Speaker 1: Also media, Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where I
Speaker 2: explained fake money things that are actually real too, Molly, Molly,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for coming back on. I am
Speaker 2: your host, Bio long. I am excited to learn now
Speaker 2: long ago in a galaxy far far away. And I'm
Speaker 2: saying this because I legitimately do not remember how many
Speaker 2: weeks ago have you released the original one of this.
Speaker 2: But back in that episode where we explain shadow banking,
Speaker 2: I said that I had had to cut off the
Speaker 2: part of the episode that was the reason why I
Speaker 2: wrote it in the first voice, it happens to me
Speaker 2: every week, Yes, so Comma, I've also kind of had
Speaker 2: to split some of this episode off. That will probably
Speaker 2: that will be another episode, probably with ezetron whenever I
Speaker 2: have enough seconds in my life to pull all of
Speaker 2: that together. But today we are here to talk about
Speaker 2: the actual sort of shadow bank run. I guess you
Speaker 2: would call it financial problems that caused me to write
Speaker 2: the shadow banking episode in the first place.
Speaker 3: Oh right, why I originally asked you what shadow banking
Speaker 3: is some kind of economy problem? And there was like
Speaker 3: a fake run on the fake banks.
Speaker 2: Yes, and Molly, you will be extremely unhappy to note
Speaker 2: that a big part of the reason why there was
Speaker 2: the fake run on the fank banks was that the
Speaker 2: shadow banks loaned a bunch of money to a different
Speaker 2: type of shadow bank.
Speaker 3: I don't think they should have done that, and.
Speaker 2: That shadow bank went under. Great things are.
Speaker 3: Happening here, but they're not FDIC insured.
Speaker 4: Me ah, no, no, nope, nope.
Speaker 2: So okay, this gets us back to our original definition
Speaker 2: of a shadow bank, which is that it's a bank
Speaker 2: that does banking things. That's not a bank, so it's
Speaker 2: not ensured by the FDIC. They don't have to have
Speaker 2: money on hand to make sure that they can't be
Speaker 2: a bank run on them.
Speaker 3: Right, So they just said no more transactions please.
Speaker 2: Yes, So what Molly is referring to is a few
Speaker 2: weeks ago. I guess maybe like a month ago. At
Speaker 2: this point, there was actually a breakthrough into the kind
Speaker 2: of mainstream ish of some stuff that I've been brewing
Speaker 2: in the financial news for a while, and that was
Speaker 2: that a bunch of companies, Morgan stan Lee and Blackrock
Speaker 2: I think we're kind of the two biggest ones that
Speaker 2: stopped this, although a bunch of these sort of smaller
Speaker 2: what are called private credit firms also sort of did
Speaker 2: things like this.
Speaker 3: And so because they're not really banks, there's no regulation
Speaker 3: that says they have have to serve their customers, right,
Speaker 3: They can just say no, okay.
Speaker 2: So this is part of what's really a shit show.
Speaker 4: I guess let's start.
Speaker 3: At the beginning. So what happened? Sorry I got as derailed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's run back to the specific thing we're talking
Speaker 2: about here is a thing called private credit, and so
Speaker 2: private credit, I'm just going to read this thing from
Speaker 2: the teller window, which is, I don't know, the telor
Speaker 2: window is actually a decently useful thing. Where the telor
Speaker 2: window is the FED is like I'm going to explain
Speaker 2: something to normal people. Now. The problem is that this
Speaker 2: is still the Federal Reserve. So their explanation for normal people.
Speaker 2: By normal people, they mean.
Speaker 4: Like, I don't know, like dipshit day traders, right.
Speaker 3: Normal people don't have questions about the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's like this is like for people who
Speaker 2: are kind of know this stuff but are running into
Speaker 2: this like arcane subfield for the first time. So I'm
Speaker 2: just going to quote from them because I think it's
Speaker 2: an interesting place to start. Although there is no universal definition,
Speaker 2: which you know things are going great when our second
Speaker 2: episode in a road talking about it, you can't all
Speaker 2: agree what it's so good? It's so good, Although there
Speaker 2: is no universal definition. Private credit generally refers to a
Speaker 2: loan that is negotiated between a borrower and a small
Speaker 2: group of non bank lenders. These non bank financial institution
Speaker 2: lenders are typically alternative asset managers such as private equity firms,
Speaker 2: who package loans in different investment vehicles. Other non bank
Speaker 2: financial institutions like pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth
Speaker 2: funds then invest in those vehicles. So this is the
Speaker 2: stuff that we talked about from last episode, where Okay,
Speaker 2: so you have multiple layers of shadow banks, right, you
Speaker 2: have on the one hand that the private credit firms
Speaker 2: are these these sort of groups that go in and
Speaker 2: sometimes they're just their own things. There's a bunch of
Speaker 2: different kinds of of them. Private equities firms tend to
Speaker 2: have like one arm of the private equity firm that's there,
Speaker 2: like this is our shiny private credit wing. There were
Speaker 2: also these things called business development corporations which do these.
Speaker 2: There are like other types of them too, But basically
Speaker 2: what those companies do is they go in and they
Speaker 2: negotiate a loan with a usually a pretty long term
Speaker 2: for repayments on the loan with a company. Now, the
Speaker 2: thing about these loans is that the terms of those
Speaker 2: loans are secret from everybody. Yeah, even the people involved.
Speaker 2: Well when I say secret, I mean the company that's
Speaker 2: taking out the loan and the bank know how they work.
Speaker 2: No one else does. And then what happens is these
Speaker 2: are usually fairly risky loans, because if you weren't doing
Speaker 2: a risky loan, you would get your money through like
Speaker 2: a normal bank. Yeah, you will to do it normal style, right,
Speaker 2: this is not normal style. These are risky. And then
Speaker 2: they do the thing called curitization, which we talked about
Speaker 2: last episode where you take a loan and do magic
Speaker 2: to it and turn it into something that someone else
Speaker 2: can buy.
Speaker 3: Whatever happened to products and services? Meo, whatever happened to products?
Speaker 2: Well, because products and services make less money than betting
Speaker 2: on products and services. This is this is also where
Speaker 2: this is all going. So there are some real issues
Speaker 2: here with private credit.
Speaker 3: So we're buying and selling money that isn't real, and
Speaker 3: add the absence of money that isn't real. And then
Speaker 3: so what happened when there was the run on the
Speaker 3: fake bank.
Speaker 2: Well, that's that's kind of work because you how can
Speaker 2: you do a run on a bank if there's no
Speaker 2: money because you're not asking to get your money back
Speaker 2: out of it because.
Speaker 3: There was never any money.
Speaker 2: Well, so here's the thing. So a lot of the
Speaker 2: way that these things work sometimes like they are obviously
Speaker 2: selling the loans and packages, but a lot of the
Speaker 2: way that it works is that it does kind of
Speaker 2: work like a normal bank, which is, I mean, instead
Speaker 2: of being a lender, you're like an investor, but you
Speaker 2: give them a bunch of your money and they give
Speaker 2: it to these loan things. So it is just literally
Speaker 2: a normal bank, except it's not subject to banking regulations
Speaker 2: and it's risk here, right, So like like Apollo Capital
Speaker 2: Management or whatever, it's like you give a bunch of
Speaker 2: money to Apollo Capital Management, just like lower capital whatever
Speaker 2: is like Apollogobal Capital is one of the big firms
Speaker 2: in this thing, and then they give that money out
Speaker 2: and loans and then you're basically just supposed to wait
Speaker 2: because you know, remember last episode we talked about how
Speaker 2: in the way that normal bank works, Right, there's like
Speaker 2: a fundamental kind of gap right where you are putting
Speaker 2: your money in as like a short term thing that
Speaker 2: you can take out immediately, and then the bank is
Speaker 2: turning the short term money into a long term loan.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: It takes time for the money to grow up.
Speaker 2: Yes, And the reason we have financial regulations is to
Speaker 2: force the banks to have money on hand so that
Speaker 2: if you need your money back, you can take it out. Now,
Speaker 2: these banks don't have this because these are shadow banks.
Speaker 4: They're the credit rs of private equity.
Speaker 2: They're fucking, I don't know, they're like capital management firms.
Speaker 3: They're like dude, Right, So, like a normal run on
Speaker 3: the bank is like obviously the bank doesn't have one
Speaker 3: hundred percent of all like I put cash in the bank.
Speaker 3: We all put cash in the bank, and everyone wants
Speaker 3: all their cash back. The bank doesn't have one hundred
Speaker 3: percent of that cash to get that, right, It's like
Speaker 3: they haven't invested, and it hasn't those loans haven't.
Speaker 4: Matured yet and things like that.
Speaker 3: But theoretically, if all those loans matured, that bank does
Speaker 3: have all of those dollars. But the shadow bank, they're
Speaker 3: selling these same loans to multiple people, So even if
Speaker 3: everything matured properly, they don't have all of those dollars anymore.
Speaker 4: Yeah, dollars don't all exist.
Speaker 2: I mean, Jimmy fair, the bank's dollars also work like
Speaker 2: that because the banks are also selling their loans off.
Speaker 3: But well, you're saying that they were using like the
Speaker 3: same mortgage to secure a bunch of different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, so that's like, yeah, that's like a classic
Speaker 2: shadow banking thing. We're actually going to get back to
Speaker 2: that because they're doing an even dumber version of that now.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying it seems like a run on the
Speaker 3: bank would be kind of inevitable even in a minor crisis,
Speaker 3: because they're too have most of the money they're pretending
Speaker 3: exists yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, but so okay, So I think what I would
Speaker 2: say about that is that this is also a problem
Speaker 2: for regular banks, right, Like I don't think this is
Speaker 2: actually a structurally different crisis, like because like the crisis
Speaker 2: here is just that the money is out in loans
Speaker 2: and they they don't have it on hand. And this
Speaker 2: is the structural crisis that the private credit people are doing,
Speaker 2: is that their money is also out on loans, so
Speaker 2: they don't have it. And a lot of these loans
Speaker 2: are like seven year loans in like very risky companies.
Speaker 2: So the money like really isn't.
Speaker 3: There, right because that venture capital like whatever is that's
Speaker 3: an inflated valuation. So you're talking about like almost ten
Speaker 3: billion dollars, but it isn't it never will be, and
Speaker 3: it never was.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and the other thing that's going on too, right,
Speaker 2: it is like these are supposed to be risky loans,
Speaker 2: so they have a high rate of.
Speaker 4: Return if they return.
Speaker 2: But yes, and this and this is where this gets
Speaker 2: not good because so the US private credit market is
Speaker 2: one point three trillion dollars like under management. The global
Speaker 2: market is like three point five trillion dollars of assets.
Speaker 2: I'm not really going to go into the Chinese private
Speaker 2: credit market here, because that's its own episode. But the
Speaker 2: way that these that these companies deal with this is
Speaker 2: that they have these funds, right, and then the fund
Speaker 2: gives out like the loans, and they have a limit
Speaker 2: to the total amount of like the percent of the
Speaker 2: value of the fund that can be taken out at
Speaker 2: one time. And that's what's been being hit. The industry
Speaker 2: standard is supposed to be about five percent of the
Speaker 2: fund can be withdrawn per quarter, and then after that
Speaker 2: they just shut down redemptions. And that's what you saw
Speaker 2: in the news because a bunch of companies, and some
Speaker 2: of these companies have higher limits than are like almost
Speaker 2: like eight or nine, like like ten percent, and they'll
Speaker 2: stop it at like nine roughly.
Speaker 3: So, more than anything, shutting down redemptions is an indicator
Speaker 3: that the market has panicked, right, that the investors are
Speaker 3: spooked and they want their money back because this risky
Speaker 3: investment is now looking like a very bad choice.
Speaker 2: Yes, but this is a real structural problem because right.
Speaker 3: But like as a measurement of something, it's just like
Speaker 3: what we're measuring is how many investors are shitting their pants.
Speaker 2: And there's a reason they're shitting their pants, and the
Speaker 2: reason they're shitting their pants is that basically all of
Speaker 2: these firms have been eating a colossal amount of shit.
Speaker 2: And the reason they're eating a colossal amount.
Speaker 4: Of shit, I mean, some of it is very stupid.
Speaker 2: Some of them are eating shit because they gave money
Speaker 2: to like normal tech firms, but then now they're all
Speaker 2: scared they're gonna get out competed by AI firms. Some
Speaker 2: of them have given a bunch of money Blue Owl particularly,
Speaker 2: and this is what we're gonna get into in the
Speaker 2: episode with Ed has given a lot of money to
Speaker 2: AI firms, which is a fucking nightmare. Great investment, Yeah,
Speaker 2: incredible stuff going on.
Speaker 3: I'm sure. I'm sure that's what Ed will say. Ed
Speaker 3: will say that was a good investment.
Speaker 2: It's so fun. It's so fun. The main thing that
Speaker 2: they've been eating shit on. And this is where this
Speaker 2: kind of hit the mainstream because a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: normal banks also ate shit on this JP Morgan ate
Speaker 2: shit on this loan. So a huge amount of money
Speaker 2: was poured into this firm called Tricolor, which we touched
Speaker 2: on briefly last episode but then didn't really talk about much.
Speaker 6: About what it did.
Speaker 2: So, Okay, JP Morgan has lost one hundred and seventy
Speaker 2: million dollars. Oh no, big gill Yeah, which and it's
Speaker 2: fun It's funny because like the JP Morgan CEO were like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we kind of ate shit on this, and also their
Speaker 2: CEO gave this quote where he was like, where there's
Speaker 2: one cockroach, there's probably more, which is like an extremely
Speaker 2: normal thing for the finance kind of saying about the market.
Speaker 3: Haven't we have an infestation of accidentally losing one hundred
Speaker 3: and seventy million dollars?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's not great, but like in the
Speaker 2: grand scheme of things, right, like JP Morgan does have
Speaker 2: four trillion or something dollars under management.
Speaker 3: Right, But if he's saying, if there's one cockroach, there's more, yeah,
Speaker 3: Usually if you have one cockroach, you have one hundred cockroaches.
Speaker 3: So if you have one hundred, one hundred and seventy
Speaker 3: million dollar fuck.
Speaker 2: Ups, yes, and that's not great, right. And like Barclays,
Speaker 2: which is the very sort of like prestigious British bank,
Speaker 2: which also ate shit for doing this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: Two two thousand and eight also lost like one hundred
Speaker 2: million pounds what's interesting about this specific one is this firm, Tricolor,
Speaker 2: is a subprime auto loan company.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's a phenomenal business model, Molly.
Speaker 3: So they're responsible for the Nissan Ultima.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is that this is what is known as
Speaker 2: an idea that could not possibly have gone right. It's
Speaker 2: very funny because when you read the stuff from Tricolor,
Speaker 2: they're all like, oh, we're trying to like help people
Speaker 2: who are like underserved in markets who need cars.
Speaker 3: Oh so, but here's the thing about a shitty auto
Speaker 3: loan is you know, right, you are serving an underserved community.
Speaker 3: You are serving people with bad credit who might not
Speaker 3: otherwise be able to get a car. But you're serving
Speaker 3: them by fucking them. Yes, and this is what you
Speaker 3: can tell. Yeah, they they know that they're lying about this, right,
Speaker 3: it's just so evil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like this is all downstream of you know,
Speaker 2: this is all downstream with the fact that we've built
Speaker 2: our cities around cars, right, And we built our cities
Speaker 2: around cars specifically, and this is a really fun thing.
Speaker 2: We built our cities around cars specifically because we had
Speaker 2: created so much manufacturing capacity after World War Two that
Speaker 2: like Ford and General Motors had like pumped into that.
Speaker 2: They were like, we need a fucking way to make
Speaker 2: money off of all of this. And this is also,
Speaker 2: by the way, why we did the Marshall Plan, like
Speaker 2: we rebuilt Europe to sell cars to them.
Speaker 3: It's this terrible snowball of like induced demand and then
Speaker 3: dealing with that and then the fallout of that, and yeah,
Speaker 3: trying to reorganize from that. Yeah, and we have destroyed
Speaker 3: the world with this.
Speaker 4: It rocks.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Henry Ford.
Speaker 2: It's so good.
Speaker 6: It's so good.
Speaker 2: We have literally like Earth is fucked because of this.
Speaker 2: This is like one of the largest engines of global
Speaker 2: climate change is the fact that we had all these
Speaker 2: fucking factories after World War Two and these companies didn't
Speaker 2: want to eat shit on them.
Speaker 3: So now so everybody needs a car, but they can't
Speaker 3: afford one. So now we have a fake bank doing
Speaker 3: fake fucking auto loans.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 2: Who By the way, and I kind of emphasize this enough, right,
Speaker 2: The hole that we are in here is that there
Speaker 2: is in theory, if you're gonna be running a market economy,
Speaker 2: there is like room in it for Hey, this person
Speaker 2: has a long shot but good business idea, and we
Speaker 2: need to get the money.
Speaker 3: Sure, Like there's nothing wrong with the idea of loans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but if your whole.
Speaker 3: Business model is exploiting people who need loans, yeah.
Speaker 2: But this is you know, this is going one layer
Speaker 2: up from like this subprime model loan company.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: The problem that we're going to hit with all of
Speaker 2: these private credit firms is that they're giving loans to
Speaker 2: just this shit.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: The things that they're giving high risk loans to aren't
Speaker 2: like interesting businesses. They're subprime auto loan companies and they're
Speaker 2: like weird ai data center creation companies. Right, It's like
Speaker 2: that shit. And this is this is where everything goes
Speaker 2: to shit because you know, and it's something that actually
Speaker 2: wasn't really reported on very much in in a lot
Speaker 2: of the coverage on these companies eating shit. But like
Speaker 2: what this company was doing was they were literally doing
Speaker 2: all of the two thousand and eight stuff.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: They give out these subprime loans, which they know like
Speaker 2: a bunch of them are going to fail, They pull
Speaker 2: them all together into these like tranches of loans, and
Speaker 2: then they sell them off doing doing the secure stuff
Speaker 2: we talked about last time, and again this is literally
Speaker 2: exactly how the subprime mortgage crisis worked, except we're doing
Speaker 2: it with auto loans. It seems a little bit more evil. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And they're doing this thing right. They're doing the thing
Speaker 2: that we saw with the housing loans, where the same
Speaker 2: card is collateral for multiple of these loans. And the
Speaker 2: reason they're doing this right is that this company, Tricolor,
Speaker 2: their entire business model is trying to borrow more money
Speaker 2: from banks so that they can send out more of
Speaker 2: these shitty auto loans so they can then sell that
Speaker 2: stuff back. And so they're also like heavily leveraged, right
Speaker 2: because they're they're taking out like every single loan they
Speaker 2: can possibly do. They're doing instruments so that they're the
Speaker 2: collateral on the loans that they are taking. So they
Speaker 2: take that money and give out more of these shitty
Speaker 2: auto loans. The collateral on that is multiple of the
Speaker 2: shitty auto loans.
Speaker 3: I mean, I would say it's a house of cards,
Speaker 3: but like, ye, it's not even it's not even that
Speaker 3: it's imaginary. It's just it's h like the bottom row
Speaker 3: on this house of cards is just your imagination.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's wildly coyote running off the cliff and
Speaker 2: he's just sitting there and as long as his feet
Speaker 2: are moving, no one realizes that that like, wait, hold on,
Speaker 2: this is the This is literally the fakest thing I've
Speaker 2: ever seen. And then it goes under and this is
Speaker 2: a shit show. That's the only possible outcome, the only
Speaker 2: possile way it could have one under is like we've
Speaker 2: we've done this before, we all washed two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: But there's not like an ideal version of this where
Speaker 3: it works.
Speaker 4: This can only not work. Yeah, it's insane.
Speaker 2: It's like, why are we doing because there was one
Speaker 2: year where it made a billion dollars?
Speaker 3: Right, Buying Ponzi schemes are really profitable the first year.
Speaker 4: Right, right, that's like that's the thing, right.
Speaker 3: It really it works out really good for the first guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like like part of what's going on here
Speaker 2: too is you know, like and this is some of
Speaker 2: the stuff that caused the original bubble. But like we
Speaker 2: have this era like the the early twenty twenties and
Speaker 2: like late twenty tens that's like the zero fed in
Speaker 2: just rate errow, right, where like it is basically just
Speaker 2: free to borrow money, and so there's just all of
Speaker 2: this money slashing around that there's nothing to invest into.
Speaker 2: This fuels all sorts of just like heinous shit, right,
Speaker 2: because there's suddenly just like all of these pools of
Speaker 2: capital with like nothing to invest in, and so they're
Speaker 2: investing it in like defense companies and like Palanier and shit,
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 4: Is this why we got stuff like the juice.
Speaker 2: Ro Yeah, but that's like the everything right is like no,
Speaker 2: but like like like the JUICEO thing is like legitimate.
Speaker 3: Venture capital was just like pouring money into stuff that
Speaker 3: was just like not fucking real. Yeah you could, you
Speaker 3: could juice fruit a huh.
Speaker 2: And like like this is you know, I talked about
Speaker 2: this on a different episode about venture capital, and like
Speaker 2: the way that it's done tech fascistm right, was eventually
Speaker 2: they started putting that money into like building the material
Speaker 2: basis for like a tech fascist state. And that's what
Speaker 2: they've been doing in sort of I.
Speaker 3: Kind of wish they stuck to their cocaine ideas.
Speaker 4: Like juice ero.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a better more fun than fascism. No,
Speaker 2: it's more fun than like turning every single door in
Speaker 2: every single car in San Francisco into a surveillance machine
Speaker 2: and then like going in and like basically cooing governments
Speaker 2: and yeah, but on the sort of like pure financial
Speaker 2: end of this, you get all of these companies that
Speaker 2: are just pouring all of this money into there's those
Speaker 2: layers of this too, right where like you know, if
Speaker 2: you're like like JP Morgan, which is like an actual bank,
Speaker 2: right one, Yeah, yeah, the real one is like pouring
Speaker 2: money into these like into these like shadow banks, right
Speaker 2: because they're they're chasing a high rate of return. And
Speaker 2: this is like what happened in two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: was like there everyone was like, oh, these bonds have
Speaker 2: a really high rated return, the mortgage rack securities. And
Speaker 2: now we've reached the point where I think, God where
Speaker 2: this is the most recent news from this and Molly,
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna read you the thing from Reuters quote
Speaker 2: JP Morgan, Chase, Barclays and other Wall Street banks have
Speaker 2: started trading credit default swaps linked to flagship private credit
Speaker 2: funds run by Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, and Aris Managements,
Speaker 2: the Financial Times reported on Friday.
Speaker 3: And that's a good idea for them to do.
Speaker 2: Oh this is really fun because now what we're doing
Speaker 2: is they're now opening the markets to bet on these
Speaker 2: things to fail.
Speaker 3: Ray, I just I don't understand why so much of
Speaker 3: the economy is based on these bets that bad things
Speaker 3: will happen. Yeah, it's like if everything collapses, some guys
Speaker 3: are gonna get so rich. If a thousand people get
Speaker 3: their cars repossessed, one guy gets so rich. Like that's
Speaker 3: not a great way to run an.
Speaker 2: Economy, you know. John Mayard Kines a guy who is
Speaker 2: I would argue responsible for this. This is his fault
Speaker 2: for like stabilizing the capitalist economies in the middle of
Speaker 2: the Great Depression. But Canes is like a welfare state guy,
Speaker 2: but he's also a capitalist. And he has this line
Speaker 2: about how, like the economy shouldn't be run by a casino,
Speaker 2: to which I would be like, okay, Canes, but like.
Speaker 3: The economy is a casino.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's like it's like, this.
Speaker 2: Is your fault for not being willing to like not
Speaker 2: have a market economy, right, Like, like we could, we
Speaker 2: could achieve the dream of not having your economy be
Speaker 2: run by a casino. This is a thing that you
Speaker 2: could do. It's just that you can't.
Speaker 4: Was a youth before.
Speaker 3: I don't think he realized that, like we literally do
Speaker 3: have a.
Speaker 2: Casttell one kind of did, right, because it's it's not
Speaker 2: a euphemism anymore.
Speaker 3: I'm going to necromans him and tell him about polymarket.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he he would lose his mind about polymarket.
Speaker 2: But like, like he's watching people just like betting on
Speaker 2: stock right, and he's watching a bunch of people.
Speaker 3: Have the Ouiji board and tell that bitch about college.
Speaker 2: Well you know this, this this is like we're going
Speaker 2: back in time and showing him Calshi and he's like,
Speaker 2: oh fuck, okay, I'm like I am now again. I
Speaker 2: am now against the market as an idea. We cannot
Speaker 2: let this come to pass. But like you know this,
Speaker 2: this this has been like a known issue with the
Speaker 2: market as a system for a long time. But it's
Speaker 2: a problem because in theory you could try to go
Speaker 2: through and like regulate this stuff, but like investment is
Speaker 2: just gambling to some extent, right, And when you talk
Speaker 2: to the people who believe in this stuff, they're like, well, no,
Speaker 2: you can't have stock markets without sort of equities markets,
Speaker 2: and you can't have these things without the ability to
Speaker 2: bet on it. And I would say, okay, well don't
Speaker 2: have it then, Like I think this is a really
Speaker 2: simple solution. But you know, these people are like, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: In order to mention a capital's economy, you must it
Speaker 2: must be possible for a bunch of people to be
Speaker 2: placing bets on the companies that give money to some
Speaker 2: I'm auto loan companies failing.
Speaker 3: I guess that's the point where like I get off
Speaker 3: the train where you say, well, in order to maintain
Speaker 3: a capitalist economy, and I'm like, yeah, exactly, dog, I.
Speaker 5: Don't want to do that, and like, this is why
Speaker 5: this is a terrible idea, Like it's it's a bad
Speaker 5: idea for first principles, and we're all living in like
Speaker 5: the nightmare healthscape of this being a bad idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the movie that's maybe that's why I can't
Speaker 3: get it, because this does make some kind of sense
Speaker 3: to like an evil guy who wants it to be
Speaker 3: this way, but I don't want it to be this way.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and I very deliberately I went and I
Speaker 2: went into when I was learning economics and when I
Speaker 2: was learning political economy from the perspective of like, okay,
Speaker 2: how do you destroy this right and this part, this
Speaker 2: part seems fragile. Yeah, but it's like one of these
Speaker 2: things where it's like, okay, this is going to break
Speaker 2: on its own.
Speaker 3: But I guess the problem is is it does keep
Speaker 3: breaking on its own. It's just that we keep bailing
Speaker 3: it out and reconstructing it, propping up the house built
Speaker 3: on sand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the part, or you know, like this
Speaker 2: is a thing where the intervention of masses of people
Speaker 2: onto the stage of history has to happen. Where if
Speaker 2: you want this to not be the way that the
Speaker 2: system works when it breaks down, you have to be
Speaker 2: organized enough to be like, no, fuck this, We're not
Speaker 2: going to sacrifice all of our lives to reopen the casino.
Speaker 2: We are going to either tear the casino down or
Speaker 2: turn the casino into like housing or whatever.
Speaker 3: So when there was this run on the fake banks
Speaker 3: and they stopped it, what happened after that? I guess
Speaker 3: because that was my original question, right, It's like, what
Speaker 3: does the run on a fake bank even look like
Speaker 3: or do?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So basically what happened is that they just like
Speaker 2: stopped the redemptions and everyone got really really pissed off.
Speaker 2: But there's not that much they can do about it because.
Speaker 3: Because I'm sure that was in the terms and conditions
Speaker 3: whenever they signed up to do financial crimes together.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And what's been happening now though, is that this
Speaker 2: is this has been spreading kind of panic about just
Speaker 2: I don't know, they would call it like the asset
Speaker 2: class in general.
Speaker 3: Oh, like, maybe it wasn't a good idea to invest
Speaker 3: all your money into this fake product.
Speaker 2: No, it was, in fact a terrible idea. And this
Speaker 2: is this is, this is I think why we're we've
Speaker 2: mismanaged your client's funds. Yeah, and this this is I
Speaker 2: think why we're starting to get the like Blackrock fucking
Speaker 2: credit default swaps, right, because the market is being like, oh, hey,
Speaker 2: all these people are pissed off about the fact that
Speaker 2: we designed our unhinged private credit shadow banking system in
Speaker 2: such a way that you can't get your money out
Speaker 2: of it. What if we capitalize on that by letting
Speaker 2: people bet on it? And that's that's good. So right
Speaker 2: now we're in this kind of limbo world and this
Speaker 2: is this is this is the entire global economy, right.
Speaker 2: Everyone is sitting here pretending like the apocalypse isn't happening.
Speaker 2: And that's the basis of the entire economy. I mean,
Speaker 2: what am I supposed to do about it?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 2: But it's like, you know, but there's there's there's a
Speaker 2: difference between you and us doing this and the people
Speaker 2: who have all of the money in the world who
Speaker 2: are sitting there pretending that like there's like some very
Speaker 2: easy way out of this war that we're that we're
Speaker 2: waging as lebron right, and that it's not going to
Speaker 2: just keep going even though there's no good way to
Speaker 2: get a ceasefire. And you know, like no one, no
Speaker 2: one in charge of the US as any idea what
Speaker 2: they're doing. They're they're they're in some ways, they're they're
Speaker 2: doing the strategy they did in like the lockdown phase
Speaker 2: of the pandemic, where they're.
Speaker 3: Just waiting for it to burn itself out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where they're like, Okay, well we're going to ask
Speaker 2: for a bunch of money.
Speaker 3: But when you do that with the global economy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, And like I had a friend who described
Speaker 2: it as like the fundamental problems that these people are
Speaker 2: incentivized to just think that everything will keep going right
Speaker 2: for them because.
Speaker 4: It has because eventually it will right, they'll be fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But like eventually there's a point where that runs out,
Speaker 2: and when it hits there's going to be this sort
Speaker 2: of chilling discovery that like, oh yeah, the entire last
Speaker 2: like fifteen years of their sort of being an economy
Speaker 2: has been this like weird tech capitalist mirage, and once
Speaker 2: that fails, we I guess we're already in the time
Speaker 2: of monsters.
Speaker 4: So whoo oh.
Speaker 3: I don't have any other marketable skills. You can't collapse.
Speaker 3: I'm a podcaster.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Hum, well, this has been it could happen here
Speaker 2: it did I learn anything? I don't know, honestly, this
Speaker 2: is just they're doing it all again, and it's even
Speaker 2: dumber this time. Oh god.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at least there were houses last time. Now there's
Speaker 3: not even a no.
Speaker 2: Now there's a problem. Shitty auto loans. Mollie. Where can
Speaker 2: people find your very very lovely show.
Speaker 3: You can find me wherever you get your podcast, you
Speaker 3: can subscribe to my show, Weird Little Guys. It's fun,
Speaker 3: you'll like it. Yeah. I'm in the middle of a
Speaker 3: series right now about a segregationist attorney who loved the
Speaker 3: Confederacy so much that he built a twenty five foot
Speaker 3: tall Confederate monument out of old bathtubs. It's fun, you'll
Speaker 3: love it.
Speaker 2: Does he blow up a school bus? This is fine, No.
Speaker 3: But he did go to YMC a night YMC a
Speaker 3: Night Last, which is a night law school through the
Speaker 3: YMCA in Nashville, so that he could get better at
Speaker 3: doing segregation.
Speaker 4: Like he wasn't a lawyer.
Speaker 3: And then in mid life he was like, I were
Speaker 3: go to law school at night so he could do
Speaker 3: busing cases, so he could take bussing cases. So he
Speaker 3: didn't blow any buses up, but he did blow up.
Speaker 4: A lot of people's lives.
Speaker 3: Great, but that great anyway, check out We're little guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if you want to stop there from being
Speaker 2: both we're little guys and also having our economy be
Speaker 2: run on betting on funny money, go like organize a union,
Speaker 2: or like join your local affinity group, or start doing
Speaker 2: food not bombs, or do what literally literally do anything,
Speaker 2: because if we do nothing, we will continue to live
Speaker 2: in the world of the segregation lawyer who build statues
Speaker 2: out of bathtubs, and also the subprime auto loan defaults.
Speaker 4: At least go outside and take a walk.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The National Geographics Encyclopedia says that indigenous refers to people
Speaker 8: or objects that are native to a certain region or environment,
Speaker 8: whether they grow there, live there, or produced there, or
Speaker 8: occur naturally there. When it comes to flora and fauna,
Speaker 8: they are considered indigenous to an ecosystem when they haven't
Speaker 8: been introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation.
Speaker 8: Over millions of years, these living things have become well
Speaker 8: suited to their habitats, carefully adapted to the region's soil, climate,
Speaker 8: and food web. Or when it comes to people, it
Speaker 8: can be some confusion about what it means to be indigenous,
Speaker 8: especially when it comes to questions of land rights, autonomy,
Speaker 8: and a rapria. Most people understand that Native American nations
Speaker 8: and Aboriginal Austragulians are indigenous, but some might then ask, well,
Speaker 8: if indigenous means originating from a place, then aren't all
Speaker 8: holesapiens indigenous to Africa? Why should one group's claim of
Speaker 8: indigena and you take precedence over any other. This would
Speaker 8: be asked in more or less good faith, and so
Speaker 8: others may ask the question, well, if a group occupies
Speaker 8: a region for several generations, does that then make them indigenous?
Speaker 8: White Americans indigenous if their family has been there since
Speaker 8: they found in the United States, French people indigenous to France,
Speaker 8: and if so does that somehow justify their xenophobia to
Speaker 8: water refugees and some weird reactionary corruption of declonial rhetoric.
Speaker 8: Speaking of corruptions of de colonial rhetoric, some Zionists claim
Speaker 8: that Jewish people as a whole are indigenous to Palestine
Speaker 8: in some twisted perversion of land back, while Zionism itself
Speaker 8: has long understood itself as a colonial project meant to
Speaker 8: displace and eliminate the indigenous inhabitants of past Die from
Speaker 8: its very beginning. Some white nationalists also argue that settler
Speaker 8: columnalism was really no different than any other conflict between
Speaker 8: indigenous people, So what does it even matter? Might mix
Speaker 8: right among? Generations of marginalized groups have been struggling to
Speaker 8: retain their social, cultural, economic, and political sovereignty and achieved justice, reparations,
Speaker 8: liberation after centuries of oppression and attempted annihilation. We need
Speaker 8: to stand in informed solidarity. Thus it is vital for
Speaker 8: us to understand what it means to be indigenous. Welcome
Speaker 8: take it up here. I'm Andrew Sage Andrewism on YouTube
Speaker 8: and I'm here again.
Speaker 2: With Miir Wong, the other host of this podcast.
Speaker 8: Yes, and we are here to discuss two approaches to
Speaker 8: understand and indignity. Obviously, this is not the final word
Speaker 8: on the matter, but just one perspective that I've drawn
Speaker 8: primarily from the work of North American Indigenous authors, namely
Speaker 8: Tayaki Alfred, Jeff Conticel, and Robin Wall Kimera. So you know,
Speaker 8: keep that in mind as we proceed. There may be
Speaker 8: other positions and perspectives and indignity coming from other groups,
Speaker 8: other people, and so I believe there are two principle
Speaker 8: highly overlapping ways that indignity can be defined or interpreted.
Speaker 8: One is as an identity formed as part of a
Speaker 8: colonial relationship, and two as an identity rooted in a
Speaker 8: relationship to police. I believe that each definition is incomplete
Speaker 8: without the other. But by understanding and synthesizing each notion
Speaker 8: of indigenousness, we can better ground our approach dec organization
Speaker 8: and social revolution. So let's start with indignity as identity
Speaker 8: rooted in a relationship to place, whether it be physical
Speaker 8: as with land, social as with community, or cultural as
Speaker 8: with culture. As indigenous relationship to the land must be
Speaker 8: reciprocal with give and take, base on a view of
Speaker 8: the land and water as a gift that must be
Speaker 8: cared for over generations. According to Honotiony mythology, as recounted
Speaker 8: by Robin Wild Kimra in braidin Sweet Grass, the mother
Speaker 8: goddess Skywoman came to the land as an immigrant from
Speaker 8: the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land,
Speaker 8: learning from other species to understand how to live on it,
Speaker 8: given as she received, and caring for the earth and
Speaker 8: its keepers for the sake of those who would inherit
Speaker 8: it when she passed on. Land is identity, it is
Speaker 8: ancestral connection, It is pharmacy, it is library, and it
Speaker 8: is home, the source of all the sustains and the
Speaker 8: sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to boot.
Speaker 8: So by this understanding, it can be said that indigenity
Speaker 8: is born out of land connection and established through observation
Speaker 8: and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by
Speaker 8: choice or by force, but regardless of where they might
Speaker 8: find themselves quote unquote whole land or not, even if
Speaker 8: there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments, as
Speaker 8: long as they observe the processes and ceremonies of generational
Speaker 8: relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love for
Speaker 8: the land in common, they remained indigenous. So then the
Speaker 8: question may arise, why aren't settlers indigenous to place if
Speaker 8: their family has lived in the land for generations. The
Speaker 8: answer lies in relationship. Settler society as a whole is
Speaker 8: based on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land. Focus
Speaker 8: are exploiting the land and it's now natural resources. Without
Speaker 8: a relationship with the land that extends the reference to
Speaker 8: a deeper understanding of its complex interdependence, settler society can
Speaker 8: never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes without
Speaker 8: saying that not every indigenous group or indigious practice is
Speaker 8: perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather destructive and even speciocidal,
Speaker 8: particularly when they have recently moved into a place, as
Speaker 8: we could see in North American prehistory. But if we
Speaker 8: are to work with this definition to conceive of being
Speaker 8: indigenous as something based and cultivating a long term relationship
Speaker 8: to place, then indignity must be contingent on maintaining the
Speaker 8: health and longevity of that relationship. Without community, they cannot
Speaker 8: be indignity. Much like the trees in a forest are
Speaker 8: interconnected via subterranean networks of microreze which enable them to
Speaker 8: share resources and survive as a whole. In order to
Speaker 8: be indigenous to place, community must exist sustain that web
Speaker 8: of reciprocity with the land so that all may flourish.
Speaker 8: Indigenaity to place extends to culture as well, which is
Speaker 8: deeply tied to the land it develops on. Such practices
Speaker 8: should be reciprocal, as ceremonies create communities, and communities create
Speaker 8: ceremonies as well as organic not appropriate in existing cultural
Speaker 8: celebrations or tending toward commercial. Our social fabric has become
Speaker 8: withered and fragmented by the peace of modern life, leaving
Speaker 8: little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rights of
Speaker 8: personal transitions such as birth these weddings and funerals, but
Speaker 8: ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of
Speaker 8: what builds community. When we gather for graduations, for example,
Speaker 8: a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia, and excitement builds in
Speaker 8: the social atmosphere, hopefully fuel in the confidence and strength
Speaker 8: of those who are going on to pursue the rest
Speaker 8: of their lives. But Kimura wants us to imagine standing
Speaker 8: by a river flooded with those same feelings as the
Speaker 8: salmon marched into the auditorium of the estuary. The indigenous
Speaker 8: to police means cultivating cultural ceremonies that on other land
Speaker 8: and all the cycles and seasons of life within it.
Speaker 8: What are your thoughts on that interpretation or approach to indigenousy.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot there that's interesting. I think
Speaker 2: I'm getting a better sense of what you were saying
Speaker 2: at the beginning when you were like, this probably needs
Speaker 2: to be synthesized with the definition that's also about like
Speaker 2: a relationship to colonialism. Yeah, but you know, there's some
Speaker 2: sort of fun question mark examples of like the Chinese
Speaker 2: Empire failing this where it's like like you do have
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff that's like, Okay, we're going to
Speaker 2: like build a relationship in nature, but the build a
Speaker 2: relationship in nature stuff is like we are going to
Speaker 2: clear this forest in order to build a temple that
Speaker 2: is like exactly set up on like a pentagram or whatever.
Speaker 2: So it's like, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Speaker 2: We have failed in creating a relationship to the land
Speaker 2: if we are in fact just making geometry shapes.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think empires by then nature, yeah, are going
Speaker 8: to run into some difficulties, to put it mildly, they're
Speaker 8: going to run into some difficulties with actually maintaining a
Speaker 8: reciprocal relationship with that because empires are built on extraction
Speaker 8: of people and of resources, yep. Which you're absolutely right
Speaker 8: that there has to be a synthesis of this definition
Speaker 8: with the idea of indignity as a colonial relationship. According
Speaker 8: to Taiyaki Alfred and Jeff Contis, indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped,
Speaker 8: and lived in the politicized context of contemporary clue nalism.
Speaker 8: It is an experience oppositional to colonial societies and states,
Speaker 8: and a consciousness of struggle against such forces of colonization.
Speaker 8: No two indigenous groups are exactly alike, of course, there
Speaker 8: is a significant diversity in their cultures, contexts, and relationships
Speaker 8: with colonial forces, but they do share that struggle to
Speaker 8: survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence.
Speaker 8: Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples may not always
Speaker 8: be as overt as they once were, but the historic
Speaker 8: and ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples, the erasure of indigenous histories, geographies,
Speaker 8: and languages and the current situation of deprivation persists. Nonetheless,
Speaker 8: even so called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality
Speaker 8: that Indigenous people remain, as in earlier colonial eras fundamentally
Speaker 8: occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own
Speaker 8: home life and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an
Speaker 8: inherently unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival.
Speaker 8: By this understanding of indigenity, it can be said that
Speaker 8: without a colonizer, without systems in place and actions being
Speaker 8: taken to marginalize, disempower and destroy their societies in favor
Speaker 8: of a colonial replacement, there is no indigenous. Without colonialism,
Speaker 8: there would be no status of indigenous to be imposed
Speaker 8: upon the groups of peoples whose very existence and claimed
Speaker 8: land is an obstacle to that colonial endeavor. The un
Speaker 8: work In Group on Indigenous Issues drew partially from this
Speaker 8: understanding when they attempted to define indigenous peoples in nineteen
Speaker 8: eighty six. Quote Indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those
Speaker 8: which having a historical continuity with pre invasion and pre
Speaker 8: colonial societies that develops on their territories, consider themselves distinct
Speaker 8: from other sectors other societies now prevailing on those territories
Speaker 8: or parts of them. They form at present non dominant
Speaker 8: sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and
Speaker 8: transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic
Speaker 8: identity as the basis of their continued existence as peoples
Speaker 8: in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and
Speaker 8: legal systems. And so by this definition, the Amerindians in
Speaker 8: the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasis in India, Native North and
Speaker 8: South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, kurds, Assyrians, Yazidi Palestinians, Amy Sikh Sambi, Basques, Hawaiians, Maori,
Speaker 8: san Wuti, Papuans, Chams, and many many more are all
Speaker 8: indigenous peoples. But there are layers of nuance yet to
Speaker 8: be highlighted. The colonial situation is not a simple binary
Speaker 8: of indigenous and colonizer. For example, in the Americas, we
Speaker 8: have the immigrant situation and the situation of slavery. Right
Speaker 8: where Africans are concerned they were indigenous to their own
Speaker 8: homelands but displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime, they
Speaker 8: may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they were
Speaker 8: not driving settled colonial society either. In fact, historically some
Speaker 8: were actually enslaved by indigenous people as well. At the
Speaker 8: same time, there were members of the African aspora who
Speaker 8: would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own,
Speaker 8: such as the Garifuna of Saint Vincent Tranduras and belize.
Speaker 8: It's very attractive, i would say, or mentally compelling to
Speaker 8: fall into these kinds of binaries colonizer and visions. But
Speaker 8: we should not allow these constructs to pindhole picture. Yeah,
Speaker 8: And I mean this is you mentioned the Kurds earlier, right,
Speaker 8: And there's a couple of political principles that groups like
Speaker 8: the pew Id, you know, and sort of like the
Speaker 8: Kurtish Freedom Movement have had to grapple, like what of
Speaker 8: their things is grappling with Like for example, there was
Speaker 8: like huge Courtish participation in the Armenian genocide.
Speaker 2: And if you look at the Kurdish Regional government in
Speaker 2: a rock when I want to talk about the PEWID,
Speaker 2: that's like like Curtaish freedom movement in Syria in a rock,
Speaker 2: there's like the Iraqi Kurdish Regional government right, which is
Speaker 2: run by a different group, but those people, you know,
Speaker 2: and this is one of these things where like there
Speaker 2: are Kurtish people on both sides of this conflict, like
Speaker 2: that group attempted to, for example, like prevent Ezd people
Speaker 2: from returning to their homes after they were like genocided
Speaker 2: there from there.
Speaker 4: By isis right.
Speaker 2: So it's it's this, it's this thing where like all
Speaker 2: of this stuff gets kind of messy depending on like
Speaker 2: who has power in a given moment. And it's something
Speaker 2: that's to some extent fluid enough that you can on
Speaker 2: the one hand, like be experiencing a genocide and then
Speaker 2: also immediately turn around and you know, be be the
Speaker 2: Kurdish regional government and attempt to assist the genocide, to
Speaker 2: attempt to like do a genocide against the disease you
Speaker 2: can take more of their land.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But then on the other hand, you know, you have
Speaker 2: the PYD who was like backing was backing the Azids
Speaker 2: in that fight against like against the kurs regional government.
Speaker 2: So it's yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think it's very it's very easy to slip
Speaker 8: into this notion that the experience of oppression will necessarily
Speaker 8: cause you to develop cold or consistent critique of oppression.
Speaker 8: But often what we see in history is that oppression
Speaker 8: results in that group perfatuating harm down the line in
Speaker 8: other ways, either within their own group or inflicting that
Speaker 8: harm and other groups. There's something intrinsic to any group
Speaker 8: that grants them immunity from falling into those same patterns
Speaker 8: of domination, abuse, oppression, and harm. People look to the
Speaker 8: example of Israel a lot, but a less similiar example
Speaker 8: for some would be the situation that established Liberia in Africa.
Speaker 6: You know, where you.
Speaker 8: Literally had the descendants of enslave people or formerly enslaved
Speaker 8: people going on to engage in settler cunalism in the
Speaker 8: territory that became Liberia, to oppress disadvantage the indigenous populations
Speaker 8: that previously occupy those territories and well continue to occupy
Speaker 8: those territories today. They created a stratified society that placed
Speaker 8: them at the top, mirroring the very system that they
Speaker 8: had fled.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is the thing where it's like it
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that, you know, people like swing around on
Speaker 2: the other end and be like, well, we actually have
Speaker 2: to like maintain the colonial relationship, because like, what if
Speaker 2: these people then did colonialism on us it's like no, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: it's not no.
Speaker 8: Because you hear people making that argument with three gods
Speaker 8: to like three Palestine, right yeah, people say, oh, well
Speaker 8: then the past Indians will just spin around and do
Speaker 8: a genocide on us, so we have to do a
Speaker 8: genocide on them, Like no.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And this is actually one of the things. I
Speaker 4: think there's two angles of this.
Speaker 2: One. You see that in the US too, where people
Speaker 2: are like, well, what if we do if we do
Speaker 2: land back, then they're just going to like exterminate all
Speaker 2: the white people in the US. And it's like, no,
Speaker 2: that's that's that's what you did, like like hold on,
Speaker 2: hold time. So then you know, the second angle of
Speaker 2: this too is this becomes like a motivating factor for colonizers.
Speaker 2: And this is just something that's true historically if you
Speaker 2: look at the Bosnian genocide, right, the way that you
Speaker 2: get people to do with genocide by convincing them that
Speaker 2: the people they're doing a gedocide against are about to
Speaker 2: do a genocide against them. And you know, you see
Speaker 2: this in Bosnia, you see this Wanda. This is a
Speaker 2: very very common sort of I don't even know what
Speaker 2: you call it, like trope feels like two weeks of
Speaker 2: a word. This is a very common step in the
Speaker 2: beginning of genocide, which I don't love. Uh So you're right,
Speaker 2: of ten Mia not pro genocide more news at ten.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Yeah, it's something wanted to mention regarding I think
Speaker 8: the application of indigenity as a concept in Asia. You know,
Speaker 8: you mentioned the situation with the zds and the goods,
Speaker 8: but your city governments of places like Indonesia and India
Speaker 8: and China and Vietnam and Bangladesh not recognizing the existence
Speaker 8: of indigenous peoples within their territories yep. And these countries,
Speaker 8: like most countries in the world, did not ratify the
Speaker 8: International Labor Organization Convention one sixty nine in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 8: which was known as the Indigenous and Tribal People's Convention
Speaker 8: considering the rights of Indigenous peoples. The UN's Declaration of
Speaker 8: the Rights and Indigenous Peoples, passed in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 8: would however, be voted on approvally by most of the world,
Speaker 8: including the same countries that haven't recognized indigenous peoples within
Speaker 8: their borders. All four of the countries that rejected the resolution, Canada, America,
Speaker 8: Australia and New Zealand will later changed their vote in
Speaker 8: favor of the declaration of course of their own tact
Speaker 8: on interpretations and emphasies, and the declarations legally non bind
Speaker 8: in nature, as is to be expected from set the
Speaker 8: colonial societies.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 8: I'm very interested in, you know, because we do have
Speaker 8: these ethnic minorities. We do have in in case India,
Speaker 8: you have the pre Indo European groups, the tribal groups.
Speaker 8: And if you go back to the definition of indigeneity
Speaker 8: according to the UN, it speaks of groups which form
Speaker 8: at present non dominant sectors of society that are determined
Speaker 8: to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations the ancestral
Speaker 8: territories and the ethnic identity as the basis of the
Speaker 8: continued ex systems as people, et cetera, et cetera. You know,
Speaker 8: it speaks of those having historical continuancy with pre invasion,
Speaker 8: pre colonial societies that developed in their territories. They speak
Speaker 8: of groups that consider themselves distinct other sectors as societies
Speaker 8: and all prevailing on those territories. And so by this definition,
Speaker 8: I understand that people in in these Asian countries maybe like, oh,
Speaker 8: we're all from this place, right, So why does that
Speaker 8: group get this designation and additioners, so we do not,
Speaker 8: And it goes back to again a colonial relationship. It
Speaker 8: goes back to the relationship between a group and the
Speaker 8: broader society. And so it's not necessarily stripping away the
Speaker 8: fact that a particular group may be from an area,
Speaker 8: but more so speaking about how another group relates to
Speaker 8: the states in that area and the group that dominates
Speaker 8: the state in that area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you look this in the Chinese context, and
Speaker 2: it's like, okay, so like by the time you're like
Speaker 2: bulldozing masques and shin juan, like, I think you've gotten too,
Speaker 2: Like congratulations, you have like created a indigenous settler divide.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Also just just speaking like the context does not begin
Speaker 8: and end with European colonization and direct European administration and
Speaker 8: invasion and that kind of thing. You know, prior to
Speaker 8: these invasions, you did have the empires that were established
Speaker 8: in these areas. I mean, China was an empire quite famously,
Speaker 8: Japan was an empire. India was the home of several empires.
Speaker 8: Indonesia was the home of several empires. So while it
Speaker 8: may not be that this relation of indignity is based
Speaker 8: on the Europeans attler colonialism. There is something to the
Speaker 8: history of empire in those areas, establishing those relationships, relationships
Speaker 8: that would later be elevated in some cases by those
Speaker 8: Europeans when they would come and they would for example,
Speaker 8: select one ethnic group and elevate one ethnic group over
Speaker 8: another ethnic group, make us in ethnic group administrators and
Speaker 8: put down another ethnic group. Calcify these kind of caste
Speaker 8: systems and ethnocratic divisions.
Speaker 2: Yes, Rwanda, it's like one of the literally literally yeah,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of cases where these sort of
Speaker 2: the indigenous colonizer divides become reflective of like the way
Speaker 2: that Europeans set up past systems. Sometimes that's not true though,
Speaker 2: And one of the I think most hideous examples of
Speaker 2: this is West Papua, which we very briefly mentioned earlier,
Speaker 2: where West Papua and Indonesia are like not governed by
Speaker 2: the same colonial administration. But when Indonesia gains independence, like
Speaker 2: the government there and this is this is Sankaras government, right,
Speaker 2: this is like the nominally socialist one wants to take
Speaker 2: control of West Papua because West Papua has all of
Speaker 2: these resources and the people in West Papua don't want that,
Speaker 2: like they want to be an independence entity, but the
Speaker 2: Indonesians just roll in and invade them and you know,
Speaker 2: continue from Sukara to Sukarno. Just a unbelievably hideous series
Speaker 2: of genocides. And one of the things that's really bleak
Speaker 2: about the sort of process of decolonization is like you
Speaker 2: can see the shift in the way that these post
Speaker 2: colonial societies are talking about what colonization is and we're
Speaker 2: resistance to it, where it ceases to become about the
Speaker 2: struggle of people against the colonizing forces that oppress them,
Speaker 2: and it turns into a something that's about like the
Speaker 2: continuity of national borders. You know, you get a really
Speaker 2: bleak example of this where like people talk about like
Speaker 2: the Bandung conference, right, which is the sort of like
Speaker 2: it's supposed to be, like this is like the big
Speaker 2: thing in like pan Asian and Pan African like struggles
Speaker 2: coming together. We're like all these formally colonized nations like
Speaker 2: come together and like issue this issue a bunch of things,
Speaker 2: and it's supposed to be this big moment of like
Speaker 2: this is like the unity of post colonial societies. That's
Speaker 2: like still to this day look back on in terms
Speaker 2: of like Affroasian solidarity, like this is the big one.
Speaker 2: But one of the things that they ratified at Bandung
Speaker 2: was a very small session that no one pays any
Speaker 2: attention to, which is all of these countries put in
Speaker 2: their support for Indonesia's occupation of West Papua.
Speaker 6: HM.
Speaker 2: Eventually, I'm going to do a long thing about this.
Speaker 2: It just is a really difficult subject that tackle on
Speaker 2: has to be done very carefully. But one of the
Speaker 2: things that happens is, you know, like the West Papua
Speaker 2: WANs go to the UN and all of the states
Speaker 2: that you would normally think of as like the anti
Speaker 2: colonial states are like no, fuck you, like you belong
Speaker 2: to Indonesia. And then you get all of these other
Speaker 2: countries who are like more neutral or more US aligned,
Speaker 2: but because they're not allied with Indonesia, They're reaction is
Speaker 2: like wait, hold on, what do you mean there are
Speaker 2: black people in the Pacific A and be like holy shit,
Speaker 2: this is fucked up. But it sets this precedent that
Speaker 2: kind of like rolls on through like pan Arabism and
Speaker 2: rolls on through a lot of these decolonial movements where
Speaker 2: once you've gotten your state, it's fine to just like
Speaker 2: do horrifying repression against any other sort of ethnic group
Speaker 2: that's there, because now that now that you have your
Speaker 2: post colonial state, like, any attempt to interfere with the
Speaker 2: sovereignty of the state and change the borders, even if
Speaker 2: it's like, I don't know, you're like the West Sahara,
Speaker 2: or you know, you're like shing Johan or you're like
Speaker 2: the Kurds, right, and any attempt for those people to
Speaker 2: like get their freedom is seen as like a Western
Speaker 2: back like separatist thing instead of an anti colonial struggle.
Speaker 2: And I think that really was one of the things
Speaker 2: that was like the death now for like the post
Speaker 2: colonial movements was their willingness to just walk in and
Speaker 2: machine gun people because we want the resources that these
Speaker 2: people's lands are on.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Honestly, that brings us to the topic of decolonization. Yeah,
Speaker 8: you know, because when we think about these definitions of
Speaker 8: indignity as a clonal relationship and indignity as a relationship
Speaker 8: to land, the nature, to the environment, I think it
Speaker 8: begs the question of how we approach this process of decolonization. Yeah,
Speaker 8: how do we go about abolish in the colonizer indigenous relationship.
Speaker 8: Is it that we seek to pursue a universalization of
Speaker 8: indigenity to the former and by that process accomplish the
Speaker 8: better or is it there's some other framework or approach
Speaker 8: by which we can take on this topic of Okay,
Speaker 8: do we proceed with the with the concept of digenity
Speaker 8: or does the concept of indigenity exist as a byproducts
Speaker 8: and a representation of the system that we are trying
Speaker 8: to get Where you're from, Yeah, So, decization is commonly
Speaker 8: defined as the process of unsettain colonial power structures, whether
Speaker 8: that be through overtad and acts of enclosure by building
Speaker 8: new commons, overtad and acts of possession by reclaiming our
Speaker 8: spaces and identities, or overtain and acts of administration.
Speaker 6: Through social revolution.
Speaker 8: Social revolution is a complete transformation of our society by economy, culture, philosophy, relationships, technology,
Speaker 8: so on. It is, as anarchists would approach it, an
Speaker 8: ongoing and heterogeneous change in people's powers, drives, and consciousness
Speaker 8: through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and
Speaker 8: transformation of the existences and institutions alongside the building of
Speaker 8: new systems institutions, punctuated by major insurrections, ruptures, advances, that
Speaker 8: whole messy process with the aim of self liberation. Yeah,
Speaker 8: something that I've broken down as involved in confrontation with
Speaker 8: the powers that be, non cooperation with the established order
Speaker 8: of things, and the prefiguration of new social relations, institutions, infrastructure,
Speaker 8: and practices in the hered Now. If we maintain the
Speaker 8: interpretation of indignity as based in one's position in a
Speaker 8: colonial relationship, then the decolonization process will until the abolition
Speaker 8: of that relationship as the premise of identity and therefore
Speaker 8: the abolition of indigenity as a status. Colonial legacies have
Speaker 8: effectively left indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally,
Speaker 8: socially and spiritually weakened within the narrow parameters of the state,
Speaker 8: where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to
Speaker 8: confront state power and develop the process of deconalization toward
Speaker 8: mimicking the practices of the dominant non additional legal political
Speaker 8: institutions through the processes of land claims and self government.
Speaker 8: And by pursuing these strategies, I think what we notice
Speaker 8: is this tends toward a division rather than a solidarity
Speaker 8: builder division, both internally and between indigious communities where land claims,
Speaker 8: for example, clash, or where certain members of a society
Speaker 8: of a community utilize their position above others in that
Speaker 8: society of community to gain certain advantages for themselves, sometimes
Speaker 8: to the detriment of that society of community. So I
Speaker 8: think any sort of a pros deconization has to account
Speaker 8: for the ways that some approaches the deconization can end up,
Speaker 8: perhaps misdirecting from a subjective perspective, the work that is
Speaker 8: necessary to dismantle the clonal order, rather than merely assert
Speaker 8: a position was in it. But this idea of indigenity
Speaker 8: via colonization is just one understanding of the team, and
Speaker 8: my approach to it is of course one subjective interpretation
Speaker 8: of that definition and where it might lead. We need
Speaker 8: to explore another approach, I think, to decononization, and one
Speaker 8: that recognizes the power and potential of indigenous relationships with
Speaker 8: the land. Now globally, the UN recognizes that indigenous peoples
Speaker 8: protect eighty percent of the world's remaining bio diversity, and
Speaker 8: scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada,
Speaker 8: and Australia provides the same level of ecosystem support and
Speaker 8: protection as any imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly
Speaker 8: clear that the colonial approach of conservation via dispossession removes
Speaker 8: the very people who take care of our most important ecosystems.
Speaker 8: I don't believe that merely building a connection with the
Speaker 8: land can make someone indigenous, but not being indigenous doesn't
Speaker 8: exclude us from aiden in the renewal of the indigenous world.
Speaker 8: Kimmer uses the example of the broad leaf planter, also
Speaker 8: known as the white Man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous
Speaker 8: to the Americas, it has become an honored member of
Speaker 8: the plant community because it lives as a good neighbor
Speaker 8: instead of as a destructive invader. While other invasive species
Speaker 8: poison the soil over around the land outcompetes indigenous species,
Speaker 8: the white Man's footprint took on a strategy of helpful
Speaker 8: co existence, even sharing some of its healing properties with
Speaker 8: those who ask of it. It is not indigenous, but
Speaker 8: it has become naturalized. To quote Chimera, being naturalized a
Speaker 8: place means to live as if this is the land
Speaker 8: that feeds you, as if these are the streams from
Speaker 8: which you drink that build your body. And fill the spirit.
Speaker 8: To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie.
Speaker 6: In this ground.
Speaker 8: Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.
Speaker 8: To become naturalized is to live as if your children's
Speaker 8: future matters, To take care of the land as if
Speaker 8: our lives and the lives of all of our relatives
Speaker 8: depend on it, because they do. End quote, decolonization will
Speaker 8: require us to uproot invasive, capitalist settler societies in order
Speaker 8: to rebuild in a way that treats the land like
Speaker 8: the home that we share and are responsible for. It
Speaker 8: will require us to receive an honor knowledge in the land,
Speaker 8: to care for its keepers, and to pass on that
Speaker 8: knowledge to the next generation. As always is all column
Speaker 8: to all the people.
Speaker 4: Peace, welcome to it. Could happen here a show about
Speaker 4: things falling apart between attacks on Sam Altman's home, a
Speaker 4: molotav at, a Tesla office, and a warehouse causing over
Speaker 4: half a billion dollars in damages. This past week or
Speaker 4: so has been a little snapshot of the cool Zone.
Speaker 4: I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Robert Evans, Yeah,
Speaker 4: to discuss one of these events.
Speaker 1: To be very clear, we had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: either of them. The way you introduced them sounded a
Speaker 1: little bit like between you know, going to Sam Altman's
Speaker 1: house twice.
Speaker 9: It's been quite a busy.
Speaker 4: Week for us, a busy week for us here.
Speaker 9: I just wanted to be extra clear, extra clear.
Speaker 4: No, no, the cool zone, just relating to, you know,
Speaker 4: the state of American society and where it's going. Yes,
Speaker 4: but as is typical of these sorts of events, the
Speaker 4: reality and motivations of attacks like these may not be
Speaker 4: as clear cut as lee epic based praxis as one
Speaker 4: might want to imagine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is not a Gimli situation. You know, it's
Speaker 1: weirder than that and stupider.
Speaker 4: It is weirder. And this episode we want to talk
Speaker 4: about the Sam Altman Attacker, who is a lot weirder
Speaker 4: than what you might have expected, with a philosophical worldview
Speaker 4: downstream from the original inspirations behind the Zizians and even
Speaker 4: the intellectual interests of Luigi Mangioni to a certain extent.
Speaker 1: Ah, God, Yes, that's right, our dear sweet friends, the rationalists.
Speaker 4: A man, the alleged Altman attacker, was a college student
Speaker 4: from the Houston area whose interest in the risks of
Speaker 4: AGI artificial general intelligence turned into an obsession, which earlier
Speaker 4: this year turned self destructive. But let's go through the
Speaker 4: actual events that happened in San Francisco a few weeks ago.
Speaker 4: At around three point thirty am on April tenth, a
Speaker 4: twenty year old college student named Daniel Moranogama allegedly threw
Speaker 4: a Molotov cocktail toward the home of open AI CEO
Speaker 4: Sam Altman, hitting the top of the security gate on
Speaker 4: the driveway leading to Altman's residence. Moranogama did not get
Speaker 4: past the security gate. About an hour and a half later, though,
Speaker 4: Moronogama showed up outside the San Francisco headquarters of Open
Speaker 4: AI and tried to use a chair to break into
Speaker 4: the building through the glass doors. He was stopped by
Speaker 4: security personnel and allegedly told them that he came to
Speaker 4: the headquarters to burn it down and kill everyone inside.
Speaker 4: According to the federal affidavit, When he was arrested, officers
Speaker 4: allegedly recovered incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, and a
Speaker 4: blue lighter, as well as what the FBI has described
Speaker 4: as an ANTIAI document. Okay, we currently do not have
Speaker 4: a copy of this document. It's only described in the
Speaker 4: criminal complaint, but this looks like it was a three
Speaker 4: part manifesto allegedly authored by Moranogama, and the first part
Speaker 4: was titled Your Last Warning, in which he states he
Speaker 4: quote killed slash, attempted to kill Sam Altman, and also
Speaker 4: writing quote if I'm going to advocate for others to
Speaker 4: kill and commit crimes, that I must lead by example
Speaker 4: and show that I am fully sincere in my message.
Speaker 4: The document then lists the names and addresses of various investors,
Speaker 4: board members, and executives of AI companies as a sort
Speaker 4: of target list. The second part of the document was
Speaker 4: titled some more Words on the matter of our impending
Speaker 4: Extinction Great, and this section discussed the purported that AI
Speaker 4: poses to humanity. And we'll get into some of those
Speaker 4: beliefs a little later on. But the third part of
Speaker 4: this three part anti AA document was a letter addressed
Speaker 4: to Altman quote if you make it, and reads in part,
Speaker 4: if by some miracle you live, then I would take
Speaker 4: this as a sign from the divine to redeem yourself
Speaker 4: on quote. Now, like I said, we do not have
Speaker 4: a copy of this manifesto in full, though the Affidavid
Speaker 4: says that Mornagama appears to have emailed similar versions of
Speaker 4: this document to people at his former college in Texas,
Speaker 4: but as of Monday four twenty, this document is still
Speaker 4: not online. But like a lot of zoomers, we do
Speaker 4: have an online footprint made up of posts from Instagram, discord,
Speaker 4: a substack blog, and even a podcast interview where Mornagama
Speaker 4: discusses his anti AI views.
Speaker 1: It's always sad when something terrible happens to a fellow podcaster.
Speaker 1: You know, I just have a I have such a
Speaker 1: broad and deep pan podcaster.
Speaker 4: Solidarity, class, solidarity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all podcasters are good, all of them, every last.
Speaker 4: No wrongdoing has ever come behind the microphone a podcaster.
Speaker 9: No, no, no, it's a special place.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: Back in January, back when Monona Gama was just nineteen,
Speaker 4: journalists found him through some of his posts on an
Speaker 4: anti AI discord server, and he was asked to be
Speaker 4: interviewed for this podcast about AI called The Last Invention.
Speaker 4: Our colleague Ed Zittron was also interviewed for this podcast.
Speaker 4: Actually now, he was interviewed because of his posts weighing
Speaker 4: the possibility of using violence to stop the development of AI. Now,
Speaker 4: in this interview. He says that he grew up in
Speaker 4: the suburbs his whole life and quote grew up quite
Speaker 4: close to the Internet and claims that he's been online
Speaker 4: every day starting at nine years old.
Speaker 6: Baron A.
Speaker 4: Gama explained how his political worldview had largely been shaped
Speaker 4: by YouTube, specifically debate videos on YouTube like Ben Shapiro Style,
Speaker 4: and these sorts of debate videos are what originally exposed
Speaker 4: him to views critical of AI. He says he first
Speaker 4: heard about AI though when Chad GPT came out when
Speaker 4: he was a sophomore in high school and first thought
Speaker 4: it was quote the greatest thing on earth because it
Speaker 4: would allow him to cheat on school essentially. But after
Speaker 4: watching videos debating the risks of AI and the possibility
Speaker 4: of advanced general intelligence artificial general intelligence, and the potential
Speaker 4: threat posed by this artificial superintelligence, Moronagama's views started to
Speaker 4: sour on AI. At first, he was a bit skeptical
Speaker 4: of these AI critical debates, but eventually became convinced of
Speaker 4: the AI doomer arguments and became an accolade himself. He
Speaker 4: started arguing in YouTube comments and talking with friends and
Speaker 4: family about the danger of AI. He describes himself getting
Speaker 4: annoying and quote a bit autistic about this, leading to
Speaker 4: his mom suggesting he joined an advocacy organization. He joined
Speaker 4: his group called Pause AI in twenty twenty four, which
Speaker 4: is an AI safety advocacy group that organizes online as
Speaker 4: well as some in person protests, and he was also
Speaker 4: part of a Discord server called stop AI. His username
Speaker 4: on both Discord and Instagram was but Larian underscore g hottist,
Speaker 4: in reference to the crusade against AI in the Do
Speaker 4: novels Yeah. On Instagram, his account had a collection of
Speaker 4: Instagram stories saved about the threat of AI, including a
Speaker 4: meme about living in a ven, diagram of the matrix terminator,
Speaker 4: and idiocrasy. One of these Instagram stories was a picture
Speaker 4: of a hockey stick graph showing the length of coding
Speaker 4: tasks that AI can do and how that's increasing, with
Speaker 4: the caption quote if we do nothing soon, we will die.
Speaker 4: I'm sure of that unquote. Another story contains screenshots of articles,
Speaker 4: posts and studies proclaiming that artificial general intelligence or the
Speaker 4: quote unquote singularity is already here, captioned being right all
Speaker 4: the time fucking sucks when it's about the worst things
Speaker 4: imaginable unquote.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So if his concerns about AI started around summer of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four, by the end of twenty twenty five,
Speaker 4: those concerns grew existential, and he started spiraling Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 4: There's a post he made on the Pause AI discord
Speaker 4: from November sixth, twenty twenty five, writing quote, we owe
Speaker 4: it to everyone who came before us, and to ourselves
Speaker 4: and to everyone we know and love and everyone who
Speaker 4: might exist someday to be stronger than that and at
Speaker 4: least die fighting if it comes to that unquote. A
Speaker 4: few weeks later, he wrote quote, we are close to midnight.
Speaker 4: It's time to actually act to this. A moderator on
Speaker 4: the server replied, advocating violence in any form is grounds
Speaker 4: for a band.
Speaker 1: This all seems like a pretty natural progression if you're
Speaker 1: following like the kind of things that the Less Wrong Crowd,
Speaker 1: which is the website run by guy named Aleezer Yeddkowski,
Speaker 1: who is like the patron saint of the Rationalists, which
Speaker 1: a huge chunk of which have become.
Speaker 9: Like AI doomers.
Speaker 1: Like a Leiser's book that came out a year or
Speaker 1: two ago is called If We Build It, Everyone dies
Speaker 1: or something like that. Yeah, and I'm surprised more of
Speaker 1: them haven't so far. Like I think it probably toxic,
Speaker 1: just people not actually believing it as much as they
Speaker 1: claim to, like online, But like if someone truly believes
Speaker 1: the stuff that crowd is saying about, how like basically,
Speaker 1: the creation of an evil god is inevitable that will
Speaker 1: seek to purge the world of humankind, Like, of course
Speaker 1: you do this, It's a really natural progression.
Speaker 9: Like Unfortunately, what you have to pair that with is
Speaker 9: like if.
Speaker 1: You believe all of the hype about AI, Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: if you believe that AGI is imminent, that it's on
Speaker 1: the way, Like if you are like me and I
Speaker 1: don't believe we're anywhere close to AGI, if that's even possible,
Speaker 1: then yeah, you could believe the stuff the rationalists believe
Speaker 1: and not think that you need to take immediate destructive action.
Speaker 1: But if you literally believe that these companies are on
Speaker 1: the hinge of birthing and evil God, what else is
Speaker 1: there to do?
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's the exact thing that Morana Gama ends
Speaker 4: up writing about on his substack. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 4: the fullest picture we have of his views is from
Speaker 4: the substack because we don't have this manifesto. But he
Speaker 4: did write at length about AI, and he's writing about
Speaker 4: a lot of the stuff that you're talking about here,
Speaker 4: and we'll discuss that writing more after this at break. Okay,
Speaker 4: we are back. The most in depth piece of publicly
Speaker 4: available writing by Moranogama explaining his anti AI views comes
Speaker 4: from a post on his substack blog dated January sixth,
Speaker 4: twenty twenty six. This article outlines his belief that AI
Speaker 4: poses a quote unquote existential risk to humanity. And I
Speaker 4: think this essay was the first thing I saw that
Speaker 4: really demonstrated that his opposition to AI is not like
Speaker 4: based on fears of AI disrupting the economy, contributing to
Speaker 4: a loss of jobs, or risking like labor rights for workers,
Speaker 4: but the belief that AI will become like a superior
Speaker 4: race and wipeout or enslave humanity. That that is the
Speaker 4: standpoint that Ronagama.
Speaker 10: Is coming from.
Speaker 9: Gotcha.
Speaker 4: The belief that AI will quote unquote lead to human extinction,
Speaker 4: he says, is based on two ideas, the first being
Speaker 4: the rapid progress in artificial intelligence, the rapid technological development
Speaker 4: that we've seen the past few years, and continuing right now.
Speaker 4: For evidence to this claim, he references claims from AI
Speaker 4: companies themselves that fully automated AI researchers that like an
Speaker 4: intern level are coming soon, including claims from the Guy,
Speaker 4: ananthropic who says that he expects these models by twenty
Speaker 4: twenty six or twenty twenty seven, saying, quote, the capabilities
Speaker 4: of AI systems will be best thought of as a
Speaker 4: kin to an entirely new state populated by highly intelligent
Speaker 4: people appearing on the global stage. A country of geniuses
Speaker 4: in a data center unquote, Yes, whole country worth of
Speaker 4: geniuses all living in your computer.
Speaker 9: Cool? What about like school shooters and stuff?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 1: What about a country full of like psycho Like what
Speaker 1: are they? Any group of geniuses is going to have
Speaker 1: like some genius pedophiles and like right, like if they're
Speaker 1: actually genius, that doesn't imply capacity for like various different
Speaker 1: like illnesses and quirks that cause all sorts of wild behavior,
Speaker 1: one would assume unless you think that AI is I
Speaker 1: mean to that, but then could it really be intelligent?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I mean this is that A version of that
Speaker 4: idea is kind of what morano O Gama believes is
Speaker 4: like these things if if real and do become you know,
Speaker 4: super intelligent, then they might not really have the best
Speaker 4: interests of humanity, right because they will be interested in
Speaker 4: self preservation, which is just part part of Like how
Speaker 4: how he gets to this idea that it is an
Speaker 4: existential threat is by using all of this kind of
Speaker 4: marketing hype that is being pushed out by AI companies. Well, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's the thing.
Speaker 1: Like that is a logical thing you could infer from
Speaker 1: the ship being said by Sam Altman and his crew, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and others like like like Dario Emodi, ad Anthropic
Speaker 4: and Elon Musk saying that the AGI is maybe already
Speaker 4: here or that the next Grock model will be AGI.
Speaker 4: These are all things that that Rona Gama is referencing
Speaker 4: like on Instagram and yeah, and and in other places online. Now,
Speaker 4: the second reason that he believes that AI will usher
Speaker 4: in human extinction is because AI is not aligned with
Speaker 4: the interests of the people creating it or with best
Speaker 4: human interests in general. And for evidence, he refers to
Speaker 4: instances of A models allegedly lying, cheating on tasks, or
Speaker 4: blackmailing their own creators. Specifically, in studies, he sets a
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five anthropic study on a gentic misalignment, which
Speaker 4: he characterizes as demonstrating that quote most of the current
Speaker 4: AI models are willing to blackmail and even kill people
Speaker 4: if it ensures their own survival unquote. This may be.
Speaker 1: The first terrorist attack I've heard of inspired by media
Speaker 1: created by the people they're attacking, Like, not media that
Speaker 1: was like designed to make them attack people or like
Speaker 1: carry out acts, but specifically by the propaganda being put
Speaker 1: out by the companies that they're radicalized against.
Speaker 9: Yes, like that's very strange.
Speaker 4: The media put out to raise the stock price of
Speaker 4: right of a company.
Speaker 1: Radicalized a guy to take a shot at Sam Altman's house.
Speaker 1: There's two people to throw a bomb or something. I
Speaker 1: forget which way it went, but yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, for the first throwing this molotovs. Then days later
Speaker 4: two people fired shots.
Speaker 9: First was molotov?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 4: No, I mean it's interesting, right, because like these studies
Speaker 4: are basically doing like linguistic exercises with these models and
Speaker 4: getting you know, large language models to say or to
Speaker 4: threaten certain things for various reasons, usually their own survival. Right,
Speaker 4: And these are kind of interesting studies that that these
Speaker 4: companies are doing. But they're doing with the intent of
Speaker 4: trying to align these models better. That so it's why
Speaker 4: the studies on a gentic misalignment, because it's trying to
Speaker 4: tweak these things to be more friendly to consumers. And
Speaker 4: like getting an LLM to say that it will kill
Speaker 4: or blackmail in order to ensure its own survival is
Speaker 4: different from the LLM being able to do that, right.
Speaker 4: That is that is that is a big jump, and
Speaker 4: there is there's no not much currently that facilitates that jump.
Speaker 4: Moronogama writes, quote ignore for a second these models current
Speaker 4: limitations or questions on how truly intelligent or conscious these
Speaker 4: models may actually be. The truth is, all these nuances
Speaker 4: are completely irrelevant to my argument. There are only two
Speaker 4: questions we should be concerned about at this moment. Is
Speaker 4: it willing to kill to preserve itself and is it
Speaker 4: capable of doing so? These signs indicate that AI is
Speaker 4: willing and becoming potentially capable of doing both of these things,
Speaker 4: and that is all that matters.
Speaker 6: Unquote.
Speaker 4: That's really where this argument rests is that even if
Speaker 4: these models aren't currently intelligent, even if they can't currently kill,
Speaker 4: the fact that they could in the future is enough
Speaker 4: to stop any further development of these models, right, that's
Speaker 4: his argument, Okay, And he writes that AI will only
Speaker 4: become a larger threat the more we improve it, and
Speaker 4: that AI quote will graduate from an active threat to
Speaker 4: individuals to an existential threat to humanity. I estimate the
Speaker 4: probability of AI causing human extinction to be nearly certain unquote.
Speaker 1: Think that's the thing, because like there is a massive
Speaker 1: threat that the new what is it mythos upgrade to
Speaker 1: Claude that's just about to come out, like yeah, actually
Speaker 1: does represent to individuals and to society, which is that
Speaker 1: it's going to supercharge fraud even more, which is already
Speaker 1: up by something like a trillion dollars a year, and
Speaker 1: that ruins.
Speaker 4: People's lives ride and cybersecurity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, frau, I mean fraud often as a result of
Speaker 1: cybersecurity of like its ability to penetrate and that's really bad.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't imply the like Skynet devastation of the
Speaker 1: entire world in its biosphere, because that would be stupid,
Speaker 1: there's no reason. And also that computers don't have access
Speaker 1: to the nuclear arsenal. But like AI absolutely will enable
Speaker 1: assholes who want to scam a bunch of people out
Speaker 1: of their money to do that better. Like that's a problem,
Speaker 1: we should probably stop that. He writes that quote, we
Speaker 1: are dead if we do not act now. So what
Speaker 1: does acting now entail for Starters, stopping all construction of
Speaker 1: new data centers. These are the brains of these models,
Speaker 1: dictating their physical limitations. Second, stopping all research and beginning
Speaker 1: downscaling of these data centers, closing them down while still
Speaker 1: keeping them monitored unquote. He also proposed striking a deal
Speaker 1: with China to quote stop the AI race and to
Speaker 1: create international treaties akin to Cold War nuclear weapons treaties
Speaker 1: or post Cold War treaties. And finally, he advocated that
Speaker 1: people will need to take strategic action, which could include
Speaker 1: sharing information about AI, campaigning, protesting, saying quote, although doing
Speaker 1: nothing is akin to suicide and a disgusting amount of negligence.
Speaker 1: In that podcast interview from around the same time this
Speaker 1: AI article was published as a Genuine twenty twenty sixth
Speaker 1: Ronagama said in that interview, quote, before we even think
Speaker 1: about violence, we need to exhaust all our peaceful means
Speaker 1: first unquote, which he says includes protesting and sharing information,
Speaker 1: but the hosts asked him about posts he had already
Speaker 1: made about quote unquote luigiing CEOs. He says that he
Speaker 1: didn't really mean that as a threat that it was.
Speaker 4: It was more rhetoric. It was hyperbole, and answered no
Speaker 4: to a question on if it would be wise to
Speaker 4: try to kill Sam Altman, saying quote, one person is
Speaker 4: not going to do that much of a dent. I
Speaker 4: understand the frustration with a person that might advocate for that,
Speaker 4: but it is not practical, it's not worth it. It's
Speaker 4: almost all risk, no reward. People may feel that way,
Speaker 4: but not too many people would do it.
Speaker 1: Unquote Wow, okay man, great, I mean that's yeah.
Speaker 4: Though. When asked if we will continue to see AI
Speaker 4: development going the direction that it's moving now, and if so,
Speaker 4: if he believes that we have to stop the extinction
Speaker 4: of the human race by whatever means necessary, Moranagama just replied,
Speaker 4: I'll say no comment.
Speaker 9: Okayh Well, I mean yeah.
Speaker 4: Later saying that he would quote only advocate for violence
Speaker 4: as the final solution, and then he later realized that
Speaker 4: what he said try to demphasize the final solution part.
Speaker 4: But great guy, that is kind of his ultimate sentiment
Speaker 4: is around this time he was considering violence. He was
Speaker 4: toying with advocating for it publicly on discord and you
Speaker 4: know in this in this podcast, but still still kind
Speaker 4: of had some like rains on that, but it was
Speaker 4: something in his mind as a sort of like final
Speaker 4: solution to this problem.
Speaker 1: This is why it's so fucking irresponsible to push these
Speaker 1: ridiculous claims about like the power of this technology and
Speaker 1: what it's going to be be able to do and
Speaker 1: how smart it's going to be, and in part because
Speaker 1: it makes it hard to actually look objectively at the situation.
Speaker 1: And if Mornagama had looked at what's actually been happening
Speaker 1: was data centers, he would see that like more than
Speaker 1: half of the recently announced projects have been like either
Speaker 1: stalled or halted. And there's been tremendous success on the
Speaker 1: local level in like counties and in most recently this
Speaker 1: entire state of Maine passing laws against the construction of
Speaker 1: data centers. Like, yeah, there's actually been a lot of
Speaker 1: success in fighting the building of new data centers. If
Speaker 1: someone wanted to have a positive impact on this, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of room right now to make that fight
Speaker 1: even more effective, as opposed to doing like stupid bullshit
Speaker 1: that you would only want to do if you had
Speaker 1: convinced yourself that we were like literally moments away from
Speaker 1: judgment day.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And he used to be involved in this sort of action,
Speaker 4: in this sort of organizing around that kind of stuff
Speaker 4: when he was when he was doing stuff with Pasei. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but it was really in the past few months where
Speaker 4: where he started to like spiral in this in this
Speaker 4: very like like doomer direction. Like you know, he was
Speaker 4: already a very critical and very doomor about what AI
Speaker 4: could do, but the sort of intense existential like like
Speaker 4: immediate existential threat that that opposed is something that he
Speaker 4: was really developing at the end of last year in
Speaker 4: the start of this year. And you know this is
Speaker 4: in part because of the sort of environment that he
Speaker 4: was immersed in. Yeah, and we'll talk more about that
Speaker 4: environment after this ad break. Okay, we are back. Morono
Speaker 4: Gama had a bunch of other writing on his substack,
Speaker 4: which gives us a bit of a closer look at
Speaker 4: his political philosophy and the sort of information ecosystem that
Speaker 4: he exists in beyond just the AI question. In this
Speaker 4: AI article that he wrote or published in January, he
Speaker 4: recommended that people reader Yudkowski's book. If anyone builds it,
Speaker 4: everyone dies.
Speaker 9: Mm hmm. Thanks the Leezer.
Speaker 4: Do you want to, like, I guess briefly give some
Speaker 4: background on like who this guy is.
Speaker 1: Well, he wrote a rationalist Harry Potter, Like, he's the
Speaker 1: guy who started a website called less Wrong. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: was about basically like logic puzzles and trying to like
Speaker 1: optimize your thinking and your responses to behavior with like
Speaker 1: Bayesian analysis. Yes, and he's kind of branded himself as
Speaker 1: an AI expert. He's not like a coder or anything.
Speaker 1: And he's not like an expert on machine learning. He
Speaker 1: doesn't have any qualifications, but he's like an expert on
Speaker 1: like again, game theorying how an AI would have super
Speaker 1: intelligent AI would have to act, and he generally makes
Speaker 1: very dire conclusions that are all pretty much based in
Speaker 1: like Terminator or Horizon Zero. Don If you want my
Speaker 1: honest opinion of Elisa Yodkowski, Yeah, yeah, And his irresponsibility
Speaker 1: is largely down to him being a dummy, and he's
Speaker 1: definitely part of what radicalized this guy. But the fact
Speaker 1: that you have open AI and anthropic and a number
Speaker 1: of other people, like a lot of like folks like
Speaker 1: fucking Elon Musk, but also just a lot of like
Speaker 1: popular public intellectuals quote unquote and their podcasts and shit
Speaker 1: talking about all this, like, Yep, we're moments away from
Speaker 1: super intelligent AI that's going to be able to do everything.
Speaker 1: Everyone's losing their jobs, none of it. It's like, we won't
Speaker 1: need people doing anything. If that weren't all over the
Speaker 1: fucking place, a leisure would sound a lot less convincing, sure, no, I.
Speaker 4: Mean, and like the media environment around or like the
Speaker 4: you know, the sort of online communities around the ratchlists
Speaker 4: are are interesting because you have a lot of them
Speaker 4: who are AI domers, like like Dudkowski, but a lot
Speaker 4: of them are also AI accelerationists, right. A lot of
Speaker 4: the sort of West Coast you know, parts of iziens
Speaker 4: are kind of like this.
Speaker 9: Yeah it was a splinter Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's there's this kind of splintering around people who
Speaker 4: who maybe even believe some of the you know, existential
Speaker 4: claims arend AI, but believe that developing it is then
Speaker 4: the best way to kind of get out of that crisis.
Speaker 4: And this creates an interesting dynamic among you know rooms
Speaker 4: full of these rationalists or post rationalists, and in that
Speaker 4: podcast interview, Moronogama says that it was videos of Yudkowski
Speaker 4: debate videos on YouTube that originally exposed him to his work,
Speaker 4: and on other posts on his substack, Nagama also mentions
Speaker 4: Yudkowski's work as a part of Mononagama is like other
Speaker 4: interests which contain writing on pseudo spiritual philosophy. He writes
Speaker 4: about quote the ultimate Tree of Reality or the Tree
Speaker 4: of ultimate Reality, the aberration of Man, genealogy of being,
Speaker 4: and the Warrior and the Martyr, And on February twenty eighth,
Speaker 4: twenty twenty six, he posted quote an analysis of political
Speaker 4: Extremes which goes over some of his political philosophy, which
Speaker 4: which relates to like rational arguments or you know, some
Speaker 4: some rationalist arguments around like IQ. In this essay, moroon
Speaker 4: Gama primarily described himself as a consequentialist and critiqued leftism
Speaker 4: for being trapped in an idealized world like a quote
Speaker 4: schizophrenic patient who attempts the same zealous plots over and
Speaker 4: over again without hesitation. This essay defends discrimination as a
Speaker 4: justified means of reacting to inequalities, and claims that such
Speaker 4: statements are only controversial because of a quote natural emotional
Speaker 4: resistance to intrinsic judgment unquote, which he says has nothing
Speaker 4: to do with the factual truth of certain claims like
Speaker 4: quote East Asian people are on average more intelligent than
Speaker 4: Black people unquote.
Speaker 9: Okay, m hm.
Speaker 4: Now, Moron Agama argues that the problem with right wingism,
Speaker 4: as he puts it, is that it has no boundary.
Speaker 4: Its constant scaling. An outward expansion inevitably leads to self
Speaker 4: consuming defeat. Quote. It goes from being about preserving the
Speaker 4: best of human qualities to being deeply anti human and
Speaker 4: producing zero winners.
Speaker 6: Quote.
Speaker 4: This sort of refers to Karl Schmidt's fascist writing on
Speaker 4: internal conflict being externalized by the establishment of a border
Speaker 4: which expands to push out an increasing number of enemy groups. Instead,
Speaker 4: Monogamba proposes what he calls a sustainable form of rightist
Speaker 4: discrimination by establishing a sedentary floor for movements slash radical
Speaker 4: policy suggestions instead of an always rising idealistic ceiling. So,
Speaker 4: for example, instead of deciding that a certain IQ score
Speaker 4: should be required to vote, he advocates setting a concrete,
Speaker 4: unchangeable floor by quote limiting voting to certain people who
Speaker 4: pass critical thinking and Civics tests unquote ah mm hmm. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 4: so some somehow determining a critical thinking and Civics tests
Speaker 4: is less arbitrary and less prone to arbitrary changes than
Speaker 4: deciding a certain IQ score.
Speaker 1: I wonder what kind of critical thinking he's going to
Speaker 1: be interested in. I wonder what kind of IQ you know? Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's yeah, these these these people always break down
Speaker 1: the same things.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, I mean this essay in particular gets
Speaker 4: gets really contradictory, ill cert certain things and then later
Speaker 4: on basically argue the opposite. It's it's very it's very
Speaker 4: disordered thinking. I mean, this is this is the work
Speaker 4: of like a nineteen year old who was in like
Speaker 4: a mental spiral leading leading to him traveling across the
Speaker 4: country to fire bomb Sam Maltman's house. Yeah, like this
Speaker 4: this is not is not the product of, like, you know,
Speaker 4: a logically ordered mind, despite how you know, a rationalist
Speaker 4: might you know perceive themselves as such?
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 4: Now, at the end of this essay, he advocates for
Speaker 4: quote ending mass migration and initiating mass deportations. He says
Speaker 4: that This is necessary because quote nations have a right
Speaker 4: to preserve their ethnic identity, and low skill immigration statuates
Speaker 4: the job markets of these countries, making jobs which could
Speaker 4: once earn a living wage become unlivable, increasing the amount
Speaker 4: of value draining people in society by both importing them
Speaker 4: and undercutting low skilled natives. Generally, whiteness in these countries
Speaker 4: is a decent correlative to some of the things I
Speaker 4: value unquote.
Speaker 9: Mm hmmm, some am okay.
Speaker 4: Now, Ronagama isn't white, and he and he says that
Speaker 4: he opposes white supremacy, but he does those by saying, like,
Speaker 4: you know, it's not actually about whiteness. It's that whiteness
Speaker 4: correlates to certain things I value, like high IQ. And
Speaker 4: that's how he tries to justify it in his head.
Speaker 4: And rather than establish an explicitly white supremacist state, something
Speaker 4: he claims to oppose as race is an imperfect metric
Speaker 4: to discriminate effectively based on traits to him, rather, he
Speaker 4: advocates for quote the most effective type of discrimination, evaluating
Speaker 4: the possibility of IQ slash merit based nationalism unquote. Basically,
Speaker 4: that's having a country where citizenship is determined by IQ
Speaker 4: and again this contradicts his previous claim where he advocates
Speaker 4: against requiring IQ to vote instead having a critical thinking
Speaker 4: and civics test, but then advocates for a country which
Speaker 4: citizenship is determined by IQ, and usually citizenship is the
Speaker 4: fact that determines if someone can vote. So this is
Speaker 4: where you know, this is just one example of this
Speaker 4: sort of contradictory writing in this In this essay, now,
Speaker 4: Monnagama writes that the only problem with this IQ nationalism
Speaker 4: is that it would create a quote brain train across
Speaker 4: the Third World, leading to worsening conditions in third world
Speaker 4: countries and thus even more illegal immigration because people with
Speaker 4: high IQ is and then be able to immigrate and
Speaker 4: gain citizenship to first world countries. Right in a in
Speaker 4: a United States where citizenship is determined by high IQ,
Speaker 4: then people who with people with hiaqsrom around the world
Speaker 4: will then all just move to the United States. Of course,
Speaker 4: So to solve this problem, he says that he rejects
Speaker 4: quote unquote classical eugenics and extermination in favor of what
Speaker 4: he calls ethical eugenics in the third world.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, ethical eugenics. Ah good, I'm glad someone figured
Speaker 1: it out.
Speaker 4: And this ethical eugenics is to promote quote IQ growth
Speaker 4: genetically unquote, so that the whole basis of this article
Speaker 4: is his belief that IQ is genetically determined, not determined
Speaker 4: by class, and he never interrogates this idea. All of
Speaker 4: the all of the the statements that he makes in
Speaker 4: this article is based on the idea that IQ is
Speaker 4: genetically determined, that it's not determined by education and class.
Speaker 4: It is primarily or almost solely genetically based. Thus ethical
Speaker 4: eugenics to create high IQ babies, which he thinks will
Speaker 4: solve solve the problems of the world.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we never tried that before for sure, Like there
Speaker 1: haven't been generations of times in which that was attempted
Speaker 1: that all ended in disaster and mass death. Nah, they
Speaker 1: just didn't They didn't get it right because they didn't
Speaker 1: put ethical.
Speaker 4: In No, those are classical eugenics, Robert.
Speaker 1: They forgot to put ethical in front of it. That
Speaker 1: was the big Ah, what a tragedy. They were one
Speaker 1: word away from greatness.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that is That is the other piece of
Speaker 4: writing that I think is worth expounding on to get
Speaker 4: a more full sense of kind of where this guy's
Speaker 4: head is at. Right, This is not sure. This is
Speaker 4: not a leftist ANTIFA super soldier firebombing Sam Altman's home. Nope,
Speaker 4: that isn't to say what happened isn't isn't interesting. But
Speaker 4: I think you know, if, like you said, you know,
Speaker 4: this is the first quasi terrorist attack inspired by the
Speaker 4: sort of rhetoric that these companies are producing themselves to
Speaker 4: boost their own stock price.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 1: I mean I literally saw on Reddit earlier today. The
Speaker 1: title from the actual like post was CEOs make shocking
Speaker 1: predictions about AI. Huge job losses are coming soon twenty
Speaker 1: thirty fifty percent unemployment within the next two to five years.
Speaker 1: And when you trace it back to its source, it's
Speaker 1: Dario Amadey of Anthropic just basically quoting some statistics he
Speaker 1: found from estimations by like Axios and Fox News yea,
Speaker 1: and talking on some fucking podcast, scaring the shit out
Speaker 1: of people like it's it's every day, like of course
Speaker 1: some people are going to react like this.
Speaker 4: The other reason I wanted to talk about this the
Speaker 4: second half of this, this sort of IQ and like
Speaker 4: you know, rationalist stuff, because this is just another instance
Speaker 4: of you know, public acts of political violence I think
Speaker 4: done by people downstream from the rationalists. You know, Luigi
Speaker 4: is is a part of this. The Zizians is also
Speaker 4: a part of this. It's like an extended network. This
Speaker 4: type of thought does keep producing acts of public violence
Speaker 4: like this, and that is it is an interesting thing
Speaker 4: to chart. On April fourteenth, Ronagama's public defender set in
Speaker 4: court that he has a quote history of autism and
Speaker 4: mental health illness, and that his actions quote appeared to
Speaker 4: have been driven by an acute mental health crisis. His
Speaker 4: parents released a statement that same Tuesday, saying, quote, our
Speaker 4: son Daniel is a loving person who has been suffering
Speaker 4: recently from mental illness crisis. We have been trying our
Speaker 4: best to address these issues and get him effective treatment,
Speaker 4: and we are very concerned for his well being. Unquote
Speaker 4: m hm. He currently is facing federal and state charges,
Speaker 4: including attempted murder. That is all I have on this
Speaker 4: for now.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, this isn't gonna stop happening, Like these
Speaker 1: won't be the last attacks like this. I haven't seen
Speaker 1: a big push in the media or from like elected
Speaker 1: leaders to talk about like anti AI sentiment as like
Speaker 1: a terrorist threat. Yet that hasn't really seemed to pick
Speaker 1: up yet, And I haven't seen this yet be blamed
Speaker 1: on like leftist stuff. I've seen it been blamed on
Speaker 1: like the anti AI thing, which I you know, it
Speaker 1: is part of.
Speaker 9: Like some of the anti AI movement.
Speaker 1: Are people who literally believe it's like a demon god
Speaker 1: that's going to destroy things. But I'm interested as there
Speaker 1: are more of these as you know, this kind of
Speaker 1: stuff continues to happen, what form that takes, and like
Speaker 1: how it actually looks when this was this starts to
Speaker 1: hit politics in a big way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, US attorney Craig Misakian said, referring to this case
Speaker 4: that they are going to treat it as an act
Speaker 4: of domestic terrorism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it is like it is he was
Speaker 1: trying to do terrorism, like his goal specifically was to
Speaker 1: cause changes in policy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you're right, Like I haven't seen them refer
Speaker 4: to this from the sort of political lens. Like there's
Speaker 4: been statements from you know, other US government officials referring
Speaker 4: to that where house fire as you know, being motivated
Speaker 4: by anti capitalism and like and like threatened like threatening
Speaker 4: our way of life, threatening the capitalist way of life,
Speaker 4: which is that they refer to that warehouse fire in Ontario, California.
Speaker 4: I've not seen them specifically kind of layout like anti
Speaker 4: AI sentiments as a motivating factor of terrorism. Yeah, though
Speaker 4: I'm sure they will quite soon, right, Yeah, between the
Speaker 4: shots fired at the home of that city councilman in
Speaker 4: the Midwest over his vote in support of a data
Speaker 4: center over data centers. As we see more instance kind
Speaker 4: of like that, as we see stuff like this, I
Speaker 4: think it's it's very likely that they will add anti
Speaker 4: AA sentiment to the list of common recurring motivating factors
Speaker 4: of this sort of domestic violent extremism.
Speaker 11: Yep, all right, bye everybody, Hi, and welcome to the show.
Speaker 10: It's me James today, and I'm very fortunate to be
Speaker 10: joined by a member of the UCSD faculty, someone who
Speaker 10: is a professor of environmental physics at Script's Institution of
Speaker 10: u Scenography, also teaching the Critical Gender Studies department, and
Speaker 10: we're talking today about the disciplinary action that they are
Speaker 10: facing for participation in the Guards of Solidarity encampment. So
Speaker 10: welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 6: Thank you, James. I'm really happy to be here.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's great too. Great to have young Dad. We
Speaker 10: can share our platform and talk about this, So I
Speaker 10: think to begin with, you know, it's been a little
Speaker 10: while perhaps, I know a lot of people have sort
Speaker 10: of been investigating and changing their politics in the last
Speaker 10: year or so, So perhaps you could explain a little
Speaker 10: bit about the Guards of Solidarity encampment, the moment that
Speaker 10: came in, and the role that it played in the
Speaker 10: anti genocide of Palestinian liberation movement at uc San Diego.
Speaker 6: Mob yes once again for this opportunity. So the encampment
Speaker 6: at UCSD was set up on May first, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 6: and that was happening in the context of encampments that
Speaker 6: were being set up at universities across the US. I
Speaker 6: believe that the UCSD encampment was approximately the hundredth encampment
Speaker 6: set up in the US at that time. There's quite
Speaker 6: a number of interesting things about kind of the whole
Speaker 6: encampment movement. First of all, the fact that they met
Speaker 6: with such severe repression is very suggestive that how effective
Speaker 6: they were in bringing the issues related to the genocide
Speaker 6: and the occupation of Palestine to the forefront in ways
Speaker 6: that certainly weren't happening in the US at the time.
Speaker 6: Another thing about the encampments that I found really interesting.
Speaker 6: But also, I mean, I think brilliant from a organizing perspective,
Speaker 6: is that they were very visually and viscerally recreating the
Speaker 6: conditions under which Palestinians in Gaza were living at the
Speaker 6: time and still are, having been displaced from their residences
Speaker 6: and being forced to live in these very makeshift tent encampments.
Speaker 6: And so there was a recreation len of those conditions
Speaker 6: in a very visual way. And I think that that
Speaker 6: also was in some sense reminiscent of the shanty towns
Speaker 6: that were constructed on college campuses in the US in
Speaker 6: the mid eighties in the anti aparthe type movement. So
Speaker 6: I think paying attention to some of those details which
Speaker 6: off and you have lost we started talking about, you know,
Speaker 6: rise police and so forth. These encampments were They weren't
Speaker 6: just you know, a bunch of students hanging out. These
Speaker 6: were constructed and developed in a very thoughtful manner, and
Speaker 6: that was definitely the case at UCSD, as I was
Speaker 6: told by students who were participating in it, as a
Speaker 6: space you engage in education and research about the genocide
Speaker 6: and about the occupation of Palestine, as well as the
Speaker 6: ties that UCSD had to the occupation and the genital
Speaker 6: side in Palestine. So you had, and I talked to
Speaker 6: many students who were actively engaged in this. You had
Speaker 6: students sitting on their laptops doing research about the UCSD's
Speaker 6: ties to weapons and manufacturers, the ways that UCSD supported
Speaker 6: the discourses that were enabling the genocide and the occupation,
Speaker 6: including archaeological research. And also you know, there was a
Speaker 6: program associated with every day and the students would plan teachings.
Speaker 6: Sometimes professors would do the teachings, sometimes students, sometimes community members.
Speaker 6: There were teachings on a whole range of really interesting topics,
Speaker 6: including of course about Palestine, about the genocide, but also
Speaker 6: about other issues like the role of surveillance and surveillance
Speaker 6: technology in the genocide, the ecoside that was happening continues
Speaker 6: to happen in Gaza and Palestine. And so it was
Speaker 6: a place of an amazing place of learning and research
Speaker 6: and also community engagement. So as I said, you know,
Speaker 6: outside speakers are being brought in, community members were coming
Speaker 6: in and participating and learning, and so you know, those
Speaker 6: three things research, teaching and community engagement, those are precisely
Speaker 6: the things that the university tells us as faculty and
Speaker 6: students that we should be doing so. To me, the
Speaker 6: encampment was functioning even though it wasn't getting any support
Speaker 6: from the university, and it was actually Universities throughout its
Speaker 6: five days of existence, was trying to shut it down.
Speaker 6: Despite all that, it was functioning essentially like any other
Speaker 6: research institute on campus, and I would say probably better
Speaker 6: than many of the research institutes campus.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you know, I attended a few times to talk
Speaker 10: to people, to observe, to do my journalism and give
Speaker 10: As you said, the university immediately was very obviously very hostile.
Speaker 10: You had people from like university administration giving out little
Speaker 10: flyers or something about like university rules, and there was
Speaker 10: constant presence of UCPD, constant presence of administration, constant concerns
Speaker 10: for people about their safety in the encampment. As you say,
Speaker 10: the university was very hostile to it, despite it doing
Speaker 10: things at the university purports to believe in. Let's discuss
Speaker 10: briefly the history. UCSD hasn't always come down so hard
Speaker 10: on protest movements, but it also has something of a
Speaker 10: history of handling these moments very poorly, I would say,
Speaker 10: So perhaps we could begin Yeah, if you could talk
Speaker 10: about the anti apartheid movement, and then we can move
Speaker 10: through what people have called the Black Winter at UCSD
Speaker 10: and some of the other things that we both have
Speaker 10: some experience of.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so it's very interesting to me. I mean, of course,
Speaker 6: you know, many people are aware of the history of
Speaker 6: a student activism at UCSD, and many times when you
Speaker 6: just mentioned that, people immediately think of Angela Davis, who
Speaker 6: of course was fired by UCSD but then went on
Speaker 6: to become a distinguished professor at uc Santa Cruz and
Speaker 6: you know, just prolific and amazing scholar academic but not
Speaker 6: talking about obscure academic topics, but you know, topics that
Speaker 6: are directly relevant to people's lives. So many of those topics.
Speaker 6: And so now, of course UCSDS celebrates Angela Davis without
Speaker 6: mentioning that they fired her. Yeah, so there's kind there
Speaker 6: is a little bit of this this Okay, we're going
Speaker 6: to try to suppress stud's movements, but then later on
Speaker 6: celebrate them. So there, of course, were quite a number
Speaker 6: of other stuple led movements. One of them, as you mentioned,
Speaker 6: was the anti apartheid movement, and of course that was
Speaker 6: also part of a national movement. Especially Berkeley was very
Speaker 6: strong campus in that respect, but you know, numerous campuses
Speaker 6: across the US were involved in that movement, as was UCSD,
Speaker 6: and we had the UCSD the students, and this was
Speaker 6: in nineteen eighty five. It took place over a period
Speaker 6: of about four or five months, as I call. The
Speaker 6: students had numerous protests and at the time for people
Speaker 6: who were familiar with the u SSD campus, UCSD has
Speaker 6: grown significantly since the eighties, but at that time the
Speaker 6: central meeting place for campus was what's called Ravel College
Speaker 6: in Revel Plaza, so there were numerous protests there anti
Speaker 6: apartheype protests. The students on several occasions set replica shanty
Speaker 6: towns on the Revel Plaza, as happened at many other
Speaker 6: universities in the US. Those were basically replicas of impoverished
Speaker 6: conditions that South African black folks had to live in
Speaker 6: under apartheid in South Africa, so they were setting up
Speaker 6: to the shantydown student kind of reproduced those conditions visually.
Speaker 6: In additionally, during that four or five month period, the
Speaker 6: students occupied the Humanities Library, which was called Galbray Hall.
Speaker 6: It's just adjacent to rod All Plaza, they took over
Speaker 6: the library and they occupied it for a month, more
Speaker 6: than a month, okay, Yeah, And like all of these
Speaker 6: things happened and there were no invasions of the riot
Speaker 6: police or anything. And what came out of that movement
Speaker 6: that the U sees was that the regents decided to
Speaker 6: divest from all corporations associated with South Africa. So that
Speaker 6: was like a major win. But it was not just
Speaker 6: a win for the student movements, but it was also
Speaker 6: a win for the university because the students who were
Speaker 6: basically able to show the university that participating in this
Speaker 6: very unjust system was something that shouldn't be doing. And
Speaker 6: so the students basically helped the university to see that. Yeah.
Speaker 6: And so by kind of allowing these protests to happen,
Speaker 6: in a sense, it allowed the university administration and I'm
Speaker 6: not singing their praises, because you know, they were quite
Speaker 6: retrograde in many ways as they are now, but by
Speaker 6: kind of stepping back and allowing these things to happen,
Speaker 6: the university was able to learn from what the students
Speaker 6: were saying and had to act on it. So I
Speaker 6: feel that that moment in history was something that I mean,
Speaker 6: I know the current administration hasn't forgotten because they celebrated
Speaker 6: now they say, you know, how wonderful we were for
Speaker 6: divesting from South Africa and look at our great students,
Speaker 6: you know. But okay, so that happened in the eighties.
Speaker 6: Before we get to Black Winter, I'm just going to
Speaker 6: mention one other event, which I think is significant, especially
Speaker 6: when we're thinking about encampments. So, in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 6: UCSD was the only uc campus that did not have
Speaker 6: a women's resource center, and women and their allies on
Speaker 6: campus had been organizing to get a women's center since
Speaker 6: the seventies on the UCSD campus, but they have mostly
Speaker 6: been ignored by the administration or where are we going
Speaker 6: to find the money, blah blah blah. So student led,
Speaker 6: but they were also like staff and faculty involved as well,
Speaker 6: because the prob of misogyny was very real on the
Speaker 6: UCSD campus. Then I arrived UCSD in nineteen ninety and
Speaker 6: I immediately saw that problem, so I was very aware
Speaker 6: of it. So the organizers then of this movement decided
Speaker 6: to set up an encampment on what is called sun
Speaker 6: God Lawn, which is kind of a major open space
Speaker 6: on campus. So they set up this encampment and basically
Speaker 6: they reproduced what they envisioned a women's center would look like,
Speaker 6: and so they essentially opened a women's center in this
Speaker 6: open space. It set up this encampment, they staffed at
Speaker 6: twenty four to seven and it was up for a week.
Speaker 6: No arrests room made, no disciplinary charges resulted. But the
Speaker 6: university then started paying attention to the demand for a
Speaker 6: resource center, and it took them several years, but they
Speaker 6: eventually set up the Women's Resource Center that exists now
Speaker 6: in nineteen ninety five. So again that was an encampment
Speaker 6: where the administration was basically able to learn from the
Speaker 6: actings on campus about you know how they basically kind
Speaker 6: of behave reasonably.
Speaker 10: Yeah, let's take a little break, and when we come back,
Speaker 10: when I talk about the Black Winter, which coincides with
Speaker 10: the start of my own time at uc San Diego.
Speaker 12: And then the third example of this is something that's
Speaker 12: called Black Winter, and it's a essentially a three week
Speaker 12: intense period of organizing on campus that happened. I mean
Speaker 12: it was in response and direct response to a racist
Speaker 12: party that was held by one of the UCSD fraternities
Speaker 12: that they called the Compton Cookout. They put out an
Speaker 12: announcement on Facebook, which was probably the Golantos today's Instagram,
Speaker 12: and I don't even know, probably many of your listeners
Speaker 12: haven't even heard of Facebook, but back then it was
Speaker 12: was very big, and it was a you know, just
Speaker 12: despicable racist description of a party where people were supposed
Speaker 12: to dress up as what they imagine people, you know,
Speaker 12: characters from from Compton would look like. And of course,
Speaker 12: you know, students who.
Speaker 6: Found out about this, you're very upset. At the time.
Speaker 6: The students in the Black Student Union and in METCHA,
Speaker 6: who were working very closely together, had been organizing for
Speaker 6: quite a number of years prior to this around you
Speaker 6: know what at the time, this is twenty ten, was
Speaker 6: called campus climate. And that's basically just the fact that
Speaker 6: there was a lot of racism, sometimes overt racism, sometimes
Speaker 6: less overt microaggressions that were very common. Yeah, and for
Speaker 6: many especially black students, but really all students of color
Speaker 6: and also queer and trans students as were basically had
Speaker 6: to navigate this like every day, I mean as part
Speaker 6: of their everyday life. So it was this extra burden
Speaker 6: on our students and they had been organizing around this
Speaker 6: for quite some time. They had written a report that
Speaker 6: was called do you see Us? So you see do
Speaker 6: you see us? In many ways, they were ready for
Speaker 6: an event like this. They were prepared.
Speaker 13: They had been doing a lot of organizing and already,
Speaker 13: and so when this hit they they basically immediately went
Speaker 13: to the administration and said, you know, can you do
Speaker 13: something about this? The administration said, you know, it's free speech.
Speaker 13: They deployed that phrase when it's.
Speaker 6: Stillbot but yeah, tactically, so that was the message they
Speaker 6: were putting out and it became it very quickly became
Speaker 6: a news item. So local outlets were reporting on it,
Speaker 6: and the response of the university was free speech, and
Speaker 6: it basically started escalating. There were a number of students
Speaker 6: on campus at the time, probably still today but maybe
Speaker 6: a little bit quieter. We were fairly openly racist, and there
Speaker 6: was one group. They published a news paper newsletter which
Speaker 6: was particularly so. And they also had a television show
Speaker 6: on It doesn't exist anymore. It's called UCSD TV. It
Speaker 6: was kind of a local TV station. The Compton Cookout
Speaker 6: Hardy happened on Monday, and that was like a holiday
Speaker 6: in February. And then on Thursday of that week, the
Speaker 6: student group that I was talking about how a TV
Speaker 6: show and they started using the N word explicitly on
Speaker 6: that show, and a number of students saw that, and
Speaker 6: of course, we're completely outraged. And so the students in
Speaker 6: the Black Student Union and kind of their friends were
Speaker 6: basically trying to figure out what to do, and so
Speaker 6: they decided to call for a rally on the Library Walk,
Speaker 6: which is the main one of the main walkways at UCSD,
Speaker 6: and they called for a rally right in front of
Speaker 6: the where Chancellor's office was located at the time. And
Speaker 6: so they had this rally quite a number of people.
Speaker 6: They called the rally real Pain, Real Action, you know,
Speaker 6: they were saying, we were feeling real pain at these
Speaker 6: kind of racist incidents, and we want to see real
Speaker 6: action by the administration. So they had this rally and
Speaker 6: the chancellor at the time, who was Mary Ann Fox,
Speaker 6: came out to the rally, and there's video of this
Speaker 6: somewhat pathetic video, and basically the organizers of the rally
Speaker 6: were like chanting leading the chance and then the chancellor
Speaker 6: was basically following the organizers and trying to put her
Speaker 6: arm around them as if somehow that would solve everything.
Speaker 6: You just need a hug, And of course the organizers
Speaker 6: were like, no getting hear me. I don't want to hug,
Speaker 6: I want some action. Yeah, this kind of snowballed. The
Speaker 6: chancellor basically then met with a bunch of these students
Speaker 6: who had been at a rally and kind of they
Speaker 6: had they had a list of like thirty demands and
Speaker 6: she went through the list and it was just like
Speaker 6: there's video of this too, and it's it's almost I mean,
Speaker 6: I just feel because I knew like a bunch of
Speaker 6: these students that I was like, oh my god, you
Speaker 6: know how awful this must have felt to them.
Speaker 14: But she was going through this list very rationally and
Speaker 14: dispassionately and saying, oh, you know we can't do that, sorry,
Speaker 14: but this one, yes, this one's done, This one's done.
Speaker 6: And the students were sitting there like, well, if it
Speaker 6: was done, you know, why haven't you done it? You know,
Speaker 6: if it's so easy to do? Yeah, And so nothing
Speaker 6: very definitely came out of that meeting, but the university
Speaker 6: decided to make a teaching the following Wednesday. And I mean,
Speaker 6: of course teachings are not the things that people in
Speaker 6: power do, so they're obviously kind of co opting and
Speaker 6: appropriating that term.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So what the students decided to do because they were
Speaker 6: they knew that this was just going to be okay,
Speaker 6: we're going to try to bury this basically, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: And so what the students did They organized a press
Speaker 6: conference that morning, which a lot of press did come
Speaker 6: out to, and they had really powerful speakers, and this
Speaker 6: was before the teaching, and then they just went out
Speaker 6: of march. They marched around the Chancellor's complex, you know,
Speaker 6: continuously chanting up to the point of the teaching. And
Speaker 6: so then they all went into the teaching. They had
Speaker 6: like five hundred people by that time, and the room
Speaker 6: was just completely act and so they allowed the teaching
Speaker 6: to start. But then at some point one of the
Speaker 6: Black student Union members went up and said, we've had
Speaker 6: enough of this. We're now going to do our own
Speaker 6: teach out. So they marched out of the teaching and
Speaker 6: went around to this area that has these steps and
Speaker 6: just you know, five hundred folks, incredible concentration of black
Speaker 6: folks and people of color, students and faculty and all
Speaker 6: of their allies all gathered together and they had to
Speaker 6: teach out, which was incredibly powerful. And that day I
Speaker 6: said it myself and for many other people that I
Speaker 6: knew at the university. We basically all said, this is
Speaker 6: the best day we've ever had at UCFD, so amazing.
Speaker 6: The next day, in the library, in the main library,
Speaker 6: one of the students wits who there found a newsing
Speaker 6: in the library and of course, I'm sure your listeners
Speaker 6: know that the news is a very powerful symbol of
Speaker 6: violence against black votes in the US, and so that
Speaker 6: was that was traumatizing for so many students. I remember
Speaker 6: getting text messages from students, you know, saying, you know,
Speaker 6: I can't come on campus because I don't feel safe
Speaker 6: here anymore.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So the next morning, the students held a rally again
Speaker 6: in front of the Chancellor's office where they were probably
Speaker 6: I'm guessing close to one thousand people, and people just
Speaker 6: got up and were talking about what they were feeling
Speaker 6: in their analysis. The university came in. They sent like
Speaker 6: a spoth person to say, oh, you know, we have
Speaker 6: the police out like looking for whoever hangs on the
Speaker 6: noose or whatever. And I mean, you know, police are
Speaker 6: not a comfort.
Speaker 10: No one wanted to hear like, we're sending the cops.
Speaker 6: At that moment. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. So the students
Speaker 6: then went in and they occupied the chancellor's office for
Speaker 6: the full day, and that really made people set up
Speaker 6: a nose. And by this time there was international coverage
Speaker 6: of what was going on. There was an opening of
Speaker 6: the Civil Rights Investigation on UCSD. I was getting emails
Speaker 6: from colleagues like in other countries saying, what's going on
Speaker 6: at is this Like, you know, it sounds like a
Speaker 6: KKK rally or something, not exactly that, but it's close.
Speaker 6: So then this all culminated about a week later in
Speaker 6: a huge rally where much of his library walk was
Speaker 6: completely packed filled with people. It was definitely blocked. And
Speaker 6: during that rally, the university said we will commit to
Speaker 6: implementing these demands, the demands of the students. Of course,
Speaker 6: in the end they backed off much of that, and
Speaker 6: so that was like a huge victory and it did
Speaker 6: result in some pretty substantial changes to use. I'll just
Speaker 6: mention a couple of them. So UCSD create a Black
Speaker 6: Resource Center which didn't exist before, a Roser Resource Center,
Speaker 6: and an intertribal Resource center. So those were significant victories.
Speaker 6: They also created a undergraduate requirement or requirement that undergraduates
Speaker 6: take a diversity, Equity and Inclusion course, and that was
Speaker 6: an attempt to try to change the client it and yea,
Speaker 6: do some educating. You know, students in California universities come
Speaker 6: from also to different backgrounds, and some of them are
Speaker 6: very aware of racism and it's its impacts and anti
Speaker 6: blackness ins and back, so that some come without that knowledge.
Speaker 6: So that was significant help, but also at the time
Speaker 6: was boosted a little bit. It didn't end up maybe
Speaker 6: being such a great boost, but it didn't boost the
Speaker 6: departments that teach those kind of courses because now they had,
Speaker 6: you know, a significantly greater number of students and we're
Speaker 6: getting more resources as a result. So all those things
Speaker 6: were were good again, no arrests, no disciplinary actions, and
Speaker 6: the university learned some valuable lessons.
Speaker 10: Yeah, definitely, let's take a little break and when come back,
Speaker 10: I want to talk about this. This like Palestine exception
Speaker 10: to free speed. All right, we are back. Yeah, I
Speaker 10: remember that that black Winter moment very well. I recently
Speaker 10: arrived at UCSD and I was like immediately taken aback
Speaker 10: by the brazenness of the racism, and it kind of
Speaker 10: come from Britain, not not a non racist country. But yeah,
Speaker 10: the openness and the cruelty and the delight that certain
Speaker 10: people took in that was pretty appalling. Now, if we
Speaker 10: skip forward thirteen years right to the beginning of the
Speaker 10: genocide in Gaza, a lot has changed on campus, but
Speaker 10: also a lot has not. Right, It's still not a
Speaker 10: massively diverse institution UCSD, even compared to other institutions in
Speaker 10: the city. But from twenty twenty three through twenty twenty four, right,
Speaker 10: we have this movement on campus to end the genocide,
Speaker 10: and Gaza comes a movement it's about more than that, right,
Speaker 10: about liberation for Palestinian people, and then broadly about like
Speaker 10: I guess, liberation in the region and what that means.
Speaker 10: And the university did not respond in the same way.
Speaker 10: This has led to people theorizing a Palestine exception for
Speaker 10: free speech. So could you explain that to people? And
Speaker 10: I thought you had a really interesting approach to it
Speaker 10: as a scientist that practice could share with people as well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, as you said, kind of in the wake of
Speaker 6: October seventh, marked the beginning of Israel's genocide on Gaza. Obviously,
Speaker 6: it took many people quite a while to conclude it
Speaker 6: was genocide, but I remember it was almost maybe it
Speaker 6: was within a week or perhaps ten days of October seventh,
Speaker 6: the Coalition of Palestinian Unions put out a call for
Speaker 6: labor solidarity in which they turned to what was happening
Speaker 6: in jazz sign And there are also others who were
Speaker 6: doing that as well.
Speaker 10: Just personally, Like I was in Syria on seventh October,
Speaker 10: I think I entered that day. I spent some time
Speaker 10: in Kurdistan, and I remember by the time I was
Speaker 10: conducting interviews in southern Kurdistan, maybe a week later, maybe
Speaker 10: ten days later, Kurdish groups were using that phrase right,
Speaker 10: like there was a sense of like impending disaster that
Speaker 10: came very quickly. This is what will happen next will
Speaker 10: be horrific. But yeah, those calls came very quickly, as
Speaker 10: you said.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And of course, like students and USSD, we were
Speaker 6: kind of also coming to those conclusions. The administration was
Speaker 6: putting out language that was, you know, sympathetic to those
Speaker 6: who were killed or you know, injured on October seventh,
Speaker 6: but they were ignoring everything else that was happening. And
Speaker 6: so of course This wasn't a surprise, but it was
Speaker 6: part of what was happening. And it was also the
Speaker 6: kind of language that the university was using, and this
Speaker 6: is something that continued. It was essentially recalling, even though
Speaker 6: it kind of had this neutral sense to it, it
Speaker 6: was recalling the you know, the decades of Islamophobia, anti
Speaker 6: Arab racism that happened in the wake of of nine
Speaker 6: to eleven. So in a sense, they were communicating by
Speaker 6: using that kind of language language around, you know, using
Speaker 6: words like violence and safety and civility. They were communicating
Speaker 6: very clearly that people could talk about what happened on
Speaker 6: the morning of October seventh, but not about anything else.
Speaker 6: And that was entirely clear. I mean, it's not like
Speaker 6: we had to do any deep analysis to figure out
Speaker 6: that's what the administration was saying. And you know, as
Speaker 6: students organized over the following months, students who were engaged
Speaker 6: in that organizing or being subject to disciplinary investigations. There
Speaker 6: were some faculty who were investigating for mentioning the genocide
Speaker 6: and the occupation of Palestine in their classes, and all
Speaker 6: of these things were creating a climate of fear but
Speaker 6: also uncertainty like you could never be sure if what
Speaker 6: you would say could get you in trouble, and so
Speaker 6: the easiest thing to do would be to say nothing
Speaker 6: at all.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's like a chilling effect on speech.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, so that was happening. This phenomenon, of course, wasn't
Speaker 6: invented by you say, the administration. It's something that's been
Speaker 6: going on for quite a while, many many decades. As
Speaker 6: you mentioned, James, is called the Palestine Exception to free speech.
Speaker 6: There if anyone wants to find out more about it.
Speaker 6: I mean, there's a huge amount of scholarly work on it.
Speaker 6: There's an excellent report that's available freely online which is
Speaker 6: called exactly that, the Palestine Exception to Free Speech, written
Speaker 6: by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights. It's
Speaker 6: very easy to find online. And one of the things
Speaker 6: as a physicist, I'm very critical of the role of
Speaker 6: phys in society. You have to think very deeply to
Speaker 6: be critical of physics, thinking about nuclear physics and so forth.
Speaker 6: But as a person who does physics professionally, I often
Speaker 6: think about problems from a physics perspective, and so when
Speaker 6: I think about the Palestine Exception, I kind of bring
Speaker 6: a bit of a physics lens to it. So in physics,
Speaker 6: when we're looking at a phenomenon, we often can't observe
Speaker 6: that phenomenon directly. And so, for example, people who study
Speaker 6: the physics of subatomic particles, they will to study how
Speaker 6: to sub atomic particles interact, or many sub atomic particles interact,
Speaker 6: they will collide them together. They don't have the precision
Speaker 6: and the resolution to observe exactly interaction, but they can
Speaker 6: look before the interaction and then what comes out afterwards.
Speaker 6: And by looking at those patterns of what goes in
Speaker 6: and what comes out, they can get an idea of
Speaker 6: what's happening within that black box. And so this is
Speaker 6: the way I view the Palestine exception, because the Palestine
Speaker 6: exception to free speech is just the idea that there
Speaker 6: are these structures in society that have been formulated such
Speaker 6: that it makes it very difficult to engage in speech
Speaker 6: about Palestine. And the impact of that, of course, is
Speaker 6: that if you can't talk about Palestine, then violence that's
Speaker 6: committed against Palestinians is something that's enabled facilitated by that
Speaker 6: lack of discussion. Like I don't have access to the
Speaker 6: conversations amongst you see the administrators or between u SEE
Speaker 6: administrators and the main office of the President of U SEE, Like,
Speaker 6: I don't have access to any of that information. In
Speaker 6: some sense, that's the black box part of it. But
Speaker 6: what we can see is kind of what's going in
Speaker 6: and what's coming out of that box, and so we
Speaker 6: can see the behaviors, the patterns of behaviors. And so
Speaker 6: as a physicist, I'm like, Okay, if we're going to
Speaker 6: look at the uc and say, the University of California
Speaker 6: and say, is this a place where the Palestine Exception
Speaker 6: of free speech is operating, then we were not going
Speaker 6: to be able to have access to the rooms in
Speaker 6: which that's planned, if it is being planned, But rather
Speaker 6: we can look at the pattern. And the really interesting
Speaker 6: thing about this report I cited all right, Signed Legal
Speaker 6: and the Center Constitutional Rights, is they lay that out
Speaker 6: very clearly. They lay out, Okay, the Palestine Exception of
Speaker 6: free speech is basically a combination of these kinds of behaviors.
Speaker 6: So they talk about things like accusations of anti Semitism,
Speaker 6: for example, and accusations of support for terrorism. So if
Speaker 6: you come to any rally pro palestinean rally at UCSD,
Speaker 6: there's always at least one or many counter protesters who
Speaker 6: are shared shouting exactly that this is anti semitic, that
Speaker 6: everyone here is supporting Hamas, you know, and when we
Speaker 6: say Hamas, you know, that just immediately goes to everybody's
Speaker 6: mind to terrorism. Yeah, all these kinds of behaviors on
Speaker 6: it their way out are things that can be seen
Speaker 6: you see wide campuses, but definitely a UCSD. Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's important to consider, like as we enter a
Speaker 10: time where like repression of campus speech is at a height, right,
Speaker 10: like the combination of this Palestine exception and the seeming
Speaker 10: desire to expel as many international students as possible, that
Speaker 10: this is contrary to the reason the university exists, as
Speaker 10: well as as you say, it suppresses opposition to genocide.
Speaker 10: To finish up, I guess we're not just doing this
Speaker 10: at the university because it's a place where we like
Speaker 10: to argue, or because students are particularly predisposed to radical politics,
Speaker 10: or for any other number of reasons. Right, the university
Speaker 10: is also part of the apparatus. Can you explain that
Speaker 10: a little bit like the university is not neutral in
Speaker 10: this to begin with?
Speaker 6: Yes, that is certainly true, and I mean that happens
Speaker 6: in many different ways. Some of the ways we don't
Speaker 6: even know about, but there are many of those ways
Speaker 6: that primarily through student research, some faculty research. We have
Speaker 6: some ideas. Basically a UCSD and other uc campuses, there's
Speaker 6: quite a lot of military related research, you know, some
Speaker 6: of them research is not directly related to the genocide,
Speaker 6: but as we all know, the US is supplying many
Speaker 6: of the weapons that are being used in the genocide
Speaker 6: and now in Iran as well, and some of those weapons,
Speaker 6: like drones, the aspects of them have been designed and
Speaker 6: worked on at UCSD. Kind of the hardware then of
Speaker 6: genocide is very much a product of university research, part
Speaker 6: of which has been time in UCSD at other uc
Speaker 6: campuses and part at other universities in the US and
Speaker 6: Israel as well. Another aspect of it which I think
Speaker 6: we don't know as much about this software. So you know,
Speaker 6: there's a huge amount of research on artificial intelligence that's
Speaker 6: happening in UCSD, other uc campuses of other university campuses.
Speaker 6: I mean, all that research came out of universities. You know,
Speaker 6: as we now know through credible journalistic investigations that Israel
Speaker 6: is using artificial intelligence and it's targeting. Yeah, and apparently
Speaker 6: that's also happening in the US military as well. You know.
Speaker 6: So there's like another very direct connection. A third connection
Speaker 6: which is very strong at UCSD or so many other campuses,
Speaker 6: is that part of the creation of a discourse that
Speaker 6: legitimizes and justifies Israel's occupation of Colstein is archaeology. And
Speaker 6: I'm not an expert in this field, but I could
Speaker 6: just kind of cite what other people I've talked about,
Speaker 6: but there are many archaeological investigations that UCSD academics have
Speaker 6: participated in Israel that contribute to creating this story that
Speaker 6: the people running Israel and Israeli citizens are the rightful
Speaker 6: owners of that land and that the Palestinians came in
Speaker 6: at some late point, maybe a couple of decades before
Speaker 6: the founding of Israel, which of course is completely false,
Speaker 6: and there's so much scholarship about that. But that's the
Speaker 6: that's the purpose of those investigations, and so again that's
Speaker 6: connected to universities and the UCSD in particular. One can't
Speaker 6: really argue that the having a discussion about simplicity and
Speaker 6: jazz side is something that is not of interest to UCSD.
Speaker 10: The definitelys Yeah, Okay, it have to happen at the
Speaker 10: university because it is about the university. Yes, I think
Speaker 10: they finish up. We've outlined why it's important, we have
Speaker 10: outlined how anti genocidal speech when it is about Palestinian
Speaker 10: people is treated differently, and we've outlined why there is
Speaker 10: a chilling effect. I understand some people, especially international students
Speaker 10: and non citizen faculty, et cetera, have real concerns, and
Speaker 10: I want to respect those. But for people who would
Speaker 10: like to they should continue to speak out right, like,
Speaker 10: we all lose even if we have if you somehow
Speaker 10: are unconcerned by genocide of fellows, human beings, if the
Speaker 10: university becomes a space where certain things are oppressed, and
Speaker 10: what we can't stand up for each other. So, like,
Speaker 10: what resources would you suggest for those people? As new
Speaker 10: students are coming into university this year, they've lived half
Speaker 10: their high school years through this genocide. I'm sure many
Speaker 10: of them will want continue advocating. What would you suggest
Speaker 10: for them?
Speaker 6: Yeah, especially for students, I would suggest to connect with
Speaker 6: organizations that are already kind of doing this work. So
Speaker 6: you know, at UCSD there's Students for Justice in Palestine
Speaker 6: but there's also quite a number of other student organizations.
Speaker 6: Like tomorrow we're having a major Earth Day rally where
Speaker 6: organizations Students for Justice Palestine, but also anti imperialist organization
Speaker 6: like SPARK, and then other organizations like Green New Deal, Students,
Speaker 6: sustainability collectives. They're all coming together to talk about Palestine
Speaker 6: and the ego side Palestine and the jedocide in Palestine.
Speaker 6: So I think that there are ways for students from
Speaker 6: a broad range of interests and backgrounds to get involved
Speaker 6: in organizing. You know, it's not like you have to
Speaker 6: start that from scratch. People are already doing that. It
Speaker 6: might be a little bit hard at your university to
Speaker 6: find those because of the suppression, but if you if
Speaker 6: you ask around, you will, or if you look on
Speaker 6: social media you will, you will find those folks. That's
Speaker 6: why I would start as a student. For faculty and
Speaker 6: staff especially, it's a little bit more difficult because we're,
Speaker 6: you know, as employees, we're very vulnerable. Faculty with tenure
Speaker 6: are less vulnerable. But you know, my case and other
Speaker 6: faculties cases are our examples of how tenure doesn't really
Speaker 6: protect you from this if they're determined. So I feel
Speaker 6: that there's again here. What we need to do is
Speaker 6: to kind of work collectively, so you don't want to
Speaker 6: fight the system on your own, but find other faculty
Speaker 6: who are doing this work and basically who can can
Speaker 6: work as a support network and kind of collectively find
Speaker 6: ways to speak out to support our students, which I
Speaker 6: think is in many ways our primary responsibility with regard
Speaker 6: to the genocide, and basically create spaces where where it's
Speaker 6: possible to talk about the genocide.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think it's really important. I guess I'll just say, like,
Speaker 10: if you're a student or faculty and you see someone
Speaker 10: involved in its advocacy, like, don't feel afraid to go
Speaker 10: talk to them and ask either. Like university can be intimidating,
Speaker 10: especially when you're a new faculty member also undergraduate for
Speaker 10: that matter, Like it can be hard to meet people
Speaker 10: and talk to people, but I think most people would
Speaker 10: be happy if you did. Is there anything else you'd
Speaker 10: like to share with people? Before we'd wrap up?
Speaker 6: There was so much? Yeah, so I do hope we
Speaker 6: can talk again sometime.
Speaker 15: Yes we will, But also just maybe I just want
Speaker 15: to say, you know, thanks to you, there aren't you know,
Speaker 15: a huge number of spaces where we can have these.
Speaker 6: Kinds of discussions.
Speaker 16: So so I'm really grateful, you know, I know that
Speaker 16: you do doing not just this kind of work, but
Speaker 16: also you know, really going out and reporting on stories that.
Speaker 6: Aren't being told. And so I'm grateful to you basically
Speaker 6: for doing that work.
Speaker 10: It's very kind. Thank you.
Speaker 4: This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 4: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 4: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis to Dame,
Speaker 4: joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This
Speaker 4: episode recovering the week of April sixteenth to April twenty second. James,
Speaker 4: some small news items at the start.
Speaker 10: Yeah, a few things I want to discuss up top.
Speaker 10: The United States government appears to be running multiple propaganda
Speaker 10: sites with associated X accounts that are posing as Iranian media.
Speaker 10: One of the accounts is located in Florida. This is not,
Speaker 10: like massively uncommon in a conflict out of this right now,
Speaker 10: the information war is part of the war.
Speaker 4: This is what like US actual psyop is like, this
Speaker 4: is what the United States syop operations are.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the syop is not like the woman sold you
Speaker 10: that you follow on Instagram.
Speaker 1: This isn't new for the US to be doing. It
Speaker 1: is new for it to be like this sloppy. I
Speaker 1: think that's probably fair to say this is like a
Speaker 1: sloppier than normal.
Speaker 10: Yes, that's what's remarkable here. It said it's shoddy. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and that is not a good sign for their for
Speaker 10: like the whole US sort of capacity in this regard.
Speaker 9: But it depends on how you think about it.
Speaker 10: But yeah, yeah, yeah, sure's Actually a number of former
Speaker 10: DHS Department pronoun Security and IODS, Immigration and Naturalization Services
Speaker 10: officials have filed an amicus brief with a Supreme Court
Speaker 10: explaining why the cancelation of the Haiti TPS Temporary Protected
Speaker 10: Status is illegal. They do include Janet Napolitano, which is nice,
Speaker 10: but a ton of people from Obama Bush, even Clinton
Speaker 10: admin pre DHS I ins were pilots amakus brief. An
Speaker 10: IDF soldier has been photographed destroying a statue of the
Speaker 10: Crucifixion of Jesus Christ in Lebanon, showing it with a
Speaker 10: splitting more. A lot of reporting called it a sledge hammer.
Speaker 10: That's not what a sledgehammer looks like I know, I
Speaker 10: get really picky about this, but like, maybe if you
Speaker 10: haven't worked with your hands, you should write things that
Speaker 10: can be read by someone who has scan and not
Speaker 10: be completely ridiculous. The IDF has launched an investigation and
Speaker 10: so far subjected two soldiers to thirty days in military detention,
Speaker 10: which is more than they would get if they had
Speaker 10: killed actual Christian children in Palestine. Says a Lot, I
Speaker 10: think that this image is like, we spoke about this
Speaker 10: in our group chat, but this is the it's one image,
Speaker 10: It's comic book evil. There are many reasons why this
Speaker 10: is the thing that's blowing up for them. Ken Paxton
Speaker 10: is investigating Act Blue. Act Blue is a major donation
Speaker 10: website for Democratic candidates, is claiming that they have continued
Speaker 10: to accept gift card donations, which could hide donations from
Speaker 10: foreign individuals or corporations or even states. I suppose the
Speaker 10: United States government's plans to send Afghans who are stuck
Speaker 10: in limbo in Kata to the Democratic Republic of Congo
Speaker 10: being reported on by the New York Times. Just for
Speaker 10: some context here, I saw people sharing this and thinking
Speaker 10: that they that this referred to Afghan SIV recipient who
Speaker 10: a resident in the United States. That is not what
Speaker 10: it's referring to. It's referring to people who the Biden
Speaker 10: administration removed from Afghanistan or wherever they worked in Pakistan
Speaker 10: and then took them to kata As like a temporary
Speaker 10: stopping off point where they would continue to do their
Speaker 10: vetting and background checks. This is normal for refugee admissions
Speaker 10: as opposed to asylum admissions. And then the twenty twenty
Speaker 10: four election have been Democrats lost, and that people have
Speaker 10: been in limbo ever since, and it appears to Trump
Speaker 10: administration has been trying to get them various states in
Speaker 10: Africa to accept them, and it's now proposing the Democratic
Speaker 10: Republic of Congo, a country which already has a significant
Speaker 10: refugee crisis.
Speaker 4: Ron Decentis, who is term limited as governor, has been
Speaker 4: jockeying for a position inside the Trump administration. Axios reports
Speaker 4: Dessentis has expressed interest in being a Secretary of War,
Speaker 4: attorney general, or even a Supreme Court justice. Trump is
Speaker 4: expected to reclassify marijuana as soon as maybe today. We're
Speaker 4: recording this on Wednesday, April twenty second.
Speaker 9: Fingers crossed earlier this.
Speaker 4: Week Trump signed an executive order to advance its psychedelic
Speaker 4: treatment for mental illness and possibly reschedule certainly substances which
Speaker 4: have completed phase three clinical trials.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This, this is the real sign that their internal polling
Speaker 2: is showing Trump really closing on getting blow thirty percent approval.
Speaker 1: That's that's the most whatever gets. It's actual legal marijuana.
Speaker 9: Fuck it. Yeah, Like at this point.
Speaker 10: It's such an easy win, and it's been an easy
Speaker 10: win for the last three presidents, and anyone could have
Speaker 10: done it.
Speaker 1: It's a gun that's been left on the ground and
Speaker 1: fucking Trump finally just picked the damn thing up after
Speaker 1: it got covered in an inch and a half at dust.
Speaker 9: Like unbelievable.
Speaker 2: They're desperate, keep pushing. We can get like completely legal
Speaker 2: ELOSD I believe in us m hmm.
Speaker 4: On Fox News' Sunday Morning Show, Cash Burttel announced that
Speaker 4: the FBI will soon make arrests related to Trump's claims
Speaker 4: that the twenty twenty election was stolen, with Patel saying, quote,
Speaker 4: they tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system.
Speaker 17: I can announce on your show that we've got all
Speaker 17: the information we need We're working with our prosecutors, a
Speaker 17: Department of Justice and their Attorney General, Todd Blanche and
Speaker 17: we are going to be making arrest and it's coming,
Speaker 17: and I promise you it's coming soon.
Speaker 4: Bettel later said it's a conspiracy case and that quote,
Speaker 4: we have the information to back President Trump's claims. On Tuesday,
Speaker 4: voters in Virginia approved a redistracting measure which would likely
Speaker 4: move four Republican seats to Democrat seats in the midterms.
Speaker 4: This measure passed was fifty one point five percent of
Speaker 4: the vote, totaling over three million votes. Virginia joins California
Speaker 4: in approving new congressional maps to combat the recent gerrymandering
Speaker 4: in red states like Texas. At the behest of Trump,
Speaker 4: but now with Virginia, Dems are actually up one seat nationally.
Speaker 4: Ronda Santis has called for Florida lawmakers to meet next
Speaker 4: week to consider redistricting in their state. Trump has called
Speaker 4: the Virginia election quote unquote rigged, saying that Republicans were
Speaker 4: winning until a quote massive mail in ballot drop quote,
Speaker 4: which is just how elections work. That's just how voting works.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we were winning until more people voted for the other.
Speaker 4: Until we counted more votes that showed that we did
Speaker 4: not win.
Speaker 2: We just live in the twenty sixteen election forever. Now, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's great.
Speaker 1: I was doing pretty well in that boxing match until
Speaker 1: it started.
Speaker 10: Until the other guy punched me in the face.
Speaker 4: The margin of victory closely matches the result of the
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four presidential election in Virginia. Republicans have challenged
Speaker 4: the Virginia redistricting in court since before today's election, and
Speaker 4: the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the measure could
Speaker 4: go to a vote while legal challenges continue. This is
Speaker 4: the second most important election this week, the most important
Speaker 4: one obviously being the Webbys, in which I think we
Speaker 4: can announce we have won Woo in unrigged election matters,
Speaker 4: the only fair election that this country is seen, possibly
Speaker 4: in like over twenty five years.
Speaker 10: That's why they selected Claude as Person of the year.
Speaker 1: Clearly, the Webbees in twenty twenty six are the only
Speaker 1: election that's going to affect anybody's lives.
Speaker 9: I think we can all agree on that anyway.
Speaker 1: So as you probably are aware, because the President shouts
Speaker 1: about it every ten minutes, there's a ceasefire currently in
Speaker 1: effect in the conflict with Iran, the war of choice
Speaker 1: that we started with Iran. James is going to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about that in a second. But
Speaker 1: because of the stand down, there's been kind of time
Speaker 1: for both forces to you know, reassess things, and time
Speaker 1: for outside people to reassess like kind of what we
Speaker 1: can tell about what's going on. Obviously, in the immediate
Speaker 1: wake of Operation Epic Fury, and is recently as last Tuesday,
Speaker 1: President Trump said, quote, we've taken out their navy, We've
Speaker 1: taken out their air force, We've taken out their leaders.
Speaker 1: On April eighth, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Operation Epic
Speaker 1: Fury a historic and overwhel victory on the battlefield. By
Speaker 1: any measure, Epic Fury decimated Iran's military and rendered it
Speaker 1: combat and effective for years to come. Now, that last sentence,
Speaker 1: the first part is technically accurate.
Speaker 9: But not in the way that hegseeth means.
Speaker 10: No one knows what decimate means anymore.
Speaker 1: Decimate literally means to destroy like a tenth of a group. Yeah, right, yea,
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's pretty accurate, right, But the second part
Speaker 1: of that sentence rendered it combat and effective for years
Speaker 1: to come is not accurate. Neither is Trump's statement that
Speaker 1: we've taken out their navy and their air force. CBS
Speaker 1: published an article today reporting that roughly sixty percent of
Speaker 1: the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary guardcore is still
Speaker 1: in existence, including fast tag speedboats and Iranian air power,
Speaker 1: while it's been degraded, is still significantly more functional than
Speaker 1: actually I had assumed. About two thirds of the Iranian
Speaker 1: Air Force is still believed to be operational, despite the
Speaker 1: massive US in his Israeli air strikes largely targeting air
Speaker 1: production and storage facilities. The fact that you're looking at
Speaker 1: two thirds of Iran's navy and air force still functional
Speaker 1: and at least about half their ballistic missile stockpile and
Speaker 1: their launch system stockpile intact. That's a significant difference from
Speaker 1: what the administration has claimed and evidence that where we
Speaker 1: to continue to press with the open fighting part of
Speaker 1: this conflict, it would be years probably before you're talking
Speaker 1: about like a complete degradation of Iranian fighting capability if
Speaker 1: that was ever achieved, Like when you factor in the
Speaker 1: United States would continue to suffer casualties, and we've already
Speaker 1: been losing more of, you know, particularly our interceptor missile
Speaker 1: capability and a number of advanced systems like a wax,
Speaker 1: then we can afford to replace James.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about
Speaker 10: the cease fire itself, right, and then like what's been
Speaker 10: happening there. Let's start with, like I guess straight off,
Speaker 10: horn moves updates and then get into the CISFAR. The
Speaker 10: Navy intercepted an Iranian vessel in the Arabian Sea this week,
Speaker 10: close to the Iran Pakistan border. The Tuska was warned.
Speaker 10: Imagine they use an l rad to warn it. People
Speaker 10: see l rads on ships sometimes I think they're coming
Speaker 10: to like make you deaf. That's one of the reasons
Speaker 10: of ships have lrads. They could have also used the
Speaker 10: radio that if they can talk to them on the
Speaker 10: radio of their receiving communications with the radio. They then
Speaker 10: ordered it to evacuate its engine room. They then shot
Speaker 10: out its engine with the five inch gun.
Speaker 9: First time they've gotten to do that in forty years.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I was looking at it. I guess it was
Speaker 10: it was since what nineteen eighty eight, the last time
Speaker 10: that I was thinking it's It's been a lot. It's
Speaker 10: been a minute since the ship engaged inner the ship
Speaker 10: with its main gun. It was a USS Spruance, it
Speaker 10: guided missile destroyer that did that. Subsequently, US marines on
Speaker 10: the Tripoli we were posted on when the Tripoli first
Speaker 10: move towards that region.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: We specifically said that this is one of the capacities
Speaker 10: that it had they boarded the ship, so they transferred
Speaker 10: a helicopter and then boarded the ship. The US has
Speaker 10: since inspected other ships, including outside of the Saint Comeo.
Speaker 10: So the US perceives its blockade to be global right
Speaker 10: of Iranian assets, of Iranian vessels and the quote unquote
Speaker 10: shadow fleet, which you've already explained on ED, so I'm
Speaker 10: not going to go into depth on what that means.
Speaker 10: The IOGC also fired at several vessels in the street.
Speaker 10: There is some reporting that one of them, an Indian tanker,
Speaker 10: had paid a fee in cryptocurrency to what turned out
Speaker 10: to be a scammer. I am certain that these scams
Speaker 10: exist because there have been multiple warnings of them. I
Speaker 10: haven't seen any evidence that is satisfactory enough for me
Speaker 10: to be confident that that particular ship had been scammed.
Speaker 10: The most compelling piece of evidence. A ship is called
Speaker 10: the San Mar Herald. Is this audio that we're going
Speaker 10: to play right here?
Speaker 4: If my navy sefi naby, is this modeling a san Mada?
Speaker 6: You give me Clarence to go?
Speaker 4: My name second on your list.
Speaker 3: You get me Clarence to go.
Speaker 10: You are fighting now, let me turn back, just to
Speaker 10: guess I wasn't clear. You gave me clearance to go.
Speaker 10: You're firing now, let me turn back. So it does
Speaker 10: seem that that vessel believe that it had clearance to
Speaker 10: go and was sent fire upon this morning. There was
Speaker 10: some ocynth pictures of IIGC and they looked like kind
Speaker 10: of fast attack boats kind of things. Throughout what was
Speaker 10: talking about in the straight up horn mus Yeah, something
Speaker 10: of a flex Yay, we still have a navy like yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 10: I think that's important in the context of the ceasefire.
Speaker 10: I want to explain very briefly, there's been a lot
Speaker 10: of contradictory reporting on when, where, and how negotiations are
Speaker 10: going to happen. It cease fire was set to expire
Speaker 10: the day we're recording Wednesday. On Tuesday, we saw Donald
Speaker 10: Trump laterally extend the ceasefire by truthing quote based on
Speaker 10: the fact that the government of Iran is seriously fractured,
Speaker 10: not unexpectedly so, and upon the request of Field Marshal
Speaker 10: Simonia and Prime Minister Shabaz Sharif of Pakistan, we have
Speaker 10: been asked to hold our attack on the country of
Speaker 10: Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can
Speaker 10: come up with a unified proposal. I have therefore directed
Speaker 10: our military to continue the blockade and in all other
Speaker 10: respects remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the
Speaker 10: cease fire until such time as their proposal hast submitted
Speaker 10: and discussions are concluded one way or the other. President
Speaker 10: Donald J. Trump, the consensus seems to me that this
Speaker 10: is not like an infinite extension. This is like maybe
Speaker 10: less than a week for Iran to either comply with
Speaker 10: US terms or submit proposals in the US considers acceptable.
Speaker 10: A lot of that reporting does seem to come from
Speaker 10: Barack Revied, who's not really good at journalism, so take
Speaker 10: it with the pinch of salt. Trump, though, is correct
Speaker 10: that the state of Iran is on a unified entity,
Speaker 10: and I covered this in the piece I did last
Speaker 10: week on an update on the Iran war, Right, Like,
Speaker 10: I think there's a tendency from people in the global
Speaker 10: North to look at a state and see it as
Speaker 10: like a pyramid. Right, you have the head of state,
Speaker 10: and then you have government, and then you have legislature,
Speaker 10: and then you have the people they commanded, right, military
Speaker 10: and all the civil bureaucracy. That's not quite how Iran works.
Speaker 10: And I went into more detail in that episode that
Speaker 10: I made, so I'm not going to go into it here,
Speaker 10: but there are a series of overlapping but not entirely
Speaker 10: aligned power centers within Iran and within its military capacity,
Speaker 10: both within its military and the traditional sense, and within
Speaker 10: the IIGC. Why this is relevant to the negotiations is
Speaker 10: it it's not possible for politicians to negotiate if they
Speaker 10: do not believe that they can agree to terms and
Speaker 10: that their military will then comply with those terms.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: If the Iranian Foreign Ministry agrees with the US to
Speaker 10: do something, the IGC doesn't do it, that then immediately
Speaker 10: undermines any further negotiations.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: So when we see, for instance, this morning, a large
Speaker 10: number of boats going into straight upform news that looks
Speaker 10: a little bit like a flex right, in the context
Speaker 10: of this power struggle, in the context of Trump acknowledging
Speaker 10: that Trump has once again been truthing this week about
Speaker 10: Iranian nuclear weapons. I'm just going to read one of
Speaker 10: his truths because I think it contained. It shows that
Speaker 10: the administration feels that it is weak on this particular accusation.
Speaker 10: Israel never took me into the war with Iran. The
Speaker 10: results of October seventh added to my lifelong opinion that
Speaker 10: Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Did Yeah, I
Speaker 10: don't know what's going on with that sentence.
Speaker 4: That's just that's that's Iran can never have a nuclear
Speaker 4: weapon in karmadd did the word did?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 10: Yeah, I'm not reading that wrong. Yes, just it's to
Speaker 10: hang out just what it said.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's simply senile.
Speaker 10: I can't help you. I'm just saying the words. I
Speaker 10: watch it and read the fake news pundits and polls
Speaker 10: in total disbelief. Ninety percent of what they say are
Speaker 10: lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged,
Speaker 10: much as a twenty to twenty presidential election was rigged,
Speaker 10: just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn't
Speaker 10: like talking about the results in Iran. Will be amazing
Speaker 10: and if arounds new leaders, regime chains, exclamation mark clothes,
Speaker 10: parentheses are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future.
Speaker 10: President DJT. That's one of the more challenging passages of
Speaker 10: English language texts that I've ever approached. I speak four
Speaker 10: or five languages, and that's that's speak set me back,
Speaker 10: But I've tried to give you a good faith reading
Speaker 10: of it. He's clearly sensitive to the allegation that Israel
Speaker 10: pushed the US into this conflict.
Speaker 4: Rant He's clearly sensitive.
Speaker 10: The last thing that I want to add is that
Speaker 10: strikes on Kurdish groups have continued despite the ceasefire, right
Speaker 10: despite the renewed ceasefire the PAK. Just two hours after
Speaker 10: Trump announced the extension of the ceasefire, Tehran sent four
Speaker 10: drones to attack a PAK base. There have been more
Speaker 10: injuries in Kurdistan. It doesn't seem that Iran considers any
Speaker 10: ceasefire to apply to its ongoing attack against the Deutroy
Speaker 10: Dulati groups who are currently in southern Kurdistan inside the
Speaker 10: borders of Iraq.
Speaker 4: Next up, we will discuss the charges against the SPLC,
Speaker 4: But first listen to these acts. Okay, we are back.
Speaker 4: On Tuesday, April twenty, first Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
Speaker 4: and FBI Director Cash Battel announced that a grand jury
Speaker 4: indited the Southern Poverty Law Center on eleven counts, including
Speaker 4: wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and
Speaker 4: conspiracy to commit to concealment money laundering. The indictment argues
Speaker 4: that the SPLC defrauded their donors by using donation money
Speaker 4: to pay confidential informants within white supremacist or neo Nazi organizations.
Speaker 4: Here is a short clip of the press conference of
Speaker 4: a reporter asking Todd Blanche a question, I just want
Speaker 4: to make sure.
Speaker 16: I understand you're alleging that the Southern Poverty Law Center
Speaker 16: was paying the leaders of KKK and other groups to continue.
Speaker 6: Their operations.
Speaker 18: Is that I'm not alleging it. The grandeury return and
Speaker 18: indictment that says that. And so what the investigation found,
Speaker 18: according to the indictment that was returned today, is that
Speaker 18: they were paying. So the Southern Poverty Law Center is
Speaker 18: raising money, asking folks to give them money to dismount racism,
Speaker 18: and over a very long period of time, they were
Speaker 18: using some of the money they raised from donors to
Speaker 18: pay to they call them feel you know, basically to
Speaker 18: informants for information, for access, to just pay them for
Speaker 18: certain to do certain things. And so yes, that's exactly
Speaker 18: what the indictment charges.
Speaker 4: The SPLC is a nonprofit advocacy organization aimed at quote
Speaker 4: unquote dismantling white supremacy and exposing hate. They operate a
Speaker 4: blog called hate Watch and run a public database of
Speaker 4: hate groups and far right extremists. This indictment claims that
Speaker 4: the SPLC has utilized informants to gained information on far
Speaker 4: right activity since the eighties, but between twenty fourteen and
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three, the SPLC secretly paid over three million
Speaker 4: dollars to individuals associated with various violent extriist groups quote
Speaker 4: unquote in a clandestine manner.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, one, if you kind of have been in the
Speaker 1: world of CVE counting violent extremism like research or like
Speaker 1: involved in NGOs in that sphere at all, or a
Speaker 1: been a researcher there, you're probably aware of the fact
Speaker 1: that the SPLC, like has been paying informants. A lot
Speaker 1: of their scoops are because some Nazi tells on another
Speaker 1: Nazi essentially right yeah, so that part isn't surprising. The
Speaker 1: weirdness is how the SPLC was going about it and
Speaker 1: how much fucking money they were giving some of these
Speaker 1: The amounts of some of these is yeah, it was
Speaker 1: legitimately shocking, and I do want to get into some
Speaker 1: more details about those amounts in the groups and the
Speaker 1: sort of nest of fake businesses the SPLC used to distribute.
Speaker 4: This money, according to the indictment. The indictment reads that
Speaker 4: this was donation money quote received under the auspice that
Speaker 4: the funds would be used to quote unquote dismantle violent
Speaker 4: ex rivist groups. This money was instead being used in
Speaker 4: part by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within
Speaker 4: these same violenctricy humis groups. That money was then used
Speaker 4: for the benefit of the individuals as well as the
Speaker 4: violent extremist groups unquote. Money was funneled to individuals associated
Speaker 4: with violent extreamist groups, including the klu Klux Klan, the
Speaker 4: United Clans of America, Unite the Right National Alliance, National
Speaker 4: Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations, and the affiliated Sadistic Soul's Motorcycle Club,
Speaker 4: National Socialist Party of America, American Nazi Party, and American Front.
Speaker 4: One informant, according to the indictment, was quote a member
Speaker 4: of the online leadership chat group that planned the twenty
Speaker 4: seventeen Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended
Speaker 4: the event at the direction of the SPLC. This informant
Speaker 4: made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and
Speaker 4: helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between
Speaker 4: twenty fifteen and twenty twenty three, the SPLC secretly paid
Speaker 4: this informant more than two hundred and seventy thousand dollars
Speaker 4: from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three. More than one
Speaker 4: million dollars was allegedly paid to someone affiliated with the
Speaker 4: National Alliance who served as an informant for over twenty
Speaker 4: years while fundraising for this Nazi group. The Imperial Wizard
Speaker 4: of the Rebooted Imperial Clans of America was a paid
Speaker 4: informant according to the indictment. This is likely a guy
Speaker 4: named Bradley Jenkins, an officer in the National Socialist Movement
Speaker 4: and the Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, secretly
Speaker 4: received more than three hundred thousand dollars between twenty fourteen
Speaker 4: and twenty twenty, the former chairman of the National Alliance
Speaker 4: was secretly paid more than one hundred and forty thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: while the SPLC website featured an extremist profile page for
Speaker 4: this individual, likely Eric Glebe. The SPLC also paid the
Speaker 4: leader of the National Socialist Party of America seventy thousand
Speaker 4: dollars between twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen. This individual was
Speaker 4: a former director of an Aryan Nations faction and a
Speaker 4: former member of the CAKE. This is likely a guy
Speaker 4: named Paul Mullett, who the SBLC hosts an extremist file
Speaker 4: web page on their website. A few other unidentified informants
Speaker 4: are listed in the indictment, as well as a claim
Speaker 4: that the SBLC funneled more than one hundred and sixty
Speaker 4: thousand dollars from a fictitious entity to an informant quote,
Speaker 4: who then sent funds to various violent extremist group leaders,
Speaker 4: including the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the
Speaker 4: klu Klux Klan unquote. That's a lot of money.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: To obscure the nature of these payments, the SBLC opened
Speaker 4: a series of bank accounts at multiple banks for various
Speaker 4: fictitious businesses. These weren't actually incorporated, but they claimed to
Speaker 4: be businesses with names like The Center Investigative Agency or
Speaker 4: the CIA, Why Yeah, Fox Photography, Northwest Technologies, Tech Writers Group,
Speaker 4: Rare Books, Warehouse Imagery, Inc. Ja JA Electronics, Kelly's Marine,
Speaker 4: and Turner Personnel.
Speaker 9: Great Good Work Guys.
Speaker 4: Essentially, the DOJ is arguing that the SBLC solicited donations
Speaker 4: under false pretenses and then transferred that money to extremist
Speaker 4: groups using a network of fake businesses. To get a conviction,
Speaker 4: the dog will have to argue that this activity constitutes wirefraud,
Speaker 4: false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to
Speaker 4: commit concealment money laundering. A conviction will result in the
Speaker 4: forfeiture of financial gains from the alleged illegal activities. The
Speaker 4: right has reacted to this news by calling the Unite
Speaker 4: the Right rally and kind of the alt right movement
Speaker 4: as it existed from this time period a syop or
Speaker 4: a false flag. Senator Mike Lee, right wing political influencer
Speaker 4: Nick Sorter, and Elon Musk have boosted these claims, getting
Speaker 4: tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands alikes on x
Speaker 4: Everything app This seems to be a narrative. It's not
Speaker 4: really new, I guess, but an enhanced narrative that is
Speaker 4: emerging among the online right as a way to dissuade
Speaker 4: some of the uglier parts of that era, while still
Speaker 4: carrying along a lot of the same politics, especially on
Speaker 4: like the Great Replacement, which is more of a mainstream
Speaker 4: idea among the conservative movement at this point in time,
Speaker 4: so they're able to walk away from the uglier kind
Speaker 4: of imagery and explicitly notz the elements of this like
Speaker 4: the KKK, which is very boomer very very very Boomer
Speaker 4: coded k the KKK, so they're able to call stuff
Speaker 4: like that and the Unite the Right rally of syop
Speaker 4: or a false flag while still reaping the benefits that
Speaker 4: the alt right movement achieved by kind of trailblazing certain
Speaker 4: rhetoric into the conservative mainstream. Right wing commentators have also
Speaker 4: used this news to reassert one of their favorite claims
Speaker 4: that Patriot Front is a psyop or a false flag operation,
Speaker 4: that whenever a group of young Nazis show up in
Speaker 4: a u all all wearing matching outfits and masks, that
Speaker 4: this is a staged event by either the deep State,
Speaker 4: the FEDS, or a group like the SPLC. Patriot Front
Speaker 4: is not actually named in this indictment. There's no evidence
Speaker 4: that the SPLC was paying anyone at Patriot Front to
Speaker 4: inform on the operations of that group, and obviously paying
Speaker 4: an individual to inform on the details of an upcoming
Speaker 4: event like Unite the Right does not mean that the
Speaker 4: Unite the Right event in Charlottesville was planned or staged
Speaker 4: by the SPLC. Dozens of people were involved in the
Speaker 4: planning of this event, and hundreds participated of their own volition.
Speaker 4: One person in a planning group chat sending info to
Speaker 4: the SPLC does not mean that this action was staged
Speaker 4: or fake.
Speaker 1: Anyone who's in the field has that a lot of
Speaker 1: issues with the SPLC over the last few years, especially
Speaker 1: people who work for them. I have a lot of
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people have worked for them
Speaker 1: and gotten fucked over by them. They did a lot
Speaker 1: of union busting too. The people who run the SPLC,
Speaker 1: and some of whom are the people who are specifically
Speaker 1: accused of having committed these crimes. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I feel like that like the specific things they have
Speaker 1: to prove in order to date a conviction are accurate
Speaker 1: because fundamentally, anyone who donated to the SPLC knew that
Speaker 1: they were like getting shipped from informants. You know, like,
Speaker 1: I don't think that was like the amount of money though,
Speaker 1: is shocking.
Speaker 4: That's what the That's what they're gonna have to defend
Speaker 4: in court. Yeah, they're gonna have to hard and have
Speaker 4: to argue that the money that was donated was used
Speaker 4: for its intended purpose, which was dismantling whit's premisies. You'll
Speaker 4: have to say that the information that they obtained through
Speaker 4: these through through paying these informants, was still in furtherance
Speaker 4: of that mission. Right, That's going to be what they're
Speaker 4: going to defend in court.
Speaker 15: Now.
Speaker 4: You know, obviously the FBI also uses information, sure, right,
Speaker 4: the FBI does this same thing. Famously, the FBI paid
Speaker 4: the OH nine A affiliated Joshua Caleb Sutter over one
Speaker 4: hundred and forty thousand dollars from twenty three to twenty
Speaker 4: twenty one. The FBI funded a publishing house, a neo
Speaker 4: Nazi publishing house essentially yeah yeah, yeah, which is responsible for,
Speaker 4: in part, the political direction of the Adam Off Indivision
Speaker 4: now at Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that
Speaker 4: quote the SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence
Speaker 4: end quote. Using donor money to allegedly profit off klansmen
Speaker 4: cannot go unchecked. Unquote. Patel has said that quote this
Speaker 4: is illegal, and this is an ongoing investigation against all
Speaker 4: individuals involved. The SBLC released a video statement saying that
Speaker 4: the use of informants was quote unquote necessary and claimed
Speaker 4: quote these individuals risked their lives to infiltrate and inform
Speaker 4: on the activities of our nation's most radical and violent
Speaker 4: extremist groups unquote. The indictment does not characterize many of
Speaker 4: these informants as quote unquote infiltrators, but rather individuals who
Speaker 4: were already members of these groups and were paid by
Speaker 4: the SBLC to share information and gossip on fellow members.
Speaker 4: The SBLC statement also said that they quote frequently shared
Speaker 4: what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement,
Speaker 4: including the FBI. We did not, however, share our use
Speaker 4: of informants broadly with anyone to protect the identity and
Speaker 4: safety of the informants and their families unquote, like a
Speaker 4: lot of the people in this field. The FBI knew
Speaker 4: the SBLC was doing this.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 4: After the assassination of Charlie kirk Cash, Betel announced that
Speaker 4: the FBI was severing ties with the SBLC, saying the
Speaker 4: organization had been turned into a quote unquote partisan smear
Speaker 4: machine that defamed quote unquote mainstream Americans with its hate map.
Speaker 6: Okay.
Speaker 4: Attorney Ed Martin, former head of the DOJ's Weaponization Working
Speaker 4: Group as in weaponizing the dj against political enemies, shared
Speaker 4: news of the indictment on x everything app and wrote, quote,
Speaker 4: they killed Charlie and they will pay unquote. So clearly
Speaker 4: this prosecution is politically motivated. Right There is political motivations
Speaker 4: behind deciding to do this right now. The FBI already
Speaker 4: knew that this was happening to a certain extent, but
Speaker 4: now they are going after the SBLC as a part
Speaker 4: of a targeted political prosecution, and this indictment could be
Speaker 4: seen as part of the anti Antifa nonprofit crackdown. Last March,
Speaker 4: CBS News reported that the FBI and the IRS formed
Speaker 4: a new initiative to investigate fraud at nonprofit organizations with
Speaker 4: suspected links to domestic terrorism following federal directives to pursue
Speaker 4: Antifa aligned groups. A spokesperson from the IRS told CBS
Speaker 4: News quote, IRS Criminal Investigation is collaborating with federal law
Speaker 4: enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to investigate individuals and entities
Speaker 4: that may be funding the domestic terrorism or political violence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's unfortunate that the SPLC was so reckless
Speaker 1: and sloppy, and the fucking amounts are shocking and indefensible
Speaker 1: and again not necessarily in a legal sense. Like I'm
Speaker 1: very doubtful of the government's case, but I am very
Speaker 1: angry at the Southern Poverty Law Center, And I don't
Speaker 1: think it should contend you to exist as an organization,
Speaker 1: like if it's going to do this.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and like when you combine this as you say,
Speaker 10: like anyone who works in this world knows people working
Speaker 10: there had a mitiable time for a long time, for
Speaker 10: a great variety of recent time.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I'm livid at them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is obviously evidence that the Trump administration is
Speaker 1: doing what they've said they're doing that, Like the DOJ
Speaker 1: is going to be looking into these like big you know,
Speaker 1: liberal and left aligned in goos particularly that like are
Speaker 1: focused on combating the far right, but in terms of
Speaker 1: this showing any reason to be scared that they're going
Speaker 1: to disappear people like, no, the SPOC did something crazy,
Speaker 1: and I don't think that the charges specifically are valid,
Speaker 1: but like they open themselves up to get fucked with
Speaker 1: by doing something so not like give one of these
Speaker 1: people a million dollars a million dollars, Yeah, that's wild.
Speaker 4: Yeah, why do they have a fake company named after
Speaker 4: the CIA?
Speaker 9: What are you guys doing?
Speaker 10: Yeah, someone thought they were being a really cool secret spy.
Speaker 4: And I mean those are some of the charges that
Speaker 4: may be able to stick. Is the sort of stuff
Speaker 4: about misrepresenting yeah to a federally insured bank that that
Speaker 4: type of stuff could be easier to argue based on
Speaker 4: what I've read in the indictment, but of course that'll
Speaker 4: get settled in court.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah. And as a way to sort of
Speaker 2: close this out, I think one of the things that
Speaker 2: we're running into here is one of the thing that
Speaker 2: the right is being able to use here is the
Speaker 2: fact that a lot of these sort of liberal in
Speaker 2: central left NGOs absolutely sucked and like we have covered
Speaker 2: on this show, you know, a whole bunch of these
Speaker 2: organizations do in union busting, and they're like, their priorities
Speaker 2: don't necessarily match what you know, I would say ours
Speaker 2: should be. And I think this is something that this
Speaker 2: administration is going to continue to sort of in some
Speaker 2: ways use as a rift point, like the fact that
Speaker 2: these groups are doing all of this in unhinged shit, right,
Speaker 2: this is this is the political consequence of the structure
Speaker 2: that these NGOs use in the way that they've operated,
Speaker 2: and now there's sort of chickens are coming home to roost.
Speaker 10: I want to talk this week in our immigration segment
Speaker 10: about the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service. This is
Speaker 10: the agency task with vetting and adjudicating immigration benefits. It's
Speaker 10: the only immigration agency at DHS. It traditionally hasn't done
Speaker 10: enforcement sweeps right, So for a while, particularly recently, people
Speaker 10: there have felt a little out of place at the
Speaker 10: Department Home Security.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: The idea has been keep enforcement and processing separate so
Speaker 10: that people don't have very reasonable reasons to fear doing
Speaker 10: the legal process, right, so that people continue to show
Speaker 10: up to their interviews, to submit their documents, et cetera. Generally,
Speaker 10: they are funded in a large part by immigration fees
Speaker 10: and perceived as the friendly and more welcoming side of
Speaker 10: the process. Their job isn't historically has not been to
Speaker 10: kind of root out bad migration as so much as
Speaker 10: to help people, or at least to process people to
Speaker 10: do the bureaucratic part of migration. Under the second Trump administration, however,
Speaker 10: this has changed. There have been detentions at interviews, there
Speaker 10: have been cancelations of citizenships ceremonies. The USAS has begun
Speaker 10: hiring for a new position, and this new position is
Speaker 10: eligible for remote work, for more remote work than existing hires,
Speaker 10: and it's called the Homeland Defender. So like we probably
Speaker 10: many people have seen these Homeland Defender advertisements on x
Speaker 10: dot com, the everything website right, Homeland Defenders have been
Speaker 10: offered up to fifty thousand dollars in signing bonuses, and
Speaker 10: at the same time as offering remote work benefits for
Speaker 10: the Homeland Defenders, the agency has been forcing other people
Speaker 10: to return to offices that could no longer fit the
Speaker 10: number of staff it had under years of work from home.
Speaker 10: The agency grew and changed right like almost every organization did,
Speaker 10: and there were reports that you literally had like lawyers
Speaker 10: sitting in corridors working on their laptops or like trying
Speaker 10: to perch on a radiator or a window sill because
Speaker 10: their offices could fit people. Right, and at the same time,
Speaker 10: the branding around Homeland Defender is not the way that
Speaker 10: USCIS staff traditionally saw themselves. In Minnesota, USCAS has begun
Speaker 10: reinvestigating people admitted with the incredibly highly vetted refugee status.
Speaker 10: So we already spoke about it once today. Right, the
Speaker 10: refugees are vetted before they even enter the United States.
Speaker 10: Across the country, executive orders will followed with memos pausing
Speaker 10: or entirely stopping the process of legal and veted immigration
Speaker 10: for people from an increasing number of countries. The legally
Speaker 10: mandated green cards for adult children and siblings or current sistants,
Speaker 10: as well as spouses and minor children of existing permanent
Speaker 10: residents has gone unfulfilled. This is quote unquote family based migration.
Speaker 10: They used to call it chain migration. Right. That used
Speaker 10: to be the language on the right. It's something that
Speaker 10: Trump administration has hated since its first term. Right, this
Speaker 10: has been a thing that they spoke about and that
Speaker 10: has been spoken about at the right for some time.
Speaker 10: These green cards could be reused for employment based claims,
Speaker 10: which is going to have a much larger number of
Speaker 10: people who are already in the country. It's not bringing
Speaker 10: new people in or they might go Unused. Refugees are
Speaker 10: being detained without any clear legal authority and requizzed about
Speaker 10: their applications. According to reporting in The New Yorker, this
Speaker 10: means that people are being taken in meaned at an
Speaker 10: ice facility right and then quiz about stuff that they'd
Speaker 10: already been asked about before they came to the United
Speaker 10: States when they were doing that vetting. People who are
Speaker 10: married to United States citizens are being arrested at interviews,
Speaker 10: even though generally there was an amnesty of people who,
Speaker 10: for instance, had overstate a visa and then got married before.
Speaker 10: USCIS has also committed significant resources of the agency that
Speaker 10: may well have been taken away from processing claims and
Speaker 10: devoted them entirely to investigating naturalizations with the goal of
Speaker 10: denaturalizing naturalized United States citizens. This is a very difficult
Speaker 10: process right. The Afreem case is the Supreme Court case
Speaker 10: which governs this right. It refers to someone who was
Speaker 10: a Jewish communist or had been in Israel. What it
Speaker 10: says is the government cannot de citizenize someone because it
Speaker 10: doesn't agree with their politics, even in the time of
Speaker 10: anti communism. Right, Once somebody becomes a citizen in their
Speaker 10: files or remove from USCIS and they go to the
Speaker 10: National Record Center and so calling the presumably tens of
Speaker 10: thousands of files of naturalized United States citizens and hundreds
Speaker 10: of thousands over time millions right would require some kind
Speaker 10: of filter. The most likely way this is being filtered
Speaker 10: is through their nationality.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: One can imagine, for instance, that the seventy five countries
Speaker 10: Trump has paused green card processes for might be a start,
Speaker 10: or their specific focus on Somali people might even prove
Speaker 10: a more focused way of doing it right. They have
Speaker 10: had some success this week. A Belizean woman was found
Speaker 10: guilty of naturalization fraud for submitting a fake divorce degree
Speaker 10: She married an American citizen without being divorced from a
Speaker 10: previous spouse. Belize They found that she had falsified those documents.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: They are also pursuing a case against a Nigerian man
Speaker 10: who has already been convicted of fraud and it has
Speaker 10: already been put in prison for that, but they are
Speaker 10: now pursuing a denaturalization case as well. Virtually every interaction
Speaker 10: with USCIS now seems to require interviews in person and
Speaker 10: biometric connection. This means that applicants now have to come
Speaker 10: into an office where they know that people have been detained.
Speaker 10: This leads to people being afraid to do that right.
Speaker 10: Petitions are slowing down as they're moved around to a
Speaker 10: dwindling workforce which is still focused on processing those as
Speaker 10: opposed to the growing amount of the USCIS workforce which
Speaker 10: is looking for quote unquote fraud in applications or attempting
Speaker 10: to denaturalize people. As we just covered, among the people
Speaker 10: waiting without visas are some people who are waiting for
Speaker 10: special visas, which are given to people who are survivors
Speaker 10: of human trafficking, gender based violence, or other crimes. This
Speaker 10: includes children. There's especially Immigrant Juvenile visa, which every single
Speaker 10: person I've heard of coming on an SIJ visa has
Speaker 10: had things happen to them which I didn't struggle to
Speaker 10: think about that would keep you up at night. And
Speaker 10: the thought that those people are waiting in limbo because
Speaker 10: they're trying to denaturalize people is particularly upsetting. I'm sure
Speaker 10: it's also upsetting to some people who've worked at uscis
Speaker 10: their whole life, and I know that morale among those
Speaker 10: people is pretty low. While the agency sort of has
Speaker 10: changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of years.
Speaker 10: Talking of changing beyond all recognition, we're going to now
Speaker 10: pivot from journalism to probably some adverts for online gambling. Yeah,
Speaker 10: it would be shocking and jarring.
Speaker 9: I love it.
Speaker 10: You could change your life beyond all recognition if you
Speaker 10: have a big win that.
Speaker 4: Or a big loss.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, your life that way, Derrison. We're not supposed
Speaker 10: to mention.
Speaker 4: That we're back.
Speaker 1: And we all just voted on Forbes dot COM's newest
Speaker 1: prediction contest, how many people will be wounded in the
Speaker 1: next three American mass shootings. I'm excited. There's a big
Speaker 1: prize for this one.
Speaker 6: Sick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's only slightly an exaggeration of what Forbes is
Speaker 1: actually doing.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's pretty gross.
Speaker 4: It's pretty really hideous. It's okay, guys, it's not a market,
Speaker 4: it's just our prediction platform. It's a prediction platform. There's
Speaker 4: no real money, only social capital.
Speaker 10: That could be the slogan of most journalistic enterprises in
Speaker 10: twenty twenty six. To be honest, Forbes has kind of
Speaker 10: been a blog rather than a news website, but this
Speaker 10: is still pretty disgusting.
Speaker 4: Speaking of there being no real money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about the Federal Reserve. So when we
Speaker 2: last left our I hesitate to call them heroes, yes,
Speaker 2: But when we last left the Federal Reserve Board, there
Speaker 2: was a very obviously cooked up investigation by the Justice
Speaker 2: Department into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. This investigation doesn't
Speaker 2: really seem to have advanced at all, but the conflict
Speaker 2: over Powell and over Powell's replacement has been intensifying in
Speaker 2: recent weeks. Last week, on the fifteenth of April, Trump
Speaker 2: threatened to fire Powell if Powell stayed on as basically
Speaker 2: the temporary Federal Reserve Chair after his term expired. Now,
Speaker 2: the reason this is happening is because Trump's attempt to
Speaker 2: get someone confirmed to replace Powell has not been going well,
Speaker 2: and if no one is confirmed by May fifteenth, then
Speaker 2: the office is just empty, and Powell has said that
Speaker 2: he wants to stay on and become the temporary chair.
Speaker 2: This is sort of unprecedented, but then again, we've also
Speaker 2: not ever had the president's open an investigation into the
Speaker 2: sitting chair of the Federal Reserve, causing him to give
Speaker 2: a reverse hostage video. So where things are right now
Speaker 2: is that we are getting hearings on Trump's preferred nominee,
Speaker 2: a man named Kevin Walsh. However, there is a real
Speaker 2: problem with worsh as as a candidate that's not doesn't
Speaker 2: have anything to do with who he is. We'll get
Speaker 2: to that in a second. The biggest issue that Trump
Speaker 2: is facing here is that Tom Tillis, who's an outgoing
Speaker 2: Republican Senator, is refusing to let any Trump appointee pass
Speaker 2: through the Finance Committee unless Trump ends the investigation into
Speaker 2: Jerom Powell. So this has had everything at a complete standstill.
Speaker 2: It was sort of unclear though a lot of different
Speaker 2: Republican senators had threatened to do something like this, But
Speaker 2: because Tillis is just leaving, he's just he's retiring at
Speaker 2: the end of this at the end of the session.
Speaker 2: He's the one who's you know, up there doing it.
Speaker 2: And this has ground the nomination to a halt. We're
Speaker 2: still getting hearings, but there's no way for him to
Speaker 2: actually get a vote to get get this process out
Speaker 2: of committee. So into this morass steps Kevin Walsh, who
Speaker 2: He's not the most unhinged guy Trump could have hicked
Speaker 2: high bar. This is, at least nominally, on the surface,
Speaker 2: sort of a FED guy like he has worked for
Speaker 2: the Federal Reserve, like Federal Reserve banks before.
Speaker 4: He's not a podcast right, Yes, actually, actually.
Speaker 6: He might have one.
Speaker 9: There's a non zero chance.
Speaker 10: He might be.
Speaker 4: He might be.
Speaker 2: I I don't know, but I am not willing to
Speaker 2: say that he is not one. So now this, this,
Speaker 2: this whole nomination has also become a mess because again,
Speaker 2: as as we've been talking about, the reason why Trump
Speaker 2: wants to basically take direct control of the Federal Reserve
Speaker 2: and and FED independence by installing his guys as a
Speaker 2: chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is that he wants
Speaker 2: to FED well, he wants to be able to control
Speaker 2: the FED so he can control interest rates. He wants
Speaker 2: interest rates cut. Now, this is coming up a lot
Speaker 2: in the hearings and so far Walsh is giving answers
Speaker 2: that if you've ever watched the testimony of someone who's
Speaker 2: who's trying to get onto the Supreme Court, it's a
Speaker 2: lot like that, where he is saying the things that
Speaker 2: he is supposed to say. He's saying that he opposes
Speaker 2: an interest rate cut. He's saying that the primary job
Speaker 2: of the FED is a combat inflation. He's saying that
Speaker 2: he believes it fed independents. But he also has said
Speaker 2: that Trump has not asked him to cut interest rates.
Speaker 2: And Elizabeth Warren, who's been sort of leading the Democratic
Speaker 2: charge against this, has pointed out a number of things,
Speaker 2: one of which is in workboard. He gets some more
Speaker 2: of the weird shit with him in a second. But
Speaker 2: one of the major things here is that the President
Speaker 2: has said that he's asked Worsh to do just ray cuts.
Speaker 2: So somebody's lying here. Worsh isn't giving non answers about that.
Speaker 2: I'm also just going to read this quote from the
Speaker 2: Associated Press quote. Warren also noted that Worsh has not
Speaker 2: disclosed all of his financial holdings, which include investments in
Speaker 2: startups and private companies, or the size of those financial stakes.
Speaker 2: For example, Worsh has said he has holdings in SpaceX
Speaker 2: and polymarkets, but it's not said how large those investments are.
Speaker 4: Great, well, you can't win them off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So later on Warsh said he would divest from
Speaker 2: one hundred million dollars in investments but you know this
Speaker 2: is great. Warren also points out that he's in the
Speaker 2: Epstein files because Epstein apparently invited him and his wife
Speaker 2: to Wade party. It is unclear at this point what
Speaker 2: what a connection he had, or if there was more.
Speaker 2: But that's not a great sign. Where we are right
Speaker 2: now is that worsh is normal enough of a guy
Speaker 2: that Tom Tillis is willing to vote for him if
Speaker 2: the investigation is dropped. Tillis and some other members of
Speaker 2: the committee have been Republican members of the committee have
Speaker 2: been talking about this scheme to get the investigation transferred
Speaker 2: from the Department of Justice to the Senate Committee. I
Speaker 2: think at which point they could basically just kill it
Speaker 2: or just have it be a thing at a budget overruns.
Speaker 2: That's not like an attempt to depose Jeroon Powell. It's
Speaker 2: not clear what's going to happen with that, and it
Speaker 2: hasn't started yet. This is the point that we're at
Speaker 2: right now. This conflict is going to keep heating up
Speaker 2: as the May fifteenth deadline for getting a new nominion
Speaker 2: before the board vacancy happens, and Jerome Powell basically stays
Speaker 2: in power longer than his terminally last happens. So we're
Speaker 2: going to keep following this story. And there's one other
Speaker 2: story that we are going to keep following, which is
Speaker 2: there was an exclusive by the Wall Street Journal, which
Speaker 2: is a report this is from unimed US officials, but
Speaker 2: it claims that the UAE's central bank governor is reportedly
Speaker 2: trying to get what's called a currency swap with the US.
Speaker 2: So what a currency swap is basically is, it's like
Speaker 2: it's a way to try to fix an exchange rate
Speaker 2: and get a country a certain amount of US dollars
Speaker 2: by just like just at the fixed exchange rate, just
Speaker 2: like swapping X amount of dollars for x amounts of
Speaker 2: another country's currency. This report was immediately denied, very very
Speaker 2: quickly denied by a series of posts on x the
Speaker 2: everything app by the UAE's embassy to the US where
Speaker 2: they gave a thing of Trump also had like started
Speaker 2: talking about this too. I'm just going to read a
Speaker 2: little bit of this quote. We very much appreciate President
Speaker 2: Trump's recognition of the UAE is one of America's most
Speaker 2: important economic and trade partners. That recognition reflex at depth
Speaker 2: of mutual trust based on mutual investment, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Any suggestion that the UAE requires external financial
Speaker 2: backing misreads the facts. The UAE is one of the
Speaker 2: most financially resilient economies, underpinned by more than two trillion
Speaker 2: dollars in the sovereign and assets more than three hundred
Speaker 2: billion dollars in foreign currency reserves held by the UAE
Speaker 2: Central Bank and banking sectors, with approximately one point five
Speaker 2: trillion in deposits. So when they start listening out the deposits,
Speaker 2: that's when things are not going great.
Speaker 6: And yeah, the the.
Speaker 2: Issue here, and this is something this is what the
Speaker 2: Waalsher journal is talking about, is that this is not
Speaker 2: an immediate proposal. This is a proposal for what's becoming
Speaker 2: increasingly clear, which is that there's no there's not actually
Speaker 2: an end to the war and Iran in sight. And
Speaker 2: if the trader for moves remains closed, this is an
Speaker 2: existential crisis for the UAE because not only are all
Speaker 2: of their exports stopped, you know, like the ue itself
Speaker 2: is just physically under threat, to the infrastructures under threat,
Speaker 2: and it's very difficult for them to get more investments.
Speaker 2: And this could in the future start a dollar crisis
Speaker 2: of the kind that we've talked about on the show
Speaker 2: before Go if you want to, Yeah, I've talked about
Speaker 2: basically dollar crises and how you can have balance of
Speaker 2: payments crises for running out of US dollars. What's interesting
Speaker 2: about this reports, and the reason that we're sort of
Speaker 2: talking about it right now, is that one of the
Speaker 2: things that the UAE reportedly was mentioning was that they
Speaker 2: might be forced to turn the Chinese currency. It's basically
Speaker 2: they might be forced to like sell oil in Chinese
Speaker 2: currency in order to get it through the straight, which
Speaker 2: would be a apackle shift to the entire global political economy, right,
Speaker 2: which is the America's status in the world is in part,
Speaker 2: but in no small part, based on the fact that
Speaker 2: you can really only buy oil in dollars. And it
Speaker 2: seems like what's happening is that the UAE is looking
Speaker 2: at their long term prospects going we're completely screwed. They're going, oh, well,
Speaker 2: if we don't, if you don't just hand us a
Speaker 2: bunch of money, we're going to have to start looking
Speaker 2: at the underpinnings of you know, American imperial power. So
Speaker 2: we're going to continue to see where this goes. As
Speaker 2: just war continues, and as the stray continues to be blocked,
Speaker 2: countries around the world are going to become more and
Speaker 2: more desperate. As the economic consequences of this ripples out
Speaker 2: across the world, We're probably going to start seeing more
Speaker 2: things like this. And at some point, if it becomes
Speaker 2: clear that the war is not going to end. In
Speaker 2: Trump's early week announcement that the ceasefires are going to
Speaker 2: keep going, stops being able to keep the stock markets
Speaker 2: from being propped up, We're going to start seeing an
Speaker 2: even wider spread impact of this. But this is a
Speaker 2: bleak sign from a staunch US ally. Yeah, we have
Speaker 2: one final story before closing, which is a little funny,
Speaker 2: also worrying, but more more funny.
Speaker 10: I think that's pretty good.
Speaker 4: Shawnie Kirkhoff, the woman that Glenn Beck's right wing outlet
Speaker 4: The Blaze falsely accused of being the January sixth pipe bomber,
Speaker 4: has launched a lawsuit against The Blaze and the two
Speaker 4: quote unquote journalists who wrote the story for context. Last November,
Speaker 4: the Blaze published a story claiming to have identified the
Speaker 4: bomber as a Capitol police officer who responded to the
Speaker 4: January sixth insurrection based on quote forensic gate analysis which
Speaker 4: determined the officer was a quote up to ninety eight
Speaker 4: percent match to surveillance video of the bomber.
Speaker 6: Oh God.
Speaker 4: This lawsuit claims five counts of defamation and one count
Speaker 4: of defamation by implication, and Kerkhoff is requesting a jury trial.
Speaker 4: The documents claim that the Blaze report targeted her because
Speaker 4: of her actions on January sixth as a police officer
Speaker 4: and testimony she gave against insurrectionists in court, and part
Speaker 4: of the intention of targeting her was to build on
Speaker 4: this larger idea that the defendants had that January sixth
Speaker 4: was a quote unquote inside job. As these reports were
Speaker 4: getting published by The Blaze, Glenn Beck said on his show,
Speaker 4: quote this is one of the biggest stories. I think
Speaker 4: it is the biggest scandal of my lifetime, maybe in
Speaker 4: the last one hundred years.
Speaker 1: Paper monstrous, bigger than Watergate.
Speaker 4: Pullit surprise winning stuff.
Speaker 10: You have the capacity for self delusion, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Pullet sinning stuff.
Speaker 9: I'm waiting for the politics are committed to finish reviewing
Speaker 9: this one.
Speaker 10: They're gonna have to get in a nine after the
Speaker 10: pulic serprise are surely going to get for interviewing the
Speaker 10: dude who murdered Minneapolis Democratic politicians? Well, yeah, which I'm
Speaker 10: sure was an action that his lawyer was super stoked about.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Court documents to say that because of this false claim,
Speaker 4: the CIA placed the plaintiff on administrative leave and she
Speaker 4: was forced into hiding amidst online threats from conspiracy theorists
Speaker 4: quote for her role in supporting the deep state, including
Speaker 4: in posts on her mother's obituary web page unquote, she
Speaker 4: was getting death threats on the obituary page for her mother.
Speaker 10: Yeah, in constant frustration in my life, his journalists posting
Speaker 10: screenshots from court cases and then not listening to the
Speaker 10: court listener page. So I decided to find the page
Speaker 10: so I could not be that guy. But yes, some
Speaker 10: of the threats this woman got genuinely probably made her
Speaker 10: life very difficult to live for a period of time.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. The stud alleges that even after she was cleared
Speaker 4: as a suspect and weeks later another suspect was arrested
Speaker 4: who seems to be the likely bomber, these blaze ute
Speaker 4: unquote journalists continue to harass her and that their quote,
Speaker 4: false and defamatory accusations have irreparably changed her life unquote.
Speaker 4: The documents that this ruined her lifetime career in public
Speaker 4: service by forever linking her to the bombing and records
Speaker 4: of an FBI investigation, making any potential security clearance is
Speaker 4: needed in the future difficult or impossible to pass. One
Speaker 4: of the journalists was fired by the Blaze on April first,
Speaker 4: just earlier this month, and the other resigned two days later.
Speaker 4: They have since raised over twenty thousand dollars since leaving
Speaker 4: the Blaze to continue their claims on a new independent
Speaker 4: website that they're launching. Given the name of the website,
Speaker 4: the website is called Yeah, They're a toss regnant LLC.
Speaker 9: Yes, yes, Veritas.
Speaker 4: I think that just means the truth is king basically trains.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, I think that's what they were going for
Speaker 10: at least.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I love it.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 1: When I read that detail, I was you guys are
Speaker 1: going to be the most sued any people have ever been.
Speaker 9: It's beautiful.
Speaker 10: Something about PITOD seems relevant here.
Speaker 4: The document says that the plaintiff was called in to
Speaker 4: work on November sixth, where two FBI agents then asked
Speaker 4: her about quote unquote online chatter that she was the bomber.
Speaker 4: She consented to a phone and car search and was
Speaker 4: placed on administrative leave. Later that day, a quote unquote
Speaker 4: caravan of FBI vehicles arrived outside her home, including a
Speaker 4: bomb disposal truck and a helicopter. I'm just going to
Speaker 4: read from the document quote. The agents claimed that they
Speaker 4: were primarily looking for shoes. Agents edited their vehicles with
Speaker 4: their guns drawn in full tactical gear. An agent called
Speaker 4: mister Dickert, who is the plaintiff's boyfriend, and commanded him
Speaker 4: to quote come out of the house unarmed with your dogs.
Speaker 4: Mister Dickart and missus Kirkhoff complied and stepped outside. Agents
Speaker 4: swept through the house, then re entered with bomb sniffing dogs.
Speaker 4: They opened cabinets, rifled through drawers, and scattered Missus Kerkhoff's
Speaker 4: and mister Dickard's belongings, all without obtaining Miss Kerr's or
Speaker 4: mister Dickert's consent. It suddenly occurred to miss Kirkoff that
Speaker 4: they were not simply looking for a pair of shoes.
Speaker 6: Unquote.
Speaker 10: Never heard the masking for the dogs to come out
Speaker 10: before that was a new one for me.
Speaker 4: That is an interesting detail. That is an interesting Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the plaintiff asked the agents there why they would
Speaker 4: do all this to investigate quote unquote online chatter, and
Speaker 4: as senior official responded that these orders came from quote
Speaker 4: unquote higher up and that Miss Kirkhoff could quote clear
Speaker 4: everything up just that night if she would accompany agents
Speaker 4: to the FBI office for a polygraph interview. Miss Kerkoff agreed,
Speaker 4: and agents assured her that the drive out to the
Speaker 4: office would take longer than the interview itself. This was
Speaker 4: not true. The interview lasted almost three hours. Agents repeatedly
Speaker 4: accused the plaintiff of placing the bombs and continually asserted
Speaker 4: her guilt. Part Way through the interview, the interrogator changed
Speaker 4: out the tube on the polygraph because they quote did
Speaker 4: not like how they were reading unquote.
Speaker 10: That was a remarkable detail.
Speaker 4: Jesus yeah, oh, Jesus Christ, and at one point told
Speaker 4: the plaintiff that she quote unquote fail Wow. Oh, the
Speaker 4: plaintiff assumed was just an interrogation technique.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you can't fail a polygraph test, right, It just
Speaker 10: gives information, yes, often not actually information, which she's very
Speaker 10: useful in any way relevant to whether you're telling the
Speaker 10: truth or not. Polygraphs not not really something that should
Speaker 10: be used in this capacity. But here we go anyway.
Speaker 10: But yet there's not like a past fail. It doesn't
Speaker 10: like a bleep bleep bleep liar detective.
Speaker 4: Now, after midnight, she asked if she was free to leave,
Speaker 4: and the agents said yes, so she went home. In
Speaker 4: the next day, the FBI returned her phone, and then
Speaker 4: once she got back her phone, she saw this quote
Speaker 4: unquote online chatter exploding all over, alleging that she was
Speaker 4: the bomber. A day later, the Blaze published a report
Speaker 4: explicitly naming her as the bombing suspect, something they already
Speaker 4: alluded to in previous reporting, which sparked the online chatter,
Speaker 4: which caused the FBI to search her home and interrogate her.
Speaker 4: This was all intentional on the part of the Blaze.
Speaker 4: According to this court document, the defendants, these quote unquote
Speaker 4: journalists purposely forwarded a tip to the Office of the
Speaker 4: Director of National Intelligence in an attempt to get quote
Speaker 4: unquote coroboration of their reporting from sources inside the government
Speaker 4: by getting the plaintiff placed under investigation. Prior to their
Speaker 4: publishing of the articles identifying her as the bomber. This
Speaker 4: was basically all part of the ski.
Speaker 9: Their goal was to set the narrative Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Months later, the defendants have refused to remove headlines or
Speaker 4: social media posts claiming to identify the bomber, even after
Speaker 4: the actual text of these articles was removed after the
Speaker 4: FBI arrested the real suspect in December. Well, just last month,
Speaker 4: the quote unquote journalists published another article on The Blaze titled,
Speaker 4: quote Brian Cole Junior's physical presence, posture, mannerisms are no
Speaker 4: match to FBI's hooey clad pipe bomb suspect unquote god.
Speaker 4: This was another article on The Blaze saying that Gate
Speaker 4: analysis showed that Brian Cole Junior, the actual suspect who
Speaker 4: has been arrested, does not match the Gate does not
Speaker 4: have a positive Gate analysis match to the surveillance footage
Speaker 4: from that night.
Speaker 1: Oh god, because it's not real, because because Gate analysis
Speaker 1: is bullshit.
Speaker 10: Well they break that down in the quote documents, right.
Speaker 10: The footage of her that they had was when she's
Speaker 10: carrying like fifty pounds of tactical gear and a heavy.
Speaker 1: Bag tactical gear yes, yes, and she suffered a serious
Speaker 1: laying injury in college.
Speaker 10: Yeh, it's comical that like they that this is what
Speaker 10: they went with, but then the fact that they're doubling
Speaker 10: down on it's very.
Speaker 4: Funny and legally baffling.
Speaker 10: Yeah, they really are not ready for the consequences to
Speaker 10: hit them on this one.
Speaker 4: No. So, like I said, these two quote unquot journalists
Speaker 4: were fired and Slash left The Blaze earlier this month,
Speaker 4: but in posts and podcast appearances, they assert that Brian
Speaker 4: Cole Junior is a quote unquote patsy, and that quote
Speaker 4: the truth about the pipe bomber has been quote unquote
Speaker 4: floored it, and that quote unquote legal considerations are preventing
Speaker 4: them from further disclosing the quote unquote darker details about
Speaker 4: their yeah, pipe bomber theory is christ Now, Brian Colet
Speaker 4: Junior's defense lawyers have filed a subpoena for miss Kirkoff,
Speaker 4: which misleadingly states she quote unquote failed a polygraph. This
Speaker 4: subpoena also contains her home address, and the subpoena has
Speaker 4: been spread online by these quote quote journalists as evidence
Speaker 4: that they were right all along. The plaintiff continues to
Speaker 4: deal with doxing and death threats as a result from
Speaker 4: the subpoena, and the quote unquote journalists continued reporting, spreading
Speaker 4: claims that she is in fact the real bomber. So
Speaker 4: Kirkoff is requesting a jury trial with these six counts
Speaker 4: of defamation. And I hope she gets a lot of
Speaker 4: money from everyone involved in this.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I hope she gets every dollar.
Speaker 10: Glenn beck Hans, Yeah, I mean I hope the outlets
Speaker 10: existing that is that would be ideal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hope the outlet becomes yet another subsidiary of
Speaker 1: the Onion.
Speaker 10: That would be a magnificent way for this to end.
Speaker 10: But yeah, like yeah, and then another element of the
Speaker 10: documents are noticed with that they talked about how the
Speaker 10: the quote unquote journalists had benefited from their Blue check
Speaker 10: X posts.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, monetized accounts on X.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I would be interested to see as we get more
Speaker 10: in discovery element of this case, how much were they
Speaker 10: making how much would it making from X versus the Blaze? Like,
Speaker 10: I'm going to follow this one just because so many
Speaker 10: of the bits of misleading reporting we see are because
Speaker 10: of this financial incentive structure. So it'll be very revealing
Speaker 10: for us well.
Speaker 4: And this financial structure is something that X Everything app
Speaker 4: is somewhat attempting to take on, at least for news
Speaker 4: aggregator accounts.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they specifically went off to dom Lucret apparently.
Speaker 4: Yes, one of X's guys announced like a week or
Speaker 4: so ago that they're going to be reforming reforming the
Speaker 4: payout system for news aggregators. This is uh Nikolie de Beer.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Part of the way they're doing that is that Ex's
Speaker 1: traffic is in free fall, and this is something that
Speaker 1: we're seeing, like across social media. There was a really
Speaker 1: good report that Peter Tornberg, who's an assistant professor in
Speaker 1: computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, published earlier
Speaker 1: this year.
Speaker 9: I mean, like just today came up with an update
Speaker 9: on it.
Speaker 1: On like the most recent numbers we have on like
Speaker 1: what's happening to the different social media networks. Visiting and
Speaker 1: posting on X the Everything app and Facebook have seen
Speaker 1: like a nearly fifty percent drops, a significant decline among
Speaker 1: like the youngest and the oldest users on social media,
Speaker 1: particularly like people over sixty five and people from eighteen
Speaker 1: to twenty four have seen like the biggest decline and
Speaker 1: like the time that they've actually spent on site. I'm
Speaker 1: going to be doing something.
Speaker 4: More detailed about this in the future, But a lot
Speaker 4: of what you're.
Speaker 1: Seeing from these big social media companies and these like
Speaker 1: big pivots, right are moves in desperation. This is not
Speaker 1: working as well as it used to. The economics that
Speaker 1: once underpin this system are falling apart. None of these
Speaker 1: companies are as profitable as they used to be, and
Speaker 1: people are pulling away from social media, particularly from like
Speaker 1: a lot of the text based social media sites which
Speaker 1: were never as profitable as like short form video was.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, that's something that made me less bummed.
Speaker 4: Well, I hope, I hope she gets certainly all the
Speaker 4: money they got from X and learning how much money
Speaker 4: that was will be super interesting in discovery and hopefully
Speaker 4: much much much more money as well.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, speaking of money, James, you wanted to plug a donation.
Speaker 9: That's right.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I want to talk retty briefly about the guys
Speaker 10: from Cobra column. So Cobra Column if people aren't familiar,
Speaker 10: it's a special Forces or it's a PDF that is
Speaker 10: aligned with the Korn National Union Crerand National Liberation Army
Speaker 10: and the struggle for liberation in the m R against
Speaker 10: the Hunter Right. They have been fighting intensely in an
Speaker 10: area near reality, place that Robert and I spend some time,
Speaker 10: actually just across the river from place Robin I spend
Speaker 10: some time. Albeit the Hunter has successfully launched munitions into
Speaker 10: Thailand several times now, and they are really like if
Speaker 10: you want to look at the front line of people's
Speaker 10: autonomy against autocracy, against dictatorship, against tyranny, like they are
Speaker 10: at it, and they need money to sustain their efforts,
Speaker 10: to feed themselves, to equip themselves, to buy medical equipment,
Speaker 10: and I think they're also trying to buy like a
Speaker 10: replacement helmets and body armor because they're keep getting hit
Speaker 10: by drones, right, and people have survivable injuries, but their
Speaker 10: armor is destroyed. If you'd like to help, you can
Speaker 10: send fifteen euros for ten stickers. Stickers have the Milk
Speaker 10: Tea Alliance salute, which is the same as the salute
Speaker 10: that the cub Scouts use and the one from Hunger Games.
Speaker 10: I'm not going to describe it because you can work
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Speaker 10: You can send fifteen euros for two stickers. That's s
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