Speaker 1: Al 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
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about things
Speaker 3: falling apart and how to put them back together again.
Speaker 3: I'm your host, b A walg with me is Robert Evans.
Speaker 3: Woo woo. So we have spent a lot of time
Speaker 3: on this show talking about the rise of the far
Speaker 3: right and what that's looked like electorally, what that's looked
Speaker 3: like in the streets, and the sort of you know,
Speaker 3: deleterious effects that it has had on effectively everyone in
Speaker 3: the US. This is going to be a little bit
Speaker 3: of a different episode. We've talked about a lot of
Speaker 3: the responses to the far right, sort of you know,
Speaker 3: inter sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations. What
Speaker 3: we haven't really done is talked about what can be
Speaker 3: done electorally, and I do think that a significant portion
Speaker 3: of the far right can be defanged and eventually defeated
Speaker 3: through a series of things that are not particularly complicated.
Speaker 3: But the problem is that defeating the far right means
Speaker 3: going beyond simply trying to win every single election, which
Speaker 3: is the current sort of democratic strategy. Right If you
Speaker 3: want to actually defeat the far right, winning every election
Speaker 3: is not a viable strategy. We've seen this fail already
Speaker 3: with Hillary Clinton. We cannot rely on simply winning every
Speaker 3: election into the future. You have to go beyond mere
Speaker 3: electoral victory towards using your electoral victory to actually defeat
Speaker 3: the base of the far right. When the Republican Party
Speaker 3: held power for twelve years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 3: they did it by destroying the political base the Democratic Party.
Speaker 3: They shattered America's trade unions and rebuilt the economy to
Speaker 3: ens unions would no longer be able to provide the
Speaker 3: ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on. If
Speaker 3: we are going to defeat the far right, we need
Speaker 3: to wage the same kind of campaign against them now.
Speaker 3: Luckily for us, unlike Ronald Reagan, We do not need
Speaker 3: to completely rebuild the American economy to knock the legs
Speaker 3: of the far right out from under them. There is,
Speaker 3: in fact, a pretty minimal program that we can implement
Speaker 3: to defeat the far right that is very simple. It
Speaker 3: has three components. First, a crack down on MLMs that
Speaker 3: drives them effectively completely underground.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by which we mean multi level marketing. For these
Speaker 2: are period schemes, right, which are a major source of
Speaker 2: funding for the fire right. I mean this is where
Speaker 2: Trump comes out of, right, this is why he did
Speaker 2: that fake university like, this is a big part of
Speaker 2: his base. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're going to get more into that in a seconds.
Speaker 3: The second, very important one is a regulatory overhaul of
Speaker 3: how the FDA regulates supplements. Oh boy, which sounds like
Speaker 3: it yeah, extremely technical and nerdy thing, but supplements are
Speaker 3: another enormous cash spigot for the far right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where Alex Jones and Joe Rogan get
Speaker 2: their shit. Yeah, yep, yep.
Speaker 3: And the third is another kind of wonky change that
Speaker 3: will be extremely important, which is making sure to allow
Speaker 3: car companies to make direct sales to customers, thus undercutting
Speaker 3: the enormous and extremely politically powerful base of right wing
Speaker 3: American car dealership owners.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who donate more money to political causes than any
Speaker 2: other career field in this country.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And you may not believe us yet just from
Speaker 3: this sort of basic introduction, but these three simple reforms
Speaker 3: EML and regulation, regulation of dietary supplements, and the direct
Speaker 3: sales of cars will destroy so much of the financial
Speaker 3: and political base of the far right that they will
Speaker 3: at least temporarily and in the sort of mid range term,
Speaker 3: becomes significantly less of a threat than they are now.
Speaker 3: So we are going to start with MLMs. Yeah, as
Speaker 3: Robert has sort of alluded to, MLMs are a very
Speaker 3: very important political base for the far rights. I'm probably
Speaker 3: the most famous and the one that Robert has done
Speaker 3: an entire show on. So go listen to that if
Speaker 3: you want to really actually in detailed thing on the
Speaker 3: history of Amway. Amway and the sort of political family
Speaker 3: the devices that they've generated are an incredibly important part
Speaker 3: of the emerging far right. I mean, obviously, most famously
Speaker 3: Betsy de Vos, who married into the Klan, was our
Speaker 3: Secretary of Education under Trump. You know, the sort of
Speaker 3: prince family is embedded into this and Amway famously used
Speaker 3: its own internal communications to stump for Republican Party candidates
Speaker 3: and also uses its base and also directly its own
Speaker 3: funds to fund the Republican Party and a bunch of
Speaker 3: Republican congressional candidates. Now, obviously, and this is something that
Speaker 3: is true of all of these reforms, is that everything
Speaker 3: we're doing here, they're morally and politically good in their
Speaker 3: own right. Right, MLMs are scams, They're extremely exploitative, and
Speaker 3: their role, I think in the far right is a
Speaker 3: lot more important than people understand. Even if you just
Speaker 3: look at the money, you're sort of missing part of
Speaker 3: what's going on with MLMs. MLMs aren't just a cash spigot.
Speaker 3: They're part of how the far right builds is ideological base.
Speaker 3: MLMs teach you to convert all of your personal relations
Speaker 3: into potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on
Speaker 3: a moral level, but it's also insidious on an ideological level.
Speaker 3: The MLM logic of turning all of your most precious
Speaker 3: relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world.
Speaker 3: And this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway works so well.
Speaker 3: Once you've been trained that literally everything, even your sort
Speaker 3: of closest friends and your dearest relationships with your family
Speaker 3: are just business opportunities. It's extremely easy to convince you
Speaker 3: of the rest of the Republican Party platform in the
Speaker 3: same way the experience of being in a union and
Speaker 3: organizing with your coworkers once reliably turned out the ideological
Speaker 3: base of the left. MLMs have generated enormous political basis
Speaker 3: for the right. And unfortunately, this sort of ideological threat
Speaker 3: doesn't just go away if people are able to get
Speaker 3: out of MLMs, or especially if you know they're sort
Speaker 3: of cast out of the mlems because they've simply are
Speaker 3: broken brand of money and are in debt. The isolation
Speaker 3: and alienation that comes from pushing away, you know, every
Speaker 3: single relation that's close to you, from attempting to sell
Speaker 3: them soap or whatever, makes people isolated and alienated and
Speaker 3: makes them more vulnerable to far right radicalization. And this
Speaker 3: is why driving these MLMs under isn't just a way
Speaker 3: to sort of cost Republican Party money, because that's not
Speaker 3: enough to defeat the Republicans. They can find other sources
Speaker 3: of money. What you need to do is systematically remove
Speaker 3: parts of their political base. And when I say your
Speaker 3: roofports to their political base. What I mean is you
Speaker 3: have to go after the systems that are creating more
Speaker 3: members of the or right. Going after MLMs is a
Speaker 3: way to do that. Now. The FTC has gone after
Speaker 3: m lms before. They sort of famously, as you talked
Speaker 3: about in that episode and an m way, they went after
Speaker 3: a bunch of MLMs in the eighties. But this sort
Speaker 3: of caused MLMs to get smarter and has you know,
Speaker 3: has been pretty effective in in sort of warding the
Speaker 3: FTC off from really going after MLMs since then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is by the way, like another you were
Speaker 2: just talking about how the way MLMs impact like the
Speaker 2: minds of the people participating in them, like prepares them,
Speaker 2: you know, for the far right. Yeah, the way in
Speaker 2: which this this sense of impunity has developed among the
Speaker 2: people who run and participate in these things due to
Speaker 2: their capture of the legal system is also a part
Speaker 2: of like why the far right works the way it does,
Speaker 2: that sense of impunity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And part of the reason why they have that
Speaker 3: impunity is is just the way the FDC goes after
Speaker 3: these companies, right, I mean, there was in the in
Speaker 3: the mid twenty tens, the FTC went after neutral Light,
Speaker 3: which is one of the biggest and oldest MLMs. But
Speaker 3: the way they went after them was they issued them
Speaker 3: a two hundred million dollar fine, and that's a lot
Speaker 3: of money, but it didn't drive neutral Light out of business.
Speaker 3: And as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, if government
Speaker 3: regulation just means setting fines, and if the fines still
Speaker 3: allow the business to make more money than they lost
Speaker 3: from the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut.
Speaker 3: It's not actual regulation. And if you're one of these
Speaker 3: businesses and the worst that could happen to you is
Speaker 3: the government takes a cut, you end up with, you know,
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight right where all these banks know
Speaker 3: they're going to get bailed out, and they know the
Speaker 3: worst punishment that's going to happen to them is just
Speaker 3: the government taking a small cut and they can go
Speaker 3: back to just making all their money. So in order
Speaker 3: to actually go after MLMs, we can't simply rely on
Speaker 3: the FTC. You know, even if if you were to
Speaker 3: sort of put in charge a more militant FTC that
Speaker 3: was were willing to go after stuff, there needs to
Speaker 3: be actual literary change here, and that is possible but difficult.
Speaker 3: But if we actually want, if we're actually deeply serious
Speaker 3: about wielding political power to defeat the far right and
Speaker 3: to keep them from re emerging and to keep them
Speaker 3: out of power generationally, then this is the start of
Speaker 3: what we have to do. So we mentioned Neutralite, which is,
Speaker 3: you know, a very very powerful MLM. Neutralite is important
Speaker 3: because it is actually two kinds of business that are
Speaker 3: extremely important to the far right. At the same time.
Speaker 3: It is part MLM, but it is an MLM that
Speaker 3: also sells dietary supplements. And when we come back from
Speaker 3: these ads, we will be considering the role of the
Speaker 3: virtually unregulated dietary supplement markets in the rise of the
Speaker 3: far right more broadly, and we are back, oh boy, yeah,
Speaker 3: the supplement market. There is a lot less that has
Speaker 3: been written about this, then there should be. So dietary
Speaker 3: supplements are barely regulated by the FDA. People are getting
Speaker 3: scammed all over the place enormous numbers. I mean, I've
Speaker 3: seen numbers that we're suggesting. I mean two hundred million
Speaker 3: people take some kind of dietary supplement if you include
Speaker 3: things like sort of vitamin gummyes et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: This is an enormous this is an enormous business. I'm
Speaker 3: going to read from Johnny R. Starr, who wrote an
Speaker 3: article about supplement regulation in the American Journal of Public Health.
Speaker 3: If you're going to read this, By the way, this
Speaker 3: is slightly out of date, because the next year, I
Speaker 3: don't know if this is part of this. The next
Speaker 3: year at FDC a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations.
Speaker 3: But here is star quote the Dietary Supplement Health and
Speaker 3: Education Act, which is the big thing that sort of
Speaker 3: deregulated supplements, prohibit supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury,
Speaker 3: allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue
Speaker 3: immediate bands on substances that are imminent hazards, and authorizes
Speaker 3: the FDA to implement current good manufacturing practice guidelines. The
Speaker 3: law also requires pre market notification for new dietary supplements
Speaker 3: defined supplements that were not marketed in the US before
Speaker 3: October fifteenth, nineteen forty four, which is when the Dietary
Speaker 3: Supplement Health Education Act went into effect. Products violating these
Speaker 3: regulations are deemed dangerous, adulterated, and misbranded, are otherwise unlawful.
Speaker 3: And that all sounds well and good until you get
Speaker 3: to the next sentence, which is quote, However, supplements need
Speaker 3: not be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on
Speaker 3: safety are required for new supplement ingredients.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, like you're not supposed to let people sell dangerous supplements,
Speaker 2: but we're all also not supposed to check to make
Speaker 2: sure the supplements are safe or work.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it as the FDA itself admits that even
Speaker 3: the little tiny notifications for things like new ingredients that
Speaker 3: the fa in posts of twenty sixteen, you're supposed to
Speaker 3: notify the FADA if you put new ingredients. But like,
Speaker 3: even that just isn't happening. These companies just don't care.
Speaker 3: They're just not either not even like doing the little
Speaker 3: tidy legal mandate stuff they're required to.
Speaker 2: I should also note a large part of the blame
Speaker 2: for particularly the supplements, but also I mean MLMs, actually
Speaker 2: they play a role in it too. It's the state
Speaker 2: of Utah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: By the way, a political power of the state of
Speaker 2: Utah is a huge part of why, because supplements are
Speaker 2: a massive fucking industry in Utah. So are MLMs. So,
Speaker 2: by the way, our team treatment facilities, the ones where
Speaker 2: they like kidnap your children and torture them. These are
Speaker 2: all things that the state of Utah in specific will
Speaker 2: fight like hell to stop from being fixed in any way,
Speaker 2: shape or for.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that bill I keep talking about the Dietary
Speaker 3: Supplement Health Education Act, That is the baby of Utah
Speaker 3: Senator or In Hatch, who is a terrible right wing
Speaker 3: force in American politics. And the fact that orin Hatch
Speaker 3: has been this effective and the fact that Utah serves
Speaker 3: as such a powerful base here demonstrate something that's important
Speaker 3: about this political strategy, which is that it has to
Speaker 3: be a federal level political strategy because there are a
Speaker 3: lot of states Republicans effectively have strangleholds. You need to
Speaker 3: use the federal government to bypass the unbelievable block of
Speaker 3: sort of political power in these states. I want to
Speaker 3: read a little bit more from that article by Star
Speaker 3: about what kind of regulations are required for supplements, because
Speaker 3: I think it's extremely dire in and of itself. Quote,
Speaker 3: manufacturers are not required to confirm the identity of all
Speaker 3: ingredients supply to them.
Speaker 2: Sure why they need to do that?
Speaker 3: Unbelievable, And they're not required to follow up river how
Speaker 3: I talked about there's current good manufacturing Practices guidelines. Following
Speaker 3: those guidelines does not guarantee the absence of all contabinants. Moreover,
Speaker 3: unlike drugs which are considered unadulterated or misbranded, if they
Speaker 3: do not achieve compliance with national standards set by US
Speaker 3: Pharmacopeia and National formulary, dietary supplements may choose to be compliant.
Speaker 3: Only six brands of dietary supplements are currently verified by
Speaker 3: US Pharmacopeia, so they don't have to work. They can
Speaker 3: choose whether or not they want to be submitted to
Speaker 3: see if any of this stuff works. Now in theory, also,
Speaker 3: the marketing of dietary settlements is supposed to be regulated
Speaker 3: by the FDC, But like is the FDC regulating you
Speaker 3: know all of these false claims people are making with
Speaker 3: the dietary slelements. No, of course they're not doing that.
Speaker 3: So why do we care about supplement market Robert has
Speaker 3: kind of has talked about this at the very beginning
Speaker 3: of the episode. The easiest answer for why we should
Speaker 3: care about supplement markets is simply the figure of Alex Jones,
Speaker 3: who you know, we have talked about extensively on this show.
Speaker 3: It's been behind the masters. If you want to really,
Speaker 3: really in depth look at who Alex Jones is. The
Speaker 3: podcast Knowledge Fight is the single best resource I think
Speaker 3: anyone has ever created.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would be hard to beat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's unbelievably detailed. But Alex Jones has, you know,
Speaker 3: as an individual figure, has done more or to sort
Speaker 3: of spread the ideology the far right and turn this
Speaker 3: country into what it is now then maybe almost any
Speaker 3: other single person other than someone like Trump. Right, he
Speaker 3: is probably most well known now as quote the Sandy
Speaker 3: Hook guy, which he's extremely mad at people calling him,
Speaker 3: but he's why everyone thinks that not everyone, but a
Speaker 3: bunch of people think that Sandy Hook was a false flag.
Speaker 3: And importantly, here's from NPR quote most of Free Speech Systems,
Speaker 3: which is Alex Jones, the corporate name for Alex Jones' company.
Speaker 3: Most of Free Speech System's revenue to this day, about
Speaker 3: eighty percent comes from dietary supplements, according to court records. Now,
Speaker 3: these court records come from one of a number of
Speaker 3: lawsuits against Alex Jones for defaming the families of the
Speaker 3: victims of the Alex Jones shooting. Are we certain for
Speaker 3: defaming the victims of Sandy Hook shooting. Sorry, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And you know, in the process of discovery, we got
Speaker 3: a bunch of information about how how Alex Jones's internal
Speaker 3: media empire actually works. Now, if you followed Alex Jones
Speaker 3: over the years, you know that he's hawked everything from
Speaker 3: silver to satellite phones. But it is the dietary supplements
Speaker 3: that actually sell right As an MPR article said, about
Speaker 3: eighty percent of his revenue comes from dietary supplements. And
Speaker 3: this is not a sort of small independent media outlet,
Speaker 3: right free speech systems. Again, as Alex Jones' company was
Speaker 3: worth hundreds of millions of dollars, this is an enormous
Speaker 3: for right media empire, and supplement sales allow right wing
Speaker 3: figures like Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads,
Speaker 3: which removes a lot of potential leverage from activist groups
Speaker 3: who wage pressure campaigns against you know, dated this against
Speaker 3: Tucker Carlson for example, where people went after their advertisers
Speaker 3: and showed them the stuff Tucker Carlson was saying on
Speaker 3: Fox before he got kicked off and what do you
Speaker 3: want to fund this? And you know that was actually
Speaker 3: a sort of effective strategy. But you know, the any
Speaker 3: part about this is if you look at the end
Speaker 3: of Tucker Carlson's show, right, the ads on that show
Speaker 3: were ads from the MyPillow guy, who is a far
Speaker 3: right extremist in his own right and a very important
Speaker 3: election denier, and a bunch of supplement companies. Supplement sales
Speaker 3: are a durable and renewable grift because there's already an
Speaker 3: extensive network of suppliers and distributors. Right wing brands who
Speaker 3: want to make a bunch of money can just sort
Speaker 3: of slap their name onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale,
Speaker 3: and then they can market them to their viewers, and
Speaker 3: this gives them an extremely profitable and lucrative source of funding.
Speaker 3: And this is used all over the place right.
Speaker 2: Again, it impacts what they say and like how they
Speaker 2: like the obsession they have with like seed oils and
Speaker 2: what's destroying your ability, like your testosterone and all of
Speaker 2: these like different far right conspiracy theories about you know,
Speaker 2: what kind of stuff you shouldn't be eating, Like all
Speaker 2: of this stuff is related to the supplement business, right,
Speaker 2: Like they are trying to drum up and destroy trust
Speaker 2: and public health and drum up conspiracy theories for their
Speaker 2: own profit and so it's not just a matter of
Speaker 2: like this is how they get money, but this also
Speaker 2: is why they do some of the things that are
Speaker 2: so harmful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and as you're saying, this is cyclical, right, the
Speaker 3: incentive structure for going further and further into these conspiracies
Speaker 3: and selling more and more of the supplement things, it's
Speaker 3: a spiral. It it keeps on just increasing in size
Speaker 3: and increasing in size due to the feedback loop from
Speaker 3: the incentive structure that's selling these supplements creates. Now, this
Speaker 3: is actually not an enormously difficult sort of feel to
Speaker 3: just completely shut down the next branch we're going to
Speaker 3: talk about, I think is actually a much harder political fight,
Speaker 3: But a lot of the market for this can be
Speaker 3: defeated by just having the FTC actually regulate supplements the
Speaker 3: way they do drugs because and this is really important,
Speaker 3: these supplements are being marketed as a drugs, right. The
Speaker 3: advertisements that these people are already doing are already illegal.
Speaker 3: The FTC is not supposed to allow people to sell
Speaker 3: supplements like this. They shouldn't be able to be manufactured
Speaker 3: like this. And this is again as with banning MLMs,
Speaker 3: this is something that helps the consumer because it'll mean
Speaker 3: that whatever supplement market exists after sort of a massive
Speaker 3: regulatory sweep and crackdown will be much safer, it will
Speaker 3: be much more effective, and it will also destroy the
Speaker 3: base of far right media. If you can cut the
Speaker 3: knees out of this sort of far right media ecosystem,
Speaker 3: you can go an enormous way towards solving the crisis
Speaker 3: of the far right that has been brought upon this country.
Speaker 2: Speaking of crisis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're gonna let the ads talk about the ads,
Speaker 3: and then we're gonna come back and close by talking
Speaker 3: about car manufacturers in the American gentry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're back. And this is a fun one. This
Speaker 2: is also like one of my particular favorite things to
Speaker 2: hit because I don't think a lot of people know
Speaker 2: how much the Republican Party is just a party of
Speaker 2: used car dealers YEP.
Speaker 3: Probably the most famous piece that talks it's not really
Speaker 3: fully about car dealerships, but it mentions their sort of
Speaker 3: political effect and the kind of class that they belong to.
Speaker 3: Is maybe the best thing The Atlantic has published in
Speaker 3: the last decade, at least one of the best things
Speaker 3: they've published, and it's an article on the American gentry
Speaker 3: by the by the journalist Patrick Wyman. Wyman argues that
Speaker 3: huge swaths of America are ruled by what he calls
Speaker 3: the local gentry. These are millionaires, and notably, these are
Speaker 3: not billionaires. These are multi multimillionaires whose wealth derives from
Speaker 3: immediate wealth extraction from the surrounding communities. In places like
Speaker 3: wyman childhood home of Yakima, Washington, these elites have enormous
Speaker 3: local power over the territory. They rule like the landed
Speaker 3: gentry of old Wyman quote the conspicuously consuming celebrities and
Speaker 3: jet setting cause of politans, if popular imagination exists, But
Speaker 3: they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less
Speaker 3: discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of
Speaker 3: the local hierarchies that govern life for tens of millions
Speaker 3: of people. Donald Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance,
Speaker 3: acting as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct,
Speaker 3: when he crowed about his quote beautiful boters, lauding the
Speaker 3: flotilla of his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft
Speaker 3: in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a
Speaker 3: rioting January sixth crowd that included people who had flown
Speaker 3: to the event on private jets. He knew what he
Speaker 3: was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry,
Speaker 3: the salts of the earth, multimillionaires. You see them as
Speaker 3: local leaders in business and politics, the underappreciated backbone of
Speaker 3: a once great nation. Now Wyman is largely focused on
Speaker 3: the agricultural gentry, because that's you know, the sort the
Speaker 3: sort of agrobarons who are very important to this story,
Speaker 3: but are are kind of are are kind of auxiliary
Speaker 3: to this and that you know, that's largely because he's
Speaker 3: talking a lot about the places where he grew up,
Speaker 3: which are which are agricultural hubs. But a very critical
Speaker 3: component of this American gentry, of this local elite class
Speaker 3: are car dealership owners, and their wealth and influence literally
Speaker 3: cannot be overstated. The journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in
Speaker 3: an article in Slate in twenty twenty three. Quote auto
Speaker 3: dealers are one of the five most common professions among
Speaker 3: the top point one percent of American earners. Car dealers,
Speaker 3: gas station owners, and building contractors. It turns out, make
Speaker 3: up the majority of the countries one hundred and forty
Speaker 3: thousand Americans who earn more than one point five million
Speaker 3: dollars a year. Crunching numbers from the US Census Bureau, data,
Speaker 3: scientists and author Stephens Devotowitz found that over twenty percent
Speaker 3: of car dealerships in the US have an owner in
Speaker 3: banking more than one point five million a year, which
Speaker 3: is absolutely absurd. That is, that is an unbelievable amount
Speaker 3: of money for people who really, when you think about it,
Speaker 3: don't do anything, like what is the actual service that
Speaker 3: a car dealer is do?
Speaker 2: I mean the primary thing that they do is rip
Speaker 2: people off, because there the entire way that car sales
Speaker 2: work is based on fraud yep, right, Like it's based
Speaker 2: on getting you to buy things that do not actually work,
Speaker 2: like service packages and whatnot that you often will not
Speaker 2: get any benefit from. And it's a lot of it
Speaker 2: is based around also just outright scams, you know, altering
Speaker 2: the information buyers have access to so they don't realize
Speaker 2: like problems with a used car or whatever. Like it's
Speaker 2: it's all fraud, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And as as is becoming ever true of American life, fraudsters,
Speaker 3: scammers and people who are just their entire existence is
Speaker 3: dedicated to ripping you off have more and more political
Speaker 3: power in this country. Here's a salmon from that same
Speaker 3: article quote. As of twenty twenty one, the top one
Speaker 3: hundred dealership groups in the US had annual revenues of
Speaker 3: around one hundred billion dollars, more than any company that
Speaker 3: actually makes cars. The National Automotive Dealer Association NADA became
Speaker 3: one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with
Speaker 3: sixteen thousand dues paying members spanning thirty two thousand, five
Speaker 3: hundred franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA
Speaker 3: convention became routine for presidential hall fulls, and even Presidents
Speaker 3: Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended
Speaker 3: ahead of presidential runs. Bill Clinton and both Bushes came
Speaker 3: after they left the White House. And the fact that
Speaker 3: Democrats are showing up to this is appalling on a
Speaker 3: moral level. Right, this is an entire organization of fraudsters,
Speaker 3: and it doesn't even work.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Car dealers donate six to one for Republican causes, but.
Speaker 2: They really want that one. Yeah, it's the same thing
Speaker 2: with like you've got Schumer going out for the crypto
Speaker 2: Caucus now where Yeah, well, only a fraction of those
Speaker 2: guys are going to donate to DIMS, but it's all scam.
Speaker 2: He doesn't really care as long as some of it
Speaker 2: goes to him. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Now. The thing that's that's dangerous about these people, and
Speaker 3: I think it's even more dangerous than something like crypto money,
Speaker 3: is that these are local elites, right, and they are
Speaker 3: dispersed enormously across the country. This is something that Salmon
Speaker 3: is very sort of specific about, and something that comes
Speaker 3: up in Wyman's piece, and somebody comes up if you
Speaker 3: do any research about this at all. A huge part
Speaker 3: of the power is because these people are spread geographically
Speaker 3: across the country, and because they are the richest people
Speaker 3: or among the richest people in the sort of small
Speaker 3: areas that they dominate, they have unbelievable amounts of political power.
Speaker 3: And because they are again unbelievably wealthy, they can funnel
Speaker 3: this money directly into local politics on a scale that
Speaker 3: cannot be matched by your sort of grassroots organizations. This
Speaker 3: allows them to buy everything from city council's to seats
Speaker 3: in Congress, and.
Speaker 2: They effectively unionize like and they've got the Portland Business
Speaker 2: Association right, which is to a significant extent, allied with
Speaker 2: the police and like dominates local politics. They're the ones
Speaker 2: who buy the mayor's election, like they're the ones who
Speaker 2: you know, make deals with the Portland Police Officers union.
Speaker 2: Like this is this is the way in which a
Speaker 2: lot of power gets exercise that actually impacts your daily life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they've also been doing things like like coordinating
Speaker 3: and doing strategy sharing about defeating unions. But I mean,
Speaker 3: this is why most of these big associations were formed,
Speaker 3: was specifically to destroy unions in the early twentieth century.
Speaker 3: And you know, I mean the Autolobbying Group was formed
Speaker 3: to do autolobbying because these car dealerships don't have unions.
Speaker 3: That's another thing that we'll come back to it a
Speaker 3: little bit. But yeah, these car dealerships are a durable
Speaker 3: and extremely powerful force in electoral politics, and they deliver
Speaker 3: seats and this is the most important thing if you're
Speaker 3: an electoralist. Right, these people consistently deliver cease to Republicans
Speaker 3: by flooding an amount of money into local races that
Speaker 3: people can't compete with. And because of this, they miserate
Speaker 3: the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and they
Speaker 3: can also largely be destroyed in a single stroke. That's
Speaker 3: maybe oversalling it a little bit, but their power largely
Speaker 3: rests on an enormous array of state level monopolies that
Speaker 3: ban the direct sales of cars to consumers or prevent
Speaker 3: car companies from competing with local retailers. And this is
Speaker 3: something that the autolobby has been you know, the auto
Speaker 3: association lobby not has been fighting for for ages. They've
Speaker 3: gotten it in an enormous number of states.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this, by the way, you know, in terms
Speaker 2: of abilities to like disrupt things, this is a big
Speaker 2: part of like how Tesla is different from other auto
Speaker 2: manufacturers is in most states. There are some states where
Speaker 2: they're not allowed to do this, but in most states
Speaker 2: they sell directly to the customer, which is like back
Speaker 2: before Musk became as political a figure, was actually a
Speaker 2: major reason why these people didn't like him.
Speaker 3: Well, they still don't. This is actually a really interesting thing,
Speaker 3: is what the thing I want to close on here? Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 3: these people still hate Musk and they hate electric cars
Speaker 3: because electric cars, to a large extent, are both a
Speaker 3: being directly sold by companies and B it's harder to
Speaker 3: you actually have to do service on them in a
Speaker 3: way that makes it more expensive for these these companies
Speaker 3: to write about this. This is something that Salmon has
Speaker 3: written about extensively, so they absolutely despise electric cars. And
Speaker 3: this is actually a political opportunity for us, right because
Speaker 3: Elon Musk now is again one of there is I
Speaker 3: think he's still the richest person in the world technically
Speaker 3: until sort of all his stocks implode. But this is
Speaker 3: an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base
Speaker 3: right because the local government monopolies that these car dealers
Speaker 3: have are actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the
Speaker 3: other parts of the Republican base right. Elon hates them.
Speaker 3: Actual car manufacturers hate it. No one likes car dealers, like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, and this is everything you know. This is
Speaker 3: also something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at this,
Speaker 3: and this is one of the few times libertarians are right.
Speaker 3: They look at this and go, oh yeah, well, these
Speaker 3: people have been literally granted market monopolies. There are a
Speaker 3: lot of places where if there's already a car dealer there,
Speaker 3: if you're a car company, you can't compete with these things.
Speaker 3: So these are state sanction monopolies. So there's large portions
Speaker 3: of the Republican base who oppose these companies, and if
Speaker 3: you can use this as a wedge issue to split
Speaker 3: the Republican base, and that's sort of where I want
Speaker 3: to close on. As much as I've been talking about
Speaker 3: these three very specific things, right banning MLMs or at
Speaker 3: least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns, regulatory crackdowns on supplements,
Speaker 3: and legislation to allow direct car sales. What we're trying
Speaker 3: to do here isn't just getting rid of the money
Speaker 3: that supports the far right. We're trying to destroy their
Speaker 3: institutions and we're trying to fracture their base, right. Going
Speaker 3: after MLMs destroys their ability to sort of produce more
Speaker 3: produce more Republicans from these MLMs and produce more people
Speaker 3: in the far right from these MLMs. Going after supplements
Speaker 3: is a way to destroy the right wing media ecosystem,
Speaker 3: which has been crucial to the rise of the far right.
Speaker 3: And going after cars can help split the emerging Republican
Speaker 3: coalition by you know, pitting two parts of the Republican
Speaker 3: base against each other, pitting these car dealers versus Elon
Speaker 3: and versus the auto manufacturers.
Speaker 2: Well, Mia, great episode, This is a nice starter. This
Speaker 2: is again something we're going to continue to talk about
Speaker 2: because I really think we can't hit enough on this. Obviously,
Speaker 2: these three things don't solve every problem with the far right,
Speaker 2: but this is like, if you get actually like packaged
Speaker 2: these together into a legislative agenda, it could be the
Speaker 2: equivalent of like the nuclear option for these people. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think this is a smart thing to be hitting.
Speaker 2: We will continue to talk about this in more detail,
Speaker 2: but you know what, we're done for the day, Go
Speaker 2: do something else.
Speaker 5: I'm Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas who covers political
Speaker 5: extremism in Texas.
Speaker 6: I'm Michael Phillips, an historian who wrote a history of
Speaker 6: racism in Dallas called White Metropolis. Both of us grew
Speaker 6: up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, and for both
Speaker 6: of us our home state has been a matter of
Speaker 6: both wonder and horrified fascination. In this episode of It
Speaker 6: Could Happen Here, we're going to try to explain Texas
Speaker 6: culture and politics and why the country and the world
Speaker 6: should care. Spoiler alert, what happens in Texas doesn't stay
Speaker 6: in Texas, the state has always had a disproportionate impact
Speaker 6: on national politics. The annexation of Texas in eighteen forty
Speaker 6: five provoked the Mexican American War. From eighteen forty six
Speaker 6: to eighteen forty eight, the United States I have two
Speaker 6: thirds of Mexico's territory, and there was an ugly and
Speaker 6: bitter fight over the status of slavery in all that
Speaker 6: new land the United States acquired. That's going to turn
Speaker 6: out to be one of the major causes of the
Speaker 6: Civil War, a conflict that resulted in the liberation of
Speaker 6: four million African Americans from slavery, but also the death
Speaker 6: of three quarters of a million Americans. Texas also was
Speaker 6: the epicenter of the Populist Movement, a leftist movement largely
Speaker 6: based in Texas that actually challenged the power of the
Speaker 6: Democratic Party in the South. And if the Populist Party
Speaker 6: had succeeded everything else happened in America in the twentieth
Speaker 6: century in terms of Jim Crow, lynching, the Clan, etc.
Speaker 6: May have had a very different outcome.
Speaker 5: Slavery didn't end in Texas until June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 5: months after it had ended in the rest of the country.
Speaker 5: It's a state that today is the second most pot
Speaker 5: peoalists say in the nation, and it's the eighth largest
Speaker 5: economy in the world. Two of the most consequential presidents
Speaker 5: over the last sixty years hailed from the Lone Star State.
Speaker 5: There was Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who brought the country not
Speaker 5: only Medicare and Medicaid, but the nineteen sixty four Civil
Speaker 5: Rights Act and the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act,
Speaker 5: two issues that the right wing continue to fight against
Speaker 5: to this day. Those laws made African Americans perhaps the
Speaker 5: most important constituency in the Democratic Party. Racist backlash to
Speaker 5: johnson civil rights legislation, urban uprisings in places like the
Speaker 5: Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, and white flight generally led
Speaker 5: segregationists and their children in the South, who had been
Speaker 5: loyal Democratic voters to switch allegiance to the Republican Party.
Speaker 5: Over the next three decades, another Texas president, Republican George W.
Speaker 3: Bush.
Speaker 5: He aggressively embraced homophobia, tightened the ties between the Republican
Speaker 5: Party and the most right wing Christians in the country,
Speaker 5: and made denial of climate change strict.
Speaker 7: Gope orthodoxy.
Speaker 5: Of course, the Bush family's oil wealth was central to
Speaker 5: their rise to power, and broadly speaking, the wealth of
Speaker 5: right wing oil barons in Texas has helped push the
Speaker 5: Republican Party further and further to the right, in no
Speaker 5: small part due to a particular belief in a particular
Speaker 5: strain of Christianity, which we'll get to later in this episode.
Speaker 6: Bush's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Speaker 6: Center and the Pentagon on September eleventh led to the
Speaker 6: rise of the modern surveillance state and the two longest
Speaker 6: wars in American history, both of them disastrous failures. The
Speaker 6: combination of white backlash to the LBJ era civil rights initiatives,
Speaker 6: the intense religiosity of the Bush era and the Republican
Speaker 6: Party in that time period, and the sense of the
Speaker 6: United States was a declining power unable to impose its
Speaker 6: will on Afghanistan and Iraq opened the door of the
Speaker 6: Donald Trump's ascendancy. In short, two Texas presidents played a
Speaker 6: major role in making the Democratic Party vastly more diverse,
Speaker 6: more urban based, and more mainstream liberal, and the Republican
Speaker 6: Party more white, more right wing, more isolationists, and far
Speaker 6: more fundamentalists and skeptical science.
Speaker 5: Texas has been in the national news frequently in recent years,
Speaker 5: and often for the worst reasons. It's become famous and
Speaker 5: infamous for its wide open gun laws and several of
Speaker 5: the worst mass shootings in American history, including at an
Speaker 5: army base in Killeen, a Walmart and al Paso, and
Speaker 5: an outlet mall in Allen. Draconian abortion laws allow complete
Speaker 5: strangers to sue women who go out of state and
Speaker 5: their pregnancy, and new laws are being considered to prevent
Speaker 5: women from traveling through particular counties on highways who if
Speaker 5: they are seeking abortion, you know they could be arrested
Speaker 5: for basically trying to leave the state to seek an abortion.
Speaker 6: In the last three year years in the state, a
Speaker 6: group of teachers in the Southflex School District in the
Speaker 6: Dallas Fort Worth area were instructed to tell quote both
Speaker 6: sides of the Holocaust in order to not run a
Speaker 6: foul of the legislature's ban on critical race theory. A
Speaker 6: beloved teacher, Nerving, was fire for displaying a rainbow sticker
Speaker 6: in our classroom as a sign of support for LGBTQ students.
Speaker 6: The first ever African American high school principal at Heritage
Speaker 6: High and yet another Dallas suburb, Colleyville, was forced from
Speaker 6: his job when he sent an email to his high
Speaker 6: school community after the murder of George Floyd that acknowledged
Speaker 6: existence of systemic racism in the United States.
Speaker 5: So I think you could maybe pick up on a
Speaker 5: trend here in Texas that our fundamental rights like free
Speaker 5: speech are under threat, particularly if you run a foul
Speaker 5: of the orthodoxy that comes out of the Republican Party.
Speaker 5: And one target of that orthodoxy has been books. All
Speaker 5: across this nation, we've seen dust ups over books in schools,
Speaker 5: books and libraries, and Texas has.
Speaker 7: Been one of the.
Speaker 5: Main flashpoints of this fight. So the literary organization pen
Speaker 5: America reports that Texas and Florida lead the nation in
Speaker 5: book bands at public schools, with more than fifteen hundred
Speaker 5: books banned in the state of Texas. Most of those
Speaker 5: books deal with issues like racism or LGBTQ experience, and
Speaker 5: one deputy constable in Granbury, a suburb near Dallas Fort Worth,
Speaker 5: even spent two years investigating three librarians on alleged felony
Speaker 5: charges of providing so called harmful materials to miners. Simply
Speaker 5: because they allowed miners to access acclaimed books like The
Speaker 5: Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison. According to an investigation by
Speaker 5: NBC News, the law enforcement officer Scott London was a
Speaker 5: member of the extremist Oathkeepers organization. He subpoened names of
Speaker 5: young readers who checked out supposedly objectable material, and he
Speaker 5: even secretly recorded his conversations with the librarians who drew
Speaker 5: his unwonted attention. The investigative report that came out of
Speaker 5: this investigation into so called harmful materials was eight hundred
Speaker 5: and twenty four pages long, and no charges were ever filed.
Speaker 5: But nonetheless a lot of people's lives were made difficult
Speaker 5: and a bunch of books have been taken off the shelves.
Speaker 6: So, as we mentioned, Texas has been on the cutting
Speaker 6: edge of right wing politics and America on issues like abortion,
Speaker 6: the treatment of trans children, and on immigration particular. Texas
Speaker 6: has modeled the Republican attitude on newcomers and migrants and
Speaker 6: policies towards them. The state k Governor Greg Abbott essentially
Speaker 6: tried to establish his own independent border policy, even though
Speaker 6: the constitution makes that the responsibility of the federal government.
Speaker 6: Texas so far has built thirty four miles of a
Speaker 6: wall Abbot valves will eventually extend along the entirety of
Speaker 6: texas twelve hundred and fifty four mile international border with Mexico.
Speaker 6: One estimate says that project, if it were completed, would
Speaker 6: take thirty years and cost twenty billion dollars. The State
Speaker 6: of Texas has placed Buoy's entangled with razor wire in
Speaker 6: the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass, a border town
Speaker 6: that's a major crossing point for migrants fleeing the violence
Speaker 6: and economic hardship in Central America, Venezuela and the rest
Speaker 6: of Latin America.
Speaker 5: One of Governor Abbot's border initiatives, Operation Loan Star, has
Speaker 5: flooded the border with hundreds of law enforcement agents and
Speaker 5: has touted thousands of arrests. But it's also eleven billion
Speaker 5: dollars and it's unclear what it's really done in terms
Speaker 5: of making the state safer. Texas insists, through statements from
Speaker 5: people like Greg Abbott, that immigrants are dangerous and that
Speaker 5: they are flooding our streets with crime, never mind the
Speaker 5: fact that studies indicate that immigrants are far less likely
Speaker 5: to commit crimes. On average, these initiatives have been deadly.
Speaker 5: In August twenty twenty three, a buoy trapped a twenty
Speaker 5: year old in Durham and a small child, causing them
Speaker 5: both to drown. The Texas border patrols El Paso sector
Speaker 5: has become one of the deadliest areas of the border here,
Speaker 5: with one hundred and forty nine immigrants dying over a
Speaker 5: twelve month period between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three. Recently,
Speaker 5: on a podcast, Abbot expressed regret that Texas has been
Speaker 5: unable to shoot immigrants who are attempting to enter Texas
Speaker 5: by crossing the Rio Grant and has complained that the
Speaker 5: Biden administration might file murder charges against border regions if
Speaker 5: such lethal force was used.
Speaker 3: And the only thing that we're not doing is we're
Speaker 3: not shooting people who come across the border.
Speaker 8: Because of course the Biden administration with charges with murder.
Speaker 6: One of the issues about immigration is a panic amongst
Speaker 6: the Anglos living in the state that white people will
Speaker 6: become a shrinking and less politically powerful minority, and this
Speaker 6: connects to the issue of abortion. Throughout the history of
Speaker 6: abortion laws in Texas, there's been a discussion of whether
Speaker 6: or not white Texans were committing what they said in
Speaker 6: the early twentieth century was so called Reese suicide, a
Speaker 6: real panic that black and brown people would eventually out
Speaker 6: number whites and would seize political control of the state.
Speaker 6: And this is tied to the abortion issue because throughout
Speaker 6: the history of abortion laws in America and in Texas,
Speaker 6: there's been a concern that white women are having abortions
Speaker 6: and that really fuel some of the extremism in how
Speaker 6: Texas has approached this issue. Twenty twenty two, this state
Speaker 6: legislature passed the law that would allow a third party
Speaker 6: to sue anyone who helped a woman getting an abortion,
Speaker 6: although the courts have so far blocked enforcement of that law,
Speaker 6: called Senate Bill eight. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton meanwhile
Speaker 6: has addressed another issue dealing with trans children, and again,
Speaker 6: trans children, if they're white, would be out of the
Speaker 6: reproductive demographic race that panics white racist in the state.
Speaker 6: He has tried to force doctors and other states to
Speaker 6: provide medical information on young people receiving gender affirming care
Speaker 6: outside of Texas and the parents are trans children in
Speaker 6: Texas have been investigated for child abuse in each case,
Speaker 6: these extreme laws have been discussed, in some cases imitated
Speaker 6: in other Red states.
Speaker 5: On the one hand, we've got anxieties about immigrants allegedly
Speaker 5: replacing the white race rhetoric that has been repeated by
Speaker 5: people as high up as Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who
Speaker 5: has said that immigrants are trying to take over our
Speaker 5: country without firing a shot. This is something that people
Speaker 5: like the Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes, who has met with
Speaker 5: a high ranking and influential Republican consultant who works for
Speaker 5: one of the largest political donors in the country, he
Speaker 5: believes that sort of rhetoric and pushes it. On the
Speaker 5: other hand, we've got the issue with LGBTQ issues in general.
Speaker 5: We've seen books being taken off the shelves as we've
Speaker 5: previously mentioned. We've seen rights taken away from students with
Speaker 5: regard to their access to bathrooms. We have seen, as
Speaker 5: doctor Phillips mentioned, the targeting of parents, and a lot
Speaker 5: of this comes from this anxiety that students are being
Speaker 5: groomed into becoming LGBTQ in public schools, in public libraries,
Speaker 5: and other settings. The idea being that yes, they're trying
Speaker 5: to turn your kids gay. That's what they're saying, and
Speaker 5: so of course they're going to be extremely upset about
Speaker 5: any shrinking demographic numbers among the white population, or a
Speaker 5: growing acceptance of queerness or people being transgender, and so
Speaker 5: much of that is rooted in religious belief. But all
Speaker 5: of this it matters in a bigger perspective, and I
Speaker 5: think we can understand why some of this is so
Speaker 5: prevalent in Texas through the lens of Texas's importance to
Speaker 5: national politics.
Speaker 6: Texas counts for forty of two hundred and seventy votes
Speaker 6: needed to win the electoral College. Only California has more
Speaker 6: electoral College votes, and the Republican Party has been able
Speaker 6: to rel lie on winning every single presidential election in
Speaker 6: the state since nineteen eighty. If Texas should ever flip politically,
Speaker 6: it'd be hard to see how the Republicans could ever
Speaker 6: win the White House again. And it always seems like
Speaker 6: Texas is just on the verge of flipping blue.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 5: There's there's been a lot of talk for a long
Speaker 5: time about this pending demographic revolution, the idea that eventually,
Speaker 5: you know, the numbers are just baked in and that
Speaker 5: Republicans will no longer control the state. So let's look
Speaker 5: at some of those numbers. So Tejanos or people of
Speaker 5: Latino Hispanic descent, make up more than forty percent of
Speaker 5: the state's population, so they're the largest single population group.
Speaker 5: Non Whites account for sixty percent of all Texans, and
Speaker 5: as a group, they vote mostly for Democrats, and they
Speaker 5: control most of the state's largest cities in terms of
Speaker 5: political dominance. But because of low voter turnout among people
Speaker 5: of color, laws that intentionally make registering to vote harder,
Speaker 5: making voting itself even more difficult, gerrymandering, and the general
Speaker 5: feebleness of the Democratic Party in the state, the state
Speaker 5: has remained in control of a very conservative, very white
Speaker 5: Republican minority for three decades. In Texas, every major city
Speaker 5: is blue except for one, and that's Fort Worth, which
Speaker 5: is in a place called Tarrant County. And I think
Speaker 5: it is not a coincidence that the largest, flashiest conflicts
Speaker 5: have often been in Tarrant County when it comes to
Speaker 5: things like schools, when it comes to things like books. Colleyville,
Speaker 5: as we previously mentioned, is in Tarrn County. If you've
Speaker 5: ever heard of the name South Lake, that's a town
Speaker 5: in Tarrant County. There are numerous national articles about issues
Speaker 5: that have emerged from this one single stronghold of Republican
Speaker 5: power in the state, which if it were to fall,
Speaker 5: would pretend great changes not just for the politics in
Speaker 5: the state of Texas, but perhaps even the nation.
Speaker 6: It's been remarkable because school board meetings used to be
Speaker 6: really dull and talking. You used to talk about boundaries
Speaker 6: for particular campuses, you know which students are going to
Speaker 6: tend which class. But now over the last few years,
Speaker 6: very often they've been scenes of screaming, matches, threats, and
Speaker 6: so on. Texas in many ways has become a laboratory
Speaker 6: of autocracy, and again it's a model for other states
Speaker 6: that have a right wing political leadership. For instance, the
Speaker 6: Texas Republican Party platform adopted this year called for changes
Speaker 6: in the way statewide officials like governor would be elected,
Speaker 6: and essentially, the Republican Party called for creating a local
Speaker 6: version of the electoral college. Under these proposed changes, a
Speaker 6: candidate for governor, lieutenant governor, all the down ballot statewide
Speaker 6: offices could win the popular vote and still lose the
Speaker 6: election unless they carry a majority of the two hundred
Speaker 6: and fifty four counties in the state, most of which
Speaker 6: are very white, very conservative, very fundamentalist. If this became law,
Speaker 6: the proposal would guarantee permanent Republican rule in the state,
Speaker 6: and as I said, other Republican states are looking at
Speaker 6: this proposal. It hasn't been proposed as legislation, but that
Speaker 6: would really end any pretense of democracy because most people
Speaker 6: in Texas live in cities like the rest of the
Speaker 6: United States. Another way that Republicans have maintained their grip
Speaker 6: on the state is by waging a never ending culture
Speaker 6: war centered on matters of faith. So if you really
Speaker 6: want to understand Texas, its culture, and its politics, you
Speaker 6: can't avoid a discussion of religion. You have to dive
Speaker 6: into a one particular type of Christianity. We've already referred to.
Speaker 6: This interpretation of the Bible motivates right wing voters and
Speaker 6: the vast rural sections of the state and the outer
Speaker 6: suburbs and the major cities. It's disproportionately molded the state's
Speaker 6: laws and attitudes where its African Americans, immigrants, and the
Speaker 6: people we've talked about women, gay and trans people, and
Speaker 6: also non Christians like Jews and Muslims.
Speaker 5: If you trap the sort of issues that are being
Speaker 5: discussed by the Republican Party of Texas and you look back,
Speaker 5: say to the time of George H. W. Bush, and
Speaker 5: you look to now, it will be very clear to
Speaker 5: you that the topics have changed. The sort of things
Speaker 5: that they talk about. It's less about low taxes, it's
Speaker 5: less about being business friendly, it's less about letting you
Speaker 5: do what you want in your personal life, and it's
Speaker 5: much more about imposing a particular religious viewpoint on others
Speaker 5: through policy. And the most vocal, perhaps one of the
Speaker 5: most highly organized and certainly flush with funds, sect of
Speaker 5: Christianity that is, you know, driving this is this group
Speaker 5: of Christian fundamentalists that religious scholars broadly describe as dispensationalists.
Speaker 5: So what's a dispensationalist. It's a fancy word for someone
Speaker 5: who believes that we are living in the end times.
Speaker 5: The end times being this idea that at any moment
Speaker 5: now all true Christians will be wisked up into the
Speaker 5: clouds in an event called the Rapture, that an embodiment
Speaker 5: of Satan called the Antichrist will take over the world
Speaker 5: and try to destroy Israel. And you know, all of
Speaker 5: this is, you know, presaging the final judgment, you know,
Speaker 5: the day when the Lord Jesus comes down and he
Speaker 5: basically decides who's done well, who's done bad, and that
Speaker 5: settles it for all eternity.
Speaker 6: This particular strain of fundamentalism in Texas culture and politics
Speaker 6: has a profound impact on global politics. The dispensationalists are
Speaker 6: certain World War three is going to consume the planet.
Speaker 6: They believe there's going to be a final battle between
Speaker 6: good and evil called the Battle of Armageddon. And they
Speaker 6: believe this, and this is significant. They believe that Jesus
Speaker 6: Christ will come back specifically to stop World War three
Speaker 6: for a particular purpose. He's going to come to prevent
Speaker 6: the destruction of all remaining Jewish people on the planet.
Speaker 6: And they believe that millions of Jewish people are going
Speaker 6: to die, those who survive are going to convert to Christianity,
Speaker 6: and when Jesus returns, he will establish what's essentially a
Speaker 6: divine dictatorship that will be a time of perfect peace
Speaker 6: and harmony, called the Millennium.
Speaker 5: Texans have played a major role in popularizing dispensationalism and
Speaker 5: its doom day theology both in modern times but also historically,
Speaker 5: one Texas writer named Michael Ennis once called the city
Speaker 5: of Dallas the Athens of the Apocalypse, and in the
Speaker 5: late twentieth century, predicting the end of the world was
Speaker 5: a lucrative business. So there was a theological center here
Speaker 5: in Dallas that was one of the most influential groups
Speaker 5: when it came to originating and promoting.
Speaker 7: This idea of the end times.
Speaker 5: And it also has to do with one gentleman named
Speaker 5: Cyrus Scofield. But before we talk about Cyrus Schofield, a
Speaker 5: quick ad break.
Speaker 6: What happened was there's this member, a convert to the
Speaker 6: Congregationalist church who came from Kansas. He had been a
Speaker 6: politician in Kansas who had to leave office because he
Speaker 6: was accused of accepting bribes. He later said he was
Speaker 6: struggling with alcoholism at the time. His name is Cyrus Schofield,
Speaker 6: and he converts to Christianity and he's invited to head
Speaker 6: this Congregationalist church that has a tiny congregation in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker 6: And when he gets here, he brings this dispensationalism he's
Speaker 6: learned from other evangelists and he's a modernizer. He has
Speaker 6: adult education classes correspondents courses on the Bible, and eventually
Speaker 6: he produces something published in nineteen oh nine called the
Speaker 6: Schofield Reference Bible that basically is the King James Bible
Speaker 6: with footnotes that he and his co editors have put
Speaker 6: together where they say, these strange verses in the Book
Speaker 6: of Daniel, in the Book of Revelation that refer to
Speaker 6: beast with seven heads and ten horns, and you know,
Speaker 6: these other strange creatures, and this highly symbolic language has
Speaker 6: a very literal, obvious meaning, and that is the return
Speaker 6: of Jewish people to the state of Israel, and how
Speaker 6: that marks the beginning of the end.
Speaker 5: So the Schofield Reference Bible extremely popular when it comes out.
Speaker 5: It was so popular it didn't save effectively the Oxford
Speaker 5: University Press from going.
Speaker 6: Yeah under during the Great Depression. That was very much
Speaker 6: a possibility that Oxford University Press would go under. And
Speaker 6: Schofield was lucky in some ways that you could put
Speaker 6: it that way because the Reference Bible comes out in
Speaker 6: nineteen oh nine, and four years later, what was at
Speaker 6: that point the most catastrophic war in human history, World
Speaker 6: War One, breaks out with a level of death and
Speaker 6: technology that was unprecedented in its destructiveness. Then the depression happens.
Speaker 6: You have the rise of these fascist dictators, and there's
Speaker 6: a sense that the world as we knew it was collapsing.
Speaker 6: Capitalism might collapse, you know, you might have communists takeover,
Speaker 6: you might have fascist takeover. And then of course World
Speaker 6: War Two, and then finally the thing that really makes
Speaker 6: Schofield seem like he was onto something in terms of
Speaker 6: his Biblical interpretation. And this particular interpretation had been around
Speaker 6: in certain variants for centuries and centuries, but it had
Speaker 6: always been a minority view. But what really made it
Speaker 6: seem like Schofield was onto something was nineteen forty eight
Speaker 6: when the State of Israel is established, the modern state
Speaker 6: of Israel. Because he had been saying this would happen,
Speaker 6: this would be the sign of the end. It becomes
Speaker 6: the point where a lot of churches ministers are measured
Speaker 6: by the degree to which they promote Scofieldism, and Protestant
Speaker 6: churches ministers get fired if they don't begin to talk
Speaker 6: about the end times.
Speaker 5: Schofield kind of won the lottery with timing, and you
Speaker 5: can imagine a world maybe where the Schofield Bible didn't
Speaker 5: take off.
Speaker 6: Because it hadn't come out at that time that it
Speaker 6: did now one of Schofield's acolytes separated by several decades.
Speaker 6: Schofield had been dead for a long time. When you
Speaker 6: have a student at the Dallas Theological Seminary, name how Lindsay,
Speaker 6: who had been a tugboat captain, he is attending this
Speaker 6: particular school, Dallas Theological Seminary had actually been established in
Speaker 6: the nineteen twenties by allies associates of Cyrus Schofield. It
Speaker 6: had been a center of the study of Biblical prophecy.
Speaker 6: And basically Lindsay's a student, and a lot of his
Speaker 6: peers said, basically he took his class notes and turned
Speaker 6: into a book and his real effort. He had been
Speaker 6: a leader in the campus Crusade for Christ, which was
Speaker 6: an evangelical group that was trying to fight the counterculture hippies,
Speaker 6: LSD and so on, and so he had that experience
Speaker 6: and he brought it into the writing of a best
Speaker 6: selling book called The Late Great Planet Earth. And The
Speaker 6: Late Great Planet Earth is written in the language of
Speaker 6: the time. He tries to use hippie type of lingo
Speaker 6: in to catch on with the youth culture and it's
Speaker 6: his timing, just like Schofields is great. This is a
Speaker 6: time where there's an obsession with hidden knowledge. You have
Speaker 6: really popular books selling about the lost continent of Atlantis UFOs,
Speaker 6: the phenomena supposedly a spontaneous human combustion. Did ancient aliens
Speaker 6: build the Pyramids? And if you went to a convenience
Speaker 6: store or a store department store, you might find racks
Speaker 6: of paper books with all this hidden knowledge. And people
Speaker 6: believed that there was something hidden because of Watergate and
Speaker 6: because of Vietnam, and so this became a phenomenal seller.
Speaker 6: It was the best selling quote unquote nonfiction book of
Speaker 6: the nineteen seventies. It later got made into a pseudo
Speaker 6: documentary that was narrated by the movie star Orson Wells.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it was so successful that it was
Speaker 5: like twenty eight million copies by nineteen ninety had been sold.
Speaker 5: And if you've got Orson Wells buttery voice narrating it
Speaker 5: as if it has some real import, certainly, many, many,
Speaker 5: many people were exposed to the ideas of how Lindsay Man.
Speaker 4: Is faced by unprecedented perils threatened to send him crashing.
Speaker 7: And the extention.
Speaker 9: Now from how Lindsay's incredible best selling book comes the film,
Speaker 9: which explores the terrifying.
Speaker 1: Policies of the revelations.
Speaker 4: Here's Our Planet Truly and Mortal Peril.
Speaker 9: The Late Great Planet Earth, featuring Orson Wells.
Speaker 5: But it didn't stop there. Lindsay's book inspired some other
Speaker 5: guys who you may have heard of, these two right
Speaker 5: wing political activists and Christian evangelicals named Tim Lahay and
Speaker 5: Jerry B.
Speaker 7: Jenkins.
Speaker 5: And and they're the creators of the Left Behind series. Now,
Speaker 5: if you don't know the Left Behind series, you may
Speaker 5: have been living under a rock, or maybe you weren't
Speaker 5: born yet. And that's not your fault, but it is
Speaker 5: this publishing empire. At this point, retail giants like Walmart
Speaker 5: stocked the books. They sold eighty million copies, warehouses full
Speaker 5: of merch sequels, prequels, graphic novels, audio books, calendars, greeting cards,
Speaker 5: a shoot them up computer game based on the books.
Speaker 5: All of this stuff was centrally talking about the rapture
Speaker 5: the end times. That's what the Left Behind series was about.
Speaker 5: And those who are left behind are those who were
Speaker 5: not raptured. And these films center on the chaos that
Speaker 5: breaks out right after the rapture, really really popular stuff.
Speaker 5: Will play a quick clip so you can get a
Speaker 5: sense of what that's like.
Speaker 3: He took them to protect them, what from the darkest
Speaker 3: time in the history of this world, persecution.
Speaker 7: And seven years of darkness.
Speaker 10: He took them there.
Speaker 5: The left Behind books, they basically depict Jesus not as
Speaker 5: a source of love and forgiveness, but as this like
Speaker 5: source of vengeance and bloodshed. One person who spoke to
Speaker 5: in the preparation of this episode described him as a
Speaker 5: sort of rambo Jesus, to be compared to mister Rogers Jesus,
Speaker 5: you could say.
Speaker 6: And what's particularly dangerous is sometimes believers in this interpretation
Speaker 6: of the Bible try to make the end times happen
Speaker 6: sooner rather than later. Yeah, I can mention two cases,
Speaker 6: one better known than the other. You had a father's
Speaker 6: son evangelical team called Gardner Ted Armstrong. His father was
Speaker 6: named Herbert W. Armstrong. That a radio broadcasting empire. The
Speaker 6: problem is called the World Tomorrow. And they had college
Speaker 6: campuses in California and in Big Sandy, Texas, unaccredited college,
Speaker 6: unaccredited college absolutely And one person who had listened to
Speaker 6: the armstrongs on the radio, and there's an Australian named
Speaker 6: Michael Dennis Rohan on August twenty first, nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 6: actually travels to the Aloxa Mosque in Jerusalem because he
Speaker 6: believes that's a key focal point of where armageddon is
Speaker 6: going to take place, and he actually starts a fire
Speaker 6: in that mosque, and that's a revered one of those
Speaker 6: holy sites in Islam. And there was a time where
Speaker 6: there was a diplomatic crisis caused by this believer in dispensationalism. Then,
Speaker 6: of course we have what had happened to Waco, where
Speaker 6: you had a sect very much obsessed with en times
Speaker 6: and with this spensationalism led by a man named David
Speaker 6: Koresh nineteen ninety three, he led his followers on this
Speaker 6: fifty one day standoff with federal and state officials over
Speaker 6: the illegal weapons that this group, the Branch Davidians held.
Speaker 6: Eventually you have an exchange of gunfire between the agents
Speaker 6: and the Branch Davidians, and then on April nineteenth, the
Speaker 6: Feds decide to charge in and there's a fire and
Speaker 6: seventy six people die, including twenty five children.
Speaker 5: In the modern day, you know, we've got two hugely
Speaker 5: influential people who promote End Times theology. Now, one of
Speaker 5: them is the biggest political donor in the entire state
Speaker 5: of Texas, more money donated than anyone else. And his
Speaker 5: name is Tim Dunn, and we'll talk about him in
Speaker 5: a second, But first I want to talk about someone
Speaker 5: who is also pretty influential, maybe not as wealthy as
Speaker 5: Tim Dunn, who I should mention got his money through oil.
Speaker 5: But this is a man named John Hagy. He is
Speaker 5: the pastor of a twenty two thousand member church in
Speaker 5: Texas called Cornerstone Church, and I think he has a
Speaker 5: global audience as large as one hundred million people. So
Speaker 5: back in the day, as a twenty eight year old
Speaker 5: young man, he took part in the Wallace Youth, which
Speaker 5: is an organization devoted to supporting the presidential candidacy of
Speaker 5: white supremacist Alabama Governor George Wallace in nineteen sixty eight. Yeah,
Speaker 5: let's just hear from Wallace real quick.
Speaker 11: In the name of the greatest people that I've ever
Speaker 11: taught differ. I've brought a line in the dusk and
Speaker 11: passed the government before the THEATA Turner, and I face segregation. Now,
Speaker 11: Tom and Sarah Gosan forever.
Speaker 5: So since then, in his fifty eight years as a
Speaker 5: non denominational pastor, hage has proven to be as much
Speaker 5: of a lightning rod as Wallace. When Hurricane Katrina killed
Speaker 5: nearly fourteen hundred people in New Orleans in two thousand
Speaker 5: and five, hage insisted the superstorm represented God's wrath at
Speaker 5: a planned gay pripride. I can't even believe that that's real. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so he really said, Oh, you celebrated the gays, and
Speaker 5: so God killed a bunch.
Speaker 7: Of you with a hurricane. He really said that.
Speaker 5: He's also called the Catholic Church a false cult and
Speaker 5: has falsely claimed that Muslims are commanded by the Qur'an
Speaker 5: to kill Christians in Jews. So he's a you know,
Speaker 5: really moderate guy when he comes to his word choice
Speaker 5: in his rhetoric.
Speaker 6: Hagey, for instance, believes that Jewish people are still God's chosen,
Speaker 6: and he often quotes a line from Genesis twelve three,
Speaker 6: twelfth chapter third verse in which God says to Abraham,
Speaker 6: I will bless those who bless you, and curse those
Speaker 6: who curse you, and he interprets that the mean that
Speaker 6: if the United States ever fails to support the State
Speaker 6: of Israel in any of its policies, or if it
Speaker 6: attempts to encourage Israel to trade land for peace, to
Speaker 6: set aside land for the Palestinians to establish their own nation,
Speaker 6: that that leader is violating a divine commandment to quote,
Speaker 6: not divide my land, and there will be terrible consequences.
Speaker 6: So I one dispensationalists pastor basically said that the United
Speaker 6: States has economic problems whenever it fails to support Israel.
Speaker 6: Hagey in twenty fourteen said that a small outbreak of
Speaker 6: the Ebola virus in the United States was God's vengeance
Speaker 6: against President Barack Obama for supporting the establishment of Palestinian state.
Speaker 6: And of course, when that is a big attitude amongst
Speaker 6: a really significant block of voters, that makes the United
Speaker 6: States really have problems when it tries to mediate in
Speaker 6: that conflict.
Speaker 5: We'll talk a little bit more about John Hagey. Right
Speaker 5: after this ad break, you might be asking, who cares
Speaker 5: about this guy John hagy Like, why does his interpretation
Speaker 5: of the Bible matter at all? Why does what he
Speaker 5: say have anything to do with my life? And there's
Speaker 5: a number of reasons why it matters. So, I mean,
Speaker 5: he could be considered the most important leader of the
Speaker 5: Christian Zionist movement for starters. He formed an organization in
Speaker 5: two thousand and six called Christians United for Israel, which
Speaker 5: has like a reported ten million members in the United States.
Speaker 5: Not sure how accurate or real that is, but you know,
Speaker 5: he has donated through his organizations more than fifty eight
Speaker 5: million dollars to right wing extremists in Israel's specifically ones
Speaker 5: that have you know, sponsored settlers to move to the
Speaker 5: occupied West Bank.
Speaker 7: In you know, violation of international law.
Speaker 5: And he's, you know, he's pushed Congress to take a
Speaker 5: hard line on the Palestinian issue of Palestinian statehood. He
Speaker 5: has the ear of elected officials in Texas state level
Speaker 5: politicians like Greg Gabbott and Dan Patrick have been seen
Speaker 5: with him at campaign events, have featured him at campaign events.
Speaker 5: Hagey has tried to you know, influence a number of
Speaker 5: issues and has had success. He was sought as someone
Speaker 5: whose endorsement mattered in the presidential elections of George H. W.
Speaker 7: Bush and George W. Bush.
Speaker 5: He was an early supporter of Donald Trump, and he
Speaker 5: influences the other major pastors as well, And so it's
Speaker 5: hard to say that people like this don't matter, particularly
Speaker 5: whenever you know they have been invited to speak during
Speaker 5: big events like the March for Israel in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: which drew tens of thousands of people to Washington, DC.
Speaker 7: And who was there, John Hage.
Speaker 6: And here's one of the paradoxes of this movement. When
Speaker 6: Hage was invited to speak at this pro Israel event
Speaker 6: after the October seventh Hamas attacks in Neurope, Israeli Kibbutz
Speaker 6: Hage was invited and a lot of Jewish people were
Speaker 6: horrified because he really does capture one the central paradoxes
Speaker 6: of dispensationalism, and that is someone can be inflexibly pro
Speaker 6: Israel in anti Semitic at the same time. And so
Speaker 6: John Hagen is promoted a very old anti Semitic myth
Speaker 6: that rich Jewish people control the world's finances. He talks
Speaker 6: about the Rothschild family, which has always been an obsession
Speaker 6: of anti Semites. You know, the secret puppet masters of
Speaker 6: the world, you know who rob the typical, the average
Speaker 6: person of money to gain wealth. They cause wars to
Speaker 6: enrich themselves. He actually described Hitler based on nothing as
Speaker 6: a half breed Jew, and he said that Hitler was
Speaker 6: sent by God himself. So he's Hitler was an emissary
Speaker 6: of God as a hunter to persecute Jews in Europe
Speaker 6: in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties, specifically for the
Speaker 6: purpose of forcing them to leave Europe and settle in Palestine.
Speaker 6: And you know, he said that this was all part
Speaker 6: of the Divine plan. Nazism was part of the Divine plan.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but don't just take our word for it. You
Speaker 5: can listen to him say something along these lines right now, How.
Speaker 9: Did it happen because God allowed it to happen. Why
Speaker 9: did it happen because God said, my top priority for
Speaker 9: the Jewish people is to get them.
Speaker 10: To come back to the land of Israel.
Speaker 9: Today Israel is back in the land, and they are
Speaker 9: at Hisequel thirty seven and eight. They're physically alive, but
Speaker 9: they're not spiritually alive. Now, how is God going to
Speaker 9: cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive? And say,
Speaker 9: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he is God.
Speaker 5: So yeah, you know, hege has predicted that the Antichrist
Speaker 5: will be a half breed gay Jew and will rule
Speaker 5: the planet on behalf of Satan. Those are the kinds
Speaker 5: of things that he believes and he spreads. And in
Speaker 5: spite of statements like these, several Israeli governments have welcome
Speaker 5: to the support of right wing and times past like Hagy.
Speaker 5: I mean, they don't have any issue with working with
Speaker 5: someone like Hagy. And obviously that relationship is cynical because
Speaker 5: you know, people like Hagy are able to help bring
Speaker 5: material resources to Israel and further solidify the relationship that
Speaker 5: Israel has with the state of Texas.
Speaker 6: And there's a real interesting synthusis between the far right
Speaker 6: in Texas and the very right wing government that rules Israel.
Speaker 6: Now Israel depends on Texas oil. Many of the weapons
Speaker 6: Israel is using in its warren Gonza are manufactured in Texas,
Speaker 6: including in the Dallas Fort Worth area where Steve and
Speaker 6: I are having this conversation. You have some of the
Speaker 6: wealthiest American supporters of Israel, like hyper conservatives such as
Speaker 6: the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Addison, who have
Speaker 6: spent quite a bit of money flying Texas politicians like
Speaker 6: Governor Greg Abbott, the agricultural Commissioner, said Miller, members of
Speaker 6: the state legislature to Israel to promote close business ties
Speaker 6: and to ensure that weapons manufactured in Texas and that
Speaker 6: Texas oil flows to that state.
Speaker 5: In the background of all of this is the money,
Speaker 5: the money backing these politicians, and the largest and most
Speaker 5: powerful political donor in Texas is someone who we have
Speaker 5: mentioned already, billionaire oil man Tim Dunn. So Tim Dunn,
Speaker 5: who is he? What's his deal? He's a pastor, He's
Speaker 5: based in Midland, which is in West Texas, and over
Speaker 5: the last decade, Dunn has dumped tens of millions of
Speaker 5: dollars into the campaign coffers of far right politicians and
Speaker 5: political action committees that promote sendiary messages, including the one
Speaker 5: group that I previously mentioned was caught meeting with a
Speaker 5: self admitted Hitler fan, Nick went Is. Nevertheless, Dunn is
Speaker 5: named alongside Hagey on the annual list of Israel's top
Speaker 5: fifty Christian Allies published by the Israel Allies Foundation, of
Speaker 5: which Done incidentally is the chairman of the It's like
Speaker 5: the Christian Advisory Board.
Speaker 3: So yeah, this really really.
Speaker 5: Powerful donor who has his thumb on the scales all
Speaker 5: across the state. He too is an End Times prophecy believer.
Speaker 5: And he's not just a believer. He preaches it at
Speaker 5: his own church in Midland, where he's a pastor.
Speaker 8: God is a consuming fire taking vengeance on those who
Speaker 8: do not know God and on those who do not
Speaker 8: obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The word
Speaker 8: obey means listen to, So we're talking here about unbelievers.
Speaker 8: These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence
Speaker 8: of the Lord and from the glory of His power.
Speaker 5: And you know, it's completely changed the nature of the
Speaker 5: Republican Party his influence. They were already conservative and already
Speaker 5: religious to begin with, but the sort of wave of
Speaker 5: politicians that have been supported by Dunn has taken that
Speaker 5: to a new level.
Speaker 6: And you know, I mean it's resulted in, I think,
Speaker 6: a real assault on free speech in the state of Texas.
Speaker 6: We have religious groups like Christians United for Israel in
Speaker 6: the Texas Eagle Forum lobbing the state legislature and persuading
Speaker 6: politicians like Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick were sympathetic to
Speaker 6: their agenda to pass laws that limit the way people
Speaker 6: who oppose Israeli policies can protests. So, for instance, twenty seventeen,
Speaker 6: Texas passed Hospill eighty nine, a law that banned the
Speaker 6: stay from doing any business with any company or individual
Speaker 6: contractors who participate in the boycott of Israel that many
Speaker 6: activists have participated in. And on March twenty seventh of
Speaker 6: this year, when you began to have a wave of
Speaker 6: protests across the nation and in Texas, and there were
Speaker 6: major protests at the UT Austin campus at the University
Speaker 6: of Texas at Dallas, which is in a suburb called Richardson,
Speaker 6: another one at the University of North Texas UT Arlington,
Speaker 6: University of Texas at San Antonio. Abbott responded to these
Speaker 6: protests by issuing an executive order that defined a common
Speaker 6: slogan chanted by supporters of Palestinian statehood from the River
Speaker 6: to the Sea Palace Steine will be Free, as anti
Speaker 6: SeMet and it required public colleges and universities to review
Speaker 6: their free speech policies and to punish what the state
Speaker 6: regards as anti Semitic speech by faculty and students. And
Speaker 6: it targeted two specific groups, two student groups, the Palestine
Speaker 6: Solidarity Committee and students for Justice and Palestine to be
Speaker 6: disciplined for violating these policies the State of Texas saying
Speaker 6: these words are forbidden.
Speaker 5: Indeed, and despite the fact that the University of Texas
Speaker 5: at Austin had issued a video celebrating their so called
Speaker 5: free speech Week, I think it was just a matter
Speaker 5: of months before they arrested one hundred and thirty six
Speaker 5: pro Palestinian.
Speaker 7: Demonstrators at the University of Texas at Austin.
Speaker 5: All across the state, we've seen pro Palestinian protests or
Speaker 5: what you could call anti genocide protests or calls for
Speaker 5: divestment at these various universities, and arrests have happened at
Speaker 5: least three different universities.
Speaker 6: I mentioned earlier a paradox in dispensationalism, and that is
Speaker 6: that some of the people who have absolute devotion to
Speaker 6: promoting the state of Israel are at the same time antisemitic.
Speaker 6: And another paradox is that Schofield himself, Cyrus Schofield himself
Speaker 6: said that Jesus wasn't into politics. He said that when
Speaker 6: Jesus was alive, slavery, inequality of wealth, all of these
Speaker 6: political pressure were all at their worse and Jesus and
Speaker 6: his apostles didn't address any of that. They focus on salvation.
Speaker 6: That Christianity is not about changing this world, because this
Speaker 6: world is doomed and the only person who's going to
Speaker 6: fix anything is Jesus himself. But nevertheless, these dispensationalists at
Speaker 6: the same time are very happy to be involved in
Speaker 6: politics that's not involved in social or form. They don't
Speaker 6: want you to. You know, Schofield was living at a
Speaker 6: time of progressive movement when they were trying to end
Speaker 6: child labor, trying to make workplaces safer, and so on.
Speaker 6: Today we're dealing with issues of wealth, inequality and so on.
Speaker 6: The dispensationalists will say, believing that humans can fix those
Speaker 6: problems with satanic But nevertheless, you should be involved in
Speaker 6: politics if it involves denying women sovereignty over their bodies,
Speaker 6: if it involves banning people from gender affirming care and
Speaker 6: so on, but that politics is okay and so and
Speaker 6: we see this with this activism and trying to suppress
Speaker 6: a particular side of the Israel Palestine.
Speaker 5: Debate, right, And I think that if that strain of
Speaker 5: dispensationalism that's Schofield represented, that sort of a political dispensationalism.
Speaker 5: If it still exists, it is certainly no longer dominant
Speaker 5: because today, you know, we're seeing this end times theology,
Speaker 5: this belief in this theory around the end times, it's
Speaker 5: increasingly overlapping with other sort of distinct trends in Christianity.
Speaker 5: So on the one hand, there's things like the prosperity Gospel,
Speaker 5: which is, you know, best represented by Kenneth Copeland. He's
Speaker 5: the richest pastor in all of the United States, and
Speaker 5: his whole thing is, yeah, if you know you give,
Speaker 5: you get and so you give me your money and
Speaker 5: you prove that you're you know, holy person, you will
Speaker 5: be rewarded. In turn, you will be healed, all of
Speaker 5: your things will be solved. And then the other thing
Speaker 5: that it's overlapping with this end times theology belief is
Speaker 5: what you know, we might just call the Seven Mountains
Speaker 5: dominionist trend or dominionism broadly speaking, which you may or
Speaker 5: may not be familiar with, but it really just breaks
Speaker 5: down to this idea that Christians should be at the
Speaker 5: top of all of the mountains of society, and these
Speaker 5: are just you know, basically stand ins for the segments
Speaker 5: of society they think are important, so education, media, politics,
Speaker 5: what have you. This is a really growing idea as
Speaker 5: a sort of meme in right wing Christianity in these
Speaker 5: sort of non denominational churches, which are the fastest growing
Speaker 5: and largest segment of churches I think we're talking about.
Speaker 6: And those dominionists are the ones who are taking over
Speaker 6: these school boards that are adopting the anti trans policies
Speaker 6: and also banning the books.
Speaker 5: That's right, and it is a very active form of Christianity,
Speaker 5: very politically active, and so through people like Hagey and
Speaker 5: you know, people like Tim Dunn, we see that embodied
Speaker 5: in what they do. The sort of advocate can see
Speaker 5: that John Hagy takes part in in the millions and
Speaker 5: millions of dollars that Tim Dunn dumps into the state
Speaker 5: of Texas.
Speaker 6: And you could almost characterize the Republican Party in Texas,
Speaker 6: which is one of the most important state wings of
Speaker 6: the Republican Party in the United States, as a wholly
Speaker 6: owned done subsidiary. You know. He really many of the
Speaker 6: most infamous Texas politicians in this era, such as Ken Paxton,
Speaker 6: are generously supported by Dounn. And so I think that
Speaker 6: if we kind of wrap this up, I think that
Speaker 6: we could say that the disdain from activism that dispensationalists
Speaker 6: claim is a ruse that activism is bad if it
Speaker 6: advances any attempt to create equal opportunity, reduce income inequality.
Speaker 6: And dispensationalists vote and they with Texas as one of
Speaker 6: the major bases for dispensationalism, they are a hugely influential
Speaker 6: budding block. Thirty nine percent of Americans have told polsters
Speaker 6: that they believe we're living in the end times. And
Speaker 6: the simple fact is, if you think the world's going
Speaker 6: to end, you're not going to invest much time in
Speaker 6: making the world better, making it a more just place.
Speaker 6: You're not going to try to clean the water, clean
Speaker 6: the air. Half of Evangelical Protestants in the United States
Speaker 6: believe that supporting Israel is absolutely essential to fulfilling Bible prophecy,
Speaker 6: and that group constitutes a third of all adult Texans.
Speaker 6: And they want to love Israel to death because they
Speaker 6: believe that if they push Israel to annex the West Bank,
Speaker 6: to take the most aggressive standards Palestinians, that will provoke
Speaker 6: the of the Antichrist, which will lead to arm again.
Speaker 6: And they're willing to make that sacrifice. They're willing to
Speaker 6: fight for the Second Coming to happen down to the
Speaker 6: last Jewish person. And this is creating instability for the
Speaker 6: world and putting the United States in a very difficult
Speaker 6: place in the world stage, and the chain of events
Speaker 6: leading to our position currently visa the Middle East can
Speaker 6: be drawn back to this state.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 5: And I think one thing that I really want to
Speaker 5: emphasize that we haven't dived into as much as we
Speaker 5: could have, is that this sort of belief system tends
Speaker 5: towards dehumanization. So if you believe that your opponents are
Speaker 5: in league with the devil, or are Satanic, or are
Speaker 5: doing the bidding of evil, and that you are on
Speaker 5: the side of good unequivocally and you are doing the
Speaker 5: Lord's work, it is e easy to treat your opponents
Speaker 5: as inhuman, less than human, to see them as other
Speaker 5: than someone who has equal rights and equal standing.
Speaker 6: And if you're wondering if it could happen here, it
Speaker 6: meaning fascism in many ways. It's happened in Texas already,
Speaker 6: and we have a large population here. As they wait
Speaker 6: for the end, they're building walls around the lives of
Speaker 6: more than thirty million people who live in this state.
Speaker 12: I'm Stephen MANCHELLI, I'm Michael Phillips. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 2: Oh what indicted by the FBI, my several people I
Speaker 2: don't like it could happen here a podcast about things
Speaker 2: falling apart, and today this week, well for the last
Speaker 2: couple of weeks, the thing that's fallen apart is Tenet Media.
Speaker 2: This is not related to Christopher Nolan, that we can
Speaker 2: prove at this exact moment. It is instead a media
Speaker 2: adventure starring a bunch of assholes that turned out to
Speaker 2: all be an op by the Russian government, and none
Speaker 2: of said assholes claim they knew anything, even though they
Speaker 2: got paid one hundred thousand dollars a video. Anyway, We're
Speaker 2: going to talk about all that and more today, but
Speaker 2: I'm going to bring onto the program now my co hosts,
Speaker 2: Garrison Davis and James Stout.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 13: I'm not getting one hundred k per episode here, but
Speaker 13: if I was, I certainly wouldn't tell the government now
Speaker 13: that it was actually a foreign government that's saying me.
Speaker 10: I would keep tweeting about it.
Speaker 2: Fun fact about both of you guys, Before we get
Speaker 2: into this. If you reverse your last names, you sound
Speaker 2: like Confederate era generals.
Speaker 10: Garrison Stout, James Davis like.
Speaker 2: Names Davis s Garrison Stout.
Speaker 10: Yeah, oh yeah, all right, yeah, yeah, that's sod. That
Speaker 10: is our secret backstory. We had to actually switch them
Speaker 10: when we joined cool Zone Media due to a Confederate tie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the fact that you're one hundred and ninety
Speaker 2: years old. So Garrison, you want to take us off here?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So Tene Media was this kind of small right wings
Speaker 13: startup that hired a whole bunch of more well known
Speaker 13: content creators on the right wing sphere, from like Tim Poole,
Speaker 13: Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern. Yeah, people who are
Speaker 13: either just like conservative commentators or you know, in someone
Speaker 13: like Lauren Southern's case has been like an alt right
Speaker 13: kind of white supremacist media figure for quite a while.
Speaker 13: And they put together this little collection of people to
Speaker 13: make like content for Tenants on YouTube channel as well
Speaker 13: as licensing some of their regular content. And this company
Speaker 13: was ostensibly started by another right wing YouTuber named Lauren
Speaker 13: Chen and her husband Liam Donovan. Chen's been like on
Speaker 13: Fox News News Max Daily Wire and was employed at
Speaker 13: the Blaze, where she's no longer employed based on the
Speaker 13: allocations inside this DOJ indictment. So yeah, it was a
Speaker 13: small collection, not super kind of noteworthy. Honestly, in a
Speaker 13: lot of cases, lots of people weren't super familiar with
Speaker 13: tenet media. I know they also hired like Taylor Hanson,
Speaker 13: who was kind of one of the first guys to
Speaker 13: report on grooming LGBTQ stuff like a few years ago.
Speaker 2: That's kind of what was immediately weird about them to
Speaker 2: everyone who pays attention to this stuff is that their
Speaker 2: videos did not get a crazy amount of engagement. They
Speaker 2: were clearly not an established like they came out of nowhere,
Speaker 2: but they had money, the money to pay for people
Speaker 2: who weren't cheap. Timpool, if you don't know, Tim is
Speaker 2: one of the most profitable influencers on the right wing
Speaker 2: chunks of the Internet. He's a guy who kind of
Speaker 2: got his start as a citizen journalist during occupy. Really,
Speaker 2: he's one of these guys. All he does is he
Speaker 2: gets on he reads news articles, he reads the headlines
Speaker 2: of news articles. He talks about how we're all doomed
Speaker 2: to left wing terrorism or whatever, and then he makes
Speaker 2: millions of dollars. He's a frustrating individual to say the least,
Speaker 2: but he doesn't come cheap, and Hansen also doesn't come cheap.
Speaker 2: Dave Rubin is not an inexpensive person to bring onto
Speaker 2: your team. So it was kind of clear from the
Speaker 2: beginning there's a lot of money behind this thing that
Speaker 2: seems to have come out of nowhere. Whose money is it?
Speaker 13: And that is what the federal government's been trying to
Speaker 13: figure out. And we have now a better indication on
Speaker 13: where all of these kind of right wing content firms,
Speaker 13: or at least this one who's employing some very unforunch
Speaker 13: of people, where they are getting some of their money from.
Speaker 13: Because there's a lot of money flying around this space.
Speaker 13: Lots of these guys are obviously filled by like fossil
Speaker 13: fuel billionaires.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 13: You can look at like the early funding for The
Speaker 13: Daily Wired that has a lot of money, but for this,
Speaker 13: for this smaller, kind of lesser known company, how are
Speaker 13: they paying one hundred thousand dollars per episode to these guys?
Speaker 2: And it's also the Daily Wire definitely started inorganically by
Speaker 2: getting a lot of fossil fuel money pumped into it.
Speaker 2: But one thing you have to hand it to them,
Speaker 2: is they built a business that is a functional business, right,
Speaker 2: they are now profitable in their own regard, or at
Speaker 2: least were. There's some evidence their traffic collapsed recently, but
Speaker 2: you saw you saw them have a growth curve that
Speaker 2: looked pretty organic for a media organization, which you didn't
Speaker 2: see with Tenant.
Speaker 3: No no.
Speaker 13: And it seems the only way to actually pay these
Speaker 13: millions and millions of dollars to all these people is
Speaker 13: if you are actually the government of Russia who is
Speaker 13: starting covert operations that's their words, not mine, to influence
Speaker 13: the US election by like both talking about like Ukraine,
Speaker 13: using these mouthpieces, but also just kind of so general division,
Speaker 13: which seems to be kind of the main tactic. And
Speaker 13: Robert elected to actually go through some of this g's
Speaker 13: twenty three page indictment and kind of hopefully we can
Speaker 13: find some of some of the some of the better
Speaker 13: funnier little tidbits here, because there's a lot of interesting
Speaker 13: information about kind of the inter workings of some of
Speaker 13: these media groups and how exactly Timpoole was convinced by
Speaker 13: a Russian agent.
Speaker 10: Yeah, a Russian agent pretending to be three different people.
Speaker 13: Pretending to be some mysterious European billionaire.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the document starts with some stuff that I
Speaker 2: had been unaware, which is that you know, because Russia
Speaker 2: Today is kind of the first large Russian government affiliated
Speaker 2: media organization that has been like putting up propaganda in
Speaker 2: the United States, and the FBI has been watching them
Speaker 2: like a hawk. And so they quote here from the
Speaker 2: editor in chief of RT after the expanded Russian invasion
Speaker 2: in February twenty twenty two, when he describes Russia Today,
Speaker 2: which has always argued that it's a legitimate news organization,
Speaker 2: as an entire empire of covert projects designed to shape
Speaker 2: public opinion in Western audiences. And one of these covert
Speaker 2: projects it described as the funding of what we now
Speaker 2: know is Tenant Media. Right, it's described in these documents
Speaker 2: because their indictments as a Tennessee based online creation company,
Speaker 2: but it's it can only be referring to Tenant Media.
Speaker 13: As employees have since admitted that, yes, it is for
Speaker 13: sure to Tenant Media.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, there's no doubt about this. We're not like
Speaker 2: reading into the what the FED said here at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So they spent over the course of about a year
Speaker 2: ten million dollars. I think it's actually was more like
Speaker 2: nine point six, but ten million dollars basically just buying
Speaker 2: these influencers.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: First off, things we could do with ten million dollars yeah,
Speaker 2: oh oh, James, we'd be sailing to me and Maar
Speaker 2: and on a pallet kill rocket launchers.
Speaker 10: The things that their military could do with ten billion dollars.
Speaker 2: That's sending dude to the front with as off plates. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's anyway. Whatever. So the kind of key detail there
Speaker 2: is how much they were making per one of these
Speaker 2: dog shit videos, which is about one hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 2: per YouTube video. That's what Tim was getting. I think
Speaker 2: Dave Rubin was getting close to just half a million
Speaker 2: a month to do like a weekly video. So when
Speaker 2: that is the kind of money we're.
Speaker 13: Talking about, and Tim was also being paid one hundred
Speaker 13: thousand dollars per weekly video as well. He was making
Speaker 13: one video a week. That was what he decided on
Speaker 13: his contract. So he's breaking in at least four hundred thousand,
Speaker 13: if not five hundred thousand dollars a month.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and then they had signing and download bonuses on
Speaker 10: top of that.
Speaker 2: Which is like even for them is more than you
Speaker 2: could get on YouTube for the kind of traffic that
Speaker 2: they get. That is that is like the top one
Speaker 2: percent of the top one percent of YouTube creators are
Speaker 2: making money like that, and certainly no one with the
Speaker 2: kind of views these tenivities we're getting. So anyway, Garrison,
Speaker 2: you've got a clip to play.
Speaker 13: Yeah, here's here's a here's a clip that's definitely a
Speaker 13: totally genuine opinion. Not impacted by those one hundred thousand
Speaker 13: dollars of Tim Poole talking about Ukraine.
Speaker 10: Trigger war, most annoying man on earth.
Speaker 14: This is psychotic. Ukraine is the enemy of this country.
Speaker 14: Ukraine is our enemy being funded by the Democrats. I
Speaker 14: will stress again one of the greatest enemies of our
Speaker 14: nation right now is Ukraine. They are expanding this war now,
Speaker 14: don't get me wrong. I know you've got criminal elements
Speaker 14: of the US government pushing them and guiding them and
Speaker 14: telling them what to do. Ukraine is now accused a
Speaker 14: German warrant issued for blowing up the nord Stream pipeline
Speaker 14: in triggering this conflict. Ukraine is the greatest threat to
Speaker 14: this nation and to the world. We should rescind all
Speaker 14: funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we
Speaker 14: should apologize to Russia.
Speaker 13: Interesting, I wonder what would compel a man to say that, huh, curious,
Speaker 13: very curious.
Speaker 2: There's no way to know garrison. So, since they publicly
Speaker 2: launched in November of last year, Tenant Media posted almost
Speaker 2: two thousand videos. I got about sixteen million views. And
Speaker 2: sixteen million views is a lot for a YouTube channel,
Speaker 2: but not if you've put out two thousand videos. So again,
Speaker 2: that's what I mean when I say, like, this is
Speaker 2: not the kind of audience that you would get this
Speaker 2: kind of money organically for, right, Like this was obviously
Speaker 2: and I mentioned this because this is obviously suspicious to
Speaker 2: the creators. You cannot be Timpoole is not a smart man,
Speaker 2: but you cannot work for YouTube the way that he
Speaker 2: has and not know that something is fucked up with
Speaker 2: the money.
Speaker 10: Just if you're not a mental arithmetician like myself. That
Speaker 10: is eight thousand views video. Yeah, I made a video
Speaker 10: once about how to use hiking polls, which has around
Speaker 10: that many views.
Speaker 2: I have a video that I fucked up when filming
Speaker 2: another video while I was reviewing products fifteen years ago,
Speaker 2: before anyone knew who I was that has more than.
Speaker 10: Eight years, Like where's all money, Vladimir.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, come on, Vladimir, Like I'll there's a lot
Speaker 2: I'll do for half a million dollars.
Speaker 13: Well, And I think part of this as well is
Speaker 13: not just trying to prop up ten and own news itself.
Speaker 13: It's making these specific content creators lives more comfortable, because
Speaker 13: the better that these guys do, that's all that Russia
Speaker 13: is like interested in, as alleged in this document, right,
Speaker 13: It's that they just want to make sure that these
Speaker 13: guys can still talk about Ukraine as certainly as like
Speaker 13: this like evil and how Russia is like the traditionalist
Speaker 13: Christian empire and right wing resistance to globalist domination. But
Speaker 13: in terms of like just wanting to amplify US domestic
Speaker 13: divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core government
Speaker 13: of Russia's interests in the ongoing war in Ukraine. As
Speaker 13: said in the document, all they need to do is
Speaker 13: just make sure these guys are having a lot of money,
Speaker 13: so like their comfortable tenant doesn't need to be like
Speaker 13: a successful media operation where like they're making more money
Speaker 13: on YouTube than they're paying their influences. And that's not
Speaker 13: the point. The point is just to give these guys
Speaker 13: a lot of money to keep talking the way they're talking.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: What was also interesting to me, and this comes from
Speaker 2: a Wired article. Wired downloaded as many of these videos
Speaker 2: as they could and then ran them through. This is
Speaker 2: actually one of the un journalistic uses for these large
Speaker 2: language models. They ran them through like one of those
Speaker 2: machine learning algorithms to just kind of look at how
Speaker 2: often different subjects are mentioned, because no human being could
Speaker 2: analyze that many videos with any kind of like speed, right,
Speaker 2: And one thing they found is that Ukraine, which you
Speaker 2: would imagine being the focus of a horrific war that
Speaker 2: is bleeding. Russia's military was mentioned about like a third
Speaker 2: as often as transgender people. The vast majority of the
Speaker 2: content was US culture war stuff right like woke is
Speaker 2: much more of a focus than anything to do directly
Speaker 2: with Russian military operations or Russian like government like what
Speaker 2: you would imagine, right, And the reason for that is
Speaker 2: that they see it as number one, building a sense
Speaker 2: of solidarity between American conservatives and Russia, which is largely imaginary.
Speaker 2: I'll be talking about this in an episode later, but
Speaker 2: like Russia is not the country a lot of conservatives
Speaker 2: in the US think it is. But more to the point,
Speaker 2: it's just sort of stoking division, right, rather than actually
Speaker 2: needing to change American minds on Ukraine in much of
Speaker 2: a concerted way. Like if you kind of keep them
Speaker 2: ginned up and angry about everything the quote unquote left
Speaker 2: is doing, they will be against supporting Ukrainian resistance anyway, right,
Speaker 2: And that's the bet the Russians made, very very astutely,
Speaker 2: and it seems to be paying off for them. One
Speaker 2: of the more interesting facts here is that one of
Speaker 2: the primary contacts, this is one of the people who
Speaker 2: has been indicted, who was working with you know, Pool
Speaker 2: and these other creators, is an employee of Russia today
Speaker 2: with the perfect spy name, Constantine Kalashnikov. Just amazing stuff.
Speaker 3: How is that literally their day? Yeah? How do they
Speaker 3: not just change it?
Speaker 2: We call it a Kalashnikov because the guy's name was Kalashnikov.
Speaker 13: It's just lovely, it's just beautiful.
Speaker 2: It's breathtaking because if you put a character with that
Speaker 2: name in a Bond film, everyone would be like, come on, man,
Speaker 2: it's not nineteen sixty five anymore. What are we doing here?
Speaker 2: But that that's just the person's actual name. It beautiful.
Speaker 2: So they had a couple of fake personas within the company,
Speaker 2: but this was a person who like directly talked to
Speaker 2: the employees of people like Pool, the editors and whatnot
Speaker 2: without disclosing that he worked at Russia. Today now there's
Speaker 2: evidence that people who worked for some of these creators
Speaker 2: in their discords, like editors and whatnot, saw this as
Speaker 2: deeply suspicious. Probably the most interesting came from when we
Speaker 2: now know it was Tucker Carlson posted a video during
Speaker 2: his trip in Moscow like where he was going to
Speaker 2: a Russian grocery store to be like, look, Russia has
Speaker 2: grocery stores. Everything's fine here. His editor in the discord
Speaker 2: was like, this seems like a little much what are
Speaker 2: we doing here basically, and the statement made was along
Speaker 2: the lines of like, you know, this is what the
Speaker 2: people paying us want us to get out right, which
Speaker 2: is clear evidence that people were aware of what they
Speaker 2: were doing to some extent.
Speaker 13: At least among like the tenant media producers, there was
Speaker 13: a growing awareness of what was actually going on. Obviously,
Speaker 13: all of the on air talent still maintains that they
Speaker 13: are the victims of an international conspiracy.
Speaker 2: In a victim pays, I guess, oh.
Speaker 13: My god, and no, I think one of one of
Speaker 13: the funniest parts is definitely this fake European businessman. I
Speaker 13: believe he's referred to as Edward Grengorian.
Speaker 3: Yes, this was very funny, but.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about Edward. Let's let's throw to ads first
Speaker 2: and then we'll get back to this and we're back, Garrison,
Speaker 2: Let's talk about Edward.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So in the document they talked about how Kalashnikov, this
Speaker 13: other RT person, as well as Tenants founders worked together
Speaker 13: to deceive commentators one and two, who we believe are
Speaker 13: our Timpool and Dave Rubin. The point was to let
Speaker 13: leverage their existing audiences and license their videos they were
Speaker 13: already making. So together the RT people and the Tenant
Speaker 13: founders tried to trick Pool and who we believe is
Speaker 13: Ruben into thinking that the person providing these one hundred
Speaker 13: thousand dollars per episodes was a European businessman and private
Speaker 13: investor named Edward Gregorian, which is a wonderful a wonderful
Speaker 13: fake name. And this was not real person. This was
Speaker 13: a completely faked person. At some point, I believe Dave
Speaker 13: Ruben or Commentator number one requested that the founder provide
Speaker 13: like a profile or an article.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was commentator too that wanted to know more
Speaker 2: about the quote. Would like to know more about the
Speaker 2: company and who he will be working with.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so they asked for like this, like one page
Speaker 13: profile on like who this guy was, And this was
Speaker 13: provided and he was described as an accomplished finance professional
Speaker 13: who had various positions in Brussels and France multi National Bank,
Speaker 13: including the director of private Banking division and wealth management.
Speaker 2: The one page on this guy who is supposedly their investor,
Speaker 2: shows an obvious stock photo of a man on a
Speaker 2: private jet with his face blurred out face blood. Yeah
Speaker 2: that's what's that? Looks real? Yeah, not sketchy at all.
Speaker 2: This is this is an actual guy quote. Founder one
Speaker 2: transmitted the Edward Gregorian profile to Commentator one, who is
Speaker 2: either Pool or Ruben.
Speaker 3: We believe it's Reuben.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that one's Ruben because Tim wouldn't have
Speaker 2: asked for more details, Honor. About May twelfth, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: Founder one reported to Persona one that Commentator one had
Speaker 2: a problem with the profile we sent over, specifically the
Speaker 2: reference to social justice. I think it may be because
Speaker 2: that's usually a term used by liberals, but we're trying
Speaker 2: to create a conservative network. Founder one suggested that Commentator
Speaker 2: one and Edward could simply speak together to clarify the profile.
Speaker 13: Yes, and I know there was a secure call between
Speaker 13: a Russian ation pretending to be miss Gregorian to Tempoole,
Speaker 13: and allegedly this this other call with Commentator one, who
Speaker 13: we think is Ruben. So there was like conversations between
Speaker 13: like Rubin and Pool with people like further involved in
Speaker 13: the actual like espionage parts of this and the actual
Speaker 13: like you're talking to people affiliated was like Russian spies
Speaker 13: in order to like sell this lie.
Speaker 10: I did find it very funny. Where did you read
Speaker 10: the section where they sort of did a forensic analysis
Speaker 10: of the three persona's email accounts.
Speaker 3: No, I'm not fun up in doing it yet.
Speaker 10: So they had three different personas, so all access from
Speaker 10: the same IP address and had different were presenting a
Speaker 10: three different individuals, right with three different email accounts. Obviously,
Speaker 10: the DOJ has been able to get access to those
Speaker 10: email accounts, and they found that the people using those
Speaker 10: email accounts made mistakes in signing them. So one was
Speaker 10: supposed to come from PERSONA three, but they mistakenly signed
Speaker 10: it Edward Gregorian. And another time PERSONA one sent a
Speaker 10: draft of email to person to two, which percent to
Speaker 10: two then coll beet and pasted into an email like
Speaker 10: the object was extremely poor. Yeah, it would seem, and
Speaker 10: it didn't set anyone off to kind.
Speaker 2: Of make that point in terms of like what's happening
Speaker 2: to these guys right now. What they've been indicted for
Speaker 2: is violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Like, if
Speaker 2: you are acting as the agent of a foreign government,
Speaker 2: you have to register in the United States. You have
Speaker 2: a freedom of speech, but you don't have freedom to
Speaker 2: create propaganda for another government and pretend that you're not right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so you know, obviously one of the things the
Speaker 2: Feds needed to indict them is evidence that they knew,
Speaker 2: specifically they were being employed by the Russian government, Right
Speaker 2: that like the Russians hadn't somehow snuck money to the
Speaker 2: people who founded Tenant Media, Right. And so at one
Speaker 2: point Founder two gets on the Investor Discord channel to
Speaker 2: submit one of the influencers, I think it's Ruben's invoices
Speaker 2: to PERSONA one and press for payment of those invoices
Speaker 2: on September eleventh, twenty twenty three, never forget at a
Speaker 2: post roximately eight oh seven pm Central time, Founder two
Speaker 2: wrote in that Discord channel. Today marks two weeks since
Speaker 2: I submitted the invoice for August. Any idea for the
Speaker 2: delay We are signing the large contracts. We need to
Speaker 2: be certain we will get the funding to pay these
Speaker 2: people while waiting for a response, they searched for the
Speaker 2: current time in Moscow. So yes, unbelievable OPSEC like giving
Speaker 2: the government absolute knowledge of intent.
Speaker 13: I mean similarly earlier on in the document quote in
Speaker 13: their private respondence. While working directly for RT pursue want
Speaker 13: to founder one's written contract, Founder one and Founder two
Speaker 13: regularly referred to their sponsor as the Russians, and for example,
Speaker 13: Honor about May twelfth, twenty twenty one, Founder two message
Speaker 13: Founder one on Discord, quote, so we're billing the Russians
Speaker 13: from the corporation, right, Honor about May twenty second, Founder
Speaker 13: one message Founder two on Discord. Also the Russians paid,
Speaker 13: so we're good to build them for the second month.
Speaker 13: I guess nailed it, Honor about Founder one, message Founder
Speaker 13: two on Discord. Also, I say we build the Russians
Speaker 13: for the last month. Once we're done the extrafens.
Speaker 2: I wonder if they knew they were working for the
Speaker 2: Russian government.
Speaker 3: There's a lot more that's just like this.
Speaker 13: They constantly referred to the source of their income, at
Speaker 13: least to each other as quote unquote the Russians, and
Speaker 13: then in like outreach to like talent, which is, you know,
Speaker 13: a generous word to refer to Timpoole and others, they
Speaker 13: were a little bit more vague, but they certainly made
Speaker 13: kind of coy references to it in their producer discord beautiful.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, so, I mean the big question here with
Speaker 2: all of this is, like, did any of these major
Speaker 2: right wing media figures who have like they got hired
Speaker 2: in part because they were already doing the job the
Speaker 2: Russians wanted them doing, you know, building up this kind
Speaker 2: of hatred that exists on the right over the idea
Speaker 2: of funding Ukraine and Ukrainian resistance to the Russian war machine.
Speaker 2: Like all of that kind of stuff is like why
Speaker 2: these people got brought on anyway. Tim Poole has just
Speaker 2: kind of been one of the most reflexively anti Ukraine
Speaker 2: voices and conservative media, and Ruben is very effective at
Speaker 2: getting Americans to hate other Americans, like he's one of
Speaker 2: the big kind of anti trans culture warriors out there.
Speaker 2: Did O Hanson Like that's why they wanted these guys
Speaker 2: like they wanted to encourage them basically to keep it up.
Speaker 2: And you know, the question then is what did these
Speaker 2: guys know and when did they know it? And the
Speaker 2: bigger question because I have my suspicions, and my suspicions
Speaker 2: are a lot and immediately, but none of that is
Speaker 2: in this indictment obviously. And the big question then is
Speaker 2: is the federal government going to attempt to prove anything
Speaker 2: like do they want to actually go after these guys?
Speaker 2: And I don't know. My guess is not because there
Speaker 2: very rarely are consequences for these people. But I'm curious
Speaker 2: as to what y'all think.
Speaker 3: No, it seems not.
Speaker 13: I'm both both Pool and I think three others have
Speaker 13: made statements saying that they've been contacted by the FBI
Speaker 13: as a potential victim of a crime vibe and that
Speaker 13: they will be happy to assist the FBI investigating this matter.
Speaker 2: Now, that doesn't mean the FBI isn't necessarily looking into them,
Speaker 2: because that is all which the FBI would use if
Speaker 2: they suspected them. But yeah, my guess is that they
Speaker 2: lawyered up.
Speaker 13: Absolutely. It was funny both in there. In Betty Johnson's
Speaker 13: and Timpole's immediate statements, they call this elk DOJ indictment,
Speaker 13: which is not true. It was not leaked, it was
Speaker 13: just unsealed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they just arrested people.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I'm very sure there's a press release.
Speaker 13: Like Also, one of the final posts from Tenant Media,
Speaker 13: I was talking about how this woman named Lauren's son
Speaker 13: was charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese
Speaker 13: Communist Party. Quote he or she is talking about DEI?
Speaker 13: Why would the Chinese government want to push a DEI
Speaker 13: in America?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, remember this?
Speaker 13: This is This is I think one of one of
Speaker 13: their final Twitter posts before their I can't got taken down.
Speaker 2: Yeah beautiful.
Speaker 10: Their Rumba account is still live and kicking.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh thank goodness that out.
Speaker 10: Also, could we talk about their graphic design just for
Speaker 10: a moment, because it is dog shit? Yeah, Tenant mediums
Speaker 10: Tenant Yeah, like, have you I don't know, have you
Speaker 10: have you been on their rumble account? Garrison?
Speaker 13: You know, I can't I can't say I have been
Speaker 13: on their Rumble account as of as of recent.
Speaker 2: The last time I looked at Rumble it was their
Speaker 2: booth at the rnc OW.
Speaker 10: Let me tell you they're back, and genuinely some of
Speaker 10: the most like deranged. It's just it's extremely busy, it's
Speaker 10: very nineties like. It's a lot of bright colors.
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 13: The clearest indication to me that this was absolutely a
Speaker 13: Russian op is that the company described itself as quote
Speaker 13: a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political
Speaker 13: and cultural issues.
Speaker 2: Definitely Russians. Definitely Russians.
Speaker 3: You're like, oh, I wonder who wrote that? Who would
Speaker 3: ever described themselves?
Speaker 2: Tim Poole had never even seen the word head of
Speaker 2: redox before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's crazy, It's it's wild.
Speaker 10: Yeah, they put multipolar into a theosauric and that's what
Speaker 10: they came up with.
Speaker 3: It's crazy.
Speaker 2: It is interesting. One of the things in this indictment
Speaker 2: that I did find kind of worth talking about is
Speaker 2: that it specifically notes that folks at Russia today when
Speaker 2: they were because they were largely deplatformed after the expanded
Speaker 2: Russian invasion in twenty twenty two early twenty twenty two
Speaker 2: and the indictment quotes the editor in chief of Russia
Speaker 2: Today being like, but it's fine because we were able
Speaker 2: to rebuild our following on Twitter. So I don't know
Speaker 2: if you, just in case you had any questions about
Speaker 2: like what Elon Musk's reforms at Twitter have accomplished, one
Speaker 2: of them is that we should probably roll to ads again.
Speaker 2: And then, Garrison, you had a very fun document you
Speaker 2: wanted to take us.
Speaker 13: Through, yes to kind of talk about why they might
Speaker 13: be doing some of this. There was one other document
Speaker 13: that was unsealed that kind of sheds a light on
Speaker 13: Russia's exact focus on influencing US politics.
Speaker 2: Well, that's great, speaking of influencing US politics. Our advertisers
Speaker 2: probably don't. And we're back.
Speaker 13: There's another document called Exhibit nine to A, which is
Speaker 13: originally in Russian and this translated Coffee is provided in
Speaker 13: this PDF. And this appears to be some kind of
Speaker 13: instructional manual for why exactly people are going about this,
Speaker 13: why exactly is Tim Poole and all these others getting
Speaker 13: paid to talk about what they talk about. And then
Speaker 13: it also kind of explains like tactics and like how
Speaker 13: to actually go about it. So the first bit of
Speaker 13: this of this document, they just are talking about like
Speaker 13: the US two party system, which is really funny, and
Speaker 13: they primarily explain the two party system's differences as being
Speaker 13: like the way that they affect race, that the US
Speaker 13: Political Party B or Democratic Party includes people of color
Speaker 13: and quote unquote supporters of affirmative action and reverse discrimination,
Speaker 13: i e. Infringement on the rights of the white population
Speaker 13: of the United States. And then meanwhile, the Republican Party
Speaker 13: are victims of discrimination by people of color unquote. So
Speaker 13: that's how they kind of frame the US two party
Speaker 13: system is that there's these poor white people being oppressed
Speaker 13: by wokeism. They end this little introduction on the two
Speaker 13: party system by saying, quote, a key characteristic of the
Speaker 13: American media is it skew towards the Democratic Party's influence.
Speaker 13: While society is split between supporters of the new globalist
Speaker 13: socialism and traditional values, the media is democrat by over
Speaker 13: seventy five percent. Situation for the Republicans is made complicated
Speaker 13: by the censorship on social media and Democrats oriented new media.
Speaker 13: So some kind of weird phrasing there because it is
Speaker 13: being translated from Russian. But they're talking about how liberalism
Speaker 13: is inherently biased in media, and that's something that's promoted
Speaker 13: while being racist and being a Republican is something that
Speaker 13: is harder to get paid for by big media.
Speaker 7: To talk about.
Speaker 13: And that's why they have this campaign, which they title
Speaker 13: gorilla media campaign in the United States. They justify this
Speaker 13: by saying that there is no pro Russian and or
Speaker 13: putin mainstream politicians or succinctly large numbers of influencers and voters,
Speaker 13: and this is one of the things they're trying to do.
Speaker 13: Another quote is that Americans are quote dissatisfied by the
Speaker 13: dramatic decline and center of living and large expenditures of
Speaker 13: offensive policy in the United States, in Europe and Ukraine.
Speaker 13: They are afraid of losing the American way of life
Speaker 13: in the American dream. It is these sentiments that should
Speaker 13: be exploited in the course of an information campaign in
Speaker 13: the United States. Smart The campaign topics used in their
Speaker 13: Gorilla Media campaign are included here. First ones encroaching universal poverty.
Speaker 13: Number two is the risk of job loss for white Americans,
Speaker 13: privileges for people of color, perverts and disabled, constant lies
Speaker 13: of the Democratic Party administration. They threat of crime coming
Speaker 13: from people of color, and immigrants, including new immigrants from Ukraine.
Speaker 13: Overspending on foreign policy at the expense of interests of
Speaker 13: white US citizens, constant lies to the voters by the
Speaker 13: Democrats in power. Last, but not least, America is suffering
Speaker 13: a defeat despite Liberals' efforts. We are being drawn into
Speaker 13: the water. Our guys will die in Ukraine. The target
Speaker 13: audience of their campaign is listed as Republican voters, Donald
Speaker 13: Trump supporters, supporters of quote traditional family values, white Americans
Speaker 13: representing the lower and middle class.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. It's frustrating
Speaker 2: that it is working. Yeah, to be quite frank, it's
Speaker 2: exactly what the Russiagate conspiracy theorists have been saying for years. Unfortunately, Yeah, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: and like a shitload of people on the left have
Speaker 2: just been mocking them endlessly, in part because they've bought
Speaker 2: a lot of this propaganda.
Speaker 13: And this is certainly different from the way they were
Speaker 13: going about it in twenty sixteen, right, And this isn't
Speaker 13: absolutely Yeah, this is the same like Facebook stuff they're doing,
Speaker 13: although Tenant did did have Facebook accounts. These are like
Speaker 13: weaponizing these people that have gotten big on YouTube and
Speaker 13: other platforms for talking, but the same type of things
Speaker 13: that Russia kind of wants them to talk about, and
Speaker 13: it's just making sure that they have the ability to
Speaker 13: do so. Kind of Lastly, in this information doc they
Speaker 13: talk about kind of like where you can spread this disinformation.
Speaker 13: It says here quote on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. We
Speaker 13: need to create multiple perishable accounts, primarily for the work
Speaker 13: with comments. Websites should serve as the sources of information
Speaker 13: for dissemination and for video content YouTube accounts with a
Speaker 13: relatively small number of subscribers and commentators unquote. The list
Speaker 13: of information products can be disseminated includes texts of posts,
Speaker 13: comments on social media, memes including charactures and collages, and
Speaker 13: video content including news stories in the Fox News style.
Speaker 13: They then propose creating a quote unquote project office to
Speaker 13: run us this style of like media campaign. This consists
Speaker 13: of three segments monitoring US media and social media accounts
Speaker 13: of Republican politicians. A text factor with a minimum of
Speaker 13: five to four main topic based recommendations, including about ten
Speaker 13: basic posts on social media and forty to sixty comments,
Speaker 13: and then managing an editorial office with a daily output
Speaker 13: of three to four pictures and memes and a video
Speaker 13: editorial office with a daily output of three to four
Speaker 13: videos per day.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 13: In order for this work to be effective, you need
Speaker 13: to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum
Speaker 13: of realistic information.
Speaker 3: At the same time.
Speaker 13: You should continuously repeat that this is what's really happening,
Speaker 13: but the official media will never tell you about it
Speaker 13: or show it to you unquote.
Speaker 2: So I mean, like, part of what's frustrating about this
Speaker 2: number one is just like they clearly have watched Alex Jones,
Speaker 2: and like, I've learned a great deal from how he's
Speaker 2: done this, which, unfortunately something Alex used to claim about
Speaker 2: putin that fuck maybe he was right. But the bigger,
Speaker 2: more frustrating point to me is that like, oh, they
Speaker 2: didn't need to do any of this at all, Like
Speaker 2: this was all working just fine without them directly getting
Speaker 2: involved this way, I kind of am intro. I think
Speaker 2: it's probably just a reaction to the fact that they
Speaker 2: had a lot of their more traditional stuff get deplatformed
Speaker 2: after February twenty twenty two. Yeah, but like this was
Speaker 2: all stuff the Right was doing organically in their media
Speaker 2: without Russian money. They didn't need this.
Speaker 13: They certainly are trying to kind of rebuild some of
Speaker 13: their like directability to influence after like RT got deplatformed.
Speaker 13: The other part that's interesting to me is because like
Speaker 13: this indictment focuses on like Tenet Media as being kind
Speaker 13: of one of these video editorial offices with a daily
Speaker 13: output of three to four videos a day.
Speaker 3: Like that.
Speaker 13: That's what this That's what this kind of guide it describes,
Speaker 13: that's what Tenant is. This evidence Stock also talks about
Speaker 13: how like they're also just like faking engagement, getting like
Speaker 13: sixty comments per day on various social media posts on
Speaker 13: political topics. So that also like points towards like a
Speaker 13: lot of people like driving like discussions and trying to
Speaker 13: like increase the actual visibility and engagement is being boosted
Speaker 13: by this like non authentic interference. A lot of videos
Speaker 13: will go viral not just because they had a lot
Speaker 13: of people watch them initially. It's because they have a
Speaker 13: lot of engagement in like the comments, and that's what's
Speaker 13: going to push something to actually show up more people's feets.
Speaker 13: Like that is how Twitter currently works. There's a degree
Speaker 13: to which that's how things work on YouTube. So it's
Speaker 13: also just trying to try to like engineer virality by
Speaker 13: faking a certain amount of engagement. Yeah, there's also like
Speaker 13: that that degree of like interference beyond just actually, you know,
Speaker 13: paying for Tim Poole to talk about Ukraine and talk
Speaker 13: about how gay people are evil once a week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think that's probably all we've got to say about
Speaker 2: this for right now. This is not the most surprising
Speaker 2: news in the world. It is good that it's embarrassing
Speaker 2: to some of these guys. I don't know that. I
Speaker 2: think it's actually going to hurt their listenership at all.
Speaker 2: The people who listen to them don't really care.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they'll lie out of it.
Speaker 13: Yeah, they'll find some way to and to make themselves
Speaker 13: the victim out of it. They will not have any
Speaker 13: reflection that there was a whole Russian operation to identify
Speaker 13: like influencers, to scout for that would serve Russia's purposes.
Speaker 13: That they will never reflect on why they specifically were
Speaker 13: scouted for. No, Yeah, they will never reflect that. The
Speaker 13: only bit of like, the only bit of hesitation that
Speaker 13: they had to take this money was that the profile
Speaker 13: for the think businessman mentioned to Social Justice that was
Speaker 13: the only thing that they like protested that's the only
Speaker 13: thing that they actually wanted to look further into was
Speaker 13: the fact that he listed social justice is something he
Speaker 13: cares about, and not the fact that he just doesn't
Speaker 13: exist at all.
Speaker 3: This is a completely fake person.
Speaker 13: They were able to flag social justice but not flag
Speaker 13: that he just did not existed. None of this will
Speaker 13: cause any kind of recollection because these guys don't care.
Speaker 13: Like the reason why they say what they say is
Speaker 13: because they can make five hundred thousand dollars a month
Speaker 13: extra saying it, So imagine how much money they're already making.
Speaker 13: Like that explains why they're doing what they're doing. Like
Speaker 13: they don't care what they say anymore. They make such
Speaker 13: a ridiculous amount of money that it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's what it's always been about. Like they
Speaker 2: have never believed in anything.
Speaker 13: Yeah, they don't need to like reflect on any of
Speaker 13: this because they're still making tons of money. They're making
Speaker 13: slightly less than they used to now that Russia's not
Speaker 13: paying them, but they are still making tons Especially like
Speaker 13: if this is what they thought like the going price was,
Speaker 13: like they suggested these amounts, like they this is like
Speaker 13: the regular price for them, and that kind of points
Speaker 13: towards how much money is flying around this right wing
Speaker 13: medio ecosystem.
Speaker 2: Yep, great, good to stuff.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the last couple of videos were focusing on this
Speaker 10: ridiculous lie that migrant's taken over an apartment complex in Colorado,
Speaker 10: Like all this shit that just isn't true that they've
Speaker 10: been able to make true. I don't know, it's so frustrating.
Speaker 10: I find it's so frustrating. Also, how like Pool has
Speaker 10: been able to run this line of like the media
Speaker 10: won't tell you this because there are things that legitimately
Speaker 10: our neoliberal establishment media completely ignores and like that leave
Speaker 10: the door open for this kind of shit, and as
Speaker 10: a result, people can fill that space with lies, as
Speaker 10: we're seeing here.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Well, so the next time you get contacted by a
Speaker 13: shady man on WhatsApp to pay you five hundred thousand
Speaker 13: dollars about talking about how gay people are evil, you
Speaker 13: might want to check to see if he's actually a
Speaker 13: Russian agent first. You just you might want to do
Speaker 13: a little a little bit of work. Yeah, they have
Speaker 13: to tell you. It's like cops. You just ask him that.
Speaker 2: They have to tell you, you know what, Just send
Speaker 2: him my way. That's exciting. New content news for you guys.
Speaker 13: I would not get paid by Russia to lie. I
Speaker 13: might get paid by like Sweden, you know, to like
Speaker 13: advance Swedish interests.
Speaker 2: Maybe there's a number of most countries I would lie
Speaker 2: for besides that aren't rush. Yeah, would I would lie
Speaker 2: for like Japan?
Speaker 3: Probably No, that could get dark actually never won. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I leave that one out. Brother.
Speaker 2: Sweden, Sweden's perfect, No, it's just scarce. So I just
Speaker 2: think you're underestimating the kind of shit Sweden gets up to.
Speaker 3: Oh no, they're certainly evil. They're certainly evil.
Speaker 13: But in terms of like a very like milk toast
Speaker 13: country to get paid to increase their foreign interest, then
Speaker 13: I think Sweden's about as good as you're gonna get. Like,
Speaker 13: come on, like hungry, come on, come on Switzerland.
Speaker 2: You know all the Switzerland you would you would quickly
Speaker 2: get implicated. But they could pay.
Speaker 3: All the financial all the financial price.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Robert and I received material benefits from the Burmese PDF.
Speaker 10: We both had a nice lunch from them, and that
Speaker 10: has been what we've done all our coverage. It's time
Speaker 10: for us to come clean now.
Speaker 2: We did, although you did get very sick afterwards.
Speaker 10: So deceivably sick and you lucked me out of the toilet.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that was pretty funny.
Speaker 13: Oh what a time anyway, Rip Tenant Media, you were
Speaker 13: a bake one.
Speaker 2: We'll be back tomorrow. Ah, what's not doing great? My democracy?
Speaker 2: Although better than a couple of months ago. Maybe if
Speaker 2: we're comparing this debate to the last debate, I think
Speaker 2: the short answer everyone we'll agree with is better debate.
Speaker 3: My god.
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Evans with me tonight for you know. A
Speaker 2: quick reaction to everything that went on in case you
Speaker 2: don't want to sit through it yourself is Garrison Davis
Speaker 2: and Sophie Lichdermann.
Speaker 13: Yeah, this was like a real debate. We haven't had
Speaker 13: one of these in a long time.
Speaker 2: No, no, maybe never. I can't actually think of a
Speaker 2: time in my life. It's certainly not in my adult
Speaker 2: life where we have had one. I don't know, you
Speaker 2: know what, Maybe I'm not remembering the Romney one well enough,
Speaker 2: but certainly it's been a long time since we've got
Speaker 2: This was really was about the issues to a significant extent,
Speaker 2: not all of the issues I would have picked to
Speaker 2: talk about, but there was a lot of discussion of
Speaker 2: issues and policy.
Speaker 3: And like actual moderating.
Speaker 2: And actual moderating, yes, live.
Speaker 13: Fact checks, which I've never seen to this extent at
Speaker 13: any Yeah, at any presidential debate. Ever, it was almost
Speaker 13: shocking to see the moderators actually do their job.
Speaker 2: That was the highlight of the night for me.
Speaker 15: Yeah, And if you didn't catch the debate, it was
Speaker 15: hosted by Disney's ABC and the moderators were Lindsay Davis
Speaker 15: and David Muir, and yeah, both of them each did
Speaker 15: a very decent job, I believe, with live fact checking.
Speaker 15: When Trump said some of yes, very out of pocket,
Speaker 15: unhinged comments.
Speaker 2: They deferred to him a couple of times when he
Speaker 2: would demand to be allowed to speak. That I wasn't
Speaker 2: thrilled with, but yeah, it was kind of it was
Speaker 2: made up for you know. One of the things going
Speaker 2: on on the right wing media the last couple of
Speaker 2: days has been this claim that Haitian immigrants to the
Speaker 2: United States are eating people's pets. Probably do an episode
Speaker 2: on this, it's worth covering. Like it's all lies, it's
Speaker 2: like evil, racist lies. But Trump brought it up in
Speaker 2: detail during the debate and got pressed pretty effectively by
Speaker 2: David who essentially what I'm saying like, well, that's just
Speaker 2: not true. Like we've talked to the city manager. There's
Speaker 2: no reports of anyone's pet speed. Yeah, you've just made
Speaker 2: this up. And Trump said it was true because he
Speaker 2: saw it on TV.
Speaker 3: He said it twice.
Speaker 15: But like, you know, I just want to like for
Speaker 15: like a Reuter's fact check, like this started from a
Speaker 15: Facebook post and then determined that it was there was
Speaker 15: no evidence to this claim, and that didn't stop the
Speaker 15: likes of jd Vance and other horrible individuals spreading it
Speaker 15: on the internet and Donald Trump announcing it to be
Speaker 15: true multiple times during the biggest presidential debate of our lifetime.
Speaker 13: As they kept saying, it seems every debate is the
Speaker 13: most historic debate that's ever happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to say this one wasn't. Sorry, the
Speaker 2: last one definitely was because one of the guys who
Speaker 2: was in it is no longer running for presidents.
Speaker 3: That's fair. That one was a little historic.
Speaker 15: Yeah, do we want to get into a little bit
Speaker 15: of the pre show at all?
Speaker 13: Or sure we could talk about the pre show first?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Why not? Why don't you start there?
Speaker 4: Sophie.
Speaker 15: During the pre show, Fox News was talking about how
Speaker 15: the Trump campaign says that he will only go low
Speaker 15: on the issues, and he did not. They also had
Speaker 15: a guy who is on TV way too much Byron Donald,
Speaker 15: where he said that Kamala, we know Biden is not
Speaker 15: running the country your VP.
Speaker 3: Now basically what.
Speaker 15: They they kind of just did the same sad talking
Speaker 15: points and then CNN did, I mean, this is not
Speaker 15: that interesting, to be honest, like CNN talked about how
Speaker 15: important this was, and Chris Wallace specifically said that Trump's
Speaker 15: biggest strength is he doesn't talk like a Paulian. I
Speaker 15: don't think that helped him tonight, to be honest, not tonight.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, to be honest, here's what I would
Speaker 2: say that was true of why he won. That played
Speaker 2: a major role in winning. But he talks like a
Speaker 2: politician now because politics has reordered itself around trump Ism,
Speaker 2: particularly on the right. But even Harris and Walls are
Speaker 2: a little trumpier than certainly any Democratic politician was before
Speaker 2: the selection.
Speaker 15: Right, and the most interesting thing that was said in
Speaker 15: both of these things to be which will bring us
Speaker 15: to the start of the debate. CNN was heavily focused
Speaker 15: on the fact that President Trump is almost a foot
Speaker 15: taller than Vice President Harris and asking if he will
Speaker 15: take advantage of that. He wouldn't even meet her across
Speaker 15: the stage to shake her hand. She walked all the
Speaker 15: way over to him. I genuinely think he did not
Speaker 15: want to shake her hand.
Speaker 2: No, he didn't, And I thought that was again, this
Speaker 2: all seems like very petty stuff to talk about, but
Speaker 2: this is the pettiest man alive, and like this stuff
Speaker 2: actually does matter. And I think it was a pretty
Speaker 2: intelligent strategic move. I think it started off the night
Speaker 2: with him off ballance. She immediately put him off balance
Speaker 2: and pissed him off, and he didn't really recover. He
Speaker 2: had some moments. He certainly was not weak everywhere I
Speaker 2: think he was. He was lie like his economy. Everything
Speaker 2: he says about like tariffs is like it's a nonsense
Speaker 2: policy that would devastate like large chunks of this country.
Speaker 2: But I think his messaging was pretty effective there. It
Speaker 2: probably is going to work for a lot of moderates.
Speaker 2: I thought his messaging on Afghanistan was really effective. I
Speaker 2: think he probably won that segment of the debate just
Speaker 2: in terms of what's going to play better.
Speaker 3: Those are the two definitely right.
Speaker 2: But you know, he didn't lose every clash they had.
Speaker 2: He never got momentum, and he was never able to
Speaker 2: build momentum. Even when he had a win, he was
Speaker 2: never able to tie that into a greater pattern like
Speaker 2: he was with Biden. He was never able to get
Speaker 2: any kind of weight behind him. He just kind of
Speaker 2: was wabbed the whole.
Speaker 15: Night, which I think at this scale is the first
Speaker 15: we've seen from him.
Speaker 13: No, it was definitely Kamala going in hard for the
Speaker 13: handshake at the very very start of the debate was
Speaker 13: her equivalent of Trump following around Hillary Clinton on that
Speaker 13: debate stage. Yep, it threw him off balance. He wasn't
Speaker 13: expecting it. It immediately kind of gave her the upper
Speaker 13: hand literally wow and controlling where the conversation was going
Speaker 13: to go. Like Trump refused to look at Kamala through
Speaker 13: the entire debate. He only looked straight ahead. Kamala was
Speaker 13: often addressing Trump directly looking at him and then also
Speaker 13: turning towards the cameras. Trump was just straight faced the
Speaker 13: entire time. He never he never looked at her or
Speaker 13: acknowledged her like visually. It was kind of odd to see,
Speaker 13: and throughout the debate he just kept getting really angry
Speaker 13: and almost like childish. Harris maintained her ability to present
Speaker 13: herself as like the more hopeful candidate and by and
Speaker 13: large led the debate.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, he kept having to like follow her. You just
Speaker 13: came off as like an angry child.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 13: She did not answer some of the questions about like
Speaker 13: her policy shifts, but she was able to deflect those
Speaker 13: questions and Trump to go off topic to talking about
Speaker 13: like crowd sizes and rumors about eating dogs. Trump wasn't
Speaker 13: able to actually talk about what his plans for the
Speaker 13: country were. Harris just kept him like complaining about weird nonsense,
Speaker 13: going off on tagents, and always going back to talking
Speaker 13: about immigrants. He just couldn't control the conversation at all.
Speaker 2: No, and the crowd size stuff. Like he was very
Speaker 2: clearly like on the verge of kind of losing it there,
Speaker 2: which was interesting to see.
Speaker 15: CNN claimed during their post show that that moment was
Speaker 15: when he never recovered after the crowd size stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's probably accurate.
Speaker 15: Fair, Yeah, that's a fair analysis from CNN.
Speaker 2: I would say that he didn't he never recovered from
Speaker 2: the opening handshake, Like, but that's when it was kind
Speaker 2: of undeniable, the crowd sized thing like, because he kept
Speaker 2: trying to get back on the rails, and I think
Speaker 2: he gave up. And the clearest example of that was
Speaker 2: his closing statements, which I know we're kind of jumping
Speaker 2: around here, but Kamala's closing statements were the kind of
Speaker 2: closing statements you give if you are trying to become
Speaker 2: the president, and Trump's you can contrast it to the
Speaker 2: way he was talking during his big RNC speech, which
Speaker 2: was certainly much too long, but was clearly intentional for
Speaker 2: the most part, was a better speech. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 2: there was some ad libbing there. He did some, but
Speaker 2: this was clearly not written down ahead of time. It
Speaker 2: did not sound like that. It made no sense. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was nonsense.
Speaker 13: Kamala's ending statement was talking about how this is a
Speaker 13: fight for two different versions of what this country will
Speaker 13: look like, you know, very politician e speech. Trump didn't
Speaker 13: talk about himself at all. He just was complaining that
Speaker 13: if Kamala Harris has so many great ideas for the country,
Speaker 13: why hasn't she enacted them? And the answer is because
Speaker 13: she's not the president. Yes, but he did not talk
Speaker 13: about his own version of the country. He was just
Speaker 13: complaining about how much he didn't like Kamala Harris and
Speaker 13: that Kamala Harris is promising to do great things even
Speaker 13: though that she's not like doing them right now as
Speaker 13: vice president. And that was his messaging, at.
Speaker 2: Least in the pre show that I watched, and in
Speaker 2: a lot of like the punditry I read before this,
Speaker 2: the thing that kept getting reinforced was that this has
Speaker 2: to be a debate about the issues. The Americans that
Speaker 2: are still undecided want to hear what people's plans are
Speaker 2: for the country. Now. Do I believe that's the case.
Speaker 2: I'm not necessarily the most optimistic about how seriously Americans
Speaker 2: take political policy. But if that is the case, Trump
Speaker 2: blew his chance to talk about what he wants to
Speaker 2: do as president because he number one, was extremely defensive.
Speaker 2: He spent more time denying things that he wasn't going
Speaker 2: to do. Like it she got him very good on
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five. That has proven to be an extremely
Speaker 2: effective line of attack, and he was really he had
Speaker 2: to not just deny that he planned to like in
Speaker 2: State Project T twenty five as present, but like he
Speaker 2: had to repeatedly claim I've never read it like, I
Speaker 2: don't know what's in it.
Speaker 3: I don't want to read it.
Speaker 15: I have nothing to do with Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: In a way that sounded almost panicked. Yeah, right, like
Speaker 2: where he really I'm kind of surprised they didn't give
Speaker 2: him a better response on that, that they didn't really
Speaker 2: drill that down, and I wonder if they did. And
Speaker 2: he just was so flustered and pissed that he didn't
Speaker 2: do it. But he certainly did not have an effective
Speaker 2: response to that one. And when he kept repeatedly being
Speaker 2: asked to give his policy on how he would like
Speaker 2: fix the Affordable Care Act or replace it, he just punted.
Speaker 15: He just kept saying it's terrible.
Speaker 2: It's like, okay, yeah, it's terrible, but i can't do
Speaker 2: anything about it, so I'm not going to repeal it,
Speaker 2: but like We've got to do better. It was. It
Speaker 2: was a really weak answer.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 13: One thing I found interesting is that the last debate
Speaker 13: was full of so many AD breaks and we went
Speaker 13: full like a one hour, yeah, full hour before before ads,
Speaker 13: and speaking of ads, oh wow, we have gone a
Speaker 13: full thirteen minutes, and that means it's time for us
Speaker 13: to take an ad break.
Speaker 3: All right, we are back.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Can I get to one thing first because I
Speaker 2: just came across this. It's about the Haitian immigrants. PBS
Speaker 2: put up a documentary like literally a day or two
Speaker 2: ago talking, yeah, one day ago, talking about this, and
Speaker 2: they interview a factory owner in Springfield, Ohio about what
Speaker 2: he thinks of Haitian migration, and he's like, I wish
Speaker 2: a lot more of them would come. They're the only
Speaker 2: people in town who don't do drugs and come to
Speaker 2: work on time. I just thought that was a great,
Speaker 2: great Springfield, Ohio representation. I hope that guy's happened a
Speaker 2: good night.
Speaker 15: Great quote there, Robert, Yeah, Gerre, what do you want
Speaker 15: to talk about next?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 13: In this middle section, it is kind of I want
Speaker 13: to go over some of what they actually talked about
Speaker 13: during the debate, a few of kind of the main topics.
Speaker 13: They started with the economy. Kamla was talking about how
Speaker 13: there's a shortage of homes, they're the cost of housing
Speaker 13: is just too high, and she's going to have tax
Speaker 13: cuts for families and warned about Trump's quote unquote sales
Speaker 13: tax that would rise costs for households by nearly four
Speaker 13: thousand dollars a year now. This is in reference to
Speaker 13: Trump's tariffs, which he then talked about next. They know
Speaker 13: they're not sales tax, they're tariffs, and that countries will
Speaker 13: pay us back for all that we've done in the
Speaker 13: world's insane, which will bainly mean that our economy will
Speaker 13: do worse and things will be more expensive for us.
Speaker 15: I thought Kama was pretty strong during that section in
Speaker 15: terms of like her response. She directly mentioned Goldman Sachs,
Speaker 15: which is something that's come out in the last couple
Speaker 15: days from Reuters. It's that the Goldman Sacks's biggest boost
Speaker 15: you as economy from Maharis when talking about US economic
Speaker 15: growth would likely get the biggest boost in the coming
Speaker 15: two years from Democrats headed by Kamala Harris winning the
Speaker 15: White House in Congress in Novembers election. And she specifically
Speaker 15: called out to that, And her being actually able to
Speaker 15: call out to something like that in a debate was
Speaker 15: something we I haven't seen in a while on a debate,
Speaker 15: and so that was something that I particularly took note of.
Speaker 13: Yeah, actually slight relevant authorities on issues.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, she did a lot of that. She definitely
Speaker 2: had her moments where she would avoid responses. I noted
Speaker 2: she consistently refused to answer, are there limitations you think
Speaker 2: should be in place on when people can get abortions? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 2: she just kind of did not answer that one. Now,
Speaker 2: to be frank, I think that's a bullshit question, and
Speaker 2: I think a redirection was pretty effective. Yeah, But as
Speaker 2: a general rule, when she answered questions, she cited statistics
Speaker 2: and like studies and did a pretty a pretty good job. Now, again,
Speaker 2: how well is that going to matter? We're still very
Speaker 2: early in the pundit cycle here. It seems pretty clear
Speaker 2: that most of the mainstream media, including Fox Like, agrees
Speaker 2: Harris won the night. Polymarket predicts a ninety seven percent
Speaker 2: chance that Harris is judged the winner in the debate snappoles,
Speaker 2: which I found out from Nate Silver's quick reaction, where
Speaker 2: he also notes, quote bitcoin prices are down, which also
Speaker 2: implies a loss for Trump.
Speaker 15: That's very funny.
Speaker 13: I love that Bitcoin's a good political needle to see
Speaker 13: where the country's going.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you the happiest assuming that we don't usher
Speaker 2: in a new fascist or you know, a significantly worse
Speaker 2: state in November. The best thing about it is going
Speaker 2: to be not needing to pay attention to Nate Silver
Speaker 2: for another four years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: He did make one other point that I found kind
Speaker 2: of funny, which was his argument that, like well, Trump
Speaker 2: is a lot taller. The stature gap in terms of
Speaker 2: physical size was also notable, especially with Harris having a
Speaker 2: shorter podium. And you'll hear people say that you should
Speaker 2: watch the debate with the sound off, and by that
Speaker 2: measure it was much closer than with the sound on.
Speaker 3: Who says that name? Has ever said that, who's gonna
Speaker 3: watch the debate with the sound off?
Speaker 2: Stick to Poles man, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Speaker 13: These debates used to be audio only. They were a
Speaker 13: radio broadcasts. That is, that's how the TA started.
Speaker 15: That is so unwell of him to say what are you?
Speaker 15: What are you doing? Why think that over head? And
Speaker 15: don't put that on the internet.
Speaker 3: He is a good one.
Speaker 2: Yes, every second Nate Silver isn't writing a blog post
Speaker 2: or looking at Poles he is he is sitting in
Speaker 2: a shitty bar in like Fremont Street, Vegas, playing like
Speaker 2: mid Steaks poker. So he probably does consume a lot
Speaker 2: of television with the sound off.
Speaker 3: But to go back to the economy.
Speaker 13: So as Kamla was talking about her plans for like
Speaker 13: tax credits and tax cuts helping people buy homes, Trump
Speaker 13: was just talking about and immediately brought up that one
Speaker 13: of the things that's affecting the economy is that there's
Speaker 13: there's millions of people pouring in from prisons and a
Speaker 13: sane asylums, taking jobs from black and Hispanic and union workers.
Speaker 13: That these immigrants are taking over towns and buildings violently,
Speaker 13: And it's just immediately that's that, that's what that's what
Speaker 13: he goes to because he has really just nothing else.
Speaker 15: He also said people can't buy bacon, cereal and eggs
Speaker 15: cereal cereal.
Speaker 3: Of all the foods to choose cereal.
Speaker 13: So yeah, tried to talk about like inflation and stuff.
Speaker 13: It just it just didn't go very well, especially because
Speaker 13: inflations rose so much during the pandemic when he was president.
Speaker 13: It just didn't play very well at all. Immediately it
Speaker 13: was clear that Kamala was kind of the front runner.
Speaker 13: The next topic was abortion, which Kamala also did very well,
Speaker 13: and Trump just really lost it because he couldn't stop
Speaker 13: talking about how Tim Walls wants to execute babies after birth,
Speaker 13: and this just this was the main thing he talked about.
Speaker 13: He was very defensive about his stance on a national
Speaker 13: abortion ban. Moderators asked him about his contradictory abortion statements,
Speaker 13: about how he's voting for an abortion ban in Florida
Speaker 13: but is claiming to not want one nationally, and Trump
Speaker 13: just didn't know how to talk about this topic very
Speaker 13: well and just kept saying that Democrats are evil because
Speaker 13: they want to do nine month abortions, seven month, eight
Speaker 13: month abortions, post birth executions, they will execute the baby,
Speaker 13: which was I believe this was like the first fact
Speaker 13: check for the night, and this is what kind of
Speaker 13: really scared Trump is. He was like, Oh, they're actually
Speaker 13: gonna call me on this stuff. Moderator said that there's
Speaker 13: no states where you can kill babies after birth, and
Speaker 13: Trump just didn't know what to do. Kamala brought up
Speaker 13: Project to twenty twenty five and their plans for a
Speaker 13: national abortion ban. Trump made a little funny comment kind
Speaker 13: of throwing JD Vans under the buss about Trump vetoing
Speaker 13: a national abortion ban if it was passed by Congress.
Speaker 13: Trump said that he actually hadn't talked to Vance about that.
Speaker 3: I didn't discuss it with Jamie.
Speaker 2: By the way, I've been taken a break from Twitter,
Speaker 2: but I did catch a good post recently. JD. Vance,
Speaker 2: before the debate, made a claim that a bunch of
Speaker 2: people from Springfield who he won't name, have reached out
Speaker 2: to him talking about Haitians eating their pets, and then
Speaker 2: ended it by saying like, it's possible this will prove
Speaker 2: to be untrue. And someone just quote tweeted that and said,
Speaker 2: every day I see something that makes me understand why
Speaker 2: Vance's mom traded him for a couple of perk thirties.
Speaker 3: Incredible.
Speaker 13: Kamala basically said most of her regular talking points and abortion.
Speaker 13: She would like for the House in the Senate to
Speaker 13: put abortion protections into law and she would sign that
Speaker 13: bill and wants to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade,
Speaker 13: and also talked about how it's absurd to be talking
Speaker 13: about post birth executions and how this is like consulting.
Speaker 15: Yep, she's correct, Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Next thing was the border, very similar to both their
Speaker 13: RNC and their DNC speeches. Kamala talking about this kind
Speaker 13: of very conservative border bill that Trump shot down for
Speaker 13: political gain and then invited us to attend a Trump
Speaker 13: rally where he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter
Speaker 13: and how windmills caused cancer, and that people leave early,
Speaker 13: and he never talks about you, the American people. So
Speaker 13: this was obviously giant bait for Trump, which he he
Speaker 13: took immediately. He just couldn't stop talking about people actually
Speaker 13: come to my rallies way more than they go to
Speaker 13: your rallies. They don't leave early. You have to bust
Speaker 13: in people to your rallies.
Speaker 15: And he claims she pays people to attend her rallies
Speaker 15: as well.
Speaker 3: He got so flustered.
Speaker 13: Is that this is what he started talking about the
Speaker 13: eating dogs thing. It's because he got so flustered on
Speaker 13: this line of argument about his crowd size that he
Speaker 13: just he just had to immediately talk about how there's
Speaker 13: immigrants eating dogs. Yeah, because he just didn't know what
Speaker 13: to do.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's actually kind of just a very like
Speaker 2: on the nose, but perfect representation of how racism works
Speaker 2: culturally a lot of the time, which is like white
Speaker 2: man feels aggrieved and threatened and immediately turns to attacking
Speaker 2: an entire group of people based on their race, like
Speaker 2: it really was the most direct example of that that
Speaker 2: you could possibly get, Like, he felt vulnerable and so
Speaker 2: he attacked a group of people for eating cats. He
Speaker 2: did a blood libel.
Speaker 13: I think a big part of Kamalist strategy here was
Speaker 13: to paint Trump as like an illegitimate figure in politics,
Speaker 13: like someone who's not like responsible to like lead the.
Speaker 3: Military and it's dangerous. Yeah, she bragged.
Speaker 13: About the endorsement of two hundred Republicans, including Dick Cheney
Speaker 13: hated that moment, like, no, but you know, is not great,
Speaker 13: but we'll see if it plays politically well.
Speaker 2: It might work.
Speaker 15: Yeah, it doesn't play well for us, but yes, doesn't
Speaker 15: mean it doesn't overall play well.
Speaker 13: Unfortunately, a lot of her statements seemed like she was
Speaker 13: trying to court both the NATSEC people and the courts
Speaker 13: if there's ever like a contested election, Like she wants
Speaker 13: those people to be on her side. And there was
Speaker 13: a lot of Commons throughout the debate that was kind
Speaker 13: of pointing to that and like showing how Trump's just
Speaker 13: like an unreliable and like dangerous figure to be in
Speaker 13: control of national security. Trump went on this interesting tangent
Speaker 13: about how he was actually good because he fired a
Speaker 13: whole bunch of those Republicans because they were because they
Speaker 13: were bad at their jobs.
Speaker 2: I thought it was one of his more effective moments.
Speaker 13: That was something we've never really seen done before, openly
Speaker 13: attacking military leaders in that fashion.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I didn't read it as attacking military leaders. I read
Speaker 2: it as him specifically stating because she was Harris had
Speaker 2: been talking about the Republicans from the Bush White House
Speaker 2: who had endorsed her, And I read it as Trump
Speaker 2: saying I brought in a lot of like rhinos, what
Speaker 2: he would call rhinos, but I brought in a lot
Speaker 2: of like old Republican veterans and fired them because they
Speaker 2: were bad at their job. And I thought that was
Speaker 2: one where I was like, well, yeah, they were, you know, like,
Speaker 2: you're not wrong. You didn't replace them with anyone better,
Speaker 2: but like they were. In fact, you did hire a
Speaker 2: bunch of Republican officials who had a long history working
Speaker 2: in other administrations, who sucked at what they did, you know, like,
Speaker 2: not wrong. Now it's interesting to have him say I
Speaker 2: brought in a lot of people, some of them were
Speaker 2: good and some of them were bad.
Speaker 3: Yes, Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2: Think I've ever heard a former president admit that during
Speaker 2: a debate.
Speaker 15: He was like, we don't talk about the good people.
Speaker 15: And it's like, well, why why don't you do that
Speaker 15: now during your debate. Yeah, here's your chance.
Speaker 6: JD.
Speaker 3: Vance great guy, great guy, great, great guy. Trump, So JD.
Speaker 15: Van's great guy. Never met him, don't know who he is.
Speaker 15: Who are you talking about, never talked to him.
Speaker 13: One of the more interesting questions the moderator asked was
Speaker 13: just directly asking Trump, how would you go about your
Speaker 13: massive deportation program? How would you actually go about deporting
Speaker 13: eleven million or more undocumented immigrants? And Trump did not
Speaker 13: have a real answer to this question. Trump said that,
Speaker 13: you know, there's actually way more of them here than
Speaker 13: what you would think. South America is sending all their
Speaker 13: criminals here.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting because he said, they say fifteen million,
Speaker 2: it's really twenty one million. And then he said, and
Speaker 2: it's a lot more than twenty one million.
Speaker 3: Okay, how many is it? Donald?
Speaker 13: The moderators challenged him on like rising crime rates, saying
Speaker 13: that the FBI is actually, you know, showing that crime
Speaker 13: is going down, and Trump then claimed that the FBI
Speaker 13: crime rates are fraudular, are fraudulent, which is the first
Speaker 13: time that you've seen, at least that I've seen him
Speaker 13: talk about it that way. Like usually on Fox News
Speaker 13: they will like mention that, but they'll be like, but
Speaker 13: people feel crime is going up, So that's what really matters.
Speaker 13: Even if even if the FBI claims it's going down,
Speaker 13: people still feel less safe. But he just openly said
Speaker 13: that those numbers are just like fake, like the FBI
Speaker 13: is just like lying saying that they aren't counting crimes
Speaker 13: in like the biggest major cities. Kanma's response to this
Speaker 13: was saying that that's rich coming from a convicted criminal.
Speaker 13: So we got that first, like prosecutor girl boss moment.
Speaker 3: Okay, hi've rise up.
Speaker 13: Trump complained about all of like the legal witch hunts
Speaker 13: he's been facing and said that, quote, I probably took
Speaker 13: a bullet to the head because of the things they
Speaker 13: say about me, unquote, which is just a fascinating way
Speaker 13: to frame that unhinged thing to say.
Speaker 2: It is, especially given how many Americans don't think he
Speaker 2: was shot in the head.
Speaker 15: You just know his advisors were like, what the fuck, Like,
Speaker 15: what are you saying right now?
Speaker 2: Ah?
Speaker 5: Fuck?
Speaker 2: Oh they are drinking tonight.
Speaker 3: Oh, they they.
Speaker 15: Are drinking tonight.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Yeah, And that's not even like the most unhinged thing
Speaker 15: he said, because the most unhinged thing he said the
Speaker 15: entire night came shortly after that, which was, she wants
Speaker 15: to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison. Based
Speaker 15: she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.
Speaker 15: She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in.
Speaker 3: Prison, and the leader says she's a radical liberal.
Speaker 2: I believe that a president can perform surgery if that
Speaker 2: president wants to. Sophie and I support Kamala Harris's policy.
Speaker 15: You should have voted for Ben Carson, then.
Speaker 3: I did I write him in every year? Okay Jesus Christ,
Speaker 3: no you don't.
Speaker 13: There was a good tweet that remarked that it just
Speaker 13: sounds like he's talking like he's playing cards against humanity.
Speaker 13: He's just like change, He's just like changing out different
Speaker 13: words like transgender aliens, prison, surgery. I believe what he's
Speaker 13: referencing here is that both Fox News and Trump's campaign
Speaker 13: team the past few days have been talking about how
Speaker 13: in twenty twenty, Kamala made a statement basically saying that, yeah,
Speaker 13: we should like offer gender affirming health care to people
Speaker 13: in prison. Like, if you're in prison, we should not
Speaker 13: like deny health care to you just because you're locked up.
Speaker 13: That's like what he's talking about. That is specifically what
Speaker 13: he's referring to. But it just it's sounds just absolutely bad.
Speaker 7: Shit.
Speaker 13: Let's have another quick ad break. We will come back.
Speaker 13: I want to talk a little bit about January sixth,
Speaker 13: foreign policy, Israel, Palestine, and then some of Trump's and
Speaker 13: Kamala's post debate statements made to the press.
Speaker 3: All Right, we are so bad, so bad.
Speaker 2: It's so bad, like the Harris campaign kind of kind
Speaker 2: of She's been slowly kind of like flatlining in some
Speaker 2: of these polls. I do want to talk about that
Speaker 2: a little before we get into this, because it has
Speaker 2: been interesting. She's been losing kind of national popular vote momentum,
Speaker 2: and that has been narrowing. The swing states have not
Speaker 2: really narrowed in the same way. Yeah, which is not
Speaker 2: to say that she is a clear favorite. Everything basically
Speaker 2: is within the margin of error.
Speaker 13: She's barely ahead, but she's still ahead. It has been
Speaker 13: a really interesting change. It has not been the same.
Speaker 2: There's a newsletter I check on occasionally for stuff like
Speaker 2: this at GERMNTUM. That made what I thought was an
Speaker 2: interesting point, which was that it's possible that a lot
Speaker 2: of that has to do with the fact that the
Speaker 2: national popular vote has been narrowing as a result of
Speaker 2: the ads the Republicans have been pumping out because there
Speaker 2: wasn't a real strong consensus about who Harris was and
Speaker 2: now that's growing. But in a lot of these swing states,
Speaker 2: which are red states, people have been living under Republicans
Speaker 2: and are just a lot less kind of vulnerable to
Speaker 2: being drawn away by that kind of propaganda because they
Speaker 2: know what it's like.
Speaker 13: No, I mean, especially if you're looking at North Carolina,
Speaker 13: you're looking at Georgia. Those are two battlegrounds that the
Speaker 13: Harris campaign is targeting. I can definitely see that being
Speaker 13: being an aspect. So the mods turned the questions towards
Speaker 13: January sixth. Trump immediately claimed that nobody on the other
Speaker 13: side was killed, only Ash the bad that was killed
Speaker 13: by a bad police officer.
Speaker 15: Very ironic, but.
Speaker 2: Easily the only Coppall go to bat for the best
Speaker 2: shoot in twenty twenty one by a mile.
Speaker 13: And he then complained that why haven't BLM rioters been
Speaker 13: prosecuted in Seattle and Minneapolis, which of course they have.
Speaker 13: They are still they're still arresting people.
Speaker 2: Man, I've spent time in courtrooms with people, Like.
Speaker 15: Yes, I was shocked he did not call out Portland.
Speaker 2: It is interesting that he went for Seattle and not Portland.
Speaker 2: I guess maybe just says a lot about his media
Speaker 2: diet that he just maybe got a lot more Chaz
Speaker 2: stuff than he did Portland stuff.
Speaker 10: I don't know.
Speaker 13: He certainly did go after a commonal a few times
Speaker 13: for being pro defund the police back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: He really, he tried several times. He clearly she never
Speaker 2: took the bait. Yeah, she never took the bait. And
Speaker 2: that must have been one that his advisors really pushed
Speaker 2: him on. Yeah, like they must have said, you'll get her.
Speaker 13: It was both that and her previous like fracking policies,
Speaker 13: which which she has like backtracked on. And ye, you
Speaker 13: have to if you want to win Pennsylvania. So like,
Speaker 13: I understand why they're doing it. It sucks because the
Speaker 13: planet's burning, but right now they're trying to win Pennsylvania.
Speaker 13: The debate was in Pennsylvania, Like that's why she has
Speaker 13: backtracked on those policies. I think it's smart to deflect
Speaker 13: from that at least right now. But yeah, I mean,
Speaker 13: that's that's not surprising to me.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 13: I think Kamala did a pretty good statement about January sixth.
Speaker 13: She said, I was at the Capitol on j sixth.
Speaker 13: He incited a violent mob. And now she got kind
Speaker 13: of emotional. She said one hundred and forty officers were
Speaker 13: injured and some died. Trump was impeached, which is something
Speaker 13: that just hasn't been talked about very much. Is like, yeah,
Speaker 13: Trump has been impeached. Why isn't that talked about very much?
Speaker 15: Because so many other things have happened, then everyone has forgotten.
Speaker 13: Yeah, that he was liter really impeached. Yeah, multiple times.
Speaker 13: And then she pointed to January sixth as like not
Speaker 13: the only incident. No, she pointed back to Charlottesville, talked
Speaker 13: about Trump's statements about Proud Boys and how the Proud
Speaker 13: Boy militia was told to stand back and stand by,
Speaker 13: and she kind of closed this this little January sixth
Speaker 13: monologue by saying, like, we don't have to go back
Speaker 13: to this. He says that if the election doesn't go
Speaker 13: to his liking there will be a blood bath.
Speaker 3: We don't have to go back.
Speaker 13: And she's positioning herself as like as an alternative towards
Speaker 13: like that type of chaos. Trump got very mad at this,
Speaker 13: very mad Trump talking about how Fox News debugged the
Speaker 13: Charlottesville quote.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure.
Speaker 13: I know one other like fact checker I think with
Speaker 13: Snopes is like, actually, the Charlottesville quote is different in context,
Speaker 13: and at least a whole bunch of fact checkers that
Speaker 13: like I know and extremism reporters have kind of gotten
Speaker 13: on snopesas for this, because it's very clear it's a
Speaker 13: very disingenuous way of framing what he was trying to say. Yeah,
Speaker 13: we all know what happened on Charlottesville. We all know
Speaker 13: what he was talking about.
Speaker 15: Yeah, Cataboo is a really good video on it if
Speaker 15: you want to watch more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes she does.
Speaker 13: And then the moderators talked about how Trump has been
Speaker 13: falsely claiming for three and a half years that he
Speaker 13: won the twenty twenty election, but now says that he
Speaker 13: lost by a whisker, and Trump was startled by this.
Speaker 3: He's like, did I actually say that? I said that
Speaker 3: I said that. No, no, no, no, no, that was sarcastic,
Speaker 3: and it was.
Speaker 2: Like the only time I've ever heard him he sounded
Speaker 2: genuinely like confused, like maybe there was a little old man.
Speaker 2: But we were like, oh shit, what have I been saying.
Speaker 13: He's like, no, no, no, that was a sarcastic statement.
Speaker 13: I still think I won the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he really And that was one of the
Speaker 2: more effective moderator moments because you could see the moderator
Speaker 2: was like, Oh, what a gift I've been given. I
Speaker 2: just want to make very clear. Let's have him say,
Speaker 2: Let's have him confirm what he means, like three times,
Speaker 2: and then we could move on.
Speaker 13: Kabla had a good reply talking about how like we
Speaker 13: can't have a candidate who's confused about how the elections work.
Speaker 3: And being like like she is correct, Yeah.
Speaker 13: Come on, great respond and then Trump immediately went on
Speaker 13: to defend Victor Horbon, Yes, the president of Hungary, seg
Speaker 13: some people call him the strong man because he's a
Speaker 13: really tough guy.
Speaker 15: He loves the strong man thing.
Speaker 2: That was my favorite part because he clearly misunderstood, no,
Speaker 2: strong man is a term for dictation.
Speaker 3: Yes, Yeah, he just that was quite a moment for
Speaker 3: this country.
Speaker 15: It was just the fumbling and bumbling.
Speaker 2: I love it, you know what. Overall, good time, except
Speaker 2: for one thing that really sucked, which is several things
Speaker 2: that really sucked, which is whenever it came to something
Speaker 2: where a huge number of human lives were involved. Yeah,
Speaker 2: almost always it got kind of brushed over.
Speaker 3: Ukraine.
Speaker 2: I will say, I don't think it got a very
Speaker 2: good set of questions. It was the same shit that
Speaker 2: they've been asking both sides. Right, The Dims get asked,
Speaker 2: how are you going to actually conclude this conflict in
Speaker 2: a favorable way? And the Republicans get asked, are you
Speaker 2: just going to abandon Ukraine? Right? Like, that's the gist
Speaker 2: of what both candidates are being pushed on, and the
Speaker 2: gist of their responses is unchanged from everything we've heard
Speaker 2: earlier this year.
Speaker 15: Right, And despite being asked multiple times, Trump refused to
Speaker 15: answer if it was in the world's best interest of
Speaker 15: Ukraine wins the war. He was asked that several times,
Speaker 15: and he just he just said, I want the war
Speaker 15: to end, not an answer.
Speaker 2: And there wouldn't have been a war if I'd been president.
Speaker 15: This wouldn't have happened. Yeah, this wouldn't have happened. That's
Speaker 15: his claim.
Speaker 2: But you know, Harris did not have an answer, because
Speaker 2: there isn't one, no, no, this is an incredibly difficult war.
Speaker 2: Right now, I will say, I think like the actual
Speaker 2: things she should have done, and the thing that Biden
Speaker 2: should have done, is say, like we are removing all
Speaker 2: extant limitations on the weapons that we ship Ukraine and
Speaker 2: how they can use them. You know, at this point
Speaker 2: they have now invaded Russian territory and occupied hundreds of
Speaker 2: miles of it. Like, you know, that was something I
Speaker 2: was interested in that she should have hit on and
Speaker 2: did not, which Trump brought up the fact that Russia
Speaker 2: has nuclear weapons in a matter of like, we can't
Speaker 2: push him too much. Who knows what they'll do, right
Speaker 2: That was clearly what he wanted people to take from
Speaker 2: him bringing up the fact that Russia has a nuclear arsenal,
Speaker 2: and Harris didn't bring up like, yeah, you know, they
Speaker 2: invaded Russia a couple of weeks back, no nukes, Like
Speaker 2: this kind of threat is clearly something that the Putin
Speaker 2: regime wants the international community to have. But when push
Speaker 2: comes to shove, he's not suicidal. And the idea that
Speaker 2: like Putin is going to start nuking people if Ukraine
Speaker 2: is able to fire missiles at Russian fuel depots or whatever,
Speaker 2: I just don't think is supported by how he's actually
Speaker 2: performed so far. But at any rate, at least Ukraine
Speaker 2: got a decent amount of time. It was one of
Speaker 2: the things that they talked about more in this debate.
Speaker 2: Gaza got one very quick question. You could tell the
Speaker 2: moderators wanted to move the fuck past it as fast
Speaker 2: as possible, and both Trump and Harris wanted to get
Speaker 2: past it, Harris more so than Trump.
Speaker 15: Harris stayed about the same statement she made at the
Speaker 15: DNC YEP she first mentioned October seventh, talked about how
Speaker 15: far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.
Speaker 13: The war must dan. We need a cease fire deal,
Speaker 13: the hostages out. We need to chart a course for
Speaker 13: a two state solution and rebuild Gaza. We will always
Speaker 13: give Israel the ability to defend itself, especially in relation
Speaker 13: to Iran. That was most of her statement, which is
Speaker 13: nothing new from her now. Trump first tried to skip
Speaker 13: the question and just immediately talking about Russia. He then
Speaker 13: said that Kamala hates Israel and she also hates the
Speaker 13: Arab people.
Speaker 3: The whole area will be bombed.
Speaker 13: Under her presidency, saying that if he gets elected as
Speaker 13: president elect, he will solve the war. And then he
Speaker 13: just talked about like how oil pipelines are important.
Speaker 2: It was so weird interesting to me that he tried
Speaker 2: to skip this when this is one of the things
Speaker 2: she's weakest on the things. But I think it may
Speaker 2: just be that, like Americans overwhelmingly at this point do
Speaker 2: not think Israel is categorically in the wrong. They think
Speaker 2: that Israel is often in the wrong in this war
Speaker 2: and been killing a lot of innocent people. And so
Speaker 2: it may just be that he knows that, Like this
Speaker 2: isn't really a great issue for me either, Let's move
Speaker 2: back to something. But it was it was interesting to
Speaker 2: me that he didn't have any kind of concerted attack,
Speaker 2: like saying she hates Israel and Arabs is such a
Speaker 2: strange tactic to take here, and I don't see how
Speaker 2: he thought it could help him.
Speaker 3: Who are you trying to appeal to.
Speaker 2: Right, How is this supposed to get you a vote?
Speaker 2: What vote does this get you that you don't have?
Speaker 15: There's just no way. That was like what was in
Speaker 15: his campaign prep. Yeah, that was not advice, There's no way.
Speaker 13: Yeah, Kamla did have a good line here to think
Speaker 13: points towards her like recording that sec people. She said,
Speaker 13: it's well known that Trump is a weak on foreign
Speaker 13: policy and national security. He's pro dictator. Yeah, yeah, Trump
Speaker 13: just doesn't have any way to answer that, because yeah,
Speaker 13: he does want to be a dictatory. He just he
Speaker 13: just offended the president of Hungary like a few minutes ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like called him as strong man and said that
Speaker 2: that means he's tough.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: He also she had a good line about how like
Speaker 2: he's not going to be tough with these people, They're
Speaker 2: just going to like say something nice to him and
Speaker 2: then he'll immediately want to be their friends. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that was a decent little jab. She got a few
Speaker 2: of those in more than a few. I want to
Speaker 2: talk about since we're kind of running along just a
Speaker 2: little bit. At the endier after the debate ended, I
Speaker 2: caught this. I don't think you guys did, but Trump
Speaker 2: went down to what's called the no spin zone, which
Speaker 2: is just a thing Fox did. I I think it
Speaker 2: started on the Handity Show.
Speaker 3: I caught the.
Speaker 15: Fox immediate after the debate response, do you want me
Speaker 15: to get into that, it's just one quick thing?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 15: Yeah, So immediate response from Fox was Vice President Harris
Speaker 15: was clearly well prepared, but she was never held to
Speaker 15: the fire and felt like ABC was helping her out.
Speaker 15: He went down a few cat and cat and dog
Speaker 15: holes instead of rabbit holes and not rabbit holes. That
Speaker 15: a direct thing to the eating pets thing. Make no
Speaker 15: but snake about it. Trump had a bad night.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 15: Then just talked about how she was calm and prepared
Speaker 15: and whatnot. But then you know, Hannity came on and
Speaker 15: did his Hannity thing and then I'm.
Speaker 3: No spin zone.
Speaker 2: That must have been why Trump was heading down to
Speaker 2: the no spin zone. So what happened? You've got this.
Speaker 2: It's the floor of where they did the debate, so
Speaker 2: everyone is everywhere, tons of media and Trump. There's like
Speaker 2: this huge scrum around him and I'm watching on ABC
Speaker 2: and the ABC anchors just start screaming at him from
Speaker 2: like Donald Donald, mister President, trying to get him to
Speaker 2: answer their questions and like everyone is doing this, and
Speaker 2: he eventually like gives a statement where he says, well,
Speaker 2: this was my favorite debate. This was like the best
Speaker 2: debate I've ever had. I clearly won. Someone was like,
Speaker 2: so are you going to do a second debate? Harris says,
Speaker 2: she wants another debate, and he's like, well, she just
Speaker 2: wants another debate because she lost, So I don't know
Speaker 2: if I'm going to do another debate. I found that
Speaker 2: very funny. I found it kind of shameful how the
Speaker 2: ABC guys just kept howling at him to give them
Speaker 2: some attention in the middle of this very crowded room.
Speaker 2: There was no way he could hear you. He's an
Speaker 2: old man. Guys have some self fucking respect. You're supposed
Speaker 2: to be journalists, and you had a colleague down there
Speaker 2: who was actually asking him questions. But anyway, yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, there wasn't a ton there other than him
Speaker 2: kind of desperately trying. And one of them did make
Speaker 2: the good point that, like he is claiming, I obviously
Speaker 2: won the debate, as he heads down to the spin
Speaker 2: zone spin his loss, which is like, yeah, it's not
Speaker 2: a position of strength. No, I don't know that you
Speaker 2: would have been doing this if this had been a
Speaker 2: clean win, but it certainly wasn't and yeah, like I
Speaker 2: think tonight went pretty badly for him.
Speaker 15: Yeah, yeah, CNN was like foaming at the mouth happy
Speaker 15: or sad a CNN was thrill, They're foaming at the
Speaker 15: mouth for Kamala Harris that nobody else has done what
Speaker 15: she's been able to do. And then something else happened
Speaker 15: that made CNN and MSNBC thrilled and ruined one Trump
Speaker 15: advisor's day. I'm sure Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for
Speaker 15: president right after the debate, And if only we could
Speaker 15: have seen that Trump advisor whispered in his ear that
Speaker 15: he did not, in fact, despite that AI fake endorsement,
Speaker 15: get endorsed by childless cat lady Taylor Swift.
Speaker 2: That's so interesting to me that she couched her endorsement
Speaker 2: in I am doing this because of the AI that
Speaker 2: Trump kept retweeting.
Speaker 13: Yeah, retruthing, sorry, retruthing.
Speaker 2: Retruthing, Yes, you're right, I apologize. I didn't mean to.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to make that joke anyway, Garrison, what
Speaker 2: were you going to say?
Speaker 13: Just that that's all just retruth thing.
Speaker 2: It's interesting to me that she she did specifically like
Speaker 2: couch it and like is it's because of what he
Speaker 2: did with this AI video like that, I felt like
Speaker 2: I had a need to come out and say who
Speaker 2: I'm voting for.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also, she has a cute cat. I hadn't seen her
Speaker 2: cat before.
Speaker 3: It's also that.
Speaker 15: But because I pay attention to Taylor Swift News, she
Speaker 15: was getting hammered a little bit in the last week
Speaker 15: because one of her good friends, Brittany Mahomes, who's the
Speaker 15: wife of Patrick Mahomes, who is Taylor Shift's boyfriends Travis
Speaker 15: Kelsey's teammate Jesus Christ You're welcome, has liked several of
Speaker 15: Trump's posts and uh truth truths. No, I don't know where.
Speaker 3: It was to be.
Speaker 15: I think it was actually think I don't I actually
Speaker 15: don't think.
Speaker 3: It was his posts.
Speaker 15: I think it was your post about him pro Trump
Speaker 15: post on Instagram very important to this election. Yes, and
Speaker 15: then and then they were seen together at the US
Speaker 15: Open and and the Girl Bosses were very unhappy with
Speaker 15: Taylor about this, and so so I think that also
Speaker 15: played into the timing. Robert, just so you know know,
Speaker 15: you're Taylor Swift. Facts by Sophie Lickterman.
Speaker 2: Sorry Sophie, well you were talking about washed up musician
Speaker 2: Taylor Swift Live.
Speaker 13: You are going to get ones are going to get
Speaker 13: on our ass.
Speaker 3: They will get our show canceled.
Speaker 15: Robert Evans, we are not in that era. I was
Speaker 15: getting in that.
Speaker 2: I was getting crucial debate take from America's most influential celebrity,
Speaker 2: Gilbert artist, Scott Adams.
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 2: No, the debate is a tie so far with lots
Speaker 2: of folks is flying a tie? Is a win for Harris?
Speaker 3: Well, that's true. I think that is true.
Speaker 2: There you go, Scott, good work.
Speaker 13: Scott comes out saying that Harris won the debate.
Speaker 3: There you go. That's great.
Speaker 13: Finally, I do I do think it's funny that Trump
Speaker 13: claimed that he didn't know about his previous comments questioning
Speaker 13: if Kamala Harris was black.
Speaker 3: That was a very.
Speaker 2: Talk about that moment. Oh, were you accused her of
Speaker 2: putting out too?
Speaker 3: What was that to talk?
Speaker 13: He was also like saying, well, the Central Park five
Speaker 13: pled guilty, So actually I think it was okay. I
Speaker 13: wanted them executed a wild, a wild.
Speaker 3: Unforced error there.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 13: That whole little racism section was just crazy.
Speaker 2: Look, I will take one quick victory lap because I
Speaker 2: said after the last debate, which was a disaster in
Speaker 2: every possible way for Biden. Trump's not his soul self either.
Speaker 2: He is definitely an older man. Yeah, he was in
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen and even twenty twenty, and like, yeah, this
Speaker 2: was that.
Speaker 13: Well, hopefully this was the only presidential debate that we'll
Speaker 13: have to talk about with Kamala v.
Speaker 3: Trump. What an exciting time.
Speaker 13: I'm excited for that, for that Vance Walls debate, if
Speaker 13: that ever happens.
Speaker 2: So am I.
Speaker 15: Oh interesting that Like our reaction after this debate was like, Okay,
Speaker 15: she shouldn't do any other debates and he's going to
Speaker 15: want to do more debates. Yeah, And it was the
Speaker 15: exact opposite in their in their reactions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was interested by that, which.
Speaker 15: Like on MSNBC Tim Walls was like she should do
Speaker 15: one every day. I mean, she did good, she did well,
Speaker 15: But like my reaction was like, Okay, you did the job.
Speaker 3: You did the job.
Speaker 2: I do think like I have like, oh boys, I
Speaker 2: think this might be Hubris coming in here and a
Speaker 2: bad idea, but she could be right. I don't know.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like one of the problems is that if the
Speaker 2: election doesn't turn around as much or if something else
Speaker 2: happens that pushes momentum back towards Trump, she might need
Speaker 2: a third debate and you kind of have to You
Speaker 2: kind of can't know, like you are rolling the dice
Speaker 2: on this one way or the other.
Speaker 13: Yeah, well that was the best debate I've ever watched. Yeah,
Speaker 13: just in terms of it actually being a debate. Yeah,
Speaker 13: there was not a half dead man on screen, or
Speaker 13: yeah maybe there was that, there just wasn't two half
Speaker 13: dead men on screen, so you just.
Speaker 2: Get a good look at like, Okay, yeah, these are
Speaker 2: these are pretty decent pictures of the kinds of president
Speaker 2: that these people want to be.
Speaker 15: And like it literally comes down to he was not
Speaker 15: willing to shake her hand, and she walked across the
Speaker 15: stage to shake his hand, and that's basically what the
Speaker 15: debate was.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Anyway, anyways, this has been it could happen here. We're
Speaker 15: gonna post our source links from this episode in the
Speaker 15: episode description, so look out for that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, and you know, until next time. I
Speaker 2: don't really have any advice.
Speaker 10: Bye, Hi everyone, it's me James. This is a pick up.
Speaker 10: It's Thursday Morning. I recorded with Joseph on Wednesday night,
Speaker 10: someone destroyed or removed one of our coolers. Since then,
Speaker 10: I've received photos this morning of a place where we
Speaker 10: put it and it's gone. You can probably joy your
Speaker 10: own conclusions to how I feel about that probably tell
Speaker 10: from how I'm talking to it. I'm pretty pissed off. Also,
Speaker 10: our friend Rafael, Rafael from Los Angeles de la Desierto
Speaker 10: is without a vehicle at the moment. His truck broke.
Speaker 10: This is a person who gives every ounce of his
Speaker 10: being to rescuing migrants. He is there with them in
Speaker 10: their hardest times. When they pass away, he's there to
Speaker 10: recover their remains with dignity, to connect their families with
Speaker 10: the passing moments of their loved ones. He's there to
Speaker 10: rescue people. He rescued a woman and child on Monday.
Speaker 10: His truck's broken, and if you're able to give, I'm
Speaker 10: going to include a link in the show notes. I
Speaker 10: talk to Borderlands Relief Collective and we all agree that
Speaker 10: the most important thing right now is to get money
Speaker 10: to Raphael so he can continue doing that life saving
Speaker 10: search and rescue work as we hit record temperatures here
Speaker 10: and before it gets freezing cold in the winters. So
Speaker 10: if you can, please, please just a few bucks, like
Speaker 10: we'll buy them an old track. I'll fix it. I
Speaker 10: just don't want more people to die out there, and
Speaker 10: I think having a truck for Rafael would meaningfully make
Speaker 10: it safer for people. So if you're able to give,
Speaker 10: please give. Otherwise, please enjoy this podcast. And yeah, I
Speaker 10: understand if you can't. It's a hard time for everyone.
Speaker 10: But yeah, either way, hope if you can enjoy this podcast. Bye,
Speaker 10: Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcast today. It's me
Speaker 10: James and I'm joined by Joseph Hauser, who's a volunteer
Speaker 10: from Bordlands Relief Collective who was out with me on Sunday.
Speaker 10: We're recording this on Wednesday night and we were dropping
Speaker 10: water at the border. We wanted to describe for you
Speaker 10: a little bit of our what we saw at there.
Speaker 10: It was very hot, things were in a bad way.
Speaker 10: I think it's fair to say like despite all of
Speaker 10: our best efforts, things were really difficult there. There's only
Speaker 10: so much we can do when it's one hundred and
Speaker 10: five degrees and there are dozens of people and we're
Speaker 10: trying to get water to all of them. So welcome
Speaker 10: to the show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, James, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 10: No, I appreciate you being gay. So I think if
Speaker 10: we begin by like describing preps for people, and we
Speaker 10: first started messaging by going out on Sunday, like Saturday afternoon, right,
Speaker 10: I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, it was yeah, early Saturday afternoon. I had
Speaker 4: just finished getting my haircut, I'd gone and grabbed an
Speaker 4: early lunch, and I saw a message from you and
Speaker 4: one of our group chats that some of the local
Speaker 4: grocery stores were selling those big orange five gallon water
Speaker 4: jugs for like thirteen dollars, Like apparently they're trying to
Speaker 4: like get rid of their stock or something. So yeah,
Speaker 4: you and me a couple of other people were scrambling
Speaker 4: around the county trying to buy up as many of
Speaker 4: them as we could.
Speaker 10: Yeah, like I think I was a normally one hundred
Speaker 10: bucks for reference. They're like an insulated water vessel with
Speaker 10: a spout on the bottom. And given that we knew
Speaker 10: it was going to be a record temperature and it
Speaker 10: was already really hot on Saturday, we wanted to try
Speaker 10: and get folks water that was as cold as possible.
Speaker 10: So yeah, we went all around, bought all the all
Speaker 10: the ones from that chain of grocery stores that we could,
Speaker 10: and that sort of corralled them, and then we put
Speaker 10: ice in them. Right, this is the next day on Sunday,
Speaker 10: and then you and I met up and we went out.
Speaker 10: Do you want to just give people a sense of
Speaker 10: the people we met right from all over the world,
Speaker 10: the different places we met them, and then then the
Speaker 10: sort of condition that we found them in.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the first group of people we met, we ran
Speaker 4: into four Mauritanian men. Yeah, they seemed to be in
Speaker 4: pretty good spirits. They were all traveling together. Gave them
Speaker 4: some food, gatorade, water, kind of our typical stuff that.
Speaker 1: We hand out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I don't know, maybe three minutes down the
Speaker 4: road from there. I don't know where the man was from,
Speaker 4: but is Asian man that did not look to be
Speaker 4: in great shape.
Speaker 1: His clothes was torn up, his face was really dirty.
Speaker 4: From what we could understand, he was saying he had
Speaker 4: been mugged, his cell phone had been stolen from him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he just looked in a bad ways.
Speaker 4: So we, yeah, you know, gave him water, gave him
Speaker 4: again some gatorade, and when we tried to give him
Speaker 4: some food, he was just like I can't like, I'm
Speaker 4: so like, he's just so dehydrated.
Speaker 1: He he couldn't stomach anything other than liquid.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it was like we see people all the time
Speaker 10: who were in a bad state, but it's pretty rare
Speaker 10: for people to be like I can't eat, I'm too dehydrated.
Speaker 10: I can't face food right now. Because he'd been walking
Speaker 10: for at least seven eight hours, I'm guessing, if not days, Yeah,
Speaker 10: depends how he came man, because we were just driving
Speaker 10: along and he came out of the verge like with
Speaker 10: his hands in the air, like looking just so afraid,
Speaker 10: like they'll stay with me for a while, like absolute
Speaker 10: like fear.
Speaker 1: But he had yeah, like he just looked stricken.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, like just really it's just so sad to
Speaker 10: see someone like reduced to that. I'm glad we were
Speaker 10: able to help him and get him the stuff that
Speaker 10: he needed. And then from there we moved on to
Speaker 10: I'm trying to think where we went next. We went
Speaker 10: up to the top, right, we grave up to the
Speaker 10: top of them out too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we went up to an area where Borderlands Relief
Speaker 4: Collective has set up what we call a welcome station.
Speaker 4: It's up on top of one of the smaller peaks
Speaker 4: in the area. It gives us a good view, like
Speaker 4: you can see all the way down to the actual
Speaker 4: border and stuff and kind of take note of like, okay,
Speaker 4: like we've got a group coming up here.
Speaker 1: There's some people crossing over there.
Speaker 4: And then we've primarily done that in the winter time,
Speaker 4: just to greet people with some like some hot teas,
Speaker 4: some water food, just basically things to say like hey,
Speaker 4: like you know you're here, yeah, and at least give
Speaker 4: them a friendly face, because who knows what they've you know,
Speaker 4: what everyone's been through just to get to that point.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so we dropped one of our water jugs
Speaker 4: there and then went a little bit further down the
Speaker 4: road to a gate that I think Border Patrol maintains
Speaker 4: that gate maybe cal Fire yeah as well, they keep
Speaker 4: that locked pretty much always. But we know people take
Speaker 4: that road up obviously, So we left one of the
Speaker 4: smaller water jugs we were able to pick up. I
Speaker 4: think that one was like a two or three gallon
Speaker 4: that we left there.
Speaker 10: Right, Yeah, because people people walk up for the border.
Speaker 10: I always like that spot. It's weird because sometimes you
Speaker 10: see people in your they've got a long walk and
Speaker 10: it's hot and I'm up here and there down there
Speaker 10: and that that sucks. Yeah, sometimes it's a really if
Speaker 10: it was anywhere else, it would be a beautiful view.
Speaker 10: There's a valley below with little oak grove and like
Speaker 10: sometimes you'll see like a red tailed hawk or something
Speaker 10: and it'll be like level with your eye line because
Speaker 10: you're at the top there and it's but unfortunately, yeah,
Speaker 10: it's at the border, so people have to suffer miserably there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's absolutely gorgeous like natural landscape, but it is
Speaker 4: like just so unbelievably deadly and unforgiving.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Like you and I have both hiked lick alongside
Speaker 10: hiking up and down the roads. We've hiked on the
Speaker 10: trails and migrants often take. And I've hiked a lot,
Speaker 10: You've hiked a lot. It's incredibly difficult going. It's difficult
Speaker 10: for us as like fit people with technical apparel and
Speaker 10: good shoes, like we often see people in flip flops
Speaker 10: or like crappy sneakers if.
Speaker 1: They have footwear at all at that point.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I remember a number of the people we ran
Speaker 10: into didn't have shoes like later in the day. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and I've definitely given away shoes before and then we
Speaker 10: have some of my drug. But I'm a giant person.
Speaker 10: Everyone it's like penguin flip of feet, so I wasn't
Speaker 10: able to help everyone. And so yeah, we went from there,
Speaker 10: we dropped another We hiked to water in a little
Speaker 10: bit because the road was too narrow to turn the
Speaker 10: truck around, and we dropped that in another gate. And
Speaker 10: then I think at that point things were pretty normal,
Speaker 10: and that was like a normal water drop day, or
Speaker 10: a driving water drop day, I should say, not a
Speaker 10: hiking one. Do you want to describe what we saw
Speaker 10: at the next place you went to, because I think
Speaker 10: that was when both of us realized that like things
Speaker 10: were going to be worse in normal and people needed
Speaker 10: as much help as we could possibly get in.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So basically, once we finished up in that.
Speaker 4: Area, we went from where we were, we went a
Speaker 4: little bit further south. I don't know, I was like
Speaker 4: maybe a ten minute drive, you think.
Speaker 1: Once we got back to the main road, yeah, we
Speaker 1: ran into a group of three men.
Speaker 4: Believe they were more Aitanian again, a different group of men. Yeah,
Speaker 4: when we came across them, they were kind of walking
Speaker 4: almost like just middle of the lane on the road. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: which was kind of like keyed us in that, like, oh,
Speaker 4: like we should stop and check on these guys.
Speaker 1: They overall seemed to be doing pretty well, Like.
Speaker 4: They were obviously very tired exhausted from their journey, but
Speaker 4: they were telling us that, you know, like oh we've
Speaker 4: got another two, We've got two more they fell behind.
Speaker 4: So we gave these guys you know again the normal
Speaker 4: like food, gatorade, water, checked in with them to see
Speaker 4: if they had like any wounds or anything we could treat,
Speaker 4: and they seemed pretty good. So we hung out in
Speaker 4: that area for I don't know, it was maybe five
Speaker 4: ten minutes max. Before we saw the people that they
Speaker 4: had mentioned were further down the road. So another two
Speaker 4: guys came up. We again gave them what supplies they
Speaker 4: seemed like they needed. The The fifth guy in that
Speaker 4: group seemed to be in the worst shape of all
Speaker 4: of them. Yeah, he was upright and you know, like
Speaker 4: moving under his own power, but like you just kind
Speaker 4: of see that little wobble in his step.
Speaker 1: So we kind of took some extra time with him.
Speaker 4: I believe we got him like a little ice pack
Speaker 4: to put on the back of his neck, just to
Speaker 4: try and bring his body temperature down, and then kind
Speaker 4: of just got that. All five of them regrouped together
Speaker 4: under a tree some shade, and then from there we
Speaker 4: went I don't know, maybe we got maybe three hundred
Speaker 4: feet down the road and we came across a group
Speaker 4: of five I believe they were all Spanish speakers.
Speaker 1: I didn't catch where they were from.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think once it from Colombia. I can't remember
Speaker 10: where the whole group were from, though.
Speaker 1: But that was so far.
Speaker 4: Everyone we had run into was by a parent's middle
Speaker 4: aged men I shouldn't say middle age, like young adult. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: like thirty thirty five maybe, like you know, somewhere in
Speaker 4: that range.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, they could be anywhere from like twenties to thirties. Yeah.
Speaker 10: Like I think some of that is because it was
Speaker 10: such a difficult day that like some folks who have
Speaker 10: children or older people maybe decided not to make the
Speaker 10: journey that day. Yeah, they had that choice. But this, yeah,
Speaker 10: this group was yeah, this.
Speaker 4: Group of five we I want to say it was
Speaker 4: three men in that age range.
Speaker 13: Uh.
Speaker 1: There was a woman with them, and then a kid that,
Speaker 1: if I had to guess, probably fifteen at the oldest.
Speaker 4: Like I seemed to remember, like clocking that he had
Speaker 4: braces on, like he just he seemed young.
Speaker 10: Yeah, he seemed like a child. Yeah, it wasn't like
Speaker 10: a young man.
Speaker 4: And so you know, we got off to the side
Speaker 4: of the road again, we're giving them food, water, all
Speaker 4: that again, like this is all off.
Speaker 1: The main road for that area.
Speaker 4: And like as we're interacting with these groups, you know,
Speaker 4: like several border patrol cars are just zooming passed like yeah,
Speaker 4: just crazy.
Speaker 1: But nobody.
Speaker 4: Nobody's stopping the check in and nobody's you know, like
Speaker 4: you know, stopping them from big finger quotes here, invading right.
Speaker 10: Getting getting on a bus as like people are going
Speaker 10: so mad about us. We oh before they got mad
Speaker 10: about Haitian people.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so we we worked with that group. Nobody
Speaker 4: really seemed to be in dire straits there. So we're
Speaker 4: working towards a trailhead which we could actually see from
Speaker 4: where we were working with this group of five and
Speaker 4: there's like a little bridge there and we just kind
Speaker 4: of see some heads popping up.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and we're like, oh, I think you have my binoculars.
Speaker 3: We were like checking to see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we're like oh, like we like we need
Speaker 1: to get over there.
Speaker 4: So we get back in the truck after we get
Speaker 4: them kind of you know, as settled as we can,
Speaker 4: and we get over to this trailhead, which.
Speaker 1: Is like, really I think where the day because.
Speaker 4: Like you said, like it was kind of a normal
Speaker 4: day up until we got to this trailhead and then
Speaker 4: things kind of seemed to take a turn.
Speaker 10: Yeah, talking of taking a turn, why don't we take
Speaker 10: a turn to advertisements and then come back.
Speaker 1: That's why they pay you the big bucks.
Speaker 3: That I see.
Speaker 10: You see that no one saw that comes. All right,
Speaker 10: we are back. I hope that you haven't bought anything.
Speaker 10: You could give money to board Lands Relief Collective of
Speaker 10: Google lip.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, that would be really nice. I would appreciate that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, why would I do that?
Speaker 10: Don't go to Chumber because you know, Yeah, so we
Speaker 10: got over there and like that location, just to give
Speaker 10: people like paint a picture. There's the road which we
Speaker 10: were traveling on, and then parallel to that, parallel to
Speaker 10: it ninety degrees as a dirt road which we pulled
Speaker 10: into the road that we were traveling on was going
Speaker 10: over a creek which is dry at this time of year.
Speaker 10: So there's a bridge and it was under that bridge
Speaker 10: that people were hiding from the sun, and so that's
Speaker 10: why we couldn't see them until we were very close.
Speaker 10: And yeah, describe what we saw there, because that was
Speaker 10: when I was like, oh shit, that was when we
Speaker 10: started to run out of enough bottles for people to
Speaker 10: drink out of. So we had to like just stop
Speaker 10: opening like cans of energy drink and beer and stuff
Speaker 10: or whatever we had just to use them as bottles.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So we we pull off the road and underneath
Speaker 4: that bridge. I mean I didn't do like a head
Speaker 4: count necessarily or anything, but there was a group of
Speaker 4: like fifteen twenty at least. Yeah, you know, again like
Speaker 4: mostly men in that like twenty to thirty age range,
Speaker 4: but there were moms with kids and there just there
Speaker 4: were so many people. We at that point we had
Speaker 4: you know, some water bottles, some gatorades. We had that
Speaker 4: one five gallon jug with the ice water in it
Speaker 4: left that we were going to take up to the
Speaker 4: top of this pass, and we just like by the
Speaker 4: time we got done getting every one water, we ran
Speaker 4: out of water in the jug. I think we had
Speaker 4: just about cleared out all the food we had.
Speaker 1: We had no more Gator aids.
Speaker 4: We were scrounging around in the back of your truck
Speaker 4: trying to just find vessels essentially to give people what
Speaker 4: liquid we could, you.
Speaker 1: Know, like get at shake out of the ice.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it was not good.
Speaker 4: And so then that was when there was one young
Speaker 4: man I believe he said he was from Jordan. He
Speaker 4: was trying to get our attention and telling us, you know,
Speaker 4: like I've got two like I've got family up there too,
Speaker 4: two family And he keeps pointing up up the mountain
Speaker 4: toward the pass, saying he's got two family members up there.
Speaker 4: And then another man I didn't catch where he was from,
Speaker 4: but he was telling us there were two family members
Speaker 4: of first man. And then there was another three men
Speaker 4: traveling up there and they were trying to indicate to
Speaker 4: us that one of them had heart problems.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was how they how they put it.
Speaker 4: So we kept telling like, hey, like you know, we're
Speaker 4: we're going to go help them, but the gate to
Speaker 4: access that the road that goes up that pass was locked.
Speaker 4: So first we had to figure out like who we
Speaker 4: could contact to get through the gate. And then that
Speaker 4: poor guy that you know said his family members were
Speaker 4: up on that mountain like he desperately, desperately wanted us
Speaker 4: to drive him up there with us, but we had
Speaker 4: to keep telling him, like we just we.
Speaker 1: Can't, Like it is so illegal for us to put
Speaker 1: you in a vehicle. Yeah, thank you anywhere.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Like at least the interpretation of the Lower's border
Speaker 10: patrols easy is that we would be like trafficking them
Speaker 10: at that point. And like maybe one could defend it
Speaker 10: in court if the person was like bleeding out or
Speaker 10: you know something, but pretty much that is something that
Speaker 10: we can't do.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've been out on a water drop together and
Speaker 4: just handing out food and water to people on foot
Speaker 4: next to the truck, and border patrol has like an
Speaker 4: agent has threatened to write us up for trafficking.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, in this particular student, which like I I
Speaker 10: don't really care. This agent can go fuck himself. Like
Speaker 10: we were. This girl was probably four years old. I
Speaker 10: would say, I don't know exactly, I didn't ask, wasn't
Speaker 10: the most important thing at the time. She was with
Speaker 10: her mother. They were both from Guinea and a Nigerian woman.
Speaker 10: Like I speak French, so I was speaking to the
Speaker 10: Guineaian family and like I remember you were trying to
Speaker 10: feed the little girl right she had.
Speaker 4: Yeah, another another volunteer and I were trying to feed
Speaker 4: her some trail mix I had, and she she wouldn't
Speaker 4: touch any of it but the but the dried banana
Speaker 4: chips that were in there. So yeah, like actually, ever
Speaker 4: since then, anytime I make trail mix for drops, I
Speaker 4: always make sure that I've got dry banana trips and
Speaker 4: they're just you know, in case there's another kid that
Speaker 4: that's all they'll eat.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And I remember like she wasn't very responsive. I've
Speaker 10: been talking to her mom, and her mother's feet were
Speaker 10: in a very bad way, like immersion foot. And after
Speaker 10: a while we were like, this little girl is like
Speaker 10: not very talkative at all, like maybe to a degree
Speaker 10: that we should be concerned. And I think we both
Speaker 10: were all kind of quickly realized she was very cold,
Speaker 10: like potentially hypothermic. I remember having there. I tried to
Speaker 10: record some of this for the podcast, but it's all fun,
Speaker 10: it's all. I had to wrap her up in a
Speaker 10: miler blanket such that like I was sitting behind her
Speaker 10: so that she would get like warm from me, right
Speaker 10: and sit my jacket so she would get warm from me.
Speaker 10: And obviously the whole fucking podcast bit is my love
Speaker 10: blanket noise, Which is a shame because at that point
Speaker 10: a border patrol agent arrived started swearing at us, accusing
Speaker 10: us of trafficking, just like as if this little girl
Speaker 10: wasn't having the worst day of her life anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 10: just like someone who's paid by my taxes and your
Speaker 10: taxes turns up to scream at the only people who
Speaker 10: are helping her that day, and her right like it
Speaker 10: scared them. And eventually one of our friends was able
Speaker 10: to de escalate that situation and those people got taken
Speaker 10: and hopefully protested, and I hope that they are living
Speaker 10: a happy life in the US, yeah for sure, But.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a bad day.
Speaker 10: So yeah, we as you said, right, we can't take
Speaker 10: this guy with us back up the hill, and we're
Speaker 10: now trying to get so it's about ten kilometers to
Speaker 10: the top, and it's ten kilometers and I have no
Speaker 10: idea how it's a lot of climbing, Like it's it's
Speaker 10: ten kilometers all uphill, and so like it's not really
Speaker 10: possible for us to hike up that road and get
Speaker 10: to these people who need help in a timely manner,
Speaker 10: right in a manner that, so we need to drive.
Speaker 10: I think in the end we ended up calling nine
Speaker 10: one one, Yeah, I think that was what we also
Speaker 10: called a friend who personally contacted Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then yeah, somebody got Calfi out for us.
Speaker 4: They opened the gate kind of let us take the
Speaker 4: lead up that dirt road. Yeah.
Speaker 10: I thought that was really cool of them, Like it
Speaker 10: would have been easy for them to be like, yeah,
Speaker 10: we're here to save you and like credit where it's
Speaker 10: to you. They were like, your truck is going to
Speaker 10: go fast enough, fire rangine, you guys should go first.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So we get a portion of the way up and
Speaker 4: we run into the group of three men that we
Speaker 4: were told were there and were At this point, I
Speaker 4: think is when we realized like, oh shit, like the
Speaker 4: only water we have on our that we have at
Speaker 4: all is our personal water. So yeah, I actually I
Speaker 4: have water bottle right here next to me. I I
Speaker 4: like was literally pouring what I had left into their.
Speaker 1: Water bottle for them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Luckily this is like an insulated thing, so it's cold
Speaker 4: for them. But you know, we're trying to figure out
Speaker 4: like shit, like when we get to when we find
Speaker 4: these two women, the family members, the guy kept talking
Speaker 4: about like yeah, what.
Speaker 1: Are like, what are we going to do?
Speaker 9: Then?
Speaker 4: Like I think we ended up giving when we came
Speaker 4: across them further up the mountain at that point, like
Speaker 4: we basically just had my backup now Gene. Yeah left,
Speaker 4: So we were like, hey, we want you to to
Speaker 4: take this, Like, we just gave them the full now
Speaker 4: Gene and tried our best to explain to them that
Speaker 4: we were going to go to the top make sure
Speaker 4: that there wasn't anybody else up there, and then we
Speaker 4: were going to come back down to check on them.
Speaker 1: So we do that.
Speaker 4: We go up to the top where you and some
Speaker 4: other volunteers have built like a little shade structure to
Speaker 4: try and just give people some relief.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I didn't built that one. I built the that previous
Speaker 10: one that got torn down. Okay, bye. Some type of
Speaker 10: cop lovely yeah great, really nice, really help. It wasn't
Speaker 10: actually a cop, to be fat I'm pretty sure it was.
Speaker 10: It was some other federal agency BLM or BP or someone.
Speaker 4: But so when we got up to the top, we
Speaker 4: didn't see anybody else. We couldn't find anybody up there.
Speaker 4: We were doing our best to try and use our
Speaker 4: language skills to.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we were just shouting in various languages to see
Speaker 10: if anyone needed help.
Speaker 4: Then the CalFire guys met back up with us up there,
Speaker 4: you know, figured out like hey, like you know, we
Speaker 4: we're not seeing anybody else. So you and I decided
Speaker 4: that basically all we could do at that point was
Speaker 4: go back down the mountain and go further south to
Speaker 4: a little town that's like pretty much right on the border.
Speaker 10: I think, yeah, it's literally a border crossing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because we ended up, we drove down, checked in
Speaker 4: on the women, the two women that were traveling down.
Speaker 4: They seemed to be doing about as okay as they
Speaker 4: could at the time.
Speaker 1: Again, it's like I.
Speaker 4: Don't know, one hundred and five, Yeah, completely exposed up there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no tree, c co a, you're not getting
Speaker 3: any shape.
Speaker 1: I don't I.
Speaker 4: Don't remember it being particularly windy at all, so it's just.
Speaker 3: Like hot still still.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But we get down the mountain kind of give everyone,
Speaker 4: like the big group that's there under the tree at
Speaker 4: the bridge at the bottom heads up of what we're doing.
Speaker 4: We go into this little town and like again like
Speaker 4: tiny little place, like it's basically from what I saw
Speaker 4: just parking lots and then like a gas station and
Speaker 4: a border crossing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 4: We went into this gas station and bought I think
Speaker 4: like sixteen gallons worth of water.
Speaker 10: Yeah, they had to go round the back to get
Speaker 10: the rest of the water. Like we took all the
Speaker 10: gallons jugs they had.
Speaker 4: They had one of those little like displays of like
Speaker 4: I don't know, I think it was like little keebler
Speaker 4: like cheese cracker sandwiches.
Speaker 1: Like we just bought the whole splay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just to try and give people some some more food.
Speaker 4: And then from there, like we just high tailed it
Speaker 4: back to the bridge, like distributed out some more water,
Speaker 4: checked in with them again, just like explained like we're
Speaker 4: going back up. And as we were going back up
Speaker 4: the mountain, we started seeing these like little rain drops
Speaker 4: hit in our windshield. Yeah, like oh that that can't
Speaker 4: be good, you know, so we continue up. When we
Speaker 4: when we found the two women, they were both just
Speaker 4: kind of lying in some shade just on the road.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: It was not a good scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so we got out.
Speaker 4: We mixed I think it was we got one gallon
Speaker 4: of cold water and then we took another of the
Speaker 4: gallon jugs and just mixed up like a full thing
Speaker 4: with some gatorade powder we found in your truck. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and just kind of sat down with them, and then
Speaker 4: we got help well with some translation over the phone,
Speaker 4: trying to like talk to these women figure out like
Speaker 4: what exactly was going on, because one of them kept
Speaker 4: like kind of pointing to her chest.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and she was doing the like thump thump thump, yeah,
Speaker 10: which is concerning.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, like through through.
Speaker 4: The help we got translating over the phone, just basically
Speaker 4: explained like we like we just absolutely cannot transport to
Speaker 4: like we we want nothing more in this world than
Speaker 4: to be able to take you down the mountain, but
Speaker 4: we just can't.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Like I would very happily put those ladies in my
Speaker 10: truck and driven them down, Like that would have considerably
Speaker 10: improved my day.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I did do that, because it is fucking heartbreaking trying
Speaker 10: to tell someone they have to keep walking when they're
Speaker 10: maybe halfway down and they're like just lying there, exhausted,
Speaker 10: ready to Yeah I don't know what, just give up,
Speaker 10: but yeah, it fucking sucks. It sucks. We now know
Speaker 10: that several people died that day and the day before
Speaker 10: and the day after. I guess I don't know exactly
Speaker 10: how many because the medical examiner hasn't confirmed, and I'm
Speaker 10: not going to say their names or really much about
Speaker 10: the location beyond that because I want to respect the
Speaker 10: privacy of their remains and their family, and so until
Speaker 10: we hear from them, I won't. But like it's I
Speaker 10: found out some people had died in the vicinity of
Speaker 10: where we were, and I don't know exactly where it's
Speaker 10: people died. I don't know who they were, but like
Speaker 10: it's a really fucking hard thing to say with Like
Speaker 10: I think those people we helped were probably okay. I
Speaker 10: think between the fact that as we'll get onto a
Speaker 10: giant thunderstorm soaks soaks them to the degree that we
Speaker 10: had to give them like ponchos, and then but just
Speaker 10: having to deal with like I would happily I have
Speaker 10: driven up and down that road all day, but people
Speaker 10: in my truck wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest.
Speaker 10: We're not not able to and somebody journey ended in tragedy,
Speaker 10: and like it's I don't know, Like we we try
Speaker 10: our best rather a lot, and it's not we do
Speaker 10: more than enough, Like I'm not saying that, like I say,
Speaker 10: it's own any way on us, but like we would
Speaker 10: love to do more if they would let us, and
Speaker 10: like shit like that, like not began to put people
Speaker 10: in the vehicle. It's just it's just hard to live with,
Speaker 10: you know, when you're sitting and bed at night or whatever, Yeah,
Speaker 10: having your dinner Like it sucks.
Speaker 16: But yeah, because like there's I said, I feel like
Speaker 16: there's this picture like when you talk about San Diego
Speaker 16: or just kind of southern California in general, it's oh,
Speaker 16: like it's sunny beaches.
Speaker 1: It's nice days, like it's mild weather year round.
Speaker 4: But as we've said multiple times at this point, like
Speaker 4: it gets fucking hot. It gets It was one hundred
Speaker 4: and five degrees on that mountain. A thunderstorm rolled in,
Speaker 4: and in a matter of I don't know, twenty thirty minutes,
Speaker 4: our conversation went from like, oh, like I hope they
Speaker 4: are you know, are not coming down with a heat
Speaker 4: illness or you know, gonna get heat stroke, to like,
Speaker 4: oh shit, like are they gonna go hyperthermic? Like what
Speaker 4: what do we have to get them warm? We're trying
Speaker 4: to cool them down. Now, we're trying to warm them up. Like,
Speaker 4: what kind of cruel joke is this?
Speaker 10: Yeah, like it does seem like this the most perverse
Speaker 10: thing to be. Like then worried about fucking lightning on
Speaker 10: the other side of the valley, you know, like it
Speaker 10: was insane just from like we then we carried on
Speaker 10: up the mountain, dropped some water, and then returned down
Speaker 10: to check on these women again. And when we were
Speaker 10: at the top of the mountain, we could look down
Speaker 10: on the thunderstorm. Yeah, see it beneath us. And then yeah,
Speaker 10: we drove into it, and like, just what an apocalyptic
Speaker 10: scenario to be in, you know, like it's jumping with rain,
Speaker 10: triple digit temperatures and or you have the only thing
Speaker 10: you're allowed to do is walk, like it was difficult.
Speaker 10: And then like, I guess the last thing the last
Speaker 10: person we ran into as we came down the mountain
Speaker 10: was the guy who'd been pleading with us to go
Speaker 10: help them. Yeah, God, and like had decided Border Patrol
Speaker 10: had collected everyone to take them to process them right
Speaker 10: for their asylum claim. And that we've heard on this
Speaker 10: podcast before about what it's like when that happened. It's
Speaker 10: not nice. It's not a pleasant stay. It's now considerably worse.
Speaker 10: I imagine people are being moved to Texas. They stayed
Speaker 10: for weeks. I met a young man a few months
Speaker 10: ago now who was in detention for three or four
Speaker 10: weeks before I presume being deported back. I can't find
Speaker 10: any record of him being released, which fucking sucks. So
Speaker 10: like this guy had chosen not to go back, and
Speaker 10: instead he'd chosen to hike back up the mountain without
Speaker 10: any food, without any water, to try and rescue these women,
Speaker 10: which it's an incredibly selfless thing to do, but he
Speaker 10: was in a bad way, right, yeah.
Speaker 4: Because so we passed the two women on the way down,
Speaker 4: kind of gave them little snacks here, like just try
Speaker 4: to encourage them as much as we could. And then
Speaker 4: when we ran into this man, he you know, kind
Speaker 4: of had that I don't know what other word to use,
Speaker 4: but kind of like crazed look in his eyes, like
Speaker 4: he wasn't sure, like yeah I do I just go
Speaker 4: back down, like I can't leave them, like I need
Speaker 4: to keep going, like I feel like I can't. And
Speaker 4: so we tried to get him settled as much as
Speaker 4: we could.
Speaker 1: We got him some water.
Speaker 4: I think you dug out some like gummy worms or
Speaker 4: something from one of your bags.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it had a bag of hot It wasn't It's
Speaker 10: like an open bag of horrabo that he was happy
Speaker 10: to receive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and uh, you know, we just did our best
Speaker 4: to try and convince him to just kind of sit
Speaker 4: there rest a little bit and you know, like assure.
Speaker 1: Him that they're coming. They're walking down now.
Speaker 4: And it was honestly kind of beautiful the one woman,
Speaker 4: because the two women had kind of split up a
Speaker 4: little bit while they were walking downhill. So the one
Speaker 4: comes around the bend and like when they saw each other,
Speaker 4: like he just kind of.
Speaker 1: Like you could see like just everything about.
Speaker 4: Him just kind of elevated and he, you know, pepinist stuff,
Speaker 4: was like, oh my god, I'm so happy to see you.
Speaker 10: And yeah, he got up because he'd just been kind
Speaker 10: of slouched there almost like just looking exhausted.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so like seeing them kind of reunite was really nice,
Speaker 4: and they had a quick conversation and seemed like they
Speaker 4: kind of decided she was going to keep going down,
Speaker 4: and you know, he just seemed like energized by that
Speaker 4: and decided to keep going up to find the other
Speaker 4: woman to make sure she made it down as well.
Speaker 10: Yeah, which was like not an easy choice. I'm sure
Speaker 10: of him, Like no, yeah, Like at that point again,
Speaker 10: we were out of food. We we mixed him up
Speaker 10: some gatorade, and I think we took the sugar backets
Speaker 10: from MRI and like mixed them in there and some salt,
Speaker 10: just like yeah, try and give him, like I guess
Speaker 10: something some fluid he could hold on too. So who
Speaker 10: doesn't get hyper and our tree make right, which is
Speaker 10: definitely something when you see the amount of salt on people,
Speaker 10: like the white crusting on them, like they're only drinking
Speaker 10: water and they're not replacing electrolytes, like it becomes a concern. Yeah,
Speaker 10: that I guess was us for the day, right, Like
Speaker 10: we we drove home, and like we don't get to
Speaker 10: really find out how anyone did and we don't get
Speaker 10: to follow up, right, Like it's kind of not how
Speaker 10: that works. But yeah, that's just one day. Like I
Speaker 10: spoke to Raphael from and Helistad he was out on Monday,
Speaker 10: said it was just as bad, right doing a search
Speaker 10: and rescue on Monday for a mother and child and
Speaker 10: that they were able to rescue them, and like I
Speaker 10: felt like it was a value to highlight what we
Speaker 10: saw in one day because it's it's every day. I mean,
Speaker 10: it's cooled off now Onnesday, it's we that's hot, which
Speaker 10: is good, but it's every day at the moment.
Speaker 1: Well, and I.
Speaker 4: Guess for like context, cooled off means it's like load
Speaker 4: of mid nineties.
Speaker 10: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's still like it's still not
Speaker 10: safe to make that hike without water. People are often
Speaker 10: mugged right when they cross the border or sometimes before.
Speaker 10: Sometimes they get their bags stolen. That often involves them
Speaker 10: getting their water bottles stolen that they've taken with them,
Speaker 10: right makes that journey a lot more dangerous. They also
Speaker 10: get their phone stolen, so even if they need help,
Speaker 10: they can't call nine one one. Border Patrol sometimes has
Speaker 10: like rescue beacons that you can press them and it
Speaker 10: calls Border Patrol. On the route that we run for
Speaker 10: the back half of the day, there are none of
Speaker 10: those I saw, Like I know, I came back and
Speaker 10: then you know, I sort of tried to process my
Speaker 10: day and get on with my life when you do,
Speaker 10: and and I saw the presidential debate last night, and
Speaker 10: it just makes me so fucking angry. I mean, we
Speaker 10: shouldn't expect anymore from these people. They're politicians. They don't
Speaker 10: give a shit about you, they don't give a shit
Speaker 10: about me, and they certainly don't care about these poor,
Speaker 10: desperate people. And like, I understand that people want to
Speaker 10: vote for Kamala because maybe she's less bad than Trump,
Speaker 10: but like, I have a real fucking hard time thinking
Speaker 10: about the parents of the young man who died at
Speaker 10: the border. Yeah, having to deal with Okay, well, she's
Speaker 10: less bad than Trump. Cool, it doesn't bring their baby
Speaker 10: boy back, you know, Like and just seeing both of them, Like,
Speaker 10: the whole framing of the immigration discussion was how do
Speaker 10: we reduce numbers and make it harder. They didn't entertain
Speaker 10: for a moment that someone might come here because they've
Speaker 10: got nowhere else to go and they need to be safe,
Speaker 10: or because they want to work hard and have a
Speaker 10: better future for their family. There are a million reasons
Speaker 10: to come here, right. I came here to fucking do
Speaker 10: a PhD in Spanish history, and no one made me
Speaker 10: race my bike, No no one made me walk across
Speaker 10: the desert. You know. It's the reasons were a lot
Speaker 10: more valid than mine were. And like I know I guess,
Speaker 10: I guess we should take a commercial break.
Speaker 3: Okay, we're back.
Speaker 10: I guess I want to finish up. You told me
Speaker 10: a story about why you started volunteering, which I thought
Speaker 10: was really meaningful and I'd like people to hear it.
Speaker 10: Would you mind sharing that with everyone?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no problem.
Speaker 4: So my grandmother on my father's side came to the
Speaker 4: US from Panama to go to college. My grandma on
Speaker 4: my mother's side. My understanding is they originally came to
Speaker 4: the US because somewhere down the line they were German.
Speaker 4: One of them was a duke fell in love with
Speaker 4: you know, like a servant girl or something, you know
Speaker 4: that old story. Yeah, got ostracized from the family and
Speaker 4: fled to you know, the United States, and so like
Speaker 4: even though looking at me like, I'm a why does
Speaker 4: white can be freckles?
Speaker 16: And all?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: Like my family it's immigrants like you go back, yeah,
Speaker 4: like you know, as we all are. And god, this
Speaker 4: was twenty nineteen. I didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker 4: I felt stuck in my job. I just kind of
Speaker 4: wanted to get away from my family for you know,
Speaker 4: lack of a better phrase, And I thought, hell why
Speaker 4: not the like why not the Peace Corps. Go do
Speaker 4: something good on the government's dime. And you know, see
Speaker 4: the world, it's you know, it's big, it's sexy, it's foreign.
Speaker 1: And so I went.
Speaker 4: I got placed in Swatini, which is a country in
Speaker 4: southern Africa, and I was in the youth development sector there.
Speaker 1: So I got placed.
Speaker 4: I was working at a high school there, and I
Speaker 4: was having a conversation one day with the religion teacher
Speaker 4: who just couldn't he could not understand the idea of
Speaker 4: like why we don't teach religion in high schools in
Speaker 4: the US. Like he's like, you know, how can you
Speaker 4: learn to understand somebody else's point of view if you're
Speaker 4: not allowed to learn about it. And so like talked
Speaker 4: about like how we value the concept of separation of
Speaker 4: church and state, and it just kind of got on
Speaker 4: the topic of different viewpoints between our two cultures like that,
Speaker 4: and this man looked at me and said, I feel
Speaker 4: so blessed that there is a country in this world,
Speaker 4: like the United States, where there's no poverty, nobody goes hungry,
Speaker 4: everybody has a job, and there are people like you
Speaker 4: willing to leave such a beautiful place to come here
Speaker 4: and help us, which you know, naturally, I was like, oh,
Speaker 4: like that's, you know, really nice of you to say.
Speaker 1: But you know, like in the United States, like we
Speaker 1: have people that.
Speaker 4: Go hungry, we you know, deal with poverty, homelessness, et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera. And I'll never forget this guy looked me
Speaker 4: dead in the eyes and just said like, oh, then
Speaker 4: why are you here?
Speaker 1: Why aren't you at home helping them?
Speaker 4: And it just kind of shattered me in this you know,
Speaker 4: like yeah, no, like you're right, Like I totally and
Speaker 4: completely joined the Peace Corps for like the super selfish
Speaker 4: reasons and so, like I said, I was there twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: so I was there.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you were.
Speaker 4: The listeners heard about this thing called COVID and the
Speaker 4: pandemic that happened, But I was part of the global
Speaker 4: evacuation order that went out for Peace Corps. Came back
Speaker 4: to the US, moved around a little bit, and last
Speaker 4: year I was listening to your podcast at work. You
Speaker 4: interviewed a couple of people that do work with Borderland's
Speaker 4: Relief Collective and just kind of thought to myself, we like, shit,
Speaker 4: I live near there, Like I can carry stuff in
Speaker 4: a backpack, Like I know how to hike, you know,
Speaker 4: why not me? Why not go see how I can
Speaker 4: help out? And you know, it's been a year and
Speaker 4: some change at this point that I've been with the group,
Speaker 4: and you know, like it's not like I've got some
Speaker 4: big fancy degree in like international relations or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I'm just a I'm some guy.
Speaker 4: I'm a graphic I'm a graphic designer that can carry
Speaker 4: stuff at a backpack. Yeah, but you know that makes
Speaker 4: all the difference sometimes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just being willing.
Speaker 4: To go out there and you know, like put that
Speaker 4: compassion to you.
Speaker 1: Know, to work.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I think it's like we're just two dudes with the
Speaker 10: truck and like a good credit card to buy water.
Speaker 10: It doesn't take a brilliant so like command, I speak
Speaker 10: a couple of other languages, but often like maybe I'll
Speaker 10: make the image for the show of my Google Translate
Speaker 10: app for that day. Yeah, Like we we're just using
Speaker 10: the tools that most of us have, right, Like, and
Speaker 10: it doesn't have to be at the border. Obviously people
Speaker 10: listening on the border, but like things will be so
Speaker 10: much worse there if local folks didn't just take it
Speaker 10: upon themselves. To do the things that the state refuses
Speaker 10: to do. And like that applies to the unhoused population too,
Speaker 10: write like I know my friends were also carrying water
Speaker 10: for them this weekend because it was hot trying to
Speaker 10: get and the city shut down the Homelessness Resource Center
Speaker 10: because the temperatures were too high for the stuff, which
Speaker 10: is fucking just something else. But I don't think we
Speaker 10: should expect anymore from the state. That's not what it's for.
Speaker 10: It's not to keep us safe. It's to keep capital safe,
Speaker 10: it's to keep wealth safe. It's to keep a certain
Speaker 10: class of people faith. And it camouflages itself and all
Speaker 10: these institutions which say they're there to look after us,
Speaker 10: but like when it comes down to it, like when
Speaker 10: those ladies are lying on the dirt, it's just two
Speaker 10: toots in a truck kind of scrounge around for gatorade. Right,
Speaker 10: And like I want people listening. I know I harp
Speaker 10: on this a lot, but like, the only way that
Speaker 10: we fixed is it's not someone else, it's not posting.
Speaker 10: I would love it if you could donate, right, I mean,
Speaker 10: I'll include a link in the show. That'd be great,
Speaker 10: But I would love it so much more if you
Speaker 10: could do something wherever you are, Like, just don't think
Speaker 10: that anyone doing this is special. Like, of course the
Speaker 10: things that I think they're special, people enjoy spending time
Speaker 10: with them. But like, you could do it too. There's
Speaker 10: nothing that's inherently stopping you from doing it. And it
Speaker 10: doesn't matter who wins the election, right, it really doesn't matter.
Speaker 10: Every year that Joe Biden has been president, more people
Speaker 10: have died than the year before. And he was the
Speaker 10: guy who was supposed to be kind. He didn't even
Speaker 10: run on a harsh border policy. Harris is running on
Speaker 10: a half border policy. It's only going to get worse.
Speaker 10: She's even renegged on building more wall, like they are
Speaker 10: beginning to construct wall around her cumber in the places
Speaker 10: where we looked after people last winter. So that will
Speaker 10: push people to value of the moon where it is
Speaker 10: impassable ter rain. Yeah, more people will die in the cold,
Speaker 10: and more people will die in the heat, and I
Speaker 10: guess we'll probably be out there too. You're trying to
Speaker 10: help them, But I just want everyone listening, Like, I
Speaker 10: know we've covered the election a lot, it doesn't I
Speaker 10: don't want to tell you it doesn't matter I'm sure
Speaker 10: it matters, like it matters for my friends in Kurdistan
Speaker 10: who Trump fucking abandoned left to die after they gave
Speaker 10: thousands of their children to fight. Isis right? But even
Speaker 10: if Harris wins, like, donations went down so much in
Speaker 10: the Biden era compared to the Trump era, and people
Speaker 10: died in the desert, people died in Tijuana, right, because
Speaker 10: that's what this system does. But people stop caring when
Speaker 10: a lot of big commercial networks start reporting on it.
Speaker 10: And I would like you will still to care whoever
Speaker 10: wins the election. And I'd like you will still to
Speaker 10: care before the election. And the way you can show
Speaker 10: that you care is showing up for your community. Whatever
Speaker 10: it is, right, Harmelo isn't going to fucking solve homelessness either.
Speaker 10: So yeah, you got anything to leave people with if
Speaker 10: anything you want to you want to say, want to
Speaker 10: plug just.
Speaker 1: You know, order lands, relief, collective order kindness.
Speaker 4: Raphael's group, the Anhelez de Desierto.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, you know, just if you can.
Speaker 4: Come out, like if you're in the area, if you
Speaker 4: can come out, you can help great, Like the more
Speaker 4: people that carry supplies, the more we can leave. If
Speaker 4: you're not in the area or you know, like hiking
Speaker 4: and carrying heavy things is not what you're into. Donating
Speaker 4: always super appreciated. I know, specifically Order Lands Relief Collective.
Speaker 4: Every single cent that is donated to us goes to
Speaker 4: supplies that we leave for migrants. And even if it's
Speaker 4: only a few dollars, I mean, like we're talking bottled water.
Speaker 4: I mean the sixteen gallons of water that we bought
Speaker 4: I think ended up running somewhere in ballpark like fifty bucks.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, you know, like it's it's water or gatorade.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it's you know, off brand gatorade. So like a
Speaker 4: few dollars can go a long way, and that long
Speaker 4: way could mean saving someone's life.
Speaker 10: Yeah, totally. So you know, whatever you can give I
Speaker 10: would be appreciated. I know our friend Rafael from Lochandelesto
Speaker 10: is his vehicle broke this weekend. He does search and rescue.
Speaker 10: I gave you got a few bucks and you want
Speaker 10: to pass him his way. It's Los and Hell's like
Speaker 10: the town del Desierto do or go put that on
Speaker 10: the link to but we'll put both those in the
Speaker 10: show notes. Please do whatever you can and yeah, hopefully
Speaker 10: next time I talk to you about border stuff, it'll
Speaker 10: be better than you. Thank you, Jons, Yeah, thanks mat.
Speaker 4: Hey.
Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 2: now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 15: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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