WEBVTT - It Could Happen Here Weekly 248 0:00:00.390 --> 0:00:02.910 Call zone media. 0:00:03.350 --> 0:00:05.700 Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let 0:00:05.710 --> 0:00:09.420 you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode 0:00:09.619 --> 0:00:12.700 of the week that just happened is here in one 0:00:12.780 --> 0:00:16.520 convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to 0:00:16.579 --> 0:00:19.070 listen to in a long stretch if you want. If 0:00:19.090 --> 0:00:21.049 you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, 0:00:21.090 --> 0:00:22.850 there's going to be nothing new here for you, but 0:00:23.190 --> 0:00:24.390 you can make your own decisions. 0:00:28.600 --> 0:00:31.080 Hello everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My 0:00:31.100 --> 0:00:33.460 name is Anna Elkurd and I'm a researcher and analyst 0:00:33.479 --> 0:00:36.639 of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I want to talk 0:00:36.680 --> 0:00:40.210 about the recent announcement that Hamas agreed to a second 0:00:40.250 --> 0:00:43.510 phase of the Gaza ceasefire. So the Board of Peace 0:00:43.570 --> 0:00:47.650 and mediator countries announced July 30th, last Thursday, I'm recording 0:00:47.850 --> 0:00:51.290 on August 4th, that Hamas had agreed to a sort 0:00:51.310 --> 0:00:54.800 of roadmap in which they would relinquish some of their weapons. 0:00:54.840 --> 0:00:59.380 So this whole scenario has hinged on Hamas disarming, even 0:00:59.420 --> 0:01:02.920 though in other conflicts, when there have been two parties, 0:01:03.460 --> 0:01:07.480 disarmament comes at later stages. But in this scenario, the 0:01:07.520 --> 0:01:11.800 Board of Peace and the Director General, Nikolai Mladenov, has 0:01:12.319 --> 0:01:17.179 basically hinged the entire process on Hamas disarming first. And 0:01:17.240 --> 0:01:23.020 so in the recent announcement, which President Donald Trump basically 0:01:23.060 --> 0:01:26.179 celebrated on his social media, calling it a historic agreement 0:01:26.260 --> 0:01:30.220 for the complete disarmament of Hamas. Hamas basically said that 0:01:30.300 --> 0:01:33.690 they had been in conversation with not only the mediators 0:01:33.720 --> 0:01:36.700 and their proposals, but with other Palestinian factions and had 0:01:36.810 --> 0:01:41.870 agreed to relinquish their weapons in a particular way. So 0:01:41.890 --> 0:01:45.369 they said it was contingent and conditional on a permanent 0:01:45.450 --> 0:01:48.490 end to Israeli attacks and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, 0:01:49.410 --> 0:01:54.040 as well as recovery and reconstruction. And importantly, they basically 0:01:54.100 --> 0:01:56.700 said that no weapons would be handed over to Israel 0:01:56.860 --> 0:02:00.340 or to any non-Palestinian party. So what Hamas is saying 0:02:00.400 --> 0:02:03.120 is we're going to give up our weapons eventually if 0:02:03.340 --> 0:02:08.639 Israel also adheres to the guidelines of the ceasefire. And 0:02:08.660 --> 0:02:12.290 we will relinquish our weapons to the National Committee, which 0:02:12.410 --> 0:02:18.669 is a governance structure made up of Palestinian technocrats. So 0:02:18.730 --> 0:02:22.220 since the National Committee is supposed to govern Gaza eventually, 0:02:22.820 --> 0:02:25.880 or at least that's the intention of this committee, even 0:02:25.900 --> 0:02:28.700 though they haven't actually been allowed to do that, the 0:02:28.780 --> 0:02:31.740 idea here is Hamas is saying, you want to claim 0:02:31.780 --> 0:02:35.500 that disarmament is the reason that the ceasefire and recovery 0:02:35.639 --> 0:02:39.570 and reconstruction can't proceed? Okay, so we'll disarm, but we'll 0:02:39.610 --> 0:02:43.910 only disarm to other Palestinians. And like I said, it's 0:02:44.070 --> 0:02:50.500 contingent on Israel also agreeing. withdrawing from Gaza, ceasing the 0:02:50.700 --> 0:02:54.340 continued attacks. Israeli officials have basically said that they have 0:02:54.380 --> 0:02:57.800 like severe worries about it and they're not interested. The 0:02:57.860 --> 0:03:01.370 national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir, basically said that it's not 0:03:01.410 --> 0:03:04.430 acceptable to Israel. So, you know, it's very much up 0:03:04.470 --> 0:03:09.150 in the air, but Hamas basically threw the ball in 0:03:09.290 --> 0:03:12.829 Israel's court with this announcement. It's also important to point 0:03:12.950 --> 0:03:15.890 out that throughout these past couple of months since the 0:03:15.930 --> 0:03:18.870 ceasefire was announced, Over a thousand Palestinians have been killed. 0:03:19.450 --> 0:03:23.370 In the week that this announcement was made, Israel killed 0:03:23.389 --> 0:03:25.630 at least six in Gaza and wounded many others. 0:03:26.210 --> 0:03:28.169 And so all of that is going on. 0:03:28.290 --> 0:03:30.690 And that's not even mentioning what's happening in the West Bank, 0:03:31.120 --> 0:03:34.420 where things have really escalated in terms of both Israeli 0:03:34.500 --> 0:03:37.540 army and Israeli settler violence, which often, of course, goes 0:03:37.580 --> 0:03:42.490 hand in hand. This announcement might really amount to nothing here, 0:03:42.650 --> 0:03:46.250 especially if Israel doesn't comply. But I think it poses 0:03:46.290 --> 0:03:49.510 a bigger question around the Board of Peace and its 0:03:49.870 --> 0:03:54.310 design and its objectives. So that's basically what this episode 0:03:54.350 --> 0:03:56.540 is going to be about, answering the question of whether 0:03:56.560 --> 0:03:59.600 the board's design, who sits on it, who pays for 0:03:59.620 --> 0:04:02.580 a seat, who answers to who, actually makes a fair 0:04:02.660 --> 0:04:07.160 outcome for Palestinians structurally impossible, regardless of this announcement or 0:04:07.200 --> 0:04:11.300 any other announcements or decisions that Palestinians may make. So 0:04:11.340 --> 0:04:14.080 just as a reminder to listeners, the Board of Peace 0:04:14.640 --> 0:04:18.130 was announced as part of President Trump's 20-point Gaza plan 0:04:18.790 --> 0:04:22.970 back in September 2025. 20 points to get Gaza back 0:04:23.050 --> 0:04:26.690 on track. I shouldn't make jokes here, but that's what 0:04:26.730 --> 0:04:29.180 it was called, and it was launched in January 2026. 0:04:29.180 --> 0:04:33.960 Its stated purpose is to promote stability, restore dependable and 0:04:34.000 --> 0:04:38.850 lawful governance, and secure enduring peace. in conflict-affected areas. So 0:04:38.900 --> 0:04:41.849 not only in Gaza. At the start, the Board of 0:04:41.880 --> 0:04:45.090 Peace was announced around what was happening in Gaza, but 0:04:45.230 --> 0:04:49.430 eventually it grew into a bigger idea, and Gaza was 0:04:49.490 --> 0:04:52.790 framed as a template. So this Board of Peace is 0:04:52.870 --> 0:04:55.850 supposed to be a model for managing future conflicts globally. 0:04:56.770 --> 0:04:59.490 But as I've argued in the past, this really is 0:04:59.910 --> 0:05:03.550 not about conflict resolution. It's about conflict management and a 0:05:03.850 --> 0:05:08.650 very particular type of conflict management where you subdue conflict 0:05:08.670 --> 0:05:13.690 through repressive means rather than reconciliation or recovery or reparations 0:05:13.740 --> 0:05:16.599 or anything kind of long-term. So I think it's important 0:05:16.640 --> 0:05:20.380 to maybe discuss at this point how the Board of 0:05:20.440 --> 0:05:24.980 Peace is structured. It's basically a three-tier hierarchy with Gaza 0:05:25.020 --> 0:05:28.470 at the bottom. At the top, there's the founding executive board. 0:05:28.490 --> 0:05:31.990 This is chaired by President Trump In fact, in the 0:05:32.150 --> 0:05:35.609 founding documents of the Board of Peace, he is named explicitly. 0:05:35.650 --> 0:05:38.070 It's not that the president of the United States, you know, 0:05:38.279 --> 0:05:40.240 will continue to chair the Board of Peace. No, it's 0:05:40.620 --> 0:05:44.460 specifically Donald Trump. So apparently he's going to be president 0:05:44.480 --> 0:05:48.140 for life here. That's the top decision-making body. And then 0:05:48.240 --> 0:05:51.320 underneath that is the Gaza Executive Board. Includes a lot 0:05:51.370 --> 0:05:54.270 of different interesting characters. I'll talk about them in a second. 0:05:54.790 --> 0:06:00.140 The Gaza Executive Board oversees implementation of what happens in Gaza. Farther, farther, 0:06:00.180 --> 0:06:02.840 farther underneath that is the National Committee for the Administration 0:06:02.860 --> 0:06:08.820 of Gaza, who are 15 unelected Palestinian technocrats approved by 0:06:09.110 --> 0:06:11.870 Palestinian factions. But, you know, they are not of any 0:06:11.930 --> 0:06:15.390 particular party. They are civil servants and they're supposed to 0:06:15.510 --> 0:06:19.409 actually administer Gaza day to day. Now, the National Committee 0:06:19.510 --> 0:06:22.310 reports to the director general of the Gaza Executive Board, 0:06:22.350 --> 0:06:26.780 who is Nikolai Mladenov, not to any Palestinian constituency at 0:06:27.160 --> 0:06:30.930 or to the Palestinian Authority, for example, or any Palestinian body. Now, 0:06:30.940 --> 0:06:33.990 the six-page charter of the Board of Peace never actually 0:06:34.029 --> 0:06:36.590 mentions Gaza or human rights. And I don't think this 0:06:36.630 --> 0:06:38.710 is an oversight. You know, the board is designed as 0:06:38.750 --> 0:06:41.990 a template for managing future conflicts. It's not designed to 0:06:42.430 --> 0:06:46.270 uphold human rights. And I think even though, of course, 0:06:46.330 --> 0:06:50.060 these are problematic positions to take, I think the European 0:06:50.100 --> 0:06:54.220 reaction serves as a sort of legitimacy check here. When 0:06:55.320 --> 0:06:58.710 the Board of Peace and its mechanisms were supposed to 0:06:58.750 --> 0:07:02.529 be applied to Gaza, the EU attended the board's first 0:07:02.589 --> 0:07:04.750 meeting as an observer, for example, and a number of 0:07:04.830 --> 0:07:08.990 countries kind of floated the idea of joining. But then 0:07:09.110 --> 0:07:12.550 when the Board of Peace was expanded as an idea 0:07:12.670 --> 0:07:16.230 to become a template for future conflicts, for example, Ukraine, then, 0:07:16.510 --> 0:07:20.830 you know, the European Union and other European actors basically 0:07:20.890 --> 0:07:25.500 cited serious doubts about compatibility with the UN Charter. And 0:07:25.520 --> 0:07:30.000 then France and the UK voiced reservations when Putin, for example, 0:07:30.140 --> 0:07:33.080 was invited to be on the board. So yeah, who 0:07:33.180 --> 0:07:37.780 is on the top tier board here? It's got people 0:07:37.820 --> 0:07:42.090 like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who holds a 0:07:42.110 --> 0:07:44.790 seat on the Board of Peace, despite being a party 0:07:44.830 --> 0:07:47.990 to a conflict that's literally ongoing and is the reason 0:07:48.030 --> 0:07:50.890 why the Board of Peace supposedly came into existence. And 0:07:50.910 --> 0:07:54.590 despite having an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes. So clearly, 0:07:54.670 --> 0:07:57.680 you know, one party to the conflict in this scenario, 0:07:57.960 --> 0:08:01.680 in the Gaza case, is elevated while the other is administered. 0:08:02.600 --> 0:08:05.960 Then there are a bunch of business figures. So CEOs, 0:08:06.000 --> 0:08:10.110 venture capitalists, they sit alongside heads of state. So reconstruction 0:08:10.170 --> 0:08:12.330 is really framed as a business opportunity as much as 0:08:12.410 --> 0:08:16.230 it's framed as an issue of governance. There's not a 0:08:16.290 --> 0:08:19.490 single Palestinian, nor does the PA actually hold a seat 0:08:19.570 --> 0:08:22.680 anywhere in this hierarchy. Even though the Palestinian Authority did 0:08:22.780 --> 0:08:25.160 actually want to join the Board of Peace and it 0:08:25.180 --> 0:08:28.000 sought full membership on it, all they got was basically 0:08:28.020 --> 0:08:30.960 a consolation prize, which was this coordination committee between the 0:08:30.980 --> 0:08:34.120 Palestinian Authority and the board, with the Palestinian Authority Prime 0:08:34.140 --> 0:08:39.620 Minister Mohammad Mustafa basically representing the Palestinian Authority one-on-one to Mladenov, 0:08:40.260 --> 0:08:43.460 which has been described as a type of compromise because 0:08:43.500 --> 0:08:47.100 the PA doesn't actually have a seat by itself. There 0:08:47.140 --> 0:08:51.059 was much made about a $ 1 billion price tag for 0:08:51.080 --> 0:08:54.780 a permanent seat on the board. So people like Viktor 0:08:54.880 --> 0:09:00.729 Orban and Vladimir Putin and Lukashenko basically were invited to 0:09:00.809 --> 0:09:03.790 participate in this way. And it's, you know, kind of 0:09:04.309 --> 0:09:07.930 obviously a sham, turning participation and, you know, quote-unquote peace 0:09:07.970 --> 0:09:12.640 governance into a commodity for heads of state. Now, Jared Kushner, 0:09:12.700 --> 0:09:16.579 the president's son-in-law, who is inexplicably also involved in this, 0:09:17.190 --> 0:09:20.790 at Davos in January, basically presented a master plan that 0:09:20.860 --> 0:09:25.960 projected $ 10 billion for Gaza's GDP by 2035. And he 0:09:26.000 --> 0:09:29.620 talked about new towers and industrial parks and all of this, 0:09:29.660 --> 0:09:32.329 of course, drawn up without consulting Palestinians living in Gaza. 0:09:32.970 --> 0:09:36.090 And Trump himself has described Gaza as a, quote, beautiful 0:09:36.110 --> 0:09:38.350 piece of property over and over. So to me, this 0:09:38.410 --> 0:09:41.390 is a shorthand for how the plan frames the conflict. 0:09:42.020 --> 0:09:45.220 or wants to, wants to convince people that this conflict 0:09:45.280 --> 0:09:49.089 is fundamentally about underdevelopment. Palestinians have grievances because they're poor, 0:09:49.630 --> 0:09:53.050 rather than the occupation, rather than the genocide. So, you know, 0:09:53.090 --> 0:09:55.490 it poses the question, what does it mean for this 0:09:55.590 --> 0:09:59.970 peace architecture when the same people who oversee reconstruction also protest? 0:10:00.020 --> 0:10:00.690 Profit from it? 0:10:11.420 --> 0:10:14.660 Now, who is on the Gaza executive board, that second tier? 0:10:15.240 --> 0:10:17.829 You can find the full roster online It is important 0:10:17.870 --> 0:10:21.929 to note that they actually haven't met ever as a board. 0:10:22.030 --> 0:10:23.630 You know, some of these people have their names and 0:10:23.770 --> 0:10:26.490 their pictures on the website. And this Gaza executive board 0:10:26.510 --> 0:10:29.450 has really not functioned except as kind of a legitimacy 0:10:30.090 --> 0:10:33.650 stamp on the Board of Peace's activities. But it really 0:10:33.710 --> 0:10:35.890 is very indicative of what the Board of Peace is 0:10:35.910 --> 0:10:37.790 supposed to be and how they want to deal with 0:10:37.809 --> 0:10:40.610 Gaza here. When you look at who has been invited, 0:10:40.650 --> 0:10:44.130 even if they've never met. So it's got Gulf diplomats, 0:10:44.190 --> 0:10:48.040 Turkish diplomats. It has an Egyptian intelligence chief. It has 0:10:48.080 --> 0:10:52.300 a bunch of Trump administration people, Kushner, Susan Wiles, Steve Witkoff. 0:10:52.860 --> 0:10:54.860 And then finance and business interests, like I said, are 0:10:54.960 --> 0:10:59.960 very heavily represented here. So you have the CEO of Apollo, 0:11:00.400 --> 0:11:05.189 Mark Rowan. You have venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg and a 0:11:05.210 --> 0:11:08.470 number of other businessmen, many of them with ties to Israel. 0:11:08.490 --> 0:11:10.329 There's only really two companies. 0:11:10.950 --> 0:11:13.570 Let's say, peace process veterans on this board. 0:11:14.130 --> 0:11:17.319 There's the director general, Mladenov, who I've discussed in a 0:11:17.360 --> 0:11:19.900 previous episode, who's very problematic. I'll talk about him in 0:11:19.920 --> 0:11:23.380 just a second. And then Tony Blair. Tony Blair, also 0:11:23.620 --> 0:11:27.359 extremely problematic. He has a history of basically delivering the 0:11:27.400 --> 0:11:30.940 Good Friday Agreement in the Northern Ireland conflict, but he 0:11:31.000 --> 0:11:33.670 doesn't seem to be applying any of the lessons of 0:11:33.730 --> 0:11:35.710 those previous conflicts to the Middle East in any way. 0:11:36.380 --> 0:11:39.700 But the point here is that security, finance, and U.S. 0:11:39.740 --> 0:11:45.140 political operatives clearly outweigh conflict resolution expertise on this executive board. 0:11:46.280 --> 0:11:48.600 So who's actually running this? Like I said, they've never 0:11:48.660 --> 0:11:52.020 actually met. Maybe some of them have been promised a 0:11:52.059 --> 0:11:55.400 bigger role in the future. I'm thinking particularly the business 0:11:55.440 --> 0:11:59.520 people here. But let's linger on Nikolai, I don't know 0:11:59.559 --> 0:12:02.040 how to pronounce his name, Ladinov, who is the director 0:12:02.090 --> 0:12:05.040 general here. I've talked about him before in a previous episode, 0:12:05.080 --> 0:12:08.339 but he's the former Bulgarian foreign minister under a government 0:12:08.360 --> 0:12:13.170 that was toppled by anti-corruption protests. Since 2022, he was 0:12:13.250 --> 0:12:16.230 the head of an Emirati diplomatic academy which championed the 0:12:16.309 --> 0:12:20.210 Abraham Accords, the so-called peace agreements between Israel and the 0:12:20.290 --> 0:12:23.309 UAE and Bahrain and a few others. And this is 0:12:23.370 --> 0:12:27.350 a framework that was disastrous. It's seen, especially by Palestinians, 0:12:27.550 --> 0:12:30.969 as essentially cementing their exclusion from statehood. So this is 0:12:31.010 --> 0:12:34.330 the guy who's supposed to run the Gaza executive board 0:12:34.470 --> 0:12:37.709 and who has turned the peace process on its head 0:12:37.830 --> 0:12:40.550 by basically, again, like I said at the beginning of 0:12:40.600 --> 0:12:46.680 the episode, conditioning the entire process on disarmament first. We 0:12:46.720 --> 0:12:48.380 have the rest of the Gaza executive board, and then 0:12:48.400 --> 0:12:52.199 we have the Center for Civilian Military Control. So- This 0:12:52.300 --> 0:12:55.600 is a center. It's based in the south of Israel. 0:12:56.220 --> 0:13:00.940 It's supposed to oversee the ceasefire. But every ceasefire enforcement 0:13:00.960 --> 0:13:06.210 decision basically has no sway on Israel itself. Like there's 0:13:06.250 --> 0:13:09.290 no mechanism to actually hold Israel accountable. It has no 0:13:09.330 --> 0:13:13.650 independent authority. It coordinates with the White House. And in particular, 0:13:13.720 --> 0:13:16.420 the liaison to the White House is this man, Aryeh Lightstone. 0:13:16.940 --> 0:13:20.160 who was a senior advisor to a former U.S. ambassador 0:13:20.179 --> 0:13:23.830 to Israel who was extremely right-wing. And there's been recent reporting, 0:13:23.870 --> 0:13:26.850 which I'll link in the show notes, about how intensely 0:13:26.929 --> 0:13:29.970 hostile he is to Palestinians. So this is the guy 0:13:30.030 --> 0:13:33.050 who's supposed to oversee the ceasefire and report to the 0:13:33.070 --> 0:13:33.410 White House. 0:13:34.470 --> 0:13:36.229 So what are the consequences on the ground? 0:13:36.870 --> 0:13:39.130 As I said, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed 0:13:39.170 --> 0:13:41.910 in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced. Over half of 0:13:41.960 --> 0:13:44.920 Gaza is now behind this quote-unquote yellow line, which is 0:13:45.000 --> 0:13:49.380 Israeli-controlled territory. Humanitarian and agricultural access is restricted or prohibited 0:13:49.450 --> 0:13:52.810 in that area. So Gaza is more and more squeezed. 0:13:53.450 --> 0:13:56.429 The aid that was supposed to reach 600 trucks a 0:13:56.470 --> 0:14:00.569 day has never reached that promised 600 trucks. And much 0:14:00.590 --> 0:14:03.030 of what enters is basically private sector goods that's sold 0:14:03.050 --> 0:14:06.270 for profit, with the Israelis also getting like a coordination 0:14:06.309 --> 0:14:11.420 fee on each truck. Now, Hamas dissolved its emergency committee 0:14:11.480 --> 0:14:15.120 in July 2026. before they announced that they had accepted 0:14:15.160 --> 0:14:19.260 the mediator's proposals about disarmament. They dissolved this emergency committee 0:14:19.280 --> 0:14:21.560 and said they were handing authority over to the national committee. 0:14:22.280 --> 0:14:26.680 But the board basically was uninterested in this move. They 0:14:26.720 --> 0:14:30.220 said that they were guided by actions, not promises. And 0:14:30.300 --> 0:14:32.100 it really points to the fact that these kind of 0:14:32.140 --> 0:14:34.739 procedural concessions that Hamas is attempting to make don't really 0:14:34.800 --> 0:14:38.160 fix the structural design flaws. I think it's also important 0:14:38.200 --> 0:14:41.330 to point out here that even though on paper Hamas 0:14:41.350 --> 0:14:44.000 has given up its civilian government, On the ground, like 0:14:44.040 --> 0:14:47.180 that doesn't actually change much. It's still involved in security 0:14:47.200 --> 0:14:50.480 and policing and bureaucracy. And what they dissolved is this 0:14:50.640 --> 0:14:55.590 like civilian cabinet body that had run Gaza since October 2023. 0:14:55.590 --> 0:14:59.430 And it's a very like specific administrative organ. And it's 0:14:59.510 --> 0:15:03.630 not all of Hamas's governing capacity. So it was kind of, again, 0:15:03.670 --> 0:15:05.810 a way of like throwing the ball in Israel's court 0:15:06.290 --> 0:15:08.750 and claiming that we are dissolving the committee. 0:15:08.810 --> 0:15:11.860 We are making these concessions. But they're being very, you know, 0:15:11.880 --> 0:15:12.700 strategic about this. 0:15:13.380 --> 0:15:16.060 And in the same announcement, when they dissolved the emergency committee, 0:15:16.080 --> 0:15:18.360 they basically said that their technical and professional staff would 0:15:18.400 --> 0:15:22.400 remain in their posts. And it hasn't, you know, relinquished 0:15:22.780 --> 0:15:27.360 control over the civil service and security bureaucracy. So a 0:15:27.380 --> 0:15:30.180 few months ago, much was made about Hamas's strategy and 0:15:30.200 --> 0:15:32.360 whether there were going to be shifts in that strategy. 0:15:32.800 --> 0:15:37.480 Because there was an internal election in Hamas that basically 0:15:37.820 --> 0:15:41.470 cemented the divide between a kind of more hardline camp 0:15:41.570 --> 0:15:45.070 and a more pragmatist camp. And the more hardline camp won. 0:15:45.770 --> 0:15:51.090 So between Khaled Mishal, who was supposedly, you know, more 0:15:51.130 --> 0:15:56.150 pragmatist and arguing for political accommodation, and Khalil Hayya, who 0:15:56.720 --> 0:16:00.460 demanded kind of more confrontation, the second guy won. And 0:16:00.520 --> 0:16:03.800 so there was a lot of speculation back in February 0:16:03.880 --> 0:16:08.260 that that meant if the hardliners won, that this is 0:16:08.700 --> 0:16:12.140 going to impact disarmament. And that that means Hamas will 0:16:12.220 --> 0:16:15.950 never disarm and would never actually acquiesce to what was 0:16:16.010 --> 0:16:20.100 being demanded of them. But in the last couple of weeks, months, 0:16:20.840 --> 0:16:25.450 you can see that Hamas' strategy is much more, let's say, 0:16:26.200 --> 0:16:30.880 nuanced and attempting to kind of buy time with the 0:16:30.920 --> 0:16:35.000 United States and with the international community while. 0:16:34.280 --> 0:16:36.740 Still saying, okay, we're going to make concessions. 0:16:37.590 --> 0:16:39.890 This is not to imply that the victory of the 0:16:39.910 --> 0:16:42.230 kind of more hardline camp isn't going to impact Hamas' 0:16:42.270 --> 0:16:46.490 strategy in the future. They are much more Gaza-rooted and 0:16:46.510 --> 0:16:51.729 a more pro-Iran faction. Obviously, these are internal shifts between them, 0:16:51.910 --> 0:16:55.590 but we'll see how that plays out in the near future. 0:16:56.410 --> 0:16:58.910 But again, I think we go back to the idea 0:16:59.150 --> 0:17:02.010 of how the Board of Peace is designed and whether 0:17:02.750 --> 0:17:05.960 the flaws in its design and the dangerous precedent it 0:17:06.020 --> 0:17:09.510 sets for not only quote unquote, you know, conflict resolution 0:17:09.550 --> 0:17:12.790 in Gaza, but conflict resolution in every other arena of 0:17:12.830 --> 0:17:17.470 conflict here, where in this scenario, there isn't neutral mediation. 0:17:17.930 --> 0:17:21.260 There isn't buy-in from all parties. One side is completely 0:17:21.340 --> 0:17:25.000 missing from the board. One side is administered. It really 0:17:25.100 --> 0:17:30.240 poses the question of whether any kind of political movement, 0:17:30.680 --> 0:17:34.379 any concessions, anything that can be mediated and agreed upon 0:17:35.040 --> 0:17:38.650 actually impacts how the board is going to function. Hamish Hedda, 0:17:38.830 --> 0:17:42.540 who was speaking at a Carnegie Endowment roundtable back in April, 0:17:42.970 --> 0:17:46.000 he is a Gazan journalist, I think put it really 0:17:46.040 --> 0:17:48.619 well when he said that, quote, Gaza is no longer 0:17:49.060 --> 0:17:52.240 just a unique, extraordinary case of human savagery. It is 0:17:52.260 --> 0:17:54.780 a canary in a coal mine. What starts there does 0:17:54.840 --> 0:17:57.800 not end there. And I think I want to end 0:17:57.859 --> 0:18:00.500 on that note of framing Gaza as a canary in 0:18:00.520 --> 0:18:02.660 the coal mine, because the Board of Peace is this 0:18:02.740 --> 0:18:09.290 model that combines billionaires, profiteering, and kind of the worst 0:18:09.410 --> 0:18:11.910 actors in the world in terms of dictators and those 0:18:11.970 --> 0:18:16.020 who are invested in a more authoritarian world, that is 0:18:16.060 --> 0:18:18.240 going to be the model that's going to be exported 0:18:18.540 --> 0:18:21.000 to other weak states or contested territories. 0:18:22.040 --> 0:18:25.000 That's all for me today. Hope that this was at 0:18:25.040 --> 0:18:27.770 least eye-opening. And thanks for listening. 0:18:40.100 --> 0:18:43.820 The drums of war are beaten. Everywhere you look, people 0:18:43.940 --> 0:18:48.420 are picking sides. Governments are demanding unity. Critics are being 0:18:48.460 --> 0:18:54.950 denounced as naive, irresponsible, even treacherous. And a movement built 0:18:55.350 --> 0:19:00.830 on international solidarity has been split in the kiosk. The 0:19:00.869 --> 0:19:04.800 year is 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, 0:19:05.720 --> 0:19:08.960 though you'll be excused if you thought I was describing today. 0:19:10.080 --> 0:19:13.100 Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, 0:19:13.280 --> 0:19:18.379 also Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by Neil Wogg to 0:19:18.400 --> 0:19:22.730 discuss the infamous split among the anarchists over World War I, 0:19:23.150 --> 0:19:26.389 of all things. So just to be clear, the common 0:19:26.550 --> 0:19:30.450 anarchist stance prior to the war was fairly straightforward. It 0:19:30.470 --> 0:19:34.750 was a stance of internationalist worker solidarity against imperialist wars, 0:19:35.210 --> 0:19:39.560 a solidarity that transcended borders and nationalities. recognizing that ordinary 0:19:39.600 --> 0:19:42.220 people had more in common with one another than with 0:19:42.240 --> 0:19:45.810 the ruling classes of their own countries. Such wars were 0:19:45.830 --> 0:19:48.429 never fought in the interests of workers, but in the 0:19:48.470 --> 0:19:53.399 interests of states, empires, dynasties, and capitalists. If war came, 0:19:53.900 --> 0:19:57.699 the task of revolutionaries was not to rally behind their 0:19:57.760 --> 0:20:02.619 own governments, but to oppose the conflict and preserve international 0:20:02.800 --> 0:20:08.320 working-class solidarity. However, the Great War would strain the internationalist cause. 0:20:08.820 --> 0:20:12.420 forcing splits and theoretical developments owing to the ensuing debates 0:20:12.500 --> 0:20:17.530 personified in the disagreement between Errico Malatesta and Peter Kropotkin, 0:20:17.900 --> 0:20:21.510 as well as many others, who clashed intellectually over the 0:20:21.570 --> 0:20:27.070 nature of war, history, national struggle, and revolutionary change. The 0:20:27.090 --> 0:20:32.290 First World War emerged from decades of imperial rivalry, colonial competition, 0:20:32.410 --> 0:20:36.990 military expansion, and competing alliance systems among Europe's great powers. 0:20:37.850 --> 0:20:41.250 The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on the 0:20:41.290 --> 0:20:45.650 28th of June 1914 served as the immediate catalyst, but 0:20:45.830 --> 0:20:48.969 it merely ignited tensions that had been building for years. 0:20:49.830 --> 0:20:54.730 Within weeks, a regional dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated 0:20:54.770 --> 0:20:59.149 into a continental and eventually global conflict. On one side 0:20:59.250 --> 0:21:03.550 stood the Central Powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, later 0:21:03.590 --> 0:21:07.320 joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. and opposing them 0:21:07.430 --> 0:21:11.440 were the Allied powers, initially consisting of France, Russia, and Britain, 0:21:11.980 --> 0:21:15.980 with countries such as Italy, Romania, Japan, and eventually the 0:21:16.020 --> 0:21:19.179 United States entering the war on the Allied side as 0:21:19.220 --> 0:21:23.640 the conflict expanded. Attitudes toward the First World War across 0:21:23.740 --> 0:21:27.300 Europe were deeply divided and often changed dramatically in the 0:21:27.380 --> 0:21:30.939 opening weeks of the conflict. A powerful wave of patriotic 0:21:31.000 --> 0:21:35.010 enthusiasm swept through many cities, with countless people volunteering for 0:21:35.050 --> 0:21:39.240 military service, under the belief that the war would be short, necessary, 0:21:39.820 --> 0:21:44.220 or even glorious. Governments, newspapers, churches, and much of the 0:21:44.260 --> 0:21:48.859 political establishment promoted national unity and portrayed the conflict as 0:21:48.880 --> 0:21:54.700 a defensive struggle against foreign aggression. For socialists, trade unionists, 0:21:54.800 --> 0:21:59.800 religious pacifists, and most relevantly anarchists, the stance was deeply 0:21:59.880 --> 0:22:03.810 sceptical or openly oppositional to the war. as it appeared 0:22:03.830 --> 0:22:07.270 to be a catastrophic clash between rival empires in which 0:22:07.550 --> 0:22:11.390 ordinary people would bear the costs while elites pursued their 0:22:11.470 --> 0:22:15.520 geopolitical ambitions. However, one of the attitudes that flared up 0:22:15.600 --> 0:22:18.200 as a result of the war, even amongst some anarchists 0:22:18.240 --> 0:22:23.719 and socialists, was anti-German sentiment, manifest in Kropotkin's open letter 0:22:23.850 --> 0:22:27.570 in the anarchist newspaper Freedom. This open letter would spark 0:22:27.609 --> 0:22:32.000 the ensuing debate between Kropotkin and Malatesta. As documented by 0:22:32.080 --> 0:22:35.359 historian Matthew S. Adam in Anarchism and the First World War, 0:22:35.940 --> 0:22:39.699 Kapotkin wrote, quote, I consider that the duty of everyone 0:22:39.720 --> 0:22:43.030 who cherishes the idea of human progress is to crush 0:22:43.109 --> 0:22:46.070 the invasion of the Germans into Western Europe. Since 1871, 0:22:46.070 --> 0:22:50.830 Germany has become a standing menace to European progress. All 0:22:50.869 --> 0:22:53.870 were living under the menace of sudden invasion. More than that, 0:22:54.310 --> 0:22:57.630 Germany was the chief support and protection of reaction, end quote. 0:22:58.330 --> 0:23:02.619 For many anarchists, and even Leon Trotsky, this seemed a 0:23:02.760 --> 0:23:06.619 clear break from Kropotkin's anarchism, which would be in opposition 0:23:06.780 --> 0:23:11.600 to alignment with nation-state-based struggles. However, as noted by historian 0:23:11.640 --> 0:23:15.460 George Woodcock in Peter Kropotkin, From Prince to Rebel, quote, 0:23:15.830 --> 0:23:20.109 anti-German sentiment was probably an influence on Kropotkin long before 0:23:20.150 --> 0:23:23.129 this point, as it was a current in Russian revolutionary 0:23:23.170 --> 0:23:26.470 movements due to the German rule by the Romanov dynasty. 0:23:27.070 --> 0:23:30.310 and perhaps also because his fellow Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin 0:23:30.890 --> 0:23:35.220 had an infamous rivalry with the German Karl Marx. End quote. 0:23:35.900 --> 0:23:39.600 Though of course, you know, this is speculation. Kropotkin and 0:23:39.660 --> 0:23:42.899 Malatesta were both in Britain when their exchange of letters 0:23:42.940 --> 0:23:47.220 took place. Malatesta wrote in his article, Anarchists Have Forgotten 0:23:47.270 --> 0:23:50.690 Their Principles, that the only war worth fighting was one 0:23:50.790 --> 0:23:54.450 of liberation, and there was no siding with national agglomerations. 0:23:55.130 --> 0:24:28.209 He said, quote, End quote. Now, Kropotkin had previously argued 0:24:28.270 --> 0:24:33.760 that modern wars were fundamentally driven by capitalist competition for markets, resources, 0:24:33.800 --> 0:24:38.280 and opportunities to exploit less industrialized nations. He pointed to 0:24:38.320 --> 0:24:41.719 the imperial conquests and colonial conflicts of his time as 0:24:41.820 --> 0:24:46.080 evidence that financiers and economic interests, rather than ordinary people, 0:24:46.480 --> 0:24:49.760 were the true beneficiaries of war. And while he saw 0:24:49.859 --> 0:24:54.520 capitalism as the primary engine of modern militarism, he also 0:24:54.580 --> 0:24:58.939 condemned the state as the political institution that organized and 0:24:59.060 --> 0:25:04.280 carried out these conflicts. So it was odd for Kropotkin 0:25:04.340 --> 0:25:07.939 to seemingly come out the contrary of his previous positions, 0:25:08.640 --> 0:25:11.590 and take one state's side over another when he had 0:25:11.650 --> 0:25:16.830 seen through such sides before. But, of course, people and 0:25:16.850 --> 0:25:21.970 their motivations are more complex. Kropotkin had sympathy for France 0:25:22.210 --> 0:25:26.460 and hostility toward Germany. He saw France as the heir 0:25:26.510 --> 0:25:30.190 to the revolutionary tradition of 1789 and the Paris Commune, 0:25:30.710 --> 0:25:34.950 and he saw Germany as the embodiment of militarism and authoritarianism. 0:25:35.670 --> 0:25:38.149 He believed the war was a poor moment for social 0:25:38.190 --> 0:25:41.689 revolution and feared that a German victory would usher in 0:25:41.810 --> 0:25:46.429 decades of political reaction, wiping out the hard-won freedoms that 0:25:46.450 --> 0:25:50.609 had been achieved in countries like Britain and France. His 0:25:50.650 --> 0:25:53.790 support for the Allies was rooted in his broader view 0:25:53.869 --> 0:25:57.660 of history, that social progress was never guaranteed and could 0:25:57.810 --> 0:26:02.150 always be reversed, that periods of freedom and cooperation could 0:26:02.190 --> 0:26:07.070 collapse into authoritarianism. He also believed that national liberation struggles 0:26:07.109 --> 0:26:11.290 were a space ripe for anarchist social insertion and radicalization, 0:26:11.310 --> 0:26:15.700 and that in times of war, an anti-militarist general strike 0:26:15.760 --> 0:26:19.480 within the targeted nation would simply gift the country to 0:26:19.500 --> 0:26:23.930 its invaders, and that anti-militarists advocating such actions were thus 0:26:24.170 --> 0:26:28.210 siding with the invaders and making social revolution more difficult 0:26:28.250 --> 0:26:31.300 to carry out in the future. This is, for me, 0:26:31.720 --> 0:26:37.860 a somewhat compelling argument. I feel this way about current struggle. 0:26:38.240 --> 0:26:40.879 While the worker has no friend in the states of 0:26:40.920 --> 0:26:43.530 the world, and I don't think it should be framed 0:26:43.650 --> 0:26:46.790 as a matter of campism the way we see running 0:26:46.830 --> 0:26:50.919 rampant today, It is undeniable that there are some victories 0:26:51.060 --> 0:26:53.960 and defeats that will be more or less preferable to 0:26:54.000 --> 0:26:57.310 the viability of the struggle long term. I am rooting 0:26:57.490 --> 0:27:01.830 against an Israeli victory anywhere. And while I reserve my 0:27:01.890 --> 0:27:05.429 right to criticize the politics, ideologies, and other actions of 0:27:05.470 --> 0:27:09.150 the groups carrying out that resistance, it remains true that 0:27:09.260 --> 0:27:11.699 the defeat of the oppressors can open up the space 0:27:11.820 --> 0:27:15.970 for further struggles. If it was that anarchists were arguing 0:27:16.130 --> 0:27:20.180 and acting solely for anti-militarism in the targeted countries, then 0:27:20.200 --> 0:27:23.900 I would be fully with Kropotkin, you know, I would 0:27:23.960 --> 0:27:26.380 get where he's coming from, we would indeed have a problem. 0:27:27.160 --> 0:27:30.820 But I think he mischaracterized the anarchist position, or perhaps 0:27:30.900 --> 0:27:34.080 did not give them enough credit. As for the anarchists, 0:27:34.280 --> 0:27:39.230 primary responsibility for anti-militarist ends is in agitating within the 0:27:39.330 --> 0:27:43.810 invader countries themselves. to disrupt the militarism within the threatening 0:27:43.830 --> 0:27:47.780 nations to the bitter end. Anything less would be an 0:27:47.920 --> 0:27:53.359 incomplete and flaccid anti-militarist struggle. Kropotkin addresses this in the 0:27:53.440 --> 0:27:57.350 Manifesto of the Sixteen, which we'll get to shortly. And yet, 0:27:57.770 --> 0:28:01.629 with the context of hindsight, I share Malatesta's criticism of 0:28:01.670 --> 0:28:06.030 the pitfalls of lesser evilism as he kinda predicted World 0:28:06.050 --> 0:28:10.970 War II. Adam wrote of Malatesta's position, quote, German victory 0:28:11.250 --> 0:28:14.340 would certainly mean the triumph of militarism, but the triumph 0:28:14.359 --> 0:28:17.040 of the Allies would result in much the same. Both 0:28:17.100 --> 0:28:20.960 guaranteed the victory of the state principle. With statism delivered 0:28:20.980 --> 0:28:23.940 in both cases, and the tensions that caused the war 0:28:23.980 --> 0:28:29.770 remaining unresolved, Malatesta perspicaciously warned that with both sides exhausted, 0:28:30.310 --> 0:28:32.770 some kind of peace would be patched up, leaving all 0:28:32.830 --> 0:28:36.590 questions open, thus preparing for a new war more murderous 0:28:36.650 --> 0:28:52.750 than the present. End quote. In 1915, Malatesta, along with 0:28:52.770 --> 0:28:57.750 Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 32 other signatories, co-signed a 0:28:57.790 --> 0:29:02.450 manifesto titled The Anarchist International and the War, otherwise known 0:29:02.490 --> 0:29:05.650 as the International Anarchist Manifesto on the War, Manifesto of 0:29:05.670 --> 0:29:07.729 the 35, and Anti-War Manifesto. In this text, Malatesta, along 0:29:07.760 --> 0:29:10.750 with Emma Goldman, and 32 other signatories, the anarchists call 0:29:10.810 --> 0:29:13.930 out the ridiculous notion that any side of this clash 0:29:13.970 --> 0:29:18.800 of civilizations had claim to righteousness, freedom, or civilization. Quote, 0:29:19.300 --> 0:29:22.500 In the current conflict, the governments in Berlin and Vienna 0:29:22.560 --> 0:29:26.600 have justified themselves by producing documents every bit as authentic 0:29:26.660 --> 0:29:30.300 as those produced by the governments in Paris, London, and Petrograd. 0:29:30.780 --> 0:29:33.050 It is for whoever on each side who will produce 0:29:33.090 --> 0:29:38.190 the most unchallengeable, most telling documentation to prove their bona fides. 0:29:38.610 --> 0:29:41.820 and portray themselves as the unblemished defender of the right 0:29:42.180 --> 0:29:47.830 and of freedom, the champion of civilization. Civilization? Who stands 0:29:47.870 --> 0:29:50.310 for that at the moment? Is it the German state 0:29:50.330 --> 0:29:53.970 with its redoubtable militarism, so powerful that it has stifled 0:29:54.070 --> 0:29:57.550 every vestige of rebellion? Or the Russian state, whose only 0:29:57.610 --> 0:30:01.120 methods of persuasion are the nowt, the Gibbet, and Siberia. 0:30:01.660 --> 0:30:07.530 Or the French state, with Espiribi, its bloody conquests in Tonkin, Madagascar, Morocco, 0:30:07.850 --> 0:30:11.410 and forcible conscription of black troops. The France whose prisons 0:30:11.430 --> 0:30:15.050 have housed, for years past, comrades whose only crime was 0:30:15.090 --> 0:30:18.510 to have written and spoken out against the war. Or England, 0:30:18.770 --> 0:30:22.290 as she exploits, divides, starves, and oppresses the peoples of 0:30:22.350 --> 0:30:26.610 her huge colonial empire. No, none of the belligerents has 0:30:26.770 --> 0:30:29.940 any right to lay claim to civilisation. just as none 0:30:29.960 --> 0:30:33.860 of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defense. The truth 0:30:33.980 --> 0:30:36.800 is that the root of wars, of the war currently 0:30:36.920 --> 0:30:39.360 bloody in the plains of Europe, just like all the 0:30:39.520 --> 0:30:42.900 ones that went before it, is located exclusively in the 0:30:42.960 --> 0:30:46.320 existence of the state, which is the political form of privilege. 0:30:47.060 --> 0:30:49.680 The state is born of military might, it has grown 0:30:49.740 --> 0:30:53.360 through recourse to military might, and logically, it is upon 0:30:53.400 --> 0:30:55.500 military might that it must rely if it is to 0:30:55.540 --> 0:30:59.990 retain its omnipotence. Whatever the form it may assume, the 0:31:00.760 --> 0:31:03.900 state is merely oppression organized for the benefit of a 0:31:03.940 --> 0:31:08.460 privileged minority. The present conflict offers a striking illustration of this. 0:31:09.140 --> 0:31:11.880 All forms of the state are embroiled in the present war. 0:31:12.560 --> 0:31:17.450 Absolutism is represented by Russia, absolutism mitigated by parliamentarism and 0:31:17.470 --> 0:31:21.430 by Germany, a state ruling over very different peoples by Austria, 0:31:22.050 --> 0:31:27.310 constitutional democracy by England, and the democratic republican system by France. 0:31:28.220 --> 0:31:32.400 End quote. Malatesta rejected the idea that anarchists should support 0:31:32.600 --> 0:31:36.520 one state over another because it was supposedly the lesser evil. 0:31:37.140 --> 0:31:40.870 Doing so, he argued, placed the struggles of some workers 0:31:41.030 --> 0:31:45.450 above those of others and abandoned international working class solidarity. 0:31:45.990 --> 0:31:49.410 While he accepted that anti-colonial wars and social revolutions could 0:31:49.450 --> 0:31:53.560 be justified, he maintained that anarchists should oppose wars between 0:31:53.640 --> 0:31:57.870 rival capitalist and imperialist states. refusing to become complicit in 0:31:57.910 --> 0:32:03.560 their violence and exploitation. Later, in the brief manifesto, No 0:32:03.600 --> 0:32:07.360 matter where they may find themselves, the anarchists' role in 0:32:07.380 --> 0:32:10.400 the current tragedy is to carry on proclaiming that there 0:32:10.480 --> 0:32:13.920 is but one war of liberation, the one waged in 0:32:14.080 --> 0:32:17.320 every country by the oppressed against the oppressor, by the 0:32:17.360 --> 0:32:21.010 exploited against the exploiter. Our task is to summon the 0:32:21.050 --> 0:32:25.820 slaves to revolt against their masters. Anarchist propaganda and anarchist 0:32:25.920 --> 0:32:29.680 action should set about doggedly undermining and breaking up the 0:32:29.700 --> 0:32:33.660 various states, cultivating the spirit of rebellion, and acting as 0:32:33.760 --> 0:32:36.980 midwife to the discontent in the peoples and in the armies. 0:32:37.720 --> 0:32:41.040 End quote. Going on to describe how anarchists might convince 0:32:41.080 --> 0:32:45.240 the soldiers, the factory workers, the peasants, the outcasts, the women, 0:32:45.420 --> 0:32:50.700 and to quote, capitalize upon every stirring of rebellion, every discontent, 0:32:51.070 --> 0:32:54.380 in order to foment insurrection. to organize the revolution to 0:32:54.420 --> 0:32:57.719 which we look for the ending of all of society's iniquities. 0:32:58.480 --> 0:33:02.610 End quote. Powerful words. Yeah. And indeed in line with 0:33:02.630 --> 0:33:07.469 what anarchists had long proclaimed. But Kropotkin, and Kropotkin was 0:33:07.530 --> 0:33:10.910 not alone, mind you, he took a different position on 0:33:10.950 --> 0:33:15.970 the war. He and 14 allies published in 1916 the 0:33:15.990 --> 0:33:19.380 Manifesto of the Sixteen as a reply. It was not 0:33:19.380 --> 0:33:23.390 16 of them who signed that manifesto, it was 15. 0:33:23.390 --> 0:33:26.140 He just got called the Manifesto of the Sixteen because 0:33:26.220 --> 0:33:29.480 the home address of one of the contributors was mistaken 0:33:29.580 --> 0:33:30.840 for another contributor. 0:33:32.500 --> 0:33:34.540 Incredible stuff. 0:33:36.350 --> 0:33:38.330 Yeah, and so that's what I was knowing today. But 0:33:39.010 --> 0:33:42.190 it's like he was living in some town in Algeria, 0:33:42.450 --> 0:33:44.590 I believe, and they thought the name of the town 0:33:44.630 --> 0:33:48.390 was a person's name. Oh my God. Publishing mistakes are 0:33:48.410 --> 0:33:52.260 tailors all this time. In the Manifesto of the Sixteen, 0:33:52.730 --> 0:33:56.530 Kropotkin and the other signatories reaffirmed their opposition to militarism 0:33:56.710 --> 0:33:59.990 and wars of conquest, but argued that peace could not 0:34:00.170 --> 0:34:03.990 simply be declared while Germany continued its invasion and expansion. 0:34:04.620 --> 0:34:07.500 They contended that German workers had failed to resist their 0:34:07.640 --> 0:34:13.420 own government's imperial ambitions, leaving no meaningful internal opposition to militarism. 0:34:14.160 --> 0:34:17.900 Although they maintained their commitment to internationalism and the eventual 0:34:18.000 --> 0:34:22.110 abolition of borders... they concluded that the defeat of German 0:34:22.150 --> 0:34:26.870 militarism was a necessary precondition for a just and lasting peace, 0:34:27.650 --> 0:34:31.270 believing it would ultimately benefit both the German people and 0:34:31.310 --> 0:34:35.739 the cause of human liberation. So, I get where Kropotkin 0:34:35.780 --> 0:34:38.580 is coming from too, as I see parallels to the 0:34:38.620 --> 0:34:43.400 situation today vis-a-vis American imperialism and the flawed actors that 0:34:43.440 --> 0:34:48.250 resist it. Even though I generally share Malatesta's sentiments, and 0:34:48.489 --> 0:34:51.930 Malatesta was ultimately correct in his assessment that maintaining a 0:34:51.989 --> 0:34:55.960 consistent stance is necessary for the clarity of the movement, 0:34:56.540 --> 0:34:58.759 and also that this war's outcome would be nothing but 0:34:58.800 --> 0:35:01.300 a precursor to a further war and would not advance 0:35:01.320 --> 0:35:04.640 the class struggle and in fact worsen its conditions. All 0:35:04.660 --> 0:35:07.819 that being said, I think there's room for a more 0:35:07.880 --> 0:35:13.629 sympathetic appraisal of Kropotkin's position. As for responses and just 0:35:13.670 --> 0:35:17.540 the overall outcome of this rift, For one, the Bolshevik 0:35:17.580 --> 0:35:21.299 party had something to say. Lenin condemned the supporters of 0:35:21.340 --> 0:35:27.870 World War I as anarcho-chauvinists. Stalin and Trotsky dismissed Kropotkin's 0:35:27.930 --> 0:35:32.350 pro-war stance as evidence of anarchism's failure, despite the fact 0:35:32.390 --> 0:35:35.250 that the majority of the anarchist movement remained opposed to 0:35:35.290 --> 0:35:38.930 the Great War. Malatesta, responding to the Manifesto of the 0:35:38.969 --> 0:35:43.770 Sixteen with his article Pro-Government Anarchists, accused its signatories of 0:35:43.870 --> 0:35:47.710 abandoning anarchist principles and by siding with states in wartime. 0:35:48.350 --> 0:35:50.509 He also pointed out that in the name of defeating 0:35:50.590 --> 0:35:56.779 German militarism, they had instead strengthened militarism, authoritarianism, and nationalism 0:35:56.960 --> 0:36:01.160 across Europe, including in the countries they were siding with 0:36:01.200 --> 0:36:05.930 the governments of. Alexander Bultmann, echoing this criticism, argued that 0:36:05.969 --> 0:36:09.650 Kropotkin had wrongly treated nations as if they were their governments, 0:36:10.170 --> 0:36:13.850 when in reality the war was being driven by ruling elites, 0:36:14.230 --> 0:36:19.029 not ordinary people. Malatesta maintained the position that anarchists should 0:36:19.090 --> 0:36:22.719 capitalize on the imperialist war for class war by encouraging 0:36:22.760 --> 0:36:27.580 workers to resist their own governments and revive genuine international solidarity. 0:36:27.600 --> 0:36:32.980 Although wartime repression made revolutionary activity extremely difficult, he believed 0:36:33.020 --> 0:36:37.020 the crisis created new opportunities for insurrection rather than justification 0:36:37.080 --> 0:36:40.890 for supporting any state. The anarchist movement emerged from the 0:36:40.930 --> 0:36:44.640 other side of the Great War Fragmented. some of its 0:36:44.680 --> 0:37:00.910 adherents forever stained by their inconsistency of principle. The war 0:37:01.010 --> 0:37:06.280 forced anarchists to reconsider strategy and revolutionary tactics, and, alongside 0:37:06.320 --> 0:37:10.680 the economic devastation and political instability it unleashed, helped create 0:37:10.739 --> 0:37:16.420 conditions that fueled revolutionary upheavals across Europe, most notably the 0:37:16.460 --> 0:37:20.160 Russian Revolution and the wave of labor unrest that followed 0:37:20.180 --> 0:37:23.660 the war. Though the revolution was initially carried out by 0:37:23.680 --> 0:37:27.430 a diversity of forces, the Bolsheviks claimed it, and with 0:37:27.450 --> 0:37:30.390 the seeming success of the Marxist model in Russia, it 0:37:31.010 --> 0:37:34.930 appeared anarchism would be on the downturn. Though disillusionment with 0:37:34.969 --> 0:37:38.070 that model would follow, and as many anarchists have highlighted, 0:37:38.670 --> 0:37:41.690 the metrics of success between the respective movements were in 0:37:41.730 --> 0:37:45.230 many ways different, it wasn't all bad news coming after 0:37:45.250 --> 0:37:50.020 the war. The collapse of old regimes inspired experiments in workers' self-governance, 0:37:50.460 --> 0:37:53.780 such as the German Revolution of 1918 and the Bavarian 0:37:53.840 --> 0:37:57.880 Council Republic, where anarchists like Gustav Landauer and Eric Moussam 0:37:58.120 --> 0:38:01.520 sought to build a federation of workers' councils rather than 0:38:01.560 --> 0:38:05.989 a new state. Similar anti-authoritarian currents appeared in the Kronstadt 0:38:06.030 --> 0:38:10.750 Rebellion of 1921, where rebels called for free Soviets independent 0:38:10.830 --> 0:38:15.310 of Bolshevik control. Despite the growing dominance of state socialism, 0:38:15.770 --> 0:38:19.460 anarchist ideas continue to shape revolutionary struggles in the aftermath 0:38:19.500 --> 0:38:22.180 of the Great War. Though the war marked a shift 0:38:22.400 --> 0:38:25.940 in the movement that some would argue anarchism has never 0:38:26.100 --> 0:38:31.819 fully recovered from, anarchism has persisted, continues to reach people worldwide, 0:38:32.200 --> 0:38:35.310 and has the potential still to intercede in the diversity 0:38:35.410 --> 0:38:38.680 of struggles and places today. What is needed is a 0:38:38.860 --> 0:38:43.859 clarity and consistency of principles and analyses across contexts that 0:38:43.880 --> 0:38:49.550 can encourage initiative and responsibility and solidarity and revolutionary achievement. 0:38:50.410 --> 0:38:54.910 It's easy, I think, to reduce this story to Kropotkin 0:38:54.950 --> 0:39:00.140 standing alone, betraying anarchism. While ultimately I end up aligning 0:39:00.200 --> 0:39:04.180 more with Malatesta's position than Kropotkin's, I do think that 0:39:04.219 --> 0:39:08.300 Kropotkin deserves a bit more credit and he has sometimes 0:39:08.340 --> 0:39:12.460 been afforded in retrospect. While his prejudices played a role, 0:39:12.480 --> 0:39:17.060 he did seem to genuinely believe that German militarism posed 0:39:17.080 --> 0:39:20.640 a unique threat to freedom that British, French, and Russian 0:39:20.660 --> 0:39:23.990 powers did not. Whether he was right is another question, 0:39:24.570 --> 0:39:28.010 but I think he was still coming from an anarchist place. 0:39:28.810 --> 0:39:32.420 Coloured as he may have been by his anti-German prejudices. 0:39:33.280 --> 0:39:36.360 I think the whole incident revealed the liveliness of the 0:39:36.420 --> 0:39:41.410 anarchist movement as one that was constantly questioning and adapting 0:39:41.550 --> 0:39:45.489 and conflicting and refining its ideas. Something that I hope 0:39:45.530 --> 0:39:48.430 that we will be willing to carry on today. But 0:39:48.550 --> 0:39:52.300 what were your thoughts? on this bit of early 20th 0:39:52.340 --> 0:39:54.120 century drama alert. 0:39:55.120 --> 0:39:57.960 Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, 0:39:58.500 --> 0:40:01.060 this is the anarchist version of a debate that played 0:40:01.140 --> 0:40:06.090 out throughout the entire socialist movement and effectively ended up 0:40:06.110 --> 0:40:09.810 destroying it in the sense that, you know, the logic 0:40:09.850 --> 0:40:14.500 that Kropotkin is operating from to some extent makes sense, 0:40:14.800 --> 0:40:16.859 but it's also the logic that was taken by every 0:40:16.950 --> 0:40:19.510 single individual side in the conflict where like the German 0:40:19.530 --> 0:40:22.990 social democratic party, you know, ends up supporting the war 0:40:23.090 --> 0:40:25.710 because they think that if they don't, they're going to 0:40:25.750 --> 0:40:29.210 be sort of like annihilated by the reactionary forces. 0:40:28.870 --> 0:40:29.690 Of the czar. 0:40:29.989 --> 0:40:32.410 And, but then like the French think they're going to 0:40:32.450 --> 0:40:36.319 be destroyed by the reactionary forces of the Germans and 0:40:36.400 --> 0:40:39.660 so on and so forth. And so everyone ends up 0:40:39.900 --> 0:40:43.200 operating from this logic of like, It's going to be 0:40:43.260 --> 0:40:45.480 really bad for us if the other side of this 0:40:45.540 --> 0:40:51.240 wins this war. And it ends up squandering this moment 0:40:51.300 --> 0:40:54.550 of possibility. And instead, everyone just gets sort of fed 0:40:54.570 --> 0:40:58.530 into the meat grinder. And I think the struggle playing 0:40:58.690 --> 0:41:02.630 out this way was effectively the worst possible thing that 0:41:02.670 --> 0:41:06.130 could have happened. Because it meant that some of the 0:41:06.190 --> 0:41:09.680 only people who were left resisting it were people who 0:41:09.700 --> 0:41:13.790 shouldn't be running a dog kennel, much less, you know, like, 0:41:13.910 --> 0:41:16.930 controlling the fate of the socialist movement. And also it 0:41:16.969 --> 0:41:19.850 meant that the war was allowed to continue. And so 0:41:20.030 --> 0:41:22.770 I think from a theoretical perspective, it's like, it makes 0:41:22.910 --> 0:41:27.750 sense why people took the positions that they did, and also, like, 0:41:28.110 --> 0:41:32.839 supporting this war was so catastrophically wrong that basically every 0:41:32.880 --> 0:41:36.110 subsequent war of the 20th century can be laid upon it. 0:41:37.580 --> 0:41:38.920 But, I don't know. 0:41:39.660 --> 0:41:41.040 The other thing I'll say about it is it's not 0:41:41.080 --> 0:41:44.460 clear to me if Kropotkin acting differently would have changed anything. 0:41:45.300 --> 0:41:50.100 But the sort of general failure of the socialist movement 0:41:50.140 --> 0:41:53.460 to actually grapple with this moment was a sort of 0:41:54.580 --> 0:41:58.880 apocalyptic moment in the history of class struggle that we 0:41:58.920 --> 0:41:59.879 have never recovered from. 0:41:59.900 --> 0:42:04.030 Yeah, I definitely don't think that the blame for World 0:42:04.090 --> 0:42:06.910 War II and all subsequent wars in the 20th century, which... 0:42:07.640 --> 0:42:10.470 can in some way be connected to that World War I. 0:42:11.580 --> 0:42:13.380 I don't think we should lay the blame on the 0:42:13.440 --> 0:42:16.380 feet of Kropotkin or on the anarchist movement or the 0:42:16.420 --> 0:42:17.260 socialist movement. 0:42:17.520 --> 0:42:18.120 Yeah. 0:42:18.960 --> 0:42:20.500 All we can really do is speculate the what if, 0:42:20.980 --> 0:42:26.270 you know? Yeah. And what if there was a unified front, 0:42:26.290 --> 0:42:29.850 a unified stand across all these countries, a commitment, a 0:42:29.890 --> 0:42:33.770 solid commitment to we will not cooperate with our respective states. 0:42:34.530 --> 0:42:37.770 How might the course of the war turned out differently 0:42:37.850 --> 0:42:40.890 how might history have played out differently i guess we'll 0:42:40.910 --> 0:42:45.930 never know yeah but we are in a position to 0:42:46.070 --> 0:42:49.489 shape the course of history here and now yeah as 0:42:49.530 --> 0:42:51.970 the title of the podcast goes you know it could 0:42:51.989 --> 0:42:56.870 happen here it kind of is happening here by here 0:42:56.930 --> 0:42:59.219 i mean on this planet across the world we are 0:42:59.239 --> 0:43:06.009 dealing with wars we are dealing with interstate conflicts diplomatic economic, 0:43:06.950 --> 0:43:12.690 and military. And despite how interconnected we are through the internet, 0:43:13.630 --> 0:43:16.290 it certainly doesn't feel like we've come any closer to 0:43:16.310 --> 0:43:20.810 the kind of international solidarity that the Great War demanded, 0:43:21.469 --> 0:43:25.810 let alone the many wars being raged across the world today. 0:43:25.830 --> 0:43:30.110 Yeah, but even, you know, the bleakness of the past 0:43:30.180 --> 0:43:33.180 and the bleakness of the present does not mean that 0:43:33.239 --> 0:43:38.630 the future As I've said before, the definitional quality of 0:43:38.710 --> 0:43:41.819 modernity is that today is not like yesterday. And so 0:43:42.050 --> 0:43:46.500 we don't actually have to live through yet another round 0:43:46.540 --> 0:43:49.240 of imperialist butchery where different parts of the working class 0:43:49.260 --> 0:43:53.340 slaughter each other. We don't have to live in a 0:43:53.700 --> 0:43:58.620 world that's defined by endless status and capitalist war. We 0:43:58.660 --> 0:44:02.290 can build something else. But that's something that is the 0:44:02.330 --> 0:44:06.739 responsibility of not the state, because the state will never 0:44:07.480 --> 0:44:10.380 choose to abandon its privilege and abandon its wars. And 0:44:10.420 --> 0:44:14.080 it's not up to, you know, capital, because capital will 0:44:14.100 --> 0:44:16.540 also continue fighting its wars. The only people who can do. 0:44:16.500 --> 0:44:16.960 It is us. 0:44:18.600 --> 0:44:23.190 As usual, all power to all the people. Peace. 0:44:35.080 --> 0:44:37.219 Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here, 0:44:37.300 --> 0:44:39.860 a podcast about our crumbling world and the people making 0:44:39.910 --> 0:44:42.570 it crumble. And a good chunk of those people happen 0:44:42.610 --> 0:44:45.310 to be race scientists, which is why today I'm going 0:44:45.330 --> 0:44:48.109 to be talking about the gang of race scientists who 0:44:48.290 --> 0:44:52.170 went after Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who recently 0:44:52.270 --> 0:44:57.029 died by suicide just earlier this year in August of 2026. 0:44:57.030 --> 0:45:00.430 And I came across a very good article about what 0:45:00.530 --> 0:45:03.109 happened to Jason and the people kind of responsible to that. 0:45:03.670 --> 0:45:07.110 by Stephanie Lamy. Stephanie is a researcher, a feminist, and 0:45:07.130 --> 0:45:11.010 an expert in influence operations. She's the former Secretary General 0:45:11.090 --> 0:45:17.589 of Internet Without Borders and the co-founder of DANAIDES.org, which 0:45:17.650 --> 0:45:21.319 develops and deploys technology for civil society organizations operating in 0:45:21.360 --> 0:45:24.940 conflict and crisis environments. She's a PhD candidate in political 0:45:25.000 --> 0:45:28.390 sociology and And she wrote this really, really good article 0:45:28.430 --> 0:45:30.950 that was published initially on the Club de Media part, 0:45:31.110 --> 0:45:35.259 which is a French journalism blog, effectively. And she published 0:45:35.300 --> 0:45:38.020 also a really good translation of it. And I enjoyed 0:45:38.060 --> 0:45:40.200 it very much. I thought it was really valuable. So 0:45:40.239 --> 0:45:42.900 I reached out to Stephanie and asked if we could 0:45:42.940 --> 0:45:46.480 pay to host the audio version of her investigation. And 0:45:46.560 --> 0:45:49.080 she agreed. So I'm going to be reading it. She 0:45:49.120 --> 0:45:50.819 wanted me to do that. But I want to make 0:45:50.840 --> 0:45:52.920 it clear, none of this is my work. And I 0:45:53.120 --> 0:45:55.880 don't say that to, you know, defray any sort of 0:45:55.920 --> 0:45:58.790 responsibility or whatever. This is much better work than I 0:45:58.830 --> 0:46:00.770 could have done on the same subject, and I'm really 0:46:00.810 --> 0:46:03.529 proud to be able to host Stephanie's article. Before I 0:46:03.570 --> 0:46:05.129 get into her article, I do want to note that 0:46:05.170 --> 0:46:08.200 she is the author of two books, Ogura Toxica, Uncivil 0:46:08.239 --> 0:46:11.160 Society in the Internet Age, which is about how anti-democratic 0:46:11.300 --> 0:46:14.460 actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilize and 0:46:14.500 --> 0:46:19.540 undermine democratic societies. and La Terreur Masculiniste in 2024, an 0:46:19.580 --> 0:46:23.410 investigation into masculinist radical milieus, their ideologies, networks, and the 0:46:23.469 --> 0:46:26.130 use of violence as a political strategy. Both are published 0:46:26.190 --> 0:46:29.870 by Editions du Deux Tours. I think, unfortunately, they're, I mean, 0:46:30.130 --> 0:46:32.250 unless you speak French, then it's very fortunate, but they 0:46:32.469 --> 0:46:35.910 are in French. Obviously, I'm going to be reading Stephanie's 0:46:35.930 --> 0:46:39.029 article in English. And here it goes. The Hunt for 0:46:39.070 --> 0:46:44.270 Jason Arday. Race science is a pseudoscience that feeds far-right propaganda. 0:46:44.650 --> 0:46:47.210 Long relegated to the margins, it is gaining traction in 0:46:47.290 --> 0:46:50.850 universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge. 0:46:51.370 --> 0:46:53.529 The hunt that led to Jason Arday's death reveals how 0:46:53.570 --> 0:46:57.750 this machinery of epistemic domination operates and who helps normalize it. 0:46:58.410 --> 0:47:01.490 From day one, everything pointed to the fact that Jason Arday, 0:47:01.630 --> 0:47:04.850 the black neurodivergent Cambridge professor who died in August of 2026, 0:47:04.850 --> 0:47:09.110 was being subjected to racist and ableist harassment. exactly the 0:47:09.130 --> 0:47:12.029 kind of targeting he himself had described. Arte had been 0:47:12.090 --> 0:47:15.210 marked as quarry long before the fatal media pile-on. An 0:47:15.330 --> 0:47:19.339 open and immensely well-funded race science international network enabled its 0:47:19.360 --> 0:47:22.500 hunters to unleash the pack, to give the pursuit scale, reach, 0:47:22.560 --> 0:47:25.280 and political unity. But to break out of the margins 0:47:25.440 --> 0:47:27.879 of race science, the chase had to become something else. 0:47:28.219 --> 0:47:31.190 Its extremist ideology needed to be laundered into a story 0:47:31.230 --> 0:47:35.340 about scientific and journalistic integrity. The media had ample evidence 0:47:35.360 --> 0:47:38.690 to challenge the frame imposed on them by the eugenicists. Instead, 0:47:38.790 --> 0:47:41.649 they adopted it, running with the hounds, and in doing so, 0:47:41.969 --> 0:47:45.690 legitimized both the aims and the epistemic authority of race scientists. 0:47:46.650 --> 0:47:50.580 Marking the Quarry The hunt for Professor Jason Arday began quietly, 0:47:50.760 --> 0:47:53.360 three years earlier, couched in the civilized nodes of a 0:47:53.420 --> 0:47:58.029 scholarly society, a professor who was merely asking questions. In 0:47:58.070 --> 0:48:01.469 May of 2023, Dave Harris, a retired white academic and 0:48:01.510 --> 0:48:06.560 professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, began examining Arday's publications. 0:48:07.120 --> 0:48:10.280 Arday's appointment as professor of sociology and education at Cambridge 0:48:10.300 --> 0:48:13.290 had made national news. At 37, he was the youngest 0:48:13.350 --> 0:48:16.610 black professor in the university's history. From the moment he 0:48:16.650 --> 0:48:19.200 arrived at Cambridge, our day was targeted by freedom of 0:48:19.239 --> 0:48:23.640 information requests. In the United States, Christian nationalist organizations opposed 0:48:23.680 --> 0:48:27.440 to teaching and researching drawing on critical race theory, CRT, 0:48:27.660 --> 0:48:30.440 which examines, among other things, how racism is reproduced through 0:48:30.480 --> 0:48:34.299 law and institutions, were already explicitly encouraging their supporters to 0:48:34.320 --> 0:48:37.650 use public records procedures to target academics and then identify 0:48:37.930 --> 0:48:41.830 or manufacture misconduct. Such smear campaigns are now part of 0:48:41.850 --> 0:48:46.270 the academic far-right's repertoire. aimed particularly at researchers who examine 0:48:46.310 --> 0:48:49.520 power relations, but also at those whose very presence, whose 0:48:49.560 --> 0:48:53.280 perceived identity, appears to embody the gains of diversity, equity, 0:48:53.380 --> 0:48:57.980 and inclusion policies. The largely covert campaign against Black scholars 0:48:58.060 --> 0:49:01.120 also surfaced in 2023, when the work of Claudine Gay, 0:49:01.280 --> 0:49:04.330 Harvard's first Black president, came under heightened scrutiny against a 0:49:04.370 --> 0:49:08.110 backdrop of misogynoir. Christopher Ruffo, a senior fellow at the 0:49:08.130 --> 0:49:11.370 Manhattan Institute and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, 0:49:11.650 --> 0:49:15.239 both Christian nationalist organizations, is one of the principal architects 0:49:15.280 --> 0:49:19.069 of the American campaigns against CRT and DEI. He helped 0:49:19.170 --> 0:49:22.440 turn the plagiarism allegations against gay into a broader political 0:49:22.480 --> 0:49:27.760 offensive against minority representation in American institutions. What connects Rufo 0:49:27.820 --> 0:49:29.859 to what would later come for ARDE is not only 0:49:29.920 --> 0:49:33.980 the method, but also the network. Rufo has repeatedly promoted 0:49:34.040 --> 0:49:39.200 race-science-focused online magazine, Aporia, and appeared on its podcast in 2023. 0:49:39.200 --> 0:49:43.140 Research by the anti-fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies Emporia 0:49:43.200 --> 0:49:47.100 as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, or HDF, 0:49:47.520 --> 0:49:51.230 a Wyoming-registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund, 0:49:51.510 --> 0:49:56.450 the American eugenics organization established in 1937. Byline Times reports 0:49:56.469 --> 0:50:00.069 that Rufo and HDF also shared a funder. Tech entrepreneur 0:50:00.210 --> 0:50:04.799 Andrew Conru invested $ 1. 3 million in HDF, while his foundation 0:50:04.840 --> 0:50:10.560 gave $ 25, 000 to Rufo's documentary foundation in 2021. Aporia repeatedly 0:50:10.620 --> 0:50:14.180 provided a platform for Nathan Kofnes, the race science researcher 0:50:14.219 --> 0:50:16.299 who would later propel the allegations against R & A 0:50:16.320 --> 0:50:20.160 to a mass audience. HDF co-founder Emile Kierkegaard had met 0:50:20.219 --> 0:50:24.180 Peter Thiel in 2019. According to Kierkegaard's own account, Thiel 0:50:24.280 --> 0:50:28.830 subsequently asked him to recommend other researchers. Kierkegaard named Kofnes 0:50:28.950 --> 0:50:32.190 and Noah Carl, Aporia's editor. Both have been run out 0:50:32.210 --> 0:50:36.009 of Cambridge for their mediocre work and overt racism. This 0:50:36.070 --> 0:50:40.370 network also overlaps directly with Britain's Free Speech Union, FSU, 0:50:40.710 --> 0:50:44.610 founded by Spectator magazine associate Toby Young, who has himself 0:50:44.800 --> 0:50:49.150 advocated what he called progressive eugenics. Aporia's Noah Karl is 0:50:49.190 --> 0:50:53.649 the co-director of Skeptics LTD, the publishing company controlled by Young, 0:50:53.969 --> 0:50:58.420 while Aporia contributor Eric Kaufman sits on the FSU's advisory council. 0:50:59.160 --> 0:51:02.299 The funding of race science by Christian nationalist and extractive 0:51:02.320 --> 0:51:06.940 industry billionaires, including surveillance capitalism, serves a political function. As 0:51:06.980 --> 0:51:11.609 historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek's Bastards, racialist 0:51:11.680 --> 0:51:14.450 theories and the obsession with IQ make it possible to 0:51:14.550 --> 0:51:18.630 naturalize inequality. Social hierarchies are no longer presented as the 0:51:18.670 --> 0:51:21.950 product of power relations, but as the expression of supposedly 0:51:22.010 --> 0:51:27.150 objective biological differences that are hereditary. In largely secular societies, 0:51:27.450 --> 0:51:30.890 race science therefore provides Christian nationalists with a substitute for 0:51:30.910 --> 0:51:35.180 the authority religion no longer commands. It also provides intelligence-obsessed 0:51:35.360 --> 0:51:39.020 techno-masculinists with a scientific veneer for the hierarchies they seek 0:51:39.100 --> 0:51:43.260 to uphold or even reinforce. The day Claudine Gay resigned 0:51:43.300 --> 0:51:47.200 as Harvard president, Rufo announced an initial $ 10, 000 fund for 0:51:47.360 --> 0:51:51.680 plagiarism hunting at elite universities, explicitly tying the bounty hunt 0:51:51.700 --> 0:51:55.180 to his campaign to defeat what he called racialist ideology. 0:51:55.950 --> 0:52:00.129 Plagiarism hunting reconfigures legitimacy. Promoters of the junk science, that 0:52:00.190 --> 0:52:04.030 is race science, reposition themselves as arbiters of scientific integrity, 0:52:04.350 --> 0:52:06.930 from which position they can disqualify those who expose the 0:52:06.989 --> 0:52:11.469 cultural foundations of systems of power. By June 2024, Black 0:52:11.530 --> 0:52:15.330 academics were describing the climate in their universities as... open season. 0:52:16.969 --> 0:52:20.710 The pursuit. So, against this backdrop of racist attacks on 0:52:20.790 --> 0:52:24.800 scholars at elite universities, on the 4th of May, 2023, 0:52:24.800 --> 0:52:28.700 Arday received his first email from Dave Harris. Harris challenged 0:52:28.739 --> 0:52:32.240 his public work. When Arday did not reply, Harris wrote again. 0:52:32.580 --> 0:52:35.990 On the 11th of May, Arday eventually responded, accusing Harris 0:52:36.010 --> 0:52:39.050 of spending hours combing through his work looking for mistakes 0:52:39.070 --> 0:52:41.790 and He told him not to contact him again. Anything 0:52:41.870 --> 0:52:45.169 further from you will be considered bullying and harassment, citing 0:52:45.230 --> 0:52:47.790 a past incident of bullying in which Harris had been involved. 0:52:48.530 --> 0:52:51.970 Harris replied anyway. Arday had explicitly asked him to stop, 0:52:52.010 --> 0:52:55.470 but Harris, willfully oblivious of his own oppressive behavior, treated 0:52:55.510 --> 0:52:59.390 the pursuit of academic standards as an entitlement to continue. Meanwhile, 0:52:59.530 --> 0:53:02.779 across the Atlantic, this very posture was growing. The self-appointed 0:53:02.820 --> 0:53:05.920 investigator of black academics could recast himself as a guardian 0:53:05.940 --> 0:53:10.009 of merit, simply a man of learning, asking questions. With 0:53:10.050 --> 0:53:12.780 no reply to his last email, Harris took his claims 0:53:12.840 --> 0:53:17.320 elsewhere and enlisted another retired academic, Martin Hammersley, professor emeritus 0:53:17.340 --> 0:53:20.680 of education and social research at The Open University, who 0:53:20.719 --> 0:53:24.020 has a history of wild claims about feminist standpoint theory. 0:53:24.540 --> 0:53:26.640 His grievance is what he regards as the influence of 0:53:26.940 --> 0:53:30.410 activist research on the social sciences and the diversity of viewpoints. 0:53:31.360 --> 0:53:34.790 On the 19th of May, 2023, Hammersley wrote to Hillary Crimin, 0:53:35.280 --> 0:53:38.420 head of Cambridge's Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, the 0:53:38.480 --> 0:53:41.860 university's head of research policy, governance, and integrity, setting out 0:53:41.920 --> 0:53:46.680 allegations concerning Arday's 2018 paper in social sciences. Kremen then 0:53:46.700 --> 0:53:49.879 met with Arday and the faculty's director of research. Arday 0:53:49.920 --> 0:53:52.360 agreed that the article could be temporarily removed from the 0:53:52.410 --> 0:53:55.470 journal's platform while the issues raised were examined. On the 0:53:55.650 --> 0:53:59.250 21st of June, 2023, Kremen told Hammersley that Arday retained 0:53:59.270 --> 0:54:03.020 the faculty's full support. Morgan separately informed him that, because 0:54:03.040 --> 0:54:06.380 the work predated Arday's employment at Cambridge, the university did 0:54:06.460 --> 0:54:10.260 not consider an investigation to fall within its remit. Hammersley 0:54:10.400 --> 0:54:14.080 escalated the pursuit, rejecting the resolution and demanding a systematic 0:54:14.140 --> 0:54:18.390 investigation of Arday's other publications. Kremen did not respond. The 0:54:18.410 --> 0:54:22.210 chase then spread beyond Cambridge. Harris and Hammersley contacted academic 0:54:22.230 --> 0:54:25.489 journals and Liverpool John Moores University, which had awarded Arday 0:54:25.550 --> 0:54:30.490 his Ph.D., Harris and Hammersley also harried Arday outside university channels. 0:54:30.950 --> 0:54:34.450 As early as 2023, he contacted Jack Grove, a journalist 0:54:34.510 --> 0:54:37.830 at Times Higher Education, drawing his attention to the correction 0:54:37.850 --> 0:54:42.069 to Arday's 2018 paper. Times Higher Education, THE, did not 0:54:42.110 --> 0:54:46.070 investigate the allegations in earnest until June 2025, when another 0:54:46.110 --> 0:54:50.069 professor contacted the publication about Arday's work. Harris then supplied 0:54:50.110 --> 0:54:54.160 material to Grove, whose scrutiny extended far beyond Arday's publications 0:54:54.200 --> 0:54:58.150 to his CV, sporting achievements, charitable activities, and personal biography. 0:54:58.590 --> 0:55:02.770 By September, Grove had compiled a 63-page dossier and approached 0:55:02.830 --> 0:55:05.210 Arday for comment not only on his work, but on 0:55:05.250 --> 0:55:09.040 his private life. By all accounts, Arday experienced this as 0:55:09.080 --> 0:55:12.360 a continuation of the harassment he had already identified. The 0:55:12.380 --> 0:55:14.540 man he had asked to stop pursuing him had now 0:55:14.600 --> 0:55:18.060 enlisted journalists for the hunt. It's important at this stage 0:55:18.100 --> 0:55:20.750 to understand what the hunt had failed to achieve. After 0:55:20.810 --> 0:55:23.990 years of relentless scrutiny, only two of Jason Narde's 33 0:55:23.989 --> 0:55:27.810 peer-reviewed papers had been challenged. The article in Social Sciences 0:55:27.850 --> 0:55:31.350 was amended in December of 2023, with additional references and 0:55:31.390 --> 0:55:34.680 clarification of its relationship to earlier work. The paper in 0:55:34.719 --> 0:55:39.040 Educational Philosophy and Theory was corrected in May of 2024. 0:55:39.040 --> 0:55:43.300 Neither was retracted. By the time THE began its investigation 0:55:43.420 --> 0:55:46.570 in 2025, both matters had been closed. When the allegations 0:55:46.610 --> 0:55:51.020 eventually reached Arday's PhD, Liverpool John Moores University found citation 0:55:51.060 --> 0:55:54.200 defects but cleared him from plagiarism, including that they resulted 0:55:54.239 --> 0:55:58.400 from honest and reasonable error compounded by inadequate supervision related 0:55:58.440 --> 0:56:01.900 to his learning disabilities. It's also important to center the 0:56:01.940 --> 0:56:06.340 story here. From Arday's standpoint, and from LJMU's own standards, 0:56:06.640 --> 0:56:10.080 there was no intent to commit academic fraud. Arday, for 0:56:10.120 --> 0:56:12.839 his part, consistently described what was happening to him as 0:56:12.960 --> 0:56:17.940 racist and ableist harassment, not legitimate academic debate. In April 0:56:17.969 --> 0:56:22.250 of 2026, in his British Sociological Association keynote, Wanted Dead 0:56:22.270 --> 0:56:25.489 or Alive, the playbook, he described how black academics were 0:56:25.530 --> 0:56:29.470 being targeted through an identifiable repertoire already deployed against prominent 0:56:29.489 --> 0:56:32.430 scholars in the United States. He explicitly warned that the 0:56:32.469 --> 0:56:35.850 very instruments designed to protect academic integrity were being weaponized 0:56:35.890 --> 0:56:39.080 against them. By then, Arday had already made public the 0:56:39.100 --> 0:56:43.799 very tangible effects of the campaign, racist abuse, threats, and intimidation. 0:56:44.400 --> 0:56:47.720 In a July 2025 letter to Jackie Smith, then Minister 0:56:47.739 --> 0:56:50.560 for Skills at the UK Department of Education, he reported 0:56:50.600 --> 0:56:53.549 a physical assault, death, and rape threats against himself and 0:56:53.590 --> 0:56:56.549 his family, and racist objects and threats sent both through 0:56:56.590 --> 0:56:59.390 Cambridge and to his family home. In his memoir, he 0:56:59.450 --> 0:57:03.580 likewise described targeted campaigns driven by racial animus. In fact, 0:57:03.680 --> 0:57:06.879 the entire media coverage of the plagiarism affair cast Dave 0:57:06.920 --> 0:57:10.880 Harris in the familiar role of the reasonable, concerned academic, 0:57:11.320 --> 0:57:15.380 a variation on the concerned parent or concerned citizen routinely 0:57:15.440 --> 0:57:19.140 mobilized to lend the appearance of spontaneous, reasonable concern to 0:57:19.200 --> 0:57:23.650 far-right campaigns against sex education, trans rights, racial equality, and 0:57:23.730 --> 0:57:27.170 public health measures, while Arday became the eccentric young black 0:57:27.210 --> 0:57:31.210 professor resisting legitimate scrutiny. His attempts to protect himself were 0:57:31.230 --> 0:57:35.630 recoded as aggression through the classic mechanism of DARVO, deny, attack, 0:57:35.730 --> 0:57:39.810 and reverse victim and offender, first identified by psychologist Jennifer Freed. 0:57:40.470 --> 0:57:42.810 The reversal drew on the myth of the perfect victim. 0:57:43.210 --> 0:57:47.010 Inaccuracy in Arday's autobiographical narrative, as well as unprovable facts, 0:57:47.050 --> 0:57:49.590 were used to discredit his testimony. If he was not 0:57:49.650 --> 0:57:52.280 beyond reproach, perhaps he was not a victim at all, 0:57:52.530 --> 0:57:55.720 and perhaps his place at Cambridge was itself suspect, and 0:57:55.780 --> 0:57:59.150 maybe he even deserved to be harassed. In a historically 0:57:59.250 --> 0:58:04.010 white and male elite institution, credibility, merit, and belonging became entangled. 0:58:04.490 --> 0:58:07.370 The racist trope of the threatening black man did the rest. 0:58:07.910 --> 0:58:11.470 Arday could be cast simultaneously as aggressor and fraud, while 0:58:11.510 --> 0:58:14.470 those pursuing him became the hapless victims of an interloper 0:58:14.530 --> 0:58:17.400 with something to hide. But for the reversal to take hold, 0:58:17.500 --> 0:58:20.400 it had to be made public. Darvo works by manipulating 0:58:20.440 --> 0:58:23.440 how third parties perceive victim and offender. On the 5th 0:58:23.460 --> 0:58:25.980 of August, as Arday resigned from Cambridge and lost the 0:58:26.040 --> 0:58:29.200 institutional protections that came with his position, the Committee for 0:58:29.320 --> 0:58:34.250 Academic Freedom, CAF, an anti-DEI organization, revealed that Arday had 0:58:34.290 --> 0:58:36.530 reported Dave Harris to the police and that the case 0:58:36.550 --> 0:58:40.630 had been closed without further action. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, who 0:58:40.670 --> 0:58:43.770 had previously headed research at the Free Speech Union, FSU, 0:58:44.130 --> 0:58:46.280 framed Arday's report to the police as a threat to 0:58:46.380 --> 0:58:49.680 academic freedom. Also on the 5th of August, Times Higher 0:58:49.720 --> 0:58:53.380 Education helped publicize the same reversal. Jack Grove published his 0:58:53.420 --> 0:58:56.060 account under the headline, I was reported to police over 0:58:56.080 --> 0:58:59.520 the Arday case. I was just doing my job. Arday's 0:58:59.560 --> 0:59:01.860 complaint to the police and his instruction of Carter Rook, 0:59:02.160 --> 0:59:05.229 the London firm specializing in media and defamation, were framed 0:59:05.290 --> 0:59:08.710 as attempts to obstruct legitimate journalism, while Arday's attempts to 0:59:08.750 --> 0:59:12.520 protect himself from harassment became threats to press freedom. On 0:59:12.540 --> 0:59:15.380 the 10th of August, the FSU fused the supposed attacks 0:59:15.440 --> 0:59:19.060 on academic and press freedom into a single conspiratorial narrative, 0:59:19.420 --> 0:59:24.010 casting Arday as a powerful censor determined to intimidate his critics. Quote, 0:59:24.270 --> 0:59:27.010 in a desperate bid to avoid scrutiny, Professor Arday tried 0:59:27.030 --> 0:59:29.810 to use the police to silence a journalist and an academic. 0:59:30.860 --> 0:59:33.880 This threat frame survived Arday's death on the 14th of August. 0:59:34.060 --> 0:59:37.450 That same day, THE published an opinion piece by Ian Pace, 0:59:37.670 --> 0:59:41.430 an advisory board member of Academics for Academic Freedom, AFAF, 0:59:41.690 --> 0:59:46.450 who campaigns on institutional neutrality and academic free speech alongside 0:59:46.490 --> 0:59:49.800 Cambridge professor and Reform UK head of policy, James Orr. 0:59:50.280 --> 0:59:53.720 As Byline Times has documented, Orr himself is a keynote 0:59:53.760 --> 0:59:57.020 in the same network. Peter Thiel made a secret five-figure 0:59:57.060 --> 1:00:00.260 donation to Cambridge through Orr around the time of his appointment. 1:00:00.650 --> 1:00:03.870 while Orr later helped bring the race science publication Aporia 1:00:03.970 --> 1:00:07.990 into organized national conservative politics. Pace argued that the Arday 1:00:08.030 --> 1:00:11.860 affair demonstrated, quote, the danger of treating criticism as injury. 1:00:12.510 --> 1:00:15.780 Three days after Arday's death, THE news editor Tom Williams 1:00:15.900 --> 1:00:18.460 maintained that the journalistic inquiry into the person of Arday 1:00:18.480 --> 1:00:23.600 by Grove was justified. And we'll continue, but first, here's 1:00:23.620 --> 1:00:39.090 some ads. And we're back. The Code of Gentlemanly Conduct. 1:00:39.850 --> 1:00:42.830 The chase had remained largely confined to allegations and rumors 1:00:42.930 --> 1:00:46.190 circulated by Harris and others through academic and journalistic channels. 1:00:46.670 --> 1:00:49.330 The public frenzy began in earnest on the far-right French 1:00:49.370 --> 1:00:52.820 on the 21st of July, 2026, when Nathan Kofnas, the 1:00:52.880 --> 1:00:56.400 race scientist, published allegations based on a dossier he said 1:00:56.420 --> 1:00:59.760 he had recently received from an unidentified source inside Cambridge. 1:01:00.220 --> 1:01:03.720 That claim is unverifiable. Three days later, the Telegraph, to 1:01:03.780 --> 1:01:06.480 which Free Speech Union founder and General Secretary Toby Young 1:01:06.580 --> 1:01:10.790 regularly contributes, published an article with the title, Cambridge Diversity 1:01:10.850 --> 1:01:13.950 Poster Boy in Plagiarism Row. The Times and the Daily 1:01:13.990 --> 1:01:16.850 Mail followed that same day with similar articles. By the 1:01:16.990 --> 1:01:19.710 1st of August, The Guardian published its investigation under the 1:01:19.730 --> 1:01:23.560 sensational headline, Plagiarism, Playbooks, and a Pig's Head, the new 1:01:23.600 --> 1:01:27.280 claim surrounding Cambridge professor Jason Arday. The story had become 1:01:27.300 --> 1:01:30.620 a national media affair, still oriented by the race science 1:01:30.660 --> 1:01:34.500 network's framing. Four days after the Guardian piece, Cambridge announced 1:01:34.540 --> 1:01:39.140 a new investigation into Arday's qualifications and career, citing new information. 1:01:39.700 --> 1:01:43.940 Arday resigned later that day, saying that the relentless accusations, speculation, 1:01:43.980 --> 1:01:46.600 and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him 1:01:46.960 --> 1:01:50.160 and those he loved. The scrutiny had to be of Arday, 1:01:50.420 --> 1:01:53.680 not the PAC. The Guardian article subjected Arday's accounts of 1:01:53.740 --> 1:01:56.680 racist harassment to minute scrutiny, going so far as to 1:01:56.720 --> 1:01:58.960 check some of them with police and witnesses, and finding 1:01:58.980 --> 1:02:02.900 discrepancies in but the three-year pursuit initiated by Harris, the quarry, 1:02:02.960 --> 1:02:06.120 the chase, and the context was entirely absent from the story. 1:02:06.510 --> 1:02:09.370 Harris briefly appears in the article as a concerned academic. 1:02:10.090 --> 1:02:12.930 But Dave Harris's own history should have complicated his portrayal 1:02:12.970 --> 1:02:16.910 as a neutral source. For example, it's publicly available information that, 1:02:17.050 --> 1:02:20.630 in May of 1998, Times Higher Education reported that Harris 1:02:20.650 --> 1:02:23.410 had been dismissed from what is now Plymouth Marion following 1:02:23.470 --> 1:02:27.350 a complaint alleging harassment and bullying. Harris maintained that the 1:02:27.390 --> 1:02:30.250 dispute had begun after he and a colleague raised concerns 1:02:30.270 --> 1:02:34.220 about academic standards, and his union supported his appeal. He 1:02:34.240 --> 1:02:37.240 was reinstated the following month, although the re-hearing upheld a 1:02:37.280 --> 1:02:39.820 finding of misconduct and issued him with a formal warning. 1:02:40.410 --> 1:02:42.890 This history should have at least alerted the Guardian to 1:02:42.930 --> 1:02:46.430 a possible recurring pattern of behavior. Although Arday had pitched 1:02:46.490 --> 1:02:49.690 specifically to him, maybe sending the arts and culture editor 1:02:49.730 --> 1:02:52.170 to cover the story was not the appropriate choice to 1:02:52.210 --> 1:02:55.730 cover a far-right propaganda campaign. In a video published after 1:02:55.790 --> 1:03:00.190 Arday's death, Harris lied, saying he had been cleared. Furthermore, 1:03:00.510 --> 1:03:06.550 Times higher education accounts repeatedly confirmed Harris's correspondence was described 1:03:06.650 --> 1:03:10.390 as notably, even excessively, polite, as though civility of tone 1:03:10.450 --> 1:03:15.460 guaranteed disinterestedness of purpose. Times Higher Education's Jack Grove recalled 1:03:15.500 --> 1:03:18.700 his first email in his August 5th account as softly phrased. 1:03:19.160 --> 1:03:22.160 By then, Arda had already asked Harris to stop contacting 1:03:22.200 --> 1:03:24.830 him and reported him to the police. When Times Higher 1:03:24.870 --> 1:03:29.230 Education had resumed its investigation in 2025, Tom Williams similarly 1:03:29.250 --> 1:03:32.900 described the anonymous professor who contacted him as almost apologetic 1:03:33.000 --> 1:03:36.940 about raising his concerns. Politeness became a proxy for trustworthiness, 1:03:37.140 --> 1:03:40.280 while the repetition and escalation of approaching THE, the very 1:03:40.360 --> 1:03:44.640 conduct Arday had identified as harassment, disappeared from view. Two 1:03:44.680 --> 1:03:47.160 things can be true at once. A harasser can also 1:03:47.200 --> 1:03:51.430 be perfectly gentlemanly. As race and performance scholars Kyla Wazana-Tomkins 1:03:51.530 --> 1:03:55.350 and Tavia Nyong'o have argued, Civility operates as a covert 1:03:55.390 --> 1:03:59.370 political aesthetic and a rhetorical mode which guards the boundaries 1:03:59.410 --> 1:04:02.930 of access to politicity. It helps determine whose speech and 1:04:02.990 --> 1:04:06.980 conduct are recognized in the first place as legitimate political participation. 1:04:07.460 --> 1:04:12.560 Harris's softly phrased manner helped make him legible as reasonable, measured, rational, 1:04:12.660 --> 1:04:16.460 and therefore credible, irrespective of the cumulative effect of his conduct. 1:04:17.070 --> 1:04:20.210 The veneer of politeness, combined with other markers of legitimacy, 1:04:20.530 --> 1:04:23.270 a white man, a professor emeritus, a selfless defender of 1:04:23.370 --> 1:04:27.400 academic standards, positioned Harris as an arbiter of scientific integrity 1:04:27.720 --> 1:04:31.560 rather than an object of scrutiny himself. Retraction Watch, a 1:04:31.600 --> 1:04:36.110 specialist publication dedicated to research integrity and misconduct, glaringly failed 1:04:36.150 --> 1:04:39.760 to scrutinize Harris' own track record. In its lengthy investigation 1:04:39.820 --> 1:04:42.940 published on the 27th of July, it detailed Harris' pursuit 1:04:42.980 --> 1:04:46.040 and quoted Arday explicitly asking him to stop, yet did 1:04:46.080 --> 1:04:48.820 not frame that conduct as harassment, nor did it mention 1:04:48.860 --> 1:04:52.200 that Harris had himself previously been dismissed following allegations of 1:04:52.240 --> 1:04:55.100 harassment and bullying in a dispute he said arose from 1:04:55.140 --> 1:04:58.990 concerns about academic standards. Instead, Harris was given space to 1:04:59.030 --> 1:05:02.370 complain that bloody awful work could get through when standards 1:05:02.390 --> 1:05:06.410 were relaxed for special issues devoted to activist issues, like 1:05:06.550 --> 1:05:11.490 racial inequality. Harris's own record received no comparable scrutiny, nor 1:05:11.530 --> 1:05:15.110 was his sustained campaign against critical race theory treated as activism. 1:05:15.860 --> 1:05:19.200 The very man denouncing other people's work as bloody awful 1:05:19.480 --> 1:05:22.120 had himself faced questions about the quality of his research. 1:05:22.540 --> 1:05:26.740 In April of 2025, internal Plymouth Marjan correspondents described publications 1:05:26.800 --> 1:05:30.960 produced in the Marjan name as poor quality and often controversial, 1:05:31.320 --> 1:05:35.020 a criticism Harris himself understood to refer to his methodological 1:05:35.080 --> 1:05:38.570 assessments of critical race theory. His resulting critique of CRT 1:05:38.630 --> 1:05:42.230 was self-published in March 2024, rather than published by an 1:05:42.310 --> 1:05:46.250 academic press. The pamphlet attracted just five reviews, including a 1:05:46.270 --> 1:05:50.450 generic endorsement from Martin Hammersley. Concerns about the poor standard 1:05:50.470 --> 1:05:53.210 of Harris' research had already been public knowledge since January 1:05:53.230 --> 1:05:56.830 of 2026, when The Telegraph reported Plymouth Marjon's decision to 1:05:56.870 --> 1:06:00.520 suspend his emeritus status. In that article, The Telegraph explained 1:06:00.540 --> 1:06:03.580 the university's assessment of the publications produced in the Marjon 1:06:03.640 --> 1:06:07.770 name were poor quality and often controversial. Although the Telegraph 1:06:07.790 --> 1:06:10.710 framed Harris as the injured party, an academic stripped of 1:06:10.770 --> 1:06:14.260 title after critiquing critical race theory, the information was now 1:06:14.300 --> 1:06:17.580 in the public domain, readily available to any journalist assessing 1:06:17.600 --> 1:06:21.660 his credibility when the Arday allegations resurfaced in July. Between 1:06:21.680 --> 1:06:24.090 the 24th of July and Arday's death on the 14th 1:06:24.110 --> 1:06:28.790 of August, the Telegraph published 43 articles about Jason Arday. 1:06:29.110 --> 1:06:32.190 It even ran a box headed, How the Telegraph's Reporting 1:06:32.250 --> 1:06:35.830 Led to Jason Arday's Resignation. After his death, the newspaper 1:06:35.890 --> 1:06:39.310 quietly altered the headline, Jason Arday is living proof that 1:06:39.350 --> 1:06:43.510 you reap what you sow, removing the word living. Meanwhile, 1:06:43.770 --> 1:06:47.310 the January article about Harris briefly disappeared from the Telegraph's website, 1:06:47.590 --> 1:06:50.660 the very article containing information that should have disqualified Harris 1:06:50.700 --> 1:06:54.620 from being treated as an unimpeachably credible source. What felled 1:06:54.700 --> 1:06:57.160 Arday was not the action of isolated actors, but that 1:06:57.180 --> 1:07:00.979 of a single well-connected and well-financed PAC with a not-so-secret plan. 1:07:01.600 --> 1:07:04.840 In 2023, Nathan Kofnes laid out a roadmap to power 1:07:04.960 --> 1:07:08.220 on his substack, How to Take Back Academia. He was 1:07:08.280 --> 1:07:11.230 not alone in articulating such a strategy, and the prescriptions 1:07:11.290 --> 1:07:14.150 tend to look very similar. Quote, There are two ways 1:07:14.190 --> 1:07:16.890 to reduce the power of the wokesters on campus. Remove 1:07:16.930 --> 1:07:19.550 them by showing that they don't satisfy minimal criteria for 1:07:19.610 --> 1:07:22.620 contract renewal or academic promotion, or dilute their influence by 1:07:22.660 --> 1:07:24.640 bringing in some of the non-woke scholars who have been 1:07:24.660 --> 1:07:30.270 pushed out of academia for political reasons. The two-pronged approach— eliminate 1:07:29.270 --> 1:07:32.470 the black scholars, platform the mediocre white males— is apparent with 1:07:32.490 --> 1:07:35.170 the support system they enjoy. When Dave Harris had his 1:07:35.230 --> 1:07:38.710 emeritus status suspended in January of 2026, he became a 1:07:38.750 --> 1:07:42.240 cause célèbre in Britain's anti-woke ecosystem, with the Committee for 1:07:42.320 --> 1:07:47.200 Academic Freedom, CAF, rallying to his defense. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, 1:07:47.460 --> 1:07:49.780 during his time at the Free Speech Union, had also 1:07:49.820 --> 1:07:54.950 defended Nathan Kofness. When Emanuel College, Cambridge, terminated Kofnes' affiliation 1:07:54.970 --> 1:07:58.270 on the 5th of April, 2024, following his writings on race, heredity, 1:07:58.310 --> 1:08:01.770 and intelligence, the FSU assisted him in the proceedings, with 1:08:01.850 --> 1:08:05.950 Attenborough personally promoting his case. Kofnes later stated that FSU 1:08:06.010 --> 1:08:09.730 Chief Legal Counsel Bryn Harris assisted his appeal. The FSU 1:08:09.770 --> 1:08:13.050 subsequently backed his legal challenge and urged supporters to contribute 1:08:13.070 --> 1:08:15.740 to his legal fund. The FSU itself says it has 1:08:15.780 --> 1:08:18.780 supported Kofnes throughout and helped him bring legal action against 1:08:18.820 --> 1:08:23.450 Emanuel College. In March of 2026, Attenborough, now at CAF, 1:08:23.570 --> 1:08:27.509 intervened on Kofnes' behalf again, urging Ghent University to resist 1:08:27.550 --> 1:08:31.090 demands that his appointment be rescinded. Kofnes had been recruited 1:08:31.130 --> 1:08:34.280 to Ghent by Bouc Devry, whose own work on intelligence 1:08:34.340 --> 1:08:39.860 and dysgenic fertility draws extensively on hereditarian researchers. In 2024, 1:08:39.860 --> 1:08:43.439 Devry also attended the London Conference on Intelligence alongside Human 1:08:43.470 --> 1:08:48.090 Diversity Foundation co-founder Emile Kierkegaard. De Vries had already sought 1:08:48.150 --> 1:08:50.910 university funding to bring Kofnis to Ghent for a lecture 1:08:50.930 --> 1:08:54.630 in February of 2024, just days after Kofnis published A 1:08:54.710 --> 1:08:58.210 Guide for Hereditarian Revolution, before later hiring him as a 1:08:58.250 --> 1:09:03.740 postdoctoral researcher on his Liberalism's Fertility Problem project. So when, 1:09:03.860 --> 1:09:07.160 on the 21st of July, Nathan Kofnes published DEI Fraud 1:09:07.200 --> 1:09:10.380 and Cover-Up at Cambridge on his substack, the architecture of 1:09:10.520 --> 1:09:14.809 uncivil society actors to immediately scale the harassment initiated by Harris, 1:09:15.170 --> 1:09:17.469 as well as give cover to the attackers, was already 1:09:17.510 --> 1:09:21.430 in place. So was the framing. Kofnes heavily promoted his 1:09:21.470 --> 1:09:24.590 blog entry on X, where the post exceeded one million views. 1:09:25.010 --> 1:09:27.850 It was amplified by figures such as Richard Hanania, the 1:09:27.910 --> 1:09:31.340 American race and IQ writer from the same reactionary intellectual 1:09:31.380 --> 1:09:35.500 milieu as Curtis Yarvin. A foundational figure of the anti-democratic 1:09:35.600 --> 1:09:39.200 Dark Enlightenment, Yarvin coined the concept of the cathedral to 1:09:39.220 --> 1:09:42.880 describe what, in secular societies, he presented as a new church, 1:09:43.460 --> 1:09:46.500 a decentralized system made up, in particular, of universities and 1:09:46.540 --> 1:09:51.010 mainstream media— responsible for producing and disseminating progressive orthodoxy and 1:09:51.060 --> 1:09:54.580 policing the boundaries between truth and heresy. The concept made 1:09:54.660 --> 1:09:58.960 refutation almost impossible. If academic institutions rejected race science, that 1:09:59.000 --> 1:10:01.460 rejection itself could be presented as proof of their membership 1:10:01.520 --> 1:10:05.309 in the cathedral, discrediting academic knowledge production on race while 1:10:05.350 --> 1:10:09.510 recasting hereditary and race science as censored truth fitted directly 1:10:09.590 --> 1:10:13.090 into this logic. By the time the first national newspaper 1:10:13.150 --> 1:10:15.790 articles appeared three days later in the Telegraph, the Times 1:10:15.830 --> 1:10:18.380 and the Daily Mail reported Kofnes and those amplifying his 1:10:18.420 --> 1:10:21.520 narrative had already transformed Arday into a symbol of the 1:10:21.640 --> 1:10:26.139 supposed corruption of universities by DEI. A DEI star whose 1:10:26.180 --> 1:10:29.479 alleged failings were presented as proof that Cambridge had sacrificed 1:10:29.560 --> 1:10:32.400 academic standards to racial hiring and then sought to conceal 1:10:32.420 --> 1:10:35.519 the consequences. Brought to bay on the 31st of July, 1:10:35.930 --> 1:10:38.270 Arday submitted to an interview with the Times to defend 1:10:38.310 --> 1:10:41.410 himself against the allegations. But by then, the media pack 1:10:41.450 --> 1:10:44.519 was closing in and the kill seemed inevitable. According to 1:10:44.580 --> 1:10:48.120 News Corp's verified corpus, 52 articles about Arday had appeared 1:10:48.160 --> 1:10:50.700 by the time his resignation statement was published on the 1:10:50.840 --> 1:10:54.320 5th of August. Arday's resignation did not stop the hunt, 1:10:54.700 --> 1:10:56.960 because the actions of the victim have no bearing on 1:10:56.979 --> 1:10:59.439 the level of harassment they receive. It stops when the 1:10:59.479 --> 1:11:02.190 harassers stop, whether because they move on to another target 1:11:02.470 --> 1:11:06.150 or because institutions and bystanders intervene. If the prey is isolated, 1:11:06.210 --> 1:11:10.010 the hunt can intensify. Another 222 articles appeared between his 1:11:10.070 --> 1:11:12.030 resignation and the moment he was found dead on the 1:11:12.050 --> 1:11:16.070 14th of August. 214 through the 13th, and eight more 1:11:16.110 --> 1:11:19.390 that day before his death became known. In all, News 1:11:19.430 --> 1:11:24.310 Cord records 274 articles across 26 outlets in the 22 1:11:24.310 --> 1:11:26.960 days between the first national coverage on the 24th of 1:11:27.000 --> 1:11:30.680 July and his death. Of those articles, my own, Stephanie's, 1:11:30.860 --> 1:11:34.380 mapping identifies at least 23 produced by outlets or authors 1:11:34.420 --> 1:11:38.280 with links to the FSU, 19 of them after Arday resigned. 1:11:38.280 --> 1:11:42.100 21 appeared in The Spectator alone, where FSU founder Toby 1:11:42.140 --> 1:11:45.000 Young is associate editor and columnist. Another was written in 1:11:45.020 --> 1:11:48.260 The Telegraph by FSU-linked Alison Pearson, and another in The 1:11:48.320 --> 1:11:53.660 Times by FSU chair Nigel Bigger. And we'll continue, but first, 1:11:53.729 --> 1:12:09.360 we've got one last ad break. And we're back. the trophy. 1:12:10.479 --> 1:12:14.010 Rather than a media pile-on, this was predatory propaganda. Fighting 1:12:14.050 --> 1:12:17.229 propaganda is not simply a matter of determining whether each 1:12:17.290 --> 1:12:19.809 individual claim is true or false. It is first and 1:12:19.850 --> 1:12:23.050 foremost a struggle over who has the power to define reality. 1:12:23.490 --> 1:12:26.310 That is what framing does. It places certain perspectives at 1:12:26.330 --> 1:12:29.110 the center, relegates others to the margins, and determines what 1:12:29.150 --> 1:12:33.479 becomes visible, sayable, and relevant. That authority, that power, is 1:12:33.520 --> 1:12:36.740 precisely what is at stake. Race science, a belief system 1:12:36.820 --> 1:12:40.379 fundamentally untethered from reality. needs to be received as science. 1:12:40.780 --> 1:12:44.479 Its proponents crave legitimacy because their very existence depends on it. 1:12:44.820 --> 1:12:48.219 Without recognition from journalists, universities, and the public, they remain 1:12:48.240 --> 1:12:51.760 what they are, marginal and extremist. With it, they acquire 1:12:51.780 --> 1:12:54.400 the authority to police the boundaries of knowledge, to decide 1:12:54.460 --> 1:12:59.389 what counts as evidence, what constitutes merit, whose scholarship warrants investigation, 1:12:59.490 --> 1:13:02.790 and whose testimony can be dismissed as mere grievance. And 1:13:02.870 --> 1:13:06.890 Arde was an extraordinarily useful object around which to manufacture 1:13:06.910 --> 1:13:09.769 that authority. A young black professor at Cambridge with a 1:13:09.810 --> 1:13:14.070 remarkable life story, working on racism, sanism, and inequality. Make 1:13:14.090 --> 1:13:16.010 him doubtful enough, and he can be made to carry 1:13:16.050 --> 1:13:19.770 the weight of a much larger proposition. Perhaps inclusion policies 1:13:19.830 --> 1:13:23.189 put him there. Perhaps standards were lowered. Perhaps research on 1:13:23.250 --> 1:13:26.689 racism itself is suspect. Perhaps the people telling us racism 1:13:26.729 --> 1:13:29.450 structures the academy are precisely the people who do not 1:13:29.510 --> 1:13:31.600 belong in it. You do not have to prove the 1:13:31.640 --> 1:13:34.450 whole proposition. You only have to keep the doubt moving. 1:13:35.229 --> 1:13:38.570 As defense researcher Olivier Schmitt, now research director at the 1:13:38.610 --> 1:13:41.809 Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defense College, 1:13:41.850 --> 1:13:45.729 has shown, methodological doubt can be turned into systematic doubt. 1:13:46.290 --> 1:13:49.269 I'm just asking questions, then becomes a posture through which 1:13:49.310 --> 1:13:52.670 suspicion can be kept moving, alive and definitely, even in 1:13:52.710 --> 1:13:55.970 the absence of sufficient evidence, while claiming the credibility of 1:13:56.030 --> 1:13:59.570 critical thinking. Arde did not have to be proved a fraud. 1:13:59.870 --> 1:14:02.910 He only had to be made permanently suspect. and with him, 1:14:03.180 --> 1:14:06.179 everyone who looked like him. But the hunt could continue 1:14:06.340 --> 1:14:08.300 only as long as the pact kept running and the 1:14:08.340 --> 1:14:12.980 hounds baying. Arday's mass harassment on social media was participatory. 1:14:13.420 --> 1:14:19.250 For some, the serialization of revelations discrediting him became collective fun, harass-tainment. 1:14:19.790 --> 1:14:22.870 Adam Serwer, the American journalist at The Atlantic whose work 1:14:22.930 --> 1:14:26.430 examines race in American politics, captured this political pleasure in 1:14:26.530 --> 1:14:30.130 collective humiliation in one phrase, the cruelty is the point. 1:14:30.880 --> 1:14:34.160 For others, the reward was informational ascendancy and a misguided 1:14:34.220 --> 1:14:38.560 impression that their contribution would protect science somehow. Kate Starbert, 1:14:38.700 --> 1:14:42.300 a University of Washington professor who studies collective sense-making, has 1:14:42.360 --> 1:14:44.920 shown that online crowds do not merely consume a narrative. 1:14:45.160 --> 1:14:48.700 They participate in investigating, producing, and circulating the material that 1:14:48.720 --> 1:14:51.890 sustains it. The invitation to go and look for yourself, 1:14:51.990 --> 1:14:55.630 to check another supposedly outlandish claim, to uncover another discrepancy, 1:14:55.990 --> 1:14:59.330 was particularly enticing to those who define themselves as rationalists 1:14:59.390 --> 1:15:04.280 or skeptics. Participation could be experienced as independent inquiry, affording 1:15:04.340 --> 1:15:07.260 a sense of intellectual superiority over those who brought the 1:15:07.320 --> 1:15:10.780 issue back to the reality of harassment, and thereby establish 1:15:10.850 --> 1:15:15.530 ascendancy over them. Participation in the harassment offered epistemic domination. 1:15:15.910 --> 1:15:19.550 That reward helps explain why, even after Arde's death, so 1:15:19.570 --> 1:15:21.650 many of those who engaged with the ready stream of 1:15:21.689 --> 1:15:25.469 revelations remain invested in fact-checking him to this day, unable 1:15:25.510 --> 1:15:29.580 to let him go. Even the reasonable minds. Kate Starbert 1:15:29.600 --> 1:15:32.980 has also argued that the answer to information disorder lies, quote, 1:15:33.320 --> 1:15:36.620 not in better facts, but better frames. Arday was hounded 1:15:36.660 --> 1:15:40.100 to death. But the frame that made the hunt possible survives, 1:15:40.400 --> 1:15:43.059 a frame centered on the feelings of cisgender white men 1:15:43.090 --> 1:15:45.450 who believe themselves to be being greatly replaced from the 1:15:45.510 --> 1:15:49.490 institutions that produce knowledge, while pushing Arday's own perspective out 1:15:49.530 --> 1:15:52.740 of view. On the 20th of August, six days after 1:15:52.780 --> 1:15:56.300 the kill, Ghent University suspended Kofnes as a precautionary measure 1:15:56.340 --> 1:16:00.220 pending a disciplinary investigation into conduct that, in part, predated 1:16:00.260 --> 1:16:04.519 his post about Arday. The disciplinary letter describes months of complaints, reports, 1:16:04.560 --> 1:16:07.060 and concerns about his conduct and public statements and their 1:16:07.100 --> 1:16:10.300 impact on staff and students. It accuses him, among other things, 1:16:10.380 --> 1:16:13.720 of using his position and Ghent affiliation to pursue and 1:16:13.800 --> 1:16:17.860 promote his race realism and hereditarian revolution, despite having been 1:16:17.880 --> 1:16:21.400 hired to work on the future of liberalism. The university 1:16:21.460 --> 1:16:24.040 regarded this as a breach of his professional obligations, a 1:16:24.120 --> 1:16:27.160 misuse of his institutional reputation, and a conflict with its 1:16:27.200 --> 1:16:30.460 code of ethics, which prohibits, among other things, the dissemination 1:16:30.479 --> 1:16:34.140 of ideas of racial superiority and incitement to racial segregation. 1:16:34.660 --> 1:16:37.340 This time, fraud really was at the heart of the case. 1:16:38.100 --> 1:16:41.540 Kofnes immediately recast his suspension of censorship, an attack on 1:16:41.580 --> 1:16:44.889 his freedom of speech. The experiences of his racialized colleagues 1:16:44.930 --> 1:16:47.980 disappeared from the story. His claim amplified by the very 1:16:48.090 --> 1:16:51.010 architecture of actors implicated in the hunt but now with 1:16:51.050 --> 1:16:54.610 an American dimension. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal handed him 1:16:54.670 --> 1:16:58.070 its opinion pages to consolidate the frame. How I became 1:16:58.130 --> 1:17:02.310 the scapegoat in the Jason Arday affair. My university suspended me, 1:17:02.370 --> 1:17:05.189 the article declared. All I did was tell the truth. 1:17:06.050 --> 1:17:06.270 U.S. 1:17:06.330 --> 1:17:09.590 Ambassador to Belgium Bill White then reproduced the free speech frame, 1:17:09.870 --> 1:17:13.460 pressuring Ghent to reinstate Kofnis and warning that all options 1:17:13.520 --> 1:17:15.960 were on the table as the United States reviewed its 1:17:16.020 --> 1:17:19.850 relationship with the university. Its rector, Petra de Sutter, a 1:17:19.890 --> 1:17:22.910 trans woman and former Green Party deputy prime minister of Belgium, 1:17:23.260 --> 1:17:25.640 then became the new target onto which the frame could 1:17:25.660 --> 1:17:29.179 be transferred. Within days, an open letter opposing the punishment 1:17:29.220 --> 1:17:31.680 of a whistleblower in the person of Cofnes attracted more 1:17:31.700 --> 1:17:36.140 than 800 academics. Among them, actors embedded in a billionaire-funded 1:17:36.240 --> 1:17:40.990 Christian nationalist and transphobic networks across Europe. In France and Belgium, 1:17:41.030 --> 1:17:45.590 for example, signatories Florence Beauregard Blackner and Xavier Laurence Salvador 1:17:45.970 --> 1:17:49.750 led back to Christian nationalist billionaire Pierre-Edward Sterin, who funds 1:17:49.810 --> 1:17:55.580 Salvador's Observatoire du Decolonialisme, while his Pericles project funds Justitia, 1:17:55.840 --> 1:17:59.099 created with the Institut Thomas More in Belgium. The latter 1:17:59.140 --> 1:18:02.040 collaborates with Beauregard Blackner and is linked to a French 1:18:02.080 --> 1:18:07.490 transphobic organization that fuels campaigns against trans right. Pierre-Edward Sterin's 1:18:07.650 --> 1:18:12.280 Observatory has since expanded its remit, The organization intervenes in 1:18:12.400 --> 1:18:16.800 academic controversies in the name of academic freedom, opposition to censorship, 1:18:16.880 --> 1:18:19.900 and scientific integrity, a function comparable to that of the 1:18:19.939 --> 1:18:23.030 Free Speech Union in the United Kingdom. And like the FSU, 1:18:23.110 --> 1:18:26.730 it has relays across several media spaces. Its actors circulate 1:18:26.750 --> 1:18:32.130 in particular through the neo-secularist cluster around Lapointe, Marianne, Franck Thirure, 1:18:32.250 --> 1:18:35.480 and Charlie Hebdo, but also through far-right media organs such 1:18:35.520 --> 1:18:39.900 as Le Figaro, Cossure, Belur's Actuals, and Atlantico. Added to 1:18:39.939 --> 1:18:45.190 this is Christian nationalist Vincent Ballor's media apparatus, CNews, Europe 1, JDD, 1:18:45.310 --> 1:18:48.810 and others. But Beauregard, Blackner, and Salvador are not the 1:18:48.890 --> 1:18:53.900 only French signatories. Martine Benoit, Jean Fichaud, Andreas Bekfalvy, and 1:18:53.960 --> 1:18:58.280 Charles Ramond have, like Beauregard, Blackner, and Salvador, signed initiatives 1:18:58.460 --> 1:19:02.900 organized by Vigilance Universities, a collective founded in 2016 to 1:19:02.939 --> 1:19:07.620 combat what it describes as racialism, communitarianism, and attacks on 1:19:07.720 --> 1:19:12.250 universalism in higher education. The neo-secularist milieu thus performs both 1:19:12.310 --> 1:19:15.510 a function of monitoring and that of ideological laundering. The 1:19:15.550 --> 1:19:19.750 dominant group's identity anxieties and the objectives advanced by Christofascist 1:19:19.790 --> 1:19:22.770 networks are stripped of their religious matrix and translated into 1:19:22.790 --> 1:19:27.600 the language of universalism, secularism, science, and academic freedom. Nathan 1:19:27.640 --> 1:19:30.620 Kofnes has since been permitted to return to his mediocre work, 1:19:30.920 --> 1:19:34.400 albeit remotely in pending investigations. But he's only a cog 1:19:34.439 --> 1:19:36.900 in a well-oiled machine, the one who looks the part. 1:19:37.270 --> 1:19:40.470 Behind him, billionaire money flows through think tanks, media, and 1:19:40.490 --> 1:19:44.809 strategic litigation and concerned academics, allowing the same politics of 1:19:44.870 --> 1:19:47.990 white cis male supremacy to circulate under the cover of neutrality, 1:19:48.370 --> 1:19:50.969 a very long way from the besieged dissidents they claim 1:19:51.010 --> 1:19:53.910 to be. The hood is not what makes the racist. 1:19:54.189 --> 1:19:57.280 Sometimes it simply makes the racist easier to recognize. And 1:19:57.340 --> 1:20:00.020 race science is a lab coat with an equally white hood. 1:20:00.700 --> 1:20:03.660 The onslaught against Jason Arday was not inevitable. It became 1:20:03.740 --> 1:20:07.720 possible because at every stage of the pursuit, people and institutions, 1:20:07.800 --> 1:20:11.480 the police, universities, the media, the commentariat, chose to ignore 1:20:11.520 --> 1:20:14.910 his warnings, legitimize the frame and amplify the reality imposed 1:20:14.950 --> 1:20:17.870 by the proponents of race science. Collectively, we did not 1:20:17.930 --> 1:20:20.850 simply follow the hunt. We handed them the trophy, the 1:20:20.890 --> 1:20:23.970 power to define what is real. To overturn that frame, 1:20:24.070 --> 1:20:26.370 to take back the power, we first have to lift 1:20:26.410 --> 1:20:29.559 the hood, collectively name what is wearing it, That starts 1:20:29.650 --> 1:20:31.990 with bringing the voices of those producing knowledge from the 1:20:32.030 --> 1:20:34.510 front lines back to the center and listening when they 1:20:34.550 --> 1:20:37.870 sound the alarm. Jason Arday was afforded no such attention. 1:20:38.430 --> 1:20:41.890 The stakes are huge. As Jafari Sinclair Allen, professor of 1:20:41.930 --> 1:20:45.110 black studies at Columbia University, writes in The Nation, this 1:20:45.189 --> 1:20:48.170 is a transatlantic movement to end the independent production of 1:20:48.250 --> 1:20:51.070 knowledge about race and power and to decide on both 1:20:51.150 --> 1:20:53.960 shores who is permitted to produce it at all. The 1:20:53.979 --> 1:20:56.280 question now is whether we can recognize the hunt for 1:20:56.320 --> 1:20:59.280 power when it disguises itself as free speech, academic freedom, 1:20:59.360 --> 1:21:02.550 or scientific concern, and refuse our assigned role in the 1:21:02.630 --> 1:21:07.150 killing of our democracies. And that's it. Again, this was 1:21:07.170 --> 1:21:09.400 written by Stephanie Lamy. You can find more of her 1:21:09.410 --> 1:21:11.740 work on the Club de Media part, and we'll have 1:21:11.780 --> 1:21:14.420 that linked in the show notes. Thank you again, Stephanie. 1:21:14.780 --> 1:21:15.620 We'll be back tomorrow. 1:21:29.729 --> 1:21:33.269 Did you have a favorite ancient civilization that you were 1:21:33.290 --> 1:21:37.510 learning about growing up? Oh man, so many. 1:21:37.530 --> 1:21:41.380 I guess I enjoyed like Celtic things because that's like 1:21:41.740 --> 1:21:42.660 part of the world I'm from. 1:21:43.160 --> 1:21:45.479 I wasn't even that Celtic. I think she was Celtic, 1:21:45.520 --> 1:21:49.280 like a Celtic warrior, queen, Bodicia. 1:21:49.760 --> 1:21:51.920 Bodicia is how people used to say it, but Boudica 1:21:51.939 --> 1:21:53.500 I think is more accurate. 1:21:53.840 --> 1:21:57.139 That speed. Like she was someone who had resisted the 1:21:57.280 --> 1:21:58.980 Roman invasions, right? 1:21:59.710 --> 1:22:00.450 Yeah, that's right. 1:22:00.550 --> 1:22:03.970 Where my dad lives is like where the Romans built 1:22:03.990 --> 1:22:09.139 their border wall called Hadrian's Wall. And it's just kind 1:22:09.180 --> 1:22:11.920 of cool to be like, you know, the Romans brought 1:22:11.960 --> 1:22:13.860 their colonialism to all of Europe and they got here 1:22:13.880 --> 1:22:17.400 and I can't fucking do it. It might have been 1:22:17.430 --> 1:22:18.550 they got to that part of the world and they 1:22:18.570 --> 1:22:20.430 were like, it's raining so fucking much I want to 1:22:20.470 --> 1:22:24.110 go back to Italy. But yeah, it was always interesting 1:22:24.130 --> 1:22:26.979 to me to think of like, You know, the amount 1:22:27.040 --> 1:22:30.240 of our modern world that's still impacted by Roman colonization 1:22:30.270 --> 1:22:32.820 and then these people who were able to resist it. 1:22:33.630 --> 1:22:36.050 Yeah. I remember as a child, I was a really 1:22:36.110 --> 1:22:40.530 big fan of Egypt, of course, I guess, classic. 1:22:40.950 --> 1:22:41.370 Of course. 1:22:41.830 --> 1:22:45.620 Greece, you can't go wrong. Yeah. Babylon, big fan. I 1:22:45.979 --> 1:22:48.120 liked the beards. Yeah. You know, very cool. 1:22:49.860 --> 1:22:50.040 Yeah. 1:22:50.760 --> 1:22:53.340 As someone who, you know, I grew up like with 1:22:53.400 --> 1:22:58.270 a voracious appetite for those things. living long ago, how 1:22:58.310 --> 1:23:03.570 people lived in the past, like historical books, how people dressed, 1:23:03.610 --> 1:23:07.090 what they ate, how they lived day to day. And 1:23:07.150 --> 1:23:10.150 a lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me 1:23:10.310 --> 1:23:17.100 as humanity's great achievements. You know, the magnificent architecture, the 1:23:17.400 --> 1:23:22.140 advances in agriculture, the remarkable works of art, and so on. 1:23:23.040 --> 1:23:25.519 But as I got older and I started reading more 1:23:25.580 --> 1:23:29.290 history from below rather than history through the lens of 1:23:29.930 --> 1:23:36.210 kings and empires, I learned more about life before civilization 1:23:36.790 --> 1:23:41.840 and outside of empire. And I really became less interested 1:23:42.080 --> 1:23:46.500 in civilization as something to be held up as the 1:23:46.560 --> 1:23:49.990 pinnacle of what he wants to keep full of. although 1:23:50.030 --> 1:23:52.840 I am still very much interested in it as an 1:23:52.920 --> 1:23:55.920 idea and how we think about and talk about it 1:23:56.400 --> 1:23:59.500 as an idea. And so this is It Could Happen Here. 1:23:59.520 --> 1:24:05.679 I am Andrew Sage, or Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by... James. 1:24:06.340 --> 1:24:08.780 People have already heard me sounding off, but yeah, it's 1:24:08.820 --> 1:24:09.559 nice to be here again. 1:24:09.880 --> 1:24:13.260 Yes, in case you didn't recognize the voice. And I 1:24:13.840 --> 1:24:17.380 want to talk about the meaning of civilization. If I 1:24:17.420 --> 1:24:21.390 were to ask you if you... were civilized, how would 1:24:21.410 --> 1:24:21.969 you respond? 1:24:23.450 --> 1:24:26.990 I think I aspire not to be, but like I 1:24:27.850 --> 1:24:31.890 have been raised in a society which very much proposed 1:24:31.910 --> 1:24:36.030 this binary between like the civilized and the uncivilized, right? 1:24:36.370 --> 1:24:38.229 I guess savage is a word you could use if 1:24:38.250 --> 1:24:40.630 you were looking at how that society portrayed it, right? 1:24:40.689 --> 1:24:44.429 And like, even though I think British education and stuff 1:24:44.470 --> 1:24:47.530 wouldn't use that word anymore, it says a lot about 1:24:47.550 --> 1:24:51.200 like the state and its desire to shape narratives in 1:24:51.240 --> 1:24:55.100 its favor. So I think I would aspire to de-civilize myself, 1:24:55.160 --> 1:24:58.979 I guess. I'm not like anti-civ in the big scheme 1:24:59.020 --> 1:25:00.969 of things, but I think in the way that it's 1:25:01.010 --> 1:25:04.729 often used to describe indigenous peoples or peoples who are 1:25:04.750 --> 1:25:05.729 not under control of the. 1:25:05.710 --> 1:25:07.070 State, I don't like that very much. 1:25:07.630 --> 1:25:11.769 Yeah, it's interesting to me because if you ask most people, 1:25:12.189 --> 1:25:14.170 they'll probably just be like, yes. They would say yes 1:25:14.189 --> 1:25:15.090 without hesitation. 1:25:15.530 --> 1:25:15.769 Sure. 1:25:16.030 --> 1:25:19.170 You know, obviously we're not... Most people. 1:25:19.189 --> 1:25:19.269 Yeah. 1:25:22.229 --> 1:25:25.130 But, you know, as you mentioned, like the alternative being, 1:25:25.450 --> 1:25:27.950 you know, the savage, that is something that has kind 1:25:27.970 --> 1:25:32.110 of fallen out of fashion. You know, that exact binary 1:25:32.170 --> 1:25:35.840 of civilized and savage is not in vogue. You know, 1:25:35.880 --> 1:25:38.360 it's not treated as something that you see. And yet 1:25:38.400 --> 1:25:43.260 we maintain one half of the binary as something to uphold. 1:25:43.800 --> 1:25:46.660 So we still say, you know, we are civilized and 1:25:46.680 --> 1:25:51.019 this is civilization, but you wouldn't as much see descriptions 1:25:51.340 --> 1:25:55.960 of the alternative, of the barbarian, the uncivilized, the savage, 1:25:56.780 --> 1:26:00.470 the primitive. I think you can ask people, like, what 1:26:00.650 --> 1:26:04.350 is civilization? What do you mean by being civilized? And 1:26:05.210 --> 1:26:06.850 it's a bit shaky. You know, it's one of those 1:26:06.870 --> 1:26:10.510 concepts that is so familiar, so used to being referenced, 1:26:10.689 --> 1:26:14.790 that not many people stop to interrogate it. You know, 1:26:14.810 --> 1:26:17.330 we throw the word around all the time and it 1:26:17.390 --> 1:26:21.970 can mean cities or technology or modernity or law or 1:26:22.189 --> 1:26:28.280 culture or the state or simply not being barbaric. Historically, 1:26:28.320 --> 1:26:32.060 it's also been a way of dividing humanity. The Greeks, 1:26:32.140 --> 1:26:35.760 I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone 1:26:35.800 --> 1:26:40.090 who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian. You know, China 1:26:40.200 --> 1:26:46.150 infamously treated... everything outside of china as the barbarian. 1:26:45.610 --> 1:26:50.150 Yeah isn't it like a literally an onomatopoeia like people 1:26:50.170 --> 1:26:50.750 are saying like. 1:26:50.670 --> 1:26:52.670 Bar bar bar bar bar bar bar. 1:26:53.110 --> 1:26:55.190 I think i've heard that story as well yeah i'm 1:26:55.220 --> 1:26:56.110 not sure how true it. 1:26:56.180 --> 1:27:01.120 Is yeah i'm not super familiar with like the little 1:27:01.160 --> 1:27:02.160 exhausting on that one i. 1:27:02.160 --> 1:27:06.639 Guess yeah but you know the distinction of the civilized 1:27:06.660 --> 1:27:10.919 and barbarian is something that has been weaponized across history 1:27:10.960 --> 1:27:18.639 to justify conquest and colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the 1:27:18.650 --> 1:27:22.700 human race. White man's burden, quote unquote, was to bring 1:27:22.860 --> 1:27:27.820 civilization to the less advanced people. Yeah. Civilization being, of course, 1:27:27.860 --> 1:27:31.760 the most advanced stage of human social and cultural development, 1:27:32.260 --> 1:27:35.520 which to me is itself a hubris because I think 1:27:35.560 --> 1:27:38.900 that presumption that we made it, you know, we reach 1:27:39.660 --> 1:27:41.720 where we go and, you know, what we figured out here, 1:27:41.740 --> 1:27:42.280 this is it. 1:27:42.939 --> 1:27:43.120 Yeah. 1:27:43.410 --> 1:27:46.430 You know, I think that is a very damaging way 1:27:46.490 --> 1:27:47.009 of thinking. 1:27:47.490 --> 1:27:47.929 Definitely. 1:27:48.350 --> 1:27:52.250 And it's something that I think is embedded into a 1:27:52.830 --> 1:27:58.720 very popular perception of what civilization is. You know, usually, historically, 1:27:58.800 --> 1:28:05.260 civilization has also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture, 1:28:05.840 --> 1:28:11.870 social stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture, and 1:28:11.890 --> 1:28:12.710 of course, the state. 1:28:13.170 --> 1:28:13.290 Yeah. 1:28:13.680 --> 1:28:16.440 Buried in many of these associations is the assumption that 1:28:16.479 --> 1:28:22.469 hierarchy is advanced, that this way of structuring human society 1:28:23.030 --> 1:28:26.190 is the destination we were always headed to. You know, 1:28:26.210 --> 1:28:31.189 we have this term in anthropology, stateless. The presumption being 1:28:31.250 --> 1:28:35.550 that lacking a state is itself, you know, something that 1:28:36.170 --> 1:28:38.710 perhaps needs to be rectified. I'm not saying that every 1:28:38.729 --> 1:28:41.979 anthropologist takes this perspective. but the words that we use 1:28:42.240 --> 1:28:45.530 carry certain connotations. And I think that for some people, 1:28:45.550 --> 1:28:50.849 particularly people raised in a civilization context, It's like, oh yeah, 1:28:50.860 --> 1:28:53.950 they haven't reached where we have reached yet. They haven't 1:28:54.010 --> 1:28:56.590 gotten there yet. They haven't evolved to a point where 1:28:56.630 --> 1:28:59.410 they've developed a state yet. But that is the trajectory 1:28:59.450 --> 1:29:01.910 that they are on or are supposed to be on. 1:29:02.790 --> 1:29:07.019 The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and institutions your 1:29:07.060 --> 1:29:10.300 society has, the more advanced it is presumed to be. 1:29:10.320 --> 1:29:13.559 And then, of course, you have people like Samuel Huntington, 1:29:14.000 --> 1:29:18.420 who used civilization in this very broad sense as cultural identities. 1:29:19.770 --> 1:29:24.650 Yeah, I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington 1:29:24.710 --> 1:29:26.490 as a human being and as a theorist, but. 1:29:26.950 --> 1:29:27.810 As do I, I mean. 1:29:27.830 --> 1:29:29.330 I think we all do. 1:29:30.050 --> 1:29:33.150 To give you the listener an indication, he treats Islam 1:29:33.600 --> 1:29:39.099 as a civilization, Hinduism as a civilization, Orthodoxy as a civilization, 1:29:39.400 --> 1:29:42.280 and then everything south of the Sahara in Africa is 1:29:42.740 --> 1:29:44.280 just one civilization, Tim. 1:29:45.620 --> 1:29:50.550 Yeah, I love that, like, Islam is a civilization and also, like, 1:29:50.610 --> 1:29:54.309 south of the Sahara is a civilization as if never 1:29:54.370 --> 1:29:58.010 the two shall meet, right? Like, famously, there were no 1:29:58.070 --> 1:29:59.170 Muslims in Africa. Yeah. 1:30:01.300 --> 1:30:05.580 The maps that I've seen, he does have, like, Islam 1:30:05.900 --> 1:30:08.480 in Africa as well. If you ever look at the map, 1:30:08.520 --> 1:30:11.460 the map is awful. The map is just awful. 1:30:11.860 --> 1:30:15.890 Yeah, the map, like, gives me fucking... Yeah, like, admittedly, 1:30:15.910 --> 1:30:19.439 it's been a long time since I've engaged. Yeah, Muslim 1:30:19.520 --> 1:30:22.060 and African. I guess, yeah, he includes a horn of 1:30:22.160 --> 1:30:23.339 Africa in Muslim. 1:30:23.900 --> 1:30:26.839 Fucking unbelievable. Yeah, Confucian. 1:30:27.580 --> 1:30:32.210 Japan just exists as, like, a, like, every other culture is, like, 1:30:32.330 --> 1:30:35.650 massively homogenized, and then Japanese is, like, completely unique in 1:30:35.670 --> 1:30:36.849 this little bubble. 1:30:37.450 --> 1:30:41.429 Yeah, yeah. That's such, like, I'm sorry, like, that's so 1:30:41.490 --> 1:30:42.809 weeb-coded to me. 1:30:45.400 --> 1:30:50.080 Yeah it's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged 1:30:50.120 --> 1:30:51.740 with the world coded you know. 1:30:51.740 --> 1:30:54.660 Yeah yeah it's like oh yeah the entire continent of 1:30:54.780 --> 1:30:59.809 africa sure fine whatever that's that's africa japan though like 1:30:59.970 --> 1:31:03.590 this japan is distinct from korea from china from the 1:31:03.610 --> 1:31:07.339 philippines from all of asia japan has its own thing yeah. 1:31:07.880 --> 1:31:10.820 From these places it's had exchange with for centuries yeah 1:31:10.860 --> 1:31:16.280 and then like The entirety of North America, Greenland, Western Europe, 1:31:16.700 --> 1:31:22.150 and Australasia is just Western. The indigenous peoples there don't exist, right? Like, 1:31:22.229 --> 1:31:23.290 the differences in those cultures. 1:31:23.330 --> 1:31:27.350 Yeah, well, Western is code for white, so... Yeah. It's 1:31:27.390 --> 1:31:28.250 not surprising. 1:31:28.790 --> 1:31:30.670 Yeah, that's definitely what he's doing there. 1:31:31.610 --> 1:31:34.960 His famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated 1:31:35.280 --> 1:31:41.420 on clashes between these civilizations. Hence, clashes of civilizations being... 1:31:41.810 --> 1:31:44.910 The title of his book. Yeah. I don't find it 1:31:44.930 --> 1:31:47.830 very convincing. I don't think you do either. Yeah. 1:31:48.030 --> 1:31:49.510 No, I'm not buying it, to be honest. 1:31:50.229 --> 1:31:50.410 Yeah. 1:31:50.810 --> 1:31:54.910 It treats these big cultural blobs as if they're unified 1:31:55.070 --> 1:31:59.440 entities and discrete entities when, you know, history has been 1:31:59.450 --> 1:32:05.980 a long story of exchange, borrowing, overlap, divergence, migration, and transformation. 1:32:06.000 --> 1:32:07.019 Yeah. Yeah. 1:32:18.090 --> 1:32:22.230 Finally, for another perspective, I want to share on the 1:32:22.270 --> 1:32:26.530 subject of civilization. We have David Wengru, who many of 1:32:26.550 --> 1:32:29.250 you may know as the co-author of The Dawn of Everything. 1:32:30.310 --> 1:32:32.840 And for him, he argued that if we're going to 1:32:32.860 --> 1:32:35.940 keep using the word civilization, we should think of it 1:32:36.500 --> 1:32:42.559 as a product of interaction between societies. So through trade 1:32:42.700 --> 1:32:47.880 and conflict and migration and imitation collaboration, Civilization is like 1:32:47.960 --> 1:32:52.320 an emergent phenomenon of that interconnectedness. I think that is 1:32:52.590 --> 1:33:01.310 a somewhat idiosyncratic, but still compelling and somewhat familiar approach 1:33:01.410 --> 1:33:05.290 to the idea. Typically, people do think of civilizations as 1:33:05.350 --> 1:33:10.050 discrete entities, though. Yeah. At least in Lehman's perspective. But 1:33:10.410 --> 1:33:13.510 the field of anthropology and historical research I know is 1:33:13.630 --> 1:33:20.460 rife with comparative studies. and investigations of those very exchanges 1:33:20.880 --> 1:33:25.300 between societies. So as he is speaking from an anthropological perspective, 1:33:25.720 --> 1:33:28.960 I see why he would want to put forward that reframing. 1:33:29.479 --> 1:33:32.280 And the thing about definitions of words and connotations and 1:33:32.300 --> 1:33:35.180 stuff is none of it is really objectively correct. They're 1:33:35.200 --> 1:33:38.920 all just pointing to different things. And the way that 1:33:38.939 --> 1:33:42.219 we use language is always going to be subject to debate. 1:33:42.810 --> 1:33:44.770 I think the fact that we can't even agree on 1:33:44.850 --> 1:33:49.320 what civilization exactly is should probably make us a bit 1:33:49.360 --> 1:33:53.509 more cautious in how we make sweeping claims about it. 1:33:53.960 --> 1:33:55.620 And really, I feel I've heard about many of the 1:33:55.660 --> 1:33:59.160 words that we throw around so casually. But one consistency 1:33:59.280 --> 1:34:03.650 I've seen across most definitions of civilization is this packaging with, 1:34:03.810 --> 1:34:07.450 of course, the city, but also with ideas of advancement 1:34:07.630 --> 1:34:11.590 and development, which of course begs the question, advanced according 1:34:11.630 --> 1:34:15.439 to whom? measured by what standard? How do you actually 1:34:15.920 --> 1:34:20.230 quantify how much more advanced one society is compared to another? 1:34:20.250 --> 1:34:25.630 If the benchmark is skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies 1:34:26.590 --> 1:34:30.650 or industrial output, then yeah, sure, modern states score very 1:34:30.710 --> 1:34:33.929 highly in terms of advancement. But then we can ask, 1:34:33.990 --> 1:34:36.630 why should those be the specific metrics we use? Why 1:34:36.670 --> 1:34:39.070 not measure the advancement of a society according to how 1:34:39.110 --> 1:34:43.930 much leisure its members enjoy? or by how equal they are, 1:34:44.050 --> 1:34:48.810 or by how sustainable they engage with the ecosystem they're 1:34:48.830 --> 1:34:52.639 embedded in, or by how much freedom regular people have 1:34:52.720 --> 1:34:55.219 over their own lives. You know, we can pick different 1:34:55.260 --> 1:34:58.400 measuring sticks and get different winners and losers in this 1:34:58.680 --> 1:35:02.040 competition of advancement. But the measuring stick we're working with 1:35:02.080 --> 1:35:05.930 when we speak of civilization clearly isn't very helpful for 1:35:05.950 --> 1:35:09.490 many of us. All societies are not working with the 1:35:09.510 --> 1:35:13.690 same measuring stick. despite the efforts to impose this capitalist 1:35:13.810 --> 1:35:17.330 neoliberal measuring stick on everybody. You know, we have countless 1:35:17.370 --> 1:35:21.070 experiments and examples of different ways of organizing life across history, 1:35:21.630 --> 1:35:25.850 some lasting for centuries, others millennia, some expanding into empires, 1:35:26.020 --> 1:35:32.400 others staying small, some prioritizing equality, others prioritizing hierarchy, accumulation 1:35:32.439 --> 1:35:36.420 versus mobility. You know, we can't assume that All of 1:35:36.460 --> 1:35:40.080 humanity is trying to reach the same predetermined destination. So 1:35:40.120 --> 1:35:44.020 the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really 1:35:44.060 --> 1:35:48.380 cut it for me. But the language of civilization does 1:35:48.860 --> 1:35:51.930 work for the people that it serves. The people who 1:35:52.020 --> 1:35:55.210 see their society as the highest stage of human development, 1:35:55.729 --> 1:35:59.990 which must be imposed on others by evangelism and conquest 1:36:00.090 --> 1:36:04.900 and so on to bring development. And same attitude which 1:36:04.920 --> 1:36:10.160 is extended to people by European colonial powers to invade 1:36:10.180 --> 1:36:14.299 these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them, to 1:36:15.140 --> 1:36:18.140 treat them as a lesser on the ladder of human development. 1:36:18.580 --> 1:36:23.510 That very same attitude extends beyond people to nature itself 1:36:24.310 --> 1:36:29.030 as something vile and unproductive and waiting to be mastered 1:36:29.630 --> 1:36:33.229 by civilizations. But one thing that's really stuck with me 1:36:33.670 --> 1:36:36.790 in reading, for instance, James E. Scott, which he talks 1:36:36.830 --> 1:36:40.019 about this in Against the Green, is just how fragile 1:36:40.720 --> 1:36:47.939 and not inevitable this civilizational development was. These early states 1:36:48.780 --> 1:36:53.660 very often collapsed, very often fragmented. And for many people 1:36:54.120 --> 1:36:59.969 in those contexts, the collapse, quote unquote, was an escape 1:37:00.010 --> 1:37:03.939 to freedom. You know, it was something that gave them 1:37:03.960 --> 1:37:07.590 an opportunity to disperse and to create smaller communities and 1:37:08.229 --> 1:37:13.309 to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations to rulers. And 1:37:13.330 --> 1:37:15.990 so with all that history in mind, I find the 1:37:16.060 --> 1:37:19.100 concept of civilization, you know, something to think about, but 1:37:19.280 --> 1:37:20.860 certainly not something to idealize. 1:37:21.700 --> 1:37:21.979 Yeah. 1:37:22.820 --> 1:37:24.860 Something that just came to my mind is a speech 1:37:25.240 --> 1:37:28.190 that Daruti gave to the cop's. 1:37:28.439 --> 1:37:33.040 On the eve of the Catalan revolution, right? So 19th 1:37:33.060 --> 1:37:33.439 of July. 1:37:33.460 --> 1:37:36.020 So the cops have been sent, right? They know that 1:37:36.060 --> 1:37:38.370 the military is going to rise up against them, right? 1:37:38.970 --> 1:37:42.990 They know that in the coming days that they will 1:37:43.229 --> 1:37:47.030 either have to fight their own military or accept the 1:37:47.150 --> 1:37:50.590 end of this like liberal democracy in Spain, right? This 1:37:50.650 --> 1:37:54.230 republic in Spain. The Catalan government has still sent the 1:37:54.270 --> 1:37:57.360 police to seize weapons from the anarchists, right, who are 1:37:57.380 --> 1:38:00.540 the most capable people of fighting this coup. They would 1:38:00.580 --> 1:38:03.040 rather state than no state, I guess, right? The state's 1:38:03.080 --> 1:38:04.980 always going to have more solidarity with the state than 1:38:05.320 --> 1:38:10.769 its constituents. And he says to the cobs, sometimes when 1:38:10.780 --> 1:38:11.519 we're given an order. 1:38:11.560 --> 1:38:12.630 We have to disobey it. 1:38:12.729 --> 1:38:14.650 And even if the order comes from a very big 1:38:14.670 --> 1:38:19.030 and important person, to translate, obviously, and paraphrase to, we 1:38:19.130 --> 1:38:21.130 civilize ourselves with disobedience. 1:38:22.510 --> 1:38:24.300 It's a really interesting phrase, right? 1:38:24.340 --> 1:38:28.250 Like to him, I guess the concept of civilization is 1:38:28.410 --> 1:38:33.400 dignity and like, autonomy the person who is given up 1:38:33.420 --> 1:38:36.740 their autonomy to the state is not civilized because they 1:38:36.800 --> 1:38:41.040 have given up that autonomy and allowed the state to 1:38:41.080 --> 1:38:43.990 be the one that makes their decisions for them right 1:38:44.030 --> 1:38:46.450 like it's an alternative use it's like. 1:38:46.310 --> 1:38:48.670 An inversion basically. 1:38:48.590 --> 1:38:51.530 Exactly yeah yeah like he's taken that term and said 1:38:51.570 --> 1:38:55.980 like it's it's fundamentally uncivilized of you to uh to 1:38:56.030 --> 1:38:57.700 allow the state to be the one that makes the 1:38:57.720 --> 1:39:01.600 choices for you it's just a really interesting yeah inversion 1:39:01.620 --> 1:39:03.259 of the terminology. 1:39:03.560 --> 1:39:07.260 Yeah yeah i think it's it's curious because when i 1:39:07.280 --> 1:39:12.099 look at for instance there's this book civilized death by 1:39:12.180 --> 1:39:18.880 Christopher Ryan, and he uses this concept of human domestication. Okay. 1:39:19.479 --> 1:39:22.760 And he argues that, you know, just as humans selectively 1:39:23.420 --> 1:39:26.510 bred and conditioned animals to fit into environments that we 1:39:26.520 --> 1:39:32.330 designed for our own purposes, civilization shaped us to fit 1:39:32.370 --> 1:39:35.769 the needs of these large hierarchical systems. Okay. You know, 1:39:35.790 --> 1:39:39.590 with sort of routines and obedience and punctuality for activity, 1:39:40.030 --> 1:39:43.519 dependence on these institutions. And so it's kind of interesting 1:39:43.540 --> 1:39:49.460 to me that, you know, by Dorotes Freeman, the domestication 1:39:49.700 --> 1:39:53.100 of civilisation is precisely what makes us uncivilised. 1:39:53.580 --> 1:39:56.370 Yeah, like the forced pacifism, I don't know how to 1:39:56.390 --> 1:40:00.710 say it, is what makes us uncivilised, it makes us undignified. 1:40:00.729 --> 1:40:05.470 Yeah, and I guess that is another use or connotation 1:40:05.530 --> 1:40:09.670 associated with civilisation that he's utilising there, which is, Civilization 1:40:09.720 --> 1:40:10.309 as dignity. 1:40:10.490 --> 1:40:10.729 Right. 1:40:11.120 --> 1:40:15.019 As being upright or dignified as a person. To be 1:40:15.080 --> 1:40:19.220 civilized is to be, you know, a certain standard or 1:40:19.320 --> 1:40:20.979 caliber of person. 1:40:21.380 --> 1:40:22.910 Yeah, exactly that. 1:40:22.950 --> 1:40:23.250 Yeah. 1:40:23.530 --> 1:40:27.450 And so he's kind of pointing to civilization as corrupting 1:40:27.490 --> 1:40:34.300 that caliber by making us slavishly dependent on the institutions 1:40:34.380 --> 1:40:36.580 over which we have very little control over. 1:40:37.150 --> 1:40:39.930 Yeah, it's like an interesting inversion. I'm not sure how 1:40:40.110 --> 1:40:41.830 useful it is. I'm not sure if it's a term 1:40:41.870 --> 1:40:45.110 anyone needs to recapture, but it's interesting. 1:40:45.470 --> 1:40:48.010 First thing, even if I find that an invasion is 1:40:48.050 --> 1:40:54.180 not necessarily practical in terms of day-to-day communication, I think 1:40:55.180 --> 1:40:59.840 playing with concepts, tinkering with concepts, invoking them, I think 1:40:59.860 --> 1:41:04.200 it's still useful in better grasping them. Yes. In better 1:41:04.900 --> 1:41:07.270 formulating our sense of what they are And what they 1:41:07.310 --> 1:41:07.630 are not. 1:41:08.510 --> 1:41:09.530 Yeah, definitely. 1:41:10.050 --> 1:41:13.510 The meaning of a word is something we co-create over time, right? 1:41:13.590 --> 1:41:17.420 It's not like a fixed thing. And obviously we have 1:41:17.439 --> 1:41:19.720 these dictionaries and they have the meanings of words, but 1:41:19.960 --> 1:41:24.679 language is just a way of communicating concepts. And so 1:41:24.700 --> 1:41:28.080 we co-create that meaning as we redefine those concepts. 1:41:28.280 --> 1:41:45.210 Exactly. Exactly. So much of modern civilized life clearly isn't 1:41:45.350 --> 1:41:50.480 good for us. I say that after stretching my back with, 1:41:50.770 --> 1:41:54.560 you know, great futility as I spent most of my 1:41:54.600 --> 1:41:56.120 day sitting. 1:41:56.560 --> 1:41:56.780 Yeah. 1:41:57.600 --> 1:42:00.519 Working at a desk. You know, a lot of people 1:42:00.560 --> 1:42:04.060 are working jobs they find meaningless simply because they need 1:42:04.080 --> 1:42:06.599 the income to survive. You know, they are spending most 1:42:06.640 --> 1:42:11.500 of their waking hours indoors, unexposed to fresh air. If 1:42:11.520 --> 1:42:15.020 they even have fresh air outdoors because many of us 1:42:15.080 --> 1:42:20.320 live in urban environments where the standards of air quality 1:42:20.350 --> 1:42:23.090 are not the best. You could also speak of the 1:42:23.130 --> 1:42:26.430 rates of stress and loneliness and anxiety and depression and 1:42:26.470 --> 1:42:30.150 burnout that have continued to rise even as our material 1:42:30.510 --> 1:42:35.150 wealth as societies, not necessarily as individuals, but as societies 1:42:35.800 --> 1:42:40.519 and our technological capabilities have both increased. I don't think 1:42:40.540 --> 1:42:43.660 you have to be a primitivist and advocate for some 1:42:43.700 --> 1:42:48.700 return to prehistory to recognize the negatives, the real same. 1:42:49.939 --> 1:42:53.889 And while I think many technological developments associated with civilization 1:42:53.930 --> 1:42:59.689 have genuinely improved people's lives, you know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes, 1:42:59.930 --> 1:43:03.630 the internet, especially for disabled people and those medical conditions 1:43:03.670 --> 1:43:07.160 that would otherwise be untreatable. You know, these are very 1:43:07.200 --> 1:43:12.090 beneficial innovations. Yeah. I just don't think that civilization as 1:43:12.150 --> 1:43:14.689 we have structured it and conceived of it has a 1:43:14.729 --> 1:43:20.950 monopoly on innovation. In his book, Wild Thoughts, Claude Lévi-Strauss 1:43:20.990 --> 1:43:24.769 had made the point that many of humanity's greatest technological 1:43:24.830 --> 1:43:31.140 breakthroughs in agriculture, weaving, pottery, animal domestication, they were developed 1:43:31.229 --> 1:43:36.120 long before we conventionally think of as civilization. Human beings 1:43:36.280 --> 1:43:40.960 have always been creative. We've always experimented. We've always invented 1:43:41.060 --> 1:43:43.720 and we always will. I don't think we can or 1:43:43.780 --> 1:43:46.760 should go back because, I mean, there are billions of 1:43:46.840 --> 1:43:50.580 us now, mostly in cities that are far from ecologically sustainable. 1:43:51.300 --> 1:43:53.900 But I think if we keep the history of our 1:43:53.920 --> 1:43:58.520 diverse social forms in mind, then as we go forward, 1:43:58.740 --> 1:44:02.090 we can try to preserve what genuinely enriches human life 1:44:02.870 --> 1:44:08.010 while leaving behind the institutions and assumptions that no longer do. 1:44:08.910 --> 1:44:12.390 By the way, do you by chance have a blueprint 1:44:12.990 --> 1:44:15.030 for the future of our species? 1:44:17.610 --> 1:44:21.590 No, I don't think I do other than working it 1:44:21.650 --> 1:44:22.210 out together. 1:44:22.229 --> 1:44:24.630 Yeah, me neither. Hoping someone might. I guess we'd have 1:44:24.650 --> 1:44:27.530 to figure that out together. Exactly. Yeah. 1:44:28.670 --> 1:44:29.760 Maybe that is a blueprint. 1:44:30.180 --> 1:44:33.140 Exactly. I'm really not interested in seeing that there's like 1:44:33.439 --> 1:44:36.600 one correct society that everybody has to adopt. 1:44:36.640 --> 1:44:36.780 Yeah. 1:44:37.570 --> 1:44:40.410 I think we can learn something from the incredible diversity 1:44:40.830 --> 1:44:44.450 of human societies that have existed. And we can use 1:44:44.490 --> 1:44:48.460 that not for mimicry, but for inspiration, you know, to 1:44:49.060 --> 1:44:54.520 realize that we too can pursue these uncharted territories and 1:44:55.240 --> 1:44:58.340 develop something new or to take old concepts and stretch 1:44:58.360 --> 1:44:59.400 them into new forms. 1:45:00.220 --> 1:45:01.000 Yeah, definitely. 1:45:01.620 --> 1:45:05.430 The author Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael had made 1:45:05.470 --> 1:45:09.900 a point that Tribes can be defined not by hunting 1:45:09.960 --> 1:45:14.200 and gathering or ethnicity, but as a social organization that 1:45:14.240 --> 1:45:17.479 allows people to make a living together. And so by 1:45:17.620 --> 1:45:22.020 this definition, people still today create tribal forms of organization 1:45:22.180 --> 1:45:25.390 all the time, whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups, 1:45:25.470 --> 1:45:31.050 intentional communities, wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs 1:45:31.150 --> 1:45:34.660 and shared purposes. One thing Quinn emphasizes is that these 1:45:34.680 --> 1:45:38.010 kinds of societies can be very flexible. You know, when 1:45:38.250 --> 1:45:41.170 these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can 1:45:41.210 --> 1:45:44.030 change them. We can walk away from them. We're not 1:45:44.130 --> 1:45:46.309 tied to them in the way that we are basically 1:45:46.390 --> 1:45:50.750 bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social 1:45:50.810 --> 1:45:53.910 contract with today. And so really, for me, that's what 1:45:54.010 --> 1:45:56.689 I want to focus on, a world where people have 1:45:57.020 --> 1:46:02.590 greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation, a 1:46:02.610 --> 1:46:06.130 world where organizations are things that people can freely join 1:46:06.250 --> 1:46:10.560 and reshape and split and leave, and they're no longer 1:46:10.600 --> 1:46:15.059 serving their needs. I really care about GDP metrics and, 1:46:16.100 --> 1:46:21.189 you know, megacity concentrations. I just want to know, you know, 1:46:21.330 --> 1:46:27.330 how we get from here to there together. And to me, 1:46:27.370 --> 1:46:30.950 that is something that requires... as I've said many times 1:46:30.990 --> 1:46:34.639 before on this podcast and on my YouTube channel, it 1:46:34.689 --> 1:46:40.620 requires opposition to systems of domination, you know, through confrontation 1:46:40.680 --> 1:46:44.940 and non-cooperation, through things like strikes and boycotts and other 1:46:44.979 --> 1:46:48.429 forms of resistance. And it also requires, on the other 1:46:48.510 --> 1:46:51.850 end of that equation, that we prefigure the world we 1:46:51.890 --> 1:46:55.650 want to live in by promoting certain ideas and philosophies. 1:46:55.750 --> 1:47:00.190 But more so by building the actual relationships and institutions 1:47:00.229 --> 1:47:03.370 we want to live in and be a part of. 1:47:04.050 --> 1:47:05.930 And I think that these are two processes that will 1:47:05.970 --> 1:47:09.650 reinforce each other. You know, people will see and experience 1:47:09.689 --> 1:47:14.550 different ways of organizing their lives and that informs their ideology. 1:47:15.010 --> 1:47:18.550 They become more confident that these alternatives are possible and 1:47:18.570 --> 1:47:22.519 it drives them to push them in new directions. So 1:47:22.530 --> 1:47:25.720 I say all that to say that The idea of 1:47:25.780 --> 1:47:30.950 civilization had its place and has had its time. But 1:47:30.990 --> 1:47:35.970 I think that we can let go of that old idea. 1:47:35.990 --> 1:47:41.330 You know, that we don't have to assume that there 1:47:41.390 --> 1:47:45.760 is no other alternative. And I think that requires not 1:47:45.800 --> 1:47:49.880 just a rejection, but an act of replacement. To make 1:47:49.920 --> 1:47:55.460 the cracks of the old order apparent... And to make 1:47:56.260 --> 1:48:03.160 the idea, the omni idea of liberalism, capitalism, and civilization 1:48:03.840 --> 1:48:09.439 unconvincing by the presentation of this other alternative. I know 1:48:09.510 --> 1:48:13.190 some people might call that next thing a better civilization, 1:48:13.870 --> 1:48:16.410 but I would prefer to be, you know, didn't bind 1:48:16.450 --> 1:48:20.720 ourselves to that old terminology. I least that's how i 1:48:20.880 --> 1:48:23.240 try to approach it and what about. 1:48:23.100 --> 1:48:26.260 You yeah i don't think we should be beholden to 1:48:26.979 --> 1:48:29.100 these things that they can hold us back right and 1:48:29.120 --> 1:48:30.920 as you say we should be more focused in like 1:48:31.540 --> 1:48:34.040 building the world that we want to live in and 1:48:34.100 --> 1:48:36.040 not so much building the world we've been told we 1:48:36.080 --> 1:48:38.729 should want to live in language can turn into a 1:48:38.770 --> 1:48:42.290 way of seeing the world and i think we need 1:48:42.310 --> 1:48:45.090 to be careful of letting language determine how we see 1:48:45.130 --> 1:48:48.970 the world in a way that inherently like limits our 1:48:48.990 --> 1:48:51.309 ability to create a better one and i think this 1:48:51.380 --> 1:48:54.259 is a concept that we need to be very careful 1:48:54.300 --> 1:48:57.120 of like when it comes to that and just like 1:48:57.160 --> 1:49:00.019 the inherent bigotry that came came with a lot of 1:49:00.360 --> 1:49:03.900 civilization narratives right Sometimes I do like the idea, and 1:49:03.950 --> 1:49:05.580 Scott talks about this a little bit, right? But like, 1:49:05.860 --> 1:49:09.179 in fact, it is people in states who are domesticated 1:49:09.200 --> 1:49:12.820 and they were domesticated by grain crops. Grain crops brought 1:49:12.840 --> 1:49:14.960 those people in, forced them to live in a certain place, 1:49:15.000 --> 1:49:16.660 forced them to live in a certain way, all this 1:49:16.680 --> 1:49:19.559 so they could tend and care for grain crops, right? 1:49:19.689 --> 1:49:19.990 Yeah. 1:49:20.250 --> 1:49:23.830 Like, I think maybe flipping that around might help people 1:49:23.870 --> 1:49:25.010 understand a little bit. 1:49:25.750 --> 1:49:28.030 Yeah, I think there's a, I forget the name of 1:49:28.070 --> 1:49:30.750 the book. Is it Botany of Desire? 1:49:30.770 --> 1:49:30.850 Yeah. 1:49:32.260 --> 1:49:35.000 Yeah, I haven't read that. I've been recommended that book before. 1:49:35.020 --> 1:49:38.740 Yeah, I read that a couple years ago. And I 1:49:38.880 --> 1:49:42.320 think it was on that very subject. The idea that 1:49:43.140 --> 1:49:47.400 the plans that we've raised have in some ways domesticated us. 1:49:47.939 --> 1:49:48.200 Right. 1:49:48.900 --> 1:49:52.200 Just as we have domesticated them. It's been a reciprocal process. 1:49:52.689 --> 1:49:53.620 Yeah, I like that idea. 1:49:54.050 --> 1:49:56.269 That, I think, was like a theme or an element 1:49:56.390 --> 1:49:57.849 of that book, if I remember correctly. 1:49:57.870 --> 1:49:58.550 Okay, nice. 1:49:58.630 --> 1:50:01.830 Yeah. Or maybe it's a theme that I read into it. 1:50:02.280 --> 1:50:04.640 Right, either way, I think it's sometimes a useful way 1:50:04.680 --> 1:50:05.360 of seeing the world. 1:50:06.020 --> 1:50:07.980 And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well. 1:50:08.860 --> 1:50:13.099 Play around with concepts, think with them, flip them upside down. 1:50:14.020 --> 1:50:17.349 And I think that is also how we innovate, how 1:50:17.390 --> 1:50:21.809 we create new things, new meaning. You know, there is this, 1:50:22.370 --> 1:50:25.689 I think it's a proverb, or it might be an Ecclesiastes, 1:50:26.350 --> 1:50:28.350 but it's like, there's nothing new under the sun. 1:50:28.810 --> 1:50:28.950 Yeah. 1:50:29.700 --> 1:50:32.660 So it's like creativity is just the ways that we 1:50:32.700 --> 1:50:37.500 repurpose what already exists. We build upon everything that came before. 1:50:38.420 --> 1:50:40.889 And we have to be willing to play around with 1:50:40.970 --> 1:50:43.929 it if we want to get to that point of innovator. 1:50:44.570 --> 1:50:44.750 Yeah. 1:50:45.710 --> 1:50:49.950 That's pretty much all I have for today. All power 1:50:49.990 --> 1:50:52.450 to all the people. Peace. 1:51:08.200 --> 1:51:11.620 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly 1:51:11.660 --> 1:51:14.630 newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, 1:51:14.689 --> 1:51:18.110 and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, 1:51:18.150 --> 1:51:22.570 we are covering the week of August 26th to September 2nd. Today, 1:51:22.590 --> 1:51:26.400 I'm joined by James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent 1:51:26.939 --> 1:51:30.280 Prop from our show Hood Politics. Welcome. 1:51:30.300 --> 1:51:32.679 Hey, long-time listener, first-time caller, you know. 1:51:33.280 --> 1:51:33.940 Glad to be here. 1:51:34.240 --> 1:51:36.380 First time on ED. You've been on It Could Happen 1:51:36.400 --> 1:51:37.120 Here a few times. 1:51:37.590 --> 1:51:38.550 Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. 1:51:38.630 --> 1:51:38.830 Yeah. 1:51:39.370 --> 1:51:40.430 Your favorite cousin, you know. 1:51:41.229 --> 1:51:43.170 James, do you want to start with your little short 1:51:43.250 --> 1:51:43.870 news items? 1:51:44.110 --> 1:51:46.530 This is a barrage of bad news. Prop if you're 1:51:46.560 --> 1:51:51.080 not familiar with this. Last week, I guess, barrage was 1:51:51.100 --> 1:51:54.220 an unfortunate choice of words. Right when we were releasing this, 1:51:54.540 --> 1:51:57.640 a flood in Nepal caused catastrophic damage. 1:51:58.080 --> 1:51:58.380 Yeah. 1:51:59.660 --> 1:52:02.090 If you're on the internet, you've seen the videos, right? Yeah. 1:52:02.090 --> 1:52:07.090 1,000... People have been reported dead so far with nearly 1:52:07.090 --> 1:52:11.469 4,000 missing. The current hypothesis is that a glacial collapse 1:52:11.689 --> 1:52:14.769 so large and fast that it caused a seismic event, 1:52:15.430 --> 1:52:18.980 caused a detached portion of the glacier to melt due 1:52:19.020 --> 1:52:21.080 to friction as it fell. So there was like a 1:52:21.100 --> 1:52:21.840 seismic event. 1:52:22.000 --> 1:52:22.200 Yeah. 1:52:22.300 --> 1:52:24.599 And there was some question of the timeline, right? Did 1:52:24.620 --> 1:52:27.180 the seismic event precipitate the collapse or did the collapse? 1:52:27.780 --> 1:52:28.040 Yeah. 1:52:29.280 --> 1:52:32.349 From what I've seen, the current hypothesis is that so 1:52:32.400 --> 1:52:36.120 much of the glacier fell that it created the seismic event. 1:52:36.520 --> 1:52:38.139 Yeah, yeah, that's what I remember hearing. 1:52:38.860 --> 1:52:40.420 Me too. And the most logical. 1:52:41.060 --> 1:52:43.820 Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does seem like it wasn't a 1:52:43.860 --> 1:52:45.809 tectonic situation here. 1:52:45.820 --> 1:52:49.050 No, it was purely as a result of the glacier degrading. 1:52:49.439 --> 1:52:53.240 Yeah, I've seen a glacier carve before. 1:52:53.979 --> 1:52:56.080 It's an incredible thing. But this is on a scale 1:52:56.140 --> 1:52:59.929 that is almost unfathomable. There are early warning systems for 1:52:59.970 --> 1:53:02.269 flooding on that river, but the flooding moved so fast 1:53:02.290 --> 1:53:06.809 that it swamped and destroyed those facilities before they could trigger. 1:53:06.930 --> 1:53:08.050 Yeah. 1:53:08.070 --> 1:53:09.410 We're talking seconds here. 1:53:09.590 --> 1:53:09.910 Yeah. 1:53:10.850 --> 1:53:14.710 Secondly, I'm going to talk about the SDF, the Syrian 1:53:14.750 --> 1:53:19.400 Democratic Forces, which was officially dissolved on August 25th. had 1:53:19.439 --> 1:53:24.219 its forces absorbed into the new Syrian army, Masloum Ebdi. 1:53:24.460 --> 1:53:27.740 The SDF being, of course, the armed forces of Rojava, 1:53:27.939 --> 1:53:33.349 the self-administration, the ANAS, you know, in northeast Syria. James 1:53:33.370 --> 1:53:34.490 and I both reported from there. 1:53:34.850 --> 1:53:37.710 Yeah, and I know it's been really an important place, 1:53:37.770 --> 1:53:40.139 an important thing for both of us. We will, like, 1:53:40.700 --> 1:53:43.560 break this down in more detail in another episode, but 1:53:44.130 --> 1:53:46.729 I wanted to say really briefly, Mazlou Mebdi made the 1:53:46.790 --> 1:53:51.550 announcement and he said that approximately 10,000 SDF fighters have 1:53:51.570 --> 1:53:56.340 been integrated into a new Syrian army. The integration that 1:53:56.460 --> 1:53:59.440 matters is the Women's Protection Forces, the YPJ. 1:53:59.800 --> 1:54:02.299 And some of the ethnic minority militias. 1:54:02.560 --> 1:54:05.480 Sure, yeah, yeah. The non-Kurdish ethnic minorities. 1:54:05.580 --> 1:54:08.860 Yeah, the Armenians and the Assyrians and the like. 1:54:08.880 --> 1:54:10.840 The Assyrians, yeah, yeah. 1:54:12.340 --> 1:54:15.600 As it seems right now, the offer is for the 1:54:15.720 --> 1:54:20.620 YPGA to integrate as individuals into the Ministry of the Interior. 1:54:20.880 --> 1:54:23.880 So doing stuff like tourism police, border police. And it 1:54:23.939 --> 1:54:27.020 does not seem that the new Syrian government is interested 1:54:27.060 --> 1:54:29.540 in having women in its armed forces, right? Despite these 1:54:29.600 --> 1:54:32.500 particular women being some of the most capable fighters in 1:54:32.540 --> 1:54:35.720 the world who have been trained by the US and 1:54:35.740 --> 1:54:38.470 by other militaries and have been fighting for more than 1:54:38.480 --> 1:54:41.400 a decade in some cases. Yeah. Right now, what they 1:54:41.460 --> 1:54:43.970 want is to remain as a distinct entity with their 1:54:44.050 --> 1:54:47.450 own structures and not to be broken up as a 1:54:47.510 --> 1:54:51.510 group of disparate individuals. In related news, I guess, there 1:54:51.530 --> 1:54:53.950 have been protests in Kamishlo this week after the government 1:54:54.010 --> 1:54:56.450 failed to follow through on its promise in the constitution 1:54:56.590 --> 1:55:00.280 to have Kurdish be a language of instruction. Instead, lessons 1:55:00.340 --> 1:55:03.360 are optional and three hours a week. 1:55:04.100 --> 1:55:05.840 This would be a disaster for people. 1:55:06.100 --> 1:55:09.310 There are generations who have grown up in Rojava Where 1:55:09.370 --> 1:55:11.470 Kurdish was the language they spoke at home, Kurdish was 1:55:11.490 --> 1:55:14.910 the language they spoke at school. Of course, Comanji Kurdish 1:55:14.930 --> 1:55:18.130 has a different alphabet to Arabic. There are older generations 1:55:18.190 --> 1:55:21.670 who were educated in Arabic, right? And they're very aware 1:55:21.710 --> 1:55:25.330 of this difference. But the right to education in your 1:55:25.350 --> 1:55:28.850 mother tongue, when we look at autonomous movements across the world, 1:55:28.870 --> 1:55:31.650 I wrote about this in my PhD dissertation actually, this 1:55:31.710 --> 1:55:34.530 is one of the things that is considered sufficient autonomy 1:55:35.150 --> 1:55:39.260 for these sub-state national groups and taking it away. It's 1:55:39.270 --> 1:55:40.400 a very serious thing. 1:55:40.960 --> 1:55:43.140 No, especially since, I mean, a lot of these people, 1:55:43.180 --> 1:55:45.800 like in Turkey, it's been criminalized and there have been 1:55:46.280 --> 1:55:48.920 degrees of this in Syria under different regimes. But in Turkey, 1:55:48.940 --> 1:55:50.840 it's been criminalized for a long time to speak the 1:55:50.860 --> 1:55:51.540 Kurdish language. 1:55:51.900 --> 1:55:52.040 Yeah. 1:55:52.300 --> 1:55:57.690 And the school textbooks have explicitly in Turkey, like, I mean, 1:55:57.710 --> 1:56:00.800 they've written Kurds out of history, right? Let's move to Myanmar, 1:56:00.860 --> 1:56:04.100 where a Burmese junta resupply convoy to Bamu has been 1:56:04.140 --> 1:56:07.240 targeted by numerous FPV drones and attacks on its way 1:56:07.300 --> 1:56:11.010 up the Urawadi River to resupply the town. The KIA, 1:56:11.070 --> 1:56:14.910 Kachin Independence Army, is attacking government forces there. It seems 1:56:14.930 --> 1:56:18.629 like this morning, two boats seem. 1:56:18.450 --> 1:56:19.430 To have surrendered. 1:56:19.770 --> 1:56:22.400 And there are videos of what look like hundreds of 1:56:23.020 --> 1:56:26.440 what are probably conscript soldiers being captured by the KIA. 1:56:26.100 --> 1:56:27.360 And associated PDFs. 1:56:28.180 --> 1:56:28.780 They're relying. 1:56:29.560 --> 1:56:32.490 incredibly heavily on conscripts right now. Someone sent me some 1:56:32.550 --> 1:56:35.610 documents from a junta officer who they captured showing that 1:56:36.070 --> 1:56:38.890 something like a single digit percentage of the troops under 1:56:38.950 --> 1:56:43.430 his command had been in the military before the conscription began. 1:56:44.350 --> 1:56:47.020 So they're like taking people with very little training and 1:56:47.040 --> 1:56:50.240 sent into the front line very quickly, which relates to 1:56:50.260 --> 1:56:52.300 my next point, which is that Malaysia is planning to 1:56:52.360 --> 1:56:56.580 forcibly return Myanmar nationals on Myanmar Navy ships at the 1:56:56.600 --> 1:56:59.290 end of this month. We can pretty safely assume that 1:56:59.330 --> 1:57:03.050 these will be Rohingya or other Muslim peoples from Myanmar, right? 1:57:03.170 --> 1:57:04.850 Malaysia has been one of the places where people have 1:57:04.870 --> 1:57:07.850 tended to go, especially with conditions being what they are 1:57:07.910 --> 1:57:11.780 in Cox's Bazaar. This would lead to those people most 1:57:11.820 --> 1:57:14.280 likely immediately being conscripted if they were sent back. 1:57:15.040 --> 1:57:16.960 That's all I've got. Gary, I know you have some 1:57:17.000 --> 1:57:20.400 stuff too. Yes, I do have some stuff because it 1:57:20.440 --> 1:57:25.320 was a big news week for White House extended universe 1:57:25.340 --> 1:57:26.120 related news. 1:57:26.440 --> 1:57:27.200 Okay. On. 1:57:27.900 --> 1:57:30.560 August 28th, Trump signed an executive order to create the 1:57:30.600 --> 1:57:34.450 country's first US Space Academy. The order starts by saying, quote, 1:57:34.930 --> 1:57:38.950 space is a critical domain for American national security, economic growth, 1:57:39.030 --> 1:57:43.450 scientific discovery, and technological innovation. More details on this will 1:57:43.490 --> 1:57:44.900 come out in the next 120 days. 1:57:45.270 --> 1:57:47.560 I'm really excited to see how they're going to work 1:57:47.640 --> 1:57:50.140 in the Confederate flag into that, because you know they're 1:57:50.160 --> 1:57:50.540 going to. 1:57:51.520 --> 1:57:56.840 Military academies love that shit. Yeah. Trump starts evil Star Trek. 1:57:58.480 --> 1:58:02.810 Amid trade disputes with Canada, on August 27th, President Trump 1:58:02.830 --> 1:58:07.290 signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. 1:58:07.310 --> 1:58:11.660 And as of recording, both Google and Apple Maps have 1:58:11.740 --> 1:58:17.010 complied with Trump's order. This move has not received universal praise, 1:58:17.990 --> 1:58:22.600 even among Trump's followers on the right. Matt Walsh came 1:58:22.640 --> 1:58:26.760 out against this, saying, quote, This will be an unpopular 1:58:26.780 --> 1:58:28.680 opinion on the right, but I think this is kind 1:58:28.700 --> 1:58:31.180 of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given 1:58:31.200 --> 1:58:35.440 that name on maps by European explorers long before the 1:58:35.480 --> 1:58:39.970 Canadian province of Ontario was named. There are several cities 1:58:40.010 --> 1:58:42.860 in America called Ontario, at least one of them, predating 1:58:42.900 --> 1:58:45.910 the Canadian province by like a hundred years, because the 1:58:45.930 --> 1:58:49.190 word originates with native tribes in North America. Yeah. It 1:58:49.250 --> 1:58:52.090 is not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the 1:58:52.130 --> 1:58:54.960 lake or the name, so in effect... All you're doing 1:58:54.980 --> 1:58:56.880 here is actually giving them credit for a thing that 1:58:56.920 --> 1:59:00.650 wasn't theirs to begin with. Yeah, it's funny when Canadians 1:59:00.710 --> 1:59:04.030 are upset, I guess, or whatever, but Lake Ontario name 1:59:04.070 --> 1:59:09.030 itself is American history dating back many centuries. Not sure 1:59:09.070 --> 1:59:12.230 how you own Canada by deleting your own history, unquote. 1:59:13.010 --> 1:59:18.330 So that's Matt Walsh's long, long take on this, if 1:59:18.370 --> 1:59:19.420 you are interested in. 1:59:20.010 --> 1:59:22.630 Man, of all the things I would think he'd break 1:59:22.670 --> 1:59:23.910 with the administration on. 1:59:24.590 --> 1:59:25.310 Right. Yeah. 1:59:25.450 --> 1:59:25.810 Okay. 1:59:26.110 --> 1:59:26.610 All right, Matt. 1:59:27.290 --> 1:59:27.490 All right. 1:59:27.670 --> 1:59:30.690 Well, because European explorers did that. 1:59:30.930 --> 1:59:31.290 I know. 1:59:31.310 --> 1:59:31.890 I know. 1:59:32.410 --> 1:59:33.570 It's just also stupid. 1:59:33.590 --> 1:59:34.170 Yeah. 1:59:34.810 --> 1:59:39.070 And also, okay, it's stupid. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. 1:59:39.790 --> 1:59:44.970 But America's the name of the continent. It shouldn't bother 1:59:44.990 --> 1:59:48.370 me as much as it does. But like- Canada's a 1:59:48.390 --> 1:59:50.470 part of America. Like, you understand it. 1:59:50.770 --> 1:59:51.560 The Americas. 1:59:51.690 --> 1:59:51.990 Yeah. 1:59:52.700 --> 1:59:54.230 Even if it is a troll. It's not even a... 1:59:55.480 --> 1:59:57.300 I shouldn't care that your troll sucks. 1:59:57.840 --> 1:59:59.400 It's deeply frustrating. 1:59:59.900 --> 2:00:00.320 Yes. 2:00:00.800 --> 2:00:01.660 It's so stupid. 2:00:02.600 --> 2:00:06.630 And even calling the Gulf of Mexico, calling the Gulf 2:00:06.650 --> 2:00:07.210 of America. 2:00:07.250 --> 2:00:08.950 You know Mexico's a part of America. 2:00:09.090 --> 2:00:09.410 It's still. 2:00:10.030 --> 2:00:13.320 It's not a... It's just not a... This doesn't matter. 2:00:13.940 --> 2:00:14.500 It doesn't matter. 2:00:14.620 --> 2:00:17.060 It's one of the most annoying things that he has 2:00:17.100 --> 2:00:19.200 done and continues to do as president. Yeah. And the 2:00:19.240 --> 2:00:21.940 fact that Apple and Google Maps is like the key 2:00:21.960 --> 2:00:26.040 towing to this is just completely embarrassing. A pundit on 2:00:26.160 --> 2:00:30.890 Fox News' The Five also did not like this, but 2:00:30.940 --> 2:00:33.630 because he was concerned that the new acronym that would 2:00:33.670 --> 2:00:35.850 be given to kids to memorize the Great Lakes, right? 2:00:35.870 --> 2:00:40.090 Because the acronym used to be HOMES. To go over 2:00:40.250 --> 2:00:43.710 all of the Great Lakes. That's the first letter of 2:00:43.890 --> 2:00:48.950 each said lake. Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Work 2:00:48.990 --> 2:00:53.100 well for you. This Fox News prudent is concerned that 2:00:53.280 --> 2:00:57.600 now the acronym will be too close to Hamas. Because 2:00:57.680 --> 2:00:59.730 you have to trade the O for the A. 2:00:59.810 --> 2:01:00.870 Yep, yep, yep, yep. 2:01:01.950 --> 2:01:02.330 All right. 2:01:03.590 --> 2:01:07.210 If we could get a merry-go-vespoochie in there, if. 2:01:06.730 --> 2:01:07.950 Lake Erie, we'd be there. 2:01:08.310 --> 2:01:10.710 Right. I think we could make it to Homo. We 2:01:10.730 --> 2:01:12.650 could probably get to Homo pretty easily. We could get 2:01:12.670 --> 2:01:14.430 to Homo. If we're close to Hamas, we've got to 2:01:14.470 --> 2:01:15.250 be close to Homo. 2:01:15.550 --> 2:01:18.250 The next liberal president has to replace the name of 2:01:18.310 --> 2:01:21.720 Lake Erie with another O word and have homos. 2:01:22.980 --> 2:01:26.840 Lake Obama. There we go. Lake Obama. 2:01:26.860 --> 2:01:32.710 Lake Obama. Yeah, that's good. Trump has also, since renaming, 2:01:32.930 --> 2:01:35.530 quote unquote, renaming the lake, he has also suggested changing 2:01:35.560 --> 2:01:38.540 the name of either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean to 2:01:38.740 --> 2:01:39.580 the American Ocean. 2:01:39.600 --> 2:01:40.400 The American Ocean, absolutely. 2:01:40.480 --> 2:01:43.860 And has also talked repeatedly about changing the name of 2:01:43.880 --> 2:01:46.120 the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of America. 2:01:46.140 --> 2:01:46.860 Oh my gosh. 2:01:46.880 --> 2:01:50.300 So we'll see how that works out for him. How's 2:01:50.320 --> 2:01:54.110 that going for him? We'll check in later. how's that 2:01:54.150 --> 2:01:55.630 going yeah. 2:01:55.230 --> 2:01:58.280 About to go to your backyard and change the name 2:01:58.320 --> 2:01:58.560 of it. 2:01:59.180 --> 2:02:02.260 This is just for clout right like this is just 2:02:02.300 --> 2:02:04.360 a fucking like he's found out that he gets a 2:02:04.380 --> 2:02:06.750 lot of attention and owns the libs and yeah yeah 2:02:06.770 --> 2:02:09.210 yeah creates like a news cycle whenever he does this 2:02:09.270 --> 2:02:11.730 bullshit that's the reason this is happening right. 2:02:11.690 --> 2:02:13.770 Yeah that's why i don't want to speak any more 2:02:13.830 --> 2:02:16.720 about it but right it's it's it's it's worth a 2:02:16.760 --> 2:02:20.740 little mention there and for sure Homes to Hamas is 2:02:21.040 --> 2:02:21.940 undeniably funny. 2:02:22.100 --> 2:02:27.080 Homes for Hamas is an amazing, like a fictional NGO 2:02:27.120 --> 2:02:29.020 that would come out of like a Matt Walsh tweet. 2:02:29.680 --> 2:02:32.560 That is true. And then maybe the new Daily Wire 2:02:32.640 --> 2:02:33.680 Plus film. 2:02:34.100 --> 2:02:38.160 The next film, yeah. It's Habitat for Humanity, but it's 2:02:38.230 --> 2:02:39.690 Habitat for Hamas instead. 2:02:40.970 --> 2:02:43.170 Speaking of something that could come out of a Daily 2:02:43.210 --> 2:02:47.770 Wire exclusive film, A former staffer for Mike Collins, a 2:02:47.810 --> 2:02:50.650 Republican congressman from Georgia who's currently running for Senate against 2:02:50.690 --> 2:02:54.070 John Ossoff, has been linked to a Nazi account on 2:02:54.270 --> 2:02:57.950 X the Everything app. This ex-staffer is a 24-year-old who 2:02:58.150 --> 2:03:01.360 interned for Collins in 2024 and then the next year 2:03:01.420 --> 2:03:05.860 worked as a contractor at a pro-Collins PAC. On X, 2:03:06.080 --> 2:03:10.360 this staffer described himself as a quote-unquote twink fascist. 2:03:10.640 --> 2:03:11.800 Okay, yeah. 2:03:12.450 --> 2:03:15.490 And in one post from July of this year, he 2:03:17.130 --> 2:03:20.530 used the word twink to type out the shape of 2:03:20.570 --> 2:03:21.390 a swastika. 2:03:21.710 --> 2:03:23.630 Okay. All right. 2:03:23.710 --> 2:03:25.350 I have it in the doc here if you guys 2:03:25.370 --> 2:03:27.110 want to see. 2:03:27.490 --> 2:03:28.590 What is happening? 2:03:28.890 --> 2:03:30.600 How does he think that's going to end for him? 2:03:31.340 --> 2:03:32.230 I don't think he cares. 2:03:32.720 --> 2:03:33.000 Yeah. 2:03:34.060 --> 2:03:36.160 I think there's a chunk of people for whom all 2:03:36.180 --> 2:03:38.200 that matters is the lulz, right? 2:03:38.640 --> 2:03:39.860 So it would seem, yeah. 2:03:40.190 --> 2:03:40.430 Wow. 2:03:40.470 --> 2:03:42.810 He also posted thirst traps of himself. 2:03:43.070 --> 2:03:43.290 Sure. 2:03:43.330 --> 2:03:44.589 Captioned racist. 2:03:44.650 --> 2:03:45.570 That's not desperate. 2:03:45.910 --> 2:03:49.250 And also shared a grok generated photo of himself in 2:03:49.270 --> 2:03:50.870 a Klan robe. Fascinating. 2:03:50.910 --> 2:03:54.990 I never thought I'd see the day of like bored Nazis. 2:03:55.350 --> 2:03:57.310 With too much time on their hands online. 2:03:57.610 --> 2:03:57.950 Yeah. 2:03:57.970 --> 2:03:58.430 Yeah. 2:03:58.510 --> 2:03:59.950 I was like, y'all just bored now. 2:04:00.090 --> 2:04:02.610 I mean, that's where these Nazis started. 2:04:02.810 --> 2:04:03.100 Okay. 2:04:03.220 --> 2:04:03.400 Right. 2:04:03.560 --> 2:04:06.460 It began in boredom. And I guess to some extent, 2:04:06.780 --> 2:04:08.520 you know, it should end there. 2:04:08.540 --> 2:04:08.620 Yeah. 2:04:10.750 --> 2:04:11.170 Touche. 2:04:11.650 --> 2:04:14.330 Yeah, it's downstream of being on the internet too much. 2:04:14.570 --> 2:04:14.870 Yeah. 2:04:16.690 --> 2:04:19.970 On Monday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced an emergency 2:04:20.010 --> 2:04:25.100 shutdown of 110 commercial driver's license schools, which, according to 2:04:25.140 --> 2:04:28.680 the White House, accounted for, quote, more than 5,000 of 2:04:28.740 --> 2:04:34.060 the drivers who have failed English proficiency tests, unquote. So 2:04:34.140 --> 2:04:37.000 this will make it harder for people to work as 2:04:37.080 --> 2:04:37.700 commercial drivers. 2:04:38.400 --> 2:04:38.620 Hmm. 2:04:39.350 --> 2:04:40.990 Yeah, we've got too many of those as it is, 2:04:41.030 --> 2:04:42.030 so that's good. 2:04:42.630 --> 2:04:43.010 Yeah, yeah. 2:04:43.610 --> 2:04:47.290 Things are going great. A federal appeals court ruled three 2:04:47.310 --> 2:04:50.630 to one, and that's Trump appointees on that court, that 2:04:50.830 --> 2:04:56.430 states can regulate prediction market platforms like Cauchy as gambling. 2:04:57.410 --> 2:05:00.710 This case originated from regulators in Nevada with support from 2:05:00.730 --> 2:05:03.570 their Republican governor. Obviously, the state of Nevada has an 2:05:03.610 --> 2:05:07.070 interest in keeping these platforms regulated as gambling or kicking 2:05:07.090 --> 2:05:10.670 the platforms out of their state entirely. because it's Nevada. 2:05:10.890 --> 2:05:15.030 It's Las Vegas. The judges in this case wrote, quote, 2:05:15.670 --> 2:05:20.130 The substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshi's 2:05:20.170 --> 2:05:25.270 exchange is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps. 2:05:25.750 --> 2:05:30.330 Kalshi's attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sportsbooks 2:05:30.390 --> 2:05:37.200 betting are unpersuasive, unquote. The judges also highlighted how in court, 2:05:37.520 --> 2:05:41.990 Kalshi argued that Its platform wasn't actually sports betting, but 2:05:42.030 --> 2:05:45.530 Kalshi had previously used that term to market its platform 2:05:45.650 --> 2:05:46.380 to users. 2:05:47.720 --> 2:05:51.400 I didn't go too deep into this, but yesterday, the 2:05:51.460 --> 2:05:54.260 first person to get a lifetime ban from Kalshi, did 2:05:54.280 --> 2:05:56.060 y'all see this? No. 2:05:56.080 --> 2:05:56.140 No. 2:05:57.280 --> 2:05:59.560 Is it Trump's teleprompter guy? 2:05:59.580 --> 2:05:59.640 No. 2:06:00.180 --> 2:06:00.360 No. 2:06:01.550 --> 2:06:05.570 It's even funnier. It's George Santos. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 2:06:05.930 --> 2:06:06.550 He's back. 2:06:07.310 --> 2:06:09.290 Yeah. 2:06:09.590 --> 2:06:12.810 No way. 4-1 out for Santos. 2:06:13.510 --> 2:06:14.930 For insider trading. 2:06:15.010 --> 2:06:18.870 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did he bet on himself getting booed 2:06:18.950 --> 2:06:19.510 out of Congress? 2:06:19.530 --> 2:06:22.290 I can only imagine him being like, oh, me, right? Oh, 2:06:22.370 --> 2:06:24.110 fuck me, right? Fuck me. 2:06:26.030 --> 2:06:26.850 That's good. 2:06:27.310 --> 2:06:27.560 Yeah. 2:06:28.220 --> 2:06:28.400 Yeah. 2:06:29.150 --> 2:06:32.490 This case here will most likely escalate to the Supreme Court. 2:06:32.930 --> 2:06:34.610 Another case which might end up going to the Supreme 2:06:34.670 --> 2:06:38.590 Court relates to this next short story. A district court 2:06:38.650 --> 2:06:41.970 judge in California ruled that Rubio's use of the NIA 2:06:42.270 --> 2:06:45.750 to deport non-citizens based on their political speech violates the 2:06:45.810 --> 2:06:50.290 First and Fifth Amendments. Stephen Miller reacted to this ruling 2:06:50.380 --> 2:06:54.040 by writing, quote, a district court judge says America must 2:06:54.160 --> 2:06:58.090 admit and keep foreigners who hate America and hate Americans out. 2:06:58.610 --> 2:07:07.270 Court-ordered civilizational suicide. It will not stand, unquote. Yeah. Very 2:07:07.290 --> 2:07:10.470 much in line with Stephen Miller's stance on restricting free 2:07:10.510 --> 2:07:12.850 speech in order to save our civilization. 2:07:12.870 --> 2:07:13.390 Yeah. 2:07:14.850 --> 2:07:17.030 Second to last here, I'm going to talk about a 2:07:17.050 --> 2:07:19.890 story in The Guardian, which everyone should just read the 2:07:19.950 --> 2:07:22.610 full story. It'll be at the top of our show notes, 2:07:22.810 --> 2:07:24.470 so you can check it out. Usually I keep the 2:07:24.530 --> 2:07:26.530 small things show notes at the top. And this one 2:07:26.550 --> 2:07:27.810 will be at the top of the top because you 2:07:27.830 --> 2:07:30.750 should just read the story. Last Saturday, The Guardian reported 2:07:30.790 --> 2:07:33.640 that the Trump admin has been using a, quote, obscure 2:07:33.770 --> 2:07:37.080 legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, 2:07:37.180 --> 2:07:43.540 nonprofits and unions, unquote, all without judicial oversight. How The 2:07:43.560 --> 2:07:46.500 Guardian learned about this is that feds tried to get 2:07:46.560 --> 2:07:49.510 a search warrant for digital information from a Minneapolis journalist 2:07:49.590 --> 2:07:54.330 named Georgia Fort and Don Lennon. The judge denied this request, 2:07:54.860 --> 2:07:57.620 citing a lack of probable cause, and the government then 2:07:57.720 --> 2:08:01.830 withdrew its request. But weeks later... DHS requested the information 2:08:02.010 --> 2:08:05.340 from Google anyway. They went straight to Google. And per 2:08:05.450 --> 2:08:09.300 The Guardian, they used a, quote, administrative summons citing an 2:08:09.540 --> 2:08:15.640 arcane provision of federal law, 19 U.S.C. 1509, dealing with 2:08:15.800 --> 2:08:20.320 customs imports, unquote. All that was needed to send the 2:08:20.360 --> 2:08:23.740 summons was a sign-off from a DHS official. There was 2:08:23.780 --> 2:08:28.710 no judge involved. Google denied the requests for information on Fort, 2:08:29.130 --> 2:08:34.050 but DHS did secretly obtain her phone records from T-Mobile, 2:08:34.670 --> 2:08:37.620 with no opportunity for her to challenge the summons. 2:08:37.920 --> 2:08:38.200 Hmm. 2:08:38.670 --> 2:08:41.190 For more information, people should read this full article on 2:08:41.210 --> 2:08:45.590 The Guardian. It has other instances of DHS using this 2:08:45.650 --> 2:08:48.839 little piece of customs law. Basically, DHS is arguing that 2:08:48.910 --> 2:08:53.900 because this involves people interfering with ICE agents, it is 2:08:54.160 --> 2:08:58.860 subject to this customs, duties, and taxes import law, which is, 2:08:59.220 --> 2:09:01.100 in cases where this has been actually argued in court, 2:09:01.140 --> 2:09:03.840 has not succeeded. But they have been able to successfully 2:09:03.880 --> 2:09:06.900 get information on a number of people and have also 2:09:07.080 --> 2:09:13.170 requested information on outlets like Democracy Now!, independent journalists, and nonprofits. 2:09:13.950 --> 2:09:15.490 And this follows, you know, a few weeks ago, we 2:09:15.590 --> 2:09:21.930 reported DHS obtaining financial information on unions in Minneapolis as well. 2:09:22.050 --> 2:09:24.030 This is all kind of part of this same time 2:09:24.070 --> 2:09:29.270 zone in terms of the response to Operation Metro Surge. Lastly, 2:09:29.390 --> 2:09:32.770 for small things, and this will be a future episode 2:09:32.810 --> 2:09:38.800 probably next week, Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was deported last week. 2:09:39.280 --> 2:09:40.580 Yeah, he sure was. 2:09:41.100 --> 2:09:41.780 Yeah, buddy. 2:09:42.000 --> 2:09:47.820 After promoting ICE and deportations pretty gloriously for years and years. 2:09:47.840 --> 2:09:51.580 Yeah, talking about wanting to masturbate while ICE tore people 2:09:51.620 --> 2:09:57.170 away from their families. Like, he specifically and directly stated, like, that, yeah, yeah, 2:09:57.250 --> 2:09:59.170 I don't know. I got no sympathy for the man. 2:10:00.130 --> 2:10:00.690 Certainly not. 2:10:00.810 --> 2:10:02.710 Like, fuck ICE, but, yeah. 2:10:03.220 --> 2:10:06.480 Yeah, I mean, this is Milo suffering the consequences of 2:10:06.500 --> 2:10:09.000 the world that he helped bring into existence and has 2:10:09.100 --> 2:10:11.660 cheered on for years and years and years. This, you know, 2:10:11.680 --> 2:10:12.860 this should not be a thing that we have in 2:10:12.900 --> 2:10:15.320 our country. This process should not be something that exists, 2:10:15.440 --> 2:10:17.830 but it's one that Milo wants to exist and he 2:10:17.930 --> 2:10:20.450 still wants it to exist. In his interview with Piers 2:10:20.470 --> 2:10:23.810 Morgan after his deportation, he said that the problem is 2:10:23.910 --> 2:10:26.550 not deportations, but that they're just deporting the wrong people. 2:10:26.690 --> 2:10:29.190 Yeah, after saying no one deserves this kind of treatment, 2:10:29.850 --> 2:10:31.600 he then went on to say like, but obviously some 2:10:31.640 --> 2:10:32.120 people do. 2:10:32.320 --> 2:10:32.500 Yes. 2:10:33.980 --> 2:10:37.680 But even that, like, this man's treatment, he still got the, like, 2:10:38.360 --> 2:10:39.540 white glove treatment. 2:10:39.560 --> 2:10:39.880 He's fine. 2:10:39.920 --> 2:10:40.580 He's fine. 2:10:40.640 --> 2:10:44.430 Yeah. Did you miss a meal, bro? Like, was they 2:10:44.470 --> 2:10:45.210 handing you stuff? 2:10:45.270 --> 2:10:45.490 Yeah. 2:10:45.610 --> 2:10:46.210 Maggots in it? 2:10:46.290 --> 2:10:48.790 No. He spent less than a day in detention. 2:10:48.830 --> 2:10:48.990 Yeah. 2:10:49.010 --> 2:10:52.390 And now he is free to go back in Britain 2:10:52.470 --> 2:10:55.210 with all of the money and resources that he has. 2:10:55.310 --> 2:10:57.850 He is not suffering the way thousands and thousands of 2:10:57.890 --> 2:10:58.850 other people have suffered. 2:10:59.030 --> 2:10:59.230 Yeah. 2:10:59.860 --> 2:11:00.140 Yeah. 2:11:00.460 --> 2:11:02.840 Now, DHS claims that he overstayed a visa. 2:11:02.860 --> 2:11:03.020 Yeah. 2:11:03.950 --> 2:11:07.290 Meanwhile, Milo himself claims that his green card was quote-unquote 2:11:07.330 --> 2:11:12.730 canceled without him knowing and that summons to immigration court 2:11:12.750 --> 2:11:14.270 were sent to an address that he no longer lives 2:11:14.390 --> 2:11:16.690 at and he never learned about the summons. That's what 2:11:16.720 --> 2:11:19.140 he's claiming. We will go over all of these in 2:11:19.520 --> 2:11:23.660 much more detail next week. Unless anyone has anything to 2:11:24.540 --> 2:11:25.240 add on that. 2:11:25.600 --> 2:11:25.760 Nope. 2:11:25.960 --> 2:11:28.320 I think we can... Yeah, whatever. 2:11:28.340 --> 2:11:29.200 Yeah, whatever. 2:11:29.660 --> 2:11:33.100 It's funny, I think last time me and Prop talked 2:11:33.230 --> 2:11:36.110 at length, it was about Kanye West, who Milo was 2:11:36.170 --> 2:11:37.330 working for at the time. 2:11:37.350 --> 2:11:38.630 He was working for him, yep. 2:11:39.630 --> 2:11:42.070 And is actually working for Kanye again. 2:11:42.130 --> 2:11:42.390 Yes. 2:11:42.430 --> 2:11:44.850 He started working with him again earlier this year. 2:11:44.870 --> 2:11:45.610 Oh, good. 2:11:45.650 --> 2:11:49.000 That's what he was in Louisiana for, it looked like. 2:11:49.120 --> 2:11:49.820 Quite possibly. 2:11:49.840 --> 2:11:54.520 Yeah. Okay, obviously there's exceptions to everything, right? 2:11:55.440 --> 2:12:02.850 But within sort of like black American culture. It's, we're 2:12:02.890 --> 2:12:04.730 done talking about you. We're done dragging. We won't even 2:12:04.770 --> 2:12:08.020 check for you. I'm like, Kanye dropped an album. And 2:12:08.030 --> 2:12:14.300 I'm like, wait, what? Like, I don't know anyone who 2:12:14.340 --> 2:12:14.960 heard this record. 2:12:15.980 --> 2:12:17.960 Just like dropped it into a void. 2:12:18.140 --> 2:12:21.780 I was just like, this is how you know how 2:12:22.060 --> 2:12:26.440 thoroughly you burnt your brand. Like, honestly, as a person 2:12:26.460 --> 2:12:32.550 who bleeds hip hop, is arguably a generational talent when 2:12:32.590 --> 2:12:37.680 it comes to production, soundscaping, like creating music, but is 2:12:38.640 --> 2:12:40.940 so completely insufferable. 2:12:42.000 --> 2:12:45.000 And just so, we're just. 2:12:44.760 --> 2:12:50.890 So done with you. And your boy Milo gone, as 2:12:50.930 --> 2:12:51.380 he should be. 2:12:52.670 --> 2:12:52.850 Yes. 2:12:53.960 --> 2:12:56.900 Yeah, that's what happens when you hire the man who 2:12:56.940 --> 2:12:58.740 perfected the art of the fall off. 2:12:59.020 --> 2:12:59.900 Yeah. 2:13:00.120 --> 2:13:01.740 To work for your company. 2:13:01.960 --> 2:13:06.890 To help you in your fall off, sir. And you 2:13:06.900 --> 2:13:07.590 can argue. 2:13:07.610 --> 2:13:11.630 He's like he sold out five days at crypto. Okay, 2:13:11.650 --> 2:13:16.070 but that's not five days in every city in America, 2:13:16.510 --> 2:13:18.530 which is what he was doing. 2:13:18.870 --> 2:13:20.130 Yeah. Anyway. 2:13:21.650 --> 2:13:23.830 Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about what Milo's 2:13:23.850 --> 2:13:27.630 been up to and other issues regarding his ongoing separation 2:13:27.650 --> 2:13:31.270 from his husband and questions about his legal status next 2:13:31.370 --> 2:13:34.680 week in a special episode. But for now, let's go 2:13:34.740 --> 2:13:36.680 to a quick ad break and then return for some 2:13:36.720 --> 2:13:37.400 more news. 2:13:48.820 --> 2:13:50.180 Okay, so. 2:13:50.180 --> 2:13:54.230 27 years ago, one of the greatest rappers of all 2:13:54.330 --> 2:13:56.770 time was murdered in front of everybody. 2:13:56.850 --> 2:14:01.450 This is Tupac. And the killer just now got sentenced. 2:14:02.070 --> 2:14:04.440 One would wonder, first of all, why this is so 2:14:04.480 --> 2:14:06.980 important to put it on executive order. And I have 2:14:07.020 --> 2:14:10.120 a theory as to why. But also, why did it 2:14:10.160 --> 2:14:13.820 take 27 years to solve this? And everybody involved except 2:14:13.850 --> 2:14:17.230 for one dude has been dead. So what is we 2:14:17.290 --> 2:14:20.830 talking about? So to understand his importance to this, I 2:14:20.870 --> 2:14:23.870 think we have to understand really just how singular Tupac 2:14:24.370 --> 2:14:28.470 was as a person. And I think anybody born post 2:14:28.510 --> 2:14:31.060 his birth, it's like you weren't a part of the 2:14:31.560 --> 2:14:34.280 monoculture that we had all existed in, in the sense 2:14:34.320 --> 2:14:36.440 that at some point in our lives, we used to 2:14:36.520 --> 2:14:39.920 all sit down at eight o'clock Thursday night to watch 2:14:39.980 --> 2:14:44.290 the same television show like across the world. You know, like, yeah, 2:14:44.390 --> 2:14:46.850 that just doesn't exist. So to be a star in 2:14:46.900 --> 2:14:50.580 that era means the planet is watching you. And I 2:14:51.540 --> 2:14:54.960 think that Pac was such an enigma. We're talking about 2:14:54.980 --> 2:14:57.730 a guy's life who's like his life would be a 2:14:57.830 --> 2:15:00.630 bad script. Like if this was somebody was writing like 2:15:00.670 --> 2:15:02.430 what he actually lived in a script, you'd be like, 2:15:02.450 --> 2:15:02.950 come on, guys. 2:15:03.320 --> 2:15:06.380 Yeah. His last words as he was bleeding out and 2:15:06.420 --> 2:15:08.280 the police asked him who did it were something along 2:15:08.310 --> 2:15:09.430 the lines of fuck you, pig. 2:15:09.510 --> 2:15:09.740 Right. 2:15:09.780 --> 2:15:10.890 Like it was something like that. 2:15:10.900 --> 2:15:11.850 Fuck you, pig. 2:15:12.070 --> 2:15:16.350 Like you're talking about a guy whose godfather was Geronimo Pratt, 2:15:16.790 --> 2:15:22.010 the legendary Black Panther. His mama and auntie, Fanny and 2:15:22.150 --> 2:15:26.930 Assata Shakur, defended themselves in federal court while she was 2:15:27.050 --> 2:15:31.350 pregnant with him. The man was clearly Jada Pinkett's first love, 2:15:31.430 --> 2:15:36.590 which means that Will Smith is the consolation prize to Tupac. Like, 2:15:36.650 --> 2:15:39.760 that's what I'm trying to say. Like, the man dated Madonna. 2:15:40.030 --> 2:15:45.540 He dated Quincy Jones's daughter. Like, there was just genre-defining films. 2:15:45.600 --> 2:15:48.920 The guy lived four lives. Like, he literally lived four 2:15:48.980 --> 2:15:52.860 lives inside of the five years that he was a 2:15:52.920 --> 2:15:58.730 public figure. Rapper, gangster, sex symbol, revolutionary. All before he 2:15:58.780 --> 2:16:02.610 was 26. So backstory before we get this court case. 2:16:03.250 --> 2:16:07.870 So 1996, honestly, the biggest star in the world, him 2:16:08.190 --> 2:16:12.730 and Notorious B.I.G., two biggest rappers that rap has ever seen, right? 2:16:13.250 --> 2:16:16.670 Pac and his friends, part of Defro Records, Suge Knight, 2:16:16.750 --> 2:16:19.390 who was the leader of Defro, went to Vegas to 2:16:19.410 --> 2:16:20.290 a Mike Tyson fight. 2:16:20.850 --> 2:16:23.990 At the Mike Tyson fight, they see a man named Orlando. 2:16:24.130 --> 2:16:29.520 Now, Orlando was a crip important to the story, Shug 2:16:29.720 --> 2:16:33.760 being a notorious Compton Piru blood in charge of death 2:16:33.780 --> 2:16:37.580 row records at this fight for Mike Tyson, which only 2:16:37.620 --> 2:16:39.660 lasted 15 seconds, which was why they were. 2:16:39.620 --> 2:16:41.620 So bored because the fight was done immediately. 2:16:42.040 --> 2:16:45.420 So while they were out trying to party, still kind 2:16:45.470 --> 2:16:47.830 of bored because the fight they came to see didn't happen, 2:16:47.840 --> 2:16:51.990 they run into this guy named Orlando. Now, Orlando's important because, again, 2:16:52.330 --> 2:16:55.900 he's a crip. And a few months earlier, he snatched 2:16:55.980 --> 2:17:00.140 a chain, a Death Row Records gold chain from another 2:17:00.180 --> 2:17:03.600 person at the Lakewood Mall, no less, which is very 2:17:03.680 --> 2:17:07.360 funny because Lakewood is a suburb of Long Beach. It's 2:17:07.420 --> 2:17:10.950 not even like a city. It's literally just a mall. 2:17:11.490 --> 2:17:17.110 So these murderous Crips steal this chain from this guy. 2:17:17.930 --> 2:17:20.390 They see him and they're like, hey, that's the dude 2:17:20.410 --> 2:17:23.539 that snatched the homie's chain. So him and Suge go 2:17:23.980 --> 2:17:26.220 stomp the guy out. It's all, you could see it all. 2:17:26.280 --> 2:17:29.660 It's all on, you know, surveillance footage, camera footage. They 2:17:29.700 --> 2:17:31.260 see him stomp him out. They're still on a high. 2:17:31.620 --> 2:17:33.400 They're about to go party. They want to go do 2:17:33.440 --> 2:17:36.320 their thing. The problem is the guy that they stomped out, 2:17:36.700 --> 2:17:39.570 his uncle is this man named Keefie D. Keep Keefie 2:17:39.590 --> 2:17:41.690 D's name in mind because Keefie D had a friend 2:17:41.730 --> 2:17:42.869 named Zip, I know. 2:17:43.330 --> 2:17:45.410 But Zip worked for P. 2:17:45.450 --> 2:17:49.850 Diddy, as in Sean Puffy Combs, as in the worst 2:17:49.870 --> 2:17:52.200 human we've ever met you know what I'm saying so 2:17:52.260 --> 2:17:55.720 he works for him Puffy is the leader of Bad 2:17:55.760 --> 2:17:58.660 Boy Records who's got Biggie they're in this amazing like 2:17:59.200 --> 2:18:01.150 struggle for power to be the king of hip hop 2:18:01.940 --> 2:18:05.870 it was pretty well known worst kept secret Puffy wanted 2:18:06.510 --> 2:18:11.060 Suge and Pac dead right So Zip works for Diddy. 2:18:11.640 --> 2:18:14.900 Keefy D gets a gun from Zip and says, you 2:18:14.920 --> 2:18:17.480 finna let that man, you know, stomp you out like 2:18:17.520 --> 2:18:18.860 that in front of the homies. We got to go 2:18:18.879 --> 2:18:21.430 get your gift back. They get in the car, find 2:18:21.470 --> 2:18:23.250 out where he's going to be at the club. He's 2:18:23.290 --> 2:18:26.310 not there. They were going to give up. And then 2:18:26.350 --> 2:18:27.730 some girls on the side of the road at the 2:18:27.770 --> 2:18:30.789 gas station realized that that's Tupac in the car because, again, 2:18:30.870 --> 2:18:32.590 he's the biggest star on the planet at the time. 2:18:32.870 --> 2:18:34.590 They're screaming, oh, my God, oh, my God, it's Pac. 2:18:34.830 --> 2:18:36.400 They go, oh, dude, it's him. He's there. 2:18:36.840 --> 2:18:40.840 Flip a U-turn. roll the window down, shoot through the car, 2:18:41.140 --> 2:18:45.380 kill Tupac, right? Now, all kinds of conspiracy theories as 2:18:45.420 --> 2:18:48.040 to how this happened because the case went unsolved, but 2:18:48.200 --> 2:18:51.040 of course it was solved. He's the biggest artist on 2:18:51.080 --> 2:18:54.250 the planet. They absolutely knew who killed this guy. It's just, 2:18:54.270 --> 2:18:57.930 you didn't have enough to convict him, right? Because it's 2:18:57.950 --> 2:19:01.030 still all hearsay. It's still all this, the word of 2:19:01.390 --> 2:19:03.930 a bunch of crips who all tell war stories all 2:19:03.970 --> 2:19:07.410 the time. You can't prove it, right? Anyway, They're waiting 2:19:07.450 --> 2:19:10.230 for a chance to actually solve this. Six months later, 2:19:10.290 --> 2:19:13.300 Biggie gets killed, right? So now you got two of 2:19:13.340 --> 2:19:16.220 the biggest stars in the world in hip hop murdered. 2:19:16.620 --> 2:19:20.480 Biggie's mom sues NYPD for not solving the case, right? 2:19:20.740 --> 2:19:23.599 Which means that, damn, we better solve this shit. Well, 2:19:23.620 --> 2:19:25.210 we kind of know who did it, but we can't 2:19:25.270 --> 2:19:28.910 prove it yet. 2008, Keefie D gets picked up on 2:19:29.070 --> 2:19:32.119 a drug charge, right? It's a federal case because he's 2:19:32.140 --> 2:19:34.420 doing a whole lot of drugs. Right. So now the 2:19:34.459 --> 2:19:36.619 man's going to get put up under the jail. The 2:19:36.670 --> 2:19:38.910 cops say to him, hey, listen, we know you got 2:19:38.970 --> 2:19:40.450 all them drugs, but can you tell us about what 2:19:40.490 --> 2:19:42.390 happened in 96? He was like, what you talking about? 2:19:42.430 --> 2:19:45.310 They was like, we don't play dumb. You know that 2:19:45.370 --> 2:19:46.190 we know it was you. 2:19:46.650 --> 2:19:46.869 Right. 2:19:47.450 --> 2:19:49.779 And let me tell you something about this code that 2:19:49.800 --> 2:19:52.160 the gangsters have. You throw enough time at somebody, they're 2:19:52.180 --> 2:19:56.390 going to start singing, boy. And Keefie sang, right? He 2:19:56.430 --> 2:20:00.129 told him the whole story, exactly what happened, all the names. 2:20:00.190 --> 2:20:01.650 Let me tell you, look, this is where we were 2:20:01.690 --> 2:20:04.370 sitting in the car. This the homie, this the one 2:20:04.390 --> 2:20:06.850 who actually shot. I got the gun from this person 2:20:07.530 --> 2:20:09.820 and the gun I got from Diddy's homie told the 2:20:09.840 --> 2:20:12.180 whole thing in exchange for immunity. 2:20:13.020 --> 2:20:15.060 It was like, all right, we got you. 2:20:15.440 --> 2:20:15.780 Good. 2:20:16.280 --> 2:20:17.980 Shut your mouth. Everything's fine. 2:20:19.050 --> 2:20:20.770 They would go to trial, except they can't go to 2:20:20.810 --> 2:20:25.150 trial because, again, it's the word of just Keefie by 2:20:25.190 --> 2:20:28.470 himself because everybody else that was in the car is dead. 2:20:28.990 --> 2:20:31.930 And are you going to press charges against Puffy, against Diddy? 2:20:31.990 --> 2:20:34.610 It's absolutely, you can't do it. Anyway, it had been 2:20:34.670 --> 2:20:36.870 fine right off to the sunset. We wouldn't have known 2:20:37.070 --> 2:20:42.900 until this fool got on YouTube. And then, guys, listen, 2:20:44.020 --> 2:20:45.939 it can happen here, podcast team. 2:20:47.340 --> 2:20:54.640 My friends. My friends, he wrote a book. He wrote 2:20:54.720 --> 2:21:00.320 a book confessing all of this, right? He wrote a book. 2:21:01.140 --> 2:21:01.580 Perfect. 2:21:01.840 --> 2:21:05.050 He got on every podcast he could get on telling 2:21:05.070 --> 2:21:10.400 this story. Two years ago, Las Vegas PD say, hey, homie, uh, 2:21:11.400 --> 2:21:12.610 we got to charge you for murder. 2:21:13.060 --> 2:21:14.500 He was like, what are you talking about? I got 2:21:14.540 --> 2:21:14.900 a deal. 2:21:14.959 --> 2:21:16.859 They was like, first of all, your deal was with 2:21:16.900 --> 2:21:20.180 the feds, not with the Las Vegas PD, number one. 2:21:20.280 --> 2:21:25.080 And number two, the deal was for your testimony to us. 2:21:25.959 --> 2:21:30.420 You just told the planet what you did. You got 2:21:30.480 --> 2:21:32.520 on the internet and you told. 2:21:32.360 --> 2:21:37.920 The planet, sir, you confessed to a murder. So he like, okay, well, 2:21:38.080 --> 2:21:41.050 I guess we got to do. The trial started last month. 2:21:41.780 --> 2:21:44.220 The man's defense was, I need you to look me 2:21:44.260 --> 2:21:47.879 in my eyes. The man's defense was, I was making 2:21:47.920 --> 2:21:48.760 that up for clout. 2:21:49.629 --> 2:21:50.990 I was lying the whole time. 2:21:51.050 --> 2:21:53.029 We're seeing a lot of that in court these days. 2:21:54.890 --> 2:21:58.609 Yeah, I made it up. This is not real. I 2:21:58.670 --> 2:21:59.190 made it up. 2:21:59.270 --> 2:22:02.300 They was like, sir, we finna put you up under 2:22:02.320 --> 2:22:05.270 the jail. So he just got convicted for murder. He 2:22:05.300 --> 2:22:07.080 was not the one that pulled the trigger. The one 2:22:07.110 --> 2:22:09.440 that pulled the trigger is dead. But he was the 2:22:09.560 --> 2:22:11.939 one that attained the gun to make sure this happened. 2:22:11.959 --> 2:22:14.200 He's the last one left. 2:22:14.200 --> 2:22:15.980 63 years old, about to go to jail for the 2:22:16.020 --> 2:22:16.680 rest of his life. 2:22:17.040 --> 2:22:20.599 Now, the reason why I bring this up for executive 2:22:20.640 --> 2:22:25.920 disorder is I really think this is the destiny of 2:22:26.100 --> 2:22:26.879 the Epstein case. 2:22:28.260 --> 2:22:29.600 They're going to wait until everybody's dead. 2:22:31.000 --> 2:22:33.770 Except for one dude, and then put him in jail. 2:22:35.490 --> 2:22:36.070 That's my theory. 2:22:36.610 --> 2:22:39.570 Thomas Massey was on One in Congress again today reading 2:22:39.650 --> 2:22:42.310 off a bunch of the Epstein co-conspirators. I'm not sure 2:22:42.330 --> 2:22:44.140 if you saw that bit. 2:22:44.660 --> 2:22:45.780 Yes, I did. Oh, yeah. 2:22:46.379 --> 2:22:49.840 And so what I'm trying to say is the case 2:22:49.920 --> 2:22:52.640 was solved within a week. 2:22:53.700 --> 2:22:59.629 Yeah. Everyone knows who's guilty. Now, I'm not a gangster. 2:22:59.980 --> 2:23:02.340 Okay, I'm from here, but I do not at all 2:23:03.100 --> 2:23:07.090 report to be a member of an active gang. I 2:23:07.120 --> 2:23:10.129 don't think there's a single gang member in Los Angeles 2:23:10.150 --> 2:23:11.890 who did not know who killed Tupac. 2:23:12.010 --> 2:23:12.410 Yeah. 2:23:13.990 --> 2:23:17.850 Everyone knew who did it. But you don't talk to 2:23:17.890 --> 2:23:21.430 the cops. It's their job to figure it out. All right, 2:23:21.470 --> 2:23:23.589 that's your job. That's not my job. That's your job. 2:23:23.959 --> 2:23:24.800 That's their job to. 2:23:24.720 --> 2:23:27.860 Figure it out. But either way, now. 2:23:28.370 --> 2:23:34.709 Officially, case closed. Tupac was murdered by Keefy D's friend. 2:23:34.430 --> 2:23:35.370 Who shot through the thing. 2:23:35.490 --> 2:23:37.430 And now he's going to jail for a murder that 2:23:37.470 --> 2:23:38.730 happened 27 years ago. 2:23:39.690 --> 2:23:42.030 But yeah, you know, keep fun in the police, right? 2:23:42.050 --> 2:23:42.949 Yeah. 2:23:42.990 --> 2:23:43.810 They're good at their job. 2:23:44.170 --> 2:23:44.970 They'll solve murders. 2:23:45.250 --> 2:23:47.430 I mean, not like they can't solve like a kidnapping 2:23:47.450 --> 2:23:49.080 of an incredibly famous person's mom. 2:23:49.800 --> 2:23:50.060 Right. 2:23:50.560 --> 2:23:54.540 But, you know, eventually they solve the really obvious crimes 2:23:54.820 --> 2:23:55.820 if they're forced to. 2:23:55.840 --> 2:23:56.920 Yeah. 2:23:56.940 --> 2:23:57.020 Yeah. 2:23:58.500 --> 2:24:00.199 I think that's why we should be funding millions of 2:24:00.240 --> 2:24:03.200 dollars to big podcasts so we can continue to have 2:24:03.240 --> 2:24:05.379 people confess to murders on podcasts. 2:24:05.459 --> 2:24:08.340 Honestly, that's what we replace the police with. It's just 2:24:08.379 --> 2:24:09.959 podcasts where people confess to crimes. 2:24:10.420 --> 2:24:10.940 Yeah. 2:24:10.959 --> 2:24:14.600 Just promise them $ 500 and a Vlad TV interview. 2:24:15.280 --> 2:24:17.380 They will tell you every crime they did. 2:24:17.800 --> 2:24:20.520 That's our new take on true crime. Someone just comes 2:24:20.600 --> 2:24:21.910 on and talks about their crimes. 2:24:22.570 --> 2:24:22.810 Right. 2:24:23.990 --> 2:24:24.170 Yeah. 2:24:24.730 --> 2:24:27.789 I think being forced to talk on the Joe Rogan 2:24:27.830 --> 2:24:31.060 experience would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. So I 2:24:31.100 --> 2:24:36.420 don't know about that. Constitutionally prohibited. Yeah, I don't know. 2:24:36.600 --> 2:24:37.520 It's one of the amendments. 2:24:38.240 --> 2:24:41.939 Like, okay, guys, just give me the time. Yeah. 2:24:43.100 --> 2:24:43.390 Yeah. 2:24:43.920 --> 2:24:45.310 So moral of the story, guys, yeah. 2:24:45.410 --> 2:24:47.890 Like, hey, listen, if you were about to get away 2:24:47.930 --> 2:24:50.650 with murder, just, like, shut the fuck up. 2:24:50.970 --> 2:24:53.030 Like, I can't stress this enough. 2:24:55.860 --> 2:24:57.510 If you're going to write a book, at least title 2:24:57.530 --> 2:25:00.010 it something like If I Did It. Don't say I 2:25:00.090 --> 2:25:00.490 did it. 2:25:00.730 --> 2:25:01.789 Right. If I did it. 2:25:01.790 --> 2:25:02.930 That worked great for OJ. 2:25:02.950 --> 2:25:03.590 Yeah. 2:25:03.810 --> 2:25:05.709 You got to put the if in front first. 2:25:06.350 --> 2:25:09.740 OJ got away with murder. Like, can we just? Yes. 2:25:09.940 --> 2:25:11.540 Because he was like, well, if I was going to 2:25:11.560 --> 2:25:11.779 do it. 2:25:13.280 --> 2:25:13.580 All right. 2:25:14.200 --> 2:25:15.119 Back to actual death. 2:25:15.980 --> 2:25:16.300 Okay. 2:25:16.459 --> 2:25:19.810 So talking of two groups of people who keep shooting 2:25:19.830 --> 2:25:23.360 each other, let's go to Venice Wayler first. Hmm. The 2:25:23.700 --> 2:25:27.720 United States yesterday, when we're recording this on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2:25:27.760 --> 2:25:31.100 so that would be Tuesday, September 1st, announced an oil 2:25:31.140 --> 2:25:33.629 deal with Venezuela. And when I say Venezuela, I mean 2:25:33.650 --> 2:25:37.050 specifically with Delce Rodriguez. The way we found out was 2:25:37.090 --> 2:25:40.590 that the president truthed, quote, breaking news that parts in 2:25:40.610 --> 2:25:44.100 block capitals. The United States of America has just entered 2:25:44.140 --> 2:25:48.260 into an agreement with the country of Venezuela, countries capitalized. 2:25:48.459 --> 2:25:52.150 I'll just do the block caps. on the biggest oil 2:25:52.190 --> 2:25:54.470 deal in world history. That one's in block caps. At 2:25:54.510 --> 2:25:57.269 my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of 2:25:57.310 --> 2:26:00.720 War Pete Hegsess working closely with highly respected interim president 2:26:00.760 --> 2:26:04.600 of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and through a partnership with private business, 2:26:05.180 --> 2:26:08.570 have secured majority US control of more than 65 billion 2:26:08.610 --> 2:26:11.920 barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela. At no cost 2:26:11.940 --> 2:26:15.080 to the American taxpayer, this historic transaction more than doubles, 2:26:15.220 --> 2:26:18.379 that's in block caps, American oil reserves greatly increases our 2:26:18.440 --> 2:26:21.080 oil supply and will substantially lower gas prices for all 2:26:21.120 --> 2:26:23.830 Americans long into the future while helping, that's not a 2:26:23.850 --> 2:26:26.730 full stop, I'm struggling, while helping to continue to set 2:26:26.750 --> 2:26:29.970 Venezuela on a course toward tremendous success and great prosperity. 2:26:30.470 --> 2:26:33.530 This transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between 2:26:33.570 --> 2:26:36.460 Venezuela and the United States. Thank you for your attention 2:26:36.500 --> 2:26:40.310 to this groundbreaking matter. Make America great again, President Donald J. 2:26:40.320 --> 2:26:40.580 Trump. 2:26:41.230 --> 2:26:44.030 I wouldn't pay too much attention to the claims he's 2:26:44.090 --> 2:26:47.650 making here. We know that the United States is planning 2:26:47.690 --> 2:26:51.209 to partner with some kind of private business entity to 2:26:51.250 --> 2:26:54.440 develop oil fields. It seems like from reporting, they will 2:26:54.480 --> 2:26:58.060 take 55% of the effective output and have a right 2:26:58.100 --> 2:27:01.470 to buy oil at cost. If you remember when they 2:27:01.530 --> 2:27:06.210 first kidnapped Maduro, Trump summoned oil executives to the White 2:27:06.250 --> 2:27:09.070 House and none of them were exactly chomping at the 2:27:09.090 --> 2:27:13.490 bit to go drill baby drill in Venezuela, right? That's 2:27:13.530 --> 2:27:17.090 because the infrastructure is damaged and the crude oil is 2:27:17.129 --> 2:27:20.560 among the heaviest and dirtiest on the planet. They would 2:27:20.670 --> 2:27:24.630 just rather go berserk. almost anywhere else, right? They have 2:27:24.650 --> 2:27:26.710 to do more work to get this oil in worse conditions. 2:27:27.270 --> 2:27:29.040 I want to recap a little bit where we're at. 2:27:29.120 --> 2:27:31.820 The United States is effectively running Venezuela as a vassal 2:27:31.860 --> 2:27:36.570 state now. It literally receives revenue from Venezuelan exports and 2:27:36.610 --> 2:27:39.110 then sends it back via private banks. There was a 2:27:39.230 --> 2:27:42.600 really good NYT article on Delcy and Rubio's relationship that 2:27:42.700 --> 2:27:44.670 made the analogy that this is like a parent giving 2:27:44.680 --> 2:27:47.890 a child, what do you call it, an allowance, right? 2:27:48.390 --> 2:27:49.270 We call it pocket money. 2:27:50.180 --> 2:27:54.160 The United States deployed hundreds of troops to Venezuela after 2:27:54.180 --> 2:27:58.580 a devastating earthquake. Allegedly, according to this NYT report, Rubio 2:27:58.800 --> 2:28:02.620 has an effective veto on government appointments. He decides who 2:28:02.660 --> 2:28:06.340 gets sanctions waivers to work there. He and Delci send 2:28:06.379 --> 2:28:10.459 each other birthday messages and selfies. Venezuela, in the meantime, 2:28:10.480 --> 2:28:14.360 has quietly wound down its cooperation with Russia. And it coordinated, 2:28:14.400 --> 2:28:17.780 Venezuelan intelligence coordinated with the US military when they struck 2:28:18.140 --> 2:28:22.670 Tren de Aragua personnel. They have forced Venezuelan ministers to 2:28:22.709 --> 2:28:27.070 delete tweets condemning the US attack on Iran. Just for reference, people, 2:28:27.090 --> 2:28:29.970 Iran has been a longtime ally of the regime in 2:28:29.990 --> 2:28:33.529 Venezuela in so much as we can see. There is continuity, obviously, 2:28:33.570 --> 2:28:36.190 from Delcy, from Maduro to Delcy, but things are very 2:28:36.250 --> 2:28:40.680 much changing. Delcy has run drafts of tweets past Marco 2:28:40.740 --> 2:28:42.100 Rubio before posting them. 2:28:42.360 --> 2:28:42.760 Okay. 2:28:42.860 --> 2:28:43.280 Oh, boy. 2:28:43.600 --> 2:28:44.060 Sheesh. 2:28:45.260 --> 2:28:45.640 All right. 2:28:46.180 --> 2:28:49.000 When there were reports that DOJ was building a case 2:28:49.040 --> 2:28:52.400 against her, she approached him for assurance. And it seems 2:28:52.459 --> 2:28:56.000 like that directly resulted in Trump truthing. Do you remember 2:28:56.020 --> 2:28:58.980 a few months ago now, Trump truthed how great she 2:28:59.040 --> 2:29:00.220 was and how high? 2:29:00.300 --> 2:29:00.500 Yeah. 2:29:00.920 --> 2:29:03.330 It seems like that was the assurance that she was 2:29:03.450 --> 2:29:05.789 asking for. So it came in the form of the 2:29:05.850 --> 2:29:09.590 president posting, as he did again yesterday, about how great 2:29:09.629 --> 2:29:09.930 she is. 2:29:10.230 --> 2:29:11.450 The poster's republic. 2:29:12.370 --> 2:29:12.610 Yes. 2:29:13.129 --> 2:29:16.450 What incentive does the United States have to move towards 2:29:16.490 --> 2:29:20.450 democracy in Venezuela, when it is getting everything it wants, 2:29:20.670 --> 2:29:22.750 and it doesn't have to deal with the possibility of 2:29:22.810 --> 2:29:27.980 the president changing, of the legislature changing. The US is 2:29:28.260 --> 2:29:32.119 effectively running Venezuela as an informal colony, as it has 2:29:32.180 --> 2:29:33.800 done in all of its colonies. 2:29:34.040 --> 2:29:36.519 It is not inclined to give those people more rights. 2:29:37.270 --> 2:29:39.470 I would focus less on this deal and more on 2:29:39.490 --> 2:29:42.730 the fact that Trump is very clearly trying to lean 2:29:42.790 --> 2:29:46.550 on gas prices. And the reason he's doing that is 2:29:46.650 --> 2:29:49.349 what we're going to talk about next, his ongoing disastrous 2:29:49.430 --> 2:29:53.480 war with Iran. So the US this week is once 2:29:53.530 --> 2:29:57.760 again on a path to escalation in Iran. On the 2:29:58.040 --> 2:30:02.879 30th of August, a new round of strikes inside Iran began. 2:30:02.900 --> 2:30:07.640 This followed the kind of reduced bombing activity that we 2:30:07.660 --> 2:30:10.510 spoke about last week, right? The United States says it 2:30:10.590 --> 2:30:13.970 struck launches for rockets which were preparing to deploy mines 2:30:14.070 --> 2:30:16.990 into the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump has claimed is 2:30:17.090 --> 2:30:20.750 not mined. In response, Iran launched ballistic missiles at US 2:30:20.830 --> 2:30:24.110 bases and allies in the region. And a US source 2:30:24.150 --> 2:30:28.560 told Fox News that, quote, nearly all of them were intercepted. 2:30:28.780 --> 2:30:29.120 Yeah. 2:30:29.240 --> 2:30:29.620 All right. 2:30:29.660 --> 2:30:29.940 Great. 2:30:30.000 --> 2:30:31.780 Well, that's good. You want to know that most of 2:30:31.800 --> 2:30:32.949 the missiles didn't make it? 2:30:33.400 --> 2:30:35.320 Nearly all is all the missiles you need to stop. 2:30:35.360 --> 2:30:37.140 That's what I want out of a missile defense system. 2:30:37.580 --> 2:30:38.340 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2:30:38.990 --> 2:30:41.190 What it means, of course, is that United States has 2:30:41.430 --> 2:30:44.310 used more of its interceptors, right, which are It is 2:30:44.370 --> 2:30:51.030 already dwindling its supply. The Iranians, meanwhile, struck four vessels 2:30:51.110 --> 2:30:53.190 in the Strait of Hormuz this week, perhaps soon to 2:30:53.209 --> 2:30:56.110 be renamed the Strait of America. It does not seem 2:30:56.170 --> 2:30:58.580 that America has much to say on what goes on there. 2:30:59.170 --> 2:31:02.260 In one incident on Monday, which I saw a UK MTO, 2:31:02.540 --> 2:31:04.720 so it's American Trade Office, right? That's kind of the 2:31:04.800 --> 2:31:09.379 entity which puts out these safety briefings to mariners. A 2:31:09.440 --> 2:31:13.360 tanker was hit with three projectiles. Which is the first 2:31:13.400 --> 2:31:16.679 time I can recall in this conflict that happening, right? 2:31:16.700 --> 2:31:20.280 Like there's a difference between like, we will strike your 2:31:20.379 --> 2:31:23.300 vessel to show you that we can strike your vessel 2:31:23.340 --> 2:31:25.890 and hopefully cause people to stop coming through here out 2:31:25.930 --> 2:31:28.629 of fear and hitting it three times, which seems to 2:31:28.670 --> 2:31:30.490 me like maybe an attempt to sink a vessel, right? 2:31:30.510 --> 2:31:31.970 Like that's an escalation. 2:31:33.090 --> 2:31:37.230 In response, on Tuesday, 1st September, the US began another 2:31:37.270 --> 2:31:41.030 series of bombings with the president truthing. The United States is, 2:31:41.170 --> 2:31:43.580 as we speak, striking Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz. 2:31:44.020 --> 2:31:46.120 The strikes are large and powerful, and then retaliation for 2:31:46.140 --> 2:31:48.900 the Iranians' failed attempt to adding sea mines to the Strait, 2:31:48.940 --> 2:31:51.880 which currently has no mines. They have been completely removed 2:31:51.940 --> 2:31:55.580 or detonated. And the Iranians shooting eight missiles all successfully 2:31:55.600 --> 2:31:58.390 knocked down an armed military base in Jordan. If the 2:31:58.430 --> 2:32:01.330 failed nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack, 2:32:01.370 --> 2:32:04.010 they'll be hit again at a much harder and higher level. 2:32:04.490 --> 2:32:05.970 but it will not be the biggest attack of them 2:32:06.090 --> 2:32:06.990 all that. 2:32:06.910 --> 2:32:07.970 Is waiting in the wings. 2:32:08.090 --> 2:32:09.790 And when it is over, there will be very little 2:32:09.830 --> 2:32:12.529 left of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And then he 2:32:12.590 --> 2:32:15.950 signs it. He also did another one where he said, 2:32:16.730 --> 2:32:18.930 it's a failed nation. They have no eight Navy. They 2:32:18.950 --> 2:32:21.740 have an air force for inflation to 300%. Their leadership 2:32:21.770 --> 2:32:25.000 is disarray. And then he's blaming fake news for giving 2:32:25.020 --> 2:32:29.019 you other impressions. He also tweeted a shit tier AI 2:32:29.160 --> 2:32:34.380 slop video of missiles hitting Karg Island. where the observer 2:32:34.740 --> 2:32:38.539 was in a helicopter with the missiles flying over their head. 2:32:39.280 --> 2:32:39.890 It was very bad. 2:32:39.920 --> 2:32:40.129 What? 2:32:41.110 --> 2:32:41.530 Yeah. 2:32:42.150 --> 2:32:45.010 Prop, have you not seen this? I will drop this 2:32:45.090 --> 2:32:47.170 in the chat for you to watch. Yeah, let's get 2:32:47.209 --> 2:32:47.910 a live react. 2:32:48.500 --> 2:32:48.900 Okay. 2:32:49.520 --> 2:32:52.460 The video is its own thing. The caption he used 2:32:52.560 --> 2:32:54.980 for this, or whoever's running his account used for this, 2:32:55.550 --> 2:32:57.350 is also, I think it's kind of incredible. 2:32:57.450 --> 2:32:58.800 Smithereens? 2:32:59.030 --> 2:32:59.280 Yeah. 2:32:59.320 --> 2:33:01.700 Garg Island being blown to smithereens. 2:33:01.740 --> 2:33:02.440 Yeah. 2:33:03.660 --> 2:33:04.640 President DJT. 2:33:04.780 --> 2:33:04.980 Yeah. 2:33:05.430 --> 2:33:07.350 It is interesting that that one was not signed. Thank 2:33:07.390 --> 2:33:11.050 you for your attention on this, Matt. That's a good point. 2:33:11.240 --> 2:33:13.760 It looks like a cut scene from like a Command 2:33:13.800 --> 2:33:14.740 and Conquer game. 2:33:15.020 --> 2:33:17.240 Yes, that is exactly what I thought of. 2:33:17.480 --> 2:33:21.640 Why is this person lowering themselves into the explosion? 2:33:21.660 --> 2:33:23.060 Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense. 2:33:23.300 --> 2:33:25.300 I don't understand why you would do this. 2:33:25.620 --> 2:33:26.320 Yeah. 2:33:26.340 --> 2:33:27.420 Yeah, I wouldn't want to be there. 2:33:28.080 --> 2:33:31.330 Who is shooting these missiles? What is happening? 2:33:32.230 --> 2:33:34.849 Yeah, there's like infinite secondaries. Every like. 2:33:35.520 --> 2:33:38.340 Everything that explodes lands and then explodes again. The way 2:33:38.360 --> 2:33:42.600 the AI understands explosions, it's fascinating shit. 2:33:43.200 --> 2:33:45.600 Just on a very basic level, this is an interesting 2:33:45.720 --> 2:33:48.900 thing for a president to do. I know this is Trump. 2:33:48.920 --> 2:33:51.140 He posts shit from his account all the time. But 2:33:51.580 --> 2:33:55.879 the idea of a president posting a semi-photorealistic, obviously we 2:33:55.900 --> 2:34:01.300 can tell, but a semi-photorealistic video Another location being hit 2:34:01.440 --> 2:34:07.520 by ostensibly our own military is interesting. I just like 2:34:08.000 --> 2:34:10.700 a more advanced version of this could be an actual 2:34:10.760 --> 2:34:14.180 video that's indistinguishable from real footage, at least on a 2:34:14.220 --> 2:34:19.189 service level glance. That's like, you know, the president saying that, 2:34:19.290 --> 2:34:21.390 you know, X location has been hit. 2:34:21.530 --> 2:34:21.830 Yeah. 2:34:21.900 --> 2:34:23.160 And like, no, it hasn't. Yeah. 2:34:23.400 --> 2:34:23.619 Yeah. 2:34:23.980 --> 2:34:26.280 This is the kind of sloppy and bad. It's not clear. 2:34:26.300 --> 2:34:28.959 He's actually trying to convince people that this actually happened. 2:34:29.040 --> 2:34:29.310 Yeah. 2:34:29.890 --> 2:34:33.109 But just the very basic components of this are interesting 2:34:33.170 --> 2:34:33.929 and troubling. 2:34:34.650 --> 2:34:34.850 Yeah. 2:34:35.030 --> 2:34:37.580 With the, from the commander in chief, it's not great stuff. 2:34:37.780 --> 2:34:38.060 Yeah. Yeah. 2:34:38.760 --> 2:34:41.810 Clearly, like, he's enjoying watching little AI videos. He posted 2:34:41.830 --> 2:34:42.310 another one. 2:34:42.230 --> 2:34:45.890 Today of Lake America. Well, yeah, he's kicking the sign 2:34:45.930 --> 2:34:49.290 for Lake Ontario. He walks up. He's carrying, you know, 2:34:49.350 --> 2:34:52.690 it's a wooden sign on a couple of 4x4s. He 2:34:52.750 --> 2:34:55.230 kicks the sign over. At that point, one of the 2:34:55.270 --> 2:34:57.330 legs on the sign suddenly becomes shorter when it's on 2:34:57.350 --> 2:34:57.770 the ground. 2:34:58.090 --> 2:34:58.390 Yeah. 2:34:58.870 --> 2:35:03.820 And then YMCA starts playing, and he dances in his 2:35:04.500 --> 2:35:05.879 characteristic fashion. 2:35:06.000 --> 2:35:06.180 Yeah. 2:35:06.700 --> 2:35:08.480 It's just so embarrassing, man. 2:35:08.500 --> 2:35:11.500 He's having a great time with the AI machine that 2:35:11.540 --> 2:35:12.140 someone gave him. 2:35:12.640 --> 2:35:13.160 Yeah. 2:35:13.360 --> 2:35:15.480 So let's talk about what these mean, right? 2:35:16.040 --> 2:35:18.820 He's clearly losing patience with this war and he's worrying 2:35:18.860 --> 2:35:22.000 about how it's going to impact the midterms. So much 2:35:22.050 --> 2:35:24.470 of what we're seeing now is like, we're going to 2:35:24.490 --> 2:35:28.189 talk about other stuff with voting rights later, right? DHS 2:35:28.250 --> 2:35:32.230 is clearly winding up. for the midterms in blue states. 2:35:31.970 --> 2:35:34.310 Yeah i'll be commenting on that a bit yeah. 2:35:34.390 --> 2:35:36.830 We can see the work requirements for federal benefits not 2:35:36.870 --> 2:35:39.400 hitting until january 27 like they are still worried about 2:35:39.430 --> 2:35:43.600 these midterms right yeah meanwhile they are still fucking up 2:35:43.660 --> 2:35:46.320 in iran i saw a video last night of an 2:35:46.620 --> 2:35:48.980 iranian missile hitting something in jordan like this is one 2:35:49.000 --> 2:35:50.699 of the ones that wasn't most of them i guess 2:35:51.180 --> 2:35:54.090 uh because it clearly impacted the ground Iran claims to 2:35:54.110 --> 2:35:58.360 have shot down a Reaper. Last night, United States missiles, 2:35:58.940 --> 2:36:00.540 not for the first time in American history. 2:36:00.800 --> 2:36:01.519 Hit a wedding. 2:36:01.980 --> 2:36:03.020 Yeah, we've done a bit of that. 2:36:03.459 --> 2:36:03.759 Yeah. 2:36:04.600 --> 2:36:05.300 Yeah, yeah. 2:36:05.320 --> 2:36:09.580 This was like a defining moment for Obama's air war, right? 2:36:09.600 --> 2:36:11.100 For his drone campaign. 2:36:11.340 --> 2:36:11.580 Yeah. 2:36:12.120 --> 2:36:15.230 When people talk about Obama and how he was a 2:36:15.280 --> 2:36:19.890 disappointment in foreign policy terms, this is what they talk about, right? 2:36:19.910 --> 2:36:21.110 Like, this is the moment. 2:36:21.150 --> 2:36:21.369 Yeah. 2:36:21.629 --> 2:36:22.490 And he bombed a wedding, yeah. 2:36:23.170 --> 2:36:24.510 Yeah, we did that again. 2:36:25.129 --> 2:36:29.440 This time, Weapon Fragments at the scene show, I think 2:36:29.459 --> 2:36:33.160 it's what a slam ER or slammer. Please email me, 2:36:33.220 --> 2:36:35.020 Navy people, tell me how you refer to the missile. 2:36:35.440 --> 2:36:39.230 Boeing has touted it as the, quote, most accurate missile 2:36:39.260 --> 2:36:41.690 in the Navy's arsenal. It punched straight through the roof 2:36:41.750 --> 2:36:45.170 of this building. Balooch weddings are really big. There were 2:36:45.209 --> 2:36:48.390 hundreds of people there. There were at least 50 people injured, 2:36:48.410 --> 2:36:50.609 at least five of them dead, including a child missing. 2:36:50.879 --> 2:36:54.340 I've seen videos where you can see children's shoes, little 2:36:54.379 --> 2:36:56.980 tiny toddlers' wedding shoes among the rubble, right? 2:36:57.020 --> 2:36:57.360 Damn. 2:36:58.200 --> 2:37:00.050 Yeah, it's pretty fucked up, and the images that will 2:37:00.080 --> 2:37:02.730 come out of it will not look good. 2:37:03.370 --> 2:37:03.630 Yeah. 2:37:04.550 --> 2:37:08.110 Finally, talking of Iranian missile strikes, I want to speak 2:37:08.150 --> 2:37:11.910 about this. Discourse about this missile. This missile is generally 2:37:11.950 --> 2:37:14.760 referred to as a castle breaker. The Persian name is 2:37:14.860 --> 2:37:19.250 Kaibasha Khan, I believe. Castle is referring... to a specific 2:37:19.330 --> 2:37:22.390 castle from like Quranic history. And that's relevant only because 2:37:22.410 --> 2:37:25.400 this missile is designed to hit Israel, right? Like that 2:37:25.440 --> 2:37:28.060 is what this is for. It's a medium range ballistic missile, 2:37:28.080 --> 2:37:31.080 something like a 900 mile range. Recently, though, there's been 2:37:31.120 --> 2:37:32.720 a lot of reporting that this is some kind of 2:37:32.900 --> 2:37:36.000 new and groundbreaking thing that Iran's been dropping in the 2:37:36.040 --> 2:37:38.839 last few weeks. And they have had them for years. 2:37:39.379 --> 2:37:42.640 We know this because they unveiled it on live TV. 2:37:43.180 --> 2:37:46.390 They literally whipped a tablecloth off it and were like, 2:37:46.420 --> 2:37:47.310 there it is. 2:37:47.850 --> 2:37:50.030 Iran does this a lot with its weapons systems, right? 2:37:50.090 --> 2:37:50.290 Yeah. 2:37:50.690 --> 2:37:53.010 But I'll include a link to a Russia Today post 2:37:53.070 --> 2:37:57.160 about it. They do seem to be likely the missiles 2:37:57.200 --> 2:38:00.160 that killed several US service people in Jordan in July. 2:38:00.780 --> 2:38:03.020 But in part, the reason that they were the missiles 2:38:03.060 --> 2:38:05.650 that snuck through because they're the missiles that Iran uses 2:38:05.700 --> 2:38:08.730 a lot. Iranian state propaganda is making a big deal 2:38:08.770 --> 2:38:11.370 of talking about these missiles. They do this occasionally with 2:38:11.390 --> 2:38:14.800 their weapon systems, right? They portray it as like, oh, 2:38:14.810 --> 2:38:18.150 the American patriot has nothing on this missile system that 2:38:18.190 --> 2:38:18.530 we have. 2:38:19.010 --> 2:38:22.529 But they are effective, right? They're smallish. They're maneuverable. 2:38:22.980 --> 2:38:26.950 And in the terminal phase of their trajectory, they maneuver, 2:38:26.990 --> 2:38:31.129 which makes them harder to intercept. If it's just doing 2:38:31.170 --> 2:38:35.090 a ballistic arc, then it's a math problem to intercept it. 2:38:35.640 --> 2:38:38.880 But if it's maneuvering, from what I understand, that makes 2:38:38.900 --> 2:38:43.670 the intercept more complicated. They use these in Syria soon 2:38:43.750 --> 2:38:47.609 after I left, actually. This isn't some secret brand new technology, 2:38:47.890 --> 2:38:50.570 but it is a technology that is effective. And the 2:38:50.610 --> 2:38:53.920 reason it's continuing to be effective is that despite more 2:38:53.940 --> 2:38:56.920 than six months of war, the United States has failed 2:38:56.959 --> 2:39:00.640 to destroy their launchers and failed to destroy their missile supplies, right? 2:39:01.240 --> 2:39:04.320 And that is why they're still able to strike United 2:39:04.360 --> 2:39:07.270 States bases all around the region, which they have been 2:39:07.290 --> 2:39:09.830 doing last night and they will do again. 2:39:10.310 --> 2:39:11.210 Tonight, I imagine. 2:39:11.940 --> 2:39:14.980 And as the US supply of munitions continues to dwindle, 2:39:15.020 --> 2:39:16.800 this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem 2:39:16.820 --> 2:39:17.619 for the United States. 2:39:18.320 --> 2:39:18.959 What an L. 2:39:19.879 --> 2:39:22.310 Talking of big problems, we haven't done an ad break 2:39:22.340 --> 2:39:22.779 in a while. 2:39:34.990 --> 2:39:39.279 And we're back. So at the end of March, 2026, 2:39:39.280 --> 2:39:44.930 which is, I think, At least it feels like that. 2:39:45.110 --> 2:39:47.700 President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a 2:39:47.820 --> 2:39:52.020 national list of verified eligible voters. Mail-in voting would be 2:39:52.060 --> 2:39:54.459 restricted to the people on this list, which would be 2:39:54.620 --> 2:39:58.459 essentially an arbitrary list of whoever the administration thought should 2:39:58.480 --> 2:40:00.470 be on it, right? It was going to be compiled 2:40:00.490 --> 2:40:03.890 with help from DHS based on like citizenship roles. Voting 2:40:03.950 --> 2:40:07.030 law experts immediately complained that this violated the Constitution for 2:40:07.050 --> 2:40:09.690 a variety of reasons. And some people have said essentially 2:40:09.730 --> 2:40:12.160 this is an attempt at a coup. Under the order, 2:40:12.270 --> 2:40:15.560 DHS was supposed to work with the Social Security Administration 2:40:15.600 --> 2:40:18.460 to create lists for each state. Ballots would be given 2:40:18.620 --> 2:40:21.700 new envelopes with special barcodes for tracking, and federal funds 2:40:21.720 --> 2:40:23.960 would be withheld from states that refused to comply with 2:40:23.980 --> 2:40:27.340 this illegal order. As with many Trump executive orders, this 2:40:27.400 --> 2:40:29.740 one was immediately met by a federal judge who issued 2:40:29.780 --> 2:40:32.820 a temporary restraining order that blocked it from going into effect. 2:40:33.320 --> 2:40:36.780 Trump appealed, and the whole situation remains legally unsettled to 2:40:36.820 --> 2:40:40.070 this day. Despite the fact that the order has been halted, 2:40:40.270 --> 2:40:43.750 earlier this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, announced that 2:40:43.770 --> 2:40:46.820 a USPS whistleblower had come forth to assert that the 2:40:46.860 --> 2:40:49.840 Postal Service was still moving forward to comply with the 2:40:49.900 --> 2:40:53.700 halted order anyway. According to an article by the AP, quote, 2:40:54.200 --> 2:40:57.190 The disclosure from the unidentified whistleblower contends that the Postal 2:40:57.209 --> 2:40:59.609 Service has been scrambling to try and build a complex 2:40:59.650 --> 2:41:01.550 system that would normally take a year or more and 2:41:01.650 --> 2:41:04.610 only three months, sometimes in defiance of the judge's orders 2:41:04.629 --> 2:41:06.770 halting work. The goal is to have it ready for 2:41:06.910 --> 2:41:10.050 use in the midterm elections. The disclosure contends that, due 2:41:10.070 --> 2:41:12.390 to the new procedures, a single scanning error in a 2:41:12.450 --> 2:41:15.010 batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could prevent 2:41:15.110 --> 2:41:18.070 any from reaching voters. It details a system that election 2:41:18.090 --> 2:41:20.859 officials have already warned could not be implemented before the 2:41:20.920 --> 2:41:23.980 first mail ballots begin going out Friday in North Carolina. 2:41:24.540 --> 2:41:27.360 The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions 2:41:27.379 --> 2:41:30.359 of Americans, Blumenthal told reporters in advance of releasing the 2:41:30.379 --> 2:41:34.439 whistleblower information. this administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework 2:41:34.500 --> 2:41:38.450 on casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons. Now, 2:41:38.870 --> 2:41:41.690 For its part, the U.S. Postal Service contends that the 2:41:41.750 --> 2:41:45.240 judge's restraining order still gave them explicitly the right to 2:41:45.270 --> 2:41:49.120 develop online tools for states who wanted to voluntarily abide 2:41:49.180 --> 2:41:51.820 by the order. Even if this is true, it's a 2:41:51.940 --> 2:41:55.300 massive issue because the changes mandated by the EO are 2:41:55.400 --> 2:41:58.820 hideously unconstitutional and no state should be allowed to carry 2:41:58.860 --> 2:42:00.900 them out. And to make that point, here's a quote 2:42:00.920 --> 2:42:04.370 from the actual whistleblower complaint to Blumenthal. When ballots are 2:42:04.410 --> 2:42:07.410 submitted to USPS in large volume batches, if any one 2:42:07.510 --> 2:42:10.590 ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the portal, 2:42:11.030 --> 2:42:14.130 all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, 2:42:14.230 --> 2:42:16.830 if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 2:42:16.830 --> 2:42:20.000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just 2:42:20.220 --> 2:42:23.039 one of those ballots against the portal because, for example, 2:42:23.120 --> 2:42:26.160 someone had recently changed their name after marriage or they've moved, 2:42:26.480 --> 2:42:29.300 then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots 2:42:29.320 --> 2:42:29.500 as well. 2:42:31.930 --> 2:42:35.490 That's what the whistleblower is contending about the new USPS 2:42:35.590 --> 2:42:39.810 rules regarding, yes, the barcodes and the portal system. 2:42:40.230 --> 2:42:40.449 Yeah. 2:42:40.709 --> 2:42:44.119 Like this is how he's describing the system as working, right? 2:42:44.140 --> 2:42:44.660 Yeah. 2:42:45.240 --> 2:42:48.720 He continues, USPS expects the state to take back the 2:42:48.760 --> 2:42:51.279 entire batch to cure the issue with a single ballot. 2:42:51.540 --> 2:42:54.760 Should the slapdash portal mistakenly mark a ballot as unverified, 2:42:54.810 --> 2:42:57.530 there is no clear process by which state election officials 2:42:57.570 --> 2:43:00.800 or voters themselves can challenge the rejection. The rule simply 2:43:00.879 --> 2:43:03.959 vaguely states that they will be informed of the escalation 2:43:04.000 --> 2:43:08.099 procedures should they decide to challenge a rejection. Voters intending 2:43:08.150 --> 2:43:10.450 to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware 2:43:10.490 --> 2:43:12.529 that their ballots have been rejected or were part of 2:43:12.570 --> 2:43:14.990 a rejected batch until it is too late to secure 2:43:15.030 --> 2:43:19.289 an alternative ballot or vote in person. Now, I would 2:43:19.330 --> 2:43:22.039 call this a clear attempt to steal an election or 2:43:22.080 --> 2:43:24.259 not necessarily to steal, but at least to create doubt 2:43:24.400 --> 2:43:27.100 around the midterm elections, right? This is something of a 2:43:27.140 --> 2:43:29.180 desperate Hail Mary by Trump and his cronies as the 2:43:29.220 --> 2:43:32.390 numbers of them have gotten much, much worse nationwide. And 2:43:32.690 --> 2:43:35.310 if individual states are allowed to do this, even if 2:43:35.570 --> 2:43:37.789 the TROs remain in place and this is halted from 2:43:37.810 --> 2:43:41.000 going forward nationwide before the election, if individual states are 2:43:41.030 --> 2:43:44.620 allowed to use this system, then we could see countless 2:43:44.660 --> 2:43:48.060 Democrat votes tossed out in red states where many Dems 2:43:48.100 --> 2:43:50.519 are doing well for the first time in several election cycles. 2:43:51.020 --> 2:43:52.650 And I think a large part of the goal here, 2:43:52.690 --> 2:43:57.430 beyond just blunt disenfranchisement, is creating chaos, right? Because chaos 2:43:57.470 --> 2:44:00.070 is almost as good as outright tossing out votes. It 2:44:00.110 --> 2:44:03.390 creates doubt and it provides opportunity, a period of time 2:44:03.690 --> 2:44:06.500 in which the administration can set narratives about how the 2:44:06.560 --> 2:44:09.700 election went in an uncertain election night, right? That's a 2:44:09.740 --> 2:44:11.760 big part of, I think, why they're doing this is 2:44:11.780 --> 2:44:14.640 to provide opportunities to where they can throw doubt on 2:44:14.660 --> 2:44:18.280 the system. Here's another relevant quote from the complaint. According 2:44:18.320 --> 2:44:20.910 to the whistleblower, USPS's effort to develop and deploy the 2:44:20.950 --> 2:44:24.770 portal has been rushed, risky, and haphazard because leadership has 2:44:24.790 --> 2:44:28.320 demanded an impossible timeframe. In an effort to meet impossible deadlines, 2:44:28.420 --> 2:44:31.900 USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating a 2:44:31.940 --> 2:44:35.260 substantial risk of a catastrophic failure of the system that 2:44:35.340 --> 2:44:37.119 could derail the midterm elections. 2:44:37.600 --> 2:45:05.940 Quote, Now, It's good that. 2:45:05.860 --> 2:45:08.580 This whistleblower came forward and courage like this is one of, 2:45:08.640 --> 2:45:10.480 if not the only ways that we're going to have 2:45:10.500 --> 2:45:12.699 a chance to catch and stop schemes like this from 2:45:12.740 --> 2:45:15.660 coming to fruition. It is too early to know what 2:45:15.700 --> 2:45:18.420 the fallout from this revelation is going to be. That 2:45:18.480 --> 2:45:20.560 is still very much ongoing. This all just came out 2:45:20.620 --> 2:45:22.980 in the last couple of days. So we'll update you 2:45:23.160 --> 2:45:25.610 on this in the future as this evolves. But I 2:45:25.650 --> 2:45:27.790 wanted to talk a little bit more about some other 2:45:28.070 --> 2:45:30.610 midterm fuckery related news, some stuff that's a little bit 2:45:30.709 --> 2:45:34.289 less dark, right? General Dan Cain, chairman of the Joint 2:45:34.330 --> 2:45:37.670 Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter to Senator Alyssa Slotkin, 2:45:37.990 --> 2:45:41.040 a Democrat, early this week, promising her, quote, the joint 2:45:41.100 --> 2:45:43.940 force has no plans to send federal military personnel or 2:45:44.040 --> 2:45:46.860 federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during 2:45:46.879 --> 2:45:50.779 the 2020 elections. Likewise, the joint force has no plans 2:45:50.990 --> 2:45:53.670 to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines or 2:45:53.730 --> 2:45:56.990 other election related material. Now, this was in response to 2:45:57.030 --> 2:46:00.170 a request Slotkin's office sent Cain and Pete Hegseth, asking 2:46:00.190 --> 2:46:03.040 for confirmation the Pentagon would not interfere with the election 2:46:03.080 --> 2:46:06.500 by having soldiers at polling places or seizing ballots. I'd 2:46:06.540 --> 2:46:09.620 call this a partial positive story, right? It's good that 2:46:09.660 --> 2:46:12.980 he's saying that. It's not great that elected Democrats are 2:46:13.020 --> 2:46:15.269 so worried about this that they felt the need to ask. 2:46:15.670 --> 2:46:18.310 It's not just the military we have to contend with here, 2:46:18.370 --> 2:46:21.890 because back in February, DHS Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity 2:46:21.930 --> 2:46:29.680 Heather Honey said, And that sounded great, but on September 2:46:30.060 --> 2:46:33.000 1st of 2026, just a couple of days ago, Homeland 2:46:33.020 --> 2:46:36.340 Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen made some concerning statements to 2:46:36.360 --> 2:46:46.050 reporters in New York City. Per Politico, quote, Yep. He added, however, 2:46:46.129 --> 2:46:49.450 that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could 2:46:49.470 --> 2:46:51.869 be a reason for ICE to deploy. The only reason 2:46:51.910 --> 2:46:53.629 why we would be at polling places is that there 2:46:53.670 --> 2:46:55.709 is a threat to that polling place or we're serving 2:46:55.750 --> 2:46:58.610 a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down, 2:46:58.709 --> 2:47:02.140 he said. ICE's job is immigration, customs enforcement. That's their job. 2:47:02.480 --> 2:47:04.640 If we're serving a warrant, we will be where we 2:47:04.700 --> 2:47:07.519 need to be. And that does leave the door open 2:47:07.560 --> 2:47:10.140 to some degree of intimidation and fuckery at polls, because 2:47:10.160 --> 2:47:11.880 we've all seen over the last two years that ICE 2:47:11.959 --> 2:47:15.100 regularly take being brown as a sign that someone might 2:47:15.140 --> 2:47:17.320 be an illegal alien in need of tasing and arrest. 2:47:17.700 --> 2:47:20.190 And when the agency was asked for more clarification, on 2:47:20.209 --> 2:47:24.210 Mullen's statement, ICE responded, ICE is not planning operations targeting 2:47:24.250 --> 2:47:29.030 polling locations. ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement. And if an 2:47:29.129 --> 2:47:32.170 active public safety threat endangered a public location, they may 2:47:32.190 --> 2:47:35.029 be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action. 2:47:35.050 --> 2:47:36.590 So again, what's going to happen? 2:47:36.610 --> 2:47:38.250 It's hard to say. 2:47:39.070 --> 2:47:42.590 So far, DHS and the military are saying the right things. 2:47:42.629 --> 2:47:45.189 But certainly with ICE, there remains open the possibility of 2:47:45.230 --> 2:47:48.330 some targeted ICE fuckery at polling locations around the country. 2:47:48.420 --> 2:47:49.850 So something to keep an eye on as well. 2:47:50.140 --> 2:47:50.379 Yeah. 2:47:50.840 --> 2:47:54.900 Yeah, no parts of me trust them in any way 2:47:55.900 --> 2:48:00.859 that their word means anything. And it sounds like exactly 2:48:00.879 --> 2:48:05.030 what you said. This is some sort of word judo. 2:48:05.950 --> 2:48:10.789 We're not planning to be there for the purpose of. 2:48:10.970 --> 2:48:12.050 Keeping the door open. 2:48:12.330 --> 2:48:15.130 Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Well, we told you 2:48:15.170 --> 2:48:17.910 we wasn't coming for the purpose of this. We here 2:48:17.950 --> 2:48:18.330 for that. 2:48:18.709 --> 2:48:21.090 And again, you know, I don't expect some national rollout 2:48:21.129 --> 2:48:24.550 of ICE, but there's some really close state elections and maybe, 2:48:24.890 --> 2:48:25.190 you know. 2:48:25.430 --> 2:48:25.690 Yeah. 2:48:26.480 --> 2:48:30.340 There were people who were attempting to do this six 2:48:30.379 --> 2:48:33.320 years ago in 2020 in swing states, right? 2:48:33.360 --> 2:48:35.400 Yeah. And like that. 2:48:35.400 --> 2:48:40.260 Very narrowly avoided happening through the intervention. I think of 2:48:40.280 --> 2:48:43.280 a couple of members of Congress, but like this is 2:48:43.379 --> 2:48:46.259 something that has clearly been like a. 2:48:48.080 --> 2:48:49.120 I guess a strategy, right? 2:48:49.140 --> 2:48:50.700 It's not a hard one to come up with, but 2:48:50.900 --> 2:48:53.439 it's a thing that we should be really fucking worried about. 2:48:53.640 --> 2:48:58.459 Yeah. Yep. To clarify one thing regarding my reporting last 2:48:58.520 --> 2:49:02.990 week on the plans for this UPS implementation of the 2:49:03.010 --> 2:49:08.250 executive order, there was two injunctions that were dropped last week. 2:49:08.770 --> 2:49:12.450 And then after the USPS published the rule change, a 2:49:12.530 --> 2:49:16.609 new lawsuit was initiated by over half a dozen states. 2:49:17.450 --> 2:49:20.450 And then a judge granted a TRO in regards to 2:49:20.470 --> 2:49:24.510 that new lawsuit. And there will be a hearing tomorrow, 2:49:24.770 --> 2:49:28.230 which for us is September 3rd, that will determine if 2:49:28.250 --> 2:49:29.590 there's going to be a permanent injunction. 2:49:29.730 --> 2:49:29.990 Yeah. 2:49:30.370 --> 2:49:32.820 And then based on whatever happens at that hearing, the 2:49:32.830 --> 2:49:36.199 Trump administration will also likely appeal to the Supreme Court. 2:49:36.260 --> 2:49:39.080 And it's really just a matter of days in terms 2:49:39.120 --> 2:49:40.340 of ballots being sent out. 2:49:40.560 --> 2:49:40.740 Yeah. 2:49:40.980 --> 2:49:43.939 It's cutting it super close. And they're trying to make 2:49:43.959 --> 2:49:44.879 this be very close. 2:49:44.959 --> 2:49:45.160 Right. 2:49:45.720 --> 2:49:46.039 Yeah, yeah. 2:49:46.640 --> 2:49:48.420 Usually I can at least follow the logic of the 2:49:48.440 --> 2:49:50.619 Supreme Court. But this one, I just kind. 2:49:51.160 --> 2:49:54.240 Of, whether I agree with them or not, I was like, 2:49:54.280 --> 2:49:56.190 at least I understand how you got there. But they're 2:49:56.230 --> 2:49:59.390 just like, I don't know. This ain't illegal yet, but 2:49:59.470 --> 2:50:00.150 let them cook. 2:50:00.390 --> 2:50:02.150 No, this seems like some of the one of the 2:50:02.190 --> 2:50:06.459 more partisan or like subservient to Trump kind of type 2:50:06.540 --> 2:50:07.520 orders that they've had. 2:50:07.920 --> 2:50:11.460 Yeah yeah like okay a little bit of our like 2:50:11.500 --> 2:50:14.800 personal information but basically we've been waiting for the insurance 2:50:14.860 --> 2:50:17.840 to it happened already but my wife needed a particular 2:50:17.860 --> 2:50:21.180 medical procedure this is to like prevent a stroke you 2:50:21.200 --> 2:50:23.870 know i'm saying and so essentially they was like well 2:50:23.910 --> 2:50:30.490 we can't approve this this preventative procedure unless you already 2:50:30.550 --> 2:50:35.900 have a stroke let me get this straight fam perfect 2:50:36.120 --> 2:50:41.070 okay just say it to yourself again yeah like so 2:50:41.090 --> 2:50:43.550 you so they gotta so they gotta break a law 2:50:44.930 --> 2:50:48.570 before you could say what they doing is illegal I 2:50:49.410 --> 2:50:50.090 just yeah. 2:50:50.150 --> 2:50:53.509 That is a fair interpretation of the Supreme Court's logic 2:50:53.690 --> 2:50:54.970 yeah that's what the. 2:50:54.910 --> 2:50:57.270 Supreme Court just said they gotta break a law before 2:50:57.290 --> 2:51:00.710 we could tell you what they did is illegal okay okay. 2:51:01.090 --> 2:51:02.560 Yeah that does seem to be where we're at it's 2:51:02.610 --> 2:51:08.340 great yeah For our final story, let's talk about Data Republican. 2:51:09.200 --> 2:51:15.539 Data Republican is a relatively popular conservative influencer or propagandist 2:51:15.640 --> 2:51:17.760 on X the Everything app. But this isn't just a 2:51:17.760 --> 2:51:21.640 story about Twitter drama, trust me. Data Republican has almost 2:51:21.879 --> 2:51:24.580 a million followers on X. Her account started to gain 2:51:24.830 --> 2:51:28.770 traction in the early days of Musk's doge by her 2:51:28.990 --> 2:51:31.990 posts that are kind of like data journalism. I use 2:51:32.030 --> 2:51:37.170 that term very loosely. Yeah. using manipulated data to justify 2:51:37.230 --> 2:51:41.030 Doge in a very questionable way. And now she produces 2:51:41.070 --> 2:51:44.470 content which is essentially like open source, like OSINT style 2:51:44.950 --> 2:51:50.170 data journalism for MAGA or a far right audience. Her 2:51:50.270 --> 2:51:53.370 bio reads, I'm just a tool builder and has a 2:51:53.450 --> 2:51:56.730 quote from Musk saying that she's worth following as well 2:51:56.750 --> 2:51:59.890 as a quote from Charlie Kirk saying, you're a must follow. 2:51:59.910 --> 2:52:06.330 Last week, Data Republican published a web tool mapping out 2:52:06.430 --> 2:52:11.470 thousands of Antifa, anarchist, and left-wing websites from across the 2:52:11.490 --> 2:52:15.570 globe hosted through NoBlogs. And as we discussed last week, 2:52:15.610 --> 2:52:20.340 the collective that runs the infrastructure behind NoBlogs was designated 2:52:20.420 --> 2:52:25.260 as a specially designated global terrorist. Data Republican basically scraped 2:52:25.660 --> 2:52:28.980 every NoBlogs site that was online as of last week 2:52:29.320 --> 2:52:33.560 and created an index of posts, if they host doxing information, 2:52:33.680 --> 2:52:37.080 calls to violence, and if they have any financial information 2:52:37.120 --> 2:52:41.850 or donation links, as well as quote-unquote institutional affiliations to 2:52:42.030 --> 2:52:45.690 other organizations such as the SPLC and any connections to 2:52:45.810 --> 2:52:49.830 other no-blogs sites. She described the tool like this, quote, 2:52:50.370 --> 2:52:54.830 introducing an interactive map of 7,000 plus blogs across many 2:52:54.870 --> 2:53:01.130 countries and languages, anti-fascist, anarchist, ecological, prisoner solidarity, migrant border, revolutionary, 2:53:02.020 --> 2:53:06.250 Every one classified, geolocated, and searchable down to the verbatim quote. 2:53:06.910 --> 2:53:10.270 Verified quotes. Every claim is a receipt. Their words, not mine. 2:53:10.270 --> 2:53:13.890 4,000 plus blogs pinned to a live world map. Zoom 2:53:13.950 --> 2:53:18.730 into your own city. Many blogs classified, quote-unquote, operational. Click 2:53:18.750 --> 2:53:21.910 any blog, author, or cell, and walk the network one 2:53:21.950 --> 2:53:25.500 tie at a time. No grant funded this. No client 2:53:25.590 --> 2:53:28.080 asked for it. I do this for free on my 2:53:28.140 --> 2:53:32.090 own time because someone should, unquote. I have a little 2:53:32.150 --> 2:53:36.590 picture of the tool here below, which was titled Trump Blogs. 2:53:37.670 --> 2:53:39.490 That's what she calls her tool to search all these 2:53:39.530 --> 2:53:42.890 different sites. She has little nodes on this map that 2:53:42.930 --> 2:53:46.710 are labeled mainstream authority for groups like the SPLC or 2:53:46.730 --> 2:53:51.670 the ADL. She has another node for Antifa slash Watchdog Research, 2:53:52.060 --> 2:53:54.900 which she calls naming shops, basically like, you know, info 2:53:54.959 --> 2:53:58.580 sites where anti-fascist researchers will name fascists. 2:53:58.100 --> 2:53:58.740 In their area. 2:53:58.879 --> 2:53:59.019 Yeah. 2:54:00.090 --> 2:54:03.449 She's in other nodes for movement legal defense, for official 2:54:03.560 --> 2:54:10.340 political parties, mostly international-based parties, and for movement infrastructures. Now, 2:54:10.379 --> 2:54:13.940 a few days prior, she posted a similar network map 2:54:14.060 --> 2:54:19.040 for the DSA, inspired largely by Marco Rubio's Cuba conspiracy document. 2:54:19.500 --> 2:54:22.880 This quote-unquote DSA explorer allows you to navigate an alleged 2:54:22.959 --> 2:54:26.920 web of connections between DSA members, journalists, politicians, and other 2:54:27.250 --> 2:54:33.720 left-wing organizations. other quote-unquote anti-imperialist organizations, foreign political parties, and 2:54:33.920 --> 2:54:38.630 Islamic terror groups. Data Republican has a few projects like 2:54:38.690 --> 2:54:42.410 this on her website. Other projects include the National Endowment 2:54:42.430 --> 2:54:47.709 for Democracy Explorer, quote, AI-generated summaries of NED's Journal of 2:54:47.750 --> 2:54:50.470 Democracy articles, authors, and NGOs, unquote. 2:54:50.830 --> 2:54:51.830 Perfect. 2:54:51.850 --> 2:54:56.130 She also has another database of nonprofit NGOs, their employees, 2:54:56.250 --> 2:55:00.130 and their volunteers, and whether they receive government funding. For instance, 2:55:00.470 --> 2:55:05.689 she has pages on 92 nonprofits focused on combating hunger. 2:55:06.690 --> 2:55:09.390 Truly the worst of the worst being documented here. Yeah. 2:55:10.330 --> 2:55:13.520 She also has a database of grant funding, a 2024 2:55:13.520 --> 2:55:16.520 voter turnout analysis, and a link to her book on 2:55:16.600 --> 2:55:20.880 NGOs and USAID published under her real name, Jennica Pounds, 2:55:21.420 --> 2:55:24.550 with a foreword by Doge's own Big Balls. 2:55:25.110 --> 2:55:25.849 Oh my god. 2:55:25.990 --> 2:55:30.240 Is he credited using his legal name there or Big Balls? No, 2:55:30.330 --> 2:55:32.940 he is credited as Big Falls. Like I read it, 2:55:33.000 --> 2:55:36.120 he is credited as Big Falls. 2:55:36.260 --> 2:55:38.900 At the bottom of the Data Republican website is a 2:55:38.940 --> 2:55:43.490 link to a nearly 5,000-word essay from her pastor titled 2:55:43.570 --> 2:55:50.129 The Historical Case for Christianity. Last April, Jenica Pounce, Data Republican, 2:55:50.790 --> 2:55:55.220 became a credentialed member of Hegseth's revamped Pentagon Press Corps. 2:55:55.740 --> 2:55:58.240 Remember when he kicked out all those news outlets out 2:55:58.280 --> 2:56:01.040 of the Pentagon last March and replaced them with right-wing cheerleaders? 2:56:02.060 --> 2:56:05.560 Pound's admission into the press corps was part of this effort. 2:56:06.180 --> 2:56:10.100 And then last month, something odd happened in the Pentagon 2:56:10.140 --> 2:56:14.770 press corps. Jenica Pound, data Republican, accused someone from the 2:56:14.810 --> 2:56:18.790 State Department of trying to entrap her into leaking old 2:56:19.190 --> 2:56:23.530 Biden-era documents about Cuba by presenting the documents as an 2:56:23.730 --> 2:56:27.220 exclusive scoop. I'm going to read a quick text exchange 2:56:27.580 --> 2:56:30.660 that Data Republican posted on Twitter. This is her, quote, 2:56:31.040 --> 2:56:33.379 Just to be clear, you want me to leak the 2:56:33.420 --> 2:56:34.779 material you gave to me? 2:56:35.480 --> 2:56:36.199 Unredacted? 2:56:37.600 --> 2:56:40.570 Happy to help your efforts. The person that she was 2:56:40.590 --> 2:56:45.350 texting to responded, quote, It already contains all necessary redactions. 2:56:46.070 --> 2:56:49.330 If you'd rather report on already open source stuff, that's 2:56:49.390 --> 2:56:51.980 fine too. But I wanted to give you the option of, 2:56:52.050 --> 2:56:56.760 quote unquote, breaking the story as a sort of gift. Unquote. OK, 2:56:57.170 --> 2:57:01.350 so as data Republican, Jenica Pounds posted a now deleted 2:57:01.390 --> 2:57:05.129 tweet reading. It's not OK when the deep state sets 2:57:05.170 --> 2:57:07.369 you up to commit a crime. I have never been 2:57:07.450 --> 2:57:12.520 more angry in my life. Meanwhile, the Undersecretary of State, 2:57:12.580 --> 2:57:17.119 Sarah Rogers, who oversees Voice of America, basically government-funded media, 2:57:17.780 --> 2:57:21.910 replied to Pounds' thread about this alleged entrapment and tried 2:57:21.920 --> 2:57:25.570 to explain that this wasn't a deep state plot trying 2:57:25.590 --> 2:57:29.280 to trick Pounds into committing treason, but rather, a sincere 2:57:29.500 --> 2:57:34.160 offer from her, Sarah Rogers, to just publish some exclusive documents. 2:57:34.180 --> 2:57:54.450 And then Sarah Rogers posted a thread of those documents. Also, 2:57:54.480 --> 2:57:57.980 it's funny that she calls just redactions FOIA redactions because 2:57:58.300 --> 2:58:00.600 these were not FOIA documents, but she just refers to 2:58:00.640 --> 2:58:05.439 those as FOIA redactions. Just an interesting note here. Yeah. 2:58:05.980 --> 2:58:09.000 So essentially, Data Republican just botched a scoop because of 2:58:09.060 --> 2:58:11.400 her weird paranoia and because she doesn't really know how 2:58:11.420 --> 2:58:17.959 to do journalism, even like administration propaganda journalism. And in 2:58:18.000 --> 2:58:20.380 the midst of this shit show, like this, this caused 2:58:20.400 --> 2:58:22.480 a lot of drama, like on like, you know, MAGA Twitter. 2:58:23.230 --> 2:58:25.850 But in the midst of this shit show, the far-right 2:58:25.910 --> 2:58:31.449 news aggregator account America First News claimed that Pounds wasn't 2:58:31.530 --> 2:58:36.220 just a Pentagon press corps journalist, but was actually a, quote, 2:58:36.480 --> 2:58:41.420 Department of War employee, unquote. A big claim. And then 2:58:41.640 --> 2:58:45.880 a few days later, the Pentagon confirmed that Pounds was 2:58:45.980 --> 2:58:49.940 indeed an employee of the Department of War, the so-called 2:58:50.510 --> 2:58:53.780 This is a statement from the DOD or the DOW, quote, 2:58:54.360 --> 2:58:56.840 Miss Jenica Pounds serves at the Department of War as 2:58:56.879 --> 2:59:00.770 a special government employee and is no longer a credentialed 2:59:00.830 --> 2:59:04.879 journalist at the Pentagon. Her press credentials expired in June 2:59:04.879 --> 2:59:07.980 2026 and she did not seek a renewal. She began 2:59:08.010 --> 2:59:12.400 working for the department in July, 2026 unquote. So that's 2:59:12.440 --> 2:59:15.279 pretty wild. And I will invite you to return back 2:59:15.620 --> 2:59:20.060 to this map of like Antifa anarchist, no blogs, websites 2:59:20.760 --> 2:59:24.560 that pounds created while she was a special government employee 2:59:24.720 --> 2:59:26.720 of the department of war. You know, same thing with 2:59:26.740 --> 2:59:29.440 this DHS list, same thing with this, you know, voter analysis, 2:59:29.459 --> 2:59:32.179 although the voter analysis, what I think was an older piece, 2:59:32.220 --> 2:59:34.879 but it's still on her website, but both this no 2:59:34.900 --> 2:59:39.570 blogs list and, and this network map of DSA were 2:59:39.650 --> 2:59:43.690 created and published as public tools while she worked and 2:59:43.720 --> 2:59:47.180 is still working for the Department of War. And then 2:59:47.280 --> 2:59:49.660 a few days after this was revealed, the Washington Post 2:59:49.720 --> 2:59:52.040 published an article revealing that Pounce was not the only 2:59:52.120 --> 2:59:55.940 right-wing influencer secretly working for Pete Haig's death. This is 2:59:55.959 --> 2:59:59.390 a quote from the Post. Quote, The Pentagon has secretly 2:59:59.450 --> 3:00:03.390 installed several conservative military veterans with large eyeline followings in 3:00:03.450 --> 3:00:07.220 government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify 3:00:07.530 --> 3:00:11.379 Defense Secretary Pete Higgs's viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize 3:00:11.400 --> 3:00:15.179 the Trump administration, unquote. So according to the Washington Post, 3:00:16.000 --> 3:00:19.920 at least three retired colonels, who now boast hundreds of 3:00:19.980 --> 3:00:23.300 thousands of followers each on XTheEverything app, have been assigned 3:00:23.340 --> 3:00:27.020 to civilian roles in the office of Anthony Tada, the 3:00:27.080 --> 3:00:31.240 Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. And this office 3:00:31.280 --> 3:00:34.500 has been focusing on how to make the military less woke, specifically. 3:00:34.780 --> 3:00:35.080 Man. 3:00:35.440 --> 3:00:38.930 These influencers are listed as either special government employees or, quote, 3:00:39.190 --> 3:00:43.470 highly qualified experts, which can work on a longer-term basis 3:00:43.790 --> 3:00:45.970 than special government employees who can only work for a 3:00:45.990 --> 3:00:46.430 few months. 3:00:47.070 --> 3:00:47.230 Yeah. 3:00:47.709 --> 3:00:51.430 And, like, these are influencers who are actively working on policy, 3:00:51.510 --> 3:00:54.400 on military policy, on how to make the military less woke, 3:00:55.209 --> 3:00:58.430 while also posting on their big accounts and in major 3:00:58.450 --> 3:01:01.230 news publications, like the Daily Caller, as well as the 3:01:01.250 --> 3:01:04.090 Washington Post itself. One of these influencers had a letter 3:01:04.110 --> 3:01:08.250 to the editor published in the Post recently. And so 3:01:08.270 --> 3:01:11.270 they're doing all this and posting about how awesome Pete 3:01:11.290 --> 3:01:15.170 Hegseth is, while never disclosing that they also work for 3:01:15.209 --> 3:01:15.850 Pete Hegseth. 3:01:16.170 --> 3:01:17.869 They work for Pete Hegseth, right. 3:01:18.330 --> 3:01:22.570 And like, again, Twitter sucks. But unfortunately, Twitter is still 3:01:22.629 --> 3:01:24.670 very consequential to national politics. 3:01:24.690 --> 3:01:24.810 Yeah. 3:01:25.330 --> 3:01:28.480 It's one of the primary ways the administration communicates with 3:01:28.920 --> 3:01:33.920 people and the public digitally. And as a platform, it's important, 3:01:34.300 --> 3:01:37.379 not just to this administration, but especially for the so-called 3:01:37.410 --> 3:01:41.470 Department of War. We've seen pictures from live military operations 3:01:42.170 --> 3:01:45.030 that show that Hengsteth has Twitter feeds pulled up on 3:01:45.110 --> 3:01:48.160 screen of While special operations are underway. 3:01:48.340 --> 3:01:49.519 The man is watching Twitter. 3:01:49.760 --> 3:01:53.040 Yeah, like in the situation room. Yeah, they're checking hashtags. 3:01:53.140 --> 3:01:56.920 And now they're recruiting staff from Twitter, including staff who 3:01:56.959 --> 3:02:01.660 are building publicly accessible tools mapping out the left. From 3:02:01.680 --> 3:02:07.199 the DSA and Palestinian solidarity organizations to Antifa info blogs 3:02:07.700 --> 3:02:12.779 and anarchist report backs. She's building those databases while covertly 3:02:12.860 --> 3:02:15.490 working for the Pentagon. And I want to close with 3:02:15.510 --> 3:02:19.050 this one reply she made to her posts regarding the 3:02:19.129 --> 3:02:23.090 NoBlogs tool. Quote, in the course of building this website, 3:02:23.610 --> 3:02:27.530 a number of anti-fascists were identified. I disclosed them, but 3:02:27.590 --> 3:02:32.010 not on the website directly to the USA government. Unquote. 3:02:32.530 --> 3:02:35.400 The government that she works for, that she is working for. 3:02:35.440 --> 3:02:35.900 Yeah, yeah. 3:02:36.060 --> 3:02:37.520 How would you have that direct channel? 3:02:37.540 --> 3:02:41.770 Like, When I let myself think too long about like, 3:02:42.470 --> 3:02:45.140 follow me, what frustrates me about climate change is the 3:02:45.170 --> 3:02:48.200 fact that we saw it coming a hundred years ago 3:02:48.459 --> 3:02:53.779 and just watch this slow, slow moving death. And we're like, guys, 3:02:53.940 --> 3:02:56.180 it's on its way. This is where here's evidence. Here's 3:02:56.200 --> 3:02:56.760 what's happening. 3:02:57.270 --> 3:02:57.910 It's coming. 3:02:58.250 --> 3:03:01.670 If we get above two degrees Celsius, we're above two 3:03:01.690 --> 3:03:03.769 degrees Celsius. 3:03:03.910 --> 3:03:04.970 It's right there. 3:03:04.990 --> 3:03:09.580 I feel like that when Pete Hexeth said, I'm finna 3:03:09.640 --> 3:03:13.780 fire everybody from the press corps, you not allowed to come. 3:03:13.800 --> 3:03:16.480 And you're going, he's going to hire his own press people. Guys, 3:03:16.500 --> 3:03:17.890 they're going to put him on the... She works for him. 3:03:18.240 --> 3:03:18.580 It's just so. 3:03:25.580 --> 3:03:28.020 This is the slowest moving coup. 3:03:29.510 --> 3:03:33.290 Like, it's just, it's the slowest moving coup that you 3:03:33.470 --> 3:03:33.910 all see. 3:03:33.950 --> 3:03:36.290 Hey, hey, hey, excuse me, excuse me. 3:03:37.250 --> 3:03:39.949 They're going to hire their own press and put, they're 3:03:39.970 --> 3:03:43.010 going to send all of our names to the government. 3:03:43.480 --> 3:03:43.980 Oh, there it is. 3:03:44.840 --> 3:03:46.920 I just, yeah. 3:03:47.080 --> 3:03:48.320 One of the things that gets me the most about 3:03:48.340 --> 3:03:51.100 this is how literally days ago, she was, you know, 3:03:51.200 --> 3:03:52.600 ranting about the deep state. 3:03:53.390 --> 3:03:53.730 You know? 3:03:54.050 --> 3:03:58.450 Of which she is part. While she is a secret, like, covert, undisclosed, 3:03:58.550 --> 3:04:01.519 special government employee. That's you! 3:04:02.500 --> 3:04:04.100 She is you and you are it. 3:04:05.400 --> 3:04:08.320 People will often talk about, like, psyops or psywar, right? 3:04:08.360 --> 3:04:11.000 And be like, an individual person is a psyop. And 3:04:11.020 --> 3:04:13.860 generally that's not how psychological warfare works, right? But, like, 3:04:14.750 --> 3:04:16.910 now they're doing it. That is what. 3:04:16.830 --> 3:04:17.570 They're doing now. 3:04:18.690 --> 3:04:20.070 You're the thing. You're the thing. 3:04:21.790 --> 3:04:24.359 It's great stuff. Oh, and one other thing that I 3:04:24.480 --> 3:04:26.910 do want to briefly mention, and this could just be 3:04:26.940 --> 3:04:31.690 a curious coincidence, but late last week, NoBlogs suffered a 3:04:31.770 --> 3:04:36.090 hack a few days after the group that runs NoBlogs, 3:04:36.129 --> 3:04:40.970 the IA Collective, was declared a specially designated global terrorist. 3:04:41.629 --> 3:04:44.720 The collective published a statement saying that the hack lasted 3:04:44.860 --> 3:04:49.260 about two hours, during which the title of NoBlogs was 3:04:49.379 --> 3:04:54.420 changed to Trump Blogs, and the attacker, quote, may have 3:04:54.450 --> 3:04:59.300 had access to the user's database. Now, Trump Blogs is 3:04:59.440 --> 3:05:05.879 also what Data Republican calls her no-blogs tracking tool. Now, 3:05:05.980 --> 3:05:10.890 I'm not saying that Data Republican scraped no-blogs data by 3:05:11.150 --> 3:05:14.810 hacking the website, but these two events did happen around 3:05:14.850 --> 3:05:18.690 the same time, which means could just be a curious coincidence. 3:05:18.990 --> 3:05:21.890 There is no direct evidence that Data Republican is the 3:05:22.030 --> 3:05:26.129 one who hacked noblogs, and the use of Trumpblogs as 3:05:26.190 --> 3:05:30.660 a term isn't very original, for one, and could just 3:05:30.720 --> 3:05:34.820 be a sort of inside joke, troll, or reference. But 3:05:34.920 --> 3:05:39.160 considering the fact that Data Republican secretly works for the Pentagon, 3:05:39.860 --> 3:05:43.160 I thought this is something worth mentioning, coincidence or not. 3:05:44.020 --> 3:05:47.129 You can draw your own conclusions. That should do it 3:05:47.410 --> 3:05:49.350 for us here at It Could Happen Here. 3:05:50.330 --> 3:05:52.230 If you want to email us, you can do it. 3:05:52.230 --> 3:05:57.740 It's coolzontipsatproton.me. Prop, do you have any other podcasts that 3:05:57.800 --> 3:05:58.920 you'd like us to listen to? 3:05:58.940 --> 3:06:00.920 Hey, it'd be great, actually. 3:06:00.980 --> 3:06:03.820 We have a cousin podcast called Politics with Prop where 3:06:03.860 --> 3:06:08.119 we dive into not the breadth of topics that were 3:06:08.170 --> 3:06:11.160 covered here, but... A couple of topics that may make 3:06:11.170 --> 3:06:13.580 you scratch your head a little bit. Like, I feel 3:06:13.600 --> 3:06:15.620 like what they're saying is A, B, and C, and 3:06:15.660 --> 3:06:17.460 I get to go, yes, you're right. That's exactly what 3:06:17.500 --> 3:06:17.879 they're saying. 3:06:18.400 --> 3:06:19.420 So, yeah, tap in with me. 3:06:20.100 --> 3:06:22.780 Hub Politics with Prop every Wednesday and Friday. 3:06:23.520 --> 3:06:23.700 Yeah. 3:06:24.860 --> 3:06:25.840 We reported the news. 3:06:26.879 --> 3:06:27.680 We reported the news. 3:06:32.020 --> 3:06:35.120 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week 3:06:35.240 --> 3:06:37.020 from now until the heat death of the universe. 3:06:37.920 --> 3:06:40.390 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. 3:06:40.570 --> 3:06:43.570 For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, 3:06:43.770 --> 3:06:48.190 coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 3:06:48.550 --> 3:06:51.360 or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find 3:06:51.420 --> 3:06:54.340 sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. 3:06:54.840 --> 3:06:55.520 Thanks for listening.