to think of good they were terrible
for migrants, but they did they got that, they got
that through, right. So what we'll see from the Trump administration,

(02:00:10):
I don't imagine we will see a return to like
regular title light asylum processing as we saw like the
last time we saw it, I guess within the Obama area,
and that was pretty bad.

Speaker 3 (02:00:21):
So yeah, I don't know what we'll see.

Speaker 13 (02:00:23):
Yeah, all right, now I'm going to throw two Robert
Evans for a special report on the Diddy trial.

Speaker 2 (02:00:29):
Hey, everybody, Robert here. I guess I'm a resident p
Didy expert because I did the Bastards episodes on him.
Just felt like it was appropriate to give y'all a
brief update. So on the day that we record this,
which is Wednesday, the second of July, Sean Diddy Combs
was found guilty on two of the five charges in
his trial. He was being charged with racketeering, conspiracy and

(02:00:52):
sex trafficking, and he was not found guilty of racketeering,
conspiracy or of both sex trafficking accounts, each of which
carried fifty near mandatory minimums, but he was found guilty
on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. These
were for one for a woman who was pudent into Jane,
and one for his former partner, Cassie Ventura. So you know,

(02:01:13):
this is not what people who understand the case had
hoped entirely, right, Like, this is not ideal, It's not nothing,
but it's not ideal.

Speaker 3 (02:01:23):
Now, if you can't like why did this happen? Right?

Speaker 2 (02:01:26):
Why didn't he get convicted on these higher charges he
was absolutely guilty of? And it's because the prosecutors focked up, Right,
there were a number of different felony charges they could
have gone after him for that were less difficult to
prove than racketeering and sex trafficking and did he had
good lawyers?

Speaker 5 (02:01:41):
Right?

Speaker 2 (02:01:41):
And there's a lot of weirdness about, like, well, they
didn't go after him for the guns and drugs that
he had both at his properties, or for a number
of the other things that they could have done after him.
You know, this is because prosecutors have to make choices
as to like what to charge someone with, and they
tried for some of the harder stuff that was always
going to be a little more difficult to prove. Now,
the two charge he's been convicted on, he could do
up to twenty years each shows up to a maximum

(02:02:03):
ten year sentence, so he could get sentenced to do
ten years for each. Prosecutors have said that they're looking
for a four to five year prison sentence, which I
think is much too light. Twenty years would be I
would say, like, okay, that's that's a serious punishment.

Speaker 3 (02:02:17):
Anything over it. You know, ten years are over.

Speaker 2 (02:02:18):
I would say, that's still at least you know, we
can say it's not all the things he should have
been convicted on, but that's not You can't know. No
one's going to spit it ten years in prison, especially
at his age. He's in his mid fifties right now.
But four or five years, you know, I wouldn't quite
say that's a slap on the wrist, but it's not
nearly what is deserved here right now. You do with
federal sentences like this, tend to serve a lot more

(02:02:39):
of this. This is not a hope and he'll be
out in a year kind of situation. One of the
things that's kind of worth noting here is that he
and his team did ask for bail while he waited
for because next week he's going to they're going to
like set up when he's going to get sentenced. Right,
So that doesn't mean he'll be sentenced next week, but
they'll be scheduling as sentencing next week.

Speaker 5 (02:02:58):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:02:58):
The legal system moves pretty slow. And his team asked
for bail. There's evidence that he had people like setting
up getting extra security up around his primary home and
they were kind of expecting him to be able to
go home today. That's not going to happen. The judge
has denied his bail. This is after one of his
accusers basically said, hey, I think this guy is really dangerous.

(02:03:19):
He has a history of going after his accusers. I
don't feel safe with him out, you know, before sentencing,
and that's maybe a good sign that maybe the judge
will go further than the prosecutors. So though I don't
know if that's likely. Again, I'll be like, Okay, well,
at least this is serious. If he gets ten years
or something like that. If it is four or five,
I'm going to be pretty frustrated. But you know that's

(02:03:41):
the case. This is we are talking about a billionaire
going to core here, so any serious prison sentence is
more than you usually would expect. And this is a
guy who's been used to living with kind of impunity
for a while, and if he spends years in prison,
either way, it's not totally impunity. But yeah, not ideal.
That's the situation as it stands right now with P Diddy.

(02:04:02):
You know, we'll see again next week. They're going to
schedule his sentencing, so yeah, we'll see how things shake out.

Speaker 13 (02:04:10):
Now we'll pass over to me to discuss our second
main story this episode, the formerly named One Big Beautiful Bill.

Speaker 3 (02:04:19):
Oh God. So actually reading through this, I refuse to
call this anything over in the genocide budget because this
budget what is designed to do is a genocide and
that's not an exaggeration.

Speaker 13 (02:04:32):
Well, there's multiple types of killing included in this bill,
not just genocide. Yeah, the medicare cuts, I think that's true.
Aren't aren't technically genocide, but they but they could lead
to mass death, So we should be we should be inclusive.
We should be inclusive of all the types of death.
I think we'll get into the medicaid shit later. We
need to start with the mass deportation. We want to
do an ethnic cleansing. We want you to just simply

(02:04:53):
wipe out entire people as you'll live in the US
and like fucking dig depots them from this country. Right,
And by we you mean the bill, not you Mia
Wong or US school zone media.

Speaker 3 (02:05:03):
Yeah no, by yeah, by bye bye, We I mean
the Republican Party who fucking wrote this bill?

Speaker 6 (02:05:07):
Okay, just checking.

Speaker 3 (02:05:08):
So, okay, what is actually in this So there's a
very good writeup of this from the American Immigration Council
and a lot of the stuff is from there. Okay.
So across homeland security and government affairs, the judiciary, and
the military. The version of the budget that just passed
the Senate allocates one hundred and seventy billion dollars to

(02:05:29):
their fucking unhinged deportation ship. This would be the third
largest military budget in the world. It is thirty percent
larger than the military budget of Russia, which is currently
fighting an active, full scale ground war. Right. This is
a genocide budget. They are trying to get one hundred
and seventy billion dollars for all of their board enforcement
shit because they want to do a genocide. They're trying

(02:05:51):
to remove entire peoples from the United States, and to
do that they need this kind of money. Yeah, so
let's let's let's break down a little bit of where
this money's fucking going We're gonna do a longer thing.
I'm gonna do a longer episode about this thing, probably Tuesday,
like everything else in this budget, but this needs to
be understood. They're running forty five billion dollars specifically for

(02:06:12):
immigration detention, and, as the American Immigration Council points out,
that is at minimum five and a half billion more
dollars per year than the entire budget of the entire
federal prison system. Yeah, what the shit? That's again at minimum,
that's it's like fourteen it's like fourteen and a half

(02:06:33):
billion at minimum for detention, just just framgration attention. Again, significantly,
like over fifty percent larger than the budget for the
fucking entire federal prison system. They want to put into this.
They're also giving out three point five billion dollars to
state and local government spent on working with ICE. The
American Immgration Council estimates this could be one hundred and

(02:06:55):
twenty five thousand holding beds for people, which is and
I quote, only just a bit below the current population
of the entire federal prison system.

Speaker 13 (02:07:03):
They basically want to create a whole new prison system
just for immigrants.

Speaker 3 (02:07:07):
Yes, yeah, and again and again, and I cannot emphasize
this enough. The United States has one of the largest
prison systems on Earth, and they want to the the largest.
I think it's I think it's technically smaller than the Chinese. Actually,
let let let me actually pull the numbers up. Yeah,
I think it's technically for America per capita. Yeah, it's
like it's like there's like no contest. Yeah. Well, the

(02:07:28):
statistics are weird because there's countries that have like a
really really small number of people, sure like in terms
of like large countries or major countries for major companies,
not even close. Yeah, not even close. And then now
obviously that's also kind of like state prisons, but like
still with the far federal prison systm is still like
unfathomably massive. Yeah, and they basically want to double the
size of its specifically just to fucking do this, just

(02:07:51):
just to do these deportations. There's thirty billion dollars in
this for direct deportations and just like the higher ten
thousands more ICE agents.

Speaker 13 (02:07:59):
Which Trump's also been calling for in executive orders.

Speaker 3 (02:08:02):
Yeah, there is forty eight billion dollars for building the
wall and like border inflict physical border enforcement infrastructure. There's
an additional five billion dollars for checkpoints and like border patrol,
like facilities, not posts, and shit. There's also about fifteen
billion dollars for states to do deportation.

Speaker 5 (02:08:21):
Shit.

Speaker 3 (02:08:21):
There's so much unhinged anti immigrant shit in this bill
that like, again, I can't, we don't have time to
get into it.

Speaker 5 (02:08:27):
Yere.

Speaker 3 (02:08:27):
This is going to be a full episode on fucking Tuesday.

Speaker 13 (02:08:29):
This is why you have people like Steven Miller trying
to rally the whole party in support of this bill,
which massively raises the deficit, something that Elon's been complaining
about quite famously.

Speaker 3 (02:08:40):
Yeah, five trillion dollar hole in the budget. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 13 (02:08:43):
Now there's all these Republican congressmen who constantly complain about
the federal debt, who are totally fine increasing the federal
debt massively, people compromising their fiscal conservatism yep, in support
of a bill that furthers the United States as a
white supremacist penal colony. And at the end of there's
the congressmen vote against it, then that will be used
against them in future elections. Being flanked from further on

(02:09:06):
the right with attack ads claiming that these senators failed
to round up the illegals in not voting for the
big beautiful budget bill.

Speaker 3 (02:09:14):
Yeah, and I want to point this out, like they're
not gonna stop at immigrants. I need to make this
incredibly clear.

Speaker 13 (02:09:21):
Once you have this infrastructure, you have to use it.

Speaker 5 (02:09:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:09:24):
Okay, Look like the people on the on like the
furthest left of the US have talked about for a
long time, but this is a country that is built
on genocide, right. This is an apparatus that is designed
to turn the US specifically into a machine to and again,
and I need to point this out. The definition of
genocide includes like like removing people from a place, right, Like,

(02:09:46):
that is a genocide. If you force a bunch of
people to if you fucking round them up, put them
into camps, and then fucking send them somewhere else, that's
a genocide. That is what they are trying to do.
Like Laura Lumer has been talking today about like the
numbers she was citing with sixty five million people, which
is just every Latino person in the entire US. Yeah,
that's Latino people.

Speaker 6 (02:10:05):
That's what she's talking about.

Speaker 13 (02:10:06):
Specifically talking about how she wants to feed them to alligators,
which we'll talk about later.

Speaker 6 (02:10:10):
Yes, the context of the number was feeding them to allegates.

Speaker 3 (02:10:13):
Yeah, yeah, right, So, like Trump has been joking for
a long time about how if Stephen Miller got his way,
there would be like one hundred and fifteen million people
in this cushion and they would all look like Stephen Miller,
like that's where they're going. And that's not like, oh,
this is blah blah blah. You're like, this is the
infrastructure for them to be able to do this. And
so like, killing this fucking bill is unbelievably important. We're

(02:10:33):
going to get into more of the fucking unhinshit in here.
But like they only passed it by one vote in
the House last time. Yeah, and because of the way
that that reconciliation works, right, if anything changes in the
House version of the bill, it has to go back
to the Senate, where they also only barely passed it
by like buying off Susan Collins.

Speaker 13 (02:10:51):
It was a fifty to fifty split.

Speaker 6 (02:10:53):
Yeah, in this Senate. Yeah, with like Makowski voting for it,
for example.

Speaker 3 (02:10:59):
Yeah, So, like you know, on the one hand, being
able to pass this bill is precarious. On the other hand,
if they do it. That limits the window for which
we have to like make ice nonfunctional a lot because
as they ramp up this capacity. It's going to take
them a while to ramp up this capacity, right, even
if this passes, But like they haven't had the capacity
to do the genocide they've been trying to do, right,

(02:11:20):
this will give it to them with this, with this
amount of resources. Yeah, with the third largest military budget
in the world, they can do this kind of shit,
and we have to stop them before they get there.

Speaker 6 (02:11:30):
Yeah, Like this is one of those call everyone you
can in Congress situations, like not always a big call
your ramp person.

Speaker 3 (02:11:38):
Yeah, we're going to get to at the end of this,
like how we've actually met. We've gotten provisions killed from
this bill already. We're going to get to that later.
We also need to talk about the Medicaid shit, because Garrison,
you were saying, Oh, I don't think this can be
considered the genocide, but it's so killing. I actually disagree
with that, because, Okay, let's explain what's going on with Medicaid.

(02:11:59):
They want to do a brillion dollars of cuts. I
think it's like just slightly under a trillion or maybe
it's actually a trillion dollars of cuts over the next
ten years to Medicaid. They want to put an eighty
hour a month work requirement from Medicaid and food stamps. Now,
if you are disabled, right, this is just like a
fuck you die proposal because there are a lot of

(02:12:20):
people who fucking can't work eighty hours in a month,
and this is just like literally each hit and die.

Speaker 5 (02:12:24):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:12:25):
They're also expanding this shit the work requirements to They
want these work requirements to apply to people who have
children ages thirteen and older. So if you are trying
to like raise a child, fuck you eat shit and die.
And again also like this is both Medicaid and SNAP,
so this is a targeted The estimates by the CBO,

(02:12:46):
this is per PBS, the Correctional Bunchet Office estimates that
it will by twenty to thirty four, eighteen point eight
million people will be uninsured from this. It will get
three million people off of food stamps at a lot
of those people are just going to be disabled and
unbelievable numbers people of those people are going to fucking die,
And that's the point of this, right. Also, it's going

(02:13:07):
to be just hideous for trans people who use Medicaid
and SNAP at enormous rates because disabled and trans people
are like the two poorest populations in the US. It's
fucking hideous.

Speaker 13 (02:13:18):
These systems are already so hard to get in on
and stay on, like both, like both SNAP and Medicaid,
requires substantial revisions and reforms to make them easier to access.
To strengthen the infrastructure capacity of these things to get
more people on them, they need more funding. This is
basically trying to take an already kind of dying system

(02:13:39):
and just take it out of back and shoot it
in the head.

Speaker 5 (02:13:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:13:42):
Yeah, Well, and they intentionally just want it to be
like harder and more frustrating and shitty to use, Like
they literally rolled back that part of this bill is
rolling back a bunch of reforms that Biden made to
make it like slightly easier to get on. Yeah, and
this is just going like, yeah, fuck you. This is
going to be an absolute fucking catastrophe, not just because
of the people that it immediately affects, although it is

(02:14:02):
again going to kill unbelievable numbers of people. The other
thing with this is that this is going to fucking
annihilate rural hospitals, because rural hospitals get a huge amount
of their money for Medicaid. And you know, there's a
very good Kaiser Family Foundation report where they talk about
how like, yeah, one in four people in rural areas
get their health insurance from Medicaid, and it's estimated one

(02:14:24):
hundred and fifty five billion dollars decrease in in money
to hospitals and rural regions over the course of a decade.
Those hospitals are already closing. Those hospitals are fucking gone.
Like the this if this fucking passes as is and
there is a provision in there, I that's like, oh,
we're gonna spend fifty billion dollars on like to give
money to royal hospitals. That's not enough. That's like that's
a third of the amount that they're getting cut by, right,

(02:14:46):
like and even and even if those hospitals are open,
how the fuck are people going to pay for the
treatments because they're now kickoff Medicaid. But this is going
to fucking just absolutely eviscerate like the tiny remains of
our rural healthcare system, which is a complete fucking shymbolic mess.
This is just going to fucking liquidate it. It is
going to cause mass suffering and death on a scale
that like we are going to look back at the

(02:15:07):
height of the opioid crisis and like in fucking nostalgia
because we're going to have the opioid crisis and this
at the same time. So it's real, real, fucking bad.
I'm gonna mention a couple of other things that are
in It's like, there's two points to this bill, right.
One of the two points of it is to do
is to again just like technically cleanse every non much

(02:15:28):
person from the US. The second point of this bill
is to give corporations four point five trillion dollars in
tax cuts. It's mostly for rich people. That shit sucks.
That's like the buy in for like the business people
is you get these tax cuts. They also want to
end the tax credit for electric cars because their response
to climate change is fuck you die now again. As

(02:15:49):
I mentioned, this only passed in the House by one
vote last time, and that was actually a less extreme
version of the Well, okay, there were some there's some
more union shit in it that we'll talk about in
the other episode in the House version of it, but
this only passed in the House by one vote, and
it only passed by one vote because three Democrats died
in office. Great system's great, So things going great. However, Comma,

(02:16:10):
it is possible to like, like, it is possible to
beat these people. It is possible to get shit cut
from this fucking bill. To end on a positive note
on this, we talked a bit last we.

Speaker 13 (02:16:22):
Maybe last week, two weeks ago, one recent executive disorder.

Speaker 3 (02:16:26):
Yeah, yeah, we're talked about I think it's on two
different months now about how we beat the fucking ban
on using Medicaid for trans healthcare. And by we, I
mean a combination of trans journalists like Maddie Castigan, Bia Levine,
David Forbes, or like resident trans policy analyst Kurvin Green.
I did some work on it, not like a huge amount,
but like, I don't know, like it a little bit.
A lot of like local queer orgs did a bunch
of really good work on this, and like quite frankly,

(02:16:50):
like the other people who killed this as every single
one of you who like fucking called and emailed and
harasser senator like Ron Whiten, there was like there was
there was there was queer orgs like lobbying directly, and
then also his office got fucking flooded by shit from
like you who went and like screamed at them until
they stopped doing this. And because of that, we got

(02:17:11):
this thing killed from the fucking bill, and the Republicans
are so mad about it that like they could theoretically
re add it to the House one and there is
a chance where they get so mad that they readd
this to the House bill, and then that causes the
House bill to fail in the Senate because if they
readd this into the House build then reconciliation fails and
they had to go back to the Senate again. So
you know, it is possible to fucking beat these people.
And it's also important to understand that this was not

(02:17:33):
done by like the giant national like gating, like huge
nonprofit like Human Rights Commission, bullshit council stuff. They did
a little bit of stuff on the fucking trailing end.
This was accomplished almost entirely by a combination of non
white and working class trans journalists and organizers and just
like a bunch of random fucking people who were like,

(02:17:54):
each shit, fuck you get this out, and you know
on a thing that would have killed unbelievab numbers of transpeople.
We fought the Republican Party and we beat them, So
this can be done. And this bill is not guaranteed
to fucking pass. The bill can still be it can
still be killed. Yeah, yeah, like it is.

Speaker 5 (02:18:14):
It is.

Speaker 3 (02:18:15):
It is devastating enough to like rural healthcare that even
Republican senators are talking about not wanting to cut Medicaid.

Speaker 13 (02:18:22):
So it's a very unpopular bill. And when you tell
just regular Republicans about the details of the bill, they
don't like it. You can hey, they're being like the
Republican media machine is being so selective and how they're
talking about the bill, because if you discuss the way
that it just rips the heart out of Medicaid, that's
not what most older Republicans want because they actually also

(02:18:46):
rely on Medicaid. So it's it's a it is a
pretty unpopular bill, and the more people learn about the bill,
the more they dislike it. And you can you can
see stats on this.

Speaker 3 (02:18:54):
Yeah, and and the the unhinge thing about this right
is that even with limited information most Republicans have about this,
it still has like a twenty to thirty percent approval
rating it's so unpopular even in the low information environment
we're currently in. It it's like a twenty to thirty
percent of proof rating. I think if everyone actually understood
what was in the bill, I think it's roof rating
would fucking drop even further. Yeah, nobody wants this, except

(02:19:15):
except for like the overt genocide people.

Speaker 6 (02:19:18):
So most people, if they're not personally harmed, will know
someone who's being personally harmed.

Speaker 5 (02:19:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:19:24):
Do you know what is popular, James Uh? I can
guess the products and services that support this podcast beautiful.

Speaker 3 (02:19:32):
Ooh you know what else is extremely popular? It is
my hit theme song about tariffs. Let's fucking go.

Speaker 6 (02:19:52):
Sarry Ropy jazz rocky jazz Bart Sorry lacking.

Speaker 3 (02:20:03):
Rocking jazz rocking jazz bo.

Speaker 5 (02:20:08):
Mia.

Speaker 13 (02:20:09):
What do we have for tariff talk this week?

Speaker 3 (02:20:10):
So this is an important week for tariffs. Next week
will be the really really critical one. So next allegedly, allegedly,
we'll see he's skeptical. So so next week, all of
the tariffs on every other country in the world from
the Liberation Day tarif tariffs are supposed to like come off.
We're gonna see what happens.

Speaker 13 (02:20:26):
I've i've i've become, it could happen. Here's biggest tariff denier.
I'm I'm the tariff denier conspiracy theorist.

Speaker 3 (02:20:32):
Well, so here's the Okay, So, so the Trump Minstration
is claiming that they cut a deal with Vietnam again
as a kind of recording on Wednesday. I haven't actually
seen anything from like Vietnam confirming this. It's just worry about.
It's totally real. Who fucking knows. So the deal that
he's saying is that Vietnam is going to levy or
you actually going to levey a twenty percent tariff on

(02:20:53):
all goods from Vietnam and a forty percent tariff on
goods that are produced elsewhere and moved through Vietnam. Now,
I know we're used to like looking at like one
hundred and thirty percent tariffs, but I cannot emphasize enough
that a like a twenty percent teriffs on good on
goods from Vietnam is also just fucking ruinous. Most terriiff
coverage on Vietnam focuses on the fact that like companies
like Nintendo, for example, deliberately move production to Vietnam to

(02:21:15):
avoid tariffs on China. Now coverage is like this because
all of these people fucking learned about Vietnam producing things
like a week ago, they missed a decade of capital
flight along. I mean it's a decade and a half
released like twenty and eleven. A bunch of Trainese capital
has been flowing into Vietnam, like down to the maycount delta.
So these tariffs are not just affecting the ability of

(02:21:36):
China to evade the terariffs on it by like moving
products to other countries, which has been a lot of
what's been keeping the inflation from just fucking exploding has
been the ability of producers to rout goods through places
like Vietnam. This is also hitting one of the world's
largest manufacturing hubs right and at developing manufacturing hub that
has very good infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera
that capital from China had been moving to. This is

(02:21:58):
still even this twenty percent terariff on Vietnam is like catastrophic. Yeah,
So we'll see what happens next week if the rest
of the turf tariffs kick in. I don't know what's
going to happen. Who fucking knows. I've been leaning towards
I think they will. But yeah, even even this stuff
is really fucking bad and we're gonna start seeing the
impacts of it. But yeah, this has been tariff talk.

Speaker 13 (02:22:19):
There's there's enough skepticism in the market about the tariffs
in general that so far, not not not all, but
but most corporations have been eating the tariffs in this
short term. Not all like famously, like like like Walmart
like has been has been raising some prices, but a
bunch of corporations have been eating the eating the costs

(02:22:40):
because they do not think these will these will be
largely effective like long term, and I mean this will
slowly change, especially as as more of these start like
being taken into effect on like a rolling basis. We'll
probably see corporations adjust to this, and we'll see the
market adjust to this. Yeah, but I think that's that's
part of why maybe people haven't been seeing the massive

(02:23:01):
price hikes that were expected back, you know, like two
months ago.

Speaker 5 (02:23:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:23:06):
Well, and I think also again the important thing here
is what this is going to do to logistics firms,
which have very very low margins, and right now they've
been surviving by just running shit through other places. But like, again,
if this is if twenty percent is the rate on Vietnam,
plus there's now a massive vicent of not to run
goods through Vietnam. That's really bad because that like kneecaps

(02:23:30):
the evasion tools people have been using. Yeah, so we'll
see what happens.

Speaker 6 (02:23:34):
Yeah, wait for me and come into place.

Speaker 13 (02:23:37):
Yeah yeah, let's talk about Alligator Alcatraz.

Speaker 3 (02:23:42):
So fucking god.

Speaker 13 (02:23:44):
Florida's new immigration detention center has opened this Wednesday. It's
built on a remote airport with aircraft hangars outfitted with
cages and bunk beds to incarcerate between three to five
thousand people. The facility is surrounded by a mote of
alligators and pythons. They're calling it to Alligator Alcatraz. It
was designed to be the most efficient deportation machine in

(02:24:05):
the country. National Guard members will act as immigration judges
on site to speed up deportation proceedings. I'm going to
play a short clip here apologize for hearing DeSantis.

Speaker 11 (02:24:18):
I mean this is going to be Illegals will come in,
they'll be processed, There'll be places for them to be housed.
You'll have an ability for food, you'll be an ability
for them to consult legal rights. If they have that
because there is a process.

Speaker 3 (02:24:34):
That's involved with this.

Speaker 13 (02:24:35):
So the Florida Attorney General has called this a quote
one stop shop for immigration enforcement. Come in, get your process,
and fly out unquote Jesus. So immigrants will be flown here.
They will have some degree of due process here, not
really real due process, but enough nope to fast track

(02:24:56):
their deportation. Stay basically at this facilit like less than
a week, and get deported from it. It has a
working airports. They want to start running thousands of people
through his facility basically every week. Trump toured the facility
on Tuesday and he said, quote Biden wanted me in here. Okay,
he wanted me didn't work out that way, but he

(02:25:18):
wanted me in here, that son of a bitch unquote,
which is an insane thing to say, and but it
gives you an actual look into why the current Trump
administration and like like why Trump term two point zero
is kind of different from one point no, because it's
purely built on this like this like animosity. It's built

(02:25:38):
on this idea that Trump thinks that the entire like
entire world conspired against him to lock him up, and
somehow he beat them and now he's getting his revenge
on the entire world, right, This is what's that. That's
how he's governing. It's because Biden wanted to send him
to the alligator Alcatraz, but he was able to beat him,
and now he's going to get revenge on everyone who's

(02:26:00):
tried to stop him. And that's how he's running the
country because that's the thing that he's obsessed with. He
can't stop talking about Biden. He brings up Biden fucking
every day because it's not about what Biden actually did.
It's this like symbol of like everyone who's tried to
like tried to beat me, everyone who's tried to like
lock me up. Now I get to take my revenge

(02:26:20):
out on them. They wanted to disappear me to this
alligator concentration camp, which no they didn't because this thing
fucking didn't exist a week ago. Like this, this facility
was built in the last eight days. It's going to
cost four hundred and fifty million dollars annually to operate.
I remember when I went to the Charlie Kirk event
in Atlanta, they're talking about like how much money we're

(02:26:40):
spending to give immigrants like free cell phones and to
give them housing. Meanwhile, you have not only this this
bill that massively massively increases the deficit in ways we've
never seen before. Plus on the local level, you have
four hundred million dollars a year for these deportation facilities.
And this facility specifically built on the Florida Everglades. It's

(02:27:01):
not hurricane proof, of course, after one day of operating,
they've already had flooding issues. This is an incredibly dangerous facility.
It could lead to a natural disaster, could kill thousands
of people here. And currently the state of Florida is
selling alligator Alcatraz merchandise on their website.

Speaker 3 (02:27:18):
So always a grift as well, so you.

Speaker 13 (02:27:20):
Can get deportation merchandise, you can get concentration camp merchandise.
This is the this is the soul of the of
the Republican Party. For our last main story tonight, let's
talk about how Trump and the Democrats are trying to
stop the domentum. Because ranked choice voting has now been completed.
Zoron has defeated Cuomo fifty six to forty four, twelve

(02:27:44):
points which were talied in just the third round of
ranked choice voting. The other tallies will come out like eventually,
but this is like the last like legitimate tally because
of like the elimination rules. Zoron got one hundred and
fifty thousand more votes than Eric Adams one with in
twenty twenty one, like phenomenal sweeps. It's wild, like we've

(02:28:04):
never seen anything like this. Commy summer, Baby, let's go so.
Republican Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee sent a letter to
Attorney General Pam Bondi asking to investigate Mamdani for denaturalization
on the grounds that he obtained citizenship through misrepresentation or
concealing material support for terrorism. I'm going to read this

(02:28:27):
disgusting quote from Ogles because I think people should hear it. Quote, Zoron,
little Mohammed Dani is an anti Semitic, socialist communist will
destroy the great City of New York. He needs to
be deported, which is why I'm calling for him to
be the subject to denaturalization proceedings.

Speaker 6 (02:28:43):
This is a guy who who would be petrified if
he ever had to walk around New York because seeing
brown people is very scary when you know this kind
of person.

Speaker 13 (02:28:52):
Zoron's been facing this huge wave of egregious like islamophobic attacks,
including from the gimies of his own party. On a
radio show, Democrat New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand falsely claimed
that Mam Donnie had made references in support of quote
unquote global Jihad. Outrageous stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:29:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:29:11):
On Monday, she apologized for these comments in a private
call to Mamdani and expressed that she believes that Zorn
is sincere when he says he wants to protect all
New Yorkers and combat anti Semitism, but fucking, fucking gross stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:29:26):
Yeah, it's it was so hideous, it's like two thousand
and three level.

Speaker 13 (02:29:31):
It's. Yeah, it's really bad.

Speaker 3 (02:29:33):
Wait, you know, it's considerably worse than that.

Speaker 6 (02:29:35):
Like Bush gave the islamis the Fabric of America speech
in two thousand and one. Yeah, Like we now have
Democrats just knee jerking to fuck them all their terrorists.

Speaker 13 (02:29:45):
Like in their own party, and like many top New
York Democrats have still refused to endorse the now like
Democratic nominee, including Governor Kathy Hochel, House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries,
and Sonather Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 6 (02:29:57):
Jeffries posted in support of him today, some of them.

Speaker 13 (02:30:00):
Have expressed like support of him, specifically support against Islama
public attacks, but have explicitly refused to endorse him as
a nominee, which is like it's vote blue no matter
who until you have like a Muslim democratic socialist and
it's like we have to discuss, Like, you know, there's
some we have some skeptical things about his candidacy and

(02:30:21):
his ability to keep New Yorker safe.

Speaker 6 (02:30:23):
You're like, oh boy, yeah, yeah, you voted for the
three people who die. You endorsed the three people who
died in office. I guess like since the last election
in the House, like now, the attacks have continued. On Monday,
Fox News supporter Peter Doucy asked White House pre Secretary
Caroline Levitt about deporting Zoran. Let's play the clip, Peter thak.

Speaker 10 (02:30:48):
Caroline, does President Trump want Zoran Mamdani deported?

Speaker 14 (02:30:53):
I haven't heard him say that. I haven't heard him
call for that, but certainly he does not want this
individual to be a I was just speaking to him
about it and his radical policies that will completely crush
New York City, which is obviously a city that the
President holds near and dear to his heart.

Speaker 10 (02:31:10):
There's this Congressman Annie Ogles. He wants the Attorney General
Bondi to explore denaturalization proceedings because he thinks Mom Donnie
could have misrepresented or concealed material support for terrorism based
on rap lyrics. He wrote in twenty seventeen. Does President
Trump think this is a worthwhile use of the Attorney
General's time?

Speaker 14 (02:31:30):
Well, I'll let the President speak to that. I have
not seen those claims, but surely if they are true,
it's something that should be investigated.

Speaker 10 (02:31:37):
It.

Speaker 6 (02:31:37):
It's ridiculous to suggest that you could wrap your material
support for terrorism. That they have to prove that you
materially supportated group which he is listed to FTO.

Speaker 5 (02:31:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:31:48):
Then on Tuesday day later, Trump himself attacked Zoran, threatening
to arrest him if he interferes with ICE.

Speaker 12 (02:31:57):
Your beloved New York City may well be led by
a commmunists soon, Zorhan Mundami, who in his nomination speech
said he will defy ICE and will not allow ICE
to arrest criminal aliens in New York City.

Speaker 3 (02:32:10):
Your message to communist Zorhan Mundami.

Speaker 7 (02:32:13):
Well, then we'll have to arrest him. Look, we don't
need a communist in this country. But if we have one,
I'm going to be watching over them very carefully on
behalf of the nation.

Speaker 13 (02:32:23):
Later, Trump suggested that Zoron quote unquote may be here
illegally and that the Trump administration would be looking into that,
while in the same clip praising the now independent nominee
and current mayor Eric Adams.

Speaker 7 (02:32:39):
Independent running mayor Adams, who's a very good person. I
helped him out a little bit. He had a problem
and he was unfairly hurt.

Speaker 5 (02:32:47):
Over this question.

Speaker 7 (02:32:48):
He made a statement to the effect that this is
terrible New York City can have all these immigrants come in,
and like he was indicted the following day.

Speaker 3 (02:32:57):
Just clearly admitting to corruption. He had a little problem,
and I helped him out.

Speaker 6 (02:33:03):
Yeah, yeah, just a little problem with accepting massive payments
from Turkey to fucking corrupt his whole city.

Speaker 3 (02:33:12):
And I want to say here too, like I was
watching just like Trump openly targeting Tom Donnie, like all
of the Democrats who are attacking him are just on
the side of Trump here. And this has been a
significant problem the entire administration is that one of Trump's
like core basis of support is like sitting democratic fucking legislatures.
It's like fucking Chuck Schumer. Yeah, like all of these people.

Speaker 13 (02:33:33):
Yeah, they're working with Trump rhetorically on all.

Speaker 3 (02:33:35):
Of this and sometimes literally with like Schumer voting for
the original like budget resolution shit. Like they're just they're
just actively collaborating.

Speaker 13 (02:33:45):
On Tuesday, is or unreleased a statement regarding Trump's comments, saying, quote,
the President of the United States just threatened to have
me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, and put in a
detention camp, and deport it. Not because they have broken
any law, but because I will refuse to let ice
terrorize our city. Don't just represent an attack on our democracy,
but an attempt to send a message to every New
Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows. If you

(02:34:05):
speak up, they will come for you. We will not
accept this intimidation. That Trump included praise for Eric Adams
and his authoritarian threats is unsurprising but highlights the urgency
of bringing an end to this mayor's time in City
Hall at the very moment when mega Republicans are attempting
to destroy the social safety net, take millions of New
Yorkers off healthcare, and enrich their billionaire donors. At the

(02:34:26):
expense of working families. It is a scandal that Eric
Adams echoes this president's division, distraction and hate. Voters will
resoundingly reject it. In November, unquote and former mayor of
Build a Blasio came out in support of Zoran, saying, quote,
Donald Trump will have to go through a lot of
us first. If he wants to arrest a Zor Mamdani,
We New Yorkers will put a human shield around him

(02:34:47):
if we need to. No one gets to intimidate us.

Speaker 3 (02:34:51):
Build a Blasio. If you get arrested doing the human shield,
we will forgive you for one of your many crimes.

Speaker 6 (02:34:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:35:00):
I w off for rest Bill.

Speaker 13 (02:35:01):
Good for Bill, But no, everyone needs to do this,
Like everyone needs to get behind him right now. If
he's gonna be the target of this like denaturalization, push
for this. Yeah, if he becomes like the symbol of
everything that Trump hates, Like Democrats need to fall in
line fucking right now. And you can't be attacking this
guy for like innate isamophobia. Yeah, it's it's it's outrageous.

Speaker 5 (02:35:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:35:23):
He also has made one of the funniest music videos
I have ever seen. There's some good stuff it's video
about how much he loves his grandmother with Mada Jeoffrey,
and it is outstanding.

Speaker 13 (02:35:33):
Now we do have some good news to close this
episode on, including the return of the Stinky Musk segment.
In Pennsylvania, Tesla turned into train tracks and drove into
an un drove into an oncoming train. It's okay, people
were able to exit the car before the grass. But
great stuff, great stuff in the self driving car department.

Speaker 6 (02:35:52):
Oh good, and Trump.

Speaker 13 (02:35:54):
Truthed on Monday, quote Elon might get more subsidy than
any human being in histree by far. And without subsidies,
Elon would probably have to close up shop and head
back home to South Africa. No more rocket lunches, satellites
are electric car production, and our country would save a fortune.
Perhaps we should have Doge take a good, hard look

(02:36:16):
at this big money to be saved. And then on
July first, on his way to Alligator Alcatraz, Trump was
questioned again about Elon and said, quote, We'll have to
take a look. We might have to put Doge on Elon.
You know what that Doge is, that monster that might
have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn't that be terrible?
He gets a lot of subsidies. Elon responded to this

(02:36:37):
on X the Everything app quote so tempting to escalate
this so so tempting, but I will refrain for now.

Speaker 3 (02:36:45):
I will say Musk has also been talking about four
by a new party if this budget bill.

Speaker 13 (02:36:48):
Passes, so god, I hope so would be the funniest thing.
What other good news do we have to end on here?
I think the other good news was the the Asylum
van getting Star up to the coach. Oh we already
did that, good news.

Speaker 6 (02:37:01):
Yeah, we already did that.

Speaker 3 (02:37:03):
Oh that that's it?

Speaker 5 (02:37:04):
Then?

Speaker 13 (02:37:04):
Yeah, mm hmmm, all right. Well, people like ED being
an hour long. I've been the longer, the better.

Speaker 6 (02:37:12):
It's one thing they say about ED.

Speaker 13 (02:37:14):
It goes without saying James, we reported the news.

Speaker 3 (02:37:19):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (02:37:26):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 3 (02:37:32):
It could happen.

Speaker 13 (02:37:32):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (02:37:34):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
fool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (02:37:41):
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 1 (02:37:43):
You listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for
it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks
for listening,

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