Speaker 1: A 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. Oh, welcome back to
Speaker 2: It could Happen Here a podcast about it happening. Here.
Speaker 2: Things falling apart, and today the thing that is falling
Speaker 2: apart is info Wars. Now, this is not a new situation.
Speaker 2: Info Wars has been falling apart for like half a
Speaker 2: decade now, but we are reaching certainly a point in
Speaker 2: that process. And to talk about that point, I have
Speaker 2: been bringing on really the only two people you can
Speaker 2: bring on if you want an expert opinion on Alex Jones,
Speaker 2: Dan and Jordan of Knowledge Fight Dan Jordan, Welcome to
Speaker 2: the program.
Speaker 3: Hello, Thank you for having us.
Speaker 4: Hello.
Speaker 5: You can bring us on to tell you things that
Speaker 5: every other expert in the world will say are wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well.
Speaker 3: It's nice to know that we are once again at
Speaker 3: that point where shit is looking that bad for Alex yep,
Speaker 3: that it's relevant for us to, uh yeah, get to start.
Speaker 4: Doing your media tours.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I mean, hey, well we're I'm enjoying
Speaker 5: this because I know we're gonna see you next year
Speaker 5: to have the same conversation.
Speaker 3: And I was flashing back to earlier times we've talked.
Speaker 3: We've probably been like, hey, things are looking bad for Alex.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, my fingers are crossed that he gets a
Speaker 2: bad batch of supplements and goes on like not a
Speaker 2: sad murdering spree, but like a cannibal spree, Like he
Speaker 2: eats three or four people. And then the news like
Speaker 2: you guys, you guys are on fucking CNN talking about well,
Speaker 2: actually Alex has been discussing eating people for quite some time. Sure,
Speaker 2: this is this is really a long story for him. Really,
Speaker 2: anyone should have seen this coming up. The lighting was
Speaker 2: on the wall. This is some of the least surprising
Speaker 2: cannibalism in media history.
Speaker 3: It turns out this supplement, it didn't make him a cannibal.
Speaker 3: It just brought out that cannibal that was already there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what the iodine does first before we get
Speaker 2: into it. You know, elephant in the room, by which
Speaker 2: I mean Dan, you look like you're ready to lead
Speaker 2: the Union Army in a series of Civil War battles.
Speaker 2: That's a compliment to your facial hair.
Speaker 3: So by elephant you mean the tusks. Yes, well, thank
Speaker 3: you very much. I'm learning to accept compliments. Yeah, I've
Speaker 3: got a ridiculous handlebar situation that I did as a joke.
Speaker 3: I got this as a joke to go to undercover
Speaker 3: to a Tucker Carlson event.
Speaker 2: That's an incredible decision.
Speaker 3: And then the positive feedback spit too much for me
Speaker 3: to handle.
Speaker 4: It's good.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, this is really changing things for me
Speaker 2: because prior to seeing this, Jordan would have been my
Speaker 2: go to if I needed someone to help me burn Atlanta.
Speaker 2: But now I don't know, I don't know, I don't know,
Speaker 2: could be either of you.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of Civil war jokes, a lot of
Speaker 3: hitting home runs in the seventies, sure, sure jokes.
Speaker 2: So okay, I have a whole subreddit full of people
Speaker 2: that just photoshot my face on the pictures of rass Button.
Speaker 4: So it's what happens.
Speaker 2: Speaking of ras Button, he was psychic, and so is Alex.
Speaker 2: According to Alex. Yeah, yeah, what do you guys want
Speaker 2: to start here, because like, obviously the big news right
Speaker 2: now is all of info Wars is up for auction,
Speaker 2: including apparently Alex is twittering. It sounds like will probably
Speaker 2: be part of the deal, although I guess that's a
Speaker 2: little unclear right now.
Speaker 3: He's trying to fight that inclusion of the Twitter handle
Speaker 3: in his bankruptcy estate. But I think almost anybody could
Speaker 3: make a pretty solid argument that it's company property. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like he uses it to broadcast his show. He takes
Speaker 3: calls on it for his show, Yeah, from Twitter spaces,
Speaker 3: So like, yeah, he's probably going to lose that fight,
Speaker 3: and it's probably going to be part of the auction.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But I mean, at the same time, him not
Speaker 5: having it makes it valueless, so it's worthless.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So if I were going to auction it, it would
Speaker 5: be worth zero dollars, But if I were going to
Speaker 5: give it to Alex, it would be worth to him
Speaker 5: millions upon millions of dollars.
Speaker 4: And that's the issue here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does kind of seem and I listened to
Speaker 2: Alex primarily through you, but it does seem like, from
Speaker 2: what I'm here on your show, he's kind of more
Speaker 2: concerned about the Twitter account than the multimillion dollar studio
Speaker 2: space yeah time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, which actually is kind of funny because I
Speaker 3: think it belies a lack of confidence. Yeah, because I
Speaker 3: think if he loses real Alex Jones on Twitter, he
Speaker 3: could have reeler Alex Jones. Yep.
Speaker 2: It doesn't seem like that would be a problem for him. Actually,
Speaker 2: do you think.
Speaker 3: You can't gather this audience back together.
Speaker 4: I think that's the problem. He's worried he can't get
Speaker 4: it back.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well and specifically him, Like Elon would tell people
Speaker 2: to follow him, there'd be a bunch of people with
Speaker 2: huge accounts saying this is the new Alex yit Like,
Speaker 2: I really don't think it would be much more than
Speaker 2: a speed bump. Actually, unfortunately you.
Speaker 4: Can think that, but these aren't your friends.
Speaker 5: Can't trust Elon fucking Musk help you out.
Speaker 3: I do think that there's an abandonment fear possibly, yeah,
Speaker 3: or some some sort of lack of confidence that like,
Speaker 3: if this speed bump does hit, I won't be able
Speaker 3: to rebuild.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, And it makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's delusional. I think he's totally fine.
Speaker 3: Start one hundred new Twitter accounts. You'd get a million
Speaker 3: followers on all of those, agreed.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, But I mean he's delusionable about just about everything,
Speaker 5: so it makes sense that in this case he would
Speaker 5: be delusional in the wrong direction.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So yeah, how does this seem to be going?
Speaker 2: My big concern when I'm when I'm thinking about it,
Speaker 2: is like, well, there's probably someone rich out there, some
Speaker 2: like rich asshole, you know, think tank funding oil billionaire
Speaker 2: that would consider it chump change to buy all this
Speaker 2: shit up and just give it back to Alex. But
Speaker 2: my understanding is that that's not actually like a thing
Speaker 2: you can do in these kind of situations. Although I'm
Speaker 2: not not an expert.
Speaker 3: On it, Oh, I think you can. Yeah.
Speaker 5: The trustee has the ability to even say, like if
Speaker 5: there is if there was like a bid that was
Speaker 5: from whomever you want to say, like out of nowhere,
Speaker 5: George Soros, if you.
Speaker 2: Like, fucking William Regnery the fifth or whichever rignary were
Speaker 2: on now, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Ten billion dollars more money than God could imagine. But
Speaker 5: the trustee you wanted it to stay in right wing
Speaker 5: billionaire hands. He could give it to somebody who bid
Speaker 5: six million dollars for it or five, don't.
Speaker 3: I don't think that that's actually accurate, fully, And I
Speaker 3: also don't think that the trustee is beholden to Alex
Speaker 3: in any way.
Speaker 4: I'm saying that.
Speaker 5: I'm just saying that there is that level of control
Speaker 5: that is not just like it's going to the highest bidder.
Speaker 3: I understand it. The trustees control in terms of that
Speaker 3: is more about a minimum bid. Like, if there were
Speaker 3: higher bids, it would be very difficult to rationalize not
Speaker 3: taking them if they are from people who have the
Speaker 3: actual money. Sure, aren't I guess involved with terrorism, sure
Speaker 3: or something. Unless there is a concrete reason not to
Speaker 3: accept it, I would be surprised. Yeah, if they didn't
Speaker 3: accept Soros if he made a bid.
Speaker 4: I mean I would be too.
Speaker 5: But also, currently we are on surprise number seven and
Speaker 5: a half thousand.
Speaker 4: It's not more.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that would be the least surprising thing if
Speaker 5: it was a surprising thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 2: I think we're all agreed. Alex isn't going to just
Speaker 2: shut up and ride into the sunset. He's physically incapable
Speaker 2: of doing that. Like he would literally literally explode like
Speaker 2: a soda with mintos dropped into it if that were
Speaker 2: to happen. Yeah, But also there's a massive judgment on him, right,
Speaker 2: So my understanding is that like any money beyond whatever
Speaker 2: a court decides would be necessary for him to maintain existence,
Speaker 2: although I understand there's also like ways you can fuck
Speaker 2: around with that too, Like what do you guys know about,
Speaker 2: like what kind of limitations the court has placed on
Speaker 2: Alex for the future after all of his shit gets
Speaker 2: sold out from underneath him.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know about like specific details, but because
Speaker 3: his judgment was deemed to be like malicious and intentional,
Speaker 3: the amount that he owes personally is not dischargeable by bankruptcy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so he's in chapter seven bankruptcy now personally, and so
Speaker 3: he's liquidating all the assets. So he has to sell
Speaker 3: off the company, which is how we get to the
Speaker 3: auction in the first place. And so he will sell
Speaker 3: off these assets to go towards the payment of these people.
Speaker 3: But that's not going to erase the debts and set
Speaker 3: things even so in theory, he could be hounded for
Speaker 3: the rest of his life. Sure, he could have wages
Speaker 3: garnished have some oversight of his finances in theory. Yeah,
Speaker 3: to the amount that that's exercised, I'm not sure how
Speaker 3: much it will be, but yeah, that's going to be
Speaker 3: hanging over him for the rest of his life. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Or I mean, if I was him, and based on
Speaker 5: how things are going for him so far and the
Speaker 5: direction things are taking, then once this is handled, then
Speaker 5: he's going to move all of his money to Alex
Speaker 5: jonestore dot com. And then once they catch him there,
Speaker 5: he's gonna move all of his money to Alex jonestore
Speaker 5: dot com two. And then once they catch him there,
Speaker 5: he's gonna move his stuff to Alex Jones dot com three.
Speaker 5: Until eventually everybody gets so fucking tired that they're like, fine,
Speaker 5: either we're no longer going to come after you, or
Speaker 5: will settle for fucking nothing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Because and him and his lawyers explained that even
Speaker 3: as part of their legal strategy early on, which is
Speaker 3: that you exhaust people with delays and to the point
Speaker 3: where someone's just willing to settle because you're such a
Speaker 3: pain in the ass. Yeah, And that's just kind of
Speaker 3: his mode of operation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And every time people have been like, well, clearly
Speaker 5: you can't continue to be a pain in the ass
Speaker 5: this way anymore. It won't be allowed. It has instead
Speaker 5: been allowed, so you can do it.
Speaker 4: It's fun.
Speaker 2: I don't want to get like in the way of
Speaker 2: people's you know, celebrating the downfall of Alex Jones. But
Speaker 2: it does kind of seem like nothing realistically is going
Speaker 2: to stop him from being rich and being able to
Speaker 2: talk to an audience of people who are dangerously devoted
Speaker 2: to his shit. Like none of this is actually going
Speaker 2: to I'm sure it's unpleasant and stressful, right, but it's
Speaker 2: not going to stop him. It's just not possible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is why you get other experts, because I
Speaker 5: do want to get in the way of people enjoying
Speaker 5: quote unquote info.
Speaker 2: I'm just talking about like when I'm when I'm watching
Speaker 2: people celebrate on Twitter, like you can't correct everybody. It's
Speaker 2: like whenever, whenever there's like this info about Alex Jones
Speaker 2: that people listen to your show, know, like there was
Speaker 2: a period of time where I would correct people about
Speaker 2: that or really literally anything else. And I've increasing the
Speaker 2: out to the point where like everyone's wrong about almost
Speaker 2: everything they say on the Internet, and there's really no
Speaker 2: point in correcting anybody about it anymore, Like, what am
Speaker 2: I going to do? How is this going to help?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I see people like posting videos of Alex crying, yeah,
Speaker 3: and like changing the context of what it is for
Speaker 3: some post and it's like, you guys are just it's
Speaker 3: not worth the energy to correct here. Yeah, to your point, though,
Speaker 3: Jordanan does want to stop people from celebrating and ruining
Speaker 3: everyone's fun. I'm in the middle, okay. I would like
Speaker 3: people to be a little half at the time to
Speaker 3: do it. I want people to be a little bit
Speaker 3: more realistic about their expectations, people being like celebrating prematurely,
Speaker 3: Like you're just gonna have to deal with the hangover
Speaker 3: of this. That is, there's a pretty decent chance somebody
Speaker 3: aligned with Alex is going to buy the company and
Speaker 3: then all of it is going to get just given
Speaker 3: back to him, And it's equally likely that someone you know,
Speaker 3: like a Soro or whatever, does end up buying it.
Speaker 3: Info Wars is destroyed and Alex's revenue streams remain intact
Speaker 3: because his dad runs his supplement company now that's outside
Speaker 3: of the bankruptcy. He shifted all of his merch over
Speaker 3: to this Alex Jones store dot com that's run by
Speaker 3: somebody else, So like all the meaningful ways that he
Speaker 3: can make money are now protected, and he can just
Speaker 3: start Alex Jones Fuck Around Hour or whatever and have
Speaker 3: these people be sponsors, and you know, it'll feel fun
Speaker 3: that Info Wars is gone or someone else bought it
Speaker 3: or whatever. But like you know, like you're saying, Robert,
Speaker 3: it doesn't it doesn't really address the issue, and nothing
Speaker 3: is nothing's really gained.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of been a massive waste
Speaker 5: of everybody's time. But but a lot of lawyers are
Speaker 5: ever going to make a lot of money, so that's good.
Speaker 2: It does seem if I'm going out of my way
Speaker 2: to kind of look at what are the most positive
Speaker 2: results of this, Like if I mean, it does look
Speaker 2: like he's probably going to lose control of all all
Speaker 2: of the shit that they have to film Info Wars, Right,
Speaker 2: that won't stop them from filming and doing videos, but
Speaker 2: maybe they'll look like crap, and maybe that will have
Speaker 2: an impact on like the degree of credence people give them,
Speaker 2: you know, like maybe the fact that info Wars has
Speaker 2: a nice studio isn't zero percent of like why their
Speaker 2: shit gets taken seriously by people. I don't think it's
Speaker 2: most of why, but it's not nothing either, otherwise like
Speaker 2: they wouldn't be doing it. Like I do think that
Speaker 2: that although I don't know, maybe that was in a
Speaker 2: different era is when that mattered.
Speaker 3: I think it's also psychologically important for him. Yeah, that
Speaker 3: might be the most he wants to think he's doing
Speaker 3: a real show, and without the trappings of a fake
Speaker 3: CNN studio. It's harder to pretend that you're not just
Speaker 3: reading Twitter headlines and then getting mad about them. But
Speaker 3: I do I do feel like this idea that it's
Speaker 3: a waste of time and everything has been a waste
Speaker 3: of time. I just want to give a little bit
Speaker 3: of voice to the fact that it may feel like
Speaker 3: a waste of time and nothing has been achieved. But
Speaker 3: you know, if you listen to the perspective of some
Speaker 3: of the plaintiffs and some of the families, the ability
Speaker 3: to face him in court and reclaim some of the
Speaker 3: power that he had over memories, yeah, and the power
Speaker 3: and the pain. You know, that isn't something that is
Speaker 3: quantifiable in terms of the money or you know, all
Speaker 3: of his feet dragging, but it is something that matters,
Speaker 3: and I don't want to pretend that that hasn't been achieved.
Speaker 3: Oh great, as much as it's not the catharsis of
Speaker 3: him getting arrested or losing all of his money or
Speaker 3: whatever that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I mean, I just I think we all
Speaker 5: needed to understand clearly from the beginning what this was,
Speaker 5: and that would have altered kind of the way that
Speaker 5: this is perceived. Like if we had all known from
Speaker 5: the jump, Like if all the lawyers and everybody and
Speaker 5: all the media had gotten together and been like, listen,
Speaker 5: this is going to be a moral victory, and it's
Speaker 5: gonna be good to have this like in public, to
Speaker 5: have this airing for all of us to see and
Speaker 5: for the families to have.
Speaker 4: I think we would have been fine with that.
Speaker 5: The problem was all the rest of the stuff was
Speaker 5: a waste of everybody's time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, does that make sense? Yeah, No, that makes sense
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think if we had just had that, this could
Speaker 5: all have been banged out in a day.
Speaker 4: Really.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like we get everybody in court, everybody gets to
Speaker 5: say their piece, and then we're done, and Alex gets
Speaker 5: to remain rich.
Speaker 4: It's basically the same thing.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, We're gonna keep talking on this, and
Speaker 2: I'm gonna ask you guys for an update on how
Speaker 2: Alex is handling the election too. But first, what's all
Speaker 2: handle some ads and we're back. You know, this is
Speaker 2: one thing, this is gonna right.
Speaker 3: I got to stop you. I can't believe you're running
Speaker 3: an ad for doctor Jones Natural.
Speaker 2: Well, that's just very different, very different naturals. Though, very
Speaker 2: different naturals. Not we are, we are using that in
Speaker 2: the porn sense. My okay, My Alex Jones deep fake
Speaker 2: pornography website is off the ground. For seventy dollars a month.
Speaker 2: You two can have a subscription Doctor j Jones Shrunk Natural.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, doctor doctor Jones Supplements.
Speaker 4: You have some real trunk naturals.
Speaker 2: Honestly, most of what I do is just take clips
Speaker 2: from the graduate and uh and put him in as
Speaker 2: the as the male elite. I don't know why.
Speaker 3: I don't know why to give people what they want.
Speaker 2: Anyway, we made forty million dollars last month.
Speaker 6: Damn.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we should. We should have stopped with this whole
Speaker 4: no ads thing.
Speaker 2: So I I I want to talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about how Alex has been handling the election. Because you know,
Speaker 2: one of the things that's always interesting to me is
Speaker 2: how his sense about whether or not everyone's doomed to be,
Speaker 2: you know, murdered by the New World Order and have
Speaker 2: their corpse disposed of by a robot is not related
Speaker 2: at all to like how conservatism is doing, how how
Speaker 2: his party has picked candidates are doing. It's it's a
Speaker 2: pure his own personal vibes, because right now is not
Speaker 2: a terrible time if you're a fascist in the United States.
Speaker 2: There's a real good chance they're going to have a
Speaker 2: have a runaway win here in the next couple of weeks.
Speaker 2: But alex is, at least based on the most recent
Speaker 2: episode of Knowledge Fight I've listened to more or less
Speaker 2: on the everything is fucked and we're all doomed. The
Speaker 2: New World Order is going to eat you all things.
Speaker 2: I think it's just because he's got the auction team
Speaker 2: coming by his office.
Speaker 3: Well a spoiler alert in the next episode, he's had
Speaker 3: a euphorium moment because he's realized that they're gonna win.
Speaker 5: They've already won. You've you're far you're way too far behind.
Speaker 5: Now Tomorrow, of course, they will be losing, and we're
Speaker 5: all gonna die.
Speaker 3: He's a rapid cycling kind of guy.
Speaker 4: I don't do that We're gonna win.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I mean I think I think that, you know,
Speaker 3: we've even talked about this before, this dynamic of like
Speaker 3: your enemy has to be uh, super strong and then
Speaker 3: super defeatable and super weak, like all of that must
Speaker 3: exist simultaneously or else. Yeah, you know his game doesn't
Speaker 3: really work as well. Yeah, so that that energy is
Speaker 3: going to keep going until the election.
Speaker 4: And also it makes sense.
Speaker 5: I mean, I can't imagine the idea of a bunch
Speaker 5: of professional people coming into my home or place of
Speaker 5: business and just like cataloging things, just taking each individual pictures,
Speaker 5: the amount of stress and nervous energy that that would provide. Yeah,
Speaker 5: like I'd be like I did, I didn't know. I
Speaker 5: don't know if I needed to clean that. I don't
Speaker 5: know if I needed to clean it.
Speaker 3: She would be getting real.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I just like cleaning up my dad's place
Speaker 2: after he died was like this whole thing of all
Speaker 2: of these are items that have meaning to our family,
Speaker 2: and I would be okay burning them all in a
Speaker 2: fire in.
Speaker 4: A pit, right yeah, right, Like I'm just I'm done.
Speaker 2: I'm done. So I can't imagine like the sense of
Speaker 2: fuck it I would have and Alex is, especially if
Speaker 2: I had Alex Jones money, like he really it's just
Speaker 2: more evidence that there's a deep sickness involved in all
Speaker 2: this with him, like he can't stop himself, like yes,
Speaker 2: go fish or something, bro like go on a nice
Speaker 2: fishing trip. What are you doing sitting in your office
Speaker 2: watching your life get picked apart? What a miserable place.
Speaker 4: Give everybody the day off. It's great.
Speaker 3: Fishing's not going to stop the devil, and that is
Speaker 3: really uh, you.
Speaker 5: Know, fishing is actually how the devil gets out. It's
Speaker 5: every water is a portal to the fifth dimension of Hell,
Speaker 5: which is actually the lower fifth. There's a higher fifth
Speaker 5: dimension where good demons come I mean, angels come out
Speaker 5: of but then the lower fifth dimension comes up through
Speaker 5: the pond, and that's where catfish come from.
Speaker 3: This is not an Alex theory, but it plausibly could be.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I feel like I wasn't far off.
Speaker 2: No, no, So how are we? How are we doing
Speaker 2: with Alex in terms of like one thing I've noticed
Speaker 2: maybe I have a You can tell me if you
Speaker 2: agree with my kind of interpretation here is that he
Speaker 2: seems to be at a little bit of a lower
Speaker 2: ebb in terms of getting invited on and talking with
Speaker 2: like much more popular creators. I haven't seen like last year,
Speaker 2: I felt like I saw him on a lot of stuff,
Speaker 2: and this year. I don't know if it's just that
Speaker 2: he's not, you know, as sexy as he was to
Speaker 2: them last year. But I'm just not seeing him out
Speaker 2: as much as I kind of expected to in an election.
Speaker 2: And I'm wondering if that's your interpretation too, or if
Speaker 2: I'm just kind of you think I'm off.
Speaker 3: I think it's fifty to fifty because I think that
Speaker 3: there is something to that, Like he was on he's
Speaker 3: been on more fun stuff before in the past, and
Speaker 3: it's been it's been a little bit limited this year,
Speaker 3: but he was just on Tucker's Live show in Pennsylvania,
Speaker 3: which is about as big as anything he's done. Probably
Speaker 3: it at least it feels pretty big.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it wasn't the two drunk sports guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, flagrant two flagrant too. That might have been
Speaker 3: a few years ago too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my memory is terrible.
Speaker 3: He hasn't been back on Rogan. Yeah, you know, there's
Speaker 3: some big there's some big gaps in terms of like
Speaker 3: where he feels like he should be appearing. But you know,
Speaker 3: if you look at the luminaries that were on the
Speaker 3: Tucker Carlson tour, like him being included in that list
Speaker 3: of people is pretty you know, that's that's rarefied air.
Speaker 4: I mean, unfortunately, I guess it is in a way.
Speaker 3: You got RFK Junior, Yeah, you got the vic.
Speaker 5: They're consequential people, which is the most desruning part is
Speaker 5: that these are the dregs of humanity and yet they
Speaker 5: are very consequential people that we should be paying attention.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely infuriating that, Yeah, I have to care about
Speaker 2: especially fucking Vivac. Yeah, because I ran into him at
Speaker 2: the fucking RNC and he was being surrounded by a
Speaker 2: cloud of guys who all looked like Nick Fuintes. Like
Speaker 2: the only reason I didn't assume one of them was
Speaker 2: Nick Fuintes is that any one of them could have
Speaker 2: been Nick Fuintes. And I had to fight this urge.
Speaker 2: Do you're seeing those like old man comics, like a
Speaker 2: guy I'll be fighting one hundred shrews and like eating
Speaker 2: one of them to death with the others, I had
Speaker 2: to fight off the urge to pick up one Fuintes
Speaker 2: by the lakes. It just starts swinging him.
Speaker 4: Just start swinging.
Speaker 3: You are my weapon.
Speaker 2: So like, where do you where do you see Alex
Speaker 2: a year from now?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Like, do you have any kind of expectation for where
Speaker 2: he's going to be, because like, at some point his
Speaker 2: dad has to die, which I understand is a pretty
Speaker 2: important part right now of how he's able to keep
Speaker 2: money flowing well to his operation the face of the judgment, right.
Speaker 3: His dad and his brother in law both run. Okay,
Speaker 3: the Doctor Jones naturals, So even if Old David Jones
Speaker 3: catch the bucket, his brother is still going to be there.
Speaker 3: So I think, I think Alex is fine. But he
Speaker 3: almost killed his dad with COVID.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I am surprised Doctor Jones lived through that,
Speaker 2: given alexis.
Speaker 3: Yeah gorilla sitting on his chest, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: I think it is a little bit of a testament
Speaker 5: to how insane and how the best torture for Alex
Speaker 5: is just being cursed with being Alex is. Like if
Speaker 5: I was in this scenario where I plausibly have a
Speaker 5: reason to never touch or talk about money again, and
Speaker 5: yet still make the almost exact same amount of it.
Speaker 4: That would be perfect. That's just taking a job away
Speaker 4: from me right now.
Speaker 5: It's my dad's problem to look at the sales numbers.
Speaker 4: Dr tr anywhere else.
Speaker 3: That's not a good ad man. That's the thing you
Speaker 3: can do a good read.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if Alex is the face guy, doctor Jones handles
Speaker 5: the business, that means that Alex doesn't have to do both.
Speaker 4: It makes perfect sense.
Speaker 3: But to your question, though, like I really do feel
Speaker 3: like right now we're in the most chaotic possible moment
Speaker 3: because you have these two things that could go any
Speaker 3: direction that are happening around the same time. Like you
Speaker 3: have the election, and then you also have the auction, right,
Speaker 3: and if Trump wins or loses, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: different possibilities of how his path might go. And if
Speaker 3: someone who he's aligned with ends up buying the company
Speaker 3: or not, that's another Like the world would be very
Speaker 3: different in terms of the choices that he has in
Speaker 3: front of him. Yeah, but I think it'll be bad.
Speaker 3: I think he'll be unhappy that I think, no matter
Speaker 3: what I think, will be pretty miserable. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's just because of him. He's just a
Speaker 4: real miserable piece of shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about his
Speaker 2: bee cast and how they might do because I again,
Speaker 2: I I don't see a world in which Alex gives
Speaker 2: up what he's doing. But I do see a world
Speaker 2: in which he can no longer pay Owen Schroyer.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: And that's that's the truth, that's the true goal, when it's.
Speaker 2: Not making what a heartbreaking amount of money. I'm sure
Speaker 2: more further into the six figures than Owen Shrotier ot
Speaker 2: to be.
Speaker 3: I wonder what the deal with him would be though,
Speaker 3: Like he went to jail for Alex.
Speaker 2: God, it's true, he sure did.
Speaker 3: He did. Time, Like what could he tell if he
Speaker 3: was off the payroll or you know, like or how
Speaker 3: much do you pay to keep him on the payroll?
Speaker 3: Because he's the kind of guy who went to jail
Speaker 3: for you.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you look at a I mean, David
Speaker 5: Knight's not going to jail for you. But if that's
Speaker 5: if that's a comparable exit for a personal popularity, I
Speaker 5: don't think Owen's got much of a shot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think he can be tossed into the ocean.
Speaker 3: But I think Chase Chase Geyser is more of a
Speaker 3: beat player than Owen.
Speaker 5: We just have a personal he just Chase Geyser is
Speaker 5: a new character who's popped up in the later seasons
Speaker 5: of the show.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and he's.
Speaker 5: Really brought a new He's brought a lot of a
Speaker 5: late season juice to it that I think we needed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's better than No One though, that's fr Yeah.
Speaker 2: See I was going to say, it's like when Fraser
Speaker 2: brought on all those British people. But speaking of British people,
Speaker 2: our sponsors might be British. We don't check and we're back. Okay, guys,
Speaker 2: So I guess, kind of closing stuff out, what do
Speaker 2: you think this year have been the big pieces of
Speaker 2: Alex misinformation that you've seen people spreading online? Like, what's
Speaker 2: kind of been your biggest I'm guessing this is gonna
Speaker 2: be a Jordan heavy question, but.
Speaker 5: Like stuff about Alex or stuff yeah, yeah, yeah, stuff
Speaker 5: about Alex that's like specifically, what kind of stuff have
Speaker 5: you heard, like people in media saying about Alex this
Speaker 5: year that has pissed you off the most? I Mean,
Speaker 5: the funny part of this question is that I've actually
Speaker 5: left the Internet about as much as possible because of
Speaker 5: the rage that the rage that I feel at this
Speaker 5: very situation.
Speaker 2: A wise move.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So, I honestly, I think I think the big
Speaker 5: thing for me personally is just the if we are
Speaker 5: going to talk about Alex's auction, then to me, what
Speaker 5: we're talking about is how much money the families are
Speaker 5: going to receive. That's to me in my head of
Speaker 5: if we're gonna talk money, then what we should talk
Speaker 5: about is the end point. How much do the families
Speaker 5: get And even if this auction just goes gangbusters, the
Speaker 5: families are going to get so so little of whatever
Speaker 5: happens because they're the last in line before you pay,
Speaker 5: like Norm Pattis is going to make more money at
Speaker 5: the end of all of this process than any of
Speaker 5: the family members.
Speaker 4: That's just that's just probably.
Speaker 5: True, I would say, if not guaranteed true at this point,
Speaker 5: unless of course Mark Cuban or somebody a billionaire shows
Speaker 5: up and showers them with money. But for the most part,
Speaker 5: it's it's like, the end goals should be the families,
Speaker 5: they should be first, but that's the wrong thing.
Speaker 4: They're the last. So it's very annoying, it's very frustrating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is especially given that, like that's the whole
Speaker 2: reason for the suit, Like that's.
Speaker 4: The whole reason for the season.
Speaker 2: But I mean, obviously the system is not conducted to
Speaker 2: benefit family last who are suffering. That's not who makes
Speaker 2: the rules, that's not who operates the system. The system. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: we don't need to rant about that. It is a bummer, Dan,
Speaker 2: what about you?
Speaker 3: I mean, maybe it's recency bias and stuff, but like,
Speaker 3: I do think that the conversation around the auction is
Speaker 3: missing a little bit of the point, whether it be
Speaker 3: in terms of you know, what the sale is, like
Speaker 3: you were bringing up Jordan, or like people thinking that
Speaker 3: there is a solution to the problem that Alex represents,
Speaker 3: Like this isn't going to be like a ding Dong
Speaker 3: the Witch's dead type moment. You're going to have, you know,
Speaker 3: his new thing funded by the companies that he's been
Speaker 3: building up to avoid the bankruptcy, or you're going to
Speaker 3: have somebody who's with him but that buys it in
Speaker 3: for wars is going to be the same problem on
Speaker 3: November fourteenth or whatever as it was the day before.
Speaker 3: And I think that I think that people are getting
Speaker 3: themselves may be a little bit up for a disappointment. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I think that we've seen that a couple times,
Speaker 3: like with the alexad the night where he claimed that
Speaker 3: security guards were trying to shut him down. You know,
Speaker 3: people got excited about like this is it? Yeah yep,
Speaker 3: And I think maybe I'm jaded too because of years
Speaker 3: of doing this.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's almost never it.
Speaker 5: I mean, I want to say this and I want
Speaker 5: people to recognize that this is true in regards to
Speaker 5: this scenario. You are never going to come. You're never
Speaker 5: going to come. It's never going to happen. You're going
Speaker 5: to be perpetually close, and then you're not gonna make it,
Speaker 5: and then you're gonna come back. That's how it is.
Speaker 2: If you're into edging, Alex is the guy to follow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's perfect.
Speaker 2: So I think that that's actually really good advice. Like
Speaker 2: if you if you just as a layman, are hearing
Speaker 2: people talk about Alex Jones on social media or like
Speaker 2: seeing some sort of like opinion column or whatever and
Speaker 2: some you know, left wing or liberal rag and you
Speaker 2: want to know, like how credible is this? I guess
Speaker 2: the first question to ask is are they predicting a
Speaker 2: massive change to Alex and what he actually does, because
Speaker 2: if so, probably nothing has got Unless it's like an
Speaker 2: article that he's been diagnosed with the disease, nothing's probably
Speaker 2: going to change, right, at some point he's going to die.
Speaker 2: I'm not being mean.
Speaker 3: I don't even know.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't believe that article. I wouldn't believe a word
Speaker 4: in that article.
Speaker 3: They're lying, well, you take that illness with doctor Marbles to.
Speaker 4: Get out, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3: The deposition of them, so like he you know, fu
Speaker 3: fuck even that. Yeah, I think I look at it
Speaker 3: slightly differently, and that is that I do predict that
Speaker 3: there will be a massive change. We just don't know
Speaker 3: what it'll be. Sure like there'll be something. He's got
Speaker 3: to do something, because his content is really stagnant and
Speaker 3: a bit uninteresting in the Trump sense. Yeah, and I do.
Speaker 3: I think that there is a change that will be
Speaker 3: needed if he wants to maintain whatever he's doing. But
Speaker 3: I mean, anybody who has an idea of what it
Speaker 3: is is wrong.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I imagine that predicting anything in the
Speaker 5: next sixty days is going to be a ridiculous proposition.
Speaker 5: If you had predicted a new hurricane fucking two weeks ago,
Speaker 5: people would have thought you were crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I think that's all I had to ask. Guys,
Speaker 2: anything you wanted to plug will bring up before we
Speaker 2: close out.
Speaker 3: Uh no, just we exist to where we have a show.
Speaker 2: I'll check out Knowledge Fight. It's my favorite podcast. It's
Speaker 2: the only only reasonable way to keep up with Alex
Speaker 2: Jones and a whole network of other con men and
Speaker 2: grifters who who kind of latch onto him like that
Speaker 2: fish that lives on the underside of a shark, except
Speaker 2: for Alex. Alex is also a remora or remera. Right,
Speaker 2: So it's just like a It's like a just a
Speaker 2: series of smaller and smaller ones, each sucking each other off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 2: And Alex is latched onto the side of a crew
Speaker 2: ship toilet. Yeah, there were more on the cruise ship toilet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you've now turned this into a human centipede situation.
Speaker 3: I have, I have.
Speaker 2: I don't know why again again, it's all this is
Speaker 2: all viral marketing for doctor Jones's Big Naturals.
Speaker 5: Now figured out an appropriate punishment for defamation of character
Speaker 5: human centipedes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been saying that for years years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like and I do have to point
Speaker 3: this out. Sure, that is both cruel and very unusual.
Speaker 5: It is perhaps the most unusual thing you could imagine.
Speaker 2: Really, I hate to say, but somebody, it would it
Speaker 2: would take like some of these people three months to
Speaker 2: have several thousand people convinced that human centipeding is like
Speaker 2: a mental health hack, like it's it's it's like getting
Speaker 2: rid of seed oils. You know, that's how you accelerate
Speaker 2: muscle development.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Ancient cavemen were always eating each other ship you know
Speaker 2: what You've also you've also made a very good point.
Speaker 5: If you this this whole thing. If you want to
Speaker 5: stop Alex, Alex is a symptom. Alex is a symptom
Speaker 5: of the larger problem. You need to regulate supplements, Yes,
Speaker 5: FDA approved supplements.
Speaker 2: We'll get rid of most of these guys every podcast
Speaker 2: episode we can. We are pushing the line. In my dream.
Speaker 2: If I accomplish one thing in my life, it would
Speaker 2: be getting this to become widely agreed upon by liberals
Speaker 2: and the left. Regulate supplements, allowed direct sales of cars
Speaker 2: to consumers yep, and ban MLMs, and prosecute people criminally
Speaker 2: for trying to operate them. Do that, and you fix
Speaker 2: a lot of other problems.
Speaker 3: I would do something about precious metals businesses too, I
Speaker 3: would throw that.
Speaker 2: Well. Hey, now, hey, now, Mike Lindell's giving us some
Speaker 2: gold money. Sir, right, you just wait wait right there
Speaker 2: untill he runs out.
Speaker 3: Dan, pillow sales are illegal, also, I should.
Speaker 2: Pillows are illegal? Makes your neck week Yep, all right,
Speaker 2: everybody listen to knowledge by Thank you, Dan and Jordan.
Speaker 2: As always, we'll be back tomorrow with some other episode
Speaker 2: of this podcast that we do every day.
Speaker 7: Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison. This is
Speaker 7: a little special episode today. I'm joined by Alex from
Speaker 7: Corvalis Antifa and Hank, who's using a pseudonym for personal
Speaker 7: safety from the Left Coast Right Watch Team. Hello to
Speaker 7: you both, and thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 8: Hey, what's happening? Thank you so much for having us,
Speaker 8: Thanks for having us.
Speaker 9: Good to be here.
Speaker 7: So today we're gonna be talking about this group called
Speaker 7: White Lives Matter. I guess originally White Lives Matter was
Speaker 7: like a slogan and like a very a very loose
Speaker 7: group from like twenty fifteen, or at least it kind
Speaker 7: of started in twenty fifteen as a reaction to the
Speaker 7: growing Black Lives Matter movement. I know, I definitely saw this,
Speaker 7: this phrase propagated via like memes, flyers, billboards, and other
Speaker 7: forms of propaganda as a way to like seed white
Speaker 7: nationalist rhetoric to the then like growing and burgeoning.
Speaker 8: Al Right, Yeah, so there was a formation that was
Speaker 8: kind of like an NSM splinter formation that happened in
Speaker 8: an in reaction to the initial Black Lives Matter protests
Speaker 8: in twenty fifteen. The White Lives Matter that we're talking
Speaker 8: about today is a different formation entirely that utilizes sort
Speaker 8: of the same slogan. They are a group that started
Speaker 8: in like twenty twenty one and have been organizing primarily
Speaker 8: on telegram and have grown really rapidly across the country
Speaker 8: of the years since.
Speaker 7: Yeah, like we can see the early use of this
Speaker 7: phrase spread by you mentioned the National Socialist Movement, along
Speaker 7: with a few other kind of collection of neo Nazis,
Speaker 7: the Aryan Resistance Society and the Aryan Nationalist Alliance. But
Speaker 7: then things kind of like died down. It was just
Speaker 7: it was like a slogan you could see at rallies,
Speaker 7: but it wasn't it wasn't anything like too prominent, honestly.
Speaker 7: But then we had this big second wave in twenty
Speaker 7: twenty one with Telegram channels promoting a White Lives Matter
Speaker 7: march or a series of martians to be held across
Speaker 7: the country on like April eleventh. This batch of rallies
Speaker 7: were mostly a failure, in part due to the efforts
Speaker 7: of anti fascists who worked disabotage the planning of these
Speaker 7: rallies ahead of time. Of the rallies that did eventually
Speaker 7: take place, really only a handful of white supremacists showed
Speaker 7: up and most were outnumbered by anti fascist counter demonstrators.
Speaker 7: So then after this initial event with these with this
Speaker 7: like big batch of like of like channels on Telegram,
Speaker 7: which is this like encrypted messaging platform based out of Russia.
Speaker 7: It's not very good. Don't use it unless you're trying
Speaker 7: to infiltrate a Nazi group. But after these like fail rallies,
Speaker 7: White Lives Matter kind of turned into yet another one
Speaker 7: of these networks for white supremacists and neo Nazis that
Speaker 7: advocate quote unquote pro white activism. Typically this includes like
Speaker 7: putting up white nationalists like stickers around neighborhoods, hanging large
Speaker 7: banners with fascist rhetoric or Nazi imagery, flyering, and just
Speaker 7: spreading propaganda online with the occasional like in person rally.
Speaker 7: I think you can see kind of the peak of
Speaker 7: like the White Lives Matter slogan, at least was when
Speaker 7: it was propagated to the degree that Kanye west Ward
Speaker 7: on a T shirt during his little Nazi era back
Speaker 7: in twenty twenty two. And I think now you see
Speaker 7: White Lives Matter as like a network. It overlaps and
Speaker 7: crosses over a lot with like similar groups like the
Speaker 7: GDL that's the Going Defense League, as well as the
Speaker 7: National Socialist Club and Patriot Front to some degree. I
Speaker 7: guess one thing that I wanted to talk about is that,
Speaker 7: and this is mentioned in the Corvalis and TIFA article
Speaker 7: on the organ chapter of White Lives Matter, is like
Speaker 7: the idea of hiding your power level, which we used
Speaker 7: to talk about it a little bit more. I think
Speaker 7: in some ways a much Nazis kind of blew their
Speaker 7: cover back around twenty twenty, but now you see kind
Speaker 7: of more attempts to try to seed a white nationalist
Speaker 7: rhetoric into other kind of right wing spaces to push
Speaker 7: them farther along that radicalization pathway. And I would like
Speaker 7: to have a discussion at least a little bit about
Speaker 7: how White Lives Matter specifically tries to hide their power level,
Speaker 7: like kind of disguise the level of like overt fascism
Speaker 7: that they're really proposing by employing this like quote unquote
Speaker 7: like pro white rhetoric.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So White Lives Matter as a national organization is extremely
Speaker 8: like conscious of what they would describe as like their optics.
Speaker 8: They are very intent on like radicalizing who they perceive
Speaker 8: to be everyday white people into sort of fascist politics.
Speaker 8: And in their national level manuals and the materials that
Speaker 8: they provide the leaders of statewide organizations, they specifically talk
Speaker 8: about stuff like not displaying Nazi flags or using like
Speaker 8: neo Nazi rhetoric despite that being what they believe. But
Speaker 8: their sort of goal is to use more innocuous styles
Speaker 8: of sloganeering, like you know, the phrase like white lives
Speaker 8: matter and protect white babies stuff like that as ways
Speaker 8: to kind of open the door to get people to
Speaker 8: become interested in a more like overtly national socialist politic
Speaker 8: that they can radicalize people to who like join their group.
Speaker 8: And you see a lot of groups like Active Clubs,
Speaker 8: Patriot Front, other sort of white nationalists formations using the
Speaker 8: national WL on the BORG as sort of a way
Speaker 8: to recruit to their own organizations with this sort of
Speaker 8: more innocuous, subtle style of propaganda.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and like one other thing that's pointed out in
Speaker 7: the in the Crabalis and Tifa article is like they
Speaker 7: don't just do agit prop, Like they're not just a
Speaker 7: group that is composed of only doing stickering. There's been
Speaker 7: multiple instances when their online propaganda as well as their
Speaker 7: like in person stickering, escalates to real to real violence.
Speaker 7: Last year, a twenty eight year old from New Jersey
Speaker 7: attacked an anti racism concert at a church. He yelled
Speaker 7: White Lives Matter at attendees, threw smoke pomps at the church,
Speaker 7: and then tried to bear spray the crowd, think inadvertently
Speaker 7: bear sprague himself, which he then recorded a video talking
Speaker 7: about and posted online. Later in air, fifteen and high
Speaker 7: capacity magazines were found in his home alongside White Lives
Speaker 7: Matter propaganda, and later that year, a twenty year old
Speaker 7: male associated with White Lives Matter firebombed a church in Ohio,
Speaker 7: and the church was picked as a target because it
Speaker 7: planned to host two drag events. After being arrested, police
Speaker 7: found six firearms and dozens of loaded magazines alongside Nazi paraphernalia.
Speaker 7: This guy also wrote a manifestor defending his actions and
Speaker 7: specifically stating that he was happy about it because people
Speaker 7: online were proud of him. And you can even go
Speaker 7: back to the White Lives Matter rallies back in twenty
Speaker 7: twenty one, especially the one in Huntington Beach which saw
Speaker 7: a degree of physical violence. It's important not just not
Speaker 7: to just write these groups off as being like, oh,
Speaker 7: they only do banner drops, oh they only do stickers,
Speaker 7: because not only is like propaganda really important part of
Speaker 7: growing the number of them out there, but they also
Speaker 7: do real world violence.
Speaker 8: It's also important to talk about like the ways that
Speaker 8: WLM is organizationally connected to like more like scary elements
Speaker 8: of the neo Nazi right. Recently, Left Coast Right Watch
Speaker 8: published proof that Matthew Allison, who was one of the
Speaker 8: leaders of the Terrogram collective who was recently arrested, was
Speaker 8: responsible for some of the national WLM like propaganda that
Speaker 8: they published, which is quite concerning. So you know, even
Speaker 8: these groups that are more movementarian than nature and are
Speaker 8: trying to appeal to you know, you know more quote
Speaker 8: unquote nor me white people are like directly in bed
Speaker 8: with people who are like as scene with mass shooters and.
Speaker 7: Like terrorists yep, specifically try to like groom people into
Speaker 7: becoming mass shooters. Yes, I mean, and like that's why
Speaker 7: I think specifically with both these guys who did physical violence,
Speaker 7: you can see violence as like it as like an
Speaker 7: escalatory thing for the person who's like doing it right,
Speaker 7: you start off with throwing am al top cocktail, and
Speaker 7: then later you might do a mass shooting. It's like
Speaker 7: a testing ground. You can see the same thing with
Speaker 7: you know, bear macing and anti racism concert. The fact
Speaker 7: that both these guys, specifically the one in Ohio had
Speaker 7: like a lot a lot of guns, and like we're
Speaker 7: in America, there's a lot of guns around, but having
Speaker 7: that many guns and loaded magazines in Ohio as a
Speaker 7: twenty year old with all that Nazi paraphernalia like that,
Speaker 7: that is what a Nazi mass shooter's like bedroom looks like.
Speaker 7: And these are not like isolated incidents. I guess let's
Speaker 7: let's take a bit of a break and we will
Speaker 7: come back to talk about specifically the organ chapter of
Speaker 7: White Lives Matter and what they've been getting up to
Speaker 7: the past few months. All Right, So, after Krela Santifa
Speaker 7: leaked like chatlogs from the organ White Lives Matter group
Speaker 7: back in twenty twenty one, the chapter went to dormant,
Speaker 7: and then it restarted earlier this year. I guess, Alex,
Speaker 7: can you walk us through kind of the rebirth of
Speaker 7: White Lives Matter Oregon.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So, the way that WOLM works as a national
Speaker 8: organization is there's like a series of groups that all
Speaker 8: kind of are extant, like they there are groups, and
Speaker 8: then people would like apply to be with the national
Speaker 8: org to be like a leader of a state group.
Speaker 8: So back when w OLM initially began as a thing
Speaker 8: in twenty twenty one, our group was running the Oregon
Speaker 8: chapter and exposed several people who tried to join that group,
Speaker 8: and then after that like interest in that organization became
Speaker 8: it stopped existing for several years.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Then earlier this year we noticed that somebody had taken
Speaker 8: over the chapter and had started engaging in some stickering
Speaker 8: and some propaganda. So we were like, well, you know,
Speaker 8: we may as well join this group and see what's up.
Speaker 8: So we infiltrated the organization, gathered information about the membership,
Speaker 8: and published that information online in order to warn the
Speaker 8: communities that these guys in habit about their activities. The group,
Speaker 8: you know, was doing stuff that was not like extremely intense,
Speaker 8: like they were doing stickers, they did two banner drops
Speaker 8: or three banner drops successfully rather But in their chat
Speaker 8: we also found that they were talking a lot about
Speaker 8: like you know, military training and escalating and you know,
Speaker 8: even though this group kind of like seemed very low
Speaker 8: key and was like not doing anything, you know, super scary, like,
Speaker 8: the stuff they're talking about is concerning, and they're getting
Speaker 8: organized and they're getting to know each other. So we
Speaker 8: put a kibosh on that.
Speaker 7: So it looks like, according to a research the new
Speaker 7: leader is this guy named Cruz. Dean Walters.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, so Cruz is marine kind of wash out
Speaker 8: who lives in McMinnville, Oregon. Until very recently was living
Speaker 8: a double life. He was living with his mom and
Speaker 8: his fiance, neither of who knew about his racist beliefs
Speaker 8: and now knew he was a highly incompetent leader who
Speaker 8: you know, really had a tremendous number of security flaws
Speaker 8: in his organization, you know, as is evidenced by the
Speaker 8: fact that we were able to you know, infiltrate and
Speaker 8: destroy it in a matter of just a few months.
Speaker 8: But you know, it is worth noting that, like the
Speaker 8: group grew from just a handful of people to you know,
Speaker 8: doing banner drops with like, you know, six or seven
Speaker 8: folks in just a couple, you know, a couple of
Speaker 8: short months. Like, even though these groups can kind of
Speaker 8: be benign, if there winds up being somebody who is
Speaker 8: like particularly passed it behind the channel, like, they can
Speaker 8: transform into something less benign very very quickly. And that's
Speaker 8: something we want to impart to other anti fascists across
Speaker 8: the country, is there are all these channels and they
Speaker 8: might be seen in kind of like benign now, but
Speaker 8: they can turn into something very malignant very quickly.
Speaker 7: I wanted to ask specifically about Cruise's radicalization. It's written
Speaker 7: in your piece that he was radicalized in part by
Speaker 7: the GDL, the Going Defense League, and participated in the
Speaker 7: city council desk squads, as reported by our own Molly Conger,
Speaker 7: and then just seemingly like just getting bored of just
Speaker 7: calling into city council meetings to Yelsler's he then like
Speaker 7: coued the organization. So I'm curious if he ever wrote
Speaker 7: about or talked about his background with the GDL and
Speaker 7: his like apparent boredom at their particular style of like
Speaker 7: a white supremacist activism.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so he, I think was just kind of like
Speaker 8: sitting on the internet as like a fucking, you know, dorky, lonely,
Speaker 8: sad little man, and you know, got into the GDL.
Speaker 8: For those who have the fortune of not knowing, the
Speaker 8: GDL is sort of this network of like really grotesque,
Speaker 8: highly cringey racist Twitch streamers or not on Twitch anymore,
Speaker 8: but like you know there's streamers.
Speaker 4: Nonetheless, they've been banned from Twitch. But yeah, but.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so they have this program called the City Council
Speaker 8: Death Squad where they will like call into like your
Speaker 8: local city council meeting and just like yellow slurs at
Speaker 8: the bleeder municipal employees that have to sit and watch.
Speaker 8: They did one Corvalis and like watching the footage was
Speaker 8: just like watching like these like grown men acting like children,
Speaker 8: like you know, hollering at like random like city councilor
Speaker 8: twenty three or whatever. It's really like pathetic. So I think,
Speaker 8: you know, Cruse kind of saw that and many do
Speaker 8: you know, the GDL is just a tremendously fucking pathetic organization.
Speaker 8: And he was like kind of decided that he wanted
Speaker 8: to get more involved, and he chose to get involved
Speaker 8: with WLM as opposed to like another neo Nazi formation
Speaker 8: because WLM is like a really really easy entry point
Speaker 8: and has a very like, you know, kind of base politic.
Speaker 8: It's not like you know, Patriot Front or an active
Speaker 8: club where there are you know, membership requirements and you
Speaker 8: have to engage in certain amounts of organizing activity or whatever.
Speaker 8: It's just very easy for you know, your lazy Nazi
Speaker 8: to engage with.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, it definitely feels like the lazy person's option who
Speaker 7: doesn't want to go through the work of being vetted
Speaker 7: by like actual, like larger organizations.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and he he took over the chapter from an
Speaker 8: even lazier Nazi named Christian Coats who lives in Portland, Orion,
Speaker 8: who is like this old school bonehead from the two
Speaker 8: thousands who like has some hate crime charges from like
Speaker 8: I think like attempting to and failing to assault some
Speaker 8: black teams in like two thousand and seven. So Christian
Speaker 8: had in the interceding years between us destroying the initial
Speaker 8: iteration of w Olm taking it over and basically done
Speaker 8: like zilch with it. He posts like one photo on
Speaker 8: the channel. Ever, but then he got taken over by
Speaker 8: this dude Cruise, who grew the organization from like just
Speaker 8: a few people to you know, being a reasonable street
Speaker 8: presence in a short number of months, obviously at the
Speaker 8: expense of including an anti fascist infiltrator, and you know,
Speaker 8: also just a true coterie of scumbags and idiots in
Speaker 8: the in the group.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: One of the other guys that you've identified is I
Speaker 7: don't know how to say his last name, but Casey
Speaker 7: I want to say Nutson.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, Casey Knutson, who.
Speaker 7: After being kicked out of both the Proud Boys and
Speaker 7: Patriot Front, made his own group in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 7: the Rose City Nationalists, which is kind of the laughing
Speaker 7: stock of all white pharmacist groups in the PNW, and
Speaker 7: the group has the group has largely fallen apart after
Speaker 7: being just extensively investigated and exposed by local antie fascists
Speaker 7: almost to a comical extent.
Speaker 8: Yeah, ourselves, Rose City Antifa and the Stufftown Research Collective
Speaker 8: have been kind of going through and just you know,
Speaker 8: ripping apart. RCN and RCIEN is at this point more
Speaker 8: or less just Casey and this fella named Jared Huber
Speaker 8: who is an absolute like freak. He's got a bunch
Speaker 8: of tattoos all over his face. He was arrested for
Speaker 8: kicking a puppy nearly to death and beating up his grandfather.
Speaker 8: Just real scumbag.
Speaker 4: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they all have like domestic violence charges and you know.
Speaker 4: Are just yes.
Speaker 8: Real nightmare folks. The funniest thing about Rose City Nationalists
Speaker 8: is they gotten this conflict with the Proud Boys that
Speaker 8: I believe it was in Oregon City where they got
Speaker 8: just absolutely washed by some drunken Proud Boys on the street.
Speaker 8: Not because of like ideological issues, but just because they
Speaker 8: like have you know, interpersonal issues between Casey and the
Speaker 8: Portland chapter of the Proud Boys.
Speaker 6: It was.
Speaker 8: You know, they are truly just a laughing stock and
Speaker 8: are just like you know, I hate to use the term,
Speaker 8: but kind of like locals at this point.
Speaker 7: No, I mean and one thing that you do, like
Speaker 7: document is just how many of these guys are like
Speaker 7: domestic abusers, and like this is not uncommon for like
Speaker 7: these types of fellows. But also Cruise like both admitted
Speaker 7: to stealing a gun and also abusing his wife and
Speaker 7: threatening other family with firearms. And this is like a
Speaker 7: trend across as so many of the people exposed in
Speaker 7: these articles. Is the extent to which they're all in
Speaker 7: viewed in like disposal abuse, child abuse. It's it's just
Speaker 7: it's one of the very consistent factors.
Speaker 8: Yeah, misogyny is you know, one of the very very
Speaker 8: core parts of neo Nazism and white nationalism. And yeah,
Speaker 8: there's a really really horrible like section of texts in
Speaker 8: art article that where Cruz discusses like physically hitting his
Speaker 8: fiance and then threatening his brother with a firearm. And yeah,
Speaker 8: it's really really common that these people have domestic abuse charges.
Speaker 8: Multiple people in w lam Oregon have histories of domestic abuse,
Speaker 8: including Jaron Huber and Casey Knutson, who are the two
Speaker 8: other members. And yeah, it's just anytime you look at
Speaker 8: a Nazi group, there's a dude who beats his wife,
Speaker 8: and it like kind of barn On. As long as
Speaker 8: we've been doing this work, we've been seeing it.
Speaker 7: I'd like to talk now about the second in command
Speaker 7: of White Lives Matter Oregon, this small business owner in
Speaker 7: Couse Bay named Michael Witt Gaiton Byne who usually just
Speaker 7: goes by Wit. Now, Witt has been a part of
Speaker 7: the White Lives Matter Oregon banner drops, and that was
Speaker 7: also responsible for a lot of the stickering that gets
Speaker 7: done as he leaves stickers across the truck stop bathrooms
Speaker 7: up and down the coast. Now, WIT's kind of a
Speaker 7: fascinating fellow to me. He has shockingly bad op SEC,
Speaker 7: kind of one of the worst examples I've ever seen.
Speaker 7: His very easily recognized custom flatbed truck can be seen
Speaker 7: at banner drops in August and it even appears in
Speaker 7: their own like propaganda videos for another banner drop in September.
Speaker 7: He like talked about his just like utter disregard for
Speaker 7: off SEC in one of the audio archives that you
Speaker 7: have hosted on left Goo's right watch, what else can
Speaker 7: you tell us about kind of WIT's background here?
Speaker 9: Yeah, so what is a Nazi?
Speaker 6: And I believe his mother is actually you know, he
Speaker 6: said at one point his mother was like quote awakened.
Speaker 9: To the truth about the Jews or something like that.
Speaker 6: So he seems to come from at the very least
Speaker 6: an anti Semitic family. But he himself is certainly a Nazi,
Speaker 6: and I think he has believed he can operate with
Speaker 6: impunity in kous Bay. So I think it's less that
Speaker 6: he has bad op second, more believes he seems to
Speaker 6: think of himself as living in a world where it's
Speaker 6: okay to be a Nazi. Sure, we can talk a
Speaker 6: little bit more about that, but yeah, he runs a
Speaker 6: company called Wit Industries, which he's claimed does business from
Speaker 6: Mexico to Russia. He works in the marine, marine and
Speaker 6: maritime industry within the Port of Kouz Bay and kous County.
Speaker 6: We know that he's gotten about a quarter million dollars
Speaker 6: in public contracts, primarily from the Port of kous Bay,
Speaker 6: but also the Port of Aumqua, the City of North Bend,
Speaker 6: Kou's County, South Coast Education Service District.
Speaker 9: That's just what we've found so far.
Speaker 6: It can be pretty difficult to find, you know, even
Speaker 6: though this is public money, it can still be sort
Speaker 6: of a pretty difficult process to get public records and
Speaker 6: things like that.
Speaker 9: But you know, we know that the Port of kus Bay.
Speaker 6: Alone has awarded him like two hundred nineteen thousand dollars
Speaker 6: in contracts for work ranging from hydraulics repairs and replacements
Speaker 6: on vessels on the bridge. He's also pained the state
Speaker 6: dredge and the trailer and things like that.
Speaker 9: You mentioned him using his work vehicle.
Speaker 8: So he he has.
Speaker 6: Stated, and this is from you know, information we have
Speaker 6: from the Cornellis INTI for infiltration. He stated that part
Speaker 6: of his goal is to build a white supremacist called
Speaker 6: in Coos Bay. He wants to get guys elected to
Speaker 6: mayor and city council and things like that. And he
Speaker 6: actually was using White Lives Matter to recruit guys to
Speaker 6: come and work for him. He was recruiting a guy
Speaker 6: named wand And Calhoun, who is also an alleged pedophile.
Speaker 6: And we go into in the left Colus Right Watch article,
Speaker 6: but if he got this alleged pedophile land In to
Speaker 6: come and work for him, they met in White Lives
Speaker 6: Matter and he said, hey, come work for an all
Speaker 6: white organization where we can come and build the movement together.
Speaker 9: And as far as we know, it does.
Speaker 6: Appear that Landon has moved there, who's planning to move
Speaker 6: there in this fall, and we believe he's currently there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I like to kind of go by some of these
Speaker 7: points one by one because he's he's certainly like a
Speaker 7: worrying figure. The fact that he's using his income, which
Speaker 7: is largely derived of government contracts, to like specif defictly,
Speaker 7: like fund white Ermas detectivity in the PNW, and like
Speaker 7: use his own company resources to grow the number of
Speaker 7: far right extremists in cus Bay, specifically his plans of
Speaker 7: like having them eventually like occupied positions of local government.
Speaker 7: It's a degree of like long term planning that isn't
Speaker 7: always present in some of these types of guys. You know,
Speaker 7: plans are one thing, but when you actually have a
Speaker 7: business that you are like hiring people to move to
Speaker 7: this town to like actually build this plan up, like,
Speaker 7: it shows a degree of hutspa. I guess on his
Speaker 7: part that he's actually like doing this. It kind of
Speaker 7: reminds me of the Rise Above movements tree trimming business,
Speaker 7: but that was just to pay bills. They had no
Speaker 7: plans to like slowly actually just like take over a
Speaker 7: small town. There's a lot of these businesses that are
Speaker 7: run by Nazis that primarily hire other Nazis. But the
Speaker 7: degree to which that Michael wit Is is able to
Speaker 7: operate without much oversight and just get get all of
Speaker 7: this money from local government is certainly worrying.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 7: He stated that one of his employees like prints out
Speaker 7: all of his White Lives Matter stickers and has gotten
Speaker 7: help from employees to do one banner drop outside of Roseberg,
Speaker 7: and has a history of hiring far right people, conspiracy
Speaker 7: theorists and like monetarily supporting them to like help them
Speaker 7: continue their own far right activism.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you mentioned his employees that were printing the
Speaker 6: stickers for him. That was before he hired Landon, So yeah,
Speaker 6: he already has guys that are that are doing this
Speaker 6: and the port. I think it's important to point out
Speaker 6: that the point of cou'se bay, it's public body. The
Speaker 6: commissioners are elected by the governor and they're confirmed by
Speaker 6: the organ Senate you know, or yeah, the Moorgan.
Speaker 9: Senate, I believe it is.
Speaker 6: So this is a state body that is giving state
Speaker 6: funding to this Nazi and I think that's really important
Speaker 6: to name.
Speaker 9: It's also like just to give people a.
Speaker 6: Little bit of the geography, because it's a small town
Speaker 6: that actually geographically takes quite.
Speaker 9: A while to like drive from North Bend to Coos Bay.
Speaker 6: And Witt lives right over by the Charleston Marina, and
Speaker 6: we know he's pretty in bed with the marina folks.
Speaker 10: There.
Speaker 6: There was a big organ Department of Transportation grant to
Speaker 6: the state level that the port had written that Wit
Speaker 6: would have been one of the.
Speaker 9: Like people making money. He was like written.
Speaker 6: Officially into this grant for it was a three point
Speaker 6: five million dollar grant that.
Speaker 9: Wit was written into, right, so.
Speaker 4: They're like his friends, you know, like they're like, yeah.
Speaker 9: They're writing him into these grants. Witt's office is.
Speaker 6: Over there on Ocean View Boulevard, which is right next
Speaker 6: to the Confenrated Tribes of Kuzler m Quan sayslaw Indians
Speaker 6: tribal housing office, and right next to one of their casinos.
Speaker 6: And just to give folks the terrain of where he's
Speaker 6: living and kind of operate and too.
Speaker 7: Yeah, hello Garrison from the future, just to cutting in
Speaker 7: to say something that Hank said, but I got a
Speaker 7: little bit garbled in the voice modulation. So I just
Speaker 7: want to stay at a little bit more clearly here,
Speaker 7: there's some other events that can help contextualize what WIT
Speaker 7: is doing in Kuse Bay, because currently in Kous County
Speaker 7: there's this sort of intense far right power grab that
Speaker 7: is slowly happening. Some people might know of this radio
Speaker 7: host named Rob Taylor. He's said to be one of
Speaker 7: the guys who coordinated the breaching of the Oregon Capital
Speaker 7: in late December, which was basically a test run for
Speaker 7: January sixth, and he's hosted people with the far right
Speaker 7: group Patriot Prayer. He has an old gab account which
Speaker 7: was essentially like Nazi Twitter before Twitter just became Nazi
Speaker 7: Twitter under Elon Musk. So this guy is like very
Speaker 7: comfortable and associates with extremely far right people as well
Speaker 7: as engaged in a level of activism in Oregon at least.
Speaker 7: So that's Rob Taylor, the radio guy. There's this other
Speaker 7: person named Rod Taylor who's a Kus County commissioner who
Speaker 7: actually was a January sixth insurrectionist. He was arrested at
Speaker 7: the capitol on Jay six Now Michael went to Geitonbine
Speaker 7: has also previously impled this guy named Matt Wilbanks who's
Speaker 7: a buddy of Rob Taylor. He runs this blog called
Speaker 7: The Daily Resistor and also one of the kous County
Speaker 7: neighborhood watch groups in the Empire District of cous Bay,
Speaker 7: which is mostly just focused on like doxing and harassing
Speaker 7: homeless people. And these guys are also part of various
Speaker 7: mega groups like Citizens Restoring Liberty, and Wit himself is
Speaker 7: a part of this network. He has attended Citizens Restoring
Speaker 7: Liberty events. He's also an admin on a Telegram channel
Speaker 7: called the organ Patriot Alliance, which is like this mega
Speaker 7: patriots organizing channel on Telegram. Nominally, these mega types typically
Speaker 7: say that they are, you know, not for Nazis, They
Speaker 7: are against Nazis, they are against pedophiles, and yet they
Speaker 7: are associating with Wit here who employs a pedophile and
Speaker 7: is a Nazi. But one other thing that Hank said
Speaker 7: that I want to reiter rate is that Kuspe is
Speaker 7: also a contested space. Although there is this intensely far
Speaker 7: right power graph happening, there's also a whole bunch of
Speaker 7: other much more positive activism. Hank pointed to the tribal
Speaker 7: communities of fighting for Indigenous sovereignty as well as environmentalist
Speaker 7: groups calling bs on the port's greenwashing of all their projects.
Speaker 7: So it's not just that like everyone's Nazis now in
Speaker 7: Cuse Bay. Yes, Wit is a Nazi and people should
Speaker 7: be concerned about that, but it is a contested space
Speaker 7: home to a diverse group of people who are also
Speaker 7: fighting for good things. We're now going to have an
Speaker 7: ad break and then return to talk more about White
Speaker 7: Lives Matter Oregon. Okay, we are back, and uh, Alex,
Speaker 7: you said you wanted to add something on this point
Speaker 7: about Toose Bay being a contested space.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I think one thing that is important to just like
Speaker 8: throw onto what Hank is saying about Who's Bay as
Speaker 8: a contested space is like it's not entirely unheard of
Speaker 8: for neo Nazis to kind of try to do these
Speaker 8: projects of like moving a bunch of people to certain
Speaker 8: usually rural areas to you know, try to take them over,
Speaker 8: you know, most notably like Leaf, North Dakota, where Crane
Speaker 8: Com tried to take over. But well, I think has
Speaker 8: been shown really repeatedly is that these projects have failed
Speaker 8: because the communities that live there, you know, even if
Speaker 8: they're rural communities, even if they're small towns, don't have
Speaker 8: it and are willing to fight back. And that's what
Speaker 8: we're really hoping to see from folks on the Oregon
Speaker 8: South coast being willing to push back against this sort
Speaker 8: of thing like was done in Leaf and you know,
Speaker 8: forcing these people out of the institutions they're trying to inhabit.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and especially with someone like Michael here, because he's
Speaker 7: like hiring people who advocate going much farther than white
Speaker 7: lives matter to actually engage in like paramilitary training, hiring
Speaker 7: someone who is like not just accused of being a pedophile,
Speaker 7: but has admitted to Michael that his family like hates
Speaker 7: him because of an allegation that he's that he's touched
Speaker 7: someone and that Michael himself witnessed this guy Calhoun being
Speaker 7: quote unquote hands on with an eight year old girl
Speaker 7: while while they were meeting together in Cuspe. There's like
Speaker 7: that side of it. And then you have him like
Speaker 7: posting on telegram about like wanting the day of the
Speaker 7: rope to come faster, kind of like an old like
Speaker 7: Nazi slogan about like racial like lynchings and like furthering
Speaker 7: racial conflict as well as like sharing instructions from the
Speaker 7: meme Woffen telegram channel about how to make Maltov cocktails.
Speaker 7: I believe we've talked about Meme Waffen on the show before.
Speaker 7: So he's like doing all of this type of stuff
Speaker 7: that's like so much more obviously objectionable, while also trying
Speaker 7: to like make like space for himself within like the
Speaker 7: mega community, right being the admin of this organ Patriots
Speaker 7: Alliance telegram channel, which is like also an attempt just
Speaker 7: to like further the radicalization of these like mega centric
Speaker 7: members by like inundating them with more explicit kind of
Speaker 7: fascistic propaganda, but on like a slow level.
Speaker 4: And then there are.
Speaker 7: Multi million and multi billion dollar government projects to improve
Speaker 7: the port that is expected to receive funds from. And
Speaker 7: I feel like this is something that's pretty pretty objectionable
Speaker 7: and it should be easy to stop, but it requires
Speaker 7: like attention and it requires a degree of public pressure
Speaker 7: to make sure that the government, both state and federal,
Speaker 7: are not giving funds to like an explicit neo Nazi
Speaker 7: who hires alleged pedophiles to fund like right wing activism
Speaker 7: across the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 9: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 6: And I think it's important to point out too, like
Speaker 6: you know, kus Bay is in this process. They have
Speaker 6: the intermodal Port of Kus Bay, which is like a
Speaker 6: two point three billion dollar project where they want to
Speaker 6: become like, you know, they want to be as big
Speaker 6: of a port as Oakland, California or whatever. And you know,
Speaker 6: one of the things, I mean, my understanding from talking
Speaker 6: to folks in Cuz Bay is that it's just greenwashed
Speaker 6: capitalism that will be destructive to the environment.
Speaker 9: It won't actually bring the community the.
Speaker 6: Kind of like are like what about bike lanes, you know,
Speaker 6: like there's like community infrastructure people want in cus Bay
Speaker 6: and dredging the port is not that, you know.
Speaker 9: And I think there's also like a couple of examples
Speaker 9: of that is it.
Speaker 6: Will destroy eel grass, which is a really important marine
Speaker 6: habitat and also source of storage carbon. It will destroy
Speaker 6: indigenous cultural resources or impact those spaces. And you know,
Speaker 6: we haven't seen the exact financials yet for what this
Speaker 6: project will be, but it's a two point three billion
Speaker 6: dollar project that involves dredging, you know, which is sort
Speaker 6: of deepening and widening.
Speaker 9: The port and the channels.
Speaker 6: And we know that Witt has gotten money, for example,
Speaker 6: to work on the state dredge and do work on
Speaker 6: it so I think it's very possible that wit would
Speaker 6: be until the Port takes the stand and says, hey,
Speaker 6: we're not funding this nazi who uses his work truck
Speaker 6: to do Nazi stuff. I think people should be really
Speaker 6: concerned about this port money going back to help build
Speaker 6: or not community that he's trying to build there.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and like to your previous point, like the fact
Speaker 7: that he's able to be so flagrant about his white
Speaker 7: supremacist beliefs, the way that he doesn't feel like he
Speaker 7: needs to care about OPSEC because he has a job
Speaker 7: that's like irreplaceable, Like he provides a service to this
Speaker 7: community that he feels like no one else can do.
Speaker 7: Therefore he is secure in that, Like you can't allow
Speaker 7: them that level of comfortability, and that's something that has
Speaker 7: to be like opposed due to both like public pressure
Speaker 7: and research that like you have done, as well as
Speaker 7: the crucial work from corbetto Sentiva.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, I think just to add to like,
Speaker 6: like groups like the Organ's Bay Area, which is like
Speaker 6: a popular Facebook group has been doing a really great
Speaker 6: job like raising.
Speaker 9: Just talking about and what's going on.
Speaker 6: I think largely we really haven't seen much response from
Speaker 6: the Port of Cosbe or the governor who's confirming these commissioners,
Speaker 6: Like largely the sort of institutions of power are not
Speaker 6: yet responding, and so I think that's something that with
Speaker 6: local folks in KUSBEI could be pressuring. And also at
Speaker 6: a statewide level, right Like this is state funding and
Speaker 6: the Port of Caussebae development has.
Speaker 9: Federal funding too.
Speaker 6: But I think those are places where where there could
Speaker 6: really be a lot more pressure being applied, and I
Speaker 6: think a lot more people should be talking about all
Speaker 6: of this as well.
Speaker 9: As we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 6: You know, WIT claims to have a reputation and work
Speaker 6: and contracts all up and down the entire West coast.
Speaker 6: So certainly if there are listeners in here in Oakland
Speaker 6: or Alaska or Washington.
Speaker 9: Or wherever you might be who know the name.
Speaker 6: With GAT and Bne or WIT Industries and you want
Speaker 6: to send in a tip to Cornella's Antifa or whatever
Speaker 6: Marco's right watch, we would be really happy to hear
Speaker 6: what you know about this guy, because we know we
Speaker 6: know he's working in other communities. We we would love
Speaker 6: details or any tips folks might have.
Speaker 4: Yeah, would either of you like to kind of add
Speaker 4: anything else?
Speaker 7: Before we close out and point to people towards both
Speaker 7: your work and where to send.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I guess the thing that I would just close
Speaker 8: out with is WLM is not just an organ problem,
Speaker 8: it's a national problem. I know, this podcast reaches folks
Speaker 8: all across the country. If you are somebody who is
Speaker 8: Antifa curious or is interested in making a difference in
Speaker 8: your community, it's a group with really terrible security culture,
Speaker 8: and it might be worth taking a gander at that.
Speaker 8: And then, you know, God, it feels so silly to
Speaker 8: do a podcast plug, but please check out our work
Speaker 8: at CV antifa dot no blogs dot org. We're also
Speaker 8: on Twitter at CV against fash and Instagram at cv Antifa,
Speaker 8: and you know, we have lots of articles exposing neo
Speaker 8: Nazis in Oregon and across the country, and you might
Speaker 8: just find somebody in your community who sucks.
Speaker 6: Thank Yeah, I'll just add you know, if you want
Speaker 6: to see the of course, the LEFTUS Right Watch article
Speaker 6: gives a really deep dive on what and also information
Speaker 6: for public.
Speaker 9: Use has posted like the financials, so if you.
Speaker 6: Really want to like get into the numbers, it's worth
Speaker 6: looking there. And yeah, just to reiterate, I mean, I
Speaker 6: think kus Bay and so many other places are really
Speaker 6: contested spaces, and I think these Nazis want us to
Speaker 6: believe that they're in charge and that they're powerful, and
Speaker 6: they have this idea that they can operate with impunity,
Speaker 6: and it's really not true. Like we've seen small and
Speaker 6: rural towns take down Nazis all over this country, and
Speaker 6: I think that will continue. And I think that, yeah,
Speaker 6: like what tactics in ways people might do that from
Speaker 6: place to place can look different, but I just you know,
Speaker 6: encourage folks to dig into your local Nazis and get
Speaker 6: together and figure out how to how to mess them up,
Speaker 6: you know. And it's a it's a good way to
Speaker 6: have fun with your friends and uh and we can
Speaker 6: do it, you know, and and we need we need
Speaker 6: to be doing it. I mean, there just shouldn't be
Speaker 6: state money going to help a Nazi build a white
Speaker 6: supremacist utopia. I mean, that's the that's the history of
Speaker 6: this country, right, Like, that's the history.
Speaker 7: Colonization, that's the history of Oregon specifically. So yeah, it's
Speaker 7: a time to do something else.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And Antifa isn't just for you big city folk,
Speaker 8: you know, those must live in rural communities can and
Speaker 8: should be involved in these struggles, and it is something
Speaker 8: that like is not just something that happens in Portland.
Speaker 9: People in rural orient are.
Speaker 8: Doing anti fascism and will continue to do it and
Speaker 8: will continue to win.
Speaker 4: Thank you both so much.
Speaker 7: I will leave links to your orgs and your and
Speaker 7: your articles in the description below. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 7: And yeah, if you are antifa curious, give it a shot.
Speaker 7: It is indeed fun.
Speaker 2: What Brett my cavanaughs. I'm Robert Evans, and this is
Speaker 2: it could happen here? A podcast about it happening here
Speaker 2: with me today is Sophie Lichterman and Mia Wong. We're
Speaker 2: going to be talking about a guy who is near
Speaker 2: and dear to my heart because the second to the
Speaker 2: last conversation I ever had with my mom was about
Speaker 2: Brett Kavanaugh. Mia, what are we gonna learn today?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: Boy, God, have you done the what's breading my Kavanaugh before?
Speaker 7: Like?
Speaker 2: I'm certain I haven't. Why would I have?
Speaker 4: I don't know if I oddly familiar? So if he has,
Speaker 4: somebody let me know. Thank you.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Tell us the good and the bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we already know the ugly. Yeah, I'm body shaming
Speaker 2: Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah that's right, motherfucker.
Speaker 4: That's right, motherfucker. The worst thing he consequences he's ever
Speaker 4: going to suffer are this bad news cycle and me
Speaker 4: saying something that's not legally defamatory, and if he wants
Speaker 4: to fucking prove it, you could sue me over it.
Speaker 2: He has a sweet gig for life. Yeah, he's set,
Speaker 2: is set, bro.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, he sucks so bad that even like you know,
Speaker 1: Midwest dads hate him, so at least there's that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's he's really rad sid And so I think
Speaker 4: I think the place to start with this actually is
Speaker 4: not with Kavanaugh, but with Trump, because what we're talking
Speaker 4: about today is a thing that we kind of knew
Speaker 4: was true but didn't know the extent of until now,
Speaker 4: which is that the supposed FBI investigation into everything that
Speaker 4: Brett Kavanaugh did was like fake and deliberately fucked by
Speaker 4: Trump specifically, Like this is Trump specifically told them to
Speaker 4: just like not do the investigation, and so they didn't
Speaker 4: do the investigation and nothing happened. This is the sort
Speaker 4: of how we got confirmed. And I think the interesting
Speaker 4: thing about this, partially it's because I hate breck Capital.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he sucks the worst guy, a real dick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But I think the everything about him is like
Speaker 4: I feel like everyone has forgotten what it was like
Speaker 4: to live under Trump. I agree, because there was just
Speaker 4: so much shit happening all the time, Like every single
Speaker 4: every single day was like a new one of these things.
Speaker 4: And I want to go back to what like one
Speaker 4: week of Trump was like, because every single fucking week
Speaker 4: was like this, and it was the most miserable thing.
Speaker 4: So who is Brett Kavanaugh. He's one of the nine
Speaker 4: assholes who get to decide whether we all have rights
Speaker 4: for people who've sort of forgotten his background. So he's
Speaker 4: like an old old like nineties era, kind of like
Speaker 4: protege of the nineties Republican gruls. He's like one of
Speaker 4: the people who helps Ken Starr do the like Monica
Speaker 4: Lewinsky trial. Like he's he's involved in a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of sort of like Republican rat fucking operations. He's also
Speaker 4: and I think this one's actually important to remembers, to
Speaker 4: go up to the election, Kavanall was part of the
Speaker 4: legal team that helped Bush do the original Stop the
Speaker 4: Steal in two thousands, just like straight up stole the
Speaker 4: election in Florida.
Speaker 2: So love that these guys keep getting jobs as opposed
Speaker 2: to I don't know, getting the punishment for treason.
Speaker 4: And he's only fifty nine years old. Yeah, he's so
Speaker 4: young for that job. We have like forty more years
Speaker 4: of him.
Speaker 2: If you ever wanted like a clear reason why we
Speaker 2: shouldn't do things like the death penalty for treason, it's
Speaker 2: because when people commit treason, nothing happens to them, and
Speaker 2: when people I don't know agitate for Puerto Rican independence,
Speaker 2: they get executed. Like that's that's what happens with those laws.
Speaker 2: I just bad avoid laws existing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and especially avoid all of your laws being dictated
Speaker 4: by a bunch of a bunch of fucking serial predators. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and this gets us too. So Kevinaugh's appointment was very
Speaker 4: very close. The Republicans at the time they controlled the Senate,
Speaker 4: but they had a fifty two to forty eight margin,
Speaker 4: and a lot of those kind kind of marginal senators
Speaker 4: were like.
Speaker 1: There was there was a more realistic chance of it
Speaker 1: not happening then typically Yeah, but they still fucked it
Speaker 1: in the end.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, of course. But you know the reason, the
Speaker 4: reason why it was close. Is as I think most
Speaker 4: people probably remember, Kavanaugh is a serial sexual predator. He
Speaker 4: has sexually assaulted so many fucking people. People saw him
Speaker 4: do it. There were times when he was the only
Speaker 4: fucking person there he did there were times when we
Speaker 4: did it in crowds. He definitely one hundred percent did it.
Speaker 4: And if he wants to fucking sue me about it, like,
Speaker 4: I'll see you in court, motherfucker.
Speaker 1: And while we're here, Clarence Thomas also a predator, thank you.
Speaker 4: We're going to get to that.
Speaker 2: Let's let's be clear here, Like if we're doing an
Speaker 2: Olympics of predators, Clarence Thomas is up in the number
Speaker 2: one spot. Brett Kavanaugh's down in place three. You know,
Speaker 2: Thomas is a much, much more I don't know, expansive predator.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was some belief at the time in this
Speaker 4: is sort of like every single article about this like
Speaker 4: talks about how this is peakb too, but it is
Speaker 4: of important that like this, it was a real possibility
Speaker 4: that he was going to go down in flames. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it has happened before, it can happen again, and it
Speaker 4: was a real issue for him. It was a real
Speaker 4: issue for him in large part because Christine Blossi Forde,
Speaker 4: who's a psychology professor, just like testified under oath in
Speaker 4: one of the most like fucking harrowing things I've ever
Speaker 4: seen on the floor of the Senate.
Speaker 2: Horrific.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The thing I stuck with b was like he
Speaker 4: was laughing while he did it. It's just like, this
Speaker 4: guy is a fucking monster.
Speaker 2: I Mean. One of the things that you do have
Speaker 2: to take into account is that, like the media infrastructure
Speaker 2: that world up to defend Brett Kavanaugh to ensure that
Speaker 2: this didn't take him down existed in part because about
Speaker 2: a third of right wing media, like about a third
Speaker 2: of that whole infrastructure system exists because of the Clarence
Speaker 2: Thomas hearings. Ye, Like that and Nixon's resignation being for
Speaker 2: are kind of the two two inciting incidents of modern
Speaker 2: conservative media. Those were the things that made them really
Speaker 2: commit to the idea that, like, we have to build
Speaker 2: a completely separate ecosystem of facts because if we let
Speaker 2: reality in at all, like our guys who are all
Speaker 2: sex predators and criminals will never be able to win
Speaker 2: or stay in office.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, And also, I mean it's worth noting too
Speaker 4: that like Roger ayles Off, who is like one of
Speaker 4: the people responsible for building all this infrastructure, was also
Speaker 4: himself just a serial predator on a like frankly incomprehensible scale. Yes,
Speaker 4: And so all these people were also just defending themselves
Speaker 4: because they also are all fucking their own sometimes miniature capital,
Speaker 4: sometimes worse Kavenaughs. And it into this sort of breach,
Speaker 4: right like, so this is this is this is a
Speaker 4: real pr crisis to Republicans, this is this is going
Speaker 4: even worse for them then the last time that they
Speaker 4: fucking did this, which was, as we've alluded to, when
Speaker 4: they got Clarence Thomas on and when Joe Biden didn't
Speaker 4: like personally helped Railroad Anita Hill to make sure that
Speaker 4: when she would get fucked when she to testify against
Speaker 4: claris Thomas. So that's great, incredible stuff. There was a
Speaker 4: point in our nation's history where that was actually like
Speaker 4: a political problem for Joe Biden. We're fucking no longer
Speaker 4: there anymore. And into this breach steps what's supposed to
Speaker 4: be an FBI investigation. Yeah, ostensibly, Yeah, so I'm going
Speaker 4: to read from a recently released report, and there's gonna
Speaker 4: be I'm going to quote from this report a lot,
Speaker 4: because this is this is the sort of new information
Speaker 4: that we have. Where can people see the report? It
Speaker 4: will be in the description. If you just like search
Speaker 4: Sheldon white House Report, you should be able to find it.
Speaker 4: There'll be a link in the notes. Yeah, we'll link it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's like it's like thirty pages. It's actually not third
Speaker 4: it's more like twenty pages because like a bunch of
Speaker 4: the mergercizations, so it's pretty easy read. I'm going to
Speaker 4: read some of it. And also I do want to
Speaker 4: point out the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee member
Speaker 4: who wrote this thing is named Sheldon white House. Incredible name,
Speaker 4: incredible center.
Speaker 2: That is a great name. Where does that come from?
Speaker 2: That can't be a real name. That can't be a
Speaker 2: name that existed. That can't be a name that existed
Speaker 2: before the White House, right, Like it has to have
Speaker 2: at some point been named after the White House, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, why else would you have that name?
Speaker 4: Well, it could just be that this family historically lived
Speaker 4: in a White House for seven hundred years.
Speaker 2: You'd have to be in a White House for a
Speaker 2: long ass time to get.
Speaker 4: That last name. So here's from the report quote after
Speaker 4: hearing the testimony by Ford and Kavanaugh, the Judiciary Committee
Speaker 4: agreed to request the FBI he knocked a supplemental background
Speaker 4: investigation quote limited to current credible allegations against Kavanaugh, before
Speaker 4: the full Senate voted on his confirmation. And so there's
Speaker 4: an important detail here that wasn't clear to anyone at
Speaker 4: the time, because fucking no one knows how the minutia
Speaker 4: of FBI investigations work. But this was not actually a
Speaker 4: full FBI investigation. This is this is something called a
Speaker 4: like supplemental background investigation, and we'll get into what exactly
Speaker 4: that is in a second, but it's not like a
Speaker 4: real FBI investigation. And this investigation does what it was
Speaker 4: supposed to do, which was, you know, clear Kavanaugh's name
Speaker 4: and off of Republican senators to be able to vote
Speaker 4: for him without immediately getting destroyed politically. What it didn't
Speaker 4: do was like actually conduct an investigation. Trump very famously
Speaker 4: at this time it says that the investigation had quote
Speaker 4: free reign and it unbelievably did not bull fucking shit. Yeah,
Speaker 4: he just lied about this, like yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The administration directly ran the investigation, killed it, and then
Speaker 4: used its political power and the FBI itself to you know,
Speaker 4: illegitimately railroad a serial predator or on at the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court to take away of when's right to get into abortion.
Speaker 4: And then after that they stonewalled the investigation for six years.
Speaker 4: So this is how that sort of process worked. I'm
Speaker 4: going to quote from that report again. Third, although the
Speaker 4: Trump administration and the FBI assured the Senate that the
Speaker 4: FBI's investigation was being conducted quote by the book, they
Speaker 4: failed to disclose that there was actually no quote unquote
Speaker 4: book at all. The FBI produced no written records for
Speaker 4: supplemental background investigation, saying it was merely acting as the
Speaker 4: quote agent for the White House in such matters.
Speaker 2: Which white House was it? Sheldon White?
Speaker 9: Sorry?
Speaker 4: No, white House? Bad, the one with the president White House.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: By the way, I was, I was trying to debunk
Speaker 1: his last name. He comes from the longest line of
Speaker 1: nepotism of that he.
Speaker 2: I was like, I was like, oh, they must have
Speaker 2: gotten named that back when like the fact that they
Speaker 2: had a house at all was noteworthy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, these people have paint it literally kept going.
Speaker 1: I was like, okay, one level, okay, two levels okay, three,
Speaker 1: okay for this, Okay, when does it end?
Speaker 4: And then I got bored? And the funny part of
Speaker 4: back of this again is that, like this is the
Speaker 4: good guy in this story is my NEPO baby like
Speaker 4: like corruption Junior Senator of Rhode Island. Yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: And I want to kind of focus in on this
Speaker 4: statement in and of itself, because this is just like
Speaker 4: an absolutely hideous a view of just like the hideous
Speaker 4: power of the unitary executive just do whatever the fuck
Speaker 4: it wants. Like, what do you mean that the FBI
Speaker 4: produced no written protocols for for how they're supposed to
Speaker 4: do supplements of background investigation? What do you mean that
Speaker 4: they were quote acting as an agent for the White House?
Speaker 4: That's batshit? Why why their security service is literally directly
Speaker 4: answered to one guy who could just tell them what
Speaker 4: to do whatever the fuck he wants. That's insane. That
Speaker 4: is a that is a fucking that is a drange
Speaker 4: political system. And yet this is you know, this is
Speaker 4: this is the system I'm supposed to be doing this stuff,
Speaker 4: which is also very funny because White House is like
Speaker 4: not really trying to get into a feud with the FBI,
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of kind of like a sculptory
Speaker 4: stuff in the FBI. But like, also everything the FBI
Speaker 4: does in this is such a fiasco that it's very
Speaker 4: clearly like also very much their fault. I'm gonna read
Speaker 4: another quote from this. This is from a bit later
Speaker 4: in the report. Fourth, the FBI's tip line was not
Speaker 4: used to facilitate the FBI supplemental background investigation into the
Speaker 4: allegations against Kavanall on instructions from the White House. The
Speaker 4: FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came through
Speaker 4: the FBI's tip line. Instead, all tips related to Kavandall
Speaker 4: were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything,
Speaker 4: the White House may have used the tip line to
Speaker 4: steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information, which
Speaker 4: is again absolutely nuts insane.
Speaker 2: And like, yes, so this is the kind of thing
Speaker 2: that like should be serious crime, right, like yeah, you go,
Speaker 2: you get locked up for forever, Like this is a
Speaker 2: forever crime. Yeah, it seems much more serious than I
Speaker 2: don't know, robbing a bank to try and fund the
Speaker 2: Puerto Rican independence movement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not clear to me whether this would have
Speaker 4: been a giant scandal for a normal administration, just because
Speaker 4: the American presidency has so much power. But it should
Speaker 4: have been like this was just like a thing that
Speaker 4: would happen every week under Trump, was like he would
Speaker 4: just do shit like this. Do you know also what
Speaker 4: you should do? Shit like I don't know. That was
Speaker 4: not my best pivot.
Speaker 2: No, no, but but do shit like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like like these products and services that support the podcast,
Speaker 4: we are back. We've gotten to the point where again
Speaker 4: the FBI's tip line is not actually being used of
Speaker 4: the investigation. They're sending it all to the White House.
Speaker 4: The report found that so the FBI, like and I
Speaker 4: talked about the public at the time, they talked to
Speaker 4: ten people who they said had like direct knowledge of
Speaker 4: the situation. But again they only talked to ten people,
Speaker 4: and there is a whole bunch of people who had
Speaker 4: very relevant evidence about a lot of important stuff in
Speaker 4: this Like so one of the claims that's going on
Speaker 4: here is that Kavanaugh was just wasted all the time.
Speaker 4: And this is like every single person you talk to
Speaker 4: who knew Kavanaugh in college and isn't like directly employed
Speaker 4: by the Republican Party was like, oh yeah, this guy
Speaker 4: wasted all the time, right, and this became a big
Speaker 4: part of the trial. And there were a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of people who tried to go to the FBI to
Speaker 4: be like, hey, he did this, and they just like
Speaker 4: would not talk to them. People who tried to come forward,
Speaker 4: like they wouldn't talk to people who sent them information
Speaker 4: to the tip line. They just like didn't talk to
Speaker 4: them at all. I'm going going to read from the
Speaker 4: thing again. According to a quote executive summary, if the
Speaker 4: FBI supplemental background investigation issued by the Judiciary Committee majority,
Speaker 4: the majority of that time was Republican majority, So that's
Speaker 4: why it's fucked. These people were quote all witnesses with
Speaker 4: potential firsthand knowledge at the allegations. The FBI did not, however,
Speaker 4: interview Ford or Kavanaugh, the witnesses potentially with the most
Speaker 4: firsthand knowledge, nor did it speak to other potentially corroborating
Speaker 4: witnesses who had not witnessed the events firsthand. Nevertheless, the
Speaker 4: Judiciary Committee's Republicans executive summary concluded that the quote supplemental
Speaker 4: background investigation confirms there is no cooberation of allegations made
Speaker 4: by doctor Ford and Ms Ramirez, So they didn't talk
Speaker 4: to either Kavanaugh or Ford, the two people who the
Speaker 4: thing was a ballot.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, you know, why would you need to
Speaker 2: do that, right, Like.
Speaker 4: Wait, what the fuck? This is so insane. No. Oother
Speaker 4: part of this is so the FBI's initial background check
Speaker 4: didn't turn up any of this, and so the supplemental
Speaker 4: thing is being done in place of like the normal
Speaker 4: background check because the normal background check was also done
Speaker 4: like shit, and so they never figured out any of
Speaker 4: this incredibly obvious stuff about him. And meanwhile, like the
Speaker 4: supplemental one just they just kept being like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: we don't actually need to talk to the people who
Speaker 4: this is about for incredibly nebulous reasons. And the other
Speaker 4: part of this that's going on is that like, while
Speaker 4: this process is happening, the Democratic on the Judiciary Committee
Speaker 4: are trying to figure out how this process works, and
Speaker 4: Trump but just like refuses to talk to any of
Speaker 4: them and the FBI refuses to send any of them.
Speaker 4: People are fighting out like we we know that there's
Speaker 4: no specific process for this like supplemental investigation thing, because
Speaker 4: like their staffers found it out from a YouTube video Jesus,
Speaker 4: like they did not find this out from the FBI.
Speaker 4: It was like this guy. Senator staffers were like watching
Speaker 4: YouTube videos to figure out how this investigation was supposed
Speaker 4: to work. So, and it turns out we had known
Speaker 4: at the time that the FBI was doing some kind
Speaker 4: of shady stuff. But what we know now is that
Speaker 4: so Ford and her lawyers repeatedly tried to talk to
Speaker 4: the FBI and they were just never able to do so, right,
Speaker 4: the FBI completely stonewalled them. And it turns out that
Speaker 4: they ston malled them because Trump specifically ordered the FBI
Speaker 4: not to talk to her or kavanall what what, which
Speaker 4: is absolutely insane. Yeah, the law It turns out this
Speaker 4: is this is this is the part of this is
Speaker 4: the most insane.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Everyone thought that the FBI, which is doing a normal
Speaker 4: FBI investigation, right, And part of what's going on here
Speaker 4: is that the media is just these like absolute credulous idiots, right,
Speaker 4: because every single day the media is reporting that like
Speaker 4: Trump is allowing an open investigation because like somehow again
Speaker 4: this is this is like two years into him being
Speaker 4: in office. Right, none of these people have figured out
Speaker 4: that every single thing he says is a lie. They're
Speaker 4: all like, oh, yeah, Trump keep saying that these people
Speaker 4: can talk to whoever they want, and they can investigate
Speaker 4: whoever they want. And this gets to the point where
Speaker 4: the FBI is calling the White House every day because
Speaker 4: they'll be reading the news reports that say we can
Speaker 4: talk to anyone, and they'll be like, hey, you told
Speaker 4: us we can't talk to these people, and they'll be like, no, no, actually,
Speaker 4: you still can't talk to these people. And it turns
Speaker 4: out that what's happening is this like quote unquote supplemental investigation.
Speaker 4: It's not an FBI investigation. They can only do things
Speaker 4: that are like quote unquote directed by the president, So
Speaker 4: they can only talk to the people who the President
Speaker 4: tells them to talk to, and they can't look at
Speaker 4: evidence that the President doesn't tell them to to look at.
Speaker 4: And so what ends up happening is that like you know,
Speaker 4: there's initially like four people that they're they're supposed to
Speaker 4: be talking to, right, and you know, they keep getting
Speaker 4: these like press things that are like, oh, hey, this
Speaker 4: is the full this is an open investigation. You can
Speaker 4: like do whatever you want. And eventually they put in
Speaker 4: like six more people, so like they talked to ten
Speaker 4: total people. But because this is an investigation that is
Speaker 4: not being run by the FBI. Really it's being it's
Speaker 4: being directly ran by Trump himself, which he's lying about
Speaker 4: because of that, they fucking never talked to anyone. And
Speaker 4: then also again as we talked about, right that that
Speaker 4: tip line they set up a bunch of the people
Speaker 4: who tried to talk to the FBI, who the FBI
Speaker 4: wouldn't talk to, were like told, okay, go submit stuff
Speaker 4: to this tip line. And the FBI later admits that
Speaker 4: the tip line was like never real.
Speaker 2: Sure have a nice fake tip line.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they never used any of an investigation. They sent
Speaker 4: it all the Trump Yeah. And the reason they did
Speaker 4: it was that they were sick of people calling their
Speaker 4: regular tip line, so they set up a specific tip
Speaker 4: line so they could just have all the stuff that
Speaker 4: they would never listen to, and the same sense of
Speaker 4: the White House so they could do I guess like
Speaker 4: oppo research bullshit on it. So this is just straight
Speaker 4: up a sham. There's no actual investigation going on. The
Speaker 4: media people at the time should have been able to
Speaker 4: figure out that obviously this thing was bullshit, right, but
Speaker 4: nobody looked into it except for this one guy and
Speaker 4: the Senate Duciary Committee, And so the support comes back
Speaker 4: and goes like, yeah, we did no research. We talked
Speaker 4: to like ten people and we didn't like ask them anything,
Speaker 4: and we didn't use any of the research that we had,
Speaker 4: and we have cleared this guy. As this is happening, right,
Speaker 4: the Judiciary Committee Democrats are like trying to figure out
Speaker 4: what the fuck is going on. And this begins a
Speaker 4: six year process of a Senator White House just fighting
Speaker 4: a war with the actual White House and the FBI
Speaker 4: and the DODA to try to figure out what the
Speaker 4: fuck just happens. And the interesting part of this also
Speaker 4: is that so obviously the Trump administration was never going
Speaker 4: to talk to them, right, which is idience of itself
Speaker 4: incredibly disturbing that like the Senate Judiciary Committee, who in
Speaker 4: theory is one of the organizations supposed to be doing
Speaker 4: oversight of the FBI, would send requests of the FBI
Speaker 4: for your information, the FBI would just tell him to
Speaker 4: fuck off. Yeah. But the interesting part is they kept
Speaker 4: doing this under Biden. So Biden's FBI was also doing this.
Speaker 4: It was awesome.
Speaker 2: I love, I love they do a greta, which fucking
Speaker 2: liberals like have concluded politically at least that they have
Speaker 2: to be as like vociferously pro law enforcement as they can,
Speaker 2: and all cops ever do is say, we are just
Speaker 2: waiting for the chance to kill you. Like, yeah, it's great, cool,
Speaker 2: good stuff.
Speaker 4: I'm going to go relign from this. It's so insane.
Speaker 4: When the Senators followed up, they faced the challenge of
Speaker 4: aligning FBI, DOJ, and White House equities. They sent like
Speaker 4: requests for the emails between Trump and the FBI right
Speaker 4: figure out whether Trump was doing the thing he was doing,
Speaker 4: which was like directly running the investigation himself. The FBI
Speaker 4: claimed it cannot answer without authorization from the DOJ in
Speaker 4: the White House. The DOJ directed the senator's inquiries to
Speaker 4: the White House and the FBI, and the White House
Speaker 4: referred the senators back to the agency. So they're doing
Speaker 4: this like they're doing the like the circular run around
Speaker 4: thing you give him your insurance company where they tell
Speaker 4: you to talk to three people and every single one
Speaker 4: of them tells you to talk to the other one.
Speaker 4: But again, this is the Biden DOJ, the Biden FBI,
Speaker 4: and the Biden administration all doing this. The FBI finally
Speaker 4: provides documents about like their contact with Trump for the investigation.
Speaker 4: They finally provide the documents in November of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: This investigation started in late twenty eighteen. It took half
Speaker 4: a decade, almost half of which was under the Biden administration.
Speaker 4: And also Senator Whitehouse literally threatening to torpedo and nomination
Speaker 4: for the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel, Like he had
Speaker 4: to threaten the Department of Justice in order to get
Speaker 4: them to send the documents that proved that Trump colluded
Speaker 4: to top Kavanaugh investigation, which even just some like a
Speaker 4: political standpoint from the Democrats, right, why the fuck would
Speaker 4: you not want that in the open? I mean, I guess,
Speaker 4: I guess unless you're Jo Biden, you don't want every
Speaker 4: remembering like all the shit you need to need a hill.
Speaker 4: But like this is literally free political amministionat of your opponent,
Speaker 4: like abusing the political process. And it still took a
Speaker 4: Democratic senator just directly threatening the DOJ of a democratic
Speaker 4: administration to get this out.
Speaker 1: I just like it also took so many years, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: Havanat has has been able to take away and fuck
Speaker 1: up our rights since what twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the damage he's done is permanent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he will be around in office, possible, very likely
Speaker 2: for most of the rest of our lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Like I said earlier, it's only fifty nine years old.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he could have another thirty years there at least.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And if this stuff had been known, she absolutely
Speaker 4: would not have gotten nominated.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: There were two unbelievably close votes to get him appointed.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: There was a first vote where the Republicans trade a
Speaker 4: bypassed the Fillow Bobster and still almost lost. And it
Speaker 4: turns out that, Okay, the actual final vote ended up
Speaker 4: being fifty to forty eight with two abstensions, and one
Speaker 4: of the essensions is this guy was going to his
Speaker 4: daughter's wedding or something. But the other abstention was Lisa Morowski,
Speaker 4: who's the senator from Alaska who's like the most sort
Speaker 4: of liberal Republican senators and she does like a coward
Speaker 4: present vote so it can happen. And if she had
Speaker 4: voted no, and if Joe Manchin hadn't fucking cross party
Speaker 4: lines to get to get him in office, which I
Speaker 4: think I also people just forget about. Joe mentioned that
Speaker 4: he is also like, individually specifically the guy who got
Speaker 4: fucking Kavanaugh pointed this would have failed, and the only
Speaker 4: reason that it didn't fail and that this guy was
Speaker 4: able to fucking destroy Roephi Wade is that Trump just
Speaker 4: straight up ran a fake FBI investigation and lied to
Speaker 4: everyone about it and fucking railroad of the nomination through.
Speaker 4: That's fucking Kavanaugh. And I think I think the thing
Speaker 4: that calls on here again is like every single week
Speaker 4: of Trump is just like this, yeah, right, Like every
Speaker 4: single day has some bullshit like this. It just like
Speaker 4: fucks everyone for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 4: And it's deeply grim that he could take power again
Speaker 4: and we could get back to like the stuff he
Speaker 4: was doing at the end of his administratory. Who's just
Speaker 4: like having protesters killed with federal worshels, Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, That's the scary thing about it, right, is there's
Speaker 2: not any kind of like functional resistance to this. Right,
Speaker 2: the left has no power, has no serious organizing capacity
Speaker 2: in the United States, and can't get on the same
Speaker 2: page about anything that matters, whereas liberals, when they have
Speaker 2: four years of control of the federal government cannot adequately
Speaker 2: prosecute an attempt to overthrow the government and murder them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so I don't know, you know, make sure you got
Speaker 2: clean water, folks, check on that garden. I don't know
Speaker 2: what to tell you.
Speaker 1: It's just so bleak because, like I said earlier, everything
Speaker 1: is so permanent.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know what I mean, like.
Speaker 2: Just lasts so fucking long.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it lasts so long, and like and like we
Speaker 1: we don't even know the damage that Kavanaugh is going
Speaker 1: to do to our society because of Trump. And it's
Speaker 1: also just terrifying that, you know, Trump was able to
Speaker 1: manipulate the system in this way and that so many
Speaker 1: people were silenced and now our rights are gone, yeah,
Speaker 1: or our rights are going to be taken away. We
Speaker 1: have no idea what else is going to be taken Yea,
Speaker 1: we have no idea. What else is going to get
Speaker 1: fucked up? We have ideas we have.
Speaker 2: The idea is that that Again, the problem is the
Speaker 2: root of the problem is that liberals work tirelessly in
Speaker 2: this country to stop the left from gaining any power,
Speaker 2: and the left works tirelessly to stop itself from having
Speaker 2: any kind of influence by having no capacity to organize
Speaker 2: or compromise with people who do not agree with whatever
Speaker 2: their little brand of leftism is. Right, whereas conservatives are
Speaker 2: willing to work together with other conservatives they hate for
Speaker 2: forty straight years in order to get us to the
Speaker 2: position that we're in. That's what happened is they had
Speaker 2: message discipline, they had organizing discipline, and they successfully pushed
Speaker 2: their madness into the mainstream in such a way that
Speaker 2: now the Democratic Party, in a lot of ways is
Speaker 2: expending a huge amount of its efforts on moving in
Speaker 2: the direction of that madness, especially as regards immigration. Look
Speaker 2: at where we've moved on immigration from twenty sixteen to
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four. Right, That is the result of disciplined
Speaker 2: power building as opposed to know what liberals and the
Speaker 2: left to do, which is fight with each other and
Speaker 2: fight amongst each other and engage in a mix of
Speaker 2: like craven power politics and worshiping various con artists, and
Speaker 2: the right worships con artists too. They just actually get
Speaker 2: power out of the deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like this. The other terrifying thing about this story
Speaker 1: is that it's not fucking everywhere. It's not everywhere. Ten
Speaker 1: years ago, this would be the scandal of all scandals,
Speaker 1: and it's barely barely a headline.
Speaker 2: No, because no one's going to do anything about it.
Speaker 2: It's like, it's like Elon Musk paying people a million
Speaker 2: dollars a day to vote in Pennsylvania, Like that should
Speaker 2: be illegal. Like you can at least make a strong
Speaker 2: case based on existing laws that that is election interference,
Speaker 2: the kind of which that can land you in prison.
Speaker 2: Everyone knows, nothing's going to happen to him.
Speaker 4: Nothing's going to happen to him.
Speaker 2: If Kamala wins, right, if the Dims have a blowout
Speaker 2: and wipe up with both Houses of Congress, nothing is
Speaker 2: going to happen to Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, again, just like we have no idea how
Speaker 1: how long this is going to get throw on and
Speaker 1: how much worse it could get.
Speaker 2: And uh, yeah I have some ideas, but I podcasted
Speaker 2: about those back in twenty nineteen. Sophie.
Speaker 4: I was there. I was quite literally there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so thanks Miyah.
Speaker 2: That was a boomer, Thank you, Mia. No, this was good.
Speaker 2: I uh, this is solid.
Speaker 4: And again when.
Speaker 2: I started this by saying, my second to the last
Speaker 2: conversation I had in person with my mom was about Kavanaugh.
Speaker 2: It was hers almost screaming at me because of how
Speaker 2: unfair what the Democrats did to Brett Kavanaugh was because
Speaker 2: of the good man that they and she felt the
Speaker 2: same way about Clarence Thomas right that like these guys
Speaker 2: were the victims of media assassination attempts. She feels the
Speaker 2: same way about Bill Cosby. By the way, anyway, whatever,
Speaker 2: I don't need to yell about my mom. I've yelled
Speaker 2: about enough this episode.
Speaker 4: Tomorrow's episode will be more fun. I promise we're gonna
Speaker 4: We're gonna yell about why the Kunda Wild Prizes fake
Speaker 4: and read some of the dubbest things you've ever seen
Speaker 4: in your life.
Speaker 2: Hell, yeah, there we go. There we go, back to
Speaker 2: the good stuff, Back to the good stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah. MEA has been deeply excited to do this episode,
Speaker 1: So look look out for that one. And I don't know, uh,
Speaker 1: touch grass and peta dog if it wants you to.
Speaker 10: Yeah bye, no.
Speaker 4: Bell prize, welcome to it could happen here a podcast
Speaker 4: about Nobel Prizes. I guess I'm your host via loog
Speaker 4: with Me with Me?
Speaker 11: Is James Himia excited to hear about the dynamite guy prices.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, as people I think are aware, the man
Speaker 4: who invented dynamite established a bunch of prizes to be
Speaker 4: like the pinnacle of human achievement. Right, every years decided
Speaker 4: I'm a bunch of judges and you know, and this
Speaker 4: year in the Nobel Prize in physics, right, Nobel Prize
Speaker 4: in Physics went to two guys who did a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of the sort of fundamental basic work on what
Speaker 4: became machine learning algorithms. And as annoying as modern AI is,
Speaker 4: like machine learning algorithms has fundamentally changed the way that
Speaker 4: science works. It changed the strong and I've used it.
Speaker 4: I used the new astronomy like there's all this. You know,
Speaker 4: it has fundamentally changed the way that humanity functions. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's an important discovery. Yeah, and you know, the Nobel
Speaker 4: Price in Medicine went to a group of people who
Speaker 4: discovered micro rna, which is like a different type of
Speaker 4: RNA that fundamentally changed the way that we understand how
Speaker 4: like gene regulation works. It's like a fundamental path breaking
Speaker 4: thing in biology. They got that, they got the fucking
Speaker 4: medicine double price for the Nobel Price in Economics went
Speaker 4: to uh three guys who discovered that institutions affect prosperity.
Speaker 11: Huge groundbreaking shit. It's like economists don't discover shit. They
Speaker 11: just they just say shit, and then other economists are like, yeah,
Speaker 11: cool this okay.
Speaker 4: So I when I was originally planning this episode, this
Speaker 4: is going to be an episode about the fake Nobel Prize,
Speaker 4: which is the economics Nobel Prize wich We've talked about
Speaker 4: on the show before, but it's worth saying again this
Speaker 4: is not a real Nobel Prize, Like, this is not
Speaker 4: one of the prizes that was established by Alfred Nobel.
Speaker 4: This was a thing established by the sweetest central Bank
Speaker 4: as a way to push neoliberal economics new classical economics.
Speaker 4: And every year they're always very stupid, is the thing, right,
Speaker 4: And my plan for this episode because I started seeing
Speaker 4: stuff about this Nobel Prize and I was looking at
Speaker 4: this and I was like, this is the this is
Speaker 4: the one of the dumbest ones they've had since they
Speaker 4: gave out one in the two thousands for realizing that
Speaker 4: people could simply not make a trade. Like But I
Speaker 4: was like, Okay, I'm going to go read all of
Speaker 4: these papers, right, We're going to come back, We're going
Speaker 4: to have a detail analysis of it. And and I'm
Speaker 4: reading these papers and it's like it's nothing these three
Speaker 4: economists are They're from what's called institutional economics. These are
Speaker 4: supposed to be the smart ones, right, These are These
Speaker 4: are the economists that like the neoclassical economists had to
Speaker 4: bring in, like the normalio classical comments has to bring in,
Speaker 4: because their models don't work right. And and the thing
Speaker 4: that makes them like quote unquote smart is that they
Speaker 4: understand the institutions exist, and they know how to use
Speaker 4: really really basic game theory models. And this makes them
Speaker 4: like the cutting edge, the absolute elite cutting edge of
Speaker 4: bortlaw economics on the front lines. What are these people discovered?
Speaker 4: Want the people win this prize for? Right? Okay, the
Speaker 4: thing that they won this prize for like the initial thing,
Speaker 4: and there's a couple of stuff that will get you
Speaker 4: in a second, but like the big thing that they
Speaker 4: figured out is do a series of thunderously stupid regression analyzes.
Speaker 4: They discovered something. I don't even know how to frame
Speaker 4: the magnitude of this discovery. But it took them a
Speaker 4: shit ton of math and like a bunch of like
Speaker 4: tabulations of mortality data to discover that in some places
Speaker 4: European colonial powers formed settular colonies and in some places
Speaker 4: they established colonial rule that wasn't based on settler colonies,
Speaker 4: and that these were different. This is what they won
Speaker 4: the Nobel Prize for. They did a bunch of regression
Speaker 4: analyses and were like, holy shit, in some places the
Speaker 4: Europeans did similar colonies and in some places they didn't,
Speaker 4: and it had to do with like disease and a
Speaker 4: level of redistance from the indigenous population. They won a
Speaker 4: Nobel Prize in Economics for this Are you fucking kidding?
Speaker 11: As also a paper that you could write for my
Speaker 11: history one ten class at community college.
Speaker 4: Okay, some of the discourse about this, right, the Marxist
Speaker 4: economist Sharramazar pointed out that, like these fundamental observations were
Speaker 4: made by another guy we've talked about on this show,
Speaker 4: the red again Marxist economist Paul Baran. And that's a
Speaker 4: good point. But also what I was thinking about how
Speaker 4: to do this episode, right, This isn't a thing like
Speaker 4: with like Donald Harris, like we talked abou Kabal Harris's
Speaker 4: dad's book, right, and that's that's a book where there's
Speaker 4: there's like ideas in it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: You can go through it and you can watch them
Speaker 4: developing ideas. You can't do that with this because these
Speaker 4: people are not developing ideas. They have discovered the most
Speaker 4: obvious things. They have read a single book about history,
Speaker 4: and they have attempted to use a bunch of regression
Speaker 4: analyses to prove things that like you can just read
Speaker 4: a Wikipedia article and discover about the course of colonization.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and then you can go back and to a
Speaker 11: bunch of aggressionalities to prove something that everyone already needs.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And the place that I got to about this
Speaker 4: is I have the shoke about Maoism where all the
Speaker 4: things that people get from Maoism are things that you
Speaker 4: should have learned in elementary school. Like one of the
Speaker 4: most common things you get from maoist is like, ah,
Speaker 4: you have to read no investigation, no right to speak,
Speaker 4: And like, my friend, okay, if you needed maose done
Speaker 4: to tell you that you needed to research something before
Speaker 4: you talked about it, what the fuck happened in your
Speaker 4: like the rest with your life? What we're wrong with
Speaker 4: your education? Like what has gone wrong with the way
Speaker 4: you think about the world that you needed? Nowse Dung
Speaker 4: can tell you this and this this is what most
Speaker 4: Nobel prizes and economics are and this is the most
Speaker 4: that it has ever been. So basically their argument is that, like,
Speaker 4: this is also an argument that Paul Baran makes is
Speaker 4: that like, okay, depending on whether you're dealing with a
Speaker 4: settler quality or a sort of like India style like
Speaker 4: administrative colony, I guess I'm like a term for it.
Speaker 11: It gets like an extractive colony, where you have more
Speaker 11: about extracted labor, raw materials and settling.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like that changes the kinds of institutions that are
Speaker 4: set up. And like, okay, you can if you want
Speaker 4: to credit Paul Baron for the discovery that like the
Speaker 4: settler colonies and like extractive colonies have different legal institutions
Speaker 4: and they function differently, and that has had long range
Speaker 4: economic impacts, like stretching into the future. But like this
Speaker 4: is something again that you you can just you can
Speaker 4: find in a history book and immediately understand. And these
Speaker 4: people have tried to do this. They're trying to like
Speaker 4: track the difference in why were like some colonies more
Speaker 4: prosperous later than other colonies. Right, They're trying to track
Speaker 4: this process through a whole bunch of incredibly sketchy regression
Speaker 4: analyzes and weird assumptions about what income is they're trying
Speaker 4: to track, Like why was it that like China and
Speaker 4: Turkey were like rich in the fifteen hundreds, but they
Speaker 4: ceased to be rich after that. Oh sick.
Speaker 11: They're doing a fucking Jared Diamond. Yeah, they're doing a
Speaker 11: West and the rest.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's wonder a Jared Diamond bullshit, except you know,
Speaker 4: with China standard of living in Europe, if you actually
Speaker 4: go back to the historical record and aren't doing their
Speaker 4: like stupid weird like using population density as an index
Speaker 4: for stuff, whether they start bringing Malthus into it. If
Speaker 4: you don't do that and you look at like the
Speaker 4: actual historical record, like the average quality of life in
Speaker 4: China like is not eclipsed by Europe until like the
Speaker 4: May eighteen hundreds. Yeah, like you know, so like this
Speaker 4: is all this is all like very even.
Speaker 11: Then, like life expects in the midic and hundreds didn't
Speaker 11: it took decades to go up after the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 11: right lately.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Oh, this is this is sort of drawing to
Speaker 4: what they're trying to do here, is that like a
Speaker 4: lot of this is it's just it's directly it's the
Speaker 4: product of colonialism, right, and they sort of acknowledge that
Speaker 4: colonialism existed and that it was like extractive. But their
Speaker 4: job is to take the basic insights of history and
Speaker 4: depoliticize it. Right, We're going to get you later. One
Speaker 4: of the things they win this prize for is depoliticizing revolution,
Speaker 4: turning revolution into like a Nashi Colubrium game theory thing.
Speaker 4: Oh god, which is unbelievable. It's incredible.
Speaker 11: Yeah, these are the kind of people who I have
Speaker 11: to deal with on a daily basis on list serves,
Speaker 11: Like these are the economists emailing the entire list serve
Speaker 11: with a unique insight into something that we all you
Speaker 11: thirty ye, like the old faculty email list is plagued
Speaker 11: by this kind of individual.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like like this is a thing where so
Speaker 4: they're absolutely convinced that, like, like the one hundred percent
Speaker 4: convinced that the thing that leads to economic prosperity is
Speaker 4: like the safeguarding of individual property rights. And like I
Speaker 4: will give them a little tiny bit of credit where
Speaker 4: they're like, well, yeah, so direct colonial institutions were attractive
Speaker 4: and they're bad because they infringe on property rights. And
Speaker 4: that's mildly better than most of these people yeah, but
Speaker 4: these are these are these are again, these are the
Speaker 4: most advanced Bushwai economists, right, they're not. They're not like
Speaker 4: pro Rhodesia and neoclassical guys, right, they do. They do
Speaker 4: have a lie where they say, we're not going to
Speaker 4: say when the colonialism is good or bad. And I
Speaker 4: think that's been misinterpreted a little bit because like in
Speaker 4: their work they're pretty clear that it's bad.
Speaker 11: They're just trying to make like a moral judgment because
Speaker 11: God forbid.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well they said, they're saying it's extractive and they
Speaker 4: think that like attractions bad because it's inefficients. Yeah, but
Speaker 4: basically the things like that, they think that like, Okay,
Speaker 4: so like if you if you set up like regimes
Speaker 4: that like safeguard private property, this will like make people
Speaker 4: like richer. But I want to read a quote from
Speaker 4: one of the papers they wrote. Quote, in comparatively poor
Speaker 4: and less dense populated regions where Europeans could easily settle,
Speaker 4: it was in the colonizer's interest to introduce inclusive economic
Speaker 4: institutions that helped to boost prosperity for the majority in
Speaker 4: the long run.
Speaker 12: No, now me, like they didn't go on to say
Speaker 12: how like yeah, but Britain built the railways in India,
Speaker 12: like like like.
Speaker 4: This is what he says, right, because what's happening here.
Speaker 4: You know, this is something that economists love to do.
Speaker 4: It's like economists love to go into other fields and
Speaker 4: to have to colonize them, right, Yes, Like what they're
Speaker 4: doing here is there they've gone into like this field
Speaker 4: of history. Yeah, and their attempting to colonized them, right,
Speaker 4: many such cases. Yeah, and you know they're looking at
Speaker 4: this stuff, right, and you got things like this where
Speaker 4: it's like no, like the economic institutions that were set
Speaker 4: up in like settler colonies were not designed to introduce
Speaker 4: inclusive economic institutions to like help boost the prosperity for
Speaker 4: the majority of the long run, like that was the
Speaker 4: result of social struggle. But they for some reason basically
Speaker 4: think that social struggles started in like the eighteen eighties. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the Noble Bell like committee, they're like econ fake Econdo
Speaker 4: Bell Committee like releases like a giant statement, Like there's
Speaker 4: like press summaries they have like a slightly more detail
Speaker 4: and they have like the econy one and I want
Speaker 4: to read this from so part of what they're doing, right,
Speaker 4: you're talking about like the work that was inspired by this,
Speaker 4: by the understanding that like the different institutions change economic
Speaker 4: outcomes quote better g and Ivery two thousand and five
Speaker 4: examined the legacy of British land institutions in India that
Speaker 4: gave cultivators in certain regions proprietary rights, including that productivity
Speaker 4: was higher in these regions post independence. Genioli and Rainier
Speaker 4: and Michaelopolis and Papa Iyadu studied the impact of differences
Speaker 4: in political centralization along ethnic groups dream dream pre colonial times.
Speaker 4: None documented the long run negative impacts of the slave
Speaker 4: trade Del ten by my non paper in two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight, so we'll go back to that. A second
Speaker 4: Del twenty ten investigated the long run effects of the
Speaker 4: so called meta system in operation between fifteen seventy three
Speaker 4: and eighteen twelve and Peru and Bolivian Peru, where men
Speaker 4: were forced to work in minds. Within the boundaries of
Speaker 4: meta household consumption was twenty five percent lower in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty one than just outside the boundaries. So what they
Speaker 4: have discovered here again in the late two thousands and
Speaker 4: early twenty tens, they discovered that slavery had long run
Speaker 4: negative economic impacts on the places where there was slavery.
Speaker 11: Jesus Christ, thanks for trying guys like this.
Speaker 4: And shit that they gave these people a Nobell prize
Speaker 4: for inspiring this is insane.
Speaker 11: You're right, economists due just love to tourists in someone
Speaker 11: else's discipline and like fucking have the most basic insight possible.
Speaker 11: Like all of these are things that would be like
Speaker 11: an interesting undergraduate paper, right, Like.
Speaker 4: Insane that these people are getting Noble.
Speaker 11: Prizes for this. So it's not insane, it's economics, but
Speaker 11: the same difference, I guess.
Speaker 4: All right, So speaking of economics, we need to go
Speaker 4: to ads because so it'll be a long term detrimental
Speaker 4: consequence for us. We don't, but when we come back,
Speaker 4: there's some more unreal bullshit. We are back, okay, So
Speaker 4: speaking of undergred bullshit, Well, what of the big things
Speaker 4: in their like initial paper where they did the whole
Speaker 4: Oh my god, they discovered that there's difference between settler
Speaker 4: colonies and like distractive colonies. One of the big things
Speaker 4: in that paper was they spent a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: time looking into it was the economic difference in these
Speaker 4: countries because of the climate which now, for those of
Speaker 4: you who are students of history, right, the thing you
Speaker 4: will remember is that this this was like the most
Speaker 4: advanced race science theory of the early eighteen hundreds. Yes,
Speaker 4: and these people are, like the economists are finally getting
Speaker 4: around to busting this. In like two thousand and four.
Speaker 11: They had a looked at skull measurements because I felt like,
Speaker 11: I feel like we're heading down that pod, like econophrenology.
Speaker 4: So bad, incredible. That was actually a whole thing in
Speaker 4: fascist Japan where they had all I can't remember if
Speaker 4: I ever talked about this in the episodes that I
Speaker 4: did on Bachelor's episodes, but they had this whole thing
Speaker 4: where they had like racial categorizations and like biological characteristics
Speaker 4: of like the races, and they would use them to
Speaker 4: like determine allocated efficiency of which slaves you should use
Speaker 4: to do what. Oh cool, cool, cool, cool cool. It
Speaker 4: was great and like great, I mean, like, holy fucking shit,
Speaker 4: it's so bad.
Speaker 11: They just missed that time. Those people could kick the
Speaker 11: shit out of a Nobel price. In like twenty twenty five,
Speaker 11: they came back with that stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I get, like, you know, I mean, one of
Speaker 4: the things we were talking about, right, is like you
Speaker 4: were mentioning, is like these these are like these are
Speaker 4: like such obvious insights. And I remember, so I went
Speaker 4: to the University of Chicago, right, and that means that
Speaker 4: I fucking know all of these fucking ghouls, Like I
Speaker 4: met all the people who are going to become these
Speaker 4: econ dipshits. Yeah, you at ground zero for that shit.
Speaker 4: One of the things that's funny is that like this
Speaker 4: is like a particular thing of the University of Chicago ecome.
Speaker 4: People's like they all think they can do math and
Speaker 4: they can't, right, they suck at it. But one of
Speaker 4: the thin things I was almost like, so a bunch
Speaker 4: of my friends are math majors, and math majors can
Speaker 4: like actually do math, Like they could do the kind
Speaker 4: of math that's like there's no there aren't like numbers involved.
Speaker 4: Like it's like they're doing like field theory or some shit,
Speaker 4: or like they're doing a kind of math that when
Speaker 4: someone tries to explain it to you, they have to
Speaker 4: start like making diagrams of like the faces of cubes
Speaker 4: and then like explaining how there's like thirty two dimensional
Speaker 4: edges or whatever. And there's always this joke from the
Speaker 4: math professors where they'd be mad because like they look
Speaker 4: at the kondable price and they'd be like, this person made
Speaker 4: like an incredibly minor optimization to a trading algorithm that's
Speaker 4: like incredibly obvious to anyone who even sort of knows math,
Speaker 4: and they gave them at a mole price for this. And
Speaker 4: this is that before history. Yeah. So the other thing
Speaker 4: that they discovered, right, oh god, I I I'm trying
Speaker 4: to find the least depressing way to put this. They
Speaker 4: they discovered that there are revolutions, and they discovered that,
Speaker 4: like there are different interest groups in a revolution who
Speaker 4: have different interests and like like literally one of the
Speaker 4: things that they won this prize for is a paper
Speaker 4: where they they discovered that giving people like the franchise,
Speaker 4: like giving people the ability to vote, and setting up
Speaker 4: the welfare state was something that was done by elites
Speaker 4: to stop revolutions. Yeah. Again, Yeah, they have all these
Speaker 4: mathematical models that look very impressive until you realize they're
Speaker 4: just they're like incredibly stupid game theory bullshit to like
Speaker 4: determine whether or not a country will do a revolution.
Speaker 4: And their model for it basically is and they've discovered
Speaker 4: some some genuinely impressive insights for like a sixteen year
Speaker 4: old who wants to go into into political science. Right, Like,
Speaker 4: they discovered that, for example, elites have economic interests and
Speaker 4: that those economic interests are different from masses. But because
Speaker 4: they're economists, the only way they can conceptualize this is
Speaker 4: in terms of tax rates. So they make the argument,
Speaker 4: and this is not a joke. I am being serious
Speaker 4: about this. I read this fucking footnote. They make the
Speaker 4: argument that the overthrow of Salvador Allende was about elite
Speaker 4: tax rates.
Speaker 2: Oh, that one is fucking like.
Speaker 4: Jesus wept and it's so funny too. And this is
Speaker 4: this is like one of the biggest most obvious problems
Speaker 4: with their models, right, and this is this is this
Speaker 4: is from all the way back to like their whole
Speaker 4: thing about like how the institutions that were set up
Speaker 4: by colonialists being different affected like the long term trajectory
Speaker 4: of these countries. They treat these entire process because one
Speaker 4: of the things that they've discovered is that there are
Speaker 4: revolutions and counter revolutions. Because they read a Wikipedia article
Speaker 4: about like right wing coups in Latin America and they
Speaker 4: discovered that elites can do antidemocratic coups because they don't
Speaker 4: want their taxes to be too high. That's the only
Speaker 4: reason they do it. Yeah, But their discovery of this right,
Speaker 4: that that right wingers do antidemocratic cups to like preserve
Speaker 4: their wealth and political power. Right, But never, at any
Speaker 4: point in their process does it seem to have occurred
Speaker 4: to them that elites are not purely single national figures,
Speaker 4: and that there are in fact multinational elites and in
Speaker 4: fact there's something called the Central Intelligence Agency that doesn't
Speaker 4: come for me. These people do curse, and this is
Speaker 4: this is like the fundamental core of this right. It's
Speaker 4: like these models talk about sort of like elite distraction, right,
Speaker 4: but it's all framed through the language of sort of
Speaker 4: like taxes or like rents, basically like make thinking like
Speaker 4: land ranch or like they're fighting over a surplus.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Okay, but what they're trying to do is depoliticize how
Speaker 4: this actually works, because the thing you're trying to present
Speaker 4: is that all extraction happens through the state, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: Like the state is the tool that at least use
Speaker 4: And now if you think about those about five seconds,
Speaker 4: we like, well, no, obviously, like there's an exploitation in
Speaker 4: like the workplace that's actually in these right military statorships,
Speaker 4: that's actually like the primary place where extraction happens. Where
Speaker 4: you shoot all the union organizers and then you fucking
Speaker 4: force solved the peasants to work in the fields and
Speaker 4: shoot them if they don't.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: But but what what they're doing is attempting to sort
Speaker 4: of depoliticize the deep plicize this entire process. This is
Speaker 4: what I'm talking about. Like they are the most advanced
Speaker 4: bushwiw economists, and being the most advanced bushwise economists, they
Speaker 4: have finally figured out that the whole they call it
Speaker 4: modernization theory. That's not really what modernization theory is. But
Speaker 4: they're economists. They're fucking stupid. They don't know anything. You
Speaker 4: can't judge them for not actually knowing what modernization theory is.
Speaker 4: But they finally discovered that the old old line about
Speaker 4: how economic development and evidently brought democracy was wrong. Again,
Speaker 4: huge insight here. Yeah, but this this brings them into
Speaker 4: the world of democratic transitions. Now, after we come back
Speaker 4: from these ad breaks, I would to read you the
Speaker 4: most thunderously stupid line I've ever read in a paper
Speaker 4: in my entire life. And that is fucking saying something
Speaker 4: given how many eCOM papers I've read. Yeah, you've been
Speaker 4: in the trenches. Okay, oh god, let mean let me
Speaker 4: let me, let me read this line. This is This
Speaker 4: is a quote from the the ECON Nobel Prizes site.
Speaker 4: In the two thousand and sixth book, the two of
Speaker 4: the three economists made an ambitious attempt to provide quote,
Speaker 4: the first systematic formal analysis of the creation and consultalidation
Speaker 4: of democracy, the first. This is very funny. This is
Speaker 4: fucking insane.
Speaker 11: This is like an entire field of international relations, of
Speaker 11: political science.
Speaker 4: This is shit. Not notice that there are literally multiple disciplines.
Speaker 4: This is an entire field of study, right, like I
Speaker 4: have read it, Like obviously, this is an entire matcho
Speaker 4: political science. This is an entire branch of international relations.
Speaker 4: This is an entire branch of sociology. There's like there's
Speaker 4: like an anthropological school kind of that that's about this.
Speaker 11: They're interdisciplinary fucking institute, So that exists for this reason.
Speaker 11: Like this is shit that I studied from people who
Speaker 11: wrote books about it in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 4: Like this is like like you and The funny thing
Speaker 4: is they are they literally quote people who are writing
Speaker 4: about this from the ages. People have been studying this
Speaker 4: for fucking it as long as they're it has been democracy.
Speaker 4: People have been studying this shita their ECON thing. They
Speaker 4: always was like, oh, nobody ever did formal analysis before.
Speaker 4: It's like, have you ever fucking read have you read
Speaker 4: a poly side paper? I understand, I too dropped my
Speaker 4: public policy major the moment I realized that public policy
Speaker 4: was just fucking econ with the lines in the graph relabeled, Yeah,
Speaker 4: have you ever fucking read one of these papers? Like
Speaker 4: you actually have a chance of understanding them because they
Speaker 4: are you know, okay, I can't bet you mean to
Speaker 4: political science. They are about one hundred and fifty times
Speaker 4: more advanced than the ECON papers on this subject. But
Speaker 4: that's still not like a very high level of advancement, right,
Speaker 4: But like still they're like they have formal models of this,
Speaker 4: They've done all the stupid math bullshit, the sociologists done
Speaker 4: all the number crunching, Like okay, okay, here's another go
Speaker 4: from this. The authors start the paper by showing that
Speaker 4: democratic transitions are precipitated by falls in GDP per capita.
Speaker 4: They discovered this two nineteen. I was having Twitter argument,
Speaker 4: like arguments again with like sixteen year olds on Twitter
Speaker 4: in like twenty sixteen about what the relationship between revolutions
Speaker 4: and declining and raising living standards were. Like this was
Speaker 4: Twitter discourse, right.
Speaker 11: This is seven years after the Arab Spring, just twenty nine.
Speaker 4: Yes, insane, they discovered this. Yeah, so they do form
Speaker 4: an analyzes.
Speaker 11: Is the Arab Spring famously the first and only democratic
Speaker 11: transition that's ever happened?
Speaker 4: No, that's like two recents. Okay, they're all all their stuff.
Speaker 4: Is what they call the quote the second wave of
Speaker 4: democratic transitions, which is the second wave of all because
Speaker 4: they're two social idiots, so that they're talking about the
Speaker 4: protomocracy movements in the eighties in Latin America and you,
Speaker 4: Sasha great, Yeah, which they also were just thunderously wrong
Speaker 4: about like all of the time. Yeah, I was gonna say,
Speaker 4: I can't wait to hear what they have to say
Speaker 4: about those. I'm literally not even gonna talk about it
Speaker 4: because it's nothing. It's just like air.
Speaker 11: I'm just looking up a very insightful paper that Ali
Speaker 11: Khadeva wrote, who I've been feuded several times, so different things.
Speaker 4: It's called stick stones and Molotovs cocktails that it.
Speaker 11: Is a fantastic analysis of democratic transitions. It's about like
Speaker 11: the strategic use of violence against property and the correlation
Speaker 11: it has between like successful democratic transition movements.
Speaker 4: It's good paper read that. Yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 4: great like analysis. We'll put that in like the notes here.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of great analysis of this. But what
Speaker 4: they're trying to do is they're trying to build this
Speaker 4: model where they're like looking at like basically bargaining between
Speaker 4: like the masses and elites to decide whether you do
Speaker 4: a revolution or a counter revolution. And they're trying to
Speaker 4: build like a game theory model based on like fuck
Speaker 4: off the elites and like give ranting concessions and when
Speaker 4: they don'te grant concessions, and whether people believe they're getting
Speaker 4: grant concession. The other thing that's also very stupid about this, right,
Speaker 4: is that like the thing that they're interested in is
Speaker 4: why or why not people like believe that the olibal
Speaker 4: economical forms are going to work? And a lot of
Speaker 4: democratic transitions are also about like resistance to that shit. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like the revolutions to Dan for example, like he is
Speaker 4: a proto Marcus move, but like it is also in
Speaker 4: large part a reaction to imf in constructural reforms. These
Speaker 4: people all think are good and will like cause long
Speaker 4: term prospority and like a lot of the democratic disitions
Speaker 4: they're talking about, like like, for example, again Pinochet, right,
Speaker 4: like that was like you know, and like obviously the
Speaker 4: protomocracy reformers did more neoliberalism, but like a part of
Speaker 4: the part of the reason like that stuff worked was
Speaker 4: because Pinochet ran the economy into the graduating yeah, right,
Speaker 4: which is what he was sad to do. But yeah,
Speaker 4: but like I want to close it on two things. One,
Speaker 4: I want to read this line right from I'm talking
Speaker 4: about like the advances in their papers. This is again
Speaker 4: from the equitible prize thing. Yea quote in the earlier models.
Speaker 4: The probability that the masses are successful when they stage
Speaker 4: a revolution is always one. But this is a strong
Speaker 4: assumption that does not reflect real world events very well.
Speaker 4: They published a paper about how people make a decision
Speaker 4: to do a revolution. This was peer reviewed in an
Speaker 4: economics journal. It's one of the papers that incited in
Speaker 4: the noble price they gave them when they assumed that
Speaker 4: revolutions always succeed. Yeah, Nobel Prize, And the second paper
Speaker 4: was one they realized, Holy shit, that's not true, mom mouth,
Speaker 4: isn't it. This is the kind of assumption that these
Speaker 4: absolute fucking morons make all of the time, all of
Speaker 4: the funk. This is why they had to bring in
Speaker 4: the institucial columnists in the first place, to bring the
Speaker 4: shit in, right, because like, they're basic models of how
Speaker 4: humans work. Were like every single human like sits out
Speaker 4: and calculates a fucking utility curve figure out where they're
Speaker 4: going to brush their hair in the morning. Was obviously
Speaker 4: not true. That's what I had to bring in game
Speaker 4: theory in the first place.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 4: They make stupid assumptions like this literally all the time.
Speaker 4: And again, this is one of the ones they're making
Speaker 4: in one of the papers that was cited in here
Speaker 4: as the reason they want to know what price in economics.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I want to read this models off Cocktail's paper
Speaker 11: to everyone. Here's a fun little sentence, and event history
Speaker 11: analysis finds it, right, so positively associated with political liberalizing
Speaker 11: in one hundred and three non democracies from nineteen ninety
Speaker 11: to two thousand and four attacks by civilians on police
Speaker 11: stations during the January twenty fifth Egyptian Revolution illustrate one
Speaker 11: way in which un noncollective violence can bring about a
Speaker 11: democratic breakthrough. Incredible, thank you, We love to see it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we love this. That's a pretty normal thing from like,
Speaker 4: I guess you would call it like the center left
Speaker 4: of like Democrats edition studies stuff. Right, Yeah, it's the
Speaker 4: sociology paper. Yeah, that's like a pretty normal it's like
Speaker 4: a good life, a good paper. This is from one
Speaker 4: of the books written by the people who won the
Speaker 4: Economics Nobel Prize. Quote. Chapter six explains why several European
Speaker 4: countries have managed to build broadly participatory societies capable but
Speaker 4: still shackled states. Our answer focuses on the factor is
Speaker 4: that led much of Europe towards the corridor during the
Speaker 4: early Middle Ages, as Germanic tribes, especially the Franks, came
Speaker 4: to invade lands dominated by the Western Roman Empire. Afterwards collapse,
Speaker 4: we argue, but the marriage of bottom up participatory is
Speaker 4: a tutions and norms of dramatic tribes and the centralizing
Speaker 4: bureaucratic and legal traditions of the Roman Empire forged a
Speaker 4: unique balance of power between the state and society enabling
Speaker 4: the rise of the.
Speaker 2: Oh god, me.
Speaker 4: Is so depressing.
Speaker 11: I spent ten years getting a PhD in history and
Speaker 11: they've just given these people a Nobel Prize.
Speaker 4: But like Jordan Peterson ship, they have discovered. But this
Speaker 4: is the thing, Like these people have discovered the concept
Speaker 4: of history. Yeah, and they've read like four Wikipedia articles
Speaker 4: and they've used those Wikipedia articles they started doing regression analysis. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and this is this is what they want a Nobel prize. Yeah,
Speaker 4: this is fake Nobel prize. Like again, like I've been
Speaker 4: thinking about, like you know, in physics, what you have
Speaker 4: to do to win a Nobel Prize. You have to
Speaker 4: make a prediction about the fundamental nature of the universe
Speaker 4: that can only be tested by building a fucking machine
Speaker 4: that can measure a vibration of gravitational ways, which is
Speaker 4: a It has to be able to measure a ripple
Speaker 4: in the fabric of space time that is smaller than
Speaker 4: the diameter of the fucking nucleus of an atom. That
Speaker 4: is what you have to do to win the Nobel
Speaker 4: Prize in physics. What you have to do to win
Speaker 4: the Nobel Prize in economics is realize that institutions affect prosparity. Jesus,
Speaker 4: I just cannot this has been. This has been the
Speaker 4: ViBe's econdoble Prize episode. I don't know. I hope this
Speaker 4: made your day slightly slightly better, because holy shit, this
Speaker 4: is the fakest prize in the entire world.
Speaker 11: Shout out to the economists like I guess I'm eagerly
Speaker 11: awaiting you discovering some other ship from my one oh
Speaker 11: one class. Feel free to sign up at anytime if
Speaker 11: you want to get a noble fi prize in economics.
Speaker 4: I guess ah. All right, well this has been. It
Speaker 4: could happen here. I will return.
Speaker 11: Yeah, next time we give an economy's surprised for tying
Speaker 11: the issues of.
Speaker 7: Something this is it could happen here today. I'm your host,
Speaker 7: Garrison Davis, and they're sure has been a lot happening
Speaker 7: this past year. I am kind of feeling emotionally exhausted
Speaker 7: and just numb in general. It's a different feeling from
Speaker 7: the political desensitization that my job usually provides me. I'm
Speaker 7: frankly still recovering from attending the DNC, even more so
Speaker 7: than the RNC. At the RNC I knew I was
Speaker 7: going to be walking through the pits of hell, and
Speaker 7: despite the immense evil on display, the side show conspiracy
Speaker 7: theory freak nature of the event made it almost absurdly amusing.
Speaker 7: But the DNC kind of broke me between the infighting
Speaker 7: among Palestine protesters and the insistence from the official organizers
Speaker 7: TM to oppose any course of action that would actually
Speaker 7: disrupt the event or apply pressure to attendees and instead
Speaker 7: just use the Palestine protests to promote their little socialist
Speaker 7: newspapers and political orgs. Meanwhile, inside the actual event, I
Speaker 7: was surrounded by some of the richest and most powerful
Speaker 7: people I had ever been around, and just watching them
Speaker 7: maintain their like kamala Is bracked party atmosphere at all
Speaker 7: costs and purposely blind themselves to the atrocities happening around
Speaker 7: the world, especially Gaza, was a deeply unsettling experience. Like
Speaker 7: they're supposed to be the if not the good guys,
Speaker 7: at least the better guys or the less openly fascist guys,
Speaker 7: and like among the American right wings, unprecedented focus and
Speaker 7: organized attack on trans rights. This was the first d
Speaker 7: n C SINS twenty twelve to not feature a trans speaker,
Speaker 7: and trans people were never directly mentioned during the convention's
Speaker 7: prime time speaking slots. And now with the election ramping
Speaker 7: up and the Southeast still recovering from two devastating hurricanes,
Speaker 7: Israel escalating tensions with Iran, and with the backing of
Speaker 7: the United States continuing strikes in Lebanon and Palestine, I
Speaker 7: am just feeling more lost and discombobulated than I have
Speaker 7: been in years.
Speaker 4: So to cheer.
Speaker 7: Myself up, I decided to go to a Charlie Kirk
Speaker 7: and vivek Ramaswami rally at Georgia State University. Now to
Speaker 7: some that may sound just completely bat shit or perhaps
Speaker 7: some form of bizarre self harm, but look like I've
Speaker 7: been covering far right rallies and writing about these weird
Speaker 7: conservative influencers for years now, it's almost second nature to me.
Speaker 7: Going to these events can feel paradoxically relaxing, even though
Speaker 7: it may trigger some stress. My body just kind of
Speaker 7: subconsciously knows what to do in environments like this. The
Speaker 7: RNC was so easy, it's like an autopilot just takes over,
Speaker 7: and so I thought going to this Turning Point USA
Speaker 7: event might help reset my brain by giving myself a
Speaker 7: simple task that I know I can excel at. But
Speaker 7: before we get into all that, first, for those more
Speaker 7: fortunate than I, here's some background on Charlie Kirk, also
Speaker 7: known as the far right podcaster with the Smallest Face.
Speaker 7: As a teenager, back in twenty twelve, Charles J. Kirk
Speaker 7: co founded in organization for campus conservatives called Turning Point USA,
Speaker 7: and then in twenty nineteen he founded a sister organization
Speaker 7: called Turning Point Action, which focuses on elections and conservative
Speaker 7: political advocacy. Though initially more aligned with the so called
Speaker 7: alt light rather than the alt right, Kirk has slowly
Speaker 7: moved farther and farther to the right during the past
Speaker 7: ten years, and by twenty twenty he embraced election fraud,
Speaker 7: COVID nineteen, and vaccine conspiracy theories. Also during twenty twenty,
Speaker 7: he started his own podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, which
Speaker 7: is now somehow ranked as the number seven podcast for
Speaker 7: news in Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 4: So that's not good.
Speaker 7: At this point, Charlie has kind of taken the place of,
Speaker 7: if not surpassed, the role that was previously occupied by
Speaker 7: Stephen Crowder before his fall from grace isteming from his
Speaker 7: breakup with Ben Shapiro and the allegations of abusing his
Speaker 7: ex wife. Through the Turning Point Action organization, Kirk is
Speaker 7: more tight with the actual mechanisms of the Republican Party
Speaker 7: then even the Daily Wire is just This past Wednesday,
Speaker 7: Turning Point Action hosted a rally for Trump in Duluth, Georgia,
Speaker 7: just outside of Atlanta. Trump spoke at this event, and
Speaker 7: Tucker Carlson made a very fascist speech advocating to refuse
Speaker 7: the results of the election if Trump loses, and likening
Speaker 7: Trump to a quote unquote daddy figure, needing to punish
Speaker 7: the country for being a quote unquote bad girl the
Speaker 7: past four years. It's a huge indictment against Americans, deeply
Speaker 7: Freudian politics.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 7: The event that I attended on October twenty first was
Speaker 7: a part of Charlie Kirk's You're Being Brainwashed tour, where
Speaker 7: Kirk and friends travel from swing state to swing state
Speaker 7: to debate college students on camera about why Trump is
Speaker 7: the better candidate. Charlie's focus on debating unprepared college students
Speaker 7: shows how he he has kind of picked up the
Speaker 7: baton from Stephen Crowder and his old change My mind videos,
Speaker 7: but this year specifically, Charlie's version of this college debate
Speaker 7: content creation strategy is more in line with this overall
Speaker 7: strategy to inflate Kirk's political influence leading up to the
Speaker 7: election so that he can get more directly involved in
Speaker 7: the GOPS get out the vote campaign in key swing states.
Speaker 7: As a part of this strategy, Kirk has been on
Speaker 7: a bit of a media blitz the past few months
Speaker 7: to promote himself. Some listeners may have seen the viral
Speaker 7: video featuring Charlie Kirk debating twenty five quote unquote woke
Speaker 7: college students for over ninety minutes. This video, from the
Speaker 7: YouTube channel Jubilee, has over twenty million views, and like
Speaker 7: just as an aside, Jubilee is just so deeply evil.
Speaker 7: This company claims to advocate for like empathy and human
Speaker 7: connection while turning life and death political issues into fucking
Speaker 7: game show segments for YouTube ad revenue, often pitting media
Speaker 7: trained conservative activists against just random clueless liberals. I hate
Speaker 7: this company. They are so bad, but I digress now.
Speaker 7: I actually attended a Turning Point USA event on the
Speaker 7: GSU campus last year. It was a smaller event that
Speaker 7: was ostensibly about defending the Cop City training facility in Atlanta.
Speaker 7: Though halfway through the event it just stopped being about
Speaker 7: cop City and it just turned into an ad for
Speaker 7: Turning Point USA and this other political organization started by
Speaker 7: Candice Owens called BLEXIT, which stands for the quote Black
Speaker 7: Exit from the Victimhood mentality unquote. This was one of
Speaker 7: the most racist events I've ever been to. The main speaker,
Speaker 7: in his best metrosexual attire, blamed black people for creating
Speaker 7: situations that result in police murders, said that the real
Speaker 7: problem is that black kids are never taught accountability and
Speaker 7: that in the MLK days, people only ever advocated for
Speaker 7: more police training. He also claimed that rap music is
Speaker 7: causing a spike in violent crime and ranted against jay
Speaker 7: Z and Beyonce and closed by saying that we need
Speaker 7: to support more conservative rappers and singers. It was really bad,
Speaker 7: But on the plus side, I went undercover to this event,
Speaker 7: and when talking with the Turning Point USA officials, I
Speaker 7: convinced them that I was actually a student at a
Speaker 7: different nearby university and I reserve the right to start
Speaker 7: a fake TPUSA chapter in that school, so hopefully that
Speaker 7: will never happen. Since I'm the one who's supposed to
Speaker 7: be doing it. For the Brainwashed Tour event this past Monday,
Speaker 7: I dressed like an unfashionable campus conservative and donned my
Speaker 7: Reagan movie baseball cap acquired at the RNC welcome party,
Speaker 7: and arrived at campus an hour early to scope out
Speaker 7: the terrain. They didn't announce the exact location for the
Speaker 7: event ahead of time, so for about half an hour
Speaker 7: I just walked around to GSU with the fucking Ronald
Speaker 7: Reagan hat, looking for like a TPUSA booth. Now, luckily
Speaker 7: I spotted some people with red mega hats that I
Speaker 7: tailed to the nearby Hurt Park, where it was immediately
Speaker 7: evident that this would be a much bigger event than
Speaker 7: the Copcity one I attended a year prior. In the
Speaker 7: middle of the park was a big table with microphones
Speaker 7: set up for questions and debate, and on either side
Speaker 7: there were booths with turning point stickers, buttons, flyers, a
Speaker 7: pocket constitution, and sign up sheets to get involved in
Speaker 7: their political advocacy programs. I took home a big button
Speaker 7: that read Republicans are Hotter, and I got another what
Speaker 7: I would call a brat style button, but brown instead
Speaker 7: of green. That re D's high period, stop being a
Speaker 7: socialist period. Thanks period. Not good, not good. But I
Speaker 7: watched the crowd grow from like twenty people I would
Speaker 7: say around two hundred. You know, it got kind of fluid,
Speaker 7: but yeah, around two hundred to fifty. Maybe A small
Speaker 7: majority were students or at least young, and appeared to
Speaker 7: be equally made up of liberals and conservatives, with the
Speaker 7: rest of the crowd mostly made up of conservatives from
Speaker 7: all ages who came to campus just to see Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 7: As the event was about to begin, TPUSA staff moved
Speaker 7: all of the older quote unquote non college students out
Speaker 7: of frame of the cameras to make the video seem
Speaker 7: more focused on liberal college students, and after waiting in
Speaker 7: the surprisingly warm October sun for over an hour, Charles J.
Speaker 7: Kirk finally arrived thirty minutes late from the official start time,
Speaker 7: tossing free mega hats wildly into the crowd, one of
Speaker 7: which I am now in possession of. For this leg
Speaker 7: of the tour, Kirk has been accompanied by the twenty
Speaker 7: twenty four Republican presidential candidate with the tallest hair, the
Speaker 7: vek Ramaswami, who, by the way, has also won the
Speaker 7: Cool Zone Media Award for presidential candidate with the most
Speaker 7: Nick Fuentes groyper energy.
Speaker 4: So there you go.
Speaker 7: I can't believe I've seen the vek Ramaswami like four
Speaker 7: different times this year. That doesn't feel good. But do
Speaker 7: you know what does feel good? That's right, these products
Speaker 7: and services that support this podcast. Okay, we are back.
Speaker 7: It's time to finally talk about this fucking rally. So
Speaker 7: I'm not gonna go over like the whole event play
Speaker 7: by play, because there was over two hours of quote
Speaker 7: unquote debating that I have neither the time nor the
Speaker 7: desire to recap, but I will mention some of the
Speaker 7: overarching topics and common lines of questioning. Even as the
Speaker 7: first student took the mic, I knew that this was
Speaker 7: gonna be a rough day. The first person to quote
Speaker 7: unquote debate, Charlie and Vivek, stated that their quote primary
Speaker 7: opposition to Trump is that he's anti American and anti
Speaker 7: patriotic unquote. They said that they believed that Trump fundamentally
Speaker 7: undermines American values, and they specifically invoked Trump's rhetoric online
Speaker 7: about suspending the Constitution and the whole January sixth incident. Look,
Speaker 7: I don't think this is a very compelling line of attack,
Speaker 7: especially in a debate setting. And I just don't believe
Speaker 7: that patriotism is like an inherently good thing. And I
Speaker 7: think Grifters and Conman are pretty darn American. But Vivek
Speaker 7: and Kirk responded by talking about how social media censorship
Speaker 7: in twenty twenty was a much greater act of anti Americanism,
Speaker 7: although later on in the day they defended Elon Musk
Speaker 7: in his running of Twitter, since he's a private citizen
Speaker 7: and should be allowed to do whatever he wants with
Speaker 7: his own platform. This is, of course ironic amidst reporting
Speaker 7: from The New York Times that Musk and the Trump
Speaker 7: team colluded to suppress information damaging to Trump on the platform,
Speaker 7: basically exactly what the right was accusing the old Twitter
Speaker 7: doing the last election. But none of that really matters.
Speaker 7: There's no such thing as hypocrisy. You can never hold
Speaker 7: anyone account to this sort of thing on the right.
Speaker 7: Charlie Kirk then just went on to deny that Trump
Speaker 7: called to suspend the Constitution. Here's a clip he ever has.
Speaker 13: You're misquoting him. But let's just look at what he did,
Speaker 13: not just rhetoric.
Speaker 7: Nice little quick pivot there from Charles. But yes, technical
Speaker 7: Trump didn't say suspend. He actually said terminate, which is
Speaker 7: like worse.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 7: In twenty twenty two, Trump posted on truth Social calling
Speaker 7: for the quote unquote termination of all rules, regulations, and articles,
Speaker 7: even those found in the Constitution unquote, in response to
Speaker 7: the twenty twenty election. I don't know how Kirk thinks
Speaker 7: that saying terminate is better than suspend. Of course he doesn't.
Speaker 7: He's just playing this game. It doesn't matter. Kirk went
Speaker 7: on to lie about the nature of January sixth and
Speaker 7: whether Trump literally personally committed the legal act of insurrection,
Speaker 7: eventually saying that even if Trump did, it would be
Speaker 7: thrown out under the new presidential immunity ruling by the
Speaker 7: Supreme Court, and stating that though Trump didn't actually do
Speaker 7: a coup, the Democrats did actually do a coup to
Speaker 7: get Kamala Harris on the ticket.
Speaker 4: Okay, sure, but.
Speaker 7: Now part of Kirk's just flagrant January sixth revisionist history
Speaker 7: was claiming that Ashley Babbitt was suddenly killed with no
Speaker 7: warning as she was retreating from the Capitol and just
Speaker 7: none of that is true.
Speaker 4: That just isn't what happened.
Speaker 13: The only person to die on January sixth is a
Speaker 13: Trump supporter killed by one of Nancy Pelosi's bodyguards.
Speaker 7: Okay, even that part isn't true. Two other Trump supporters
Speaker 7: died of heart attacks, and another died holding a Don't
Speaker 7: tread on Me flag after being trampled by fellow rioters.
Speaker 7: Now a student countered Kirk's claim of Babbitt's innocence by
Speaker 7: confirming that he believes in stands your ground laws that
Speaker 7: if you're breaking into property you can be shot hold on.
Speaker 13: But Ashley Babbitt was unarmed. Isn't the whole kind of
Speaker 13: stick of the American left, like, don't shoot unarmed people.
Speaker 13: If I break into your house, then I was unarmed,
Speaker 13: but I broken I was.
Speaker 8: Breaking into your house?
Speaker 13: Was George Floyd? Was that a rightful death?
Speaker 7: Okay, first of all, incredible deflection, but oh yes, as
Speaker 7: if these two situations are in any way comparable, a
Speaker 7: black man being pinned down and choked to death for
Speaker 7: over nine minutes and a woman leading a mob intent
Speaker 7: on killing US politicians right up to the last line
Speaker 7: of defense protecting set of politicians as they try to
Speaker 7: evacuate the capital. Kirk tried to make this same gross
Speaker 7: George Floyd comparison like an hour later, again to booze
Speaker 7: from the audience. Later in the day, a second student
Speaker 7: hit the Charlie Kirk debate chair debating on whether Trump
Speaker 7: is anti American, and mentioned Trump's recent comments talking about
Speaker 7: a quote unquote enemy within, some enemy inside the United
Speaker 7: States that poses a far bigger threat than foreign enemies.
Speaker 7: The Veck claimed that Trump was referring to people who
Speaker 7: shot at Trump, and Kirk claimed that it was a
Speaker 7: reference to drug cartels.
Speaker 13: So Donald Trump is talking with enemy, then he's talking
Speaker 13: about the cartels that are here that are poisoning our
Speaker 13: streets with drugs, that are bringing illegal guns into the country.
Speaker 13: That is the enemy within. Yet we say Russia is
Speaker 13: an enemy. Russia has never attacked the United States of America.
Speaker 7: Curious Russia comment there, certainly, But like for this enemy
Speaker 7: within thing, we know that's just not true. Trump has
Speaker 7: specifically named multiple Democrats as the enemy within. It's not
Speaker 7: about cartels, it's not about people shooting him. There's just
Speaker 7: non stop lying coming from Kirk and Vek and none
Speaker 7: of the students are like equipped or researched enough to
Speaker 7: call him out on it. Another common topic of debate
Speaker 7: was war and the insistence that Trump didn't start to
Speaker 7: any new wars, unlike Biden and Harris, who have personally
Speaker 7: started wars. I guess with Kirk crediting Biden for starting
Speaker 7: the Russia Ukraine War by financing the Ukrainian defensive, as
Speaker 7: well as roping in Harris by saying that she was
Speaker 7: quote in charge of the Russia Ukrainian War before it happened, unquote,
Speaker 7: which really doesn't make much sense as a sentence. The
Speaker 7: Veck later added that Kamala Harris was personally in charge
Speaker 7: of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which again just isn't true.
Speaker 7: The Vek is parroting of failed attempt by Republican lawmakers
Speaker 7: from last September to invent some way to blame Harris
Speaker 7: for the Afghanistan withdrawal now that she is the presidential nominee.
Speaker 7: Harris is only mentioned three times in the three thousand,
Speaker 7: two hundred and eighty eight pages of interview transcripts from
Speaker 7: the Foreign Affairs Committee's investigation of the withdrawal, but by
Speaker 7: far Charlie and Vivek's main focus on the topic of
Speaker 7: war is just defending Russia.
Speaker 8: Donald Trump's going to negotiate an end of that war.
Speaker 8: That's reasonable.
Speaker 14: Kamala Harrison and Joe Biden have created that war and
Speaker 14: escalated that over the last three year.
Speaker 7: Trump did not really end any wars in his first term.
Speaker 7: In fact, he increased US troop levels in twenty seventeen
Speaker 7: and raised the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan from
Speaker 7: drones strikes by three hundred and thirty percent according to
Speaker 7: Brown University. Still, the Veck tried to frame Trump as
Speaker 7: the much more principled anti war candidate, But which candadate?
Speaker 14: Was there a major war in the Middle East? Was
Speaker 14: there a major war in the Middle East or Donald Trump?
Speaker 7: There were multiple arms deal packages to Saudi Arabia for
Speaker 7: the war in Yemen, and the US increased its involvement
Speaker 7: in the series of a war under Trump. But to
Speaker 7: the Vek's earlier point, I really don't see a way
Speaker 7: Trump would end the war in Ukraine. That isn't just
Speaker 7: giving more territory over to Russia. But to Charlie Kirk
Speaker 7: that might not be such a bad thing, since he
Speaker 7: seems to be kind of fond of Russia.
Speaker 13: You know who is the enemy. China is the enemy.
Speaker 8: Russia.
Speaker 13: Well, Russia's not the enemy. Exactly how many of your
Speaker 13: friends have died because of Russians?
Speaker 4: Here's another SoundBite from the Veck.
Speaker 8: Joe Biden and Kyple Harris along with some Republican help.
Speaker 14: I'm gonna admit is sending more money to escalate that
Speaker 14: war that otherwise would have resolve itself if we had
Speaker 14: just negotiated peace back in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 7: Resolves itself. Sounds a lot like Vivek just means that
Speaker 7: Russia would have just seized territory, and like later on,
Speaker 7: Vavek argued that Ukraine just shouldn't be getting any native
Speaker 7: protection at all.
Speaker 14: So the US actually made a commitment back in nineteen
Speaker 14: ninety to say that NATO would expand not one inch
Speaker 14: past East Germany.
Speaker 7: Hmmm, I wonder what may have been different geopolitically in
Speaker 7: nineteen ninety in relation to Russia. Vivek, I wonder if
Speaker 7: anything has happened since nineteen ninety that might affect certain
Speaker 7: Slavic territories. Avek, I wonder, Oh my god. Now, the
Speaker 7: topic discussed probably the most during this event was immigration
Speaker 7: even the liberal college students seem to believe that an
Speaker 7: influx of immigration was the biggest problem currently facing the
Speaker 7: United States. Kirk claimed that Kamala Harris let ten million
Speaker 7: new quote unquote illegal immigrants into the cunt and like no,
Speaker 7: the total population of undocumented immigrants in this country has
Speaker 7: fluctuated between ten to twelve million over the course of
Speaker 7: the past twenty years.
Speaker 4: Though, like JD.
Speaker 7: Vance, Kirk considers most immigrants illegal regardless of their actual status.
Speaker 7: Kirk claimed that the quote unquote nine million immigrants seeking
Speaker 7: asylum that have come into this country under Biden are
Speaker 7: all illegal because they are quote cartel sponsored fraudulent asylum
Speaker 7: claims unquote. Kirk said that these false asylum seekers pay
Speaker 7: cartels ten thousand dollars to be smuggled into the United States.
Speaker 13: They're all illegal because they're we know it's actually, we
Speaker 13: know it to be true. It's not the question nine
Speaker 13: they're frauds. That they're defrauding the American immigration system is
Speaker 13: what they're doing.
Speaker 7: When pressed for proof on this, Kirk just stumbled, and
Speaker 7: Viveck took over and later just plugged his new movie
Speaker 7: about illegal immigration.
Speaker 13: Yes, I mean, so, for example, what is the asylum
Speaker 13: claim if you're coming from from George, Korea.
Speaker 7: Actually, wow, wow, very very convincing stuff happening. Viveck argued
Speaker 7: that most immigrants lie about seeking asylum in order to
Speaker 7: enter the country, and since that's illegal, that makes them
Speaker 7: more likely to commit other crimes once in the United States.
Speaker 15: So right now, our immigration system literally selects for the
Speaker 15: people who are most willing to lie to the US
Speaker 15: government to get in. And that's why it's no surprise
Speaker 15: that the people whose first act of entering the country
Speaker 15: breaks the law often continue to break the law while
Speaker 15: they're already here.
Speaker 13: I don't think that's racist or xenophobic.
Speaker 15: I think it's a fact based on who we're actually
Speaker 15: selecting to come into the country in actuality.
Speaker 7: Immigrants and especially undocumented or quote unquote illegal immigrants, are
Speaker 7: far less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. Most
Speaker 7: research puts it between forty to sixty percent less likely,
Speaker 7: at least according to Stanford, the Texas Department of Public Safety,
Speaker 7: and the Cato Institute, all famously liberal organizations. One thing
Speaker 7: that Kirk kept trying to do is pander his nationalism
Speaker 7: towards the racially diverse audience of Atlanta.
Speaker 4: Students.
Speaker 13: The people in this audience, which is a very diverse audience,
Speaker 13: specifically Black Americans, should be incensed that they're being replaced
Speaker 13: by foreigners. Black Americans are now being put aside so
Speaker 13: that a bunch of foreigners can come, undercut wages and
Speaker 13: fill your city. The black community, which you obviously both
Speaker 13: care a lot about, is actually not being prioritized. Instead,
Speaker 13: people from the Third World. They're coming in and Black
Speaker 13: America is getting put last, which seems to be a
Speaker 13: common theme over the last sixty years when Democrats are
Speaker 13: in control. Well, okay, we'll find that. Thank you guys,
Speaker 13: so much. Thank you, Thank you guys.
Speaker 7: The worst part is that this seems to work. The
Speaker 7: audience seems to resonate with this grossly fascistic framing, seemingly
Speaker 7: unable to recognize what Kirk was doing. And at this
Speaker 7: point I was just like fucking losing it. Vivek said
Speaker 7: that if you don't know English, you shouldn't be allowed
Speaker 7: in the United States, and like no one cared, no
Speaker 7: one pushed back on that. A pro Kamala person repeated
Speaker 7: false migrant crime wave rhetoric in her question about the
Speaker 7: Venezuelan refugee crisis. That student said that three hundred thousand
Speaker 7: Venezuelan refugees came to the United States in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 7: and Kirk then claimed that three million more would arrive
Speaker 7: if Kamala is elected, along with twenty million more immigrants.
Speaker 7: Kirk promised that if Trump's elected, any immigrant, whether legal, undocumented,
Speaker 7: or a refugee, just any immigrant who commits a crime
Speaker 7: like a dui will be immediately deported. And unfortunately, when
Speaker 7: pressed to defend or even just openly express their own
Speaker 7: personal views on whatever the topic of debate was, multiple
Speaker 7: students just like completely backed down, saying that they would
Speaker 7: rather quote unquote stay out of the political realm or
Speaker 7: in another instance.
Speaker 4: Politically charge you fair enough, what are you doing.
Speaker 7: You're trying to debate about access to abortion or if
Speaker 7: all immigrants should be rounded up and deported, but you
Speaker 7: don't want to get quote unquote too political.
Speaker 4: What are you talking about?
Speaker 7: I'm sorry you couldn't get a fast dunk on Charlie Kirk,
Speaker 7: but come on. But perhaps the most disheartening moment was
Speaker 7: when Charlie Kirk was challenged on his opposition to the
Speaker 7: Civil Rights Act. Someone asked why Charlie thinks that the
Speaker 7: Civil Rights Act was a mistake. Kirk started by saying
Speaker 7: that even if some of the original intent was good,
Speaker 7: it's now being used for bad things, like allowing men
Speaker 7: in women's locker rooms, to the complete shock of the questionnaire,
Speaker 7: Kirk and Viveki then went on to explain why we
Speaker 7: should repeal the Civil Rights Act.
Speaker 13: The fanfare that the Civil Rights Actor is met with.
Speaker 13: It's almost like the new Constitution. We talk about the
Speaker 13: Civil Rights Act more than the Constitution. Is it is
Speaker 13: cited more than the Constitution. We almost had a new
Speaker 13: American founding in the nineteen sixties with the Civil Rights Act.
Speaker 14: So let me share a couple of couple hard facts
Speaker 14: with you, which is that turns out that you're much
Speaker 14: more likely to end up in prison, you're much more
Speaker 14: likely to end up in poverty, you're much more likely
Speaker 14: not to graduate from high school if you grow up
Speaker 14: in a single parent household versus the dual parent household.
Speaker 14: Today you're talking about upwards of sixty percent of black
Speaker 14: kids born into single parent households rather than dual parent
Speaker 14: What number do you think that was in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 14: before the Great Society, Probably it was even less twenty
Speaker 14: percent twenty percent back then. So then we look at
Speaker 14: what the results have been of this entire agenda. Put
Speaker 14: the Civil Rights Act, put the LBJ great society. Black
Speaker 14: Americans are worse off today even economically in terms of
Speaker 14: mobility than they were back then, in the name of
Speaker 14: laws that were passed to supposedly advance black interests.
Speaker 7: Oh god, do you know what that can actually be
Speaker 7: attributed to. It's the massive increase in policing and the
Speaker 7: carcinal justice system that was specifically intensified as a conservative
Speaker 7: reaction to black people gaining more civil rights in society.
Speaker 13: The Civil Rights Act has nine different titles in it,
Speaker 13: and you have this this leviathan that was created, and
Speaker 13: something that most Black Americans dunt support is men in
Speaker 13: female sports. Would you agree men playing in female sports?
Speaker 13: I have no, Yeah, I know, no, no for sure, right,
Speaker 13: but believe it or not, the Civil Rights Act is
Speaker 13: now being used to keep men playing in women's sports.
Speaker 13: So the Civil Rights Act was used to help Black
Speaker 13: America originally totally get that, but now the way it
Speaker 13: was written is that any claim of identification, so someone
Speaker 13: says I'm a woman, therefore I can compete in your
Speaker 13: volleyball team. They come in with a civil rights claim,
Speaker 13: and so what we're saying is no, no, no, it
Speaker 13: should be specified to racial, not gender all that other stuff.
Speaker 13: And there were all these other privilegis as well.
Speaker 7: How sad is it that this kid was convinced that
Speaker 7: the fucking Civil Rights Act is bad through transphobia. It's
Speaker 7: so fucking predatory what Kirk is doing here. This was
Speaker 7: so fucking gross to watch in person. As the day
Speaker 7: went on, things just started to get more and more kookie.
Speaker 7: A whole batch of like libertarian Austrian trained economists went
Speaker 7: back and forth with Charles and Viveka on tariffs, free markets,
Speaker 7: and the validity of the economic philosophy of Frederick Hayek.
Speaker 7: This fucking dude with a little mustache, who ostensibly got
Speaker 7: up to debate Kirk on abortion said that quote, I
Speaker 7: think my generation has started to abuse the option of abortion. Unquote,
Speaker 7: like why the fuck are you up there debating him?
Speaker 7: Then Jesus Christ and then what I would call generously
Speaker 7: a himbo in a white dude's for Harris shirt said
Speaker 7: that Kamala's greatest to pumplishment is being an idol. After
Speaker 7: debating Kirk about FEMA money being spent on illegal immigrants. Meanwhile,
Speaker 7: Kirk just continued to spew COVID nineteen conspiracy theories to
Speaker 7: very little pushback.
Speaker 13: They were wrong about everything. They were wrong about six
Speaker 13: feet to solder spread. They were wrong about the vaccine
Speaker 13: safe and effective.
Speaker 14: They were hey, they we were wrong about whether the
Speaker 14: Arthur revolves around the sun.
Speaker 4: What are you talking about?
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 7: One student just got so fed up with Kirk's endless
Speaker 7: rambling about topics unrelated to their question and decided to
Speaker 7: walk away, which then, of course, Kirk claimed as a
Speaker 7: rhetorical victory.
Speaker 13: How to biden laptop misinformation? Where did the virus come from? Biolabs?
Speaker 13: It's exactly how fine? That's okay, go to your fics class.
Speaker 7: I was losing it and frankly just shocked at how
Speaker 7: little pushback Charles and Vivek were receiving for what I
Speaker 7: saw is very clear lies and manipulative debate tactics. The
Speaker 7: majority of some people clearly did not think too hard
Speaker 7: about the question they were going to ask, or let
Speaker 7: alone research the topic of debate beforehand. I saw people
Speaker 7: in line to ask a question using chat GPT to
Speaker 7: generate questions to ask using a prompt about how to
Speaker 7: debate Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point USA event, like
Speaker 7: what the fuck is going on now? I fundamentally refuse
Speaker 7: to participate in quote unquote debates like this for reasons
Speaker 7: that I will soon get into. So I just started
Speaker 7: taking notes of all the things Charlie was lying about,
Speaker 7: and I was right at the very front of the crowd.
Speaker 7: So whenever TPUSA publishes the video Charlie Kirk destroying silly
Speaker 7: liberal college students, you should be able to see me
Speaker 7: pretty clearly in the background in my fucking Ronald reag
Speaker 7: at a hat, just furiously scribbling down notes. Though I
Speaker 7: would recommend watching with an ad blocker not to give
Speaker 7: Kirk extra money. The whole event was a pretty pathetic affair.
Speaker 7: By my count, there were only eight liberal leaning challengers
Speaker 7: who questioned Kirk compared to thirteen conservative leaning questionnaires who
Speaker 7: entered a friendly discussion with Kirk. Out of all the
Speaker 7: liberal debaters, too backed down because they didn't want to
Speaker 7: get too political, and three others appeared to be at
Speaker 7: least somewhat swayed by Kirk and vivek now like I
Speaker 7: can't entirely blame these students right like, this setting is
Speaker 7: not a real debate. Kirk holds all of the power.
Speaker 7: He does this for a living, and he fucking brought
Speaker 7: a friend with him to help. It's two of them
Speaker 7: versus one. It's Kirk and Vivek. There's a reason he
Speaker 7: prefers debating college students rather than working professionals. Most students
Speaker 7: are not prepared to effectively counter Kirk's claims and don't
Speaker 7: have enough general knowledge on current events to call him
Speaker 7: out on every one of his many lies. And even
Speaker 7: if they do catch him on something, Kirk will try
Speaker 7: to project authority to sway the uneducated audience into believing
Speaker 7: that he is correct. Just because teens are chronically online
Speaker 7: doesn't mean that they have better media literacy, critical thinking,
Speaker 7: or know how to determine the validity of information. A
Speaker 7: twenty twenty four survey by News Literacy America found that
Speaker 7: only fifty percent of teens could identify that in article
Speaker 7: labeled as branded content on a news site was in
Speaker 7: fact an advertisement. Barely over half of teens could accurately
Speaker 7: identify an op ed with the word commentary in the
Speaker 7: headline as an opinion piece, forty four percent claimed that
Speaker 7: a company's own press release was more credible than an
Speaker 7: independent news report on the same subject, and thirty four
Speaker 7: percent of teens incorrectly labeled a random picture of damaged
Speaker 7: traffic lights as quote unquote strong evidence supporting a viral
Speaker 7: false claim that hot July temperatures had melted traffic lights.
Speaker 7: These teens surveyed said that local TV news and TikTok
Speaker 7: were the most trustworthy sources of information, and thirty five
Speaker 7: percent of teens said that professional journalists are more biased
Speaker 7: than social media content creators. Meanwhile, forty five percent said
Speaker 7: that journalists are just as biased as these TikTok influencers.
Speaker 7: Let's do a test right now, try to see if
Speaker 7: you can determine that these following clips are in fact advertisements. Okay,
Speaker 7: we are back now. This was technically my first time
Speaker 7: seeing this format of conservative YouTube debate in person. The
Speaker 7: videos that got published online later get heavily edited down,
Speaker 7: and while I was going at it in my notepad,
Speaker 7: I started to recognize the repeating patterns that Kirk and
Speaker 7: Vivek employed to gain dominance in almost every single debate matchup.
Speaker 7: So now I'm going to talk about some of these
Speaker 7: common tactics used by Kirk. When Kirk or Vivek wants
Speaker 7: to end a particular line of questioning or move on
Speaker 7: to the next person, they'll just restate their own opinions
Speaker 7: as fact and then end that debate, leaving the impression
Speaker 7: that they won. They can just stop whenever they feel
Speaker 7: like they have made the final point that gives them victory.
Speaker 4: Here's Vivek.
Speaker 14: The number one human attribute that our legal immigration system
Speaker 14: selects for isn't who's smart. Isn't who's going to work hard,
Speaker 14: isn't who loves the country. It's are you willing to
Speaker 14: lie to the US government or not. If you are,
Speaker 14: you get in.
Speaker 13: If not, you don't. That's the way it works.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 4: And here's another example from Kirk.
Speaker 13: Black Americans are treated far worse than illegals in this country,
Speaker 13: and we have violated our social contract to our own citizens.
Speaker 13: And I just want you to think about that, okay.
Speaker 13: Is that if you into America, you get a flight
Speaker 13: to the country the city of your choosing, You get
Speaker 13: taxpayer funded luxury hotels, you get a taxpayer funded phone,
Speaker 13: taxpayer funded food stamps, whereas many Americans are struggling to
Speaker 13: even make ends meet, So thank you so much for coming.
Speaker 7: Yeah, what a convenient way to say a bunch of
Speaker 7: bullshit without having to back any of it enough. Now,
Speaker 7: of of course, welfare programs like food stamps and even
Speaker 7: assistants to get access to smartphones, since they basically are
Speaker 7: now a requirement of everyday life, those programs do exist, right,
Speaker 7: Those are important programs. But those free flights to any city,
Speaker 7: that's actually a reference to New York City's reticketing program,
Speaker 7: which offers one way bus or plane tickets out of
Speaker 7: the city. This program was actually started because the governor
Speaker 7: of Texas sent forty thousand immigrants to New York against
Speaker 7: their will. And those quote unquote luxury hotels are actually
Speaker 7: a small part of an emergency housing program that utilizes
Speaker 7: some converted hotels as well as airport motels and even
Speaker 7: office buildings as temporary shelter for immigrants. But I'm sure
Speaker 7: Kirk would rather these people just be homeless living on
Speaker 7: the street. I'm sure he wouldn't find ways to complain
Speaker 7: about that too. A very common Kirk tactic to avoid
Speaker 7: answering a question is just to simply flip it around
Speaker 7: and ask the students a different question that might eventually
Speaker 7: be related to the student's original question, but not necessarily.
Speaker 13: Let me ask you just one more question. Can men
Speaker 13: give birth?
Speaker 8: Can men give birth?
Speaker 13: Yeah?
Speaker 8: If they're transgender? Q?
Speaker 7: The audience's shocked response. These people probably don't even know
Speaker 7: if this refers to a transgender woman or a transgender man.
Speaker 4: Whatever.
Speaker 7: For another example, here's how Levek responded to a question
Speaker 7: about voter fraud allegations.
Speaker 13: Do you think dal Trump committed a coup against the
Speaker 13: US government?
Speaker 7: This was part of Kirk's response to a question about
Speaker 7: US aid to Israel.
Speaker 13: What is your strong opinion about the civil war happening
Speaker 13: in the Central African Republic.
Speaker 7: For another example, a student asked Kirk what should be
Speaker 7: done about hate crimes against Venezuelan immigrants in cities like Chicago?
Speaker 13: Chicago?
Speaker 8: I think that we should do.
Speaker 13: I have a question, so what part of Chicago from?
Speaker 4: So these are all just classic red herricks. Here's another.
Speaker 13: Do you admit that the Hamas tried to commit genocide
Speaker 13: on October seven?
Speaker 7: Also simply not what a genocide is. Now, Sometimes students
Speaker 7: can catch what Kirk is doing with red herrings and deflections,
Speaker 7: but even when drilled down on the original line of questioning,
Speaker 7: Kirk will try hard to pivot away whenever the momentum
Speaker 7: is not going in his favor.
Speaker 13: You guys are super focused on technical things that we
Speaker 13: could talk about forever. Let me just ask a question.
Speaker 13: I asked you, what is Kamala Harris's greatest accomplishment? Can
Speaker 13: you tell me what that would be?
Speaker 7: Perhaps the most common tactic Charlie Kirk employes to maintain
Speaker 7: control over the interaction is instead of just stating his opinion,
Speaker 7: Kirk will throw a question back to his opponent with
Speaker 7: the intent of getting them to say something that's in
Speaker 7: support of Kirk's own argument. Alternatively, Kirk will ask a
Speaker 7: question that the student probably doesn't know, like some specific
Speaker 7: stat but something that Kirk already has a prepared answer for,
Speaker 7: so that he can throw off his opponent, make them
Speaker 7: question their own ability to debate, and make himself seem smarter.
Speaker 7: Here's a short compilation.
Speaker 13: If there was a policy that made markets more free
Speaker 13: but hurt your country, would you support it? Do you
Speaker 13: believe that FDR was right and partnering with Joseph Stalin
Speaker 13: to defeat Hitler?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 13: So I guess two questions with tariff's how do you
Speaker 13: avoid a tariff's? Ask another moral question, then, is it
Speaker 13: ever okay to do something evil after an l under abortion?
Speaker 13: Do you carve out a new morality? Is there like
Speaker 13: a different kind of morality that we apply only to abortion?
Speaker 13: At what point does it get human rights?
Speaker 8: Let me ask you just a question.
Speaker 14: Do you know which nation is the biggest supplier of
Speaker 14: the US military today?
Speaker 8: You could probably guess it.
Speaker 13: Is your phone, paid for by US taxpayers. Let me
Speaker 13: ask you, did you have a big this summer in
Speaker 13: a luxury hotel paid for by taxpayers? Ten people are
Speaker 13: murdered in Chicago. Out of those ten, how many of
Speaker 13: those cases will be solved on average?
Speaker 2: Do you think?
Speaker 13: Okay? So you said wanted to suspend the Constitution? Did
Speaker 13: he do that when he was president?
Speaker 7: His argumentative style looks pretty goofy when it's all broken
Speaker 7: down into its respective parts. Now to circle back to
Speaker 7: my stance of just never engaging with these bad faith
Speaker 7: debate spectacles. Lastly, I'll show you what happens when you
Speaker 7: quote unquote do well against someone like Charlie Kirk. I
Speaker 7: think the only time Kirk was really thrown off was
Speaker 7: during one of the very last matchups, with a student
Speaker 7: asking about Kirk's support of military aid to Israel despite
Speaker 7: his alleged anti war stance and his call for the
Speaker 7: US to pause all foreign aid until the southern border
Speaker 7: is secured. Like usual, Kirk first tried to deflect by
Speaker 7: using red herrings and turn questions back on the student.
Speaker 13: Let me ask you this a first principal question. Do
Speaker 13: you think the Jewish people have a moral rights to
Speaker 13: their religions?
Speaker 10: Do not have?
Speaker 7: Kirk then failed to accuse the student of anti Semitism.
Speaker 7: Kirk then tried to trick the student into saying that
Speaker 7: Hamas is more morally good than Israel, But the student
Speaker 7: saw what Kirk was trying to do with his bizarre
Speaker 7: moralistic framing.
Speaker 13: Do you think that Israel as it's currently constituted is
Speaker 13: morally equivalent with Hamas?
Speaker 7: The student quite wisely did not answer Kirk's precariously worded
Speaker 7: yes or no question and instead reframed the question in
Speaker 7: their own words and only then stated their opinion that
Speaker 7: both Hamas and the IDs actions can be constituted as evil.
Speaker 4: Still, Kirk wouldn't relent.
Speaker 13: So which one is better? Which one is good is better.
Speaker 7: His nonsensical framing was once again rejected, but then Kirk
Speaker 7: accused the student of being propagandized and then asked if
Speaker 7: they had personally been to Israel to assess the situation.
Speaker 4: And this is when everything fell apart.
Speaker 13: Let me tell you this that you know that.
Speaker 16: There's Arab serving in the Kannesset, you know that, and
Speaker 16: there why you're a point of Jews saying I don't
Speaker 16: like Jews because Israel absolutely.
Speaker 13: Saying I'm just gonna I'm gonna go back to this
Speaker 13: because I think it's so interesting though, which is that
Speaker 13: I believe that the Jewish people do have a rights
Speaker 13: their ancestral body.
Speaker 16: Well, first of all, that you believe that they should
Speaker 16: be leveling buildings because that's their ancestral home.
Speaker 13: I'm not I'm not defending every decision they made, but
Speaker 13: that's exactly what they're doing. Interrupt every you're interrupting. I'm
Speaker 13: gonna ask for our next question because you're not arguing.
Speaker 4: The more questions.
Speaker 13: Not much to debate, because I believe that Israel should
Speaker 13: exist in its current form, you do not, thank you
Speaker 13: very much. Okay, last couple the moral confusion on the
Speaker 13: Israel topic. Is it's it's hard to clear up in
Speaker 13: a vendy like this.
Speaker 7: Again, like these aren't real debates. If the conversation goes
Speaker 7: any way other than how Kirk wants it to go,
Speaker 7: he has complete control of the environment and can move
Speaker 7: on to a more desirable apent because, like, beyond convincing
Speaker 7: any gullible people that might happen to be in the crowd,
Speaker 7: the real reason Kirk does events like this is to
Speaker 7: make content.
Speaker 4: It's YouTube debate.
Speaker 7: These debate videos rack up thousands and sometimes millions of
Speaker 7: views on YouTube and TikTok, and every single person that
Speaker 7: participates as if these are real debates is directly helping
Speaker 7: Charlie Kirk make money and grow his brand. This TPUSA
Speaker 7: Brainwash Tour will continue into November, and I'm sure Charlie
Speaker 7: Kirk will keep doing events like this in the years
Speaker 7: to come, regardless of who wins the election. So what's
Speaker 7: the options to counter something like this? I'm of three minds.
Speaker 7: My default response to stuff like this is usually just
Speaker 7: to ignore. Don't give these attention hounds what they're looking for,
Speaker 7: don't try to debate, don't try to own Charlie Kirk
Speaker 7: with facts and logic, there's no real benefit from engaging
Speaker 7: with him and his ilk on their own terms, but
Speaker 7: there will always be at least a few college students
Speaker 7: who think they can get one up on Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 7: So since these events are gonna continue to happen even
Speaker 7: if my friends and I withhold our participation, the second
Speaker 7: option is just to simply confuse. This is what I
Speaker 7: call the skibbity Biden strategy, one which I deployed against
Speaker 7: the my pillow guy Mike Lindell in front of the
Speaker 7: Israeli Consulate as he tried to suck up as much
Speaker 7: attention as possible during the DNC.
Speaker 4: They might come work. Skibbity Biden, skibbity Biden, give me
Speaker 4: buy one. This was probably my favorite moment of the DNC.
Speaker 7: This strategy of complete confusion doesn't just deny the subject
Speaker 7: what they want. If you're the my pillow guy attention
Speaker 7: from reporters or, in the case of Charlie Kirk, an
Speaker 7: unfair debate against a non media trained college friend Shuman,
Speaker 7: but the skibbity Biden strategy also eats up their time,
Speaker 7: prohibiting others from being able to engage on the terms
Speaker 7: decided upon by Turning Point USA, the more time you
Speaker 7: spend spewing your near unintelligible gibberish about how Warhammer connects
Speaker 7: to US foreign policy or explaining your made up conspiracy
Speaker 7: theory about how the Hawktua girl is a CIA asset.
Speaker 7: All of that is less time for some nineteen year
Speaker 7: olds to challenge Kirk on his abortion views, and a
Speaker 7: knowing Charlie Kirk is just a fun bonus, now that
Speaker 7: I think about it, this is essentially the patent Oswalt
Speaker 7: filibuster tactic. Now, obviously Kirk has control of the mic
Speaker 7: and probably won't let you ramble on about gibberish for
Speaker 7: too long, So this strategy becomes more successful if you
Speaker 7: can get a whole team lined up in front of
Speaker 7: the microphone. Now, finally, the last option is disruption through force,
Speaker 7: preferably in a way that limits the possibility of creating
Speaker 7: an on camera spectacle that can be utilized by TPUSA.
Speaker 7: This has typically not been a common tactic used to
Speaker 7: counter Turning Point events on campus, but it may be
Speaker 7: time to reconsider. Forceful disruptions were often utilized when figures
Speaker 7: like Milo Uanapolis toured college campuses back in twenty sixteen
Speaker 7: to twenty eighteen, and more recently against campus events featuring
Speaker 7: Daily Wire employees like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh. Historically,
Speaker 7: this strategy has not been applied to Charlie Kirk, as
Speaker 7: he's been viewed as less radical than some of these
Speaker 7: other figures. But I just don't think that's true anymore.
Speaker 7: Kirk is spreading and normalizing hardcore as xenophobic and nationalist
Speaker 7: rhetoric across college campuses with little to no resistance, not
Speaker 7: to mention his complete embrace of conspiracy theories and use
Speaker 7: of transphobia to undermine civil rights. There's many ways to
Speaker 7: disrupt events like this through forceful means, sound disruption, visual disruption,
Speaker 7: physical disruption, planning an alternate event to take place at
Speaker 7: the same time, and place big banners with Charles's tiny
Speaker 7: face carefully placed in view of the debate cameras. Creative
Speaker 7: opportunities abound, but it requires people to be actively monitoring
Speaker 7: when and where these events take place and actually plan
Speaker 7: a counterdemo ahead of time, and that just doesn't seem
Speaker 7: to be happening at the moment. And so I thought
Speaker 7: going to this event would help reboot my brain cheer
Speaker 7: myself up and amuse me with Charlie's childish display of
Speaker 7: debate kid politics. But it just left me more sad
Speaker 7: watching hapless kids fall prey to Kirk's transparent scheme, just
Speaker 7: feeling like I had no way to stop the train wreck.
Speaker 7: But it doesn't have to be this way. With a
Speaker 7: few friends and a little preparation, there is an alternative
Speaker 7: and hey, it could happen here. Well that's my recap
Speaker 7: on this fucking Charlie Kirk rally. Oh and heads up,
Speaker 7: next week, there's gonna be no Spooky Week episodes for
Speaker 7: the first time in four years. Sorry, the world has
Speaker 7: just gotten too spooky this year. Between the election and
Speaker 7: hurricanes and the genocide and Gaza and everything else happening,
Speaker 7: the world's just too spooky. I'm really just not feeling
Speaker 7: Halloween pilled as I usually am. Hopefully things will get
Speaker 7: better soon. But in lieu of Spooky Week, we actually
Speaker 7: have a special series from James on the Darien Gap,
Speaker 7: so you have that to look forward to next week.
Speaker 7: Goodbye everyone, see you on the other side.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat Death of the Universe.
Speaker 4: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 1: now find sources for it could Happen Here listed directly
Speaker 1: in episode descriptions.
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening.