Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
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Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
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Speaker 3: Hello, go on and welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 3: My name is Dan al Kurd, and I'm a researcher
Speaker 3: and analyst of Arab and pasting in politics. Today I
Speaker 3: want to talk about football, soccer, whatever, and I'll just
Speaker 3: start by saying, obviously FIFA is a terrible, terrible organization.
Speaker 3: And while there are many heartwarming events in this World Cup,
Speaker 3: the World Cup gets me, gets a lot of us.
Speaker 3: Despite everything, there have also been egregious incidents against players
Speaker 3: and referees and fans from the global South. Take for example,
Speaker 3: what happened to the Somali referee who wasn't allowed to
Speaker 3: come into the US to do his job. He was
Speaker 3: kept hours and hours in the airport before being unceremoniously
Speaker 3: returned to Somalia. Similarly, the head of the Palestine Football
Speaker 3: Association was denied a visa in to the United States,
Speaker 3: not allowed to come to the World Cup on US soil.
Speaker 3: This is in spite of the fact that FIFA invited
Speaker 3: association heads from around the world to attend and he
Speaker 3: did attend the opening game in Mexico City. Or one
Speaker 3: of the worst incidents, if you can call it that,
Speaker 3: the way that the Iranian team has been treated. They
Speaker 3: weren't allowed to stay in the US despite the games
Speaker 3: they were playing in this country, were constantly made to
Speaker 3: fly back to Mexico after every game. Clearly they were
Speaker 3: put at a severe disadvantage because they weren't allowed to
Speaker 3: rest and recuperate like the other teams. And listen, I'm
Speaker 3: not going to say it is a conspiracy, but having
Speaker 3: not won but three goals discounted by var eventually leading
Speaker 3: to their elimination from the tournament just adds insult to injury.
Speaker 3: But like I said, of course, there are many heartwarming stories.
Speaker 3: For me as a Palestine unit's been great to see
Speaker 3: how much Palestine keeps popping up despite the fact that
Speaker 3: the environment in the United States is much more hostile
Speaker 3: on this issue than the last World Cup. People are
Speaker 3: still talking about Palestine and advocating for Palestine. Thousands of
Speaker 3: Bosnian supporters, for example, turned Toronto into a sea of
Speaker 3: blue as they marched toward the stadium for the Canada match,
Speaker 3: chanting Free Palestine, and they did that in a number
Speaker 3: of places, Englewood, Seattle. They also chanted Palestine within the
Speaker 3: stadiums in multiple games. At that Canada game, activists also
Speaker 3: a deferrald a kick Israel out of FIFA banner and
Speaker 3: it makes sense really when you understand the experience of
Speaker 3: Bosnians with jedtocide themselves not too long ago. Similarly, Moroccan
Speaker 3: fans held Palestinian flags or wore Morocco jerseys with the
Speaker 3: word Palestine on it, and this showed up on TV.
Speaker 3: At the very opening match in Mexico City, pro Palestine
Speaker 3: demonstrators gathered to form a giant human Palestinian flag, and
Speaker 3: South Korean fans brought Palestinian flags to the tournament, honoring
Speaker 3: a promise they made during their qualifying when They're fans
Speaker 3: had chanted will take Palestine to the World Cup with us.
Speaker 3: In Gaza, Palestinians are watching the games too. Spain is
Speaker 3: the favorite team these days because of the government's position
Speaker 3: on the Israel Palestinian conflict and because of superstar player
Speaker 3: leamg Yamal, who has been unapologetically pro Palestine. Obviously, the
Speaker 3: genocide that has unfolded in Gaza and the war in
Speaker 3: killing that continues in the Middle East in both occupy
Speaker 3: territories and in Lebanon are part of the reason why
Speaker 3: this issue seems to be ever present. But it didn't
Speaker 3: start with the genocide. The story of Palestine at the
Speaker 3: World Cup is more layer than that, and the twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two World Cup in Qatar was a good demonstration
Speaker 3: of why Palestine keeps popping up and what Palestine represents
Speaker 3: to fans, especially air ones then and everyone now. I
Speaker 3: know it might seem strange to be talking about this
Speaker 3: now a few years after the fact, but I've been
Speaker 3: thinking about it a lot, especially given everything that has
Speaker 3: unfolded since, and I think the World Cup moment is
Speaker 3: one of those events that gets more interesting, not less,
Speaker 3: as time passes back then as it does now. It's
Speaker 3: showing us something important, not just about Palestine, but about
Speaker 3: the limits of what governments can actually control when it
Speaker 3: comes to what their own people believe.
Speaker 4: So let's get into it.
Speaker 3: Palestine did not qualify for the twenty twenty two World Cup.
Speaker 3: The Palasadian national football team was nowhere near Doha in
Speaker 3: an official capacity, and yet Arabs from across the region
Speaker 3: and across the world began referring to Palestine then as
Speaker 3: the thirty third team. Because Palestine was everywhere at the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two World Cup. There were Palestinian flags draped
Speaker 3: over shoulders and stadiums. Crowds erupted into the chance of Multani,
Speaker 3: the Palestinian anthem. After Arab teams won, one Tunisian fan
Speaker 3: ran onto the pitch mid match for the Palestinian flag.
Speaker 3: And when Morocco pulled off their historic upset against Spain
Speaker 3: so it's the first African and Arab team to ever
Speaker 3: reach the semi finals of a World Cup, Moroccan players
Speaker 3: ran to the crowd and held up the Palestinian flag.
Speaker 3: This was significant. Morocco had just signed the Abraham Accords
Speaker 3: with Israel only two years prior to this game, and
Speaker 3: their players didn't seemed to care. Israeli journalists who traveled
Speaker 3: to Kata to cover the tournament reported being coldly received, followed,
Speaker 3: and in some cases physically shut out of interviews by
Speaker 3: crowds of Arab fans. Some of these reporters were caught
Speaker 3: on camera claiming to be from other countries like France
Speaker 3: or Switzerland in order to get people to talk to them.
Speaker 3: Some of them masked their logos from their stations. Israeli
Speaker 3: media at the time expressed something between confusion and outrage.
Speaker 3: One reporter remarked, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he basically
Speaker 3: said that the hostility wasn't just coming from governments as
Speaker 3: they had assumed, it was coming from ordinary people, and
Speaker 3: this surprised them, but it shouldn't have. Now. None of
Speaker 3: this was purely spontaneous. That's the part of the story
Speaker 3: I find most interesting and the part that gets maybe
Speaker 3: the least attention. Months before the World Cup began, a
Speaker 3: Qatari activist group called Katari Youth a post a normalization QAYN,
Speaker 3: started planning. They were founded in twenty eleven and by
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, led predominantly by Qatari women, they had
Speaker 3: been working for over a decade to push back against
Speaker 3: Glatar's slow dift towards normalizing ties with Israel. Which is
Speaker 3: something the Clitari government had been entertaining, largely under pressure
Speaker 3: from the United States and from its golf neighbors, and
Speaker 3: in a country where over eighty percent of people opposed
Speaker 3: normalization with Israel. This organization, Qultari Youth, had a base,
Speaker 3: but they had to work carefully because you can't have
Speaker 3: unsanctioned civil society organizations. There's all sorts of restrictions on
Speaker 3: independent activism, extremely severe and cleveland. But they saw the
Speaker 3: World Cup as a window, an opportunity to turn what
Speaker 3: already existed, which was deep, widespread popular solidarity with Palestine,
Speaker 3: into something visible, coordinated and impossible to ignore. So they
Speaker 3: got to work. They persuaded Katura's national team captain to
Speaker 3: wear a Kafia patterned armband before the opening match, and
Speaker 3: then there was this hashtag the captain's armband is Palestinian,
Speaker 3: which started trending on Arabic Twitter.
Speaker 4: They reached out to Quatari.
Speaker 3: Influencers from prominent journalists who amplified the campaign across social media,
Speaker 3: and they called on local businesses to display signs that
Speaker 3: they were compliant with the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement. They
Speaker 3: also ran a kind of counterintelligence operation against Israeli media,
Speaker 3: because they were the ones that began identifying Israeli journalists
Speaker 3: and their logos on social media, flagging them so that
Speaker 3: Arab fans at the tournament knew who to avoid, and
Speaker 3: this is how those videos of Israeli broadcasters being turned
Speaker 3: away kept appearing online. They also organized fans to chant
Speaker 3: for Palisian at the forty eighth minute of every match.
Speaker 3: That's not random. That's a reference to nineteen forty eight
Speaker 3: and to the Nekba where close to William Past Indians
Speaker 3: were expelled from their homes with the founding of Israeli State.
Speaker 3: Key members of Katarith said the goal was to turn
Speaker 3: Arab fans from sympathizers into participants, and they were honest
Speaker 3: about something else too. This only worked because the ground
Speaker 3: was already ready. As they put it, the campaign would
Speaker 3: not have succeeded had it not been for people's own
Speaker 3: proactive support of the Palaestini cause, and that's worth sitting
Speaker 3: with for a moment. The organizing mattered, the strategy mattered,
Speaker 3: but the reason it spread so quickly so far is
Speaker 3: that there was already a fire there. Katariuth just let
Speaker 3: them now to understand why people were so upset. You
Speaker 3: have to understand the Abraham Accords. I've talked about it
Speaker 3: on this podcast before the normalization agreements broken by the
Speaker 3: Trump administration in twenty twenty between Israel and the UAE,
Speaker 3: the United Air Emirates and Bahrain, and later Sudan and Morocco.
Speaker 3: These deals were sold as historic breakthroughs, as a new
Speaker 3: era of peace, and in terms of official diplomatic relations,
Speaker 3: they were breakthroughs. They were historic, but there was a problem.
Speaker 3: Nobody asked the people, and these accords didn't solve anything.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: Air public opinion surveys have consistently shown that the vast
Speaker 3: majority of Arabs opposed normalization with Israel absent a resolution
Speaker 3: to the question of Palestinian statehood and the ongoing occupation,
Speaker 3: and in the most recent polling before the accords, it
Speaker 3: was something like eighty eight percent of Arabs across thirteen
Speaker 3: countries that rejected normalization with Israel, and nearly two thirds
Speaker 3: of those cited the occupation of Pastinian land as their reason.
Speaker 3: Only seven percent cited something like religious objections. The fear
Speaker 3: had always been that if you normalize relations with Israel
Speaker 3: without a resolution to the Israeli Palsaiinian conflict. Israel would
Speaker 3: not have any reason to try and resolve the conflict
Speaker 3: or address the grievances of Palestinians that Israel perhaps would
Speaker 3: become more aggressive if the guardrails were off. So what
Speaker 3: the Abraham Cords actually did from the perspective of ordinary
Speaker 3: Arabs was deep in the sense that their governments wouldn't
Speaker 3: listen to them, were willing to sell them out, sell
Speaker 3: out the Palestinians for economic and security arrangements that disproportionately
Speaker 3: benefited ruling classes anyway, and the US Israeli security architecture.
Speaker 3: I've written about this academically, and what I found is
Speaker 3: a kind of paradox at the heart of these so
Speaker 3: called peace deals. Peace initiatives that don't address the root
Speaker 3: causes of conflict don't actually create peace. They create a
Speaker 3: different kind of violence, a structural violence, because they maintained
Speaker 3: the root causes of conflict, and and they enable authoritarian
Speaker 3: practices by governments. So Israel shares a lot of tools surveillance, technology,
Speaker 3: propaganda framework, security cooperation, both material and discursive tools, and
Speaker 3: these have a way of turning up in the hands
Speaker 3: of governments for pressing their own citizens. Now I'm not
Speaker 3: saying the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain needed encouragement to
Speaker 3: repress their own citizens, but it's just another added layer,
Speaker 3: another way that the red lines shift, and new ways
Speaker 3: that these governments can attack their own citizens and their
Speaker 3: own activists. For example, Amadouti activists involved in anti normalization
Speaker 3: activities after the accords became targets of surveillance operations, and
Speaker 3: people who spoke out about the deals faced travel bands
Speaker 3: in Bahrain, civil society organizations were newly restricted. The quote
Speaker 3: unquote peace came with the repressive apparatus baked in, which
Speaker 3: is exactly why when thousands of Arabs gathered and has
Speaker 3: public squares to watch the World Cup, the energy around
Speaker 3: Palestine wasn't some just like emotional sentiment, and it wasn't
Speaker 3: a relic.
Speaker 4: It was fresh.
Speaker 3: It was the anger of people who had just watched
Speaker 3: their governments make deals they never asked for, and deals
Speaker 3: that were used to oppress them and not solve the
Speaker 3: postating issue. There is a concept that academics and activists
Speaker 3: have used called sports normalization. The idea is that sports,
Speaker 3: because they're presented as a political or maybe as entertainment
Speaker 3: as a space above politics. They can be used as
Speaker 3: a soft avenue for normalizing relationships that would be otherwise
Speaker 3: politically controversial. Israel has long pursued the strategy. The logic is,
Speaker 3: if Israel and Arab athletes compete together, then this image
Speaker 3: of coexistence replaces the political reality of occupation. You don't
Speaker 3: need any kind of solution or diplomatic agreement. You just
Speaker 3: need enough footage of an Israelian Oracan shaking hands on
Speaker 3: the pitch to make people feel like things are moving
Speaker 3: in a good direction. Kutan Youth were very explicit about
Speaker 3: targeting this. They hosted panels on sports normalization. They released
Speaker 3: a statement pointing out that Western political boycotts of Russia
Speaker 3: extended the sporting events after the invasion of Ukraine, and
Speaker 3: nobody then complained that sports were being mixed up with politics,
Speaker 3: and to them, the inconsistency was glaring that mixing sports
Speaker 3: with politics was apparently fine when it was about sanctioning Russia,
Speaker 3: you know, admittedly very appropriately, but somehow inappropriate when it
Speaker 3: came to Palestinian rights, and this double standard I've encountered
Speaker 3: it constantly in my work. The insistence that the Pastadian
Speaker 3: cause is uniquely problematic, uniquely in need of being kept
Speaker 3: out of polite conversation or unreasonable. This insistence falls apart
Speaker 3: the moment you compare it to any other conflict where
Speaker 3: the West has chosen a side. Now, the World Cup
Speaker 3: made that visible in real time. When the Palestidian flag
Speaker 3: showed up in a stadium in Doha, it wasn't just
Speaker 3: a symbol of solidarity. It was an argument. It said,
Speaker 3: this issue is not resolved. We have not moved on.
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter what the Abraham records said or how
Speaker 3: many photo ops it's going to make any of this
Speaker 3: go away.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: I want to dwell for a minute on Morocco full disclosure.
Speaker 3: That's the team I support. I hope they go as
Speaker 3: far as possible. But Morocco is an interesting case, and
Speaker 3: I think it illuminates something about the limits of top
Speaker 3: down normalization. Like I said, in governments signed the apraamic courts,
Speaker 3: and the deal actually included US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty
Speaker 3: over Western Sahara, which Morocco has long occupied. Itself a
Speaker 3: case of a people's right to self determination being traded
Speaker 3: away in this diplomatic agreement situation. So it was a
Speaker 3: completely cynical arrangement all around. And yet when Morocco beat
Speaker 3: Spain and reached the semi finals, their players held up
Speaker 3: the Palestinian flag. When Morocco beat Portugal and the streets
Speaker 3: of robot and Casablanca erupted, the Palstinian flag was there too,
Speaker 3: and fans in Doha who had traveled from across North
Speaker 3: Africa and the Middle East were wearing Palstinian Kafia's chanting
Speaker 3: for Palestine. Now, the Moroccan government's deal with Israel did
Speaker 3: not transfer to the Moroccan people. And this is the
Speaker 3: key insight from the World Cup, the one that I
Speaker 3: keep coming back to that governments can sign papers, but
Speaker 3: they can't really sign on behalf.
Speaker 4: Of public sentiment.
Speaker 3: And these countries are not democratic, so any kind of
Speaker 3: push to do something like this seems like a betrayal
Speaker 3: to their own citizens. And they can't normalize what has
Speaker 3: not been normalized in the hearts and minds of their
Speaker 3: own There is a kind of arrogance in the Abraham
Speaker 3: Recurts framework. The assumption is that if you get the
Speaker 3: right signatures, if you get the right photo op on
Speaker 3: the White House lawn, that the conflict can be ignored
Speaker 3: that the Pastadian cause can recede, but the World Cup
Speaker 3: was a direct refutation of that assumption. Now I've been
Speaker 3: thinking about all of this in the context of everything
Speaker 3: that has happened since the genocide in Gaza, the daily images,
Speaker 3: the death tolls, the wholesale destruction of Gazan society, and
Speaker 3: the ongoing question of what normalization means now and whether
Speaker 3: any of those Abraham courts frameworks can survive what the
Speaker 3: world has watched happen.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: I do think it will survive. These governments do not
Speaker 3: care about what happened in Gaza. But what it shows
Speaker 3: is that the fears around the Abraham recurts were completely founded.
Speaker 3: Ignoring the Israeli Pastadian conflict would lead to an escalation
Speaker 3: in the violence. I think the World's Cup moment was
Speaker 3: a preview back in twenty twenty two. It told us
Speaker 3: something about where popular Arab opinion actually was, not where
Speaker 3: governments claimed it was and not where Western media assumed
Speaker 3: it was, but where it actually was. And it showed
Speaker 3: us that organized strategic activism can channel that sentiment at
Speaker 3: something visible and politically costly for the forces of normalization.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Katar Youth, a post a normalization. Was a small group,
Speaker 3: and they were operating under real restrictions in a country
Speaker 3: that doesn't allow independent civil society, and they still managed
Speaker 3: to turn a global sporting event into one of the
Speaker 3: most visible expressions of Palestinian solidarity in years. And that
Speaker 3: matters not because a football tournament, a soccer tournament, is
Speaker 3: going to solve anything.
Speaker 4: It doesn't.
Speaker 3: Palestinian families don't get their homes back because people flew
Speaker 3: a flag in a stadium. But movements build over time
Speaker 3: and through moments of visibility, through the accumulation of pressure,
Speaker 3: and through the refusal to let the issue disappear into
Speaker 3: a manufactured consensus that was never real to begin with.
Speaker 3: And today in twenty twenty six, this is not specific
Speaker 3: to air of publics. Even Western publics have seen their
Speaker 3: governments ignore genocide, have seen their rights recede as their
Speaker 3: government's ally to protect genocide in a variety of ways.
Speaker 3: Now I'll end with something a little more personal. When
Speaker 3: I watched those World Croup crowds back in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: when I saw all these different Arabs, Moroccans and Tunisians
Speaker 3: and Saudis, people from countries that have varying and complicated
Speaker 3: relationships with this issue. All waiving the Palestinian flag, I
Speaker 3: felt a kind of hope, and it's not naive. It's
Speaker 3: not the hope that this will be resolved soon or easily,
Speaker 3: but the hope that says Palestinians are not alone and
Speaker 3: the cause is not forgotten. And the silence that has
Speaker 3: been imposed on this question, attempted silence top down for
Speaker 3: so long, is not the consent it pretends to be.
Speaker 3: Governments can sign a chords, but they can erase what
Speaker 3: people know, and they cannot sign away what people feel.
Speaker 3: When they watch a team lose and a flag goes
Speaker 3: up in a stadium and thousands of people start chanting.
Speaker 3: Palestine keeps showing up uninvited at every table that tries
Speaker 3: to exclude it, and I think it will keep doing that.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for listening to it could happen here.
Speaker 3: I'm don algirt.
Speaker 6: Before we start. I want to make something inescapably clear.
Speaker 6: I am not against human rights or the ideals they
Speaker 6: embody and aspire to. Human rights are in fact a
Speaker 6: flawed attempts at making the world a better place for
Speaker 6: all human beings. And it is exactly those flaws that
Speaker 6: I want to address here. Just having universal human rights
Speaker 6: does not mean any progress or any improvements in that
Speaker 6: regard are no longer necessary. To reach those there needs
Speaker 6: to be in depth conversations and critiques. I've deliberately chosen
Speaker 6: a provocative title to start this episode. If sad title
Speaker 6: makes it through post production, because I think the best
Speaker 6: way to have this conversation is if we temporarily strip
Speaker 6: any blind assumptions. There should not, for the time being,
Speaker 6: be a's standard answer to just defouled back to So
Speaker 6: let me say it again. The concepts and ideals of
Speaker 6: universal human rights are good and well intended. This is
Speaker 6: not a plea against either of those. This is just
Speaker 6: to ensure that we can all engage with the flaws
Speaker 6: and the criticisms that are currently late at the feat
Speaker 6: above those human rights. Please don't hate me further. There
Speaker 6: will be some abstract concept and theories here. I'll do
Speaker 6: my best to explain them in Layman's terms. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 6: Ivory Tower of the university is still a thing, and
Speaker 6: I think this bit should be accessible to everyone, not
Speaker 6: just university educated people. So if I'm being a bit
Speaker 6: reductive or unnnuanced, it is to make it widely available.
Speaker 6: And with that, Hello everyone, welcome to this could happen here.
Speaker 6: I am Mick. I'm joined by the lovely James Stout.
Speaker 6: Hi James, how are you doing? Hey good, I'm good.
Speaker 6: I'm excited about this. Yeah, we're going to go through
Speaker 6: a lot today. When I pitched this, I thought it
Speaker 6: would be just a fun thirty minute episode and now
Speaker 6: we're at like five thousand words and ten pages of script.
Speaker 6: So yeah, these things can get away from me. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 6: And there's always the content, it's always context. You can
Speaker 6: just throw things out there. But I had to kill
Speaker 6: some darlings unfortunately. But there we go. So to start off,
Speaker 6: we first have to explore a little bit about the
Speaker 6: history of human rights and how they came to be.
Speaker 6: When we are talking about right, we are speaking of
Speaker 6: either a legal, a social, or an ethical rule that
Speaker 6: is connected to legal systems, social conventions, or neu ethical
Speaker 6: standpoints that are seen as normal for a certain group
Speaker 6: at a certain time. Because they evolved, they change. These
Speaker 6: rights are often inscribed, codified, or written down in either
Speaker 6: legal documents or in the public consciousness. And what I
Speaker 6: mean by the latter is like or make a queue
Speaker 6: for the bus or the train. It's not something that's
Speaker 6: often written down in illegal code or something. It's just
Speaker 6: an unwritten rule that exists between the people the convention.
Speaker 6: Most likely, if you're going to skip cues, you'll never
Speaker 6: be prosecuted or find for that. People will probably think
Speaker 6: you're a bit of an asshole. So the Universal Declaration
Speaker 6: of Human Rights was signed in nineteen forty eight by
Speaker 6: the UN. Prior to this, the concept of human rights
Speaker 6: was largely found in the idea of natural rights. The
Speaker 6: very first historical notion of this that we know of
Speaker 6: was in the Zoroastrian religion in the Iran region, which
Speaker 6: thought that citizens have a fundamental right to enlightened leadership
Speaker 6: and that people had the right to rise up against
Speaker 6: those who are wicked. Similar ideas surrounding rights are also
Speaker 6: found in ancient Greek philosophy, like the Epicurean school of
Speaker 6: thought and the Stoics. Later, it was also explicitly named
Speaker 6: by Roman philosophers, which they probably stole from the Greeks,
Speaker 6: like Cicero and Seneca, that that Cicero once said that
Speaker 6: we are born for justice, and that right is based
Speaker 6: not upon opinions, but upon nature. And I think This
Speaker 6: is important into the Zubin not a bit. Romans were
Speaker 6: very not a very religious, but it was a religious society.
Speaker 6: They had tons of deities. But despite that, it's to
Speaker 6: nature that Cicero make makes that claim. Yeah, as opposed
Speaker 6: to God or God's right exactly. There's something innate or
Speaker 6: something by virtue of being human that it gives you
Speaker 6: those rights. Yeah, there was. In the seventeenth century was
Speaker 6: the English philosopher John Locke, who discussed similar things, particularly
Speaker 6: that fundamental rights as he called them, such as life, liberty,
Speaker 6: and a state. A state meaning property in this case
Speaker 6: are things that could not be handed over or transferred
Speaker 6: under the social contract. With social contract, it is often
Speaker 6: meant that you, as an individual have surrendered some of
Speaker 6: your rights and handed them over to the authority under
Speaker 6: which you fall or to which you are subject. Often
Speaker 6: this exchange translates to that the authority to which you
Speaker 6: hand it over will then protect your remaining rights. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Usually this is strained as consensual, as a voluntary deal
Speaker 6: you make or have made with again, whichever authority happens
Speaker 6: to hold control over you. I also think it's worth
Speaker 6: noting that consent implies an active decision with like knowledge
Speaker 6: and circumstances and the ability to consent. And this is
Speaker 6: just my own personal gripe. Whenever people refer back to
Speaker 6: the social contract, it's like I didn't agree to anything.
Speaker 6: I must have missed that meeting.
Speaker 7: But yet it relies on this like thought experiment, right,
Speaker 7: like this idea of like would someone in ex circumstance do?
Speaker 5: Why?
Speaker 6: I think this is.
Speaker 7: What Hobbes does, right, Yes, Like I guess Hobb's lock
Speaker 7: and Rousseau would be the people you'd want to read
Speaker 7: if you wanted to learn more about this. In Rejava,
Speaker 7: they have an explicit social contract, right, which is like
Speaker 7: a document, and people do get too consent on it.
Speaker 7: I guess I should say consult rather than consent, right,
Speaker 7: There was a long consultative process was part of the
Speaker 7: formation of the metric and social contracting Java as opposed
Speaker 7: to like requiring like universal consensus to be to be established.
Speaker 6: Once again, ros Javaz leading away, Yeah, showing us all
Speaker 6: the way. That's that's right to be unusual. Yeah, we
Speaker 6: will be touching a little bit on Hobs and Rousseau. Okay, fine,
Speaker 6: but this some of the latter bid up like the
Speaker 6: virtue of being born hardly checks my boxes for active consent.
Speaker 6: But yeah, you know, I think there's some bureaucrat out
Speaker 6: there who will disagree with me on that. As you said, James,
Speaker 6: the idea of the social contract came from philosophers like
Speaker 6: Rousseau and Hobbes and our Court, who are contemporary understanding
Speaker 6: of like social and political theory, and are also foundational
Speaker 6: to like most liberal democracies, the ideas is following. At first,
Speaker 6: there was like no state and no authority, and everyone
Speaker 6: was in a state of nature where human existence was
Speaker 6: harsh and brute and short. Yeah, nasty, brutish in short
Speaker 6: is the like here's the exact words the Hobbs quite
Speaker 6: that gets deployed a lot about people and things, yes,
Speaker 6: ignoring the fact that Hobbes was an idiot.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and that life without the state is not nasty,
Speaker 7: brutish and short.
Speaker 6: And we have a lot of examples of this. But no,
Speaker 6: but it's this retroactive justification because this is how things
Speaker 6: are now. So I am inventing a story to justify
Speaker 6: how we end up here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Like Jim Scott, I guess kind of deals with
Speaker 7: this a little bit right in the art of not
Speaker 7: being governed when he's talking about the idea that those
Speaker 7: who exist without the state are behind those who exist
Speaker 7: within the state, as opposed to just on a different
Speaker 7: pathway they've chosen to follow.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because like we need we need the authority, and
Speaker 6: you need a social contract because otherwise humanity is just
Speaker 6: subject to its own worst impulses, like our hunger games
Speaker 6: without the dystopian stuff inside it. Therefore, there is we
Speaker 6: need authority, which was created to keep this state of
Speaker 6: nature at bay and make or keep us civilized. And
Speaker 6: this also then ties in with like the monopoly on violence,
Speaker 6: because that is one of the rights that you surrender
Speaker 6: under this social contract and is given to specialized government
Speaker 6: forces in order to use the violence that is necessary
Speaker 6: to maintain order. As a small side note, the whole
Speaker 6: state of nature thing is pretty much bullshit. On why
Speaker 6: that is is discussed at length in the Dawn of
Speaker 6: Everything by David Graber and David Wengro, But it would
Speaker 6: be way to watch the also include here you'd have
Speaker 6: to listen to me all week.
Speaker 7: I do have an audiobook at the Door of Everything,
Speaker 7: and it is it's a lot of audiobook, Like.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's such a massive book, just massive. Just as
Speaker 6: a small clarification before we move on, there are many
Speaker 6: more notable figures who've written about like natural rights, Francis
Speaker 6: Hudgeon Hegel, and Thomas Pain. Clearly, there are also many
Speaker 6: more who did that in the American context, like Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 6: But everyone listening to this nose the American stuff way
Speaker 6: better than I do, so I'll just skip that, including
Speaker 6: the parts where Jefferson was pretty selective on who counted
Speaker 6: as a human being and who didn't. Many such cases here,
Speaker 6: many such cases. Unfortunately it has not gone away as
Speaker 6: much as it should have. Yeah, So the biggest criticism
Speaker 6: that we have here to address against natural rights is
Speaker 6: that you can draw from facts. It's something that you
Speaker 6: say is out there, but you can prove it through
Speaker 6: science or through empirical research, through data collection. It's something
Speaker 6: that comes from tradition, authority, or morality. There is no
Speaker 6: argument to be made that it exists in the same
Speaker 6: way as the coffee on my desk as I'm writing this.
Speaker 6: To put it very bluntly, natural rights being inherent or
Speaker 6: unalienable is just saying they exist because I say so.
Speaker 6: It has just as much weight as me claiming that
Speaker 6: I now own James's chickens, which I now do. It
Speaker 6: is a fact you have.
Speaker 7: To fight me for them and surrendering them monopoly on shakins. Yes,
Speaker 7: you know, you know where I live. You can you
Speaker 7: can fat at them to me.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So what has happened is by putting these natural
Speaker 6: rights into law, we can make them like real or
Speaker 6: tangible in the sense that there is something you can
Speaker 6: point to, like that thing says it, or this law
Speaker 6: says it. It transforms natural rights from something that is
Speaker 6: scientifically baseless into like a part of the social contract
Speaker 6: and thus should be upheld by whatever authority, state, or
Speaker 6: government you happen to be subject to. The creation of
Speaker 6: constitutions in democracies is like a very explicit attempt to
Speaker 6: make rights real. But as we all know, they're also
Speaker 6: not infallible. In the wake of the horrors of the
Speaker 6: Second World War, the international community drafted and voted on
Speaker 6: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was a massive
Speaker 6: step at the time. Of the fifty eight member states
Speaker 6: at the time, forty eight voted in favor, two did
Speaker 6: not participate, an AID abstained from voting. For those who
Speaker 6: are paying attention, there are so little countries that voted
Speaker 6: on it, because judges were less countries back then, and
Speaker 6: an exact number is very hard to find because all
Speaker 6: data sets and all definitions just differ. To this day,
Speaker 6: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is still one of
Speaker 6: the most significant milestones of the twentieth twentieth century. It
Speaker 6: has pretty neutral language in terms of culture, religion, or
Speaker 6: any particular political system. It also became a stepping stone
Speaker 6: for the International Bill of Human Rights and several different treaties,
Speaker 6: with all one hundred and ninety three UN member states
Speaker 6: as of now as signing at least one or more
Speaker 6: of those treaties. Yeah, I can't understate how massive that
Speaker 6: achievement is, and before we were actually criticizing it, I
Speaker 6: do think it's right to recognize it. And that isn't perfect,
Speaker 6: which is why we're also going to kick against its
Speaker 6: shinbone for a while. So to the surprise of no one,
Speaker 6: human rights are flawed but good. They've also been used
Speaker 6: pretty disingenuously, and that is where, like this start, they
Speaker 6: have often been used as a justification for war to
Speaker 6: obscure or hide other motivations, like I think of the
Speaker 6: Iraq war. No, not that one. The Iraq in the
Speaker 6: invasion of Kuwait in the in nineteen ninety, the Saddam
Speaker 6: government publicly stated that they wanted to support the revolutionary
Speaker 6: government in Kuwait, that it was for our solidarity. They
Speaker 6: also cited that the current administration over there was incredibly
Speaker 6: unpopular and thus they had to invade for greater political
Speaker 6: and economic freedom for the Kuwaiti people. What was widely
Speaker 6: seen as like, the actual motivations were oil resources and
Speaker 6: more regional control because of course, yeah, Russia has also
Speaker 6: used human rights as a reason for invading.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you look very surprised at that, shapes I was
Speaker 7: about to say the same thing, like Russia left to.
Speaker 6: Do this, Yes, they did it in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 6: with like when they invaded Georgia because they had to
Speaker 6: protect Russian citizens and peacekeepers, while it was mainly about
Speaker 6: like preventing native expansion in the newly independent Georgia. The
Speaker 6: same thing happened in twenty fourteen when they first invaded
Speaker 6: Ukraine because Russian speakers had to be protected from Ukrainian fascists.
Speaker 6: There was also the Serbian forces in Bosnia and Kosovo,
Speaker 6: where the Serbs were under threats and Indias campaign into
Speaker 6: East Pakistan now known as Bangladesh, although in that latter
Speaker 6: one the motivations seem a bit more muddled because it
Speaker 6: appears there's some genuine concern there for human rights or
Speaker 6: humanitarian aid, but again modeled limited time.
Speaker 7: And I think like it's always telling like where states
Speaker 7: decide it's important to go to war for human rights
Speaker 7: and the right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're very selective when these rights need to be
Speaker 6: enforced or when there's violence needed for it to be enforced.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: No one's rolling out to defend the human rights of
Speaker 7: hina people in Memma, for example.
Speaker 6: No exactly, And like I think you said this at
Speaker 6: some point, but like when in Me and mar the
Speaker 6: revolution started, there was like an explicit appeal to like human.
Speaker 7: Rights, Yeah, and like a very well lucidated appeal to
Speaker 7: like R two P right, the right to protect. I
Speaker 7: think I have to check responsibility to protect. It's what
Speaker 7: R two P stands for, not right, but responsibility. So
Speaker 7: it's a responsibility of a state to intervene in the
Speaker 7: internal affairs of another state if human rights are being
Speaker 7: abused in that state. It's best of my understanding of
Speaker 7: it anyway, And this is as it spake strange to
Speaker 7: me by many many young people in Mema. I actually
Speaker 7: spoke to a young person in Memma who would orchestrated,
Speaker 7: at great risk of their life, a massive R two
Speaker 7: P like floating sort of symbol that could be seen
Speaker 7: from the air. I guess, like explicitly to alert the
Speaker 7: world that our human rights are being violated, and we
Speaker 7: have human rights, so surely the people who guarantee those
Speaker 7: rights question mark will intervene to protect those rights. So
Speaker 7: like you saw signs explicitly calling on a SCN, on
Speaker 7: the UN, on the European Union, on the United States,
Speaker 7: and like also people trying to make signs that are
Speaker 7: very funny so that they would go viral in English
Speaker 7: because they wanted the world to see them. When they
Speaker 7: figured if the world's all they'd be like, huh, human
Speaker 7: rights are being violated. And it took a lot of
Speaker 7: dead people for I think, because that's a very entrenched
Speaker 7: view that many of us have, right, that we have
Speaker 7: these rights, we do it writes any matter insofar as
Speaker 7: they are someone's prepared to use force to protect them
Speaker 7: in this instance, and nobody was apart from the people
Speaker 7: of Memma themselves, right, So they like right, space discourse
Speaker 7: still very very common there. Now those rights are backed
Speaker 7: up by people who you know, initially used home made
Speaker 7: and three D printed firearms and now have better firearms.
Speaker 7: But like, the reason those people have those rights could
Speaker 7: stay for for them, not because the rights enforced themselves
Speaker 7: or any other state decided to enforce them.
Speaker 6: No, exactly. It is pretty revealing that when a people
Speaker 6: desperately in need for their rights to be upheld by
Speaker 6: some force or by some army or whatever, and they're
Speaker 6: making explicit appeals towards and the international community as a
Speaker 6: wholes like, nah, they get a closer right than there is,
Speaker 6: but they were unalienable, so yeah, great, they still technically
Speaker 6: had them sort of maybe right, Yeah, they should have
Speaker 6: bought a premium package. And also yes, the US invasion
Speaker 6: of Iraq in two thousand and three, yeah, I did
Speaker 6: not forget. It was very much justified. There's a mission
Speaker 6: of liberation and freeing people from a dictator. Well it
Speaker 6: was much again oil and influence, as it always says,
Speaker 6: which is why you will now have to listen to
Speaker 6: ads so cools and media can get some much needed
Speaker 6: oil and influence. Nice, and we're back now loaded with
Speaker 6: petro dollars. It is time to dive deeper into the critiques.
Speaker 6: So someone whose work was incredibly influential in the realm
Speaker 6: of philosophy and ethics was Simon Veil James. I think
Speaker 6: you may have heard of her.
Speaker 7: Yeah, she was with the De Ruti column in the
Speaker 7: International Group. She burned herself frying eggs in a house
Speaker 7: they liberated and had to go home.
Speaker 6: Yeah, she is a fascinating figure.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that someone who just like forest gumps through through
Speaker 7: like the history of amazing things in that time period.
Speaker 6: Yes, it was like I have written this down in
Speaker 6: the script, but when she was eight or nine she
Speaker 6: refused to eat chocolate or something. It's solidarity with the
Speaker 6: soldiers overseas or the soldiers who were fighting in World
Speaker 6: War One. There's tons of like incredible stuff in there. Amazing.
Speaker 6: I didn't know that. Like, she taught at the university,
Speaker 6: but then in nineteen thirty four she took a leave
Speaker 6: of absence from teaching to work anonymously in two different
Speaker 6: labor factories because she better wanted to understand the working class.
Speaker 6: A few years later she would join the anarchist do
Speaker 6: Ruti column as you said, and fight in the Spanish
Speaker 6: Civil War, where she very badly wanted to fight despite
Speaker 6: her outspoken pacifism, but her comrades held her back because
Speaker 6: she was incredibly near sighted that they were like, yeah,
Speaker 6: we don't trust you with this machine gun, which fair. Yeah.
Speaker 6: And she died eventually at a very young age in
Speaker 6: nineteen forty three due to her poorer health. That is,
Speaker 6: while she was sick, she would only eat whatever she
Speaker 6: thought the residents of Nazi occupied France would be able
Speaker 6: to eat, and refuse to eat more. As her biographer
Speaker 6: Richard Reese summed up as for her death, whatever explanation
Speaker 6: one may give of it, it will amount in the
Speaker 6: end to saying that she died of love. Well, that's bad.
Speaker 7: As in my book, Yeah, yeah, that's a cool way
Speaker 7: of phrasing two it is BEAUTI presented.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Simon was very critical of the concept of rights, and
Speaker 6: she much preferred to speak of obligations. The latter, she argued,
Speaker 6: are much more fundamental than rights, because rights are only
Speaker 6: meaningful to the extent that others respect those rights. To her,
Speaker 6: rights are relative and related to certain conditions, while obligations
Speaker 6: exist outside those conditions. On the surface, this may seem
Speaker 6: like the same criticism we had earlier that they only
Speaker 6: exist out there and only because I say so. But
Speaker 6: I think she moves further than that, because she sees
Speaker 6: a system that has its foundation on these obligations, specifically
Speaker 6: what she calls the need for a soul to hear.
Speaker 6: These needs are the things that we as human beings
Speaker 6: require to thrive, food, shelter, medicine, but also like equality,
Speaker 6: freedom of opinion, and security in the form of not
Speaker 6: having any persistent fears. There are many more in her book.
Speaker 6: I'm not going to delve a buch deeper in it
Speaker 6: because I think, like the just this out there, this
Speaker 6: may seem like a very theoretical difference, but let me
Speaker 6: illustrate what I think is a very strong example of
Speaker 6: like rights versus obligations. I have stolen this metaphor from
Speaker 6: the philosophized this podcast, Okay, from the episode in which
Speaker 6: the host discusses the modern day concentration camp and Georgio Agambin.
Speaker 6: So all the credit to that host for this metaphor.
Speaker 6: So let's get back to those chickens that used to
Speaker 6: belong to James, but that I now own, like it
Speaker 6: is my right in a legal and economic sense to
Speaker 6: sell these at the market, and it is my right
Speaker 6: to sell them for any price that I think they
Speaker 6: are worth, just as it is my right to very
Speaker 6: quickly go out of business because nobody wants to buy
Speaker 6: my five thousand dollars chickens. And now I'm going to
Speaker 6: be a bit provocative. I just feel free to respond.
Speaker 6: What if someone were to be forced into prostitution, either
Speaker 6: by coercion or violence? Okay, why is that wrong? Why
Speaker 6: is that disgusting and abhorrent? Yeah, for many reasons. Is
Speaker 6: the reason for that because this person has a legal
Speaker 6: right to not be forced into prostitution? Or is there
Speaker 6: something else going on there?
Speaker 7: But there's a lot there's a lot more going on there, right,
Speaker 7: Like it's apart because it's like disgusting to us as
Speaker 7: people that someone's supposed to do this without that consent
Speaker 7: and without consenting like actively to doing a thing that
Speaker 7: they are being forced to do against their will exactly.
Speaker 6: But it speaks to the nature of right that your
Speaker 6: first instinct is not to say, oh, but that's against
Speaker 6: the law. Yeah, your first instinct is to say, like,
Speaker 6: oh jeez, that's fucked up. Yeah, that's wrong, and it
Speaker 6: is wrong because what you're doing is like violating the agency,
Speaker 6: the autonomy, the dignity, the sense of belonging to themselves
Speaker 6: and their bodies. It is something that it is much
Speaker 6: more a gut feeling, something that is that exists out there,
Speaker 6: rather than like pointing to a law twenty three, subsection two,
Speaker 6: paragraph three, whatever, three. And we can put it in
Speaker 6: a more concrete example like The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Speaker 6: In short, for those who are not familiar with either
Speaker 6: the book or the show, it's about a patriarchal, totalitarian republic,
Speaker 6: very religious, where some women are forcibly assigned to powerful
Speaker 6: and high status men to bear children for them. Now,
Speaker 6: in this society, the sexual violence, the forced pregnancies, the births,
Speaker 6: they're entirely legal, like the people doing it, and that's
Speaker 6: not just the men in those books. They are doing
Speaker 6: it within their rights. It is legal what they're doing.
Speaker 6: But also going to ask you as like the listener,
Speaker 6: does that make it any less fucked up?
Speaker 7: Yeah, Like, I guess we can argue the same thing
Speaker 7: in any Islamic state, right, there were people who were
Speaker 7: forced into slavery, sexually assaulted.
Speaker 6: Sexual violence was commonplace. It was at least accepted.
Speaker 7: I'm not familiar with the exactly legal structures of the
Speaker 7: Islamic state with regard to epicentainly that it was widespread
Speaker 7: and not condemned, and like that doesn't matter. It was
Speaker 7: still wrong. It was still disgusting, right, which is why people,
Speaker 7: including people in Kurdistan, decided to take up arms against it,
Speaker 7: and very rightfully. So, yeah, I guess they're like universal
Speaker 7: human rights were violated. That their rights, and that is
Speaker 7: the Islamic States so much as that was a state, which.
Speaker 6: It was, we're not, yeah, and we'll get there, because
Speaker 6: there's like a difference between the a so having universal
Speaker 6: right and having a sovereign that is going to respect them.
Speaker 6: So yeah, sorry for that painful metaphor. I think that
Speaker 6: that both of these make it clear, although maybe painfully clear,
Speaker 6: like legality has nothing to do with it, like the
Speaker 6: rights have nothing to do with it. It's your human
Speaker 6: response and lack or the fact that you have a
Speaker 6: sense of decency that makes something like wrong or right. Heah,
Speaker 6: So the right to not be preyed upon can be
Speaker 6: taken away as all right, but the sense of injustice
Speaker 6: of wrongness will not. There exists an obligation to the
Speaker 6: people in your community, regardless of which community or the
Speaker 6: size of it, to not do horrific shit like that
Speaker 6: and in the process destroy part of someone's solemn being.
Speaker 6: The lack of any empirical data does not mean that
Speaker 6: there isn't something there, even if it's just like a
Speaker 6: gut feeling or a sense of justice. Will and myself
Speaker 6: would say it's wrong because we have an obligation to
Speaker 6: to respect them that by like just being born human,
Speaker 6: you have to have your agency and your autonomy and
Speaker 6: your dignity respected. But do you know what will destroy
Speaker 6: your soul and being products service is support this podcast?
Speaker 6: It definitely is. They already have And we're back after
Speaker 6: the identity crushing stream of surducts and products or whatever.
Speaker 6: So quickly recap what we said before the break, which
Speaker 6: is that you can say that there is something beyond right,
Speaker 6: as rights can conveniently be taken away when those empower
Speaker 6: think that is what they need to do. It is
Speaker 6: what Simon Ville would call the difference between being a
Speaker 6: subject and being an object, being a subject to something
Speaker 6: in the sense that you can be subject to a
Speaker 6: queen through that lens. Being a subject means that you're
Speaker 6: only seen as something that is value rights in relation
Speaker 6: to the queen. Okay, there is a relational aspect here
Speaker 6: that defines what over who you are. Being seen as
Speaker 6: an object here means that you exist like in and
Speaker 6: of yourself, and that you're not defined because of the
Speaker 6: definition of something else. I think a good way to
Speaker 6: view this is the think of someone's child, son or
Speaker 6: daughter and thinking of that same person as just themselves.
Speaker 6: Like in the first one, it's the relation that you emphasize.
Speaker 6: In the latter, you just see them as a person,
Speaker 6: regardless of like linear image or relation. Yeah, I fear
Speaker 6: this next part could be rather complex, but I'll do
Speaker 6: my best to go into like Layman's terms. It evolves
Speaker 6: some pretty complex philosophy about authors whom many people have read.
Speaker 6: But do you understand Yeah, myself included, I'm an idiot.
Speaker 6: I'm just trying to make it make sense and make
Speaker 6: it like clear and legible for everyone who hasn't read
Speaker 6: these offers, and I probably wouldn't recommend reading them. So
Speaker 6: we're speaking of Hannah Arrant and Georgio Aghamben both made
Speaker 6: some major critiques of human rights, and these are in
Speaker 6: relation to each other. To an extent. So the start off,
Speaker 6: they make distinctions and definitions on what it is to
Speaker 6: be human and what it is to be recognized as
Speaker 6: a human being. Ran uses the terms zoe and bios
Speaker 6: for this, like the Greek terms Okay, zoe is the
Speaker 6: idea and the concept of life in a purely biological
Speaker 6: sense as just a biological unit that breathes, that consumes,
Speaker 6: that defecates. Okay. Think of someone living alone in the
Speaker 6: mountains without anyone else nearby or any contact with other
Speaker 6: human beings. Like, biologically, yes, they are human, They're just
Speaker 6: no denying that. But in terms of bios meaning a
Speaker 6: life that has meaning and it is political, it becomes
Speaker 6: less obvious that that personal learning the mountains like can
Speaker 6: be recognized as human.
Speaker 7: Sure, yeah, Like part of being human is being part
Speaker 7: of a community, right, Like we only are able to
Speaker 7: fully realize ourselves in the context of other people.
Speaker 6: Exactly, And that is what what I'm getting at without
Speaker 6: saying that this person of the balance is not a
Speaker 6: human being, but they're isolated and not part of a community.
Speaker 6: Think of like making meaningful moments together with like those
Speaker 6: dear to you. That that is in a sense the
Speaker 6: meaning that the term bios kind of points to Yeah,
Speaker 6: living alone in the woods also means like there's no
Speaker 6: community or no sovereign power to hold someone accountable or
Speaker 6: to uphold they're supposedly unalienable rights. As a little pointer between,
Speaker 6: I'm going to use like state power, sovereign or government
Speaker 6: pretty much interchangeably, because I don't want to repeat the
Speaker 6: same words but or say power every two sentences. I
Speaker 6: think that would make for a boring listening. But just
Speaker 6: so you use the listener, not that that is somewhat intentional.
Speaker 6: So it is in the context of the man in
Speaker 6: the mountains that we should interpret Zoe and bios, not
Speaker 6: like as in literal black and white checkboxes, but like
Speaker 6: as a nuanced lens to look through. And if we
Speaker 6: look through this lens, then the following pops up. For
Speaker 6: someone to have BIOS, there needs to be a community.
Speaker 6: There needs to be a sovereign or, as a Hanna
Speaker 6: Arrent would say, a political community. That can be any
Speaker 6: group of people, any country, political identity, or ideology. That
Speaker 6: doesn't really matter for you to belong to a political community,
Speaker 6: whichever one of those categories it is. But that is
Speaker 6: the most fundamental right. According to Hannah Rent, and we'll
Speaker 6: get into why. She also calls it like the right
Speaker 6: to have rights, the right to belong to political community
Speaker 6: that in turn cherishes you and upholds those rights for you.
Speaker 6: The man in the woods has no one to do
Speaker 6: that for him. He lacks a certain political and legal
Speaker 6: recognition of his humanity that comes with like being part
Speaker 6: of community. Yeah, if we think of people on the move,
Speaker 6: of migrants, or of stateless people, then we can look
Speaker 6: at them as not having a political community. And in
Speaker 6: the context of bios is, aren't puts it there is
Speaker 6: also of political community to emphasize their humanity or uphold
Speaker 6: their human rights. Yeah, because there is no system or
Speaker 6: sovereign that can like uphold them or enforce those ideas.
Speaker 7: Sometimes like they're able to act collectively to protect each other.
Speaker 6: Right like within that, but that is a different thing. Right.
Speaker 7: That's that I guess you could call the obligation right,
Speaker 7: that is their obligation to each.
Speaker 6: Other that they are fulfilled when they do that.
Speaker 7: Right like that, As you say that no powerful entity
Speaker 7: is obliged to protect their rights, you could look at
Speaker 7: the example of outdoor attention in the US.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: I remember once I was out.
Speaker 7: Feeding people in outdoor attention with prop Actually he also
Speaker 7: has a podcast on this network. And we ran into
Speaker 7: this guy had like a he had like a polo
Speaker 7: on and I said, the fuck you didn't Who the
Speaker 7: fuck is this? They had like nice shoes, and I
Speaker 7: was like, what's happening here? The guy was from the
Speaker 7: Office of the Immigration Detention on but to it because
Speaker 7: you have a bunch of rights in the US, right,
Speaker 7: Like that person came along and had a clipboard and
Speaker 7: they did a bunch of stuff and it didn't matter. Right,
Speaker 7: there's people, a bunch of those people's rights were being violated.
Speaker 7: I'm sure the person ticked a bunch of boxes on there,
Speaker 7: like which rights are being violated for him? It didn't
Speaker 7: feed those people. We did, didn't keep them warm that night.
Speaker 7: We did, didn't build them a shelter. We did right
Speaker 7: like it was us for filling our obligations to each other,
Speaker 7: not their theoretical rights under the state, which mattered exactly.
Speaker 6: And just to point out, like the prior to that
Speaker 6: not necessary saily part of your political community, but you
Speaker 6: just feel that it does your obligation as a human
Speaker 6: being to like I can help these people, I can
Speaker 6: feed them, I can keep.
Speaker 7: Them warm, Yeah, exactly, like and is it Locke who
Speaker 7: does ask? Not for whom the bell tolls? It tolls
Speaker 7: for thee maybe not Hemingway. Hemingway wrote the book, but
Speaker 7: it's based on No, it's a man shit. We got
Speaker 7: to google this because otherwise that's not for whom the
Speaker 7: bell tolls. John Dunn, So other John, I think about
Speaker 7: that a lot. It's something I would hear like, occasionally
Speaker 7: referenced him in reference to the international brigades in the
Speaker 7: Spanish Civil War, included by John McCain, who wrote in
Speaker 7: a bitterery for the last American International Brigadier to die,
Speaker 7: which is like one of the less shitty things John
Speaker 7: McCain did, which he did many shitty things, terrible things,
Speaker 7: but like inherenting, that is the idea that like the
Speaker 7: bell here being the funery bell, right, that like I
Speaker 7: guess when humanity is devalued, my humanity is devalued, and
Speaker 7: like I am not fully realizes a person if people
Speaker 7: are being stripped of their dignity in my presence, in
Speaker 7: my community, so like those people are not part of
Speaker 7: my community, but like my community is being devalued because
Speaker 7: humanity is being devalued in my community. And the way
Speaker 7: I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen is by
Speaker 7: stepping in in order to protect those people, to keep
Speaker 7: those people safe, to show those people that fundamentally, human
Speaker 7: dignity is guaranteed by the humans and not by other states.
Speaker 6: Yeah, very well said. So I have one last example here.
Speaker 6: If there's too many examples for the listener, I apologize,
Speaker 6: but i just want to make it clear. So I've
Speaker 6: done my best to find examples and explain them. The
Speaker 6: Sentinel Least people in the Bay of Bengal. I think
Speaker 6: most of you have heard of them. They are like
Speaker 6: an indigenous people on that are isolated on a single
Speaker 6: island and they've had little to no contact with the
Speaker 6: mainland or air quotes modern world. Yeah, I think in
Speaker 6: twenty eighteen or something, there was a missionary.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Every few years, some ball end will try and go
Speaker 6: and give them the Bible and they'll kill them or
Speaker 6: fire arrows at them or yeah. Yeah those people. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 6: like I can't guarantee that this is how what is
Speaker 6: going on because I haven't spoken to them, obviously, but
Speaker 6: I'm guessing that they don't speak of human rights and
Speaker 6: we the nonsentinelice people don't really speak of their right
Speaker 6: to healthcare, their rights to freedom of opinion. My point
Speaker 6: is more that like, unless there is contact with them
Speaker 6: and they become like a political community, there are no
Speaker 6: really not any human rights for them to speak of
Speaker 6: a bold like in a sense, they don't have human
Speaker 6: rights because there is no contact and nothing to appold
Speaker 6: or enforce at this point, James, this is where we
Speaker 6: are going to isolate ourselves on an island until it
Speaker 6: is time for part two.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Perfect, Looking forward to seeing you very soon again for
Speaker 6: our next shin kicking badass mm hmm.
Speaker 7: And I am fashioning about to defend us from Christian
Speaker 7: missionaries in boats.
Speaker 6: Yes, let us also throw like spears and arrows at
Speaker 6: missionaries coming to our isolated island. Yep, hey everyone, welcome
Speaker 6: back to it could happen here. I am still Mick,
Speaker 6: and I'm still with James. If for some reason you
Speaker 6: haven't listened to the first parts, I would strongly urge
Speaker 6: you to do that first, because we're going to dive
Speaker 6: straight in here, and I'm afraid you're going to miss
Speaker 6: a lot of context and a lot of explanation as
Speaker 6: to what's going on. So yes, our next shin kicking
Speaker 6: bad ass is Georgio Khamben. I mentioned him before. Some
Speaker 6: of you may have heard from him because around the
Speaker 6: COVID pandemic his work became incredibly popular all of a sudden.
Speaker 6: He follows is a similar philosophical path that Theatana Arentz
Speaker 6: already laid out, but he goes like a few steps further.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry to say that we have once again some
Speaker 6: concepts to explore before we get the go deeper. Argumbh
Speaker 6: strongly uses the concept of a homo seser. It's a
Speaker 6: Latin term used during some time in the Roman Republic.
Speaker 6: It means sacred man or a cursed man. It is
Speaker 6: a person who is banned from society, might be killed
Speaker 6: by anybody, but must not be sacrificed in a religious ritual.
Speaker 6: So Argamben sees this as someone who is exiled from
Speaker 6: society and also not recognized as someone fits or worthy
Speaker 6: of being used in religious rituals like In fact, the
Speaker 6: Roman state has declared that this person is just a
Speaker 6: biological life form. Okay, that's in essence what this boils
Speaker 6: down to holds like the sovereign power over this person.
Speaker 6: Because it is like the Roman state that could enforce
Speaker 6: this or retract it, but for all intents and purposes,
Speaker 6: like the homosaeser is like stripped of humanity from political community,
Speaker 6: essentially rightless. And this also like a really weird position
Speaker 6: because you're still sort of subject to the state without
Speaker 6: the state wanting anything to do with you. Yeah, almost
Speaker 6: like a very one directional relationship. And agambh in turn
Speaker 6: adapts this concept of the homo siser into his state
Speaker 6: of exception. In his work of the same name, he
Speaker 6: lays out how in times of emergency usually this is
Speaker 6: what like the German philosopher Carl Schmidt often referred to,
Speaker 6: but agambenn is taking it in a much cooler direction
Speaker 6: than Carl Schmidt ever did. In times of emergency where
Speaker 6: on a political level, the decision is made to increase
Speaker 6: the legal power of the sol system. This increase can
Speaker 6: be an addition of new laws or the adulment of others,
Speaker 6: but the question of how legal this is this increase
Speaker 6: in power is often a very very gray area, like
Speaker 6: martial laws is a good example. Like there is a real,
Speaker 6: perceived or imaginary threats to the country or society and
Speaker 6: thus whoever is in power invokes martial law and suddenly
Speaker 6: all bets are off because they can't be restricted by
Speaker 6: law in order to deal with that situation. Yeah, Like
Speaker 6: many a dictator has like invoked martial law just so
Speaker 6: they could like crush down on everything.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think there were so many places where I
Speaker 7: could think of where there's been like a state of
Speaker 7: exception or a state of emergency for decades, right, I
Speaker 7: mean to an extent, since the United States passed a
Speaker 7: Patriot Act, or like you know, in the United States,
Speaker 7: we famously have the First ten Amendment to the Constitution,
Speaker 7: which are referred to as a Bill of Rights, right,
Speaker 7: which enshrine many things in states are supposed to do
Speaker 7: to us unless you happen to be in the border
Speaker 7: enforcement zone or subject to some of these like sneak
Speaker 7: and peak warrants that the Patriot Act allows, right, or
Speaker 7: other piece of legislation as well. Right, Like, there are many, many,
Speaker 7: many examples of this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, where Hannah Arnd has like very distinct like this
Speaker 6: a way and the bios and argambenz sort of sees
Speaker 6: like an in between area where yeah, you become this
Speaker 6: homosaser where like you're not really the one, you're not
Speaker 6: really the other, and in that gray area, just anything
Speaker 6: can happen.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that like humans without rights concept is yeah, useful.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and they become so fluid in a bad way.
Speaker 6: Like if I were to arrive at like LAX, if
Speaker 6: I make the wrong joke while I'm in the gray zone,
Speaker 6: then probably every one of my ob will be searched
Speaker 6: for like drugs or other things. But once I step
Speaker 6: out of LAX, then like the LAPD can't do that
Speaker 6: to me, right without a whole different bureaucratic legal animal
Speaker 6: that they'll have to deal with. Yeah, but like physically
Speaker 6: I just took three steps yeah right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: Or like if you think of the rights the migrants
Speaker 7: and refugees have, right, like they can be in the
Speaker 7: same space as someone but have completely different rights. Think
Speaker 7: about how there were hindred people are in the camps
Speaker 7: in Bangladesh, for example, like a Bangladeshi person could come
Speaker 7: there that they would have very different experiences of the
Speaker 7: state in their rights, especially if they tried to walk.
Speaker 6: Out of there. Yeah together, Or like Palestinians living in
Speaker 6: certain areas and the Palestinians will need to be able
Speaker 6: to identify themselves at each checkpoint where they have to
Speaker 6: wait two hours and Israeli personal just walk through it
Speaker 6: and wave through the guards. Yeah, they're the exception, so
Speaker 6: they can be treated differently.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you literally have roads that they can't go on, right, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 7: a Palestinian and Israeli person is a good example. Right,
Speaker 7: they could be holding hands walking together an entry checkpoint.
Speaker 7: From the moment they entered to the moment they left.
Speaker 7: They would have completely diverting experiences and the whole different
Speaker 7: set of like legal rights and legal protections.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Another example that I wrote down here was like
Speaker 6: the pandemics and the lockdowns, because I know, at least
Speaker 6: in the Netherlands one we had lockdowns. It was very
Speaker 6: unclear as to if it was constitutionally even allowed to
Speaker 6: do that and if the crisis was severe enough to
Speaker 6: justify those measures on a legal level. Right, Yeah, that's
Speaker 6: also a discussion here. Yes, Well, I'm not an expert
Speaker 6: on the US, so I can only use my own example.
Speaker 6: Year At this point, this is where all the critiques
Speaker 6: sort of start to blend together, and this is where
Speaker 6: I hope like it's going to make the most sense.
Speaker 6: As Simon Vale already said, like rights are conditional and
Speaker 6: require power to uphold them for you as a subject.
Speaker 6: What we run into now is this distinction between being
Speaker 6: human as a biological unit or as a political one,
Speaker 6: because the latter has access to rights the former doesn't,
Speaker 6: and as a consequence, that person becomes this homosaser in
Speaker 6: a sense, outside of society and the protections that that offers.
Speaker 6: You get all the downsides of being a subject, but
Speaker 6: none of the benefits, like the social contract sort of
Speaker 6: becomes revoked. The tricky part is that our can also
Speaker 6: treat you differently based on like biological categories or political categories,
Speaker 6: like prison labor is a very good example of this.
Speaker 6: Under the thirteenth Amendment, slave labor was made illegal except
Speaker 6: as a punishment. So as soon as power can give
Speaker 6: you a punishment, some of your rights just dissipate. Yeah,
Speaker 6: Like another one is healthcare. Like if you're a this
Speaker 6: woman experiencing like a menopausal issues, it's relatively easy to
Speaker 6: get like hormone treatments, but if you're at and ruin,
Speaker 6: it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult or downright illegal to get
Speaker 6: those very same hormones. And that's also like this categorization
Speaker 6: in order to treat someone differently. So what I think
Speaker 6: I'm trying to say is that our can also navigate
Speaker 6: in such a way that even if you are part
Speaker 6: of a political community, it can negate the rights and
Speaker 6: the human rights that should come with it by categorizing
Speaker 6: you differently. Like this is a gumbance, like massive critique,
Speaker 6: because rather than you getting human rights and getting them
Speaker 6: respected by power, it makes you dependent on power to
Speaker 6: recognize and honor it. Yeah, in a way, human rights
Speaker 6: become a liability instead of a protection because power, the sovereign,
Speaker 6: the state can still decide whether or not to recognize
Speaker 6: you as like biological or political. So one of the
Speaker 6: most tangible and powerful examples of this not being recognized
Speaker 6: comes from our good friend James President Gregory Woogie Bush
Speaker 6: and his seaside resort in Guntanamo Bay. I think I
Speaker 6: had that too correct. Under international law, you're still entitled
Speaker 6: to have certain human rights when you are detained as
Speaker 6: a prisoner of war. Yeah, I'll be citing a little
Speaker 6: bit from the third Geneva Convention in which this was
Speaker 6: like ratified. The status of POW's only applies in international
Speaker 6: armed conflict. POWs are usually members of armed forces or
Speaker 6: of one of the parties to a conflict who fall
Speaker 6: into the hands of the opposing party. The Third Geneva
Speaker 6: Convention also classifies other categories of people who have the
Speaker 6: right to POW status or maybe treated as such. POW's
Speaker 6: must be treated humanly in all circumstances. They are protected
Speaker 6: against any act of violence, as well as against intimidation, insults,
Speaker 6: and public curiosity. The International Humanitarian Law also defines the
Speaker 6: minimum acceptable conditions of the tension, covering such issues as accommodation, food, clothing, hygiene,
Speaker 6: and medical care. So you know where this is going. Yeah,
Speaker 6: because Greg water Walker Bush circumvented this all by proclaiming
Speaker 6: that certain people were not prisoners of war but rather
Speaker 6: enemy combatants and as such not subject to the protections
Speaker 6: of the Geneva Convention. It's a beaten switch that is
Speaker 6: as smart as it is like diabolical, because the power
Speaker 6: simply switches around the political community that applies to you,
Speaker 6: and suddenly they can do whatever they want to you
Speaker 6: because you're just the biological unit.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Like it's a linguistic switcheru. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And it shows how our rights are perceived in us.
Speaker 7: Lord come from the state as a guarantor of them. Right, Like,
Speaker 7: because these people were quote unquote terrorists and they weren't
Speaker 7: fighting on behalf of a state. Therefore obligations to them
Speaker 7: and to the state that we're at war with don't exist,
Speaker 7: and like so they therefore they don't have rights because
Speaker 7: there is not a state to say, hey, you're violating them,
Speaker 7: even though many many Americans, including in many many court cases,
Speaker 7: said hey, you're violating their rights, and even when they
Speaker 7: were citizens of other countries like British people were in
Speaker 7: Guantanamo Bay.
Speaker 6: Yeah, from all over the world. Yeah. Also, I think
Speaker 6: that there never has been a single conviction because of
Speaker 6: whatever the fuck happened in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah, they have
Speaker 6: their own special court.
Speaker 7: I don't know if they've convicted people there, but they
Speaker 7: definitely have a court there.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I didn't know about the convictions, but I remember teaching
Speaker 7: a sociology course and getting into Guantanamo Bay quite a lot,
Speaker 7: but that was some time ago. I've had students who
Speaker 7: were who served at Guantanamo O Mai fuck, And I
Speaker 7: think it's fair to say that like that, the psychological
Speaker 7: damage that does to everybody involved should not be underestimated.
Speaker 7: Like it's It goes back to your idea of like
Speaker 7: we have an inherent gut feeling of right and wrong,
Speaker 7: and participating in something that you know to be wrong
Speaker 7: isn't good for you.
Speaker 6: It's not.
Speaker 7: It's not the same as being tortured and waterboarded, but
Speaker 7: knowing that you are in a place. To be clear,
Speaker 7: I don't know anyone who has participated in any of
Speaker 7: that like enhanced interrogation bullshit, But just being a fucking
Speaker 7: cook in a place where that happens is still damaging,
Speaker 7: I'm sure to you and your sense of being a
Speaker 7: person who believes in their obligation to others.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like I would not. I would not trust anyone
Speaker 6: who wouldn't be affected by that. Yeah, yeah, exactly like that.
Speaker 6: That person that the Burston was not affected by that
Speaker 6: is like either a psychopath or like that inside. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I'm not going to be nuanced about that. But this
Speaker 6: is like the core of like the entire critique against
Speaker 6: human rights, because it is simply the state decides that
Speaker 6: you look part of a political community or just cuts
Speaker 6: you off from it, and suddenly we can play like
Speaker 6: Hotel California at twenty four to seven and drive you insane. Yeah,
Speaker 6: or a lack of sleep, too old or too cold.
Speaker 6: It's so weird to have something that we are taught
Speaker 6: is like unalienable. It's actually just like the premium option,
Speaker 6: but you can't buy it, Like there is a power
Speaker 6: that has to say, oh no, this person has the
Speaker 6: premium package and you get to have human rights, like
Speaker 6: it is this right to have rights. As Aaron said,
Speaker 6: that makes it really weird because you're still dependent and
Speaker 6: unless recognized, you're still just just an animal existing out there.
Speaker 6: It's yeah, so, and this is why I thought it
Speaker 6: would be a good idea to have this discussion, because
Speaker 6: I think we can look at every pretty much any
Speaker 6: continent at the moment and see things they're like, oh,
Speaker 6: you can see this pattern everywhere.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's very relevant to the United States right now,
Speaker 7: right because like we've got you know, Lakey Department of
Speaker 7: Home Land Security going out there and doing stuff which
Speaker 7: is violative of people's rights, both in US and international
Speaker 7: law terms, and like there's been a response right by
Speaker 7: certain groups people, And I understand, right, if you have
Speaker 7: spent your whole life seeing like rights as guaranteed by
Speaker 7: the state, and the state is of anevolent actor, then
Speaker 7: it's hard to make that mind switch. I do understand that,
Speaker 7: but like it actually doesn't matter, and this is very
Speaker 7: hard for some people to gra judging by my replies
Speaker 7: on bskuy dot app, Yeah that's actually illegal. It doesn't matter, right,
Speaker 7: Like people just being like, oh, they can't do that
Speaker 7: while they're doing it. It doesn't matter that they're violating
Speaker 7: like half the Bill of Rights in a two minute period.
Speaker 7: They're still doing it. There is no accountability because the
Speaker 7: state doesn't hold itself accountable. So like when we need
Speaker 7: to think of a framework where like our assumptions can
Speaker 7: line up with reality, you come back to obligations because
Speaker 7: look at what Yeah, what do you think is right
Speaker 7: and wrong to happen to people. Yeah, we'd meet that
Speaker 7: a lot with outdoor attention actually, like when we were
Speaker 7: feeding people, Like you'd be like, hey, just trying to
Speaker 7: get help from folks, you know, they trying to be like, hey,
Speaker 7: you know, we're trying to feed these folks and help
Speaker 7: us out, give us whatever. Like people will be asking
Speaker 7: friends and their community and then folks will be like,
Speaker 7: well they can't do that, they have the right.
Speaker 6: To blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 7: You'd be like, oh, do you want to come tell them? Like,
Speaker 7: we'll see how it goes, I guess, but like they
Speaker 7: are doing it, and we have an obligation to take
Speaker 7: care of them. And like, I think people have become
Speaker 7: very comfortable outsourcing their obligation to the state without realizing
Speaker 7: that they therefore they no longer get to decide who
Speaker 7: gets right to when when you do that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it's important to highlight like this, this
Speaker 6: little switcher room. If you think of like the Palestine protests,
Speaker 6: like they can't outright band protests because then you're you're
Speaker 6: very much violating the constitution, right, Yeah, but if you say, like, oh, no,
Speaker 6: but this is not because they're protesting, this is because
Speaker 6: it's anti Semitic and we need to protect these other people. Yeah,
Speaker 6: Like the acts that are happening on the ground have
Speaker 6: not really changed, but the way you can approach this
Speaker 6: from a legal and a political level become a whole
Speaker 6: different ballgame. And I think that that doesn't pertain to
Speaker 6: human rights as much as like the example you mentioned,
Speaker 6: but it is again this dait and switch that keeps happening. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And I'm sure everyone listening can think of times or
Speaker 6: examples of that, and it is not great. Yeah, it's
Speaker 6: not great. Yeah, that is all I have. Unfortunately, I
Speaker 6: don't have any advice or anything or how to deal
Speaker 6: with this for you as the listener. Yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 6: help to tell if the cop they're violating your human rights,
Speaker 6: they won't listen. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think it could be easy for people to assume
Speaker 7: that this is a hopeless thing, right like that, like
Speaker 7: because the rights only matter when the state decides they
Speaker 7: matter that therefore they didn't matter. But it can also
Speaker 7: be a hopeful thing because like maybe if we look
Speaker 7: at the example I wrote back to my book, right
Speaker 7: of the CBS when they were in Shengal and they
Speaker 7: were on their mountain right and the Islamic state I
Speaker 7: think it was Isis at that time, not sure if
Speaker 7: it had declared itself the Islamic State, yet was surrounding
Speaker 7: them and like very much coming to violate every single
Speaker 7: concept of rights and decency that one can imagine for
Speaker 7: a human being. Right and our Remember I'm interviewing a
Speaker 7: Yepe Gay commander about this in Rajaba and him saying,
Speaker 7: obviously I'm translating care An a direct quotation, but we
Speaker 7: were very disappointed in the states of the world at
Speaker 7: that moment, and so we decided to go ourselves. And
Speaker 7: like it was a very small number, right, different accounts
Speaker 7: have had different numbers. I think entirely Kurdish. We can
Speaker 7: we can debate of if a Zd people are Kurdish
Speaker 7: or not, but like, it's not the place for that
Speaker 7: isn't no people from the YPG who went to the
Speaker 7: mountain and eventually built corridor with their blood, with their bodies,
Speaker 7: right to allow those people to come to Java. Now
Speaker 7: I'm fortunately those people. It's a very good example. Now
Speaker 7: I think about actually, right, so those people acted as
Speaker 7: guarantors of someone else it's rights by fulfilling their obligation. Now,
Speaker 7: if we look at where the Azd people are in
Speaker 7: some part not everything called a Zed person, but many
Speaker 7: Zed people are still in refugee camps in Iraq.
Speaker 6: Right, the conditions that they are in.
Speaker 7: We hear a lot about how bad conditions are for
Speaker 7: people in the Islamic state prisons or were. We do
Speaker 7: not hear as much about how bad conditions are for
Speaker 7: the Azdi people. But they are bad, right, they have
Speaker 7: a right to a much better life. The states of
Speaker 7: the world are not fulfilling that right, they are not
Speaker 7: fulfilling their obligation to these people who did nothing other
Speaker 7: than live the way they've lived for thousands of years.
Speaker 7: And because that way was considered to be heretical by
Speaker 7: the Islamic state, they were targeted for genocide right, and
Speaker 7: would have been killed in much greater numbers were it
Speaker 7: not for those people who were willing to fulfill their
Speaker 7: obligation to go and defend them. And then the states
Speaker 7: of the world have let them down again, and so
Speaker 7: you know, tried to try to find a future for themselves.
Speaker 6: So like it's, uh, we're very good at that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: this is the thing that we do. I may have
Speaker 6: a hopeful example. Us I told you, James, that I
Speaker 6: had a random person living in my house. Yeah, and well,
Speaker 6: for you the listeners, like through the community, it became
Speaker 6: nonlust that there was someone who had fled an unsafe
Speaker 6: home situation legal adults. But I'm not entirely sure how
Speaker 6: much it should say, but it sounded very serious and
Speaker 6: we took it very seriously. And I had a spare
Speaker 6: room at that time. I did not know this person.
Speaker 6: I only have a first name. I never learned a
Speaker 6: second name. Or anything, never asked for idea. I thought
Speaker 6: to myself, Like, the world I want to live in
Speaker 6: is one where someone can feel safe in situations like that. Yeah,
Speaker 6: So despite me being a pretty introverted person, like I
Speaker 6: was like, Okay, come live here, because you need someplace
Speaker 6: to get back on your feet. You need somewhere to
Speaker 6: be safe. And that is a way which you can
Speaker 6: like uphold your obligations to other people also with like
Speaker 6: the safety security without persistent fear, a roof over their heads,
Speaker 6: even just a place to cool down a bit and
Speaker 6: figure things out. And it would wreck my own political
Speaker 6: convictions to be able to help in such a situation
Speaker 6: and not do it because I find it a little
Speaker 6: uncomfortable to have a stranger living in my house. Also,
Speaker 6: for the record, nothing was stolen, nothing weird or bad happened.
Speaker 6: This person just lived here for a week and moved on. Yeah,
Speaker 6: but that is a way in which like you can
Speaker 6: also in an a small way, like fulfill your your
Speaker 6: obligation to other people and to live in accordance with
Speaker 6: like your own convictions and your own moral an ideological compus. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I think that's a great example of how you can
Speaker 6: act according to your obligation, right, get it, And we
Speaker 6: can all do that in different ways, right, different senses,
Speaker 6: And like that's one thing. Like I liked what you
Speaker 6: said a lot that if the world you want to
Speaker 6: live in is one where that person can feel safe,
Speaker 6: and like we only do that by building it ourselves.
Speaker 6: My perception of politics is that, like we are wasting
Speaker 6: our time asking the state to build that world for us,
Speaker 6: and instead we can build it like peace by piece
Speaker 6: along the way. And I know people like perceive anarchism
Speaker 6: to be like a chaotic and violent, but like most
Speaker 6: of the time when you're doing anarchism, you're making someone
Speaker 6: food or giving someone a blanket, like very really nice,
Speaker 6: pleasant things to be doing. And like it makes me
Speaker 6: feel better that we can make a world where that
Speaker 6: happened through our individual actions. Yeah, very nice. David Graeber
Speaker 6: a metaphor the air for the digging a well. So
Speaker 6: like Mia likes to say, like put a transgirl on
Speaker 6: your couch, Yeah, that's also protecting you in rights. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: I'm sorry, I just thought of it, but yeah, put
Speaker 6: someone on your couch who is in dire need of
Speaker 6: a safe place. Yeah, but be also safe yourself. Clearly.
Speaker 6: I think that's all we have. James. This was depressing
Speaker 6: and then uplifting enough. Yeah, that's what we do here.
Speaker 6: I don't care. Yeah, well, take care of everyone, and
Speaker 6: until next time.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about
Speaker 2: it continuing to happen here. I'm Robert Evans, and today
Speaker 2: I've I got a friend of the pod, Laura Jadid
Speaker 2: in the studio, well not literally in the studio, you
Speaker 2: know how things work with the internet, folks. And last
Speaker 2: weekend Laura traveled to the Great American State Fair in
Speaker 2: our nation's beautiful capital of Washington, DC, where she witnessed
Speaker 2: a lovely celebration of America's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
Speaker 2: with no inclement weather whatsoever? Is that right, Laura?
Speaker 4: No, it was charming and beautiful and very professionally done
Speaker 4: and everyone had a lovely time.
Speaker 2: Awesome stuff, Laura, Yeah, let's start. Was this just kind
Speaker 2: of as soon as he said he was doing this,
Speaker 2: you were like, well, I have to be there. This
Speaker 2: is just simply not an option for me to miss.
Speaker 4: I mean, I definitely wanted to go. I actually was
Speaker 4: in town for a different I was there for a
Speaker 4: religious extremist conference, which is a whole different. We we ended early,
Speaker 4: and I was like, you know, I've got several hours
Speaker 4: before I need to return home. Why didn't I go
Speaker 4: have a nice time an affair. I've been to a
Speaker 4: fair in a while.
Speaker 2: To go to a fair, Yeah, So, how was it?
Speaker 2: Walk us through, like step by step kind of your
Speaker 2: experiences at this wonderful event celebrating two hundred fifty years
Speaker 2: as technically a country.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, I would say the highlight, other than the weather,
Speaker 4: which we'll get into, was going into there. There's these
Speaker 4: little rooms where they've got booths for states and territories
Speaker 4: and departments of the government and random sponsors. And my
Speaker 4: favorite booth I think was probably the Department of Justice
Speaker 4: because it was completely empty. And by empty, I don't
Speaker 4: mean there wasn't anybody there. I mean that there was
Speaker 4: a card table, three folding chairs, a battered backdrop, and
Speaker 4: nothing else.
Speaker 5: Sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it was incredible. I'm perfect. It was so
Speaker 4: heavy handed.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 4: You know, I know people who use subtext and they're
Speaker 4: all cowards, and there are no cowards in this administration.
Speaker 2: Yeah, your photos of that were really funny. So I
Speaker 2: guess the layout is like it almost sounds like a
Speaker 2: trade show or something. We've got like these booths for
Speaker 2: each of the states and bunch of government agencies and
Speaker 2: then like what all was going on?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like if a ren fare and a trade
Speaker 4: show had a baby, and the baby had the worst
Speaker 4: aspects of both. It was incredible, Like you enter it,
Speaker 4: and I will say this, so you know, people, you've
Speaker 4: probably seen pictures. Everyone's i think seen pictures of what
Speaker 4: this thing looks like. Yeah, and the fourth of July
Speaker 4: was different, and that there were a lot of people
Speaker 4: there because that's the day. People came from all over
Speaker 4: the country to celebrate the fourth July and d s
Speaker 4: so it was crowded, but everything else was somehow worse
Speaker 4: than it looked in the pictures, because like you know,
Speaker 4: you can see the pictures of like the timou Arch
Speaker 4: and you see how bad it looks, but there's nothing
Speaker 4: like walking towards it, and from a distance it's like, oh,
Speaker 4: that's an odd thing in the middle of a field,
Speaker 4: but it looks fine. And then the closer you get,
Speaker 4: the worse it looks. And it's just this this kind
Speaker 4: of slow dawning horror of this like uncanny Valley object.
Speaker 4: There are the two long buildings that were just going
Speaker 4: by either side basically for like the length of the
Speaker 4: Washington Mall, just little like tent slash trailer buildings with
Speaker 4: canvas staple to them. And the canvas had this illusion
Speaker 4: of columns and baba leafs and stuff like that. And
Speaker 4: we've seen, you know, that's in pictures. But yeah, walking
Speaker 4: down the mall and seeing that optical illusion not shift
Speaker 4: with your perspective is just it's like being in a
Speaker 4: really badly rendered video game but it's real and you're
Speaker 4: touching grass at the same time, and it's just the
Speaker 4: whole thing is so eerie and strange. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So what can you tell me about like the audience, Like,
Speaker 2: what's the vibe like on the ground when you when
Speaker 2: you show up at least for the first portion of
Speaker 2: this before the weather starts to change.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So I've been to a lot of right wing
Speaker 4: events kind of what I do. I've been, you know,
Speaker 4: I go to a lot of these, and this was
Speaker 4: less Maga forward. I'm not saying there were no Trump
Speaker 4: hats or Trump shirts, but they were. It was mostly
Speaker 4: just like America Hell yeah, but everybody there was was
Speaker 4: very clearly Republican. Everyone assumed everyone else was a Republican.
Speaker 4: The booth operators assumed everybody was a Republican, a pretty
Speaker 4: pretty fa safe assumption. It was maga light, I'd say,
Speaker 4: I mean, it was almost more horrifying in that way,
Speaker 4: because it felt like it was kind of realizing their
Speaker 4: fantasy of like all real Americans supporting Trump. You know,
Speaker 4: these were all the real Americans out here celebrating America.
Speaker 4: It was regular folks who think Trump's doing a great
Speaker 4: job and aren't at all disgusted by this fair So
Speaker 4: the vibes were kind of cheerfully brand I'd.
Speaker 2: Say, cheerfully rancid. Yeah, what a great term to describe
Speaker 2: the country as a whole. Right now, do you have
Speaker 2: any kind of like top fhaves, Like of the of
Speaker 2: the things you saw, like on the ground, they're like,
Speaker 2: what stuff really stuck out to you?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, initially, before the weather went to hell and by
Speaker 4: focus changed, I decided, because you know, there's been a
Speaker 4: lot of articles about how absolutely got awful and dumb
Speaker 4: and silly the sarahs, I decided to do something a
Speaker 4: little different. I was going to go to every single
Speaker 4: state and territory booth and rank them, and the variety
Speaker 4: in the state and territory booths I found interesting. You know,
Speaker 4: you had Oregon. Actually I gave out some like fake
Speaker 4: awards when I wrote about this on my sub stack,
Speaker 4: and Oregon won the most fuck You award. It's close,
Speaker 4: but it was just this very small booth. Two of
Speaker 4: the walls blank white canvas, kind of plastic y, and
Speaker 4: then there was just like a thing that said Oregon
Speaker 4: the beever state, and there was kind of a little
Speaker 4: banner of some of the things that are in Oregon,
Speaker 4: and a Columbia sports like bag just kind of clipped
Speaker 4: to it with like like just a you know, a
Speaker 4: kitchen clip. I was like, yeah, that that wins this.
Speaker 2: Yeah that Oregon.
Speaker 4: Baby. It was great. It was great. And then you
Speaker 4: had like Puerto Rico, which was clearly sponsored by the
Speaker 4: businesses that want people to go to Puerto Rico for
Speaker 4: the tax breaks. And it was very lush and there
Speaker 4: were big screens and it was populated entirely by hot
Speaker 4: Puerto Rican guys. You were teaching Middle America how to
Speaker 4: salsa and everyone enjoyed that very much.
Speaker 2: So, oh yeah, that sounds good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Georgia's was completely about poultry. AI generated entirely pictures
Speaker 4: of poultry sponsored by Purdue Chicken.
Speaker 2: Uh huh. That's what I think of when I think
Speaker 2: of Georgia.
Speaker 4: Of course, poultry obviously, Yeah, the infamous Georgia poultries. Yes.
Speaker 4: And so it was like some states went all out.
Speaker 4: Some states kind of were like, you should visit our states.
Speaker 4: Some states were like, we sold this booth to a company,
Speaker 4: and then some states were like, this is a booth,
Speaker 4: we are here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're legally required, Yes, we have we.
Speaker 4: Have fulfilled our required to have an object at this fair.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then there were these like little flashes of normalcy
Speaker 4: and this otherwise very abnormal event were almost more disconcerting
Speaker 4: because it was like a glimpse of what might have been.
Speaker 4: Like the DC Metro had a full scale subway car,
Speaker 4: like three subway cars linked up mock up railroad and
Speaker 4: you go inside it. It was like a museum of
Speaker 4: the history of the Metro and how it's helped DC
Speaker 4: and how it was built and fun facts about the Metro,
Speaker 4: and it's like kind of a boring exhibit, but it
Speaker 4: was an apolitical celebration of a real achievement. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: yeah right, and so you know, naturally freedom two fifty
Speaker 4: hits that behind one of the long Low buildings, and
Speaker 4: also a twenty four to seven Christian Revival tent, just
Speaker 4: to be sure nobody accidentally stumbled on anything that wasn't
Speaker 4: just weird.
Speaker 2: As hell, just to make sure there wasn't anything that
Speaker 2: like Americans broadly could enjoy exactly.
Speaker 4: We can't have that, like, yeah, it has to be here,
Speaker 4: but you don't have to put it out of the
Speaker 4: way to worry about it.
Speaker 2: Everything's gotta be culture war oriented.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that was kind of the most normal if
Speaker 4: I had to pick a most abnormal, and it's it's tough,
Speaker 4: it's it's a that's a that's a crowded field.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The Department of Education booth was completely yes, banners by
Speaker 4: far right organizations.
Speaker 2: Awesome, Great, I love see that.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, just purely the most like racist homeschooling, forward
Speaker 2: cut school funds, vouchers, yay, like, oh, teach kids, Vietnam
Speaker 2: didn't happen, gay people don't exist kind of bullshit. Great,
Speaker 2: what a turning point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah very much. America is a Christian nation.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, So weirdly, I was. I was surprised TSA
Speaker 4: wasn't in there, one of the ones trigger You obviously,
Speaker 4: you know, the Premier University of America, Prager You was
Speaker 4: in there. Also a thing called Patriot Academy, which I
Speaker 4: wrote an article about them in twenty twenty two, not
Speaker 4: realizing they would be part of our education system at
Speaker 4: the time. But I went to their constitutional self defense
Speaker 4: course at the Whitnington Center in New Mexico, where we
Speaker 4: learned how to shoot handguns and also about the biblical
Speaker 4: origins of our constitution.
Speaker 2: So that's good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it seems like a good thing to teach kids.
Speaker 4: It seems like a really good program to implement, maybe,
Speaker 4: you know, in our school systems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not optimistic about the fact that that's the
Speaker 2: depart of Educations booth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it's not Baltimore.
Speaker 2: Not great. Yeah, any other like weird kind of culture
Speaker 2: war signifiers at the booths that are particularly noteworthy.
Speaker 4: I mean, so this has been discussed elsewhere, but it
Speaker 4: curely can't be mentioned enough. It feels like very emblematic.
Speaker 4: If the time we're in there was like a I
Speaker 4: think it was the American I don't think it was
Speaker 4: the Innovator's Hall. It was America Made in America Hall.
Speaker 4: It was like a much larger building with a lot
Speaker 4: more exhibits, and right in the center of it, taking
Speaker 4: up the majority of the real estate, like the largest
Speaker 4: by far, just portraits after portrait, large oil paint portraits
Speaker 4: of the American flag, including a cross draped in the
Speaker 4: American flag, because because why not. And the artist whose
Speaker 4: name I guess is Scott Lebido. There's a quote by
Speaker 4: him above his beautiful works of exactly one subject which says,
Speaker 4: and I quote, I have flirted eye to eye with Mona,
Speaker 4: Lisa and Paris. I have touched the thick, painful brushstrokes
Speaker 4: of van Go and I gasped in awe at nickel
Speaker 4: angelo Sistine Chapel. Yes, still to this day, my favorite
Speaker 4: work of art is Dot Dot Dot, the star spangled banner.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. I'm on this guy's website right now.
Speaker 2: And the first thing on the Scott Lobido website to
Speaker 2: sign my petition to install a giant permanent flag at
Speaker 2: ground zero, New York City got one hundred and sixteen
Speaker 2: thousand signatures. Yeah that that really matters.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, No, And if there's one thing the ground
Speaker 4: zero needs. It's more American flag in the nine to
Speaker 4: eleven Museum. It's not very American. You would never know
Speaker 4: going down there about patriotism at all.
Speaker 2: He also has a documentary about him that I think
Speaker 2: is just an ad streaming on Amazon Prime and Aple TV,
Speaker 2: called The Relentless Patriot.
Speaker 4: Oh god, relentless is a fair adjective.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I found the paintings very relentless personally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, his art is incredible stuff here, there's some very
Speaker 2: for over thirty years, America's artist Scott Lobido in America's
Speaker 2: artist Scot Lobido, every first letter in that is capitalized,
Speaker 2: has respectfully painted thousands of renditions of old glory on schools, homes, firehouses,
Speaker 2: police stations, cars, and canvases. Scott's past is rather colorful. Okay,
Speaker 2: so he's some sort of criminals. Yeah, amazing shit. I
Speaker 2: really want to know that is colorful life prior to
Speaker 2: this point.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: I like to imagine it with some kind of like
Speaker 4: petty staff and he's like, you know what would make
Speaker 4: me way more money? Yeah, it's just aging.
Speaker 2: Fucking crude American flag drawings with Donald Trump in them,
Speaker 2: or a fist in one of his works of home.
Speaker 4: Wow, like like a BLM fist or just a fist.
Speaker 2: No, it's like a fist in a flag and the
Speaker 2: fist is covered in like paint that's like flag colored.
Speaker 4: That makes sense.
Speaker 2: I'm on Facebook here, he's got a video of it.
Speaker 2: Let's wait for this fucking thing to start. But it
Speaker 2: looks like, yeah, he's unveiling a piece of art. I'm
Speaker 2: trying to click through the unveiling because I don't care
Speaker 2: what this fucker has to say. But it looks like
Speaker 2: it's just a middle finger. Yeah, it's just a middle finger. Wow.
Speaker 2: And I think that's a four fingered hand. I know
Speaker 2: there's a fifth. There's a fifth. It's just not a
Speaker 2: very well, it's not like a good like the proportions
Speaker 2: are really bad on this anyway. I'm sorry we're taking
Speaker 2: pitting way too much time on Scott Lebda.
Speaker 4: I mean, I will say, if America had to have
Speaker 4: an artist right now, a poorly drawn middle finger, you
Speaker 4: can do worst you can.
Speaker 2: Art's represent porcult middle finger. Yes, oh my god, speaking
Speaker 2: of poorly sculpted middle fingers, Maybe our advertisers sell that.
Speaker 2: I don't know, that's not my job and I'm bad
Speaker 2: with Laura. Let's continue. What next do you want to
Speaker 2: tell us about the Great American State? Also, it's not
Speaker 2: a state fair. It's like the Federal it's like the
Speaker 2: National Fair.
Speaker 4: So yeah, like the states were there, but kind of
Speaker 4: as stars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, the fair was just it was. It was
Speaker 4: pretty boring. There was the fairest wheel of the merry
Speaker 4: ground from the World Fair was probably the funnest thing there.
Speaker 4: That was from you know, a time when America did
Speaker 4: things well. But you know, it was just kind of
Speaker 4: a lot of what I've just said. That is, until
Speaker 4: the rain started, and I think that might be a
Speaker 4: decent place to go, because it seemed that despite this
Speaker 4: having been forecast for about a week, they had made
Speaker 4: no plans whatsoever. What would happen if it actually did
Speaker 4: rain at all?
Speaker 2: Sure if that sounds like the Trump administration, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: God wouldn't let that happen.
Speaker 4: Oh God loves America. Why would he let it rain?
Speaker 4: Absolutely not. So at a certain point in the fair,
Speaker 4: my phone was dying. I had forgotten my charging brick
Speaker 4: at home, and I decided to charge it at the
Speaker 4: Department of Justice. Booths since no one was using it.
Speaker 2: So I stuck in there and I, you know, plugged
Speaker 2: in my pay for the Department of Justice. You know,
Speaker 2: our tax dollars, say for that, damn.
Speaker 4: My tax dollars. Yes, and no one you know, So
Speaker 4: I occupied the Department of Justice, plugged in my phone,
Speaker 4: and about five minutes after that, this announcement starts going
Speaker 4: out over the speakers on Loop for like, you know,
Speaker 4: at least an hour and a half, just you know,
Speaker 4: due to inclement weather, the fair has been quote temporarily postponed.
Speaker 4: Please make your way to the exits and then we'll
Speaker 4: let you back in when the storm blows over. And
Speaker 4: you know, I've waited an hour to get in light
Speaker 4: most people, and it was very hot, and they'd taken
Speaker 4: my nice pen away, and I was kind of salty
Speaker 4: about that. I didn't want to wait in line again,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, I have electricity here, I have my
Speaker 4: backup pen. They didn't find I have sour patch kids,
Speaker 4: and I'm just gonna hang out. So I did that
Speaker 4: for a while until the fair people found me and
Speaker 4: kicked me out. And then when I went outside, I
Speaker 4: found that I was not alone in this logic that
Speaker 4: a lot of fairgoers were like, well, just get wet
Speaker 4: here instead of getting wet out there, right because they
Speaker 4: were telling us, you know, we'll go shelter in your
Speaker 4: cars or in the surrounding buildings. And you know, we
Speaker 4: were encouraged not to bring cars because it's Washington, d C.
Speaker 4: And there were a lot of people and there's only
Speaker 4: so much parking, so people didn't have cars. And this
Speaker 4: is you know, seven pm on a Nationville holiday in
Speaker 4: the middle of DC, so that the buildings mostly weren't
Speaker 4: open either, so you know, rather than go be wet outside,
Speaker 4: people decided to be wet inside. And this went on
Speaker 4: for about an hour until the cops showed up and
Speaker 4: in a scene that I think would be recognizable to
Speaker 4: you as well, a line of cops just kind of
Speaker 4: trundling down the fare and motorcycles. The big difference between
Speaker 4: this and any other protest was at the cops were
Speaker 4: nice and not screaming or deploying tear gas and just
Speaker 4: kind of herded everyone out, you know, past the throngs
Speaker 4: of thousands already trying to get back in because there
Speaker 4: was nowhere else for people to go except for the
Speaker 4: block traffic for blocks and blocks and blocks, which is
Speaker 4: what they did in the rain. It was yeah, And
Speaker 4: so you've got a crowd of people who are both
Speaker 4: soaking wet and dehydrated, which is a great combination, and
Speaker 4: people start dropping as people are wont to do, and
Speaker 4: so ambulances are coming through the crowd constantly. And you
Speaker 4: know this line that we always hear about protests, how
Speaker 4: they're you know, they're blocking traffic and what if an
Speaker 4: emergency vehicle needed to come in. Well, that was very
Speaker 4: much in play, but for some reason that was okay
Speaker 4: in this case. They just put on their sirens and
Speaker 4: went two miles per hour and got through. For what
Speaker 4: I want to say, about an hour. This was just
Speaker 4: everyone standing around waiting to get back in, getting out
Speaker 4: of the way for ambulances, everyone getting more and more
Speaker 4: tightly packed until the crowd shreunded into little like freaky
Speaker 4: lurches and shoves. Was that, you know, it's like we're
Speaker 4: on the verge of stampede here because they've planned this
Speaker 4: so well that what else was going to happen. They
Speaker 4: weren't going to go home. It was temporarily postponed, so.
Speaker 2: Right, you want to come back, Yeah, they said, temporary. Yeah,
Speaker 2: terrible idea, right, yes, like.
Speaker 4: Don't go home, hang out here, wait outside the gates
Speaker 4: and get soaking wet, because this is safer than being
Speaker 4: inside the fare where you could like do things instead
Speaker 4: of just standing around and being angry.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's both saying like, we want you to stay
Speaker 2: out where you will be in danger, but also we
Speaker 2: want to put you into a situation where a lot
Speaker 2: of you have to move at once.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, and it'll be upset and the security will
Speaker 4: be overwhelmed.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was. It was brilliant, really really brilliant stuff.
Speaker 4: And you know, the storm continued to get worse. It
Speaker 4: did not improve. It just got more and more rainy,
Speaker 4: and people were more and more determined to stay. I
Speaker 4: mean there was a little bit of attrition, but mostly
Speaker 4: you know, and I fell into a group that was
Speaker 4: more determined than most. They were, you know, following the
Speaker 4: ambulances in because the ambulances were making space. It was
Speaker 4: a good way to move up to completely antisocial in
Speaker 4: this way. Eventually, this group got far enough down the
Speaker 4: street that it seemed like we were going to make
Speaker 4: it in, and we kept moving a little bit and
Speaker 4: there was the chants of USA. I believe God Bless
Speaker 4: America was sung at one point, but the progress slowed
Speaker 4: and then it stopped, and then music began to play
Speaker 4: just beyond us inside the fence, and the crowd became
Speaker 4: a bit more agitated, and God Blessed the USA started playing,
Speaker 4: and that was a huge catastrophe because you know, that
Speaker 4: means the speech is about to start, and we were
Speaker 4: going to miss Trump speaking, which was a problem. And
Speaker 4: then Trump started speaking, and this was the moment that
Speaker 4: I think that the crowd just completely broke their will
Speaker 4: and spirits broke because the reverberation from the poorly placed
Speaker 4: speakers were such that you could not understand him. It
Speaker 4: was kind of a nightmare world for me in a
Speaker 4: different way because you could hear Trump's cadence and voice,
Speaker 4: but not his words. It was just this like psychotic
Speaker 4: babble of nothing just watching over us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, reading transcripts of it, even, it was just like, honestly,
Speaker 2: it's like it's like asmrs yeah, right, Like it's just
Speaker 2: he's He's creating at this point, like a soundscape for
Speaker 2: them to kind of exist inside for a little while.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. And then amplified by the fact that it
Speaker 4: was coming at us, you know, from several directions out
Speaker 4: of sync, so truly incomprehensible. Just this weird, trumpy and
Speaker 4: gibberish watching over this crowd, and the boo that erupted
Speaker 4: when they realized they couldn't hear their leaders speak.
Speaker 2: It was just primal, like that's funny, it's great.
Speaker 4: I was having the I mean, I was soaking wet,
Speaker 4: having the best time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're all in withdrawal. Yeah, yeah, it's like no,
Speaker 2: and so you know, he.
Speaker 4: Speaks for a while and midnight passes and there have
Speaker 4: been no fireworks. So the fourth of July, the two
Speaker 4: hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, has now
Speaker 4: passed in DC with zero fireworks whatsoever. But you know,
Speaker 4: everyone was excited for eight hundred and fifty thousand fireworks
Speaker 4: to go off, which they eventually started to do at
Speaker 4: around you know, twelve fifteen, completely obscured by the trees,
Speaker 4: completely obscured. Yeah, could not see them at all after
Speaker 4: all that waiting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw your pictures and stuff from it. It's
Speaker 2: like you can in like the top corner above a tree,
Speaker 2: you can see little bits of an explosion peeking out
Speaker 2: just the worst fireworks show, so frustrating.
Speaker 4: Oh bad, Oh my god. So I'm walking out and
Speaker 4: they're playing Journey. You know, first stop believing, like I
Speaker 4: have stopped believing, and yeah, then bon Jovi's living on
Speaker 4: a prayer. I'm not really living on anything at this point.
Speaker 4: The smoke is so thick. Even if we could have
Speaker 4: seen it was just an orange glow on the horizon,
Speaker 4: it's just brackling of bombs.
Speaker 2: It's just awesome. Well, we will conclude this story and
Speaker 2: your experience at the Great American State Fair, but first,
Speaker 2: here's one last at break. Okay, so how many times
Speaker 2: I'm curious would you estimate you heard Lee Greenwood's God
Speaker 2: Bless the USA during your time there?
Speaker 4: Leave it or not? Just before Trump came out?
Speaker 6: Just the one, which was good.
Speaker 2: That's not surprised as well.
Speaker 4: I assumed it would be playing NonStop, but I guess
Speaker 4: that's like Trump's theme saw.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they wanted to keep it like for him.
Speaker 2: It's like a WWF thing, that's like what plays him
Speaker 2: on stage.
Speaker 4: Or whatever exactly. Yeah, you know, I feel like this
Speaker 4: was a small rebellion because there was music playing inside
Speaker 4: of the State Fair. But what you had was like
Speaker 4: Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville is I'm like staring at the arch
Speaker 4: just I mean, they played Fortunate Son, which I guess
Speaker 4: isn't surprising.
Speaker 2: Not surprising, not really proper, but it's not really proper.
Speaker 4: Katie Perry's Firework played several times because I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: of course firework fourth of July. So it wasn't really
Speaker 4: like a big patriotic music fest. It was just kind
Speaker 4: of like pop music that was barely related and or
Speaker 4: a little sad.
Speaker 2: It was yeah, yeah, odd, odd, Well anything else about
Speaker 2: the event at all that you feel like is really
Speaker 2: worth getting into here at the at the end of
Speaker 2: our tale, I mean, the the fact.
Speaker 4: That there isn't I feel like, isn't itself something like there?
Speaker 4: It was so empty, It was such an empty thing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: everything was so sad, lazy, small and lazy and trashy
Speaker 4: and cheap.
Speaker 2: The feeling I kept having was that it all felt
Speaker 2: AI generated. Yes, even the stuff that like couldn't have been,
Speaker 2: Like the arch looked like an AI generated image just
Speaker 2: stuck in the real world and like a lot of
Speaker 2: the booths. I mean, there was a lot of AI
Speaker 2: art there, but it just yea, all of your pictures.
Speaker 2: I kept thinking of It's like my friend is trapped
Speaker 2: in like an AI generated version of reality. That's really lazy.
Speaker 4: It's exactly like it. That is such a good way
Speaker 4: to put it. It really did. It was just like
Speaker 4: the ethos of AI infused this place. Like yeah, it's
Speaker 4: kind of like if you described I mean, I feel
Speaker 4: like I'm very everything to the back rooms right now
Speaker 4: because I just watched it, not a little obsessed, but like.
Speaker 2: A lot of back rooms vibes this person watching the
Speaker 2: back rooms.
Speaker 4: Yea, and yet I mean it really was like if
Speaker 4: something described what a building was and then someone who
Speaker 4: never seen one before was like, oh like this right,
Speaker 4: like yeah, sure like that. Yeah, yeah, just no, it
Speaker 4: was so soulless. I mean, you know, whether or not
Speaker 4: you care for America, I personally, you know, like my
Speaker 4: country's got a lot of problems. I would like a
Speaker 4: lot of them to be better, but you know, I
Speaker 4: live here, I'd like it to be nice. And it
Speaker 4: was just kind of embarrassing. It was sad that this
Speaker 4: is really what we are right now. We are just yeah,
Speaker 4: this like soulless AI esque phoned in sad part is
Speaker 4: like that even part is not even the right word,
Speaker 4: like radically far right bullshit.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's gross, yeah yeah gross. Yeah, it's like funny
Speaker 2: in a cosmic sense, but mostly depressing to be honest.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I enjoyed my time there because I enjoyed
Speaker 4: depressing horrible things. But I can't I can't say that,
Speaker 4: like if I was giving a Yelp preview.
Speaker 2: It feels right in this era of America to be
Speaker 2: like depressed and disappointed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, like the people. And I caught myself doing
Speaker 4: this too, like this, this is a a representation of
Speaker 4: who we are?
Speaker 6: Like, yes it is.
Speaker 2: No, this is a pretty good Yeah, this is exactly
Speaker 2: who we are the more or less.
Speaker 4: Yeah, four point five stars nailed it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I say that a lot like whenever someone's like,
Speaker 2: this isn't who we are? Isn't it.
Speaker 6: Us?
Speaker 4: I am, and this feels like us to me.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Periodically, during like the riots in twenty twenty, I'd post
Speaker 2: some footage and one of the comments would be like,
Speaker 2: this isn't the America I grew up And it's like,
Speaker 2: I'm know when I grew up in.
Speaker 4: I mean, it wasn't the one I grew up in,
Speaker 4: but that's because I lived in areas where the police works.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it was always there. I just wasn't visiting it,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well Laura, anything else pluggables to plug
Speaker 2: at the end here.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, well you can. You can check out. I've
Speaker 4: got a newsletter at firewalledmedia dot com. I am Laura
Speaker 4: Jdeed on basically every social media platform, mostly active on
Speaker 4: Blue Sky now, but theoretically on all of the other
Speaker 4: ones as well. And yeah, come come check me out.
Speaker 4: I am the only Orige Deed in the world, so
Speaker 4: I'm very easy to find.
Speaker 2: Excellent. All right, Well, thank you Laura, and thank you
Speaker 2: all for listening. We'll be back at some point in
Speaker 2: the future. Well, actually, dumon, you know how this works.
Speaker 8: This is happening, This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder.
Speaker 8: That's right, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 8: White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
Speaker 8: I'm Garrison Davis Dame, joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans.
Speaker 8: This episode, we're covering the week of July first to
Speaker 8: July eighth, or some small things. Last week, Ben Gavier,
Speaker 8: the Israeli National Security minister canceled an upcoming trip to
Speaker 8: New York City for the UN Police Summit amidst calls
Speaker 8: for him to be arrested for war crimes.
Speaker 2: That's good, that's good to see. It's nice to see
Speaker 2: that he's feel scared even a little, you know.
Speaker 8: Yes, yeah, the planned protest outside of the UN took place,
Speaker 8: even though Ben Gavier did not travel to the city.
Speaker 8: No one really knows if Mitch McConnell is actually still alive,
Speaker 8: as he remains hospitalized after being omitted in mid June
Speaker 8: for suffering cardiac arrest. On Tuesday, a bunch of Republicans
Speaker 8: senators said that they for sure talked to him multiple
Speaker 8: mites about all his favorite topics.
Speaker 2: Definitely not AI generated images and shit.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: There's really no clear indication on what his current mental
Speaker 8: state is. Laura Lumer has said that he's effectively braindead.
Speaker 8: Not a reliable source either at all, but the audio
Speaker 8: from the nine to one to one call yeah, indicates
Speaker 8: there was CPR being performed.
Speaker 2: So based purely on that, what Lumour says is very
Speaker 2: likely because when people at McConnell's age need CPR and
Speaker 2: are like at the time at which EMS arrives. This
Speaker 2: is not an uncommon result, like what Lumur suggested.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we could see a historic weekend at Bernie's even
Speaker 8: in American politics. Yeah, if Republicans want to hold on
Speaker 8: to this Senate seat without doing a special election.
Speaker 2: Honestly, it'd be the best way to honor his memory. Like,
Speaker 2: that's the appropriate way to honor Mitch McConnell's memory. One
Speaker 2: last filibuster, kind of breaking the law one last time
Speaker 2: to stack things in the gfp's deck.
Speaker 9: I also want to note the friend of the show,
Speaker 9: Myra Lazine from trans News Network, did request comment about
Speaker 9: the status of McConnell from his office and has not
Speaker 9: received a reply.
Speaker 6: We will let you know if if we.
Speaker 9: Get any kind of confirmation from their press steal he
Speaker 9: is in fact alive.
Speaker 8: And our colleague James Stout, who will have a special
Speaker 8: segment later on this episode, also wanted us to note
Speaker 8: that San Diego has begun defunding and closing more than
Speaker 8: thirty public toilets today.
Speaker 6: Cool to that.
Speaker 8: I will add, in a not humble brag fashion, that Mom,
Speaker 8: Donnie and the MTA announced a new plan to expand
Speaker 8: bus routes great the same day anyway, you can have
Speaker 8: either world people, but not if you live in California. Actually,
Speaker 8: no toilets or slightly faster buses. The two choices of
Speaker 8: American politics, Yeah, the two choices that are presented to voters.
Speaker 9: Well, okay, I'm going to present a third choice, which
Speaker 9: is I do want to talk briefly about something that's
Speaker 9: happening in France right now. There is an attempt that
Speaker 9: has passed the Lower House and is pending a vote
Speaker 9: from the Upper House as we speak, to pass a
Speaker 9: police immunity law. I don't know what exactly the the
Speaker 9: term to describe it is, but it is a law
Speaker 9: that would automatically treat any police killing as justified until
Speaker 9: proven otherwise. This is obviously an extremely dangerous bill. It
Speaker 9: effectively allows the police to, as long as there are
Speaker 9: no witnesses, kill someone and not be investigated or removed
Speaker 9: for it. So that is still technically making its way
Speaker 9: through the French Parliament, but very much looks like it
Speaker 9: could pass. It is extremely bleak cool. Yeah, just obviously
Speaker 9: this is a bill backed by the French far right
Speaker 9: that's also being backed by a bunch of the French
Speaker 9: quote unquote center right, and yeah, quite bad.
Speaker 8: Speaking of bad, let's get on to our first main
Speaker 8: story this week. As many of you know, there's been
Speaker 8: a major update in the main Senate race. On Monday,
Speaker 8: a woman named Jenny Rassico came forward with an allegation
Speaker 8: that Graham Platner raped her into one. Rascoe told Politico
Speaker 8: and CNN that she and Plattner had been seeing each
Speaker 8: other on and off for about two years, and then
Speaker 8: one night in twenty twenty one, Platner entered her home
Speaker 8: quote unquote heavily intoxicated, despite Rassico explicitly telling him not
Speaker 8: to come over. Once inside, Platner forced himself on her
Speaker 8: while she resisted and repeatedly told him to stop, and
Speaker 8: then he raped her. Rascoe told Politico that Platta did
Speaker 8: not remember what he did the next morning, but shortly
Speaker 8: thereafter she caught off contact with him after telling him
Speaker 8: what happened that night was not consensual.
Speaker 2: Yep, I guess this is what it took. Unfortunately, and like,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry this lady had to come forward and say this. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but you know, it does look like this has done
Speaker 2: the job finally of ending this guy's career. I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess we'll see anything could happen still, but I
Speaker 2: don't know what else to say.
Speaker 8: Her specific allegation is heavily corroborated in the reporting. Politico
Speaker 8: interviewed the woman's next boyfriend, who in twenty twenty three
Speaker 8: she told him about what happened with Platner, and also
Speaker 8: reviewed emails to a therapist discussing the sexual assault. Politico
Speaker 8: published some private Facebook messages between Rascoe and a friend
Speaker 8: of hers, whom she warned against getting involved with Platner.
Speaker 8: And that was years before he ran for office. I'll
Speaker 8: read some of those texts here.
Speaker 6: Quote.
Speaker 8: He can be charming and funny, and he's a decently
Speaker 8: intelligent person. He's not all bad, but I ended up
Speaker 8: in a bad situation with him, and I will just
Speaker 8: very politely call him consensually careless at times. She followed
Speaker 8: up by writing, when drunk plus PTSD, he lies also
Speaker 8: doesn't listen to you when drunk, unquote.
Speaker 2: And it's still remarkable, honestly, how much slack she was
Speaker 2: trying to cut him in that message, like unnecessarily empathetic
Speaker 2: way of expressing that to someone else about a person
Speaker 2: who had done that to you. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 2: that's what struck me about that.
Speaker 8: One of the most devastating parts of this is that
Speaker 8: Rasico told Politico that she previously withheld this accusation because
Speaker 8: she agrees with Plattner's political platform.
Speaker 9: Quote.
Speaker 8: One of the reasons I didn't come forward sooner was
Speaker 8: the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his
Speaker 8: politics but not supporting him as a person. I just
Speaker 8: want the truth out there. I just want people to
Speaker 8: have a whole scope of who he is as a person.
Speaker 6: Unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: After Resco made this allegation, which is Platner's first public
Speaker 8: allegation of rape or sexual assault, Lindsay Feifeld, the Republican
Speaker 8: operative who was at the center of the New York
Speaker 8: Times report on Platner last month, told The Washington Post
Speaker 8: that Platinner sneakily removed condoms during sex Jesus, which is
Speaker 8: also a form of sexual assault.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: In a video released on Monday, Platner denied the allegations
Speaker 8: and said quote, we are taking time to reflect on
Speaker 8: the best path forward. Following the allegation, Platner lost high
Speaker 8: profile endorsements many of his volunteers, and support from community organizations.
Speaker 8: The thirty thousand member actives organization Made People's Alliance, whom
Speaker 8: Platner was a member of, withdrew their endorsement and told
Speaker 8: him to step down. The Democrat nominee for governor had
Speaker 8: a Pinigree, who Platners supported as a rank choice candidate,
Speaker 8: released a statement calling for him to drop out of
Speaker 8: the race. Quote for Maine, for the future of control
Speaker 8: of the US Senate, and because no party should stand
Speaker 8: behind a candidate facing allegations of assault, grand Platner should
Speaker 8: exit the race immediately. Democrats need a nominee who can
Speaker 8: beat Susan Collins in November. Grand Platner is no longer
Speaker 8: that candidate. Grand Platner tapped into something real voters hungry
Speaker 8: for change, showed up with real passion and energy. That
Speaker 8: energy doesn't have to go away. It needs a new
Speaker 8: candidate to carry it forward. That last little section by
Speaker 8: Hannah is part of what I was trying to express
Speaker 8: in my recent peace outlining the campaign's platform and on
Speaker 8: the ground strategy, and I think looking back at his campaign,
Speaker 8: it really is worth trying to understand why it worked
Speaker 8: as well as it did up to this point. Up
Speaker 8: to this allegation, this election has highlighted that there can
Speaker 8: be a considerable gap in the way certain candidates are
Speaker 8: talked about online and how they are viewed by the
Speaker 8: local organizations or the local electorate. Now, at least the
Speaker 8: organizations are breaking with Platner. We don't have a great
Speaker 8: idea yet of how voters see him post these allegations,
Speaker 8: but there was a series of focus groups that The
Speaker 8: Bulwark ran in June with a group of main women
Speaker 8: who supported Platner but said that they would draw the
Speaker 8: line at an allegation of sexual assault. So my last
Speaker 8: episode was focusing on trying to explain how he won
Speaker 8: the primary and how his relationships with unions and local
Speaker 8: activistcripts contributed to that campaign success. And there is a
Speaker 8: reason that I waited until after the primary to discuss
Speaker 8: that platform in detail. And we had done some piecemeal
Speaker 8: reporting on some of his other scandals, but the information
Speaker 8: circulated on Blue Sky right Now about Daniel Morov, who
Speaker 8: was mentioned in the piece was not as publicly accessible
Speaker 8: when that episode was written, and I think a piece
Speaker 8: fully evaluating or relitigating all the personal issues with Platner
Speaker 8: or some of his staff would have needed to be
Speaker 8: a separate episode which is why that piece starts off
Speaker 8: with mentioning all of the main scandals before narrowing its
Speaker 8: focus on why he won the nomination and focusing on
Speaker 8: why he won the nomination so handily, like over fifty
Speaker 8: points against a Democrat establishing candidate. I think it's really
Speaker 8: important to understand what's happening in American politics right now.
Speaker 8: Right Yeah, Platner got the most votes in state primary history.
Speaker 8: He did eighty three town halls, a master over fifteen
Speaker 8: thousand volunteers, and a semiotic analysis of Platner as a
Speaker 8: person doesn't tell us how his campaign attracted such historic
Speaker 8: support in Maine. Right, politics isn't just about vibes and
Speaker 8: symbols or even individual character, but rather structural forces, And
Speaker 8: there is a distinctness at the root of politics between
Speaker 8: symbols and like the real forces of society. Those forces
Speaker 8: can be esthetically flexible and adapt a lot of different symbols.
Speaker 8: For every grand Platner right a bad guy who represented
Speaker 8: good politics in Maine, there are many more people who
Speaker 8: represent very bad politics who dress themselves up in a
Speaker 8: spotless like moral symbology.
Speaker 6: Look at right now.
Speaker 8: There's a lot of Democratic like party figures who are
Speaker 8: taking a lap people who have supported Andrew Cuomo and
Speaker 8: the Clintons who are saying, like, aha, I told you so,
Speaker 8: who couldn't have seen this coming? And like that that's
Speaker 8: grossed on its face because of the types of behavior
Speaker 8: they are very clearly okay with excusing to put forward
Speaker 8: their candidates. But also I think this this this reaction
Speaker 8: of like, who couldn't see this coming? Right, there's all
Speaker 8: these red flags. This also like fails to like understand
Speaker 8: how we got to this point, Like Platter wasn't chosen
Speaker 8: to be the nominee by online leftists, but rather the
Speaker 8: people have made But there are contributing factors that led
Speaker 8: us to a very very precarious situation, including the lack
Speaker 8: of serious vetting by some of the consultants working on
Speaker 8: this campaign, oh as well as Chuck Schumer is clearing
Speaker 8: the field of other Democratic candidates, which helped create this
Speaker 8: effectively one on one Mills v. Platinir matchup, while other
Speaker 8: qualified candidates were pushed into the governor's race. And now
Speaker 8: some of those people might be going after the Senate
Speaker 8: nomination following the assumed dropout of Platner.
Speaker 6: In these next few days.
Speaker 2: We do have to wonder and by the time people
Speaker 2: listen to this, there's a good chance. I guess this
Speaker 2: won't matter. But like, what if he decides to just
Speaker 2: fuck the party right? Like what if they don't sort
Speaker 2: all this out? It's not an impossible situation from where
Speaker 2: we're sitting right now. I don't think it's the likeliest,
Speaker 2: but it's not impossible. From where we are right now.
Speaker 8: It's not impossible, and that it is an interesting kind
Speaker 8: of thing to think about. Yeah, consultants like Morse Cats
Speaker 8: are urging him to drop out, and there is a
Speaker 8: lot of reports coming out that are suggesting that he will.
Speaker 8: And to this point, a Platner has been a very
Speaker 8: effective conveyor of a working class centric platform, and his
Speaker 8: resilience as a candidate through his other well publicized personal issues,
Speaker 8: have proven a real hunger for a new kind of politics.
Speaker 8: But by making himself the avatar of that movement in Maine,
Speaker 8: he has also severely compromised the movement. There's a lot
Speaker 8: of people who supported his campaign despite his past, based
Speaker 8: on this idea that those past experiences led him to
Speaker 8: this working class politics. His campaign was predicated on that
Speaker 8: he was not the same person who made those awful
Speaker 8: Reddit posts a decade ago, but the details in the
Speaker 8: recency of this right allegation suggests that is not really
Speaker 8: the case. This allegation affirms a larger pattern of behavior
Speaker 8: which is itself disqualifying and illuminates false and misleading statements
Speaker 8: Platner has made to supporters, which further undermined his integrity, reliability,
Speaker 8: and the trust necessary for an electorate, for unions and
Speaker 8: community organizations to put forward a candidate with faith that
Speaker 8: he will follow through on the working class platform that
Speaker 8: he adopted. This redemption story that the campaign ran with
Speaker 8: attracted a lot of supporters, supporters who Platum are assured
Speaker 8: that no new damaging allegations would be coming out against him.
Speaker 8: Then this not only betrays the trust of those supporters
Speaker 8: and its volunteers, but it also puts the viability of
Speaker 8: their shared working class politics at risk based on their
Speaker 8: association with him and especially this new accusation of rape.
Speaker 9: I think there's two things that are sort of important
Speaker 9: to keep in mind when thinking about this. One is
Speaker 9: that it's quite common for someone who is a rapist
Speaker 9: to also be extremely charismatic, to be a good communicator,
Speaker 9: to be very skilled at manipulating social situations, and that
Speaker 9: none of the things that they can be good at
Speaker 9: like make it okay for them to be a rapist.
Speaker 9: But also that's how a lot of the people who
Speaker 9: are able to do these kinds of things are able
Speaker 9: to maintain themselves and are able to survive. That's how
Speaker 9: a lot of politicians you get into this place are
Speaker 9: able to just you know, survived by the fact that
Speaker 9: they have credible rate allegations, Like we should mention, you know,
Speaker 9: for example, that there are significant credible rate allegations against
Speaker 9: the President of the United States, a thing that has
Speaker 9: not stopped him from being elected twice.
Speaker 2: A conviction not just deleegation, it's a conviction found.
Speaker 8: Liable in civil court.
Speaker 9: Yeah, multiple allegations, right, like you know, and then I
Speaker 9: think the second issue here, right, and this is something
Speaker 9: you were mentioning when you're talking about like the problem
Speaker 9: with him making himself the avatar of this sort of
Speaker 9: like movement of structural forces is that this is just
Speaker 9: to some extent, one of the risks and one of
Speaker 9: the challenges you face when you're attempting to run a
Speaker 9: working class movement that is centered around a charismatic figure.
Speaker 9: Because there is always just a decent chance that like
Speaker 9: they've done something horrible like this is a problem with
Speaker 9: just like the structure of electoral democracy, right, Yeah, this
Speaker 9: is a structural problem with the way that electoral democracy
Speaker 9: is about selecting your rulers and the fact that people
Speaker 9: who want to become rulers also just have a higher
Speaker 9: chance of being able to get away with shit like this,
Speaker 9: and that's something that you have to manage to make
Speaker 9: sure that, like your movements are not just one guy
Speaker 9: who can fuck the entire thing over by being a
Speaker 9: piece of shit.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and yeah, Rasco specifically talking about how she hesitated
Speaker 8: to come forward because she agrees with this, with this politics,
Speaker 8: with this movement, I mean, is completely devastating, and that
Speaker 8: this reminds me of you know, the allegations, right, Like
Speaker 8: sexual assault is a problem across everything from you know,
Speaker 8: like non hierarchical anarchist organizing to the labor movement to
Speaker 8: electoral campaigns. Not every rapist is going to have a
Speaker 8: Nazi tattoo. Bad politics now is going to have is
Speaker 8: going to have bad politics, right, and like re looking
Speaker 8: at the sort of many red flags this has I
Speaker 8: think a lot of people saw that like something like
Speaker 8: this is a possibility, but a possibility is not an inevitability. Yeah,
Speaker 8: And for a lot of people, especially in Maine, right,
Speaker 8: the political platform and the community ties that Platner established
Speaker 8: outweighed the many red flags of Platner as a person.
Speaker 8: He kind of pushed that to of a very a
Speaker 8: very far limit, like farther than I've seen in a
Speaker 8: lot of electoral campaigns of how far he was able
Speaker 8: to maintain support. Yeah, rather than that illustrating something uniquely
Speaker 8: special about Platner as a person, that shows the depth
Speaker 8: of the desire to unseat who's in Collins and the
Speaker 8: lack of trust in the democratic establishment. Now, this rape
Speaker 8: allegation is obviously completely discrediting by itself, and also because
Speaker 8: of how it clearly illuminates this pattern of lying and dishonesty.
Speaker 8: I think that that compounds a lot of the issues
Speaker 8: that people have been talking about with Platner for a
Speaker 8: long time. And you know, like even something like the tattoo, right,
Speaker 8: even if he did not know what the tattoo was
Speaker 8: when he got it.
Speaker 2: Which I never believed, like, and we said that when
Speaker 2: at the time that that's that was never a credible story, right.
Speaker 8: Fellow Marines in his group who also got the tattoo,
Speaker 8: Where any of you by Zeto, They said they didn't
Speaker 8: know what it was.
Speaker 2: That's not what I'm talking about. He stated that he
Speaker 2: had not realized prior to it coming out that it
Speaker 2: is Nazi, after he had said that he loved the
Speaker 2: movie Come and See, which that image is repeatedly. That
Speaker 2: was when I was like, well, he's a liar, right, yes,
Speaker 2: we said, we talked about this on air, by the way, Yeah,
Speaker 2: just to be clear.
Speaker 8: Yes, and debating whether or not he is a Nazi
Speaker 8: overlooks the other very clear issues exemplified by the tattoo,
Speaker 8: you know, recklessness, poor judgment. And then considering these new allegations,
Speaker 8: you know, Platner's dishonesty right, based on the conflicting reports
Speaker 8: of when he learned of the tattoos Nazi associations, and
Speaker 8: I think that bolster's the fact that he has a
Speaker 8: pattern of lying and especially like lying to get into
Speaker 8: power multiple times these past few months, Platner has reassured senators, supporters,
Speaker 8: and volunteers that no new allegations would be coming out
Speaker 8: against him, even while he was aware that Jenny Rascoe
Speaker 8: was speaking without lets like The New York Times, Platner
Speaker 8: had until July thirteenth to drop out of the race
Speaker 8: to be removed from the ballot, and the party has
Speaker 8: until July twenty seventh to select a new candidate to
Speaker 8: appear on the November ballot. There's a lot of conflicting
Speaker 8: reporting on when exactly Plattner is going to drop out
Speaker 8: and why he has not yet, And I might do
Speaker 8: an update on this based on what will change in
Speaker 8: the next few hours the next day, but as of
Speaker 8: right now, there is seemingly a conflict or kind of
Speaker 8: like a power struggle between his campaign and the Democratic
Speaker 8: Party on deciding the transparency of the process to select
Speaker 8: the next candidate. There's been a few people from the
Speaker 8: governor's race, as I mentioned, who's thrown their hat in
Speaker 8: the ring. Troy Jackson has file paperwork. He was the
Speaker 8: only DSA endorsed candidate in the main governor's race, alsodorsed
Speaker 8: by Sanders. Doctor Nurov shaw a kind of more like
Speaker 8: moderate progressive, announced his intention and as part of his
Speaker 8: announcement he mentioned opposition to Israel. He's kind of trying
Speaker 8: to move in the direction of Platinir's politics. Even though
Speaker 8: traditionally he has been more of a moderate liberal. We'll
Speaker 8: find out in the next few days if the platform
Speaker 8: and campaign style that was so successful can transfer to
Speaker 8: someone else, because I think this campaign has provided a
Speaker 8: very effective blueprint of in person engagement, town halls, leaning
Speaker 8: on local organizing connections, and having those connections in organized
Speaker 8: labor helped determine a platform. A platform that has stuff
Speaker 8: like Medicare for all, tax rich, no money for Israel,
Speaker 8: Supreme Court reform, destroying citizens United, but also stuff like
Speaker 8: investing in manufacturing public utilities, building clean energy, and strengthening
Speaker 8: labor organizing laws. Yeah, quick update here. A few hours
Speaker 8: after recording, Platna released a lengthy eleven minute video maintaining
Speaker 8: these allegations are false and attacking the corporate media system
Speaker 8: and the quote unquote political establishment. Towards the end of
Speaker 8: the video, he announced the campaign is suspending operations and
Speaker 8: said he will withdraw from the race, though he has
Speaker 8: not yet officially dropped out of the race, and reports
Speaker 8: indicate he will not do so until Monday, which is
Speaker 8: the deadline. Also on Wednesday night, we got a better
Speaker 8: look at what the replacement process is going to be
Speaker 8: and instead of an open caucus, basically a mini primary.
Speaker 8: The main state Democrats have decided to go forward with
Speaker 8: a six hundred person nominating convention, with five hundred delegates
Speaker 8: elected proportionally by county committees and one hundred delegates from
Speaker 8: the state committee. This is not the most open or
Speaker 8: democratic option the state party could have gone forward with,
Speaker 8: and could cause some real blowback from voters who will
Speaker 8: be unable to participate in choosing the nominee.
Speaker 2: Well, we should talk about I guess the right and
Speaker 2: Grim of it all. Yeah, sure so, Ryan Grim with
Speaker 2: drop Side News published earlier and breaking points as well. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and breaking points earlier today this Wednesday the eighth, when
Speaker 2: we recorded that essentially the initial reports had not mentioned
Speaker 2: a couple of what they felt were relevant facts, one
Speaker 2: of which was that before texting him not to come over,
Speaker 2: she had texted about needing a massage on her glutes,
Speaker 2: which I don't see as super relevant.
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 2: I think the argument being made, particularly by dropside, is that, like, well,
Speaker 2: this was still a relevant detail that was not included.
Speaker 2: The other thing that wasn't that report that is more
Speaker 2: relevant is the fact that Politico had details about this
Speaker 2: assault way before they released them right like, way before
Speaker 2: it actually came out that may have been relevant to voters.
Speaker 2: They do think that's a fair critique. I don't agree
Speaker 2: with the relevance at all of her mentioning that she
Speaker 2: needed a massage. That's not an invitation to sex that
Speaker 2: doesn't like. I see that as entirely unrelevant, And I
Speaker 2: think that this is within a tradition of that particular
Speaker 2: journalist defending people that he likes from allegations that are credible.
Speaker 2: I don't particularly respect this decision, but it's relevant.
Speaker 8: It's a pretty gross move to take this moment and
Speaker 8: then try to inject any amount of doubt into what's
Speaker 8: happened and peddling this politely i'll say soft rape apologia.
Speaker 8: That's it's disgusting. There's this a very similar thing coming
Speaker 8: from the Young Turks, from an Kasparian and Chenk. I'm
Speaker 8: happy that the majority report people turned on Graham like
Speaker 8: immediately apologized for defending him throughout these these past these
Speaker 8: past few months and said that they were wrong about
Speaker 8: him as a person. Yeah, I'm glad they did that.
Speaker 8: But what Grimm did hear and what the Young Turks
Speaker 8: are doing is just completely despicable. Yeah, I think it's
Speaker 8: I think it's gross repulsive.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's any reason to bring that specific
Speaker 2: detail up other than to try to inject out like you.
Speaker 9: Said, Yeah, I want to say just one thing about
Speaker 9: the way that consent works, which is that if you
Speaker 9: withdraw consent at any time, no matter what happened before,
Speaker 9: it is withdrawn. That's that's how it works. And if
Speaker 9: anyone like, regardless of what happened until that moment, you
Speaker 9: have to continue consenting. And if you stop consenting, the
Speaker 9: moment you stop consenting like you have stopped consenting, it
Speaker 9: becomes assault. I just I want to be extremely clear
Speaker 9: about that because people are trying to muddy the waters
Speaker 9: about this, and this is just an important thing for
Speaker 9: people to understand about the way that consent works.
Speaker 2: I think that would be even more relevant if she'd
Speaker 2: said come over and then said don't later. But like
Speaker 2: what she said was not even starting the Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: it's not even that, but but I I just want
Speaker 2: to be clear about it. According to Grim's report, she
Speaker 2: did not even ask him for a massage.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: His entire motivation to do this is so is so
Speaker 8: suspib Like, hey, he's trying to say this is about
Speaker 8: like journalistic in tegrity and how Politico and CNN we're
Speaker 8: dishonest with yeah, Rasaco's you know claims, and like that's
Speaker 8: that's it's completely absurd. I think anyone with half a
Speaker 8: brainon cell can see what he's trying to do here,
Speaker 8: and it's and it's gross.
Speaker 2: I simply don't agree with that.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And I think I think the other thing that's
Speaker 9: kind of very bleak about this is that like there
Speaker 9: is more proof here than yeah, most people who are
Speaker 9: sexually assaulted are going to have right, and this is
Speaker 9: still the reaction that that it's getting from like fortunately
Speaker 9: not a very large number of people, but still people
Speaker 9: who have large.
Speaker 8: But still pretty influential yeah people.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, And and that's you know, like this is
Speaker 9: part of the reason why, you know, when this shit
Speaker 9: happens everywhere from like five person anarchist collectives up to
Speaker 9: like the DSA, up to like the Democratic Party up
Speaker 9: to the like the president of the fucking United States,
Speaker 9: why this ship plays out like this because this is
Speaker 9: just a structural factor of politics writ large, is that
Speaker 9: you are going to have to deal with people who
Speaker 9: fucking do this and their fight to get away with
Speaker 9: it and people who try to run cover for them.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think this is part of why I have an
Speaker 2: issue sometimes with folks when there's like a new allegation
Speaker 2: against like a conservative politician or like a right wing
Speaker 2: church figure or something, and they're like, it's always these guys,
Speaker 2: and it's like, no, it's every Like pedophilia is all
Speaker 2: over the place. It exists in left wing organizations and
Speaker 2: right wing organizations. And when you start being like, well,
Speaker 2: this is a thing the bad people do, not a
Speaker 2: thing the good people do, then you've created a place
Speaker 2: in which the people who do that have cover, Like
Speaker 2: that's that's what you're doing when you're like, now, bad
Speaker 2: people do that, so no one that I agree with
Speaker 2: would Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like sexual violence and getting away with it, that's
Speaker 9: a structural force, right, Like that, that's something that is
Speaker 9: brought about by like large scale structural forces that, regardless
Speaker 9: of what people stated, politics are transcendose divides and people
Speaker 9: do it. Anyways, Well, let's go on a break and
Speaker 9: then we will return with more news because more things
Speaker 9: happened this past week.
Speaker 2: All Right, we're back, and you know, there's simply nothing
Speaker 2: to say, but it's time for a little musical interlude.
Speaker 2: Locky jazz rocky jazz bo.
Speaker 8: Sorry, lock.
Speaker 2: Locky jazz bo rocky jazz bo. Ah, Oh god, that
Speaker 2: just hits every single time. It's been too long. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it really has, it really has, it really has. The
Speaker 2: time makes fools of us all mia. What's happening in
Speaker 2: tariffs today?
Speaker 9: The tariffs have been in committee, which is why the
Speaker 9: tariff song has been It has been in the box.
Speaker 9: But they are no longer in committee. So long long ago,
Speaker 9: in a galaxy far far away, which is to say, February,
Speaker 9: in a slightly different department, we talked about the possibility
Speaker 9: of Trump replacing the tariffs that the Supreme Court struck
Speaker 9: down by using a series of different sets of tariffs.
Speaker 9: One of the sets that we mentioned are tariffs imposed
Speaker 9: by using Section three ZHO one of the US Trade
Speaker 9: Act of nineteen seventy four. This allows the administration to
Speaker 9: carry out an investigation into unfair trade practices and that
Speaker 9: imposed teriffs after the investigation is concluded. Now, the administration
Speaker 9: basically set one of these investigations in motion, effectively the
Speaker 9: moments the ruling was decided in February and on July second,
Speaker 9: they returned with their conclusions, which Lo and Behold found
Speaker 9: that fifty four countries were failing to take appropriate measures
Speaker 9: to quote impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the
Speaker 9: importation of goods produced with forced labor. Now these countries,
Speaker 9: on top of Russia and China, include traditional US allies
Speaker 9: like Israel, Japan, South Korea, and India.
Speaker 8: I think you mean the Islamic Republic of Japan. I'm sorry,
Speaker 8: I had to. I just I could not let that
Speaker 8: one escape me. I missed that reference. Did someone trum
Speaker 8: Trump today said the words the Islamic Republic of Japan?
Speaker 8: Whether I think he did not mean to say the
Speaker 8: Islamic Republic of Japan.
Speaker 2: What country has taken fewer Islamic refugees than Japan? Like,
Speaker 2: I don't even understand down that could be like a
Speaker 2: conservative bugbear?
Speaker 8: He says, the Islamic Republic of Japan fired missiles at
Speaker 8: US shifts.
Speaker 2: Okay, Okay, he just misspoke. He misspoke. He's trying to
Speaker 2: say Ron It's just a normal senior moment from our
Speaker 2: president as he launches or continues a series of illegal
Speaker 2: attacks on foreign countries. Just a normal senior moment from
Speaker 2: our president. We're good, We're good, everything's fine us. Incredible
Speaker 2: stuff happening here that yeah, or that it cannot produce. Actually, admittedly,
Speaker 2: this is not the first time in our lifetimes that
Speaker 2: our president has not been able to correctly name the
Speaker 2: country which he is bombing. There isn't sure, isn't. It's
Speaker 2: not even the second president that this has happened to
Speaker 2: in our lifetime. No, I'm not certain.
Speaker 6: It's the third.
Speaker 9: Like three out of four. I'm pretty sure Bill Clinton.
Speaker 4: Could do it, So that's like three out of five.
Speaker 2: But I'm not one hundred percent. He's a country boy.
Speaker 2: He probably fucked it up once. Now, we didn't bomb
Speaker 2: as many people when he was president, but we didn't
Speaker 2: bomb no people.
Speaker 9: That's probably true. Good God, good god.
Speaker 8: Okay, So sorry, sorry, my apologies, it's okay, it's okay,
Speaker 8: returning for this this bleak interlude.
Speaker 9: So again, countries that the US are saying like are
Speaker 9: not enforcing this prohibition on the importation of goods abuses
Speaker 9: for slabor. So these again include a bunch of traditional
Speaker 9: US allies like Japan, South Korea, India, and Israel, which
Speaker 9: is sort of interesting. It also says quote the following
Speaker 9: six economies have failed to effectively enforce a prohibition on
Speaker 9: the importation of goods produced with forced labor. Canada, Ecuador,
Speaker 9: the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico, and Pakistan. So on this
Speaker 9: list that is the entire EU, Canada, Mexico, China, India, Japan,
Speaker 9: South Korea, Brazil, and Turkey, which is a list of
Speaker 9: the world's largest economies. And then also there's a few
Speaker 9: kind of oddball ones like poor Sri Lanka, which they
Speaker 9: really have something out for Sri Lanka. I don't know
Speaker 9: exactly why it keeps showing up on these terif lists,
Speaker 9: despite the fact that these poor people have been just
Speaker 9: suffering unbelievably devastating economic consequences for a very long time.
Speaker 9: Now I am in the unfortunate position of having to
Speaker 9: agree with California's Attorney General, a thing I am not
Speaker 9: typically doing. But he did in fact say something which
Speaker 9: is true that this list of countries is in fact
Speaker 9: ninety nine percent of all US imports.
Speaker 6: So okay. Now we can.
Speaker 9: Obviously note here the hypocrisy of imposing teriffs for forced
Speaker 9: labor in a country whose constitution specifically allows forced labor
Speaker 9: for prisoners, and note that you know, forced labor of
Speaker 9: various kinds from a dentuer service you to debt, p
Speaker 9: andage to various kinds of slavery have been key elements
Speaker 9: to the development of capitalism from the beginning. But this
Speaker 9: is not about forced labor at all, as I think
Speaker 9: anyone who is even remotely paying attention will understand. So
Speaker 9: the tariff rates are nominally tied to setting up systems
Speaker 9: that ensure that goods produced with forced labor aren't being
Speaker 9: sent to the US. With countries who are like out
Speaker 9: of compliance with the US system would do that getting
Speaker 9: a twelve percent twelve point five percent tariff rate, and
Speaker 9: countries who are complying facing ten percent teriff rates. That's
Speaker 9: at least the theory. The practice is not that, as
Speaker 9: the diplomat notes quote. The proposed teriff rates, however, cannot
Speaker 9: be explained by human rights concerns alone. Thailand and Vietnam
Speaker 9: at the Philippines have not established import prohibition systems meeting
Speaker 9: US standards and face a twelve point five percent tariff.
Speaker 9: Malaysia and Cambodia likewise lacks US systems, but phase a
Speaker 9: tariff for fully ten percent. So this is just a
Speaker 9: fairly naked attempt to reimpose the set of tariffs that
Speaker 9: Trump initially imposed in February in the wake of that
Speaker 9: Supreme Court decision. We talked about those in a different episode.
Speaker 9: They are up for a July twenty fourth deadline, so
Speaker 9: it's pretty clear that this report is time to come
Speaker 9: out in a way to allows these tariffs, which are
Speaker 9: very very similar to the ones that were already in place,
Speaker 9: to go into effect. Now, it's worth noting that those
Speaker 9: tariffs had some bad court rulings. They're probably not going
Speaker 9: to last long enough to get like a good Supreme
Speaker 9: Court ruling on it before they come out of effect.
Speaker 9: So those ones probably won't be lifted by a court
Speaker 9: order just because there's not enough time. But there's a
Speaker 9: good chance that these terroriffs are also not going to survive.
Speaker 9: But the California Attorney General is part of a very
Speaker 9: large group of state attorney generals which features the attorney
Speaker 9: general of almost every state with a Democratic governor, which
Speaker 9: I'm not going to read the list out because it's
Speaker 9: a bunch of them, but they are once again suing
Speaker 9: the administration over these tariffs. So here here we are
Speaker 9: again riding the tariff roller coaster, and yeah, we're back
Speaker 9: with the Trump administration trying to impose ten to twelve
Speaker 9: percent tariffs on most of the economies in the.
Speaker 8: World, speaking of the Islamic Republic of not Japan. No boy,
Speaker 8: here is James Stout with a special segment.
Speaker 7: So what I want to talk about today is this
Speaker 7: lawsuit recently filed by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund,
Speaker 7: represented by Public Citizen, which has some incredible accusations about
Speaker 7: what the United States government has done to people who
Speaker 7: are Iranian nationals seeking asylum in the United States. Specifically,
Speaker 7: they're alleging that the US government has just closed confidential
Speaker 7: information on Iranian national seeking asylum in the USA to
Speaker 7: the Iranian government. I am going to reference a complaint
Speaker 7: and quote from a length quite a bit here, because
Speaker 7: these accusations are crazy. Not crazy in that I think
Speaker 7: they're false. I don't think they're false, crazy in that
Speaker 7: they are abhorrent and disgusting, especially when you consider that
Speaker 7: the United States government has consistently talked about the rights
Speaker 7: of people in Iran while all the time violating those
Speaker 7: same rights. So let's quote from that complaint.
Speaker 6: Quote.
Speaker 7: Many of the asylum seekers are pro democracy protesters, members
Speaker 7: of religious minorities such as evangelical Christians or members of
Speaker 7: the LGBTQ community, who seek refuge in the United States
Speaker 7: because of grave dangers they face in Iran. It's closing
Speaker 7: their confidential information to the Iranian government, violates the asylum seekers'
Speaker 7: confidentiality rights, endangers their family members and acquaintances who may
Speaker 7: still be residing in Iran, and puts those who are
Speaker 7: subject to removal to Iran directly or through chain refilement
Speaker 7: via third countries at risk persecution, torture, and death following
Speaker 7: their ribal in it run. If you're not familiar with
Speaker 7: Jane Refileman, it's sending someone to a third country that
Speaker 7: will then send them to the place that the USA
Speaker 7: can't or won't send them due to concerns of persecution
Speaker 7: or torture. So it's an end ran around international law.
Speaker 7: It's barred by the ninety fifty one Refugee Convention and
Speaker 7: the UN Convention against Torture, but the US has been
Speaker 7: doing it a lot under the Trump two point zero regime.
Speaker 7: In the course of my work, I have met Iranians
Speaker 7: from all of the groups described in this complaint, as
Speaker 7: well as those who are ethnic minority is in country
Speaker 7: in addition to being parts of the groups described in
Speaker 7: this complaint. Can think of a group of young Iranian women,
Speaker 7: I men the Dadian Gap who I spent a good
Speaker 7: deal of time talking to you really lovely folks of
Speaker 7: man with them as well.
Speaker 6: Actually I think about it.
Speaker 7: You can hear them in my Darien series. I met
Speaker 7: some Iranian Christians in outdoor attention, a number of them. Remember,
Speaker 7: one of them was having a heart problem, so it's
Speaker 7: been a deal of time trying to help her and
Speaker 7: get her medical attention. As I've covered before in this show,
Speaker 7: throughout the USA, when Israel's bombing campaign on Iran, Iran
Speaker 7: has kept killing its own citizens. In the last couple
Speaker 7: of weeks, it has engaged some of the armed Kurdish
Speaker 7: groups and there have been casualties on both sides. The
Speaker 7: process of the US government sharing these records with Iran.
Speaker 7: The suit alleges began in March of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 7: It seems to have continued when the US was bombing
Speaker 7: Iran that year. It seems to have continued while Iran
Speaker 7: massacred thousands of its own citizens in January of this year,
Speaker 7: and it continued throughout the United States and Israel's current
Speaker 7: war on Iran. Indeed, a flight left for Iran on
Speaker 7: January the twenty fifth of this year, as the dead
Speaker 7: from the pro democracy protests were only recently in their graves.
Speaker 7: Iran doesn't have an embassy in the US, and these
Speaker 7: affairs go through the Iranian Interest Section of the Pakistani embassy.
Speaker 7: It was to that Iranian Interest section that the State
Speaker 7: Department reached out in March of twenty twenty five. According
Speaker 7: to the lawsuit quote, the March twenty twenty five meeting
Speaker 7: produced an agreement between the United States government and the
Speaker 7: Iranian government, under which ICE and Iranian government officials have
Speaker 7: begun holding monthly meetings to share the immigration files and
Speaker 7: information of Iranians in ICE custody. In addition, since the
Speaker 7: March twenty twenty five meeting, US government officials have periodically
Speaker 7: mailed or hand delivered immigration files of Iranians in ICE custody,
Speaker 7: who the Iranian government then goes onto. Alleged that ICE
Speaker 7: has provided officials from the Iranian Interest Section with access
Speaker 7: to people that it has detained and worked with the
Speaker 7: Iranian government to pressure these people to waive their rights.
Speaker 7: This is going to be them signing quote unquote voluntary
Speaker 7: deportation paperwork where very clear is not voluntary when they're
Speaker 7: held against their will and pressure to do it. But
Speaker 7: that's what you'll hear it called quote. Many of the
Speaker 7: Iranian detainees did not consent to meet with the Iranian
Speaker 7: Intersection officials, but were required to do so by ice.
Speaker 7: According to Iranian detainees who met with an Iranian Intersection official,
Speaker 7: the official had knowledge of their immigration cases, including the
Speaker 7: details of their asylum applications. These nonconsensual meetings with the
Speaker 7: Interestsection officials solidify the detainee's belief that they have been
Speaker 7: identified to the very same repressive government that they had fled.
Speaker 7: The United States government allowed the Iranian government to select
Speaker 7: the Iranians deported to Iran. According to this complaint, some
Speaker 7: of those people were then interrogated by an intelligent section
Speaker 7: of the IRGC on their rival in Iran. Some of
Speaker 7: these people had detailed on their application as they must
Speaker 7: to make a good asylum application right, that they had
Speaker 7: participated in the twenty twenty two jan Azadi movement Woman
Speaker 7: Life Freedom. There's a Kurdish slogan of the Kurdish Freedom
Speaker 7: movement that was used by pro democracy protesters in Iran
Speaker 7: after the murder of Jinamini by Iraan police. This sparked
Speaker 7: a whole movement. I'm sure you could find a great
Speaker 7: deal of good writing on that movement. It was very
Speaker 7: well covered. I have met women who took part in
Speaker 7: that movement. As I said before, you can hear some
Speaker 7: of them in some of my podcasts. They tried with
Speaker 7: every fiber of their being to make it round better.
Speaker 7: They saw their friends die to try and make it
Speaker 7: round better, and then they fled because it was made
Speaker 7: very clear to them that the state was willing to
Speaker 7: fill the streets with blood before it changed. Now those
Speaker 7: people are obviously afraid of telling the truth on their
Speaker 7: asylum applications or even to their lawyers, especially while they're
Speaker 7: in detention, because they now know that that information could
Speaker 7: be delivered directly into the hands of the Iranian government.
Speaker 7: They may have sat in their applications. I was part
Speaker 7: of this movement because I'm opposed to the government, and
Speaker 7: now that information is being delivered to the government. They
Speaker 7: came here to experience some of the freedoms that their
Speaker 7: friends died for dead. They were hand delivered to the
Speaker 7: regime that they had fled from the US did not
Speaker 7: ask for any protections or guarantees for their safety. At
Speaker 7: the very same time, the USA was using the rights
Speaker 7: Iranian people as a pretext for its war in era.
Speaker 7: It did this as it was depriving people of those
Speaker 7: very same rights back here. This is disgusting. I will
Speaker 7: link to the complaint in the sourceage you'd like to
Speaker 7: read it yourself. I'm going to keep an eye on
Speaker 7: this one. Even amongst the horrors of the second Trump administration,
Speaker 7: this is just particularly apparent.
Speaker 8: We'll go on a break and then return for one
Speaker 8: more batch of news.
Speaker 2: We are back.
Speaker 8: Next up two shootings by ice, which have both occurred
Speaker 8: just this last week, exactly half a year after the
Speaker 8: shooting of Renee Good Robert.
Speaker 2: Video captured Wednesday morning in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania showed Ice attempting
Speaker 2: to arrest an undocumented immigrant from Mexico named Clemente Laura Hernandez.
Speaker 2: There's video of this incident. You can see like a
Speaker 2: black car with flashing lights, like an unmarked police car
Speaker 2: blocking like a white suv. Agents get out of the
Speaker 2: car and rush the suv and again they just kind
Speaker 2: of look like guys with guns in a moment, and
Speaker 2: one of them starts screaming that he's going to shatter
Speaker 2: the window and yelling at the driver. At that point,
Speaker 2: the driver pulls away in a panic. They hit the black,
Speaker 2: unmarked car that had been blocking them. They speed off,
Speaker 2: the fucking Ice points out there, going wrong way down
Speaker 2: a one way street, and they hit another uninvolved civilian
Speaker 2: vehicle and it was like, yeah, they were panicked because
Speaker 2: an unmarked car drove up and gunman ran out and
Speaker 2: started surrounding and screaming at them.
Speaker 6: It scared them.
Speaker 2: That's the kind of shit that happens in countries where
Speaker 2: the cartels are in charge of everything, if you pretend
Speaker 2: that like Ice is in any meaningful way different from
Speaker 2: a cartellary gang. As of us recording this, this person
Speaker 2: has not been taken into custody. I hope they stay
Speaker 2: that way. Also earlier this week in Houston, Texas, Lorenzo
Speaker 2: Salgado Arajo, who is fifty two years old, was driving
Speaker 2: in the East End when the same basic thing happened.
Speaker 2: Unmarked cars surround him, guys with guns get out. He
Speaker 2: gets really scared and he drives off and he gets shot.
Speaker 2: As he's driving away. ICE accused him of having weaponized
Speaker 2: the vehicle. He was taken to the hospital where he died.
Speaker 2: Salgado a Rajo had no criminal record, he had been
Speaker 2: in the country for more than thirty years. He was
Speaker 2: in a car with several people, including his brother. There's
Speaker 2: no evidence whatsoever of any kind of violence in his past.
Speaker 2: There's no evidence that he wanted to hurt anyone. There's
Speaker 2: no evidence that he was doing anything but being terrified
Speaker 2: by unmarked, armed men surrounding him. His son has come
Speaker 2: out and said that if he knew they were ICE,
Speaker 2: he certainly would have stopped and complied. He had no
Speaker 2: idea what was happening, which again seems very credible to me.
Speaker 2: There's already been a cavalcade of people coming out to
Speaker 2: demand an independent and impartial investigation into what happened, including
Speaker 2: US Representative Sylvia Garcia, who's a Democrat from Texas, and
Speaker 2: obviously his son and Alejandra Salinas, a Houston City council manager,
Speaker 2: also called for an immediate and partial investigation. I don't
Speaker 2: know what good I think that's going to do. Like, realistically,
Speaker 2: for one thing, no law enforcement entity could be trusted
Speaker 2: to conduct an independent and partial investigation of ice period,
Speaker 2: especially right now. For another, there's literally no way to
Speaker 2: guarantee that they will be held to account even if
Speaker 2: the evidence, and I think it suggests that they were
Speaker 2: acting entirely wrongly and murdered a man like I don't
Speaker 2: believe anything's going to happen to this guy at this point.
Speaker 2: So I guess I support the idea of an independent
Speaker 2: and impartial investigation. I just don't think that's going to
Speaker 2: get us anywhere yet.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, I think I think if we want
Speaker 9: an actual independence, like impartial investigation, it's going to have
Speaker 9: to happen after this. This administration regime is out of power,
Speaker 9: and that's the thing that can be done, right, But
Speaker 9: it's going to just take a bunch of time until
Speaker 9: these people don't have control of all of the state
Speaker 9: security services. And in the meantime, they're just going to
Speaker 9: keep doing the same shooting over and over again. There's
Speaker 9: been growing protests in Houston these past few days. This
Speaker 9: is some audio recorded Tuesday published by Reuters.
Speaker 10: People are here to work, Families are dying, people are dying,
Speaker 10: but are doing murdering innocent Mexican people.
Speaker 9: They come to work.
Speaker 4: They come here to work, So what if they don't
Speaker 4: got papers? So what they're welcome?
Speaker 10: Yeah, Trump did this to us. What happened to taking
Speaker 10: the murderers out? What happened to take in the rapist own?
Speaker 10: What happened to taking the drug dealers down? Not innocent people?
Speaker 10: That's not what you said, President Trump. You didn't say that.
Speaker 8: Since then, the protests have only grown. On Wednesday evening,
Speaker 8: hundreds of people marched in Magnolia Park on the street
Speaker 8: where Lorenzo Salgado O Rajo was shot by ice four
Speaker 8: our last segment, Let's talk about America two fifty. So
Speaker 8: this past weekend marked the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
Speaker 8: of the United States, and things went off without a hitch.
Speaker 8: I heard the Great American State Fair was lots of fun,
Speaker 8: that it was totally packed, that no parts of any
Speaker 8: stages on nearly killed dancers as they were setting up
Speaker 8: the event, That there was no severe weather events that
Speaker 8: disrupted it.
Speaker 2: I heard it was fun.
Speaker 8: And adding to the fun was President Trump, who spent
Speaker 8: much of the fourth of July weekend talking about the
Speaker 8: growing threat of communism and the need to pass the
Speaker 8: Save America Act. Following the Supreme Court's ruling in support
Speaker 8: of counting mail in ballots. In Trump's July fourth speech
Speaker 8: commemorating the historic occasion of America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday,
Speaker 8: the President said that to keep America great, we must
Speaker 8: pass the Save America Act, the troubled voter restriction bill
Speaker 8: that has failed to pass Congress. Quote, all voters must
Speaker 8: provide a little thing called proof of citizenship. There will
Speaker 8: be no mail in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment,
Speaker 8: or travel. And you won't have cheating on the elections anymore.
Speaker 6: It's very simple.
Speaker 8: Unquote. Speaker Johnson has indicated his plan to pass another
Speaker 8: version of the Save Act through reconciliation. The bill's repeatedly
Speaker 8: installed in the Senate, and that has bolstered a lot
Speaker 8: of Trump's frustrations these past few months. Now, following the
Speaker 8: Supreme Court ruling, it appears that Republicans will take another
Speaker 8: crack at it. But Trump also spent much of the
Speaker 8: America two fifty address railing against communism. Quote, America will
Speaker 8: never be a communist country. It's like a cancer. You
Speaker 8: got to cut it out, and you got to cut
Speaker 8: it out fast. The communist system is the opposite of
Speaker 8: the American system, and the communist system has never worked.
Speaker 8: Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world,
Speaker 8: only to have that menace rear its ugly head right
Speaker 8: back here in America. Unquote real, real nineteen fifties style
Speaker 8: reactions to seven social Democrats getting elected. But I think
Speaker 8: that the fact that how scared he is and people,
Speaker 8: including on the Democratic Party side, and you know, there's
Speaker 8: been a wave of articles from the Atlantic really scared
Speaker 8: of the more kind of social democratic, democratic socialist direction
Speaker 8: that the party's been going, really frightened. In fact, I think,
Speaker 8: like a few days ago, Trump even said the words
Speaker 8: as social democrat and said they're just communists. But the
Speaker 8: fact that Trump had to learn what social democrat is
Speaker 8: is a really interesting indicator of where we are at
Speaker 8: as a country.
Speaker 4: M H.
Speaker 8: On the eve of July fourth, Trump gave another speech
Speaker 8: at Mount Rushmore after speaking to the AI ghost of
Speaker 8: Roseveldt God. And during this Mount Rushmore speech, he spoke
Speaker 8: at length about how communism is a quote moral threat
Speaker 8: to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country,
Speaker 8: including World War One, World War two, Pearl Harbor or
Speaker 8: even nine to eleven.
Speaker 2: World War One is simply not a threat to our country.
Speaker 2: Not in any way, shape or form was our country
Speaker 2: threatened at any point in World War Onebviously, some Americans
Speaker 2: were killed as a result of Germany attacking shipping, but
Speaker 2: in no way were we in danger.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like, does she understand that Pearl Harvard was part
Speaker 9: of World War two?
Speaker 7: Like?
Speaker 2: Does he like get that he was just shooting buzzwords off?
Speaker 2: I think that's all that was.
Speaker 9: Yeah, incredible guide to control the largest nuclear weapons arsenal
Speaker 9: in human history.
Speaker 8: Trump also called communism the enemy of the Constitution, the
Speaker 8: enemy of July fourth, seventeen seventy six. Quote, on the
Speaker 8: eve of this two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of American heritage,
Speaker 8: we resolve and swear for all to hear that the
Speaker 8: citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly.
Speaker 8: President Trump also had this banger line, which is the
Speaker 8: only clip I actually want to play of this speech.
Speaker 5: Boy, you can be loyal to Carl Box, or you
Speaker 5: can be loyal to America. You can be a communist,
Speaker 5: or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.
Speaker 11: As for those who pedal Marxist lies about our heritage,
Speaker 11: tell our children that we live on stolen land, or
Speaker 11: that our heroes were oppressors.
Speaker 5: They're doing something much worse than slandering our past. They
Speaker 5: are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let
Speaker 5: that happen.
Speaker 8: You can be loyal to Karl Marx, You can be
Speaker 8: loyal to America. So true, So true, President Donald Trump.
Speaker 8: It's just really stunning thinking about this is how the
Speaker 8: President of the United States is spending the two hundred
Speaker 8: and fiftieth anniversary of the country that he thinks it
Speaker 8: is important to start bringing this stuff up. I just
Speaker 8: thought that was a little interesting tidbit that happened this weekend. Anyway,
Speaker 8: I think that is all we have for news this week.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, I guess it's been. It hasn't been a
Speaker 2: short news week, but you know, we don't always have
Speaker 2: to talk for an hour and twenty minutes about the
Speaker 2: shit that's happening. You now kind of know what's happening.
Speaker 8: No, this is just a fifty five to one hour
Speaker 8: and three minutes with James Segment said, yeah, a short
Speaker 8: news week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a short news week. All right, go go with
Speaker 2: christ my friends, we.
Speaker 8: Reported the news.
Speaker 6: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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