Speaker 1: Also 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
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Speaker 3: It's bare time, yep, it's bad time. Hi everyone, welcome
Speaker 3: to take could Happen Here? A podcast where I talk
Speaker 3: to Molly Konga about animals.
Speaker 4: Hi, Molly, I'm so excited to learn about bears.
Speaker 5: I've been thinking about it all week.
Speaker 3: That's atacta good You've had good bad thoughts, because there
Speaker 3: are people who think about beads a lot, and I
Speaker 3: think it's not good for the mental well being.
Speaker 4: I was trying to find if I took a picture
Speaker 4: of that time a baby bear was like standing on
Speaker 4: the Median Strip outside my old apartment and I couldn't
Speaker 4: find it, so I was thinking about him.
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, I hope he's okay. He's found a better
Speaker 3: place to be in the Median Strip. I bought a
Speaker 3: show and tell item today. Molly can see it. No
Speaker 3: one else can.
Speaker 4: I was hoping he was going to be a live bear.
Speaker 3: It's not a live bear. I don't I'm not allowed
Speaker 3: because of Woke. You can't have a pet grisly bear.
Speaker 4: If you're about to tell me that those are bear antlers,
Speaker 4: I'm leaving.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's from These are actually original Jacalobe antlers from
Speaker 3: the California Jackalobe. Now it's a mule deer shared antler.
Speaker 3: I thought it was cool. I thought you'd like to
Speaker 3: see it.
Speaker 6: It's beautiful.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think lots of people don't realize that the antlers
Speaker 3: fall off and regenerate.
Speaker 4: I feel like he's been a long time growing those.
Speaker 3: Yeah he did, and then he just left them there
Speaker 3: as a gift for me in the wilderness. So I
Speaker 3: have a few of these.
Speaker 4: He's not getting laid this spring.
Speaker 3: Oh no, he's going to grow some more, ok and
Speaker 3: he's going to fight another dude with them in order
Speaker 3: to get laid.
Speaker 4: So that fell off in a fight.
Speaker 5: So he's just walking around with one. Oh he'd okay,
Speaker 5: he shed them.
Speaker 3: Yeah that they shed them and regenerate them. Okay, like
Speaker 3: this is how. This is how they get bigger and
Speaker 3: more robust antlets each time. But they put a lot
Speaker 3: of a caloric energy into growing these.
Speaker 4: That seems like that would really take a lot out
Speaker 4: of you.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, then they get horny and fight with other male
Speaker 3: deer for quite a while. Those antlers not horns, that's correct,
Speaker 3: but the horny is not related to them. Yeah, they
Speaker 3: go and then they yeah, they lose a lot of
Speaker 3: weight in that ratting time and then they have to
Speaker 3: gain it all back before the winter.
Speaker 4: Just so focused on fighting and fuck, and they can't
Speaker 4: even eat.
Speaker 3: Yep. It's the many such cases, many such cases. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So I'm not talking about mule deer today and that
Speaker 3: they are cool. The first time I saw when I
Speaker 3: was like, I see why they call it a mule deer.
Speaker 3: Really got the ears going on. I want to talk
Speaker 3: about another type of charismatic North American megafauna, bears. So
Speaker 3: there are three species of bear in North America. Should
Speaker 3: have quiz, molly, you know what they are?
Speaker 4: Okay, grizzly, brown, black.
Speaker 3: Close that's for it's going to keep praying.
Speaker 6: Bears.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nominally they are, but I think, yeah, you didn't
Speaker 3: get them all during your period of guessing brown, black,
Speaker 3: and polar. Within brown bear, we have grizzly bears, brown bears,
Speaker 3: and Kodiak bears. We used to think that the California
Speaker 3: bears were a different species and not they just lived here.
Speaker 4: They just have different politics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. They we'd have been legalized, so they
Speaker 3: just sort of thing differently. The brown bears are what
Speaker 3: I want to talk about, So I'm going to use
Speaker 3: brown bear as like a blanket term for when they're
Speaker 3: on the coast in Alaska, they're called brown bears, right,
Speaker 3: and those are generally the biggest ones. And if you
Speaker 3: ever seen it, if you've been to Alaska, Molly no.
Speaker 4: I would love to go to Alaska.
Speaker 8: I've never been.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Alaska fucking rips. I love Alaska.
Speaker 5: I found out recently that black bears can be brown,
Speaker 5: and I just think we need I think we need
Speaker 5: to re evaluate the naming system.
Speaker 3: It's not good, yes, because people, you know.
Speaker 5: The advice about a brown bear versus a black bear
Speaker 5: is different. But if a black bear can be brown,
Speaker 5: and you're relying on a rhyming phrase to know what
Speaker 5: to do, you don't know what kind of bear that is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they call them cinnamon bears sometimes the brown black bears. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you can tell a grizzly bear the bigger they've got
Speaker 3: that more pronounced hump. They have a different shape to them.
Speaker 4: No, you can tell. I cannot.
Speaker 3: You'll fucking know that. Grizzly bears coming like they don't
Speaker 3: make themselves, you know, quiet, but yeah, the big hump,
Speaker 3: they've got a more pronounced hump. Grizzly bets can also
Speaker 3: really get into like a blonde coloration even.
Speaker 5: Well yeah in California, sure everybody's blonde out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they get frosted tips when they live by the
Speaker 3: coast for too long and they listen to sublime here. Yeah,
Speaker 3: let's talk about bears. I get my bear interactions by
Speaker 3: way of establishing some credibility. I want to point out that, like,
Speaker 3: interacting with bears doesn't make non expert I'm not an expert,
Speaker 3: And what we're going to talk about here is non
Speaker 3: experts interjecting their inexpert opinions about bears and why that's
Speaker 3: actually a problem.
Speaker 5: I'm probably interacting with bears is not a desirable outcome
Speaker 5: for most listeners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I love a bear like I see
Speaker 3: because I come from a place where there's very little
Speaker 3: that can kill you. Well, I mean there are things, right,
Speaker 3: there are cars, and we have cancer in the UK
Speaker 3: as well, of course, but like animal wise, you're more
Speaker 3: or less nuclear.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 3: We have adders, which is a type of snake and
Speaker 3: they are venomous. But like, I can't think the last
Speaker 3: time I ever heard of someone getting killed, but I'm
Speaker 3: sure someone has been killed by an adobyte, but it's
Speaker 3: very rare.
Speaker 5: Now you don't have when you have a lion on
Speaker 5: like a flag or something, somebody has one.
Speaker 3: But I have a few lions. We've got some flag lions. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know the lines, the lines In fact, we I
Speaker 3: love the lines on a flag because they're drawn by
Speaker 3: someone who's never seen a lion. But just like a
Speaker 3: game of telephone has resulted.
Speaker 4: Anybody he knows they're very majestical.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's majestic, kind of like a dog longer hair.
Speaker 3: I think there was the input before he drew the lines.
Speaker 3: I kind of like being on the landscape with animals
Speaker 3: that are bigger than me and like they are the
Speaker 3: apex predator. The first time I saw Grizzly Bear, I
Speaker 3: had a bush planed to a lake in the Wrangle
Speaker 3: sent Elias Wilderness. It's in Alaska, Southeast Alaska, massive wilderness area,
Speaker 3: and we were gonna hike around a bit and then
Speaker 3: pack raft off the end of the glacier. There it
Speaker 3: goes into like a meltwater river, and so the river's
Speaker 3: kind of different every years as it melts and the
Speaker 3: river streams brayed together. Then we were going to pack
Speaker 3: for a few days and then hike out and that
Speaker 3: was a fun adventure. So we landed, we hiked a bit,
Speaker 3: we inflated our little boats, and we paddled across the
Speaker 3: lake at the end of the glacier, and then we
Speaker 3: got to pace where were camping, went on a walk
Speaker 3: and immediately saw a sat grizzly bear and her cups,
Speaker 3: which was sick.
Speaker 5: That's cute as hell. I would love to see that.
Speaker 5: I would love to see some baby bears.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sick. I'd best to stay away from them.
Speaker 3: That's when they can get angry.
Speaker 5: I would like to see them from like over here, yeah,
Speaker 5: and then they can be over there, like maybe on
Speaker 5: the other side.
Speaker 6: Of a river.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I get well, the bears, there's none afraid of water,
Speaker 3: but yeah, that's they do love to eat salmon. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it was sick. That was a sick trip. Generally, we've
Speaker 3: got to see the glacier carving, so like that's when
Speaker 3: a little baby glacier is born. Right, But the glacier
Speaker 3: a section of it broke off, and I'm talking a
Speaker 3: section of size of like a city block here.
Speaker 4: Why but it's so shiny when it breaks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's shiny and it's allowed. It's like an earth
Speaker 3: shattering rumble.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 3: And then this thing was it was majestic, right, Like
Speaker 3: it looks like a mountain has fallen into the water
Speaker 3: and that was cool as fig and then you realize that,
Speaker 3: like it has displaced a mountain sized amount of water.
Speaker 10: Mood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and now there are like fridge sized ice blocks
Speaker 3: coming at head height towards you. So yeah, we did
Speaker 3: some fast uphill running in that moment. But it was
Speaker 3: a last So it was summertimes. It wasn't getting dark, right,
Speaker 3: you have like twenty four hours sunlight, so at least
Speaker 3: it wasn't dark when that happened.
Speaker 4: Only time to run from the glacier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, great time to run from the glacier. I wouldn't
Speaker 3: want to do it in the wintertime. I don't think
Speaker 3: they carve in the winter time. Maybe they still do.
Speaker 3: I think it's to do with temperature rising. So that
Speaker 3: was my I've seen a lot of black bears. I'm
Speaker 3: a San Diego black bear truther. But it's another fun
Speaker 3: thing about me. For some reason, people don't think there
Speaker 3: are black bears in San Diego, and that is not true.
Speaker 3: I have seen barefootprints, people have seen bears on game cameras.
Speaker 3: Bears pop up on top of Mount Palamar all the time.
Speaker 5: It's like the ongoing feud about whether or not we
Speaker 5: have panthers on the East coast.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you guys love to It's like a Carolina
Speaker 3: panther or something.
Speaker 4: People are very sure I have no skin in this game.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a breeding family of mountain lions
Speaker 3: now maybe in Michigan. So they're getting closer, they're getting
Speaker 3: They're coming your way as you soon will. I've seen
Speaker 3: a lot of bears, or a good number of bears.
Speaker 3: Seen a lot of black bears right, we have them
Speaker 3: in California. The fact that I've seen bears does not
Speaker 3: make me a bear expert. And another non bear expert
Speaker 3: has been diving into the discourse on bears after.
Speaker 2: A tragedy like genuinely a terrible.
Speaker 3: Thing, when a hiker lost their life in Glassier, we'll
Speaker 3: try and to say the American way Glacier National Park.
Speaker 5: We're going to get messages about this, this British word.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, it's not like a buffalo issue. I'm just
Speaker 3: straight colonizing it. I'm sure it had an indigenous name,
Speaker 3: and so so are you if you're saying Glacier. This
Speaker 3: is really sad, right. A hiker from Florida was more
Speaker 3: by a bear, Andyde very shortly in relation to that,
Speaker 3: serious injuries occurred in another morning in Yellowstone National Park.
Speaker 3: Not so long ago, a contractor really uranium mining site
Speaker 3: was killed by a black bear in British Columbia and
Speaker 3: Canada a couple of weeks ago, maybe thirteenth of May.
Speaker 3: It looked like unusual to be killed by a black bear,
Speaker 3: probably worth pointing out that very rare for black bears
Speaker 3: to kill people. And also someone at that site clearly
Speaker 3: had a firearm because they euthanased the bear. Euthanas dies
Speaker 3: a phraser used there. They killed it right like it
Speaker 3: wasn't suffering. I don't think that they killed the bear
Speaker 3: pretty shortly thereafter, and it's undergoing a neckt now. But
Speaker 3: that's another incident I guess to add to this list.
Speaker 3: And again right there, there was a firearm present. There
Speaker 3: is seems in there that didn't prevent the person being
Speaker 3: mauled by the beck. And so former Interior Secretary Ryan
Speaker 3: Zinky has decided to wade into the debate. Do we
Speaker 3: remember Ryan Zinky?
Speaker 5: He's not the one from Real World road Rules, right,
Speaker 5: so that's the transportation guy.
Speaker 3: I don't think so. If he is, I'm not aware
Speaker 3: of what Real World road Rules is.
Speaker 5: I'm just having drouble remembering which members of cabinet have
Speaker 5: been on reality TV, and I don't think this is
Speaker 5: one of them.
Speaker 3: Okay, sorry, no, not to my knowledge. Zinky, he was
Speaker 3: maybe seal officer. He's now representative from Montana. He was
Speaker 3: Interior secretary in Trump's first administration. He presided over a
Speaker 3: series of attacks on public lands, so that we saw
Speaker 3: in Trump one point over.
Speaker 4: Exactly what you want to see from your secretary of
Speaker 4: the Interior.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's trying to rebrand himself as some kind of
Speaker 3: protector of public lands. Now he's kind of too late.
Speaker 3: On that one in my opinion, but he's certainly on
Speaker 3: the protector of bears. Last week he tweeted, maybe he's
Speaker 3: zeated and we're not doing that. We're gonna okay dead
Speaker 3: naming it. Last week, two grizzly bear attacks claimed the
Speaker 3: life of a hiker in Glacia National Park and seriously
Speaker 3: injured to others in Yellowstone National Park. The tragedies are
Speaker 3: a sobering reminder that grizzly bear populations have recovered well
Speaker 3: beyond sustainable levels and it is time for Oh, we
Speaker 3: should start killing them. Yep. It's past time for the
Speaker 3: federal government to delist them and give states to management tools.
Speaker 3: Got them back, Yeah, we're going to kill them back.
Speaker 3: This is what we do.
Speaker 8: Eye for an eye for Florida man.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was speaking to a bear a scientist who studies
Speaker 3: human bear interactions this week, and he referred to these
Speaker 3: as revenge killings. Yeah, because they won't just kill. They
Speaker 3: often in many instances don't know which bear. Sometimes we
Speaker 3: can we can that we can know the size of
Speaker 3: the bear right from like the size of the jaws
Speaker 3: that we can have several bears. There are different sizes
Speaker 3: of jews. Seems a distance between the different teeth stuff
Speaker 3: like this.
Speaker 5: Right, right, Like if one bear is like if it's
Speaker 5: like a jaw situation, like one bear just has it
Speaker 5: out for hikers.
Speaker 4: Sure, I guess go get him.
Speaker 3: But that's not like it's not happening. Yeah, and they
Speaker 3: will end up killing a number of bears in an
Speaker 3: area when this stuff happens, right, which is it's just
Speaker 3: a revenge killing. So we're taking out like we're taking
Speaker 3: out our anger on that species because they came after
Speaker 3: our species.
Speaker 5: It seems like the problem is not that there's too
Speaker 5: many bears.
Speaker 3: That is correct, Molly, That is that is why we're
Speaker 3: here today.
Speaker 5: He seems to be positioning this as there's just too
Speaker 5: many bears. People just can't avoid the bears because there's
Speaker 5: so many bears.
Speaker 3: Then it's not the case. Millions of people every year
Speaker 3: visit the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and very few of them
Speaker 3: see a bear, right.
Speaker 4: And even few of them touch a bear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're touching a grizzly bear. It's a bad day,
Speaker 3: viet Let's I guess it has decided it wants to
Speaker 3: be touched.
Speaker 5: I don't want a victim blame obviously, Like these are
Speaker 5: wild animals that are unpredictable.
Speaker 4: You're in their home. What does guy do? Why was
Speaker 4: he so close to the bear?
Speaker 3: We don't know exactly what this I did. There are
Speaker 3: a number of bear safety things which I do want
Speaker 3: to talk about, And I spoke to Tom Smith last
Speaker 3: week and I'm going to turn that into another podcast,
Speaker 3: but like, this is the person who is the guy
Speaker 3: who writes the studies on human interactions with bears right
Speaker 3: and specifically on how those could be like de escalated.
Speaker 3: And he said he's not aware of an incident in
Speaker 3: which someone has been killed by a bear in which
Speaker 3: they were adhering to all the best principles right now.
Speaker 5: I'm not blaming the victim, Like if you don't know,
Speaker 5: you don't know, you're inexperienced outdoorsman or whatever.
Speaker 8: But I feel like.
Speaker 5: There's a series of just like pieces of advice and
Speaker 5: if you follow them, you're not going to get in
Speaker 5: that situation most of the time.
Speaker 3: Mostly most of the time. Yeah, I think if I
Speaker 3: was going into bear country, I wouldn't take a dog.
Speaker 3: A lot of people take dogs. Dog is a great
Speaker 3: way to find a bear. You're looking for a bear,
Speaker 3: you could go send out your dog, and it'll come
Speaker 3: back to you with a bear and toe some like
Speaker 3: hunting dogs and also tree bears. But that's not what
Speaker 3: I'm talking about.
Speaker 4: It because the bear sees the dog as a delicious snack.
Speaker 3: I think the dog sees as a bear as a threat, right,
Speaker 3: and I'll stop back and they'll get and then like
Speaker 3: the bear then obviously sees a dog as what the
Speaker 3: fuck is this little animal? A begs predator here? Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like we're locked in, and the dog can smell the bear, right,
Speaker 3: so it's going to find it, and the be can
Speaker 3: smell the dog, so they're going to find each other.
Speaker 5: I guess I was thinking of my dog, which a
Speaker 5: bear would definitely see is a delicious snack.
Speaker 3: Yeah, your dog, I could see. Maybe it'd be sub
Speaker 3: snack sized, it wouldn't be worth it, but.
Speaker 4: Like a little cocktail weenie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a sausage dog would try it, it wouldn't give it,
Speaker 3: like I've seen. I've sent you a video of a
Speaker 3: sausage dog, Yeah, chase chasing off a mountain lion like
Speaker 3: they didn't give a fuck. Very brave.
Speaker 4: So yeah, don't take a dog, don't try and pet it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't take a dog, don't try and pet it.
Speaker 3: In this instance, I think the person was moving through
Speaker 3: thick country where the bear was probably foraging for berries,
Speaker 3: and they probably startled the bear, as you don't want
Speaker 3: to start the bet If you're moving through thick country
Speaker 3: like that, that's when people will say hey bear, or
Speaker 3: they'll use a bear bell, or they'll talk loud and
Speaker 3: converse with people in their group. It is generally preferred
Speaker 3: to be in a group when we're in grizzly country, right,
Speaker 3: not on our own. We don't know the details of
Speaker 3: this incident. There have been some reports that the person
Speaker 3: discharged bear spray, and I want to get onto the
Speaker 3: best ray topic, late Bex. They have a lot to
Speaker 3: say about that. Let's go back and talk about the
Speaker 3: bears in the history.
Speaker 4: Yes, contextualize the bear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, rensink he wants to delist the bear from the
Speaker 3: Endangered Species Act. Right, bears haven't always been protected by
Speaker 3: the Dangered Species Act. That's why California has a bear
Speaker 3: on its flag that doesn't live here anymore.
Speaker 4: Oh, we don't have those anymore.
Speaker 3: No, we kill them ball. We don't have brown bears here.
Speaker 4: So is he on the flag? Because you're sorry? About
Speaker 4: it because you're proud of it.
Speaker 3: No, I think it's more of a pride thing. I
Speaker 3: think it's more of a ye, we got him, fucking yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't actually know what he's on the flag. I'll
Speaker 3: do some searching. I'm pretty sure it's not because we're
Speaker 3: sorry about it. We have a good source right of
Speaker 3: what European people did when they first encounter bears. It's
Speaker 3: not my story from Alaska.
Speaker 8: Oh.
Speaker 4: I thought they did not know about them.
Speaker 3: Well they did, because, as it turns out, as Lewis
Speaker 3: and Clark were moving across the plains right, they encountered
Speaker 3: indigenous people who very specifically told them not to fuck
Speaker 3: with bears. Let me quote from Lewis's diary.
Speaker 5: I thought you would not have to tell like if
Speaker 5: I have never I had no concept of bear, and
Speaker 5: I see a bear, my instinct is going to be
Speaker 5: I'm going to leave that guy alone.
Speaker 3: See Yeah, but these guys are just built different. As
Speaker 3: it turns out, they're bear poking and no desire is
Speaker 3: extremely turns out counterproductive for them. Let's read from the
Speaker 3: Lewis and Clark diary. Is a first on the podcast.
Speaker 3: Quote the Indians give a very formidable account of the
Speaker 3: strength and ferocity of this animal, which they never dare
Speaker 3: to attack, but in parties of six, eight or ten persons,
Speaker 3: and are even then frequently defeated with a loss of
Speaker 3: one or more of their party. This animal is said
Speaker 3: to more frequently attack a man on meeting with him
Speaker 3: than filly from him. When the Indians are about to
Speaker 3: go in quest of the white bear, previous to their departure,
Speaker 3: they paint themselves and perform all these superstitious rites commonly
Speaker 3: observed when they're about to make war upon a neighboring nation.
Speaker 3: I think he's talking about brown bears. We talked about
Speaker 3: white bears.
Speaker 5: Zeb I was gonna say, is he talking about polar bears,
Speaker 5: because you definitely don't do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I do not fuck with it. Bare polar
Speaker 3: bear will end you. That was on the fifteenth of April.
Speaker 5: So he's like, yeah, it takes eight or ten guys,
Speaker 5: usually one of them dies.
Speaker 4: They don't always succeed.
Speaker 8: I'm gonna go check it out.
Speaker 4: I got it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep. So by early May, Captain Clark and Dryer
Speaker 3: killed the largest brown bear this evening which we have
Speaker 3: ever yet seen. It was a most tremendous looking animal
Speaker 3: and extremely hard to kill. Notwithstanding he had five balls
Speaker 3: through his lungs and five others in various parts. He
Speaker 3: swam more than half the distance across the river to
Speaker 3: a sandbar, and it was at least twenty minutes before
Speaker 3: he died. Then they go and say they thought it
Speaker 3: weighed about five hundred pounds, but they didn't have any
Speaker 3: apparatus to weigh. So that's the first interaction with a bear.
Speaker 3: Less than a month later, quote, six good hunters of
Speaker 3: the party fired at a brown or yellow bear several
Speaker 3: times before they killed him, And indeed he had like
Speaker 3: to have defeated the whole party. He pursued them separately
Speaker 3: as they fired on him, and was near catching several
Speaker 3: of them. He pursued two of them separately, so close
Speaker 3: that they were obliged to throw aside their guns and
Speaker 3: pouches and throw themselves into the river, although the bank
Speaker 3: was nearly twenty feet perpendicular.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so enraged was this animal that he plunged into
Speaker 3: the river only a few feet behind the second man
Speaker 3: he had compelled to take refuge in the water. When
Speaker 3: one of those he still remained on the shore shot
Speaker 3: him through the head and finally killed him.
Speaker 4: That's not fair. They should have let him have that guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah's eye for an eye, Like it's fascinating to me,
Speaker 3: right that, like you do see this sometimes in like
Speaker 3: indigenous people's records. Right, there was I forget his name,
Speaker 3: I forgot I was reading about this one Indigenous American
Speaker 3: guy who was like, every time I see a bear,
Speaker 3: I got to go try to take it on. But
Speaker 3: like he recognized that was like not a normal response, right,
Speaker 3: Whereas apparently everyone in Lewis and Clark's party was immediately
Speaker 3: after killing the first bear they saw, despite having been
Speaker 3: told we.
Speaker 4: Found the murder monster.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it tells me so much about the American psyche,
Speaker 3: right that the Indigenous people were like, you know, they
Speaker 3: they will kill you.
Speaker 5: And like how much bear meat were they eating?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it may be a bit. I don't know,
Speaker 3: like you can eat bare meats kind of greasy from
Speaker 3: what I understand.
Speaker 4: So they're just going after bears just because it's fun.
Speaker 3: I do understand that Lewis and Clark had to collect
Speaker 3: and catalog animals, which obviously they didn't bring them back alive. Right,
Speaker 3: they brought back skulls and hides and that kind of thing,
Speaker 3: so that the Western way of understanding the world could
Speaker 3: catalog and understand these animals. And there is a great
Speaker 3: deal of knowledge that that way of seeing the world
Speaker 3: gain from that expedition. But they also mixed it up
Speaker 3: with a lot of bears. You can read more examples
Speaker 3: in their diaries. There's this idea that still exists in
Speaker 3: parts of the American sort of psyche that we don't
Speaker 3: have to live alongside nature. We have to conquer it right,
Speaker 3: that we have to prove us are like apex position,
Speaker 3: and that doesn't always go well for us.
Speaker 4: I don't need to prove anything to a bear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm at peace. I'm happy to coexist with bears.
Speaker 3: I'm happy that they're there, They're happy that I'm here.
Speaker 3: I hope we can have a nice time. I don't
Speaker 3: want to fight with bears. Lewis and Clark, by the way,
Speaker 3: I find that Lewis and clark Is vision fascinating. Like
Speaker 3: at the time they were crossing the plains, they were
Speaker 3: meeting with indigenous people who had been to Paris to
Speaker 3: check it out and come home.
Speaker 4: I have no concept of that.
Speaker 3: Right. We see them as like questing into the great unknown,
Speaker 3: and these people are like, yeah, no, I went over,
Speaker 3: but those.
Speaker 4: People have, they've been out back.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they just didn't want it right. They came back
Speaker 3: because they liked it. They were having they were fine.
Speaker 3: It wasn't that they hadn't been exposed to the European world.
Speaker 3: It was just that the European world had not physically
Speaker 3: expanded to attempt to colonize the places that they lived. Certainly,
Speaker 3: this idea that they going on.
Speaker 4: It really makes what they did a lot less impressive.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean it was a long journey, sure.
Speaker 5: I mean people hug the Abaloche of Trail every year.
Speaker 5: I'm not impressed.
Speaker 3: That does go a perpendiculative.
Speaker 4: I'm just saying people walk a thousand miles all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did a lot of canoeing. It's
Speaker 3: a weird hobby Lewis and Clark. It's just a fun hobby.
Speaker 3: I like walking. But yeah, I mean it's an impressive journey.
Speaker 3: But like I think sometimes we have this idea of
Speaker 3: them like questing into the unknown, and that's just not it.
Speaker 3: That have met people who have been like oh yeah,
Speaker 3: I've been there, Like, what do you think of Paris. Sadly,
Speaker 3: the Lewis and Clark expedition was not the low point
Speaker 3: for the grizzly bear population, but money. Talking of low points,
Speaker 3: now is a time for us to transition to an
Speaker 3: advertisement for products and services. All right, we are back.
Speaker 3: I want to quote from a federal court case here
Speaker 3: on protections for bears. By the nineteen thirties, just one
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty five years after European settlers moved into
Speaker 3: Grizzly Country, grizzly bears were found in only twocent of
Speaker 3: their former range. Nor did this monk the low point
Speaker 3: for the grizzly Thirty seven separate grizzly populations were identified
Speaker 3: in the contiguous United States in nineteen twenty two. Only
Speaker 3: six remained nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 4: So is this largely habitat encroachment or over hunting or
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously.
Speaker 3: Both all of the above.
Speaker 4: Like, so we were just going out there and shooting them,
Speaker 4: just the bounties.
Speaker 3: There were bounties for men by the millions. Yeah, they
Speaker 3: were paying people to shoot the bears.
Speaker 4: We've got a buffalo situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we got a buffalo situation here.
Speaker 5: So this wasn't just like people doing hobby hunting and
Speaker 5: like concurrent habitat encroachment. This was like an intentional destruction
Speaker 5: of bear.
Speaker 3: The bear doesn't coexist well with like the human habitation
Speaker 3: and specifically like animal.
Speaker 2: Agriculture, right, like it is that's not a great name.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't give a fuck, and it's
Speaker 3: a big animal and it will tear shit down and
Speaker 3: people are scared of it. Bears used to live all
Speaker 3: across the plains, right, It was only a small segment
Speaker 3: of the bears that in the mountains. They're the ones
Speaker 3: that survived, just because those are the areas that it
Speaker 3: was harder to make amenable to capitalism.
Speaker 4: That never occurred to me. Yeah, that never occurred to me.
Speaker 4: That they have retreated from the hills to get away
Speaker 4: from us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think it's that the Plains bears went
Speaker 3: to the hills. I think it's that the Plains bears
Speaker 3: are gone.
Speaker 5: Right, They're just the ones that survived because they were
Speaker 5: like that's crazy.
Speaker 4: The bears just used to be roaming around down here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the bears would be out and about. Actually, the
Speaker 3: eastern most grizzly bear sow with cubs that I'm aware
Speaker 3: of is on the APR, like in the Missouri River
Speaker 3: breaks that's in the American Prairie Reserve. People who didn't
Speaker 3: listen to a Buffalo episode callback, Yeah, that's what's what
Speaker 3: they call a call back in the industry. The bears
Speaker 3: used to be all around, right, Like, I guess maybe
Speaker 3: if the plains right or an area that's especially kind
Speaker 3: of appealing, especially when we look at like the period
Speaker 3: after the nineteen twenties, right when people were trying to
Speaker 3: bring the planet to heal through the application of technology. Right.
Speaker 3: I think it's I'll do Leopold who talks about the
Speaker 3: way humans fuck with ecosystems as a bit like somebody
Speaker 3: who doesn't know how Watch works taking a part of
Speaker 3: Watch just being like that fucking cogails doesn't look like
Speaker 3: it's doing much to me. Let me whip that bad
Speaker 3: boy out, like make it lighter.
Speaker 5: I always think of what was it somebody who's colonizing
Speaker 5: and farming in Hawaii brought mongoose because they thought the
Speaker 5: mongoose would eat some They thought the mongoose would eat
Speaker 5: something that was causing a problem for the crops.
Speaker 4: It turns out the mongoose don't even eat that so now,
Speaker 4: but like feral mongie.
Speaker 5: Sometimes, like around sunset at the beach, you'll see all
Speaker 5: these like mongoose just like coming out of the underbrush
Speaker 5: taking over the beach.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's amazing.
Speaker 4: Because like they have no natural predators there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, like yeah, introducing animals into ecosystems and removing
Speaker 3: animals from ecosystems has all these downstream effects that like
Speaker 3: we never think, like I am to Sophie about this today.
Speaker 3: Like I grew up in the UK, right, where we
Speaker 3: have tons of rabbits.
Speaker 4: Oh, she has a rabbit in the garden today, does
Speaker 4: she show you?
Speaker 3: Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, I've seen a rabbit. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: able to identify it. The rabbit population is high in
Speaker 3: part because we've removed many of their predators. Right, the
Speaker 3: wolves are gone in the UK, The bears are gone
Speaker 3: in the UK. We have some foxes, but not as
Speaker 3: many because they are dangerous to sheep populations.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: We have some raptors, but not as many. So now
Speaker 3: we have times to rabbits. When the rabbits do well,
Speaker 3: they eat crops in part, right, and they come in
Speaker 3: and eat your carrots as depicted in the Peter rabbit.
Speaker 5: Oh, a Peter rabbit is just tearing the garden apart
Speaker 5: every day. Mister McGregor was right.
Speaker 3: It's a bold statement. Molly Konga childhood villain. Now, the
Speaker 3: rabbits have a disease called mix and mitosis, which is
Speaker 3: horrific disease where like they sort of become almost like zombified. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think it. It came from Australia.
Speaker 4: They've got a rabbit problem.
Speaker 3: Well, they were trying to eradicate them, right, so.
Speaker 4: Also they invented a rabbit disease.
Speaker 3: I don't know this is what now I'm wondering if
Speaker 3: they invented the rabbit disease.
Speaker 4: Lit's because they did that to another invasive animal.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, they lost a war.
Speaker 4: They gave them all a disease.
Speaker 3: I'm not even then they lose a war against emuse,
Speaker 3: that's right. The Australians really have a bad record.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So basically it is a disease that existed in American
Speaker 3: rabbits only causes mild issues with them, but it is
Speaker 3: horrific in European rabbits.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it looks like they did it on purpose. Yep,
Speaker 4: you know creat up guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, mixmatosis and rabbits, like is a thing that like
Speaker 3: genuinely as a kid would like, So I used to
Speaker 3: shoot a lot of rabbits when I was a kid, Right,
Speaker 3: and you shoot these rabbits with mixed motosis and be
Speaker 3: like what the fuck is this? Like how have we
Speaker 3: done this to a living creature? They become so incapacitated
Speaker 3: that like sometimes crows will start eating them before they've died,
Speaker 3: or like they wander onto the road and get hit. Right,
Speaker 3: it's really really really horrible.
Speaker 4: Oh I'm looking this up and I regret.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, yeah, Google makes motosis pictures at your own risk.
Speaker 4: No, don't, actually don't.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It almost looks like they have like cataracts over their
Speaker 3: their eyes. It's it's really really horrible, right, But like,
Speaker 3: this is what happens when we continually try and mess
Speaker 3: with an ecosystem that has existed in harmony, and like
Speaker 3: it changes based on inputs and changes in the climate. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: it's not like it's a fixed thing. It has shifted
Speaker 3: and changed through time, but it has found a balance
Speaker 3: every time. And then we come in and just keep
Speaker 3: pressing one side of the scale.
Speaker 6: This will fix it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, more, but keep chucking more on there and wondering.
Speaker 4: Kill the bears back.
Speaker 5: I just I can't get that's just like a child's
Speaker 5: approach to things.
Speaker 3: This is our policy, right, Like, okay, so let's talk
Speaker 3: about Zincy, right, let's talk about let's talk about the
Speaker 3: protections that he wants to take away. These protections were
Speaker 3: passed into law by the Endangered Species Act in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy three, and the Endangered Species Act lists grizzly bears
Speaker 3: and the lower forty eight as threatened. If you're not
Speaker 3: familiar with the essay, it prevents you from hunting, harming,
Speaker 3: or harassing lifted species without a special permit.
Speaker 4: Maybe he thought he's supposed to threaten them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like harass them, Like maybe it's going to
Speaker 3: do it threatened yea, these.
Speaker 4: Are threatening, of course we should threaten.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was going to post a mean tweet about them.
Speaker 3: They didn't want to be accused of harassing them and
Speaker 3: violating the essay. One thing the ESA does not do
Speaker 3: is prevent you from defending yourself against these bears, which
Speaker 3: it seems to be the implication in his post, right
Speaker 3: that like, because you're in you're.
Speaker 4: Allowed to defend yourself against a person, so I'm sure.
Speaker 3: It's likewise a bet. There was a Night's case not
Speaker 3: so long ago about someone who had killed three grizzly bears.
Speaker 5: So if you get arrested for killing an endangered animal,
Speaker 5: is it like a murder trial where you have to
Speaker 5: like prove self defense?
Speaker 3: I think it would depend on where you did it, right.
Speaker 3: I was standing my ground your Yeah, sure I was.
Speaker 3: I don't even want to make jokes about standiy Grand Miles,
Speaker 3: because fucking horrible. The nine second opinion says we hold
Speaker 3: the good faith belief defense for a prosecution and then
Speaker 3: they give the theal code. Right, it's governed by subjective
Speaker 3: rather than objective standard satisfied when the defendant actually, even
Speaker 3: as unreasonably, believes his actions are necessary to protect himself
Speaker 3: with others from perceived danger from a grisly bear.
Speaker 5: That's interesting that the language, because you don't see that,
Speaker 5: and so in self defense in like if I harmed
Speaker 5: you and an actual No, it doesn't have to be actual,
Speaker 5: but it has to be a reasonable assumption, like my
Speaker 5: belief has to be reasonable. But in Listen, there's saying
Speaker 5: it's okay if your belief was unreasonable. Yeah, if you're
Speaker 5: just scared dumb as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, if you if you have no idea what
Speaker 3: you're doing, you can still kill these bears, right, Like,
Speaker 3: it gives you a very broad remit for self defense.
Speaker 5: Because you could just say you felt that way, because
Speaker 5: it doesn't matter if that's reasonable or not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it effectively doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, effectively if you if you are willing to state
Speaker 3: in court that you were threatened by the bear, I
Speaker 3: felt that way, right, it seems like you can you
Speaker 3: can shoot the bear. I almost just scared. I'm as
Speaker 3: scaredy cat. Maybe it relies on toxic masculinity to like
Speaker 3: self self police itself and it's scared.
Speaker 12: No.
Speaker 3: It also, of course, the say does not include animals
Speaker 3: based on how dangerous they are. So like Xinki's argument
Speaker 3: that we should deal with bears because two people got
Speaker 3: hurt one person got killed, it doesn't line up with
Speaker 3: why the essay exists.
Speaker 5: And like I'm very sorry for those people, of course,
Speaker 5: but like that's not like an epidemic of bear attacks.
Speaker 3: No, cattle kill more people by a factor of ten
Speaker 3: than bears.
Speaker 4: Dogs kill more people with guns.
Speaker 3: Yeah, lightning kills more people than bears.
Speaker 4: Dog shot a lady with a gun the other day.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, Well, good for him, like it's good to
Speaker 3: see people pushing boundaries. I like, bad for her. I
Speaker 3: guess I'm sorry to hear that, but I do think
Speaker 3: there are some best practices that could have been followed
Speaker 3: there that I prevented the dog shooting.
Speaker 4: The dog was certainly not certified on the range, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the dog hadn't gone taken his apple seed clinic
Speaker 3: or whatever. So the ESA, right, it distinguishes between a
Speaker 3: threatened and engaged species and danger species is quote in
Speaker 3: danger of extinction throughout all or a significant part of
Speaker 3: its range. A threatened species is quote likely to become
Speaker 3: an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or
Speaker 3: a significant portion of its range.
Speaker 8: Right, Like if we start killing them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or keep killing them, yeah.
Speaker 5: Right, Ryan, Zincy just opens up on bears.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Zincy taking his Navy steel training and going the.
Speaker 4: Sealed Teams six is going to Yellowstone.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, they're going after that bear. Then you know,
Speaker 3: then then they look at reasons for this great disease, predation,
Speaker 3: destruction of habitat, commercial take, inadequacy of regulatory mechanisms to
Speaker 3: protect them, or natural or man made factors, including brand
Speaker 3: Zincy killing them because grizzly bears in the lower forty
Speaker 3: eight are threatened. There are defined ecosystems. There are six
Speaker 3: of them in which we're trying to recover the their population.
Speaker 3: So one of these is a Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. The
Speaker 3: Yellowstone Bears have been ping ponged around the ESA for
Speaker 3: some time. As it turns out, the bears were removed
Speaker 3: in two thousand and seven and then returned in two
Speaker 3: thousand and nine by a court decision. Then it was
Speaker 3: removed again under Zinc in the first Strump administration.
Speaker 4: I feel like, if you're on the cusp like that,
Speaker 4: leave it alone.
Speaker 5: Like obviously if every time you dealist them they become
Speaker 5: threatened again, like, leave them alone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it. Well, in this case, it wasn't. The
Speaker 3: reason for the delisting was challenged in court and found
Speaker 3: to be insufficient. It wasn't that a population like to
Speaker 3: could dive.
Speaker 4: We're just changing our mind about how much we care
Speaker 4: about bears.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or like in this case, basically what the court said,
Speaker 3: I can actually read you from the court order. It's
Speaker 3: crow Indian try their al versus USA. The policy implications
Speaker 3: of Great Yellowstone Grizzly delisting are significant, but they cannot
Speaker 3: affect the court's disposition. Althose order may have impacts throughout
Speaker 3: grisly country beyond. This case is not about the ethics
Speaker 3: of hunting. It's not about solving human or livestock grisly conflicts.
Speaker 3: As a practical or philosophical matter, these issues are not
Speaker 3: before the court. Then, little ellipses where I've skipped a
Speaker 3: bit by delisting the Great Yellowstone Grizzly without analyzing how
Speaker 3: delisting would affect the remaining members of the lower forty
Speaker 3: eight Grizzly designation. The Service failed to consider how reduced
Speaker 3: protections for the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem would impact the other
Speaker 3: grisly populations. Thus, the Service entirely failed to consider an
Speaker 3: important aspect of the problem.
Speaker 4: So the Bear has got a good lawyer.
Speaker 3: There were two different court cases and they were combined
Speaker 3: in this Montana case. Then they got a good lawyer.
Speaker 3: Essentially that what they're saying though, right, is that like
Speaker 3: this is an issue which we have to look at
Speaker 3: like nationally, because if we have state controller and Wyoming
Speaker 3: or Montana of the three states, right, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.
Speaker 3: One of them says that we've got too many bears
Speaker 3: killing too many cows. That so open it up on
Speaker 3: the bears, open season on bears. The bears don't know
Speaker 3: what state they're in.
Speaker 4: They simply do not respect borders.
Speaker 3: They do not they Yeah, they refuse.
Speaker 4: To graistictional boundaries meaningless.
Speaker 3: To they engage in interstate commerce. So this one, it's
Speaker 3: going to be like a federally controlled issue. Unfortunately, our
Speaker 3: federal government right now is not one that's massively amenable
Speaker 3: to conservation.
Speaker 4: It's run by bear murderers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they would love to mert. I mean Donald Trump's son,
Speaker 3: right is big into Oh.
Speaker 5: He does love big game hunting, doesn't he does? He
Speaker 5: does some of those like rich boys afar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's got It's funny.
Speaker 3: Someone was like, oh, someone was talking to me the
Speaker 3: other day about like you should picture this outdoor publication,
Speaker 3: and then I realized it was owned by Trump Junior.
Speaker 3: So that's a no from me. That's a clear note
Speaker 3: for me. But they love conservations, Yeah, Like I would
Speaker 3: be down to picture hunting publication about like the damage
Speaker 3: that the border wall does to our landscapes and our
Speaker 3: and our like I've seen a mule deer try and
Speaker 3: get through the border wall and it's very very Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's really sad because she had been habituated going that
Speaker 3: way for water genetically for generations, right, and now she
Speaker 3: can't And uh, yeah, that's pretty fucked. I'd love to
Speaker 3: write that for a hunting publication, not writing it for
Speaker 3: Donald Trump Junior's one. I don't think he's commissioning it either.
Speaker 3: To be honest, I don't think. I think they're probably
Speaker 3: using if I'd had to guess some artificial intelligence, but
Speaker 3: I've never actually read it. I'm not going to. Don't
Speaker 3: care if you're interested in the ESSA and what it's
Speaker 3: done for gristie, but I has something to link to.
Speaker 3: A Center for Biological Diversity report, which is pretty good.
Speaker 3: This was published when the ESA was fifty, so it's
Speaker 3: a few years old now. But people will be thinking,
Speaker 3: I have seen pictures of people hunting grizzly bears. I
Speaker 3: thought that you couldn't do that. That's because those bears
Speaker 3: are in Alaska, so they are not considered to be threatened.
Speaker 3: Different bears, yeah.
Speaker 4: Or like the same species of bears. They just live
Speaker 4: somewhere else.
Speaker 3: Arctos horribilis. Yeah, the same horibles. Yeah, yeah, they really
Speaker 3: are for him. Yeah, they really screwed him on the name.
Speaker 3: This is part of the way the colonial mindset interacts
Speaker 3: with nature, right, horrible mister horrible Yeah, horrible bear. That's me,
Speaker 3: Like I'm aware of like Arctos Syriacus, which is the
Speaker 3: Syrian there, fine, except that makes sense, that's descriptive. He
Speaker 3: also lives in other parts of the region. But that's okay. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: we could call him Arctos alsham. I guess if we
Speaker 3: if we wanted to get with it there there are
Speaker 3: translations to the Bible that used Syria to describe the
Speaker 3: whole region as well, so it did. It's okay, but
Speaker 3: like horrible bear, Yeah, horrible bear. They really did him
Speaker 3: dirty on that. One could have got it nice bear.
Speaker 3: Maybe our petition for that, he should.
Speaker 4: Call it those lawyers from Montana.
Speaker 3: I get the coalition together again with the crow tribe,
Speaker 3: the bear. It's not inherently horrible, right, We've just been
Speaker 3: horrible to the bear. He's just doing what he does.
Speaker 8: Maybe that's why he's so bad.
Speaker 5: Maybe, right, He's like, you know, if you're gonna call
Speaker 5: me horrible, I'll be horrible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe maybe, maybe he's he's playing to the stereotype.
Speaker 3: So the Alaska bears can be hunted, right, they are hunted.
Speaker 3: Things do get a little complicated in Alaska with different
Speaker 3: rules gaverning sport hunting and subsistence hunting at federal land
Speaker 3: and state land. There is a coal program in Alaska
Speaker 3: right now that is understandably very controversial. The idea is
Speaker 3: that they will cull the bear to help the caribou
Speaker 3: population recover. You are looking at a thing which is
Speaker 3: multi factorial and only. But this is like taking the
Speaker 3: part out of the watch right that was talking about.
Speaker 4: Like, because other things go on for the cariboo.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's not the bear who moved into the
Speaker 3: cariboo's home. It is people, right like. And it's not
Speaker 3: the bear who caused climate change.
Speaker 4: Right like.
Speaker 5: There are other factors we could address, but we're taking
Speaker 5: it out on the bear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which will be a common theme throughout our discussion
Speaker 3: here today. But I understand that we want the caribou
Speaker 3: herd to survive as well. But if you're trying to
Speaker 3: manage the caribou herd for hunting by controlling bear populations
Speaker 3: to allow more caribou. I know, I don't think.
Speaker 4: That's we're modifying the wrong varia.
Speaker 3: Yes, pretty gate. Yeah, there is Alaska legislation that I
Speaker 3: thought was interesting to make such programs go through peer
Speaker 3: review that appears to be going absolutely nowhere. It seems
Speaker 3: stuck in the Alaska House.
Speaker 5: So we had to get a bunch of scientists to
Speaker 5: determine whether or not there will be environmental impact of
Speaker 5: buffalo going back to where buffalo live, But we can't
Speaker 5: get a scientific review of whether or not we should
Speaker 5: be killing the bears.
Speaker 3: Yes, I know that there are other reasons for us
Speaker 3: to do environmental impact studies like hydrology and stuff. Thank
Speaker 3: you Eis people who reached out. We appreciate all our
Speaker 3: science listeners. But yeah, it is pretty sad that we
Speaker 3: can't get up get a I guess the argument would
Speaker 3: be per review takes too long, okay, but like you
Speaker 3: could get a couple of people to be like, you
Speaker 3: know what, it takes a lot longer to get all
Speaker 3: the bears back. Get a couple of scientists. It wouldn't
Speaker 3: take that long that they need jobs right now. Get
Speaker 3: a couple of bear scientists and employe see how it goes.
Speaker 2: So let's talk.
Speaker 3: About I guess like wy Zincy wants to delist.
Speaker 5: Them a Bearstol's wife and.
Speaker 3: Like an eating way they live to Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: she's she's living her best life. It seems that one
Speaker 3: incident was a sow with cubs who was foraging for berries,
Speaker 3: and on the other one was a bear foraging for
Speaker 3: berries who was surprised. This is nothing to us a
Speaker 3: population levels.
Speaker 5: As I said earlier, it's just like it's an unfortunate
Speaker 5: thing where somebody was in a bad situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's we live in a landscape where things can
Speaker 3: kill you. Most of those things are cars, but some
Speaker 3: of them are animals.
Speaker 4: Well, we should start shooting the cars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but we don't do a revenge attack on foard
Speaker 3: every time someone gets in a motor accident. Right. I
Speaker 3: looked at bear vault to beare volt. If you're not familiar,
Speaker 3: money makes bear cans. You're familiar with bear cans.
Speaker 4: So it like tin cans you wear around your next
Speaker 4: to you jingle jangle.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, you can talk to the bear.
Speaker 2: He holds one, can you hold the other one?
Speaker 5: There's a stroke like he's in history house here in
Speaker 5: your tree house exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you say, I'm coming through you, please don't eat me.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 3: A bear can is a thing that you put your
Speaker 3: food in when you're camping.
Speaker 4: I was picturing like a big necklace made out of
Speaker 4: like old tin cans, like.
Speaker 3: An old timey a like a ley, but for cans beans.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't know why you You wouldn't need to buy that.
Speaker 4: You could make that at home.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can make that for free. Bere Vault keeps
Speaker 3: like an open source collection of bear maulings. Bears, according
Speaker 3: to their data, have killed sixty six people since nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy four.
Speaker 8: That's not very many.
Speaker 2: It's not a lot of people, right.
Speaker 4: One a year, Yeah, a little more than that.
Speaker 3: It's very, very hard to make a public health argument
Speaker 3: for dlifting brown bears.
Speaker 5: More people, more people than not have measles, like in
Speaker 5: my immediate area.
Speaker 3: Get well, that's a whole other public health issue. I'm
Speaker 3: afraid when they do ESA studies on what kills bears,
Speaker 3: it's human interactions. I noticed a lot of bears, probably
Speaker 3: guns mostly trains. Trains kill a lot of bears.
Speaker 4: That's so sad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really sad.
Speaker 5: So maybe wait, so you're supposed to make noise of
Speaker 5: the bear. Here's you comment. Trains are loud as hell.
Speaker 3: They come pretty fast, I think, and I think that
Speaker 3: they're not like super loud if you're just like if
Speaker 3: they're not trying to be loud, you know, like if
Speaker 3: if you're in a linear direction to the train, maybe
Speaker 3: they're habituated to it because the trains come so regularly.
Speaker 3: I don't know, that's so sad.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I never thought about bear getting hit by a train.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's good. Bears get hit by cars too, especially
Speaker 3: black bears. I mean, I'm sure brown bears do. They're
Speaker 3: just bigger. I wonder if that's part of why, you know,
Speaker 3: like there's a sort of we can't afford to keep
Speaker 3: smashing our trains on bears situation here. I'm not sure.
Speaker 4: I think the train's probably fine, Yeah, I mean the
Speaker 4: train going.
Speaker 3: Some of those bears are pretty big. I'm sure it
Speaker 3: delays their train operations.
Speaker 4: I mean, if there was like a massive train derailment, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's maybe we need to build a bear fence or something.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, we have these wildlife under passes right that
Speaker 3: allow worldlife to go under or over three ways. While
Speaker 3: ago the right was getting really mad about one in
Speaker 3: Santa Monica. This was like a I think Benny Johnson
Speaker 3: had done like an investigation into this overpass. His theory
Speaker 3: here was that the overpass was allowing I'm not joking,
Speaker 3: terrible cougars to come into neighborhoods and kill people's children.
Speaker 3: We came into the cougar's neighborhood, the cougar's, Benny, are
Speaker 3: already fucking there because.
Speaker 5: And how many children have been eaten by cougars in
Speaker 5: Santa Monica.
Speaker 3: I'm aware of one person in California being killed by
Speaker 3: a mountain line in the last few years, and a
Speaker 3: few more people have been killed, and you can think
Speaker 3: of a couple more people.
Speaker 4: But mostly on like hiking trails, right, Like it's not
Speaker 4: their yards.
Speaker 3: Yes, I'm not aware of it. Cougar coming into anybody's house.
Speaker 3: That's not really how the mountain lion lives its life.
Speaker 5: I mean sometimes people's Chihuahuas have lost their lives to
Speaker 5: this scourge.
Speaker 4: I understand, yeah, yeah, but not their children.
Speaker 3: Not their children, And like animals aren't coming to your
Speaker 3: house and taking your child, and the idea that they're
Speaker 3: not there anyway, like they if they want to come
Speaker 3: into your neighborhood. They can come into your neighborhood. They're
Speaker 3: good at moving across country, that's what they do.
Speaker 4: This will just keep you from running into it with
Speaker 4: your lexus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly like it. And it's going to allow like
Speaker 3: the little mice and other small creatures, right that can't
Speaker 3: some nim belief jump over highway barriers. The obvious other
Speaker 3: argument for delisting bears is that.
Speaker 2: People want to kill them.
Speaker 8: Get a different hobby.
Speaker 3: You can even kill black bears in most states in
Speaker 3: the Western United States if that's your thing. Right, It
Speaker 3: seems like a lot of people just don't want bears around,
Speaker 3: and that makes me sad because I think sharing our
Speaker 3: landscape with bears is beautiful and they think it's special
Speaker 3: that we have this thing in this country, Like it's
Speaker 3: one of our national symbolic mammals, right.
Speaker 5: I mean he's like a gigantic guy who just wants
Speaker 5: to eat berries and hang out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he wants to kill stuff, sure, But.
Speaker 5: Like just I love the idea of just like this
Speaker 5: huge animal just like roaming around looking for a little.
Speaker 2: Sweet treat Yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they they they're incresis precious, They're incredibly adaptable, right,
Speaker 3: they can eat berries, they can eat meat, they can
Speaker 3: eat fish.
Speaker 5: I love when they just take one bite of a
Speaker 5: fish and throw it back so wasteful.
Speaker 3: He's just like me, for real, it's too fishy. He
Speaker 3: wants it, yeah, he wants it like a fresh one.
Speaker 3: The other argument, I guess is a certain population to recovered,
Speaker 3: which kind of it shows a misunderstanding the importance of
Speaker 3: having a population for genetic diversity, right, But also like.
Speaker 5: I just I'm really stuck on like, just because there's
Speaker 5: a lot of them doesn't mean you have to kill
Speaker 5: There's a lot of squirrels in my neighborhood, but I'm
Speaker 5: not allowed to shoot them.
Speaker 3: And you can't just do a squirrel genocide.
Speaker 5: I think, oh, there's just a lot of these, I'm
Speaker 5: going to do violence on them.
Speaker 3: Just yeah, I don't do that. There are a lot
Speaker 3: of these, and it's been incoming convenient for us, and
Speaker 3: therefore it's interesting to look at like the certain population
Speaker 3: sort of doing well. At the Yellowstone Bears. The Yellowstone
Speaker 3: Bets are much higher meat content in their diet than
Speaker 3: they used to.
Speaker 4: Well, the tourists the reading, Yes.
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, that's mostly it. They feed them into
Speaker 3: the moor every year they drop off a bus at
Speaker 3: the bear cave as an offering, and then the bears
Speaker 3: violated the treaty. That's why they're mad. No, it's because
Speaker 3: climate changes is making it hard for them to find
Speaker 3: their berries right, and human pressure is pushing them further
Speaker 3: and further away from certain areas. Eating more meat is
Speaker 3: going to lead to more conflict with hunters, both in
Speaker 3: terms of them both being in the same space at
Speaker 3: the same time trying to do the same thing.
Speaker 5: And honestly, it's so harmful for the bears that they've
Speaker 5: all been listening to Jordan Peterson.
Speaker 8: The cardboard diet is not for everybody.
Speaker 3: Just imagining a bear.
Speaker 8: It's not good advice, you guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, They've become like terrible transfhobs. That's really why
Speaker 3: we want to tea list them. I think we can
Speaker 3: look at what happens when animals lose their protections. We
Speaker 3: can see the way that Wyoming, for instance, dealt with wolves.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 3: Are you familiar with this incident last year of that
Speaker 3: wolf that was like horrifically mistreated in Wyoming. Oh that
Speaker 3: was really fucking gross.
Speaker 4: Did they like torture it?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 4: Why?
Speaker 3: Because I guess it made them feel big and strong.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 5: So again, this isn't about like managing conflict with livestock.
Speaker 5: It's not about like you know, ecological management, it's not.
Speaker 5: This is about people who just want to hurt animals. Yeah,
Speaker 5: because they didn't just kill this wolf because they didn't
Speaker 5: want it around.
Speaker 4: They did look horrible to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean this guy. There are videos of this,
Speaker 3: right that this guy.
Speaker 5: So they tormented in an animal and then they made
Speaker 5: a video of it. They made like an animal snuff film.
Speaker 5: This is just about torture.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying everyone who wants to dealist Disney Breads
Speaker 3: grispy bears wants to torture them in this way.
Speaker 4: But like this, like this desire to engage in this violence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like for certain people, right, there's an idea somehow
Speaker 3: that they can prove like strength and virility and masculinity.
Speaker 8: Get into powerlifting.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So what this guy did the people un familiar
Speaker 3: His name is Cody Roberts.
Speaker 6: Who never met a good Cody.
Speaker 3: I've met some nice coadies.
Speaker 8: Oh no, okay, we know what.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he hit the wolf on his he ran down
Speaker 3: the wolf on its snowmobile.
Speaker 4: So it wasn't bothering you. You pursued it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he chased on his snowmobile. He taped its mouth
Speaker 3: shut and took it to a bar.
Speaker 4: Does this man has a wife? Have a wife and
Speaker 4: a she?
Speaker 3: Okay, that's a good question. I'm trying to work out
Speaker 3: if he went to jail eighteen months formation cremation, uh,
Speaker 3: and he gets a prison term if he fails. He
Speaker 3: fathered guilty plea to fellony animal cruelty. I understand that
Speaker 3: there are people like within the hunting ranching outdoor space
Speaker 3: who think this guy's a piece of shit. There are
Speaker 3: many of them, I know many of them.
Speaker 5: Because that's a very weird thing to do. Like, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's psycho, it's no good thought process. What is shooting it?
Speaker 5: I don't agree with, but I understand that you would
Speaker 5: do that. That's the thing people do. But why did
Speaker 5: you like chase it down and abduct it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Why did you choose to make this animal suffer?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 3: Like did you just show no respect for life?
Speaker 14: Right?
Speaker 3: Like you we joke like, oh, does you have a
Speaker 3: way of She's okay, but genuinely, this is a person
Speaker 3: who is like a psycho, Like.
Speaker 4: No, I'm not joking. I'm not joking.
Speaker 5: Actually, Like, if you if this is your first instinct
Speaker 5: for how you treat a living creature, like.
Speaker 4: I bet he's not good to women either.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like, this doesn't seem like a person who people
Speaker 3: should feel safe around.
Speaker 4: Oh it was a young female wolf too.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh no, what have you found?
Speaker 6: Sorry?
Speaker 4: I just was I found a picture of her.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, it's really sad. The whole thing is really sad.
Speaker 3: Like to injure this animal right to the to the
Speaker 3: extent that it can't get away or defend itself, and
Speaker 3: then tape up its mouth and then drag it to
Speaker 3: a place where it's going to be in fear for
Speaker 3: the rest of its life before you kill it. It's
Speaker 3: it's unconscionable. It's horrific. I'm not saying that that will
Speaker 3: happen to bears, but I'm saying that.
Speaker 4: Like a bear would be a lot harder to do
Speaker 4: that too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I would be, you know, I think I think
Speaker 5: as his punishment, this guy should try to do this
Speaker 5: to a bear.
Speaker 3: What I am saying is that even if we like
Speaker 3: go ahead and dealist bears without serious controls, if we
Speaker 3: start to manage them just as like vermin, right, like
Speaker 3: as a pest like this opens up all kinds of avenues,
Speaker 3: and I think.
Speaker 4: A lot of people will find themselves in a situation
Speaker 4: that is beyond their grasp.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, Like if if suddenly you are if you're
Speaker 5: a guy who's like, yeah, i'd love to shoot a bear,
Speaker 5: now you're allowed to.
Speaker 4: I think people are going to find themselves in situations
Speaker 4: they didn't anticipate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know in Alaska, for instance, if you want
Speaker 3: to hunt a brown bear and you're not a NASCAR resident,
Speaker 3: you have to go with a guide. That's probably a
Speaker 3: good thing.
Speaker 5: Right, Like I think if we start killing the bears back,
Speaker 5: more people will get killed, but bears, a lot of
Speaker 5: these guys are gonna die.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the bad deaths will go up, without
Speaker 3: a doubt. Yeah yeah, Ready, your your best chance of
Speaker 3: getting into an encounter with a bear is probably hunting, right, Like,
Speaker 3: if you're not not hunting bears necessarily, but let's say
Speaker 3: you're Yeah, because you're moving around the woods quietly, you
Speaker 3: could start the one.
Speaker 4: Right, So that's already against the advice for not encountering.
Speaker 3: And then if you then you're able to shoot something,
Speaker 3: and then you Let's say you're in your backcountry hunting, right,
Speaker 3: you have to backpack them.
Speaker 4: Now you have met me out.
Speaker 3: Yeah so, but then now you're coming back to the
Speaker 3: carcass for your second load of meat. A bear may
Speaker 3: have found that carcass.
Speaker 4: Right, somebody might already be there.
Speaker 3: He might not want to give that up. It's his now,
Speaker 3: Yeah that you Yeah, you're then find yourself in a
Speaker 3: difficult situation. Talking with difficult situations, Molly, I have to
Speaker 3: pivot to advertisements again. Yeah, hopefully this one's not for
Speaker 3: a wolf tape. We are back. Let's talk Molly about
Speaker 3: safety in bear country, grisly country, specifically right after this
Speaker 3: this tragedy where this hiker died in Glassian National Park.
Speaker 3: I have seen a number of articles claiming that bear
Speaker 3: spray is quote a placebo or that you quote shouldn't
Speaker 3: bet your life on it.
Speaker 4: Well, I think if you think it's a placebo, you
Speaker 4: should taste it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's It shows a fundamental misunderstanding ifs not only
Speaker 3: how bear spray works, but also what a placebo is. Right,
Speaker 3: Like you three of the words in your title, all
Speaker 3: of the nouns you don't understand.
Speaker 4: The bear doesn't know what it is.
Speaker 8: The placebo effect will not work.
Speaker 3: On bear Yeah right, yeah, exactly, get right. Yeah, well,
Speaker 3: the Placibo effect actually does work on bears. You can
Speaker 3: spray things that are not bear spray and they still.
Speaker 4: Don't like the bear spray before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just the I guess maybe the Perceibo effect. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a noise. It's the cloud, like I guess it's
Speaker 3: not really a place.
Speaker 4: Bewildering because it's it's startling.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, yeah, but you're not saying it's actually.
Speaker 5: The bear will not have sort of imaginary symptoms of
Speaker 5: bear spray exposure due to their beliefs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that they have been bear spray. I should
Speaker 3: note that most of the articles are written by the
Speaker 3: same person.
Speaker 4: So what's his motivation here?
Speaker 5: Why is it he's like, does he own a company
Speaker 5: that sells something that like rivals big bear spray.
Speaker 3: No, it's a person who's got a guy called west
Speaker 3: Saila who used to write for Outside magazine and no
Speaker 3: longer does. There's a escalating trend in the severity of
Speaker 3: his claims about the lack of efficacy of bear spray
Speaker 3: that correlates with him making income that is directly related
Speaker 3: to the number of views on the articles making those claims.
Speaker 4: That is really destroying the information landscape.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think also people not knowing what
Speaker 3: the fuck they're talking about and being given a platform
Speaker 3: is also destroying the information landscape. Right, but they both
Speaker 3: of those are in play here.
Speaker 5: Really see the sort of escalating way people write because
Speaker 5: their income is dependent on clickbase.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah that the clicks to cash pipeline
Speaker 3: is not helping us.
Speaker 5: I make the same amount of money even if none
Speaker 5: of you listen to my podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you guys, you could all turn this off right now,
Speaker 3: I'd still be poor. This is not true, right, I
Speaker 3: take really strong offense at this. I don't know the
Speaker 3: qudit wait to say this is bullshit? Right?
Speaker 5: Like if Bear Spain never worked and couldn't work, he
Speaker 5: wouldn't be the only one saying it correct. There be
Speaker 5: there will be scores of people saying I tried this
Speaker 5: and nothing happened.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, like we have data on this, right. This is
Speaker 3: not a thing that we need to pull out of
Speaker 3: our ass. This is not a thing that we need
Speaker 3: to rely on individual anecdotes for. This is not a
Speaker 3: thing that will be determined by the outcome of a
Speaker 3: single incident in Glacier National Park.
Speaker 2: This is a thing that we have masses of data on.
Speaker 8: There's bear scientists.
Speaker 3: I spoke to one, Molly.
Speaker 8: I can't wait to hear that.
Speaker 3: I had a very lovely conversation. He has the two studies,
Speaker 3: and to be clear, where sit sees and I don't
Speaker 3: know if it's just that he didn't read them, or
Speaker 3: he didn't read them well, or that he read them
Speaker 3: to the best of his ability. And this is what
Speaker 3: we're getting.
Speaker 4: I mean, scientific literacy is pretty poor.
Speaker 3: Sure, it's always okay not to write an article making
Speaker 3: claims about something that impacts people's safety if you don't
Speaker 3: know what you're talking about. It's always okay to be
Speaker 3: quiet when we're discussing the people's well being. That's fine.
Speaker 4: Adults talk about it.
Speaker 3: Doesn't impact your substack in the same way.
Speaker 4: But oh, it's a substack situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a subsect situation. I would suggest that writing
Speaker 3: that best bray is dangerous or useless is akin to
Speaker 3: saying that seat belts are dangerous or useless, and that
Speaker 3: we can, if we look hard enough, find one person
Speaker 3: who was killed by their seat belt, and no one's
Speaker 3: ever been killed by best braidedge. I have been best
Speaker 3: braid more than once.
Speaker 5: Didn't kill me when when we were talking about this earlier,
Speaker 5: this most shocking fact of all to me so far.
Speaker 4: Bear spray is less potent than police pepper spray.
Speaker 3: I believe there's less OC and bear spray.
Speaker 5: I would have assumed it's more, but it's less. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I think the such sensitive nose.
Speaker 3: Very sensitive nose is to be clear, it's still very
Speaker 3: unpleasant for humans like I consider myself to have a
Speaker 3: nose of every sensitivity and having been a recipient a
Speaker 3: bear spray, it's highly unpleasant.
Speaker 5: Right, But I just I thought, you know, I would
Speaker 5: have assumed you said I've been bear sprayed, like, oh,
Speaker 5: that's like way more hardcore.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the bear spray. Part of
Speaker 3: the reason I think that it has less of the
Speaker 3: OC oil in it is that it has to be
Speaker 3: propelled out at a velocity that allows it to be
Speaker 3: used even if the bear is coming at you and
Speaker 3: the wind is blowing towards you. Right, so the bear
Speaker 3: is coming with the wind, so you're spraying of pay
Speaker 3: and then the spray would be you don't want the
Speaker 3: spray to all be blown back to you. Right, you
Speaker 3: want it to be able to get out, to create
Speaker 3: that barrier between you and the bear, and it does. Again,
Speaker 3: doctor Smith's studies have shown the best bait does work
Speaker 3: even with an unfavorable wind.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: I will link to both these studies. Everything he's done,
Speaker 3: which I think is really cool because this stuff impacts
Speaker 3: like your safety in Griz country. Everything he's done is
Speaker 3: available publicly for free. Hell yeah, very unusual in the
Speaker 3: in the academic research space, right, But I think it's
Speaker 3: great because it allows you to look at this best
Speaker 3: play as a Perceibo article and then you can go
Speaker 3: find the study. I will link it right here, and
Speaker 3: you can say, huh, sure, seems like this guy can't
Speaker 3: read a study.
Speaker 4: And does he has he read those studies he claims to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he quotes soon, So it's not.
Speaker 8: That he just isn't aware of them.
Speaker 5: He just doesn't believe the expert because of a personal expert.
Speaker 3: I I think he either didn't grasp the table or
Speaker 3: didn't grasp so the So I again, like the person
Speaker 3: who wate these studies is extremely easy to contact, and
Speaker 3: anyone doing reasonable journalism would do so.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: So I guess is he saying I read this study
Speaker 5: and it's wrong, Or is he saying I read the
Speaker 5: study and it agrees.
Speaker 3: With me, saying I read the study and it says
Speaker 3: best bray doesn't work. It agrees with me?
Speaker 9: Yet?
Speaker 4: Oh no, yeah, yeah, he could have just emailed the
Speaker 4: other Could it just usk?
Speaker 3: Could it just usk?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So, like there are incidents in the study which are
Speaker 3: it considered successful and non successful uses. Some of the
Speaker 3: non successful uses are with a black bear, when you
Speaker 3: spray it and it comes back later. That is still
Speaker 3: the brown bo is not killing you in that situation, right,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, a black bear.
Speaker 5: It still works. Like efficacy doesn't mean permanent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And at some point when you're making a study
Speaker 3: like this, you have to decide, like what a You're
Speaker 3: trying to create a binary relationship about his theories of things.
Speaker 3: Right that the other study he wrote was efficacy of
Speaker 3: Firearms for their defense in Alaska. It's worth noting that
Speaker 3: in the Efficacy of Firearms study, more than one hundred
Speaker 3: and twenty bears died out of a data set something
Speaker 3: like two hundred and fifty. None of the best bray
Speaker 3: bears died. Oh that's a lot right, yeaheah, it's a lot.
Speaker 4: And I feel like it's better if everybody survives the encounter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's better for all of us if we use
Speaker 3: this extremely well researched tool.
Speaker 5: Right and again, having read zero studies, I read zero studies,
Speaker 5: but I know only one point one person's a year
Speaker 5: are killed by bears. Yeah, so if this never worked
Speaker 5: and couldn't work, more people would have been killed by bears.
Speaker 3: Maybe, Yeah. Yeah, certainly a lot of people who use
Speaker 3: the best Bray didn't get killed by bears, right.
Speaker 4: Like, none of them did.
Speaker 3: It is possible to use best brain and be killed
Speaker 3: by bears, like.
Speaker 5: Especially happened to It's happened to maybe fifty people reside.
Speaker 3: Yet residues of bear spray will attract bears in the like,
Speaker 3: well that's unfair. Well it's an interesting smell, right, and
Speaker 3: they have an amazing nose, so I'm guessing like they
Speaker 3: will come check it out. And I know that, Like,
Speaker 3: there are instances where people have, for instance, used best
Speaker 3: Pray in the way that one might use bug spray.
Speaker 3: I use spraying their tent.
Speaker 6: That's not going to work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, well you're going to bring them in.
Speaker 5: That's like saying, I'm going to use this gun to
Speaker 5: protect myself by making a circle around me with bullets.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, exactly, smearing myself with.
Speaker 4: It, but the bullets in a circle around my Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's not quite cargo cult thinking, but like it's a
Speaker 3: you know, it's like magical thought process. I guess, like
Speaker 3: that's not how best pay was you spray it at the.
Speaker 5: Bear homeopathic gun is where you just lick the bullets.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about the things that you can do, right,
Speaker 3: Like you can keep a clean camp. This is really big,
Speaker 3: don't attract them? Yeah, so if we look at like Yosemite, right,
Speaker 3: Yosemite and that that like Smite Kings Canyon Sequoia Park System,
Speaker 3: you can't bring bear spray in there, right, Oh, but
Speaker 3: you have to have a bear can. So I've backpacked
Speaker 3: in that area. They have done surveys that showed that,
Speaker 3: like most people were acquainted with best bear practices, but
Speaker 3: we're not following them on the trail.
Speaker 4: So it's not that they didn't know better.
Speaker 6: Is the don't care?
Speaker 3: I think people it's hard to like fathom a giant,
Speaker 3: several hundred pound half ton creature. It's going to come
Speaker 3: in and steal my cliff bars, right, but it will
Speaker 3: And that gets hard to fathom how good their smell.
Speaker 5: Is because they love a delicious snack. Like they're berry boys.
Speaker 5: They're berry boys. They're going to come get your little tree.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they love they love a high carbohydrate like energy snack.
Speaker 3: They're endurance athletes. They want to eat your cliff bar,
Speaker 3: if your keito, you're fine.
Speaker 8: But they would like candy.
Speaker 3: But they love candy. Yeah, Like I know it would.
Speaker 8: Be unethical to give a bear.
Speaker 3: Wrong, So we want to keep a clean camp or
Speaker 3: in bad country. Right, that means stuff with odors. It's
Speaker 3: not just our food, but also like the maybe the
Speaker 3: clothes we cooked in. We have a scented toothpaste stuff
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 8: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like if I had, if I was in the
Speaker 3: habit of using a shampoo smelled like I think they
Speaker 3: spoke to doctor Smith about this, like he said, if
Speaker 3: I used apricot shampoo, probably wouldn't bring.
Speaker 12: It with me.
Speaker 5: Wow, because they just want to come check out that
Speaker 5: sweet tree.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Like it's kind of you think that they eat berries, right,
Speaker 3: you make yourself smell like a fruit, Like it's kind
Speaker 3: of on you, Like I get Yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 4: Like Winnie the Pooh, he's just like following his nose
Speaker 4: you find a sweet tree.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't want to blame anyone for not knowing things.
Speaker 3: None of us are born knowing anything. And it's not
Speaker 3: like they issue PSAs about bears every day.
Speaker 4: I bet there's a pamphlet at the trailhead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's definitely.
Speaker 3: Well, when you go to Yosemite, you have to sign
Speaker 3: him with a ranger for a wilderness permit and then
Speaker 3: they'll give you the once over. But there are other
Speaker 3: things we would not do.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 3: I would not sleep alone in a tent in bear country, said,
Speaker 3: and there are two of us, had probably two tents, right, Like,
Speaker 3: just gives one of us a chance to deploy the
Speaker 3: bear spray and the bear does come in. We can
Speaker 3: get bear fences, we can try very hard not to
Speaker 3: surprise bears. Right. So I was trail running in Alaska
Speaker 3: last year in some pretty thick brush, Right, I used
Speaker 3: a little bear bell. It's dorky, but like.
Speaker 4: Oh, it sounds cute as hell.
Speaker 6: I want to look at that.
Speaker 3: Well, there's an unfortunate video that you'll probably see when
Speaker 3: you google bear bell of a hiker who thought the
Speaker 3: bell bell with a repellent, and so the black bear
Speaker 3: is charging him and he's waving, just.
Speaker 8: Ring the bell at it all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So it sounds like people.
Speaker 5: Are purchasing these solutions but not understanding the functions of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like, I don't want to blame people for that,
Speaker 3: because part of the way we get to a place
Speaker 3: where we could destroy so much of our megafauna, is
Speaker 3: it so a few people care about or understand it, Right,
Speaker 3: that's an education issue that we can't solve quickly or
Speaker 3: like on a podcast. I think that it would behoove
Speaker 3: anyone who's going camping in especially like Griz country, right,
Speaker 3: so in Alaska, Wyoming, not all of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho.
Speaker 3: And like I've camped in those places. I've come to
Speaker 3: all of those places to learn about these things, right,
Speaker 3: because it's not just a negative instant for you, Like,
Speaker 3: it's also a negative incident for the bear. Even if
Speaker 3: you have to bear spray a bear, right, that fucking
Speaker 3: sucks for the bear.
Speaker 5: I mean I've been I've been pepper sprayed, and the
Speaker 5: bear can't even go like wash his hair with dawn.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, he can't stand in the shower like looking
Speaker 3: down like I know this this. I guess the positive
Speaker 3: outcome of that is that the bear will be like
Speaker 3: likely to not want to come around people so much, right,
Speaker 3: because they'll associate this negative attraction with the best bray.
Speaker 5: Right, So this seems like it's that it does work.
Speaker 5: And then also if we're all doing it, you'll you
Speaker 5: want to do it as much. Yeah, because the bears
Speaker 5: will leave us alone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have the solution for being in bear country, right, Like,
Speaker 3: it's carry our bear repellent.
Speaker 4: Unless the bears are like me.
Speaker 5: You know, I've been parpigedprayed by all kinds of cops
Speaker 5: and I'm still going to go look and see whether I'm.
Speaker 3: Just keep on keep on tanking. Yeah, I'm not a
Speaker 3: very stupid man. It's like the uh, the Yosemite. I
Speaker 3: guess it just keeps spraying me.
Speaker 2: These people.
Speaker 3: Why this. There were some instance where I guess brown
Speaker 3: bears got sprayed to charge the person, but like as
Speaker 3: they were charging, the person sprayed them and they came
Speaker 3: through the spray. But then there's a spray got more condensed,
Speaker 3: like I know they're not the person over and kept
Speaker 3: on charging. Okay, I don't want, Yeah, which is obviously
Speaker 3: not a great outcome, but it's a better outcome than
Speaker 3: you're getting warreed by the bear, right.
Speaker 8: Better than it eat my bear.
Speaker 3: But like, I really want to push back on this
Speaker 3: narrative that we should be all carrying firearms.
Speaker 4: First of all, most people, most people don't need a gun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, like, there are reasons to warn guns ion,
Speaker 3: lots of them, but like, defending yourself from bears probably
Speaker 3: isn't one unless you're already very proficient with firearms, and
Speaker 3: even then.
Speaker 2: I don't want to kill a bear.
Speaker 5: Like, but I just to think if you're telling every
Speaker 5: casual hiker who goes to where bears might be that
Speaker 5: they need to own a gun, a lot of those
Speaker 5: people would not have otherwise owned a gun. Yeah, are
Speaker 5: not good at handling a gun. In a situation where
Speaker 5: they need to use the gun against the bear, it's
Speaker 5: going to go badly. But also, now there's a gun
Speaker 5: in their home that they would not otherwise have had
Speaker 5: in their home, and the odds of a firearm accident
Speaker 5: in the home are now higher.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well yeah, infinitely high than it didn't have one.
Speaker 5: Right, So it's not going to work out for you.
Speaker 5: In this limited instance that you think you need it for.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then you've introduced to dangerous.
Speaker 2: Now you have a gun you didn't need.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like, it is impossible. May if you are getting
Speaker 3: If I am getting more by a grizzly bear and
Speaker 3: you bearst pray that bear, I will have I see
Speaker 3: eyes and hopefully survive. If you shoot that bear, it
Speaker 3: is very possible, and it has happened that you will
Speaker 3: also shoot me.
Speaker 5: Because the average person not a good shot under controlled circumstances.
Speaker 5: Bear attack not a controlled circumstance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like everyone like this is especially a thing with men, right,
Speaker 3: they will tend to overestimate their ability with firearms dramatically.
Speaker 3: In my experience, this is not a fuck around and
Speaker 3: find out situation. You don't want to find out that
Speaker 3: you're not very good at shooting as a grisly bear
Speaker 3: is charging you.
Speaker 5: And even if you are very good at shooting at
Speaker 5: the range, you're not in this situation.
Speaker 8: You're not.
Speaker 3: You have to deploy the firearm right now, and we
Speaker 3: have to.
Speaker 5: Like, your hands are shaking, there's piss running down your life.
Speaker 3: We're scared. Yeah, you have to incapacitate the bear, like
Speaker 3: I've been in up close situations with big animals. It's scary,
Speaker 3: like thinking I'm going to die now. It has a
Speaker 3: profound effect on the human body, and it's not one
Speaker 3: that does and it does it doesn't actually enhance your
Speaker 3: john Wick characteristics. Yeah, so I would highly recommend it.
Speaker 3: If you're going to bear country, you get some bear spray,
Speaker 3: don't fly, but you can't fly with bare spray, So
Speaker 3: you're gonna have to buy it when you get buy
Speaker 3: it when you get there. This is not like big
Speaker 3: bear spray. This is also an accusation that like big
Speaker 3: bear spray sort of funded these studies or that this
Speaker 3: is silly, right, the death spray industry is not that
Speaker 3: big guys.
Speaker 2: It works.
Speaker 3: It is statistically more effective than using firearms.
Speaker 6: It works.
Speaker 8: What does it cost like forty bucks?
Speaker 3: Yeah, not even that.
Speaker 4: And how much does a gun cost? A lot more
Speaker 4: than that, Yeah.
Speaker 3: A lot more than that, especially if you're going to
Speaker 3: actually practice with it. Right, if you're going to get
Speaker 3: bear spray, I would sugest you get a You can
Speaker 3: get a dummy. It's just got water in it and
Speaker 3: you can practice. Right. There are a couple of safeties
Speaker 3: on a bear spray. One I do have one here.
Speaker 4: With like within arms reach in your arms.
Speaker 3: You want to go one over here? Yeah, I got
Speaker 3: my RACKUS best bray, but like it's a safety on
Speaker 3: it and there's actually a zip tie when you get
Speaker 3: it to stop the safety coming off, just to stop
Speaker 3: it like blog in your back going off in the
Speaker 3: shipping container, yeah, or in the in the walmart or whatever.
Speaker 3: So you've got to whatever of that, right, And then
Speaker 3: they they sell packs which has the water one and
Speaker 3: the spicy one, and you're going to practice deploying the
Speaker 3: water one, right, and like that's smart. Yeah, when you're
Speaker 3: carrying your bear spray, if it's in the bottom of
Speaker 3: your backpack, oh, the bear doesn't give you that much
Speaker 3: advanced notice. Yeah. So the bear spray is like when
Speaker 3: I was when I'm running in places where there were
Speaker 3: grizzly bears, I wear a little running vest. Put it
Speaker 3: in the front here. If I have binoculars and I
Speaker 3: have a little binocular pack, I put it on the
Speaker 3: side there. I've done it on my belt before.
Speaker 5: Googled bear spray and the pictures, the pictures that are
Speaker 5: used to advertise the spray.
Speaker 3: I gotta see this. What's yeah, how do I send
Speaker 3: you sen you can just put it in the chat.
Speaker 4: This is not a real picture.
Speaker 8: Is this a real picture of a man spraying of bear?
Speaker 5: Because the bear is sort of enveloped in this cloud
Speaker 5: of spray, So it just looks like one of those
Speaker 5: soft effect paintings of the bears still wet in like
Speaker 5: a cloud.
Speaker 3: It looks like it looks like like a I'm a
Speaker 3: big fan of T shirts of wolves howling at the moon.
Speaker 8: It's a bear, old man's brain.
Speaker 2: I don't know why if you're staging it. This is
Speaker 2: bizarre because.
Speaker 4: That's not a real picture of something of that happened.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't think so, because there's no bare body and
Speaker 3: you can see this. You can see the bush right
Speaker 3: like it's just its head. They haven't bothered.
Speaker 8: It's very close.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, and the bear doesn't look too upset.
Speaker 3: It's kind of Yeah. That is a fascinating case. If
Speaker 3: we scroll down, there are there are better images of
Speaker 3: people using bear spray, which.
Speaker 4: Is incredible, incredible product photos that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is really quite remarkable. Suggest everybody who is
Speaker 3: going into bear country buy bear spray and practice using
Speaker 3: it like it's better for you. It's better for bears.
Speaker 3: It's cheaper than a gun. You can if you want,
Speaker 3: by a bear fence, the electric fence that goes around
Speaker 3: your camp if camping in the back country, I think
Speaker 3: that's a good idea. If you're in an area with
Speaker 3: lots of bears, they way very little. Now I'm by
Speaker 3: myself when actually after talking to doctor Smith, well I
Speaker 3: won't because I haven't got enough money, but i'd like
Speaker 3: to maybe I'll hear from the bear fence people. You
Speaker 3: can follow all the best practices, right, and you're not
Speaker 3: just going to learn them from a podcast. You're going
Speaker 3: to look up the parks system. You're going to look
Speaker 3: at doctor Smith's research.
Speaker 4: Ask a park ranger. He'll tell you that's his job.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some of their jobs depends what depends what kind
Speaker 3: of rangers they are. Some of them are cops. The
Speaker 3: overwhelming bulk of evidence suggests that the way to go
Speaker 3: with bears is bear spray until a bear kills an
Speaker 3: oil rig. We will have we will continue to have
Speaker 3: bears on our landscape, but it's something that we should like,
Speaker 3: genuinely care about, really, like the trophic cascade is not
Speaker 3: as much of a of a thing as it was
Speaker 3: once made out to be that. I'm sure you've seen
Speaker 3: that thing about how wolf change rivers.
Speaker 4: No, you have to tell me about wolves too.
Speaker 3: A whole other episode. Yeah, well, fucking wolf management is
Speaker 3: a whole other thing. The bears have entered the discourse
Speaker 3: this week because a bear killed someone. We don't talk
Speaker 3: about it when someone kills a bear, right the go
Speaker 3: ask it. They're coming bears from aircraft right now. And
Speaker 3: I'm not saying that, like a human life is equal
Speaker 3: to a bear life, but I'm saying that.
Speaker 4: Hunting from an aircraft is such bitch behavior.
Speaker 3: I know, if you want to take a bear, do
Speaker 3: it with a knife like a like a hero or
Speaker 3: a bow.
Speaker 4: But or you know, do it Lewis and Clark style,
Speaker 4: use a musket.
Speaker 6: That's fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, right, eight of your friends and a musket
Speaker 3: at the edge of the river and you don't have
Speaker 3: best brace. You're only optionists to jump into the room
Speaker 3: twenty feet clip with a bear that you could have
Speaker 3: left alone. So yeah, I want to. I guess like
Speaker 3: end by saying that, like the outdoors isn't entirely safe,
Speaker 3: and that's part of what makes it beautiful. There have
Speaker 3: been times when I have been in the wilderness where
Speaker 3: I've thought going to die, and I keep going back
Speaker 3: to the wilderness because like it's also one of the
Speaker 3: things that makes me feel so grateful to be alive.
Speaker 3: And it's okay if it isn't entirely safe. We know
Speaker 3: that when we enter the wilderness, and we do our
Speaker 3: best to mitigate that risk, right, We plan, we take
Speaker 3: safety precautions, we bring our first aid kit in our
Speaker 3: best brain, and we tell someone where we're going and
Speaker 3: when we're coming back, and we do all this stuff,
Speaker 3: but we understand that there is some inherent risk and
Speaker 3: that's all right. Like if we wanted to see wildlife
Speaker 3: and have no inherent risk and have it be comfortable,
Speaker 3: we would just go to the zoo, right, And the
Speaker 3: zoo sucks compared to the outdoors, right, Like I don't
Speaker 3: want to see a bear in a cage. It's undignified
Speaker 3: for the bear.
Speaker 4: It's so sad for them in there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like it's the meaning to me to see something
Speaker 3: demean for my entertainment in that fashion. Like we can't
Speaker 3: comprehend animals outside of the habitat. I don't think like
Speaker 3: seeing a grisbee bear in Alaska of trying to eat
Speaker 3: salmon or being a black bear in California doing its
Speaker 3: thing hamingson berries. Like that's cool, and I want you
Speaker 3: all to have that, and I want your children and
Speaker 3: grandchildren to have that, and so, like, I think we
Speaker 3: should be very skeptical about people making safety based arguments
Speaker 3: for destroying our our megafauna here like that. You'll hear
Speaker 3: it with wolves, right, You're hearing people doing it with cougars,
Speaker 3: which is absolutely ridiculous.
Speaker 4: Like most of these animals will not bother you if
Speaker 4: you leave them alone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like if very very ocasionally people have been
Speaker 3: killed by cougars who are not bothering the cougar, right, like.
Speaker 5: Very occasionally, you know, a freak accident, Yeah, doesn't justify
Speaker 5: destruction of an ecosystem.
Speaker 3: People get killed by lightning, but we're not just killing clouds.
Speaker 3: People get killed by cars. We don't get bombing the
Speaker 3: Ford factory. I understand the desire to be safe, but like,
Speaker 3: we will take away a lot of things that are
Speaker 3: really beautiful if we just want to be safe.
Speaker 8: But again, we're controlling the wrong variables.
Speaker 5: If you're worried about people dying in unfair and you know,
Speaker 5: terrible accidents.
Speaker 4: There are things we could talk about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there are policy decisions that could be made that
Speaker 5: would save thousands and thousands of lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you want people to be safe and be
Speaker 3: concerned about free healthcare.
Speaker 4: Bears have killed sixty six people.
Speaker 5: I bet that many people died today from not being
Speaker 5: able to get their insulin.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, there's a perfect example. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: if you want to keep people safe, then think about
Speaker 3: things that will keep them safe. And I think we can.
Speaker 3: We can very easily keep people bears safe. But the
Speaker 3: threat to the bears is us. That's it. The only
Speaker 3: other thing that kills bears really is other bears, and
Speaker 3: so it's on us therefore to advocate, right, Like the
Speaker 3: bears can't advocate for themselves. Luckily they had people who
Speaker 3: brought that court case in twenty nineteen. But like, if
Speaker 3: we want to continue to enjoy the outdoors in the
Speaker 3: way that they are, we need to stop randomly removing shit.
Speaker 3: And bears are one of those things, especially brown bears,
Speaker 3: that it's very easy to whip up fear about that.
Speaker 3: I think we should just leave them alone. I think
Speaker 3: we should be weary also of sort of anthropomorphizing them.
Speaker 3: Like I see this sometimes with people and animals, like
Speaker 3: they don't need this for entertainment. They don't see the
Speaker 3: world in the way we do. And that's okay that
Speaker 3: they're animals. They have their own logic. We coexist with them.
Speaker 3: But like not that. It's not like a Disney animal.
Speaker 3: It's an animal which goes about the world using its
Speaker 3: own logic, using its own understanding, and trying to pursue
Speaker 3: its own ends for its own means.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 3: But nonetheless, it is a majestic thing to see on
Speaker 3: the landscape and something that we should take care that.
Speaker 3: You know, we don't let corporate interest and people who
Speaker 3: find it entertaining distory.
Speaker 8: I would love to see a bear.
Speaker 3: Okay, we'll do that. We'll add that to our list. Okay,
Speaker 3: tep me to see a bear. Yeah, I am going
Speaker 3: to take Molly camping. We will. Maybe we'll go to
Speaker 3: We'll go to we go Yellowstone area, like I've never
Speaker 3: been to Yell, you know, have you not been to Yellowstone?
Speaker 4: I've never been out worse.
Speaker 3: Wow, Okay, I've got some friends who got a cabin
Speaker 3: outside the park. Maybe we could have a little cabin trip.
Speaker 4: Sophie's and mid Yellowstone.
Speaker 3: We can go in there and like, look at the guys,
Speaker 3: enjoy the Yellowstone ecosystem. No disrespect to my Yellowstone friends,
Speaker 3: but that's a lot of tourists. Like I ain't going
Speaker 3: outside to be around that many people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like there's there's Yellowstone style nature outside the bounds
Speaker 5: of the park.
Speaker 8: You go there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean even if you just go, if you're
Speaker 3: getting away from you can get it. Just get away
Speaker 3: from Old Faithful and that that park and you can
Speaker 3: get away from people. Just fine. But yeah, we can go.
Speaker 3: We could go to Yellowstone, see it there. Maybe see
Speaker 3: an elk. Pretty cool, Elk.
Speaker 4: Make a pretty co I bet that's big as hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, elk's the biggest ship. Like like a cow with horns.
Speaker 3: Well not the cows, cats have horns. Elk antlers a mistake.
Speaker 3: But yeah, we could go to or like that, like
Speaker 3: the Greater Yeat like outside of the park, like that
Speaker 3: Wayoming area just outside of Yellowstone. It's really beautiful. Be
Speaker 3: a fun place to go camping. Maybe see a bear,
Speaker 3: have a clean camp. Maybe we can find out a
Speaker 3: way to find a way to expense that bear fence.
Speaker 5: That's what I'm saying. Podcasts from out there it becomes business.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we will podcast from bear country proving that we
Speaker 3: can happily co exist with bears.
Speaker 2: Thank you to all the ferret people.
Speaker 4: By the way, I can't believe how many contacted you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, massive outreach of the ferret people. So if you
Speaker 3: are someone who can help me, get on one of
Speaker 3: the ferret counting surveys. I will count ferrets with you.
Speaker 3: We will make a ferret podcast, and we will change
Speaker 3: America's perception of the blackfooted ferret. On your behalf.
Speaker 8: It's already working.
Speaker 4: You got me.
Speaker 6: I love them now.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Muley's Team Ferret. Yeah. You can't see this because
Speaker 3: it's a podcast, but she has a massive tattoo.
Speaker 4: It's one of the biggest around the neck.
Speaker 3: Yeah, around the neck. Yeah, and there's a further one
Speaker 3: in the lip, but it says team Ferret.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So yeah, Money's become a ferret advocate. I hope
Speaker 3: you have all become ferret and black bear advocates. Send
Speaker 3: me pictures of your bears. Money, do you know what
Speaker 3: fat bear week is? Before we go?
Speaker 4: That is my favorite thing about bears is fat.
Speaker 3: Bear Okay, sick good yeah, bears getting plump in the
Speaker 3: the autumn before they hibernate.
Speaker 5: Is I mean, how could you hate them? How could
Speaker 5: you hate them? They're just roly poly little guys hunting
Speaker 5: for a little sweet treat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, their bulking cycle is incredible to me, Like the
Speaker 3: way a bear just adds thickness in a relatively short
Speaker 3: period of time. It's remarking powerful. Yeah, it's powerful. That
Speaker 3: lives the power of salmon. Maybe we didn't have trawlers,
Speaker 3: we'd all eat more fish. But yeah, check out Fat
Speaker 3: Bear Week if you haven't, if you're not from the US,
Speaker 3: I hope this has been fun. Fund a little diversion
Speaker 3: into animals that live here. They used to live all
Speaker 3: the way down into Mexico actually, but now sadly Mexican bears. Yeah,
Speaker 3: well there are still Mexican black bears.
Speaker 4: They have bears too, Yeah, yeah, I got to look
Speaker 4: up where bears live.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they lived. We could do a whole other one
Speaker 3: on the jaguar was there being fucked by the border
Speaker 3: wall right now pretty badly. But there'll be a fun
Speaker 3: episode up in over an, Arizona that Yeah, there's pretty cool.
Speaker 15: Animals are friends, don't kill them.
Speaker 12: Welcome to It could happened here a podcast about what
Speaker 12: workers can do when they try. I am your host,
Speaker 12: Mia Long, and with me today to talk about a
Speaker 12: company known, I guess in Portland for being a place
Speaker 12: for you shop and known most other places for being
Speaker 12: the people who make pens is Morgan and Renee from
Speaker 12: Bujie Workers United and Morgan Renee welcome to the show.
Speaker 16: Thank you, Hi, Thank you Mia.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 12: So, and obviously I guess, as you may have gotten
Speaker 12: from the word union and the title probably continuing the
Speaker 12: word union, I don't know, we haven't written it yet,
Speaker 12: is that. Yeah, one of the Muji stories in Portland
Speaker 12: is unionizing. Can you talk a little bit about like
Speaker 12: what Muji is for people who are unaware of this slash,
Speaker 12: don't follow pens and or or haven't been to the store.
Speaker 16: Yeah, so Muji is probably I would describe it as
Speaker 16: a worldwide Japanese minimalist lifestyle department store. And that's a
Speaker 16: lot of words to say. It's a department store that
Speaker 16: is for essentially basics. Muji is short for a full
Speaker 16: name that essentially translates to no brand, and that's the
Speaker 16: idea that they're trying to push for and they're trying
Speaker 16: to show to people that it's like an eco friendly
Speaker 16: company and they try and push like high quality products.
Speaker 16: And at our location in Portland, it's the only one
Speaker 16: on the American West Coast, and we have a relatively
Speaker 16: small shop. There's only thirty two people in our bargaining unit.
Speaker 16: And this is a wall to wall bargaining unit, which
Speaker 16: essentially means that everyone below the lowest management level at
Speaker 16: this location is involved with the union.
Speaker 12: Yeah, which is a really cool and B So we're
Speaker 12: talking about how this is the only one in the
Speaker 12: West coast. This is mostly a Japanese company that operates
Speaker 12: a little bit in the US and does things here,
Speaker 12: right my understanding, So.
Speaker 16: It is a Japanese company. It's actually primarily operates like
Speaker 16: all over the world. It was began in Japan in
Speaker 16: the eighties, I believe, if I know my company history correctly,
Speaker 16: but they pretty rapidly expanded to across Asia and Europe
Speaker 16: and then have also since expanded into Africa and the Americas.
Speaker 16: If the Americas were relatively late. I don't think that
Speaker 16: there was a store in the America's before the turn
Speaker 16: of the millennium and the portaland location itself opened in
Speaker 16: I want to say twenty eighteen, sometime like just pre COVID.
Speaker 12: Yeah, so it's relatively recent. And I guess the thing
Speaker 12: that's even more relatively recent is he all starting to
Speaker 12: organize a union. So can I ask how did that start?
Speaker 12: And what was the sort of things that started to
Speaker 12: get the ball rolling on it?
Speaker 16: So I guess the way that organizing started was back
Speaker 16: in November of twenty twenty five, maybe shortly before that.
Speaker 16: We had a round of appraisals. These are like yearly
Speaker 16: end of fiscal year appraisals that are technically supposed to
Speaker 16: be the end of the fourth quarter. Typically they get
Speaker 16: pushed back by a month or two. I just company practice,
Speaker 16: because the appraisals are tied to our raises, and each
Speaker 16: employee who's worked for a year or more at the
Speaker 16: company gets a praise, And so we're scored in a
Speaker 16: system of one to five, and if you get a
Speaker 16: three or better, I believe the system goes. You get
Speaker 16: a raise that is directly tied to the number that
Speaker 16: you got. They used decimal systems. So the thing is
Speaker 16: that this year they gave us the lowest raise in
Speaker 16: a memory of any of the workers that are currently there.
Speaker 16: Myself included for context. I'm one of the workers that
Speaker 16: has been at the store of the longest and at
Speaker 16: four no more than forty years now we have a
Speaker 16: pretty i turn around, which is how I ended up
Speaker 16: being the longest tenure of the lower the management workers.
Speaker 16: And this came in a year that was the best
Speaker 16: year in the Portland Locations history. Yeah, there's this competition
Speaker 16: that Muchie runs internally where it puts each store under
Speaker 16: like a group of stores worldwide, almost like almost like
Speaker 16: World Cup groups in a way, where you're just kind
Speaker 16: of like randomly sorted into groups. And each year one
Speaker 16: of the groups is chosen and within that group, they
Speaker 16: examined the performances of each of the stores within that
Speaker 16: group and select a winner to be the Store of
Speaker 16: the year. So in twenty twenty four we won Store
Speaker 16: of the Year, and it was kind of a shock
Speaker 16: to a bunch of us to have such low races
Speaker 16: after that. For example, my rays of sixty five cents
Speaker 16: last summer Jesus Christ was the highest by a significant margin.
Speaker 17: Yes, it went as low as around twenty five cents.
Speaker 16: Yeah, that's right, I.
Speaker 12: Have done the math. But like, is that sub inflation?
Speaker 2: Like I, yes, that is sub inflation.
Speaker 17: It tends to be. There are employees who have been
Speaker 17: working for more than two years who still get paid
Speaker 17: around minimum wage.
Speaker 12: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 16: In addition to that, the staff members who are keyholders
Speaker 16: and full timers and above get bonuses, and the bonuses
Speaker 16: are directly tied to the amount of money that the
Speaker 16: store makes over the target amount for the month, and
Speaker 16: they drastically increased the targets for the year going forward,
Speaker 16: which meant that because of that, our bonuses were getting lower.
Speaker 16: So this year, for the last month since that race,
Speaker 16: I've actually been making less money per month than I
Speaker 16: was the year before.
Speaker 12: Jesus Christ, So you're getting pay cuts basically, yes, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 12: After winning Store of the Year, incredible stuff. Incredible stuff
Speaker 12: from the people who are running their company in an
Speaker 12: extremely normal way.
Speaker 16: That was the spark that set this push for the
Speaker 16: union ablaze. And so in November I contacted the IWW
Speaker 16: Industrial Workers of the World and received a response, And
Speaker 16: so at first it was just me and one of
Speaker 16: the IWW representatives that we were meeting together to talk
Speaker 16: about forming a union, and we ended up having those
Speaker 16: meetings somewhat regularly, and the amount of people attending those
Speaker 16: meetings slowly started to grow, so it was maybe like
Speaker 16: two people, three people here and there. And then we
Speaker 16: took a break from the holidays because people were just
Speaker 16: generally unable to make it out and everything was super
Speaker 16: chaotic at the store. And after the holidays, I had
Speaker 16: the idea of hosting potlucks essentially and inviting people to potlucks. Ah,
Speaker 16: I can't remember, Renee, were you coming to these meetings
Speaker 16: before or after the potlucks?
Speaker 17: The first meeting I went to was at the hall
Speaker 17: where it was essentially just us grieving about our working
Speaker 17: conditions while the seasonals were there, and sort of it
Speaker 17: was I don't know how much it was in the
Speaker 17: works for you, how much stuff you had done up
Speaker 17: until that point, but I think that was the moment
Speaker 17: where we sort of became confident as a body in
Speaker 17: our prospects were unionizing. And then ye, the Pollux.
Speaker 16: Thereafter, Yeah, and the Pollux ended up starting to pull
Speaker 16: around around ten people. I think the highest attended one
Speaker 16: was actually twelve. And so when you have a shop
Speaker 16: that has about thirty two people in the bargaining unit,
Speaker 16: that is about a third of the shop attending an
Speaker 16: early union meeting while we're still in the underground phase
Speaker 16: of organizing, and we managed to successfully remain under round
Speaker 16: up until we decided to go public on our own terms.
Speaker 16: On March thirty. First, we had a march on the Boss,
Speaker 16: which slightly inconveniently, the boss had actually left the shop
Speaker 16: about forty five minutes early in for a shift, and
Speaker 16: we had accounted for her leaving early, but we didn't
Speaker 16: account for her leaving that early, and so the march
Speaker 16: on the boss kind of had this anti climax moment
Speaker 16: where the manager just wasn't in the store anymore and
Speaker 16: there wasn't anyone that actually had supervisory authority at the
Speaker 16: store for the march.
Speaker 12: Which I think there's two things there. I want to
Speaker 12: I want to come back to. Wond is the like,
Speaker 12: oh yeah, well, of course management. Management never found out
Speaker 12: about the UNI, but just left early because their management.
Speaker 12: And it's like, oh right, no, yeah, what happens if
Speaker 12: you leave just randomly walk off your job site like
Speaker 12: forty five minutes early, you're fucked. But managements just like, yeah,
Speaker 12: fuck it, I'm just done. I'm just out, Like I'm
Speaker 12: just I'm just leaving. Everything's gonna be fine, even if
Speaker 12: I'm not there, so I'm just leave roadly, right. God,
Speaker 12: I wanted to talk about the potlucks a little bit
Speaker 12: because it's a really good idea as just a way
Speaker 12: to make sure you can consistently get a bunch of
Speaker 12: people there, and yeah, can you talk about sort of
Speaker 12: what that was like and how they've been and what
Speaker 12: the effect of that has been.
Speaker 16: The POTLUCKX came about because I had the idea that
Speaker 16: people are going to be more willing to come to
Speaker 16: an event if it wasn't just going to be a
Speaker 16: meeting where they sat down and had to talk shop
Speaker 16: and they had to start talking about work while they're
Speaker 16: off the clock.
Speaker 2: But they'd be more much more.
Speaker 16: Likely to come if the meeting was framed more as
Speaker 16: a way to just hang out with their coworkers and
Speaker 16: eat dinner.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 16: So this actually came from my experience when I was
Speaker 16: a kid. I grew up behind and even though I'm
Speaker 16: no longer Behi, the way that our community did it
Speaker 16: back home was mostly through community feasts and having prioritizing,
Speaker 16: like the feasts first and then the religious discussion later.
Speaker 16: So taking that sort of and putting a more of
Speaker 16: a union spin on it was the idea behind that,
Speaker 16: and it was a massive hit. Oh yeah, Renee, do
Speaker 16: you have any more thoughts on that?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 17: I think the fact too that our worker body is
Speaker 17: I don't know if uniquely is the right word, but
Speaker 17: especially tight knit and supportive of one another really just
Speaker 17: sort of helped things flow in a very natural and
Speaker 17: easy going way. It was just super like salient for
Speaker 17: everything to come about out of these pollocks. We just
Speaker 17: sort of like sat down and immediately started like complaining
Speaker 17: about work. That oh yeah got us going, and like
Speaker 17: pretty much every meeting sense like that's how we just
Speaker 17: like start our our discussion or in our meetings is
Speaker 17: just what bullshit have you been facing from your managers?
Speaker 17: Et cetera. And we have to cut it short every time.
Speaker 16: Yeah, it feels bad sometimes to have to cut these
Speaker 16: complaints periods short because I think they can go on
Speaker 16: for two to three hours if if we're not careful,
Speaker 16: and I think the early ones did to actually go
Speaker 16: on for two to three hours, and we had clearly
Speaker 16: cought books that we didn't get any actual business done.
Speaker 16: We just spent two to three hours eating food and
Speaker 16: complaining about work with each other. And honestly, that kind
Speaker 16: of helped people get more comfortable with the idea, and
Speaker 16: it really agitated people in a way that I don't
Speaker 16: think we would have been able to do if we
Speaker 16: had just like tried to talk to people at work
Speaker 16: about unionizing or had like a more formal meeting, And
Speaker 16: it really just kept the moment in going.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 17: I think it has this effect of like realizing everything
Speaker 17: because I mean, even I would walk in and be thinking, like,
Speaker 17: you know, this is like such a taxing endeavor unionizing
Speaker 17: the workplace, and yeah, yeah, every once in a while
Speaker 17: you'd have some sort of hesitation, I guess, but then
Speaker 17: every time I would leave, it would just sort of
Speaker 17: be like, this is like this is the only option
Speaker 17: and we're definitely going to do it, and we're all
Speaker 17: with it and it feels good.
Speaker 12: Well yeah, yeah, it seems like from from everything that
Speaker 12: I've heard and everything that you're saying, it seems like
Speaker 12: it's a really powerful way to sort of both combat
Speaker 12: atomization both. Is it just like, oh, this is like
Speaker 12: a social space where you and the people you work
Speaker 12: with who are your friends can exist with each other,
Speaker 12: and then also in a we can combat sort of
Speaker 12: alienation and adimisation and stuff by just doing the union
Speaker 12: work of Oh my god, we all have all of.
Speaker 6: These issues with our bosses.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and when we return, we're going to talking and
Speaker 12: going to ask about the issues with the bosses. But
Speaker 12: first here I don't know the product services that support
Speaker 12: this podcast.
Speaker 17: We are back.
Speaker 12: I was like, oh, I have a good transition. I
Speaker 12: can go from complaining about the bosses to talk about
Speaker 12: what the bosses are doing. And then I was like, shit,
Speaker 12: I was supposed to cut an add We didn't think
Speaker 12: of that one fast enough, but you know, speaking speaking
Speaker 12: of doing things fast enough. So yeah, I wanted to
Speaker 12: ask before we get into sort of how things have
Speaker 12: been going more recently and where the campaign is going
Speaker 12: in elections stuff, other than sort of the pay raise stuff,
Speaker 12: what are the kinds of things that people have been
Speaker 12: dealing with Atmuji.
Speaker 16: So there's a lot of small things that have kind
Speaker 16: of piled up, and honestly, I say small things, but
Speaker 16: each one of these is kind of just like shocking
Speaker 16: on its own, but not rising necessarily to anyone that's
Speaker 16: worked in the service industry at all. Yeah, So, beyond
Speaker 16: the races, there's just been like a long pattern of
Speaker 16: emotional abuse from the bosses. People have been have been
Speaker 16: yelled at for pretty much no reason. The bosses have
Speaker 16: directly insulted workers' abilities, like on the floor as they're
Speaker 16: doing stuff. They've done things like pressure staff not to
Speaker 16: use their sick time, even going so far as occasionally
Speaker 16: implying that getting sick is like your own fault and
Speaker 16: that people are able to perfectly prevent themselves from getting sick.
Speaker 12: Yeah, in your job, you have to be around people
Speaker 12: all the time because you're doing a service. God, I
Speaker 12: hate this, like getting weird pseudo eugenesis shit about disease
Speaker 12: that's just everywhere now that runs the Department of yeah,
Speaker 12: Health and Human Services of the CDC.
Speaker 16: Like this, this weekend or this last weekend at the
Speaker 16: time of recording was Memorial Day weekend, and on SAT,
Speaker 16: the peak day of that weekend, there were three thousand
Speaker 16: customers approximately in store over the course of the day.
Speaker 16: And reminder that we are a team of thirty two
Speaker 16: people in total, and so of course not all thirty
Speaker 16: two people are going to be at the store at
Speaker 16: once at the same time. And so when your crew
Speaker 16: is maybe ten fifteen if you're lucky, people big and
Speaker 16: handling a customer volume of about three thousand over the
Speaker 16: course of a day. You're interacting with so many people
Speaker 16: that it's worse than Maybe it's not worse than, because
Speaker 16: kids can get pretty pretty nasty sometimes, with much respect
Speaker 16: to all the teachers out there, it can get to
Speaker 16: be a bit of a biohazard, especially when you're working
Speaker 16: in places like the fitting room that don't have ventilation
Speaker 16: and you're possibly interacting the closest with customers, and you're
Speaker 16: constantly interacting with like clothing that has been like pressed
Speaker 16: up against people's bodies. You're interacting with people that just
Speaker 16: aren't being super conscious about the space, and you're maybe
Speaker 16: you're in this small confines with two, three, even four
Speaker 16: other people for a prolonged period of time. Of course,
Speaker 16: the customer service team is going to get sick more.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's like a small and medium sized like convention
Speaker 12: that's just running through your store over the course of
Speaker 12: one day. It's like, oh, yeah, everyone has like pax
Speaker 12: pocks or whatever they're like convention plague is. But that's
Speaker 12: just like going to work. It's like oh yeah, no,
Speaker 12: of course, apparently somehow you're supposed to like magically have
Speaker 12: the like anti disease talismans. Yeah, it's like the plagued masses.
Speaker 16: And on top of that, I've called out maybe once
Speaker 16: a month. I think that maybe there's one month where
Speaker 16: it was twice a month since January. And I've already
Speaker 16: used up all the allocated sick time that I get
Speaker 16: for a year, Jesus. And that's with one of the
Speaker 16: better sick pay plans as a full timer. And so
Speaker 16: I can't imagine what people are having to go through
Speaker 16: at part time, where they're already not getting enough hours
Speaker 16: to pay rent off of their job. Yeah, and they're
Speaker 16: having to decide essentially between coming to work sick or
Speaker 16: calling out and taking that financial hit. I know one
Speaker 16: of our staff members has actually been evicted because they
Speaker 16: were not able to make rent because they didn't make
Speaker 16: enough hours.
Speaker 17: Oh my god, we're just having your sick hours rejected
Speaker 17: on the app.
Speaker 6: But it's an app.
Speaker 12: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 12: If your sick hours can get rejected, you don't have
Speaker 12: sick hours like yeah.
Speaker 16: And there's more too. It doesn't end there. They apply
Speaker 16: policies that we have this employee handbook that has this
Speaker 16: list of requirements and expectations and it is not really
Speaker 16: a huge part of our employment typically, but the policies
Speaker 16: that they have listed there are applied and consistently. Stuff
Speaker 16: like the uniform code is one of the biggest examples
Speaker 16: of this, where they will more heavily enforce the uniform
Speaker 16: code against people of color, or people with alternative styles
Speaker 16: of dress, or even they can be they can be
Speaker 16: fairly fat phobic. There have been multiple people that have
Speaker 16: said that the managers will shure them to essentially cover
Speaker 16: up parts of their body, that they will allow skinnier
Speaker 16: people to show.
Speaker 12: What Jesus Christ, Oh my god, that is so incredibly shitty,
Speaker 12: and that's got to be illegal somehow, even under like
Speaker 12: unhinged American labor law. That just feels like it feels
Speaker 12: like a very open form of discrimination. But Jesus Christ,
Speaker 12: oh my god.
Speaker 16: Yeah, do you have anything to add renee.
Speaker 17: Along those lines, just sort of like being asked to
Speaker 17: profile people. All employees can be scheduled to cover the
Speaker 17: securities breaks, which basically just involves standing around one of
Speaker 17: the entrances and reporting anything quote fishy on the radios,
Speaker 17: anything suspicious, they say suspicious.
Speaker 12: So they could just co opt you into being a
Speaker 12: security guard.
Speaker 17: What, Yeah, the security guard doesn't have any duties regarding
Speaker 17: like loss prevention. All the managers do that as part
Speaker 17: of their duties, I guess. But yeah, so they just
Speaker 17: sort of say suspicious people.
Speaker 16: And on that note too, there have been times where
Speaker 16: people have been maybe not strictly disciplined. I actually don't
Speaker 16: know for sure if there's been an instant of someone
Speaker 16: being written up, but there have been times where the
Speaker 16: managers have approached people and essentially just I yelled at
Speaker 16: them for allowing someone to get out of the store
Speaker 16: with merchandise, even though loss prevention is very specifically not
Speaker 16: part of our job description and that the official store
Speaker 16: policy actively discourages staff from engaging an active loss prevention
Speaker 16: like that.
Speaker 12: So you're getting yelled at for doing the thing you
Speaker 12: were told to do that is explicitly not part of
Speaker 12: your job, that's supposed to be the manager's job, and
Speaker 12: the managers are pissed off that you're not doing what's
Speaker 12: nominally their job. That you also and the written thing
Speaker 12: you're not supposed to do. Exactly incredible, incredible, incredible catch
Speaker 12: twenty two logic here, it's real, just oh, yeah, you're
Speaker 12: explicitly not supposed to do this. You could get punished
Speaker 12: if you do it, but also if you don't do it,
Speaker 12: we're gonna yell at you. It's gone. Jesus Christ.
Speaker 16: Yeah, yeah, naturally, there's not really anything that we can
Speaker 16: do about this besides unionize and besides start taking actions
Speaker 16: on our own, because the law certainly isn't going to
Speaker 16: help us for this. Even organ state law, which is
Speaker 16: which hans to be more protective of workers than other
Speaker 16: states are. They're incredibly overwhelmed right now with requests and
Speaker 16: going through the bully Bureau of organ Labor and Industries
Speaker 16: I think is the acronym going down the Bullie websites lists.
Speaker 16: There's a complaints box, but it says on the website
Speaker 16: that they have an incredibly high backlog of complaints that
Speaker 16: they're trying to process and that they're going through a
Speaker 16: triage system, and none of the things that we've listed
Speaker 16: so far to be placed very highly on that triage.
Speaker 16: In addition to that, we don't have access to direct
Speaker 16: access to our HR department at work. They ask us
Speaker 16: to go through a third party reporting company called Lighthouse,
Speaker 16: and as far as I know, no one has ever
Speaker 16: heard anything about Lighthouse doing anything to resolve a situation
Speaker 16: between them and management when management is treating them unfairly incredible,
Speaker 16: and it's essentially feels like just shouting into the void
Speaker 16: interacting with Lighthouse because you're just sending a complaint to
Speaker 16: a body that you don't have any access to and
Speaker 16: just hoping that they fix something.
Speaker 12: So they've contracted out their HR department, so you're just
Speaker 12: like talking to their car or is it that you
Speaker 12: can't communicate with them directly? And that's very weird.
Speaker 16: So they have an HR department. The workers at the
Speaker 16: physical location cannot communicate with HR. We are not given
Speaker 16: their their phone numbers, or their emails or anything like that.
Speaker 16: All of our HR communication has to be done through
Speaker 16: our general store manager. So when we have problems with
Speaker 16: the general store manager or assistant store managers, we can't
Speaker 16: really go to HR because we have to go through
Speaker 16: the very people that we're having problems with in order
Speaker 16: to reach our HR.
Speaker 12: Incredible. It's all means to make HR even faker, which
Speaker 12: is incredible. Oh good lord.
Speaker 16: It would also be remiss, I guess, to forget about
Speaker 16: the sexual assaults, Oh Jesus correct, Maybe not specifically sexual assault,
Speaker 16: but definitely sexual harassment possible sexual assault that has been
Speaker 16: raised to management before, where the management supposedly pushed those
Speaker 16: complaints to HR, but then HR would wait for weeks
Speaker 16: before doing anything about it. Oh my god, this happened
Speaker 16: a year or two ago. No, it was probably more
Speaker 16: in the realm of two to three years ago, if
Speaker 16: my memory is correct, where we had a coworker that
Speaker 16: was not just pro filing people and calling security on
Speaker 16: people that were doing nothing, but he was also sexually
Speaker 16: harassing other coworkers. Jesus Christ and the store managers told
Speaker 16: us that they had pushed these complaints to HR, but
Speaker 16: HR wasn't doing anything, and it took them about a month,
Speaker 16: I believe, to fire this person. And essentially what they
Speaker 16: were doing before is they were telling people that if
Speaker 16: they talked about the situation or create a drama about
Speaker 16: the situation, that they would retaliate against the people that
Speaker 16: were talking about the situation.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, Jesus.
Speaker 16: They didn't say outright, but they implied everything up to
Speaker 16: job loss for the people that were talking about this.
Speaker 12: Oh my god.
Speaker 16: And they started pulling people into the office and essentially
Speaker 16: having one on one conversations Oh my god, that were
Speaker 16: honestly quite scary to the people that were trying to
Speaker 16: spread the word about this, and they created quite a
Speaker 16: hostile store environment for a long time. Around that time
Speaker 16: was actually the first time that we had attempted to
Speaker 16: try and get a push to unionize, but that ended
Speaker 16: up dissolving and that was essentially the end of that
Speaker 16: up until on this most recent push.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 12: God, that's really hideous, both the way in which they
Speaker 12: just pushed it up the latter to HR and then
Speaker 12: just didn't do anything about it for like a fucking
Speaker 12: month that that also just the only thing they did
Speaker 12: do about it was retaliating against people who were trying
Speaker 12: to talk about it. That is Jesus as disgusting.
Speaker 16: Yeah, about the most that they did during that month
Speaker 16: to the actual coworker in question that was doing the
Speaker 16: harassment was they tried to maintain some degree of physical
Speaker 16: separation between him and the other coworkers and that was it.
Speaker 16: They kept him on the roster, They kept him at
Speaker 16: the same positions that other people were working. He had
Speaker 16: essentially all the same job responsibilities as other people and
Speaker 16: still had a pretty high degree of contact with other
Speaker 16: coworkers during this whole time.
Speaker 12: Yeah, So the people who were trying to speak out.
Speaker 12: I guess it until this I was fired, we're getting
Speaker 12: punished more than he.
Speaker 16: Was, essentially, Yeah, Jesus all the way up until he
Speaker 16: was finally fired. And I don't know what it was
Speaker 16: that actually got them to do it this time, but
Speaker 16: they wanted to wait until they had got something actually
Speaker 16: on camera, I believe, but it's kind of hard for
Speaker 16: you to catch something like harassment words on camera.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 16: If their bar for sexual harassment is stuff that they
Speaker 16: can catch on camera, they're never going to get most
Speaker 16: instances of harassment, and they're not doing their their proper
Speaker 16: job investigating these accusations.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and that also means that they're delivered strategy is
Speaker 12: to wait for someone to get hurt again, exactly. That's right,
Speaker 12: They're just throwing them to the fucking lions dend. Their
Speaker 12: strategy to detect that a bus is about to hit
Speaker 12: someone is to push someone in front of the bus
Speaker 12: and take a picture of it, which is just so
Speaker 12: unbelievably unacceptable.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 16: And I want to be clear too that this whole
Speaker 16: list is very much non exhaustive. There have been so
Speaker 16: many cases of just patterns of abuse for management and
Speaker 16: it's not possible for me to go down the entire
Speaker 16: list of things. I mean, as I mentioned previously, it
Speaker 16: would be two to three hours of people complaining about
Speaker 16: stuff that they had gone through at work during these meetings,
Speaker 16: and occasionally you get some repetition, but this is something
Speaker 16: that is very consistent. It's just a part of working
Speaker 16: at the store.
Speaker 12: Yeah, every day there's another unique core that someone is experiencing,
Speaker 12: and I guess this brings us to Okay, so how
Speaker 12: do you make the horrors stop? And that is unionizing.
Speaker 12: So yeah, let's talk about what's been happening recently in
Speaker 12: terms of like how the union is immobilizing and about
Speaker 12: the upcoming election, which will be a few days after
Speaker 12: you're hearing this, assuming you're listening to this the day
Speaker 12: it comes out.
Speaker 17: Yeah, So we've been sort of ramping up a little bit.
Speaker 17: It's been being inflowing since we started, you know, last
Speaker 17: like November, but we're really trying to kick it into gear,
Speaker 17: get people aware, get people back engaged. So we have
Speaker 17: a few things we've been doing well. On May first,
Speaker 17: for May Day, we tabled with the IWW and just
Speaker 17: started a petition just for signatures from the community. For
Speaker 17: support for acknowledgment if we ever need to, you know,
Speaker 17: pull it out and show our bosses that you know,
Speaker 17: this is no light endeavor. This is not like something
Speaker 17: they can laugh off. Yeah, but it ended up being
Speaker 17: sort of successful beyond what I imagined. We got lots
Speaker 17: of attention, lots of people saying that they had di
Speaker 17: I know that we were unionizing, people taking lots of
Speaker 17: pictures of us. Our big banner, got one inquiry for
Speaker 17: a journal report that I think is out now, and
Speaker 17: we were also written about in what was it? Was
Speaker 17: it Oregon Live or was the Oregonian? Do you remember, Luna?
Speaker 16: We had a small article published about us by the
Speaker 16: Northwest Libor Press that was then picked up by the
Speaker 16: Portland Mercury.
Speaker 17: That's right. Yeah, So we did that. And then other
Speaker 17: than that, we're sort of fighting some recently published propaganda
Speaker 17: from our boss is with display a hilarious amount of misinformation, Yeah,
Speaker 17: average boss communication.
Speaker 16: The other big thing that's been happening is that the
Speaker 16: reason that the election is happening so long after our
Speaker 16: initial march and declaration of intense to unionize is that
Speaker 16: the bosses have been trying to divide up the bargaining
Speaker 16: unit in a fairly strange case where the employer has
Speaker 16: been contending that the merchandising staff, which is essentially the
Speaker 16: back of the house staff but only like a sub
Speaker 16: section of the back of the house staff, are not
Speaker 16: eligible for unionization under the same union as the rest
Speaker 16: of the staff are. H they did this under the
Speaker 16: notion that the merchandising staff don't share a community of
Speaker 16: interest with the rest of the staff. And the other
Speaker 16: thing that they tried to do is they tried to
Speaker 16: take the keyholders, which are sort of like a shift
Speaker 16: lead position, away from the bargaining unit by trying to
Speaker 16: get them designated as supervisors, specifically Section two to eleven
Speaker 16: supervisors under the National Labor Relations Act. And we managed
Speaker 16: to shoot down both of those contests in a board
Speaker 16: hearing with the National Labor Relations Board. Hell yeah, and
Speaker 16: the process took a little bit over a month if
Speaker 16: I remember correctly, and without going too heavily into detail
Speaker 16: about it, the community of interests rule basically says that
Speaker 16: if employees don't share a community of interest with members
Speaker 16: of a bargaining unit, they have to unionize under a
Speaker 16: different union. And then the other thing is that the
Speaker 16: NLRA says that if you have supervisory authority, and there's
Speaker 16: a whole laundry list of authorities that are defined in
Speaker 16: the act. If you are a supervisor, then you don't
Speaker 16: get to unionize legally, period. And so what made this
Speaker 16: case strange is that typically employers try and add groups
Speaker 16: of employees onto the unit they believe are on the
Speaker 16: side of the employer of the anti union side, and
Speaker 16: the union generally has to contend that these people don't
Speaker 16: share community of interests or are supervisors or whatever. So
Speaker 16: it's kind of a bit of a strange situation where
Speaker 16: it's turned on its head, where instead the employer is
Speaker 16: having to prove that these people are not sharing community
Speaker 16: of interests or our supervisors. And so, even though we
Speaker 16: couldn't afford proper legal counsel and so then and representatives
Speaker 16: were myself and a friend of ours who was a
Speaker 16: member of the IWW, we were able to essentially represent
Speaker 16: ourselves in this board hearing, and the case was decided
Speaker 16: in our faith for on both counts. Hell yeah, so
Speaker 16: rock it really does?
Speaker 11: I was.
Speaker 16: I was not shocked to find out that the case
Speaker 16: was decided in our favor on the community of interest issue,
Speaker 16: because that would be like saying that the back of
Speaker 16: the houseworkers at a restaurants can't unionize with the front
Speaker 16: of the houseworkers just because they have different job descriptions.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Chiverish right.
Speaker 16: However, I was surprised at first. I was surprised at
Speaker 16: least that we managed to win on the issues of
Speaker 16: supervisory authority with the keyholders. I thought that it would
Speaker 16: take a pretty solid case in order for us to
Speaker 16: defend against that. And huge props to our friend, who
Speaker 16: I'm not sure if they're comfortable being name dropped as
Speaker 16: an IWW member like five to the world, so I'm
Speaker 16: not going to name them, but it is large thanks
Speaker 16: to this friend of ours that'll be on that case.
Speaker 16: Oh so that's where we stand now, and the board
Speaker 16: hearing was decided in our favor, and the election has
Speaker 16: been decided for next week, and both guys are now
Speaker 16: just trying to have our campaigns in preparation.
Speaker 12: Yeah, hell yeah. It's a sort of different version of
Speaker 12: like the very common tactic of because bosses want there
Speaker 12: to be more time in between when you file your
Speaker 12: paperwork to unionize and the election, because it gives them
Speaker 12: more time to do intimidation and fear tactics, and like
Speaker 12: that period in between designed to unionize and getting to
Speaker 12: actually do the vote is one of the perios where
Speaker 12: union is most vulnerable. And it's also really impressive that, Yeah,
Speaker 12: you just sort of walked into the board hearing and
Speaker 12: beat them by just reading a bunch of labor law stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 12: workers of the world too, fucking anti union lawyers zero.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 16: Basically, yeah, it was very strange across examining my manager
Speaker 16: under oath hell yeah, and then going to work. I
Speaker 16: didn't manage to attend the entirety of either of the
Speaker 16: days of the hearing because I had to close. I
Speaker 16: had to go to work at noon on both days
Speaker 16: that the hearing was. That's so nuts, which is why
Speaker 16: I wasn't there for the full hearing for either of
Speaker 16: the days. So I ended up having to log on
Speaker 16: in the morning onto the zoom meeting and attend the
Speaker 16: first two and a half hours and then hop off
Speaker 16: call and leave and then go to work and see
Speaker 16: my managers at work.
Speaker 12: Oh my god, Oh my god. It's also that's so nuts.
Speaker 12: You didn't get time off to go to the union
Speaker 12: hearing exactly.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I mean they were getting paid right, that's.
Speaker 2: Why they were getting paid.
Speaker 16: Oh my god, the managers that were testifying in favor
Speaker 16: of the employer capitalism.
Speaker 2: Bad system.
Speaker 12: Wow, we could possibly have expected this.
Speaker 16: Yeah, it was actively a challenge to find witnesses to
Speaker 16: testify for us, because the people who would be able
Speaker 16: to call us witnesses or coworkers are people who are
Speaker 16: maybe working the days of the hearing and can't actually
Speaker 16: get time off to come testify because they have to
Speaker 16: be at work.
Speaker 8: Oh my god, that's so fucked.
Speaker 16: There was one person who we approached because we were
Speaker 16: hoping that they would testify for us, who couldn't because
Speaker 16: she was working that day. It's too too complicated of
Speaker 16: a process to want to try and like subpoena them
Speaker 16: and legally get them to have the time off to
Speaker 16: come to the hearing.
Speaker 6: Jesus.
Speaker 16: So we ended up just having to figure out a
Speaker 16: way to present witnesses and have a slightly weaker case
Speaker 16: because of it. And thankfully that didn't end up mattering.
Speaker 16: But for a minute I was worried that we wouldn't
Speaker 16: be able to have as good of a case as
Speaker 16: we could have because we were not able to get
Speaker 16: a keyholder on the stand like we were hoping.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I'm glad, I'm glad you're able to pull it together.
Speaker 12: That's really impressive. And yeah, that you still just beat
Speaker 12: them even though they had And I guess that is
Speaker 12: one of the lessons of this is like, yeah, if
Speaker 12: you're willing to put the work in and work together
Speaker 12: and figure out how to navigate the system and figure
Speaker 12: out where you can apply pressure, like, yeah, you can
Speaker 12: beat a bunch of people who have way way more
Speaker 12: resources than you do because they're usually just wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 16: Yeah, I want to actually really drive that point home
Speaker 16: that neither I or my co representative have experience in
Speaker 16: any sort of like legal fields. Neither of us are
Speaker 16: even lost students. We are just the people that decided
Speaker 16: to step up and take on this role. And I
Speaker 16: don't think that there is some like special unique quality
Speaker 16: about us that allowed us to do it. It was
Speaker 16: just putting in the work that was required. It's a
Speaker 16: scary thing, being asked to essentially represent yourself in a
Speaker 16: legal setting, and I think it's a testament to how
Speaker 16: people are capable of things that they're not necessarily trained
Speaker 16: to do, and that this whole process of unionization does
Speaker 16: not necessarily require the vast resources that you might think
Speaker 16: it entails. It requires some planning, it requires some tactics,
Speaker 16: but it is something that everyone is able to do.
Speaker 12: Hell yeah, I guess if I was really on my
Speaker 12: game here, I would have something about like the concept
Speaker 12: of the organic intellectual, et cetera, et cetera. But I
Speaker 12: don't even think that's really what's going on here. It's
Speaker 12: just like, in the same way that like economics is
Speaker 12: designed to be esoteric, and you know, like finance is
Speaker 12: designed to be difficult to understand. But in the immortal
Speaker 12: words of Dan Elson, there are plenty of c students
Speaker 12: who've gotten economics degrees, like you can understand this. It's
Speaker 12: just it just takes some work, and it takes some
Speaker 12: dedication to fighting together, and it takes yeah, people working together.
Speaker 12: But these people are not smarter than you. They're all
Speaker 12: better than you. They have more money, but that's ultimately
Speaker 12: not the fact that it decides everything.
Speaker 16: And I don't want to discount the amount of support
Speaker 16: that we received from the rest of our coworkers as well. Yeah,
Speaker 16: this was truly a group effort, and everyone helped out
Speaker 16: in their own small ways, whether it was helping take
Speaker 16: care of social media posts, whether it was helping cook
Speaker 16: for us, host meeting locations. I've been dealing with a
Speaker 16: pest problem at my apartment, so I've been unable to
Speaker 16: for about the amount of time that all this legal
Speaker 16: process has been going on, So I haven't been able
Speaker 16: to host pollocks anymore, and a former coworker of ours
Speaker 16: has been hosting instead and putting in the work for that.
Speaker 16: It really is something that works when everyone comes together
Speaker 16: and takes part in the process.
Speaker 12: Hell yeah, So speaking of everyone coming together and helping
Speaker 12: to work for the process, if people want to help
Speaker 12: you all, what can they do.
Speaker 16: We are looking actually at a bit of a financial
Speaker 16: struggle right now. The biggest thing is that we don't
Speaker 16: have enough the funds at the moment to go on strike,
Speaker 16: not for any significant duration at least. Yeah, we have
Speaker 16: a go fundme Mojie Workers United.
Speaker 12: Yeah, we will put that in the description.
Speaker 16: The other thing is that we are looking for a
Speaker 16: lot of social media support. Actually, Mushi is a very
Speaker 16: media driven company and we are trying to set up
Speaker 16: an Instagram account that has a lot of visibility. You
Speaker 16: can follow us also Moodie Workers United on Instagram. And
Speaker 16: it seems like people have been sharing our articles and
Speaker 16: across the internet, both the WLP article about us and
Speaker 16: then now you're interviewing us, which is an enormous help
Speaker 16: to trust.
Speaker 8: Mia.
Speaker 16: Thank you. We super appreciate it.
Speaker 17: Yeah, thank you so much, of course.
Speaker 12: Happy.
Speaker 16: I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Renee.
Speaker 17: Yeah, just the Instagram. We have lots of very talented
Speaker 17: artists working Muji like everyone. It's great graphic designers, a
Speaker 17: lot of just very fun and cool people. So yeah,
Speaker 17: I'm sure that will be expressed in our future social
Speaker 17: media posts. Yeah.
Speaker 12: Hell yeah, what we'll link that description too.
Speaker 16: Awesome, thank you Mia.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 12: On a one final thing, you want to plug direct action?
Speaker 2: Yes, I do.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 16: We've had We've spent a lot of time talking about
Speaker 16: the legal side of unionization because our union is currently
Speaker 16: seeking federal recognition with the NLRB. I want to emphasize
Speaker 16: that this is not the end of unions. The goal
Speaker 16: is not a contract. The goal is to use direct
Speaker 16: action to enact the changes that you want to see
Speaker 16: in your workplace. For what are probably obvious reasons, I
Speaker 16: don't want to talk about specifically stuff that we have
Speaker 16: planned or maybe not even stuff that we've done in
Speaker 16: the past. But for example, one thing that I can
Speaker 16: talk about is that we have an ice response plan,
Speaker 16: Like what do we do if I shows up at
Speaker 16: a workplace and tries to tries to raid us. We
Speaker 16: have a plan for that. And I obviously don't want
Speaker 16: to go further into detail about that, but that is
Speaker 16: something that we did as an example of a direct action.
Speaker 16: There's also other stuff. There's lots of historical examples of
Speaker 16: workers getting gains in their workplace. You have examples of
Speaker 16: stuff like just a simple march on the boss has
Speaker 16: historically worked to sway the boss even without necessarily a
Speaker 16: change in the contract. Or you can have stuff that's
Speaker 16: all very legal on above board obviously, of people like
Speaker 16: just agreeing to not be as friendly with their boss
Speaker 16: at work and an emotionally sway their boss that way,
Speaker 16: or having smaller outside of work actions where people are
Speaker 16: helping each other out and having a workplace mutual aid project,
Speaker 16: or even something as simple as implementing like a workplace
Speaker 16: fitness plan. That's something that we've discussed a couple of
Speaker 16: times at meetings, very loosely, like just going on hikes together,
Speaker 16: or having like the community sports and stuff just to
Speaker 16: keep each other in shape and keep our communities healthy.
Speaker 16: All of this stuff is stuff that exists beyond the contract.
Speaker 16: We're currently emphasizing the contract because that's what we are
Speaker 16: at the moment seeking, because the contract helps this feel
Speaker 16: more real for people who aren't quite on board with
Speaker 16: the idea of humanization yet. But unionization at a workplace
Speaker 16: gets you much more than just a better contract with
Speaker 16: your employer. And you can enact changes at your workplace
Speaker 16: faster if you work together with your coworkers and organize
Speaker 16: your coworkers. Hell yeah, anything to add renee.
Speaker 17: And the union is very aware, you know, regarding their
Speaker 17: respective capacities to help what they can, you know, and
Speaker 17: cannot do their limits. And I think just after you know,
Speaker 17: working together enough, everything marries in a very effective way.
Speaker 17: And and yeah, even just like like all of these
Speaker 17: sort of direct actions that that Luna was naming are
Speaker 17: just came out of our meetings, just ideas that people
Speaker 17: think might be fun to do, or or you know,
Speaker 17: people sharing their hobbies and and want to share them
Speaker 17: with other people. Yeah, and so yeah, it really is
Speaker 17: just sort of a fun hangout. I don't want to
Speaker 17: trivialize it. But but it's like, you know, extreme hang
Speaker 17: hanging out.
Speaker 12: It's well, yeah, I think it touches on something that's
Speaker 12: really important about all of this, which is, you know,
Speaker 12: people will in the abstract talk about unions as like
Speaker 12: social institutions, but like what that actually means is this, Like, yeah,
Speaker 12: it's a place where you and your friends and the
Speaker 12: people you work with go and do stuff together. And
Speaker 12: you know, I guess, I guess I want to wrap
Speaker 12: up on like, if you want a way out of
Speaker 12: the stultifying boredom and isolation and crushing poverty of the
Speaker 12: Wadern capitalist experience, you too can't create You can create
Speaker 12: a union and resist all of those things simultaneously.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, welcome to It could happen here a show
Speaker 6: about things falling apart, the thing falling apart the past
Speaker 6: few years, the Democratic Party that's foot we're going to
Speaker 6: be talking about to I am joined by Sophie Ray Lichterman.
Speaker 1: Hello, Hi, I'm not excited about this.
Speaker 6: This is great. Last time we were on an episode together,
Speaker 6: we were talking about our two favorite Democrats, Bill and
Speaker 6: Hillary Clinton. Ah.
Speaker 10: Yes, they gave me COVID at the DNC. I'll never
Speaker 10: forgive them.
Speaker 6: Not talking about them today, but we are talking about
Speaker 6: the DNC. The other DNC, the one who puts on
Speaker 6: the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. So we're gonna be
Speaker 6: talking about the DNC autopsy. Oh boy. First, some background. Yes,
Speaker 6: after Democrats lost the House, the Senate, and the presidency
Speaker 6: in twenty twenty four, if I'm reading that correctly, including
Speaker 6: losing the popular vote, something that has not happened in
Speaker 6: twenty years. The Democratic National Committee, the DNC, wondered why
Speaker 6: did that happen? So the DNC commission to report on
Speaker 6: what happened with the twenty twenty four election, and this
Speaker 6: report came to be known as the twenty twenty four Autopsy.
Speaker 6: The newly elected DNC chair Ken Martin pledged to make
Speaker 6: the upcoming report public, announcing after his chair election quote,
Speaker 6: there has to be some lessons that we glean on
Speaker 6: that so we can operationalize it, not just here in DC,
Speaker 6: but through all the fifty seven state parties. We have
Speaker 6: to look backwards and look forward at the same time.
Speaker 6: The twenty twenty four election autopsy was commissioned in early
Speaker 6: twenty twenty five and was supposed to come out later
Speaker 6: that spring, but got pushed back to the end of summer,
Speaker 6: and then the fall, and finally, in December of twenty
Speaker 6: twenty five, Ken Martin announced that the DNC would not
Speaker 6: in fact be releasing the autopsy report. In Martin's brief
Speaker 6: statement explaining or rather not explaining why he's backpedaling on
Speaker 6: his promise to make the report public, he claimed that
Speaker 6: the committee is quote already putting our learnings into motion.
Speaker 10: Who votes Ken martin In to be the chair because
Speaker 10: I know his careerer is basically Minnesota guy, yes in
Speaker 10: turning government jobs, vice president chair, And then.
Speaker 6: Basically around four hundred members of state party chapters are
Speaker 6: chosen to be members of the Democratic National Committee, who
Speaker 6: then in turn vote on national party leadership and decide
Speaker 6: how primaries operate, though if a sitting president is a Democrat,
Speaker 6: the president can effectively choose the chair. Sn End reported
Speaker 6: that DNC officials had concerns that the report would quote
Speaker 6: inflame ongoing tensions within the party at a time they
Speaker 6: felt they had begun to generate winning momentum quote, and
Speaker 6: the committee officials decided that it would be a quote
Speaker 6: unquote strategic failure on the part of the DNC to
Speaker 6: publicly look backward. That was their reasons for not releasing
Speaker 6: the report. We're already winning elections in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 6: so there's actually no point in just looking back at
Speaker 6: why we lost to twenty twenty four. And this was
Speaker 6: alluded to in Ken Martin's statement announcing that he would
Speaker 6: not be releasing the report. Quote, we are aligned on
Speaker 6: what's important, and that's learning from the past and winning
Speaker 6: the future. Here's our north star. Does this help us win?
Speaker 6: If the answer is no, it's a distraction from the
Speaker 6: core mission. So the report would just be a distraction
Speaker 6: from letting us currently win going forward.
Speaker 1: For the DNC chair, that logic is ridiculous.
Speaker 6: No, because that's not the real reason why the report
Speaker 6: wasn't released. We will get to why the report wasn't
Speaker 6: okay very soon.
Speaker 10: That sounds like a majorly half assed reason, So okay,
Speaker 10: say more, say more.
Speaker 1: I'm listening.
Speaker 6: As the public release of the autopsy was continuously delayed
Speaker 6: in twenty twenty five and then just eventually canceled, the
Speaker 6: speculation about the contents of the report grew that the
Speaker 6: DNC must be hiding the report because it's f findings
Speaker 6: on why the Dems lost so bad in twenty twenty
Speaker 6: four must run contrary to the interests of party elites.
Speaker 6: So by burying the report, the DNC must be trying
Speaker 6: to protect the future political prospects of Kamala Harris, obscure
Speaker 6: the misuse of massive funds donated to the DNC and
Speaker 6: election campaigns. Or the report must actually definitively prove the
Speaker 6: Bidenhairs administration's failure to act on the genocide of Palestinians
Speaker 6: while aiding in a betting Israel must have played a
Speaker 6: significant factor in the election, possibly the determining factor. So
Speaker 6: if the report found such things, then the DNC might
Speaker 6: want to suppress the report to not have that information
Speaker 6: be public. But now we know that's not the reason
Speaker 6: the report was not released. The autopsy finding that the
Speaker 6: Democrats pro Israel position cost in the election was not
Speaker 6: the reason the report was buried, because last month the
Speaker 6: DNZ begrudgingly released and incomplete version of the election autopsy,
Speaker 6: which actually does not contain a single mention of Israel,
Speaker 6: Palestine or Gaza. It is not discussed in any way
Speaker 6: in a one hundred and ninety two page report.
Speaker 1: And what is in this report huh.
Speaker 6: We will also be getting into what's in the report. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 6: a lot of bad statistics, for one, unsourced graphs and
Speaker 6: discussions on whether you should spend more money on digital
Speaker 6: ads or TV ads is really really the bulk of
Speaker 6: the report, honestly. But before we get more into the
Speaker 6: report's findings, let's discuss the circumstances that led to the
Speaker 6: publishing of the unfinished autopsy and nearly a year after
Speaker 6: the finished version was supposed to come out. So this
Speaker 6: autopsy was authored by a guy named Paul Rivieria. There's
Speaker 6: a long time Democratic strategist and personal friend of DNC
Speaker 6: chair Ken Martin. Vira has not worked on a presidential
Speaker 6: campaign since two thousand and four.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 6: And despite being the sole person like tasked with running
Speaker 6: the report, and it's unclear how many people actually worked
Speaker 6: on it, but it was led by Riviera and it
Speaker 6: seems to be mostly be done by him. And despite that,
Speaker 6: Riviera only worked on it haart time while managing other
Speaker 6: contracts with sen and reporting that Riviera would say that
Speaker 6: he would only be available to conduct autopsy interviews before
Speaker 6: nine am or after seven pm or on weekends. That's
Speaker 6: when he conducted interviews for the report. Was only before
Speaker 6: nine am in the morning or after seven pm in
Speaker 6: the evening on week days and then also weekends.
Speaker 1: Was this weird or doing? What was his problem?
Speaker 6: Not much? Yeah? Apparently not much, sir, because yeah, this
Speaker 6: report was like delayed almost a full year. Yeah seesh. Now,
Speaker 6: only after his initial Spring twenty twenty five deadline did
Speaker 6: Rivera actually reach out to state party chairs in battleground
Speaker 6: states to interview them for the report, and he did
Speaker 6: not contact like T. Harris campaign staff until September, and
Speaker 6: many were not even asked to be interviewed. Portions of
Speaker 6: the autopsy were first revealed at a DNC National Finance
Speaker 6: Committee retreat for top donors held at a hotel in Millburg, Virginia,
Speaker 6: last October Percy and n At the donor retreat, Riviera
Speaker 6: himself gave a quote our long presentation with slides in
Speaker 6: part drawn directly from the report, in part via running
Speaker 6: his findings through an AI engine. Unquote, there was AI
Speaker 6: generated slides. He ran his report findings through an AI engine,
Speaker 6: according to CNN, which also generated slides, and that was
Speaker 6: what his presentation on the report at the donor retreat
Speaker 6: was based on. Was that the AI's regurgitation of report findings.
Speaker 1: Hold on, Hold on a second.
Speaker 10: So he's not willing to do work after nine am
Speaker 10: or after seven pm?
Speaker 6: Conduct please in that time.
Speaker 1: No, can't do any of that time.
Speaker 10: But yet he's just like using AI Yeah, great, DNC,
Speaker 10: feeling really hopeful.
Speaker 1: Continue, what did CNN find?
Speaker 6: So One of the slides that Riviera presented at this
Speaker 6: at this donor retreat attract the candidate's quote unquote area
Speaker 6: of focus by quote unquote content slash theme see an
Speaker 6: end notes quote. Riviera used an unclear methodology for the breakdown,
Speaker 6: assigning percentages to ten categories of content or theme. For Trump, Harris,
Speaker 6: and their running mates. The percentages in every column one
Speaker 6: for each candidate added up to well over one hundred percent.
Speaker 6: What he was trying to do here is like measure
Speaker 6: campaign themes, like you know, how much Trump focused on
Speaker 6: immigration compared to Harris. Right, So he had these like
Speaker 6: ten categories of like what the campaigns were focused on.
Speaker 6: But the percentages did not actually add up to one
Speaker 6: hundred percent.
Speaker 1: Of course they didn't.
Speaker 6: So he's just like making this stuff up, right, like
Speaker 6: it's it's again. They know. There's like an unclear methodology
Speaker 6: for the breakdown the fact these add up to over
Speaker 6: one hundred percent, Like, you cannot trust the legitimacy of
Speaker 6: any of this research now, So, after parts of the
Speaker 6: presentation were leaked to CNN, Scenan then obtained even more
Speaker 6: information about the contents of the shelved autopsy. Before publishing
Speaker 6: their findings, Scenan presented the DNC with what they knew
Speaker 6: about the report, prompting the DNC to just release the
Speaker 6: full report as submitted by Paul Riveria. And around this time,
Speaker 6: donors were also threatening to withhold funds for not publishing
Speaker 6: the report, so that probably also contributed. One of CNN's
Speaker 6: sources said that after the autopsy was published, Ken Martin
Speaker 6: informed DNC staff that Paul Via was no longer associated
Speaker 6: with the committee.
Speaker 1: These people, these fucking people.
Speaker 10: I mean, I did not read the entire report intentionally
Speaker 10: so that you could tell me about it. But the
Speaker 10: highlights that have been spread across the internet is did
Speaker 10: not mention Gaza, did not mention Joe Biden's age, and
Speaker 10: did not mention when Joe Biden dropped out late effectively.
Speaker 6: So well, we'll get into some of some of those
Speaker 6: in a little bit more detail. I think. One of
Speaker 6: the most interesting parts about the DNC's publishing of the
Speaker 6: unfinished report is that the published version of the autopsy
Speaker 6: contains annotations and corrections marked and read that the DNC
Speaker 6: added to the copy of the report as submitted by Riviera,
Speaker 6: and these were added for its public release. Okay, At
Speaker 6: the top of every single page, all one hundred and
Speaker 6: ninety two pages, reads a disclaimer quote disclaimer. This document
Speaker 6: reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The
Speaker 6: DNC was not provided with the underlying source, interviews, or
Speaker 6: supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein, and
Speaker 6: therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented unquote that is
Speaker 6: in read at the top of every single page. Ken
Speaker 6: Martin did issue a statement when the autopsy was published,
Speaker 6: reading quote. When I was elected DNC chair, I commissioned
Speaker 6: in after action review of the twenty twenty four election
Speaker 6: that I wanted to be honest and transparent and with
Speaker 6: actionable and specific takeaways for the future of the Democratic Party.
Speaker 6: When I received the report late last year, it wasn't
Speaker 6: ready for prime time, not even close, and because no
Speaker 6: source material was provided, it would have meant starting over
Speaker 6: I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp
Speaker 6: of approval on the report that was produced after last
Speaker 6: November's massive Democratic wins. I didn't want to create a distraction,
Speaker 6: but by not putting the report out, I ended up
Speaker 6: creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize
Speaker 6: for full transparency. I am release sing the report as
Speaker 6: we received it in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It
Speaker 6: does not meet my standards and it won't meet your standards.
Speaker 6: But I'm doing this because people need to be able
Speaker 6: to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word unquote.
Speaker 10: I don't know, man, that doesn't really sound very trustworthy. Brouh,
Speaker 10: sounds pretty bad.
Speaker 1: Sounds pretty bad. Here's a half asked report.
Speaker 10: It's not very good, and I've delayed it for over
Speaker 10: a year, but yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Guess here it is. No, it doesn't include any of
Speaker 1: the big issue things. Enjoy.
Speaker 6: It's a stunning sequence of events that kind of highlights
Speaker 6: all of the issues that everyone already has with it
Speaker 6: with the Democratic Party. Like the guy who was chosen
Speaker 6: to do the autopsy just happens to be a personal
Speaker 6: friend of the DNC chair, and said friend then fails
Speaker 6: to interrogate the institutional bias of the party. It is
Speaker 6: such a condensed, condensed, little version of why the party
Speaker 6: has had so many, so many troubles, and the report
Speaker 6: has published seems unwilling to actually be able to learn
Speaker 6: from successes that have been happening since the twenty twenty
Speaker 6: four election. Effectively, what the support actually is is a
Speaker 6: poorly sourced opinion piece that's dressed up as an election autopsy.
Speaker 6: It misspells names, it has typos, factual and statistical errors,
Speaker 6: and unsourced claims. Multiple key sections are left completely blank
Speaker 6: because Riviera never submitted them. The report is less interested
Speaker 6: in collecting data and interviews to inform analysis, but rather
Speaker 6: starts with certain assumptions and then cherry picks data to
Speaker 6: support this assumptions. But it doesn't even do that well
Speaker 6: because the included data is often inaccurate, and at times
Speaker 6: the analysis contradicts itself. Jesus Christ, a state party chair,
Speaker 6: told CNN quote it was very clear that it felt
Speaker 6: like Ken's theory of the case for the future of
Speaker 6: the party through the lens of twenty twenty four as
Speaker 6: opposed to a quote unquote autopsy, and after reading the report,
Speaker 6: I agree this is very much a report that's designed
Speaker 6: to fit in with what Ken Martin wants the message
Speaker 6: of the last election to be, and it tries to
Speaker 6: squeeze that into these like very rough shape of like
Speaker 6: an after election report, but it's really not.
Speaker 1: It's just like reeks of like lazy AI work.
Speaker 6: But all the like.
Speaker 10: Left out sections that the things that don't add up,
Speaker 10: the misspellings.
Speaker 6: Specifically the statistical and like factual errors, yeah, are really confusing,
Speaker 6: and it feels like someone's getting if not the actual writing,
Speaker 6: but it feels like the research was like AI assistant
Speaker 6: and in the way that you know AIS will shoot
Speaker 6: out different answers for the same question. Sure, so it
Speaker 6: feels like that in a few areas, and like like
Speaker 6: you've already mentioned, right, the report never brings up Biden's
Speaker 6: age or mental state as a factor contributing to the election.
Speaker 6: And inasmuch as the criticizes Biden, it critiques the Biden
Speaker 6: administration's failure to adequately prepare Harris to be a viable candidate.
Speaker 6: Does it discuss the debate?
Speaker 10: No, it doesn't bring up the debate where now we
Speaker 10: know that like from an interview from doctor Joe Biden
Speaker 10: from a few weeks ago that she legitimately thought that
Speaker 10: Joe was having a stroke on stage during that debate
Speaker 10: with Donald Trump.
Speaker 6: Even though she took him on to a different stage
Speaker 6: afterwards to tell him how good he did. And then
Speaker 6: they went to a waffle house. I mean, the things
Speaker 6: your due. You after you believe your husband has had
Speaker 6: a stroke.
Speaker 10: When shit has hit the fan, Garrett, you go to
Speaker 10: waffle house.
Speaker 6: Maybe maybe the waffle house actually is the move.
Speaker 10: I'm saying the waffle house is the least shocking of
Speaker 10: the entire situation.
Speaker 1: But that's not mentioned in there at all.
Speaker 6: No, it says, quote, the White House did not effectively
Speaker 6: support Vice President Harris over three and a half years
Speaker 6: to improve her standing before the candidates switch unquote. That's
Speaker 6: all it says about about switching from Biden to Harris.
Speaker 6: That's all it says.
Speaker 10: I don't I don't disagree with that statement, because you
Speaker 10: know the amount of people that we spoke to when
Speaker 10: we went to both political conventions. One of the common
Speaker 10: things that they said about Kamala Harris is like how
Speaker 10: ineffective she spent and how they don't use her and
Speaker 10: how can we trust her when they don't even trust
Speaker 10: her to do basic things for the administration, which was
Speaker 10: one of the main Republican talking points about her, is
Speaker 10: like she has no skills, which is not true, but
Speaker 10: that was a position that was against her. Is not
Speaker 10: utilizing her enough? And then you know they're like, bibbity
Speaker 10: bobby boo, she's your candidate without a primary. Do they
Speaker 10: mention anything about their not being a primary?
Speaker 8: No, okay.
Speaker 6: The port never interrogets her, considers Biden's decision to run
Speaker 6: for reelection, or lay blame on those who encouraged and
Speaker 6: enabled that decision, nor does it identify the lack of
Speaker 6: a legitimate primary as a contributing factor leading to the
Speaker 6: results of the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 8: We're going to take a quick.
Speaker 10: Break while I have, you know, an attack of my mind,
Speaker 10: your ads.
Speaker 1: And we're bad.
Speaker 6: Let's now pivot to how the report describes its own
Speaker 6: research methodology. This is quoting from the start of the
Speaker 6: autopsy quote. The report analyzes a range of publicly and
Speaker 6: commercially available data to identify actual investments, actions, and eventual
Speaker 6: voter behavior. The annalysis also includes qualitative data obtained in
Speaker 6: the form of in person and virtual interviews with more
Speaker 6: than three hundred organizations and individuals. After this sentence, the
Speaker 6: DNC has highlighted and annotated a little note that reads,
Speaker 6: no source material or data provided. Unsourced claims cannot be
Speaker 6: independently verified. So despite claiming that three hundred people or
Speaker 6: organizations were interviewed, which may be true, the report never
Speaker 6: says who these people are, nor does it allude to
Speaker 6: their relevant expertise.
Speaker 1: This is just an obed.
Speaker 6: A source that the DNC told CNN that Riviera did
Speaker 6: not even provide a list of names of the people
Speaker 6: he spoke to to the DNC, nor did he submit
Speaker 6: interview notes or recording. So there's no record that we
Speaker 6: have of like who these people are or why they
Speaker 6: were interviewed or what they actually said. And it's not
Speaker 6: like he's like quoting from people like with quotation marks.
Speaker 6: It's like regurgitating maybe portions of interviews into different text.
Speaker 6: Rivera also failed to provide data that he said was
Speaker 6: given to him by senior campaign leadership that he says
Speaker 6: is influencing the report, but we don't see it, and
Speaker 6: he did not provide it to the DNC, so like
Speaker 6: they don't know. It's just some guy saying trust me, bro,
Speaker 6: that's what it sounds like. So after the introduction to
Speaker 6: the report is a section called the executive Summary. This
Speaker 6: section was not provided by the author. This section is
Speaker 6: completely missing.
Speaker 10: Great.
Speaker 6: After the missing executive summary section, the report moves on
Speaker 6: to the electoral landscape, which has just very basic stuff. Quote.
Speaker 6: Millions of Americans are suffering from poor access to health care,
Speaker 6: manufacturing of job losses, and failing infrastructure, yet continued to
Speaker 6: be persuaded to vote against their best interests because they
Speaker 6: do not see themselves reflected in the America of the
Speaker 6: Democratic Party unquote. Just really basic stuff, very like average
Speaker 6: a ten year old can say this. Next, the report
Speaker 6: talks about how the Democratic part already rebuilt itself in
Speaker 6: the nineties, how after three consecutive presidential losses, the Democrats
Speaker 6: embraced a new strategy which got Clinton elected in nineteen
Speaker 6: ninety two, and we all know how well that went.
Speaker 6: Then there's seven pages of summarizing party history from two
Speaker 6: thousand and eight to twenty twenty four. I don't know
Speaker 6: if he was getting paid by the word, but that's just,
Speaker 6: like said, it's just seven pages that just don't need
Speaker 6: to be there. And then the report reads quote, we
Speaker 6: must be careful to draw the right lessons from this
Speaker 6: experience and not miss opportunities to identify and build upon
Speaker 6: some of the positives of the twenty twenty four cycle.
Speaker 6: We must acknowledge how close the margins actually were. The
Speaker 6: report then goes on to misstate how close the margins were,
Speaker 6: but on the other hand, it goes on to say
Speaker 6: that in the past sixteen years quote, Democrats have lost
Speaker 6: ground at every level of government. This remains true even
Speaker 6: in the face of the blue wave in the most
Speaker 6: recent elections twenty twenty five. Gobernatorial and mayoral wins in Virginia,
Speaker 6: New Jersey, New York City, Detroit, and elsewhere may lead
Speaker 6: to a false sense of security and a belief the
Speaker 6: Democratic Party has again found ways to bring voters back
Speaker 6: to the booth with their messaging. While these wins are
Speaker 6: welcome and point to optimism entrenched in the major party strategy,
Speaker 6: a dive into details shows some of these elections were
Speaker 6: tighter than Democrats should be comfortable with and points to
Speaker 6: room for improvement in future efforts. Unquote. It never gives
Speaker 6: this dive into the details, so we don't even know
Speaker 6: what it's taking There and to me, this paragraph just
Speaker 6: demonstrates an unwillingness to understand why some of these elections
Speaker 6: went the way they did, especially the one in New
Speaker 6: York City. Doesn't want to acknowledge why someone like Zoron
Speaker 6: ran such a successful campaign and claiming that the margins
Speaker 6: were tighter than what Democrats should be comfortable with. Also
Speaker 6: ignores the fact that Zorn's biggest opponent in both the
Speaker 6: primary and general election was another Democrat who ran and
Speaker 6: is an independent, someone who was associated with the Democratic establishment.
Speaker 6: It's a bizarre little tidbit that they throw in there.
Speaker 1: This is so weird, just like a highly unnecessary tangent.
Speaker 6: And it just shows this like uncomfortableness, and you know,
Speaker 6: on one side being uncomfortable, on the other side, just
Speaker 6: you know, also being incurious about why those elections have
Speaker 6: gone the way they did and what you can actually
Speaker 6: learn from them.
Speaker 1: This baffling.
Speaker 6: I'm not going to go over every single section of
Speaker 6: the report because there's a lot and the way the
Speaker 6: DNC annotated it gets interesting because at a certain point
Speaker 6: they stop actually trying to address or annotate specific claims
Speaker 6: and instead just to annotate the titles of entire sections,
Speaker 6: writing no sourcing provided for several claims in this section,
Speaker 6: and no evidence provided for many claims in this section.
Speaker 6: Public reporting and data contradict several claims.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 6: The introduction for the what Happened Electoral Overview section is
Speaker 6: also completely missing, as well as the national review section.
Speaker 6: These are just not included. The author did not provide
Speaker 6: those sections. The next section, the one on battleground state outcomes,
Speaker 6: contains very basic factual errors. In just the second sentence, quote,
Speaker 6: states which had consistently and reliably voted for Democratic candidates,
Speaker 6: including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, voted for Trump. Unquote. All
Speaker 6: these three states voted for Trump in twenty sixteen. I
Speaker 6: don't know if Rivera has a different definition of consistent
Speaker 6: or reliable, but these are notably swing states, and swing
Speaker 6: states have voted for Trump in twenty sixteen. Yeah, just
Speaker 6: like a lot of little details like that just don't
Speaker 6: make sense. And later on in this section and beyond,
Speaker 6: it gets dates wrong, It gets the percentage of votes wrong.
Speaker 6: It falsely claims that a Capitol police off was beaten
Speaker 6: to death by insurrectionists on January sixth. That's not true.
Speaker 6: That did not happen. An officer killed himself a few
Speaker 6: days later, but he was not beaten to death on
Speaker 6: site at January sixth. The report uses the word gaslighting,
Speaker 6: which I think is funny.
Speaker 10: I just kind of wonder if you, like uploaded this
Speaker 10: to one of the like AI softwares to tell you
Speaker 10: if it's AI or tell you if it was you know,
Speaker 10: plagiarized and those kinds of things, how much of it
Speaker 10: would be flagged?
Speaker 11: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Who knows, right, Like those sorts of tools aren't the
Speaker 6: most accurate themselves.
Speaker 1: No, but it's just crazy.
Speaker 6: But the level of errors is shocking.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Like, for instance, the report claims that in the twenty
Speaker 6: twenty four election, Democrats netted two seats in the House,
Speaker 6: flipping ten seats from Republicans while losing eight. This is
Speaker 6: not true. This is just not a true claim. Democrats
Speaker 6: netted one seat rather than two, flipping nine Republican health
Speaker 6: seats while losing eight Democrat seats. It's like, there's just
Speaker 6: small little errors like that that I'm like, how how.
Speaker 3: Did you do this?
Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
Speaker 6: There's also a bunch of just unfounded claims about the
Speaker 6: intentions or assumptions coming from the Harris campaign, which may
Speaker 6: be true, but they're not supported in the actual report,
Speaker 6: Like you're not providing evidence, you're not providing citations for
Speaker 6: some of the claims about what the Harris Party intended
Speaker 6: in some of their messaging or stances. But I want
Speaker 6: to move on to one of the biggest takeaways that
Speaker 6: the report had. It argues that anti Trump sentiment was
Speaker 6: assumed by Democratic campaigns and that campaign ads should have
Speaker 6: hit Trump harder to remind voters of how bad he
Speaker 6: is quote. The national campaign did not effectively drive Trump's negatives,
Speaker 6: the retrospective job approval for Trump was too high, and
Speaker 6: the Camp Pagin and allies failed to remind voters of
Speaker 6: his incompetence. The idea of Trump's negatives were quote unquote
Speaker 6: baked in is a major failure of analysis and reality,
Speaker 6: given how his favorability has cratered less than a year
Speaker 6: into this term unquote. The DNC notes that no evidence
Speaker 6: was provided for these claims, and that this claim contradicts
Speaker 6: claims elsewhere in the report because a lot of the
Speaker 6: report also criticizes Harris for only defining herself as not
Speaker 6: being Trump, as focusing too much on Trump and not
Speaker 6: defining herself. So the report kind of tries to have
Speaker 6: it both ways here. The campaigns did not hit Trump
Speaker 6: hard enough, but were also too focused on Trump, never
Speaker 6: illuminating what attacks against Trump should have looked like.
Speaker 10: Exactly is there any mention in these reports about Epstein?
Speaker 6: No? No, oh no, yeah, no, absolutely not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it.
Speaker 10: Was baffling to me that because they needed to have
Speaker 10: Bill Clinton make the worst speech at the DNC, that
Speaker 10: they didn't target Trump over his relationship with Epstein at
Speaker 10: all during the campaign.
Speaker 1: So you know, of course it's not in there.
Speaker 6: I mean, yeah, there's a lot of a lot of
Speaker 6: things that you could hit Trump on, and a lot
Speaker 6: of yeah, Democratic ads like did maybe not in ways
Speaker 6: that people found convincing. You know, like when we were
Speaker 6: at the DNC, A lot of the anti Trump stuff
Speaker 6: was based around like the horror of January sixth, Yeah,
Speaker 6: not his regular failures as president, right, like, like like
Speaker 6: the day to day incompetence that he showed as president.
Speaker 6: It was like Trump is threat to democracy, which just
Speaker 6: did not turn out to be a compelling enough reason
Speaker 6: to vote against Trump.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 6: The report claims that Harris struggled with defining herself beyond
Speaker 6: not being Trump and just framing the race as prosecutor
Speaker 6: versus felon. Report notes quote the truncated campaign timeline didn't help,
Speaker 6: but the campaign did not quickly resolve on how to
Speaker 6: tag Trump and define Harris. The report says that the
Speaker 6: enthusiasm gap was predictable, that Trump just generated more enthusiasm
Speaker 6: than Harris. Does not provide evidence to support this claim,
Speaker 6: though some people may believe this to be true, but
Speaker 6: this claim is not supported in the actual report, and
Speaker 6: it reads quote anti Trump sentiment alone was insufficient to
Speaker 6: motivate voters. The Harris campaign appears to have relied on
Speaker 6: Trump being unacceptable rather than building an affirmative case for
Speaker 6: Harris base voters and needed reasons to vote for Harris
Speaker 6: as well as vote against Trump. DNC notes no evidence
Speaker 6: provided for these claims, So I kind of agree with
Speaker 6: portions of this. I think, yeah, you do need reasons
Speaker 6: to vote for Harris. You cannot be justified as not
Speaker 6: being Trump. This does contradict the previous takeaway that anti
Speaker 6: Trump's sediment was not driven hard enough into voters. So
Speaker 6: perhaps this claim isn't necessarily wrong, but it is armchair analysis.
Speaker 6: It's not actually attempting to substantiate its claims. It's lazy
Speaker 6: and sloppy, and it ignores that there were also reasons
Speaker 6: to not vote for Harris. It's not just that the
Speaker 6: campaign needed to generate reasons to vote for Harris, but
Speaker 6: it also should have addressed or changed its course to
Speaker 6: address the reasons that people might not want to vote
Speaker 6: for Harris, which we will get to at the end
Speaker 6: of this episode. In terms of the election analysis included
Speaker 6: in this report, a lot of it is focused on
Speaker 6: comparing Harris's performance to state level races where Democratic candidates
Speaker 6: outperformed her, but also where she outperformed them, and the
Speaker 6: analysis often conflates the two. It reiterates that quote lower
Speaker 6: profile rate needed affirmative cases to vote for candidates, not
Speaker 6: just opposition to Trump, and it credits successful state campaigns
Speaker 6: to local name recognition and digital presence, things that Harris
Speaker 6: was not necessarily lacking in. Harris spent a decent amount
Speaker 6: of money on digital presence, and as vice president, had
Speaker 6: a degree of name recognition. There's more odd errors here.
Speaker 6: The report gets the number of twenty twenty four gobnatorial
Speaker 6: races wrong. It forgets that Delaware had a governatorial race,
Speaker 6: and it focuses much of this section of the report
Speaker 6: on Josh Stein of North Carolina, who's the governor. Yeah. Quote.
Speaker 6: While Stein was able to keep the governor's office under
Speaker 6: democratic control, it is concerning how Robinson was able to
Speaker 6: capture forty five percent of the state's vote even after
Speaker 6: his repudiation of equal rights for everyone and proudly and
Speaker 6: loudly asserting he was a black Nazi unquote.
Speaker 10: Man, I forgot about that guy. I'm mad that you
Speaker 10: brought him up. I forgot he existed.
Speaker 6: A lot of the section of this report is actually
Speaker 6: praising Josh Stein for how well he ran his campaign,
Speaker 6: while also finding it concerning of how much the vote
Speaker 6: Robinson was able to still get, except it gets the
Speaker 6: number wrong. Robinson did not get forty five percent of
Speaker 6: the vote. He got just over forty percent, And later
Speaker 6: in the report it says he got forty two point
Speaker 6: seven percent, which is also wrong. So it has two
Speaker 6: different numbers. The report says forty five and forty two
Speaker 6: point seven, neither of which are correct. The correct number
Speaker 6: is forty people. This is a lot of stuff like this.
Speaker 6: There's just kind of baffling, and it's even more baffling
Speaker 6: because of how much of a load bearing section this
Speaker 6: Josh Stein bit is right. It writes about how Josh
Speaker 6: Stein ran almost eight points ahead of Harris, and it
Speaker 6: says that quote Stein didn't just win by default. He
Speaker 6: addressed the exact problems Harris did not. But it never
Speaker 6: actually explains what those are. It doesn't actually explain this,
Speaker 6: It just says it. In a sentence later on, it
Speaker 6: says that, based on the North Carolina governor's race, Democrats
Speaker 6: should quote focus less on abstract issues and identity politics
Speaker 6: and connect with voters on the issues they say matter most,
Speaker 6: including the economy, disaster relief, and addressing housing affordability. Unquote,
Speaker 6: but the Harris's campaign was not actually focused on abstract
Speaker 6: issues and identity politics. They were trying to address these things,
Speaker 6: often inadequately, especially on the economy because of how much
Speaker 6: Harris had tied herself to Biden. But she did address
Speaker 6: housing affordability for like a decent bit of the campaign.
Speaker 6: Whether voters actually knew that, that's a whole other question, right.
Speaker 6: It's whether they were successful in communicating her platform on
Speaker 6: housing affordability is a different question, But not that Stein's
Speaker 6: success was focused on this. As a post to focusing
Speaker 6: on abstract issues, which is not really what the Harris
Speaker 6: campaign was actually focused on. The report continues, quote Harris
Speaker 6: saw dramatic drops in support among young Latino men and
Speaker 6: young Black men compared to Biden's twenty twenty performance. However,
Speaker 6: Stein recovered significant ground with both groups, suggesting his campaign
Speaker 6: found effective ways to reach these voters. Stein's result suggests
Speaker 6: it's possible to win women and compete with men with
Speaker 6: the right approach. Unquote. Does it explain how Stein did this? No, No,
Speaker 6: it doesn't.
Speaker 1: Of course it doesn't.
Speaker 6: He doesn't say now. The report also praises Washington Governor
Speaker 6: Bob Ferguson, who was elected in twenty twenty four. Quote.
Speaker 6: Running on a platform of housing affordability, reducing costs for
Speaker 6: families throughout the state, and improving public safety allowed him
Speaker 6: to easily capture the governor's office. His message resonated with
Speaker 6: voters concerned about how bidonomics failed to lower the cost
Speaker 6: of a and how the Trump administration would gut avenues
Speaker 6: of education and upward mobility. Stein and Ferguson, notably both
Speaker 6: then incumbent attorneys general for their states, had a definitive
Speaker 6: strategy to approach voters. Their wins provide a blueprint for
Speaker 6: candidates in other states seeking to align themselves with their
Speaker 6: voters unquote. So Ferguson's win in Washington State is presented
Speaker 6: as a blueprint for candidates as compared to Harris's failed strategy,
Speaker 6: but in fact, Ferguson ran almost four points behind Harris.
Speaker 6: Harris did better in Washington than Ferguson did, but the
Speaker 6: report promotes Ferguson's strategy, or its its opinion on Ferguson's strategy,
Speaker 6: as the winning blueprint, despite it doing worse in Washington.
Speaker 6: So that's what I mean in terms of there being
Speaker 6: lots of self contradictory claims.
Speaker 10: Yeah, did nobody proofread or edit or peer review?
Speaker 6: Well no, I think that is a big part of this, right,
Speaker 6: is that once the DNC received this, they saw how
Speaker 6: bad it was, and it was like, we don't even
Speaker 6: want to prove freedom edit this, Like this is just
Speaker 6: so bad, we just don't even want to deal with
Speaker 6: it anymore. Like it's just done right, We're just putting
Speaker 6: on the shelf.
Speaker 1: But dude released it anyways.
Speaker 6: Well, I mean they released it after public pressure because
Speaker 6: of you know, accusations that they were hiding certain findings
Speaker 6: that were damaging to the Democratic Party or the interests
Speaker 6: of party elites.
Speaker 10: No, it's just it's just that somebody did a bad.
Speaker 6: Job, when in fact it's just like, oh, this was
Speaker 6: just like a massive suck up, Like that's that's why
Speaker 6: you're hiding it, right right, Like this this this section
Speaker 6: that I just like read and the section on like Stein. Yeah,
Speaker 6: that's the only time where the word cost is used
Speaker 6: in relation to prices. Sick. This is this is the
Speaker 6: only mention of affordability.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 6: The report does not a single time mentioned inflation, Oh
Speaker 6: my god, except in adjusting like donation numbers for inflation. Like,
Speaker 6: it doesn't. It doesn't mention inflation as an issue. It
Speaker 6: does not mention the causes of inflation, messaging around inflation
Speaker 6: and how that may have been a factor contributing to
Speaker 6: the results of the election. The economy only gets mentioned
Speaker 6: six times.
Speaker 10: Okay, just thinking back to when we were at the RNC,
Speaker 10: and I'm sure you had the conversations with you know,
Speaker 10: newly eligible voters, young males. Yeah, and you ask them,
Speaker 10: you know, why they were voting for Donald Trump. They
Speaker 10: would always say the economy it's the first thing.
Speaker 6: It's the first thing. Yeah, and that's the core of
Speaker 6: Trump's ad strategy.
Speaker 1: How are they not understanding that, you know, bringing out
Speaker 1: Oprah at the DNC instead of talking about how you're
Speaker 1: going to lower the price of milk and eggs and
Speaker 1: gas and help people get jobs, Like, how are they
Speaker 1: not realizing that you're not reaching normal human connection?
Speaker 6: And this like continues to be a problem now, right, Yeah,
Speaker 6: people will look at macro economic fact sure and be like,
Speaker 6: by some accounts, the unum is actually not doing terrible,
Speaker 6: But those sorts of statements don't reflect the reality of
Speaker 6: Americans who are dealing with rising prices and may not
Speaker 6: be experiencing the same wage growth that some statistics show
Speaker 6: in the macro sense, and specifically the way that there's
Speaker 6: this like a condescending messaging around macroeconomics that really like
Speaker 6: polarizes people against you because they're having a very hard time,
Speaker 6: they don't have a lot of hope for the future,
Speaker 6: and just asserting that actually, on a macro's level, the
Speaker 6: economy is doing well, it feels like you're gas lighting them, right, Yeah,
Speaker 6: So you see this in like the discussion of like,
Speaker 6: you know, the vibe session. Yeah, which I mean I
Speaker 6: have a lot of opinions on but that's another episode.
Speaker 6: And right now we're going to go to ads. Oh boy, okay,
Speaker 6: we are back. So after this section talking about the
Speaker 6: gubernatorial races and stuff, it has a list of strategic
Speaker 6: implications for Democrats based on these state level races, and
Speaker 6: these implications are quote, anti Trump sentiment has its limits. Oh,
Speaker 6: regular voters are swing voters Canada. Definition is essential. Clear,
Speaker 6: accomplishments and concrete plans matter more than vibes. State parties matter.
Speaker 6: Voters are sophisticated. The eight to ten percent who split
Speaker 6: tickets are decisive. They evaluate candidates individually. Geographic formula is
Speaker 6: non negotiable. Strong urban plus competitive suburbs plus limited rural losses.
Speaker 6: You need all three. Yeah, no shit. In order to
Speaker 6: win elections, you must win elections. Yeah, that's what this
Speaker 6: is saying, is that in order to win elections, you
Speaker 6: have to win the election. Yeah, we know, we know.
Speaker 10: Yeah, there's this there's this announcer in the NBA that
Speaker 10: got slammed many years back for stating, well, you know,
Speaker 10: the team with the most points at the end of
Speaker 10: the game wins, and that's exactly what this is. They're like, hey,
Speaker 10: if you get more votes than the other guy.
Speaker 4: You'll win it.
Speaker 10: It's crazy, it's lazy that this whole, this whole thing
Speaker 10: reeks of just like, yes, lacksadaisical, insufferable laziness.
Speaker 6: Yes, And I want to mention two other strategic implications please. One,
Speaker 6: Elections remain winnable with the right candidates and strategies, even
Speaker 6: in difficult environments. Demographics are tendencies, not destiny. And voter
Speaker 6: support is impacted good and bad through campaign choices.
Speaker 1: Unquote, wow, thank you so much for saying that.
Speaker 10: If people genius, if people believe in and like the candidate,
Speaker 10: maybe the vote for them.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 6: Voter support is impacted through campaign choices.
Speaker 1: Just just ah, my goodness.
Speaker 6: So that's obviously laughable. Yes, this last one is more interesting.
Speaker 6: Male voters require direct engagement. The gender gap can be narrowed.
Speaker 6: Deploy male messagers address economic concerns, and don't assume identity
Speaker 6: politics will hold male voters of color, men hate women,
Speaker 6: men hate It's not the messenger. It's not the messenger,
Speaker 6: it's the message. It's not about who the messenger is.
Speaker 6: It's the message itself. And they can't grasp that.
Speaker 1: Why is that their take?
Speaker 6: They're doing the same identity politics that is like trying
Speaker 6: to critique. It's like, no, we need men to talk
Speaker 6: to male voters. That's the only way. That's also identity politics.
Speaker 6: You don't understand that. It's not about who's giving the message,
Speaker 6: it's about what the message actually is. How did white
Speaker 6: dudes for Harris work out? You literally tried this. You
Speaker 6: literally tried to do this. It did not work.
Speaker 1: Garrison.
Speaker 10: Once again, I did block that out of my brain.
Speaker 10: I did not like hearing it. Yeah, their take is sorry,
Speaker 10: if you want to talk to the boys, you also
Speaker 10: have to be a boy.
Speaker 6: It's crazy.
Speaker 1: What it's lazy, it's stupid. God, all right, what else
Speaker 1: hit me there? I know that you're saving some of
Speaker 1: the worst for the end.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I am saving some of the bad stuff for last.
Speaker 6: There's a few other small errors I want to go through, Like,
Speaker 6: let's do it like it claims that tens of thousands
Speaker 6: of voters and a handful of states are who sent
Speaker 6: Trump back to the White House. That's that's accurate. That's
Speaker 6: just that's just not inaccurate. And the DNC notesic what
Speaker 6: happened at all okay an. Out of thirty four senate races,
Speaker 6: the report only reviews six of them, which it attempts
Speaker 6: to extrapolate a pattern from, and it does not review Wisconsin,
Speaker 6: a key swing state. And the author also just did
Speaker 6: not include this section on house races. This section is
Speaker 6: completely blank. It's also missing. Cool now, it does have
Speaker 6: a list of, you know, lessons that we can learn
Speaker 6: from senate level and state level races. The positive ones
Speaker 6: are that Democrats should maintain a year around presence. We
Speaker 6: should kind of always be campaigning, don't just wait till
Speaker 6: the end, just to always keep a level of engagement.
Speaker 6: And that engagement should be community oriented. It should be
Speaker 6: grassroots in nature. You should be establishing partnerships with local
Speaker 6: community organizations and groups in working class communities, because member
Speaker 6: to member outreach is more effective. Rather than having strangers
Speaker 6: do door knocking, you should have people from that neighborhood
Speaker 6: be door knocking in their own neighborhoods, and their messaging
Speaker 6: should be bilingual and culturally competent. So like all the
Speaker 6: stuff is like yeah, like I su this is like
Speaker 6: I kind of agree, right, this is like yeah, very
Speaker 6: very basic, but yes, this is this is a good idea.
Speaker 6: You should strengthen your connections in Latino neighborhoods and with unions,
Speaker 6: and you should lean on those to help win elections. Yep,
Speaker 6: that's how politics works.
Speaker 1: You learn very young stranger danger.
Speaker 10: And so it's like, if you are someone like me
Speaker 10: who has cameras at their house and you see a
Speaker 10: strange person coming to your door, you're not necessarily going
Speaker 10: to answer that.
Speaker 6: No, someone with a clipboard is going to approach me.
Speaker 6: It's like, Oh, no way, I'm not having not doing it.
Speaker 1: I can't. You're I'm already over stimulated. Please leave me on.
Speaker 10: But if it's like, oh, hey, it's my neighbor, I'm
Speaker 10: going to open the door for them and hear them out,
Speaker 10: that's I fear. That's just common sense. I don't think
Speaker 10: that was necessarily needed in this report. That's common sense,
Speaker 10: but it's something I don't disagree with for like the
Speaker 10: first time. And all these things that you said.
Speaker 6: Now, the sort of negative things that the Democrats can
Speaker 6: learn from, yeah, include what the report calls the leadership
Speaker 6: voter gap, the fact that the Democratic Party leadership seems
Speaker 6: increasingly alienated from the priorities of voters and voters may
Speaker 6: still support their local Democrat on the state level or
Speaker 6: local races, but maybe we'll vote for Trump because he's
Speaker 6: offering an alternative to the stagnating corpse of the Democratic Party,
Speaker 6: even if that alternative turns out to be also terrible
Speaker 6: and in some ways worse. So this is what they
Speaker 6: call the leadership voter gap. They also identify late engagement,
Speaker 6: doing the bulk of your campaigning from like September to November,
Speaker 6: seating the entire summer for the Republicans to establish kind
Speaker 6: of the territory of the race, like what the issues are,
Speaker 6: the report mentions, messaging, misalignment. This is similar to the
Speaker 6: leadership voter gap, where there's tensions between the leadership of
Speaker 6: the party or the concerns of the president and what
Speaker 6: working class Americans are concerned about. Quote. The Bidenomics framing
Speaker 6: emphasized macro statistics rather than the microrealities voters experienced daily,
Speaker 6: and specifically tied President Biden by name to actual economic anxiety. Unquote.
Speaker 6: I think that's completely fair. Another of the key challenges
Speaker 6: is Republican in roads with working class of voters. This
Speaker 6: section has a typo, so it's kind of hard to read,
Speaker 6: but it essentially.
Speaker 1: States there there's so many typos, but.
Speaker 6: It essentially states that the Trump campaign targeted working class
Speaker 6: households with populas messaging which distracted from his anti worker record,
Speaker 6: and working class men, particularly manufacturing and construction, saw Trump
Speaker 6: as more aligned with their cultural values than Democratic candidates.
Speaker 6: To Kanezi's down, Democrats need to have a year round presence,
Speaker 6: more economic messaging, and address cost of living concerns that
Speaker 6: resonate more than quote unquote identity politics. This is kind
Speaker 6: of where the actual election analysis portion of the docum ends.
Speaker 6: The rest of the document is on how to more
Speaker 6: effectively spend campaign funds, debating door knocking versus text and
Speaker 6: phone banking, addressing dropping voter registration rates, comparing media and ads,
Speaker 6: spending digital versus TV ads.
Speaker 1: Is there anything interesting in those findings?
Speaker 6: No, not really, Okay, it's filling the page count. Like
Speaker 6: the Democrats got a lot of money. The problem isn't
Speaker 6: the funds. We have the funds. It's that there's small
Speaker 6: ways that you can use them better. And sure, yeah,
Speaker 6: but all of this is just treating the symptom, not
Speaker 6: the problem. The problem wasn't that you were spending more
Speaker 6: on digital and not enough on broadcast. The problem was
Speaker 6: the candidate and the message, not differences in ad spending.
Speaker 10: It's not that you you had ads running, it's that
Speaker 10: the ads you had running weren't connecting with the people.
Speaker 1: Whose votes you needed, the people that were going to
Speaker 1: vote for you already, that's who those ads were targeting to,
Speaker 1: as opposed to bringing in voters who were like, oh man,
Speaker 1: I'm really not sure.
Speaker 10: Trump was pretty bad last time, I'm on the fence here,
Speaker 10: or just for first time voters.
Speaker 6: The first time voter registration was was down significantly.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the fact that you ran ads in certain places,
Speaker 10: that was not the problem. No, you weren't advertising to
Speaker 10: the people that needed to be advertised too. Your messaging
Speaker 10: was wrong.
Speaker 6: And there's yeah, there's this more core issue that people
Speaker 6: did not get to actually pick the Democratic nominee, and
Speaker 6: the Democratic nominee had a lot of issues and direct
Speaker 6: ties to the many failures of the Biden administration, which
Speaker 6: brings us to our final section.
Speaker 1: Here, I'm afraid.
Speaker 6: Based on three polling studies, the campaign pollsters concluded that
Speaker 6: it was quote important for the vice president to find
Speaker 6: separation from the status quo. They recognized voters were looking
Speaker 6: for change and felt it was necessary to find ways
Speaker 6: to demonstrate how a Harris Wall's administration would be more
Speaker 6: effective in addressing American needs. The pollsters acknowledged the loyalty
Speaker 6: demonstrated by the Vice president, but also suggested it was
Speaker 6: contrary to strong signals in their data about how even
Speaker 6: measured breaks would help position the vice president to win unquote,
Speaker 6: and the Vice President Harris did not do these measured breaks.
Speaker 6: She remained extremely loyal to the legacy of the Biden
Speaker 6: administration while she was vice president and while she was
Speaker 6: campaigning for president in twenty twenty four. Now. These campaign
Speaker 6: posters were also part of discussions on how to respond
Speaker 6: to Trump attack ads. Quote. In particular, the attack ad
Speaker 6: focused on the Vice president's prior statements on transgendered Americans.
Speaker 6: You can't call them that, bro. They all recognized the
Speaker 6: attack as very effective and felt that campaign was boxed in.
Speaker 6: The ad was a video of her set saying what
Speaker 6: she said, and it was framed as an attack on
Speaker 6: her economic priorities. If the Vice president would not change
Speaker 6: her position, and she did not, then there was nothing
Speaker 6: which would have worked as a response quote. The polling
Speaker 6: sections also missing its conclusion but let's get into that
Speaker 6: a little bit more. Okay, Before the autopsy was released,
Speaker 6: Rob Flattery, I'm gonna say flattery. I don't know what
Speaker 6: it actually is, but I'm calling it flattery. He was
Speaker 6: Harris's deputy campaign manager, and he wrote an article in
Speaker 6: The Bulwark about what he said in his autopsy interview,
Speaker 6: also noting he was one of the few Harris staffers
Speaker 6: who was actually interviewed. Flattery argued the main issue the
Speaker 6: twenty twenty four campaign was branding, and he clarified that
Speaker 6: the Kamala Is for the Them ad was not actually
Speaker 6: the most effective attack ad according to campaign data. It
Speaker 6: was the Trump ad from July twenty twenty four, with
Speaker 6: clips of Harris saying that quote unquote, biden is working.
Speaker 6: Flattery wrote that quote The brilliance of the Trump team's
Speaker 6: ad strategy was that everything was a proof point that
Speaker 6: leveled up to a core narrative. She cares about liberal shit,
Speaker 6: not you, her position on immigrants. She's focused on the
Speaker 6: wrong thing, Harris talking about transprisoners, focused on the wrong thing,
Speaker 6: says Bidenomics is working. Focused on the wrong stuff. It
Speaker 6: was brands, not messages. The Trans ad worked because of
Speaker 6: what it implied, not what it's said. Unquote. Rob Flattery,
Speaker 6: like the autopsy, insists that there was no way to
Speaker 6: directly respond to the Kamala is for the them Trump
Speaker 6: is for you ad, claiming that they tested five to
Speaker 6: six response ads against ads about the economy, and the
Speaker 6: economy ones tested better. Quote. So, not wanting to make
Speaker 6: the fight about an issue we were losing, we talked
Speaker 6: about the economy more a literal rebuttal would have been
Speaker 6: a loser. I absolutely stand by this decision. Look at
Speaker 6: the twenty time twenty five elections in Virginia, where Republicans
Speaker 6: made trans issues the core of their advertising strategy. It
Speaker 6: failed because voters didn't find it relevant. Except that's exactly
Speaker 6: what Trump did with the they them ad. That was
Speaker 6: a big part of his ad strategy as well. So
Speaker 6: there's this sort of learned helplessness with how to address
Speaker 6: both like the trans issues, as well as the Israel
Speaker 6: Palestine stuff, which we'll get to in one second. Like
Speaker 6: Harris not seriously addressing that they them add also did
Speaker 6: not seem to help. And you don't need to run
Speaker 6: an ad directly opposing that slop, but through media appearances
Speaker 6: you can pull the old uno reverso while affirming that
Speaker 6: you'll stand up for the rights of all Americans, no
Speaker 6: matter their gender or race, and that includes making health
Speaker 6: care more affordable and more accessible. And it's Trump and
Speaker 6: the Republicans who are focusing on bullying a disadvantage small
Speaker 6: minority of Americans to distract from the fact that they
Speaker 6: have no real economic plan. You can talk about the
Speaker 6: economy while still standing up for trans people. It doesn't
Speaker 6: need to be the focus of your campaign, but it's
Speaker 6: sure as hell was a key focus of Trump's campaign,
Speaker 6: and you not addressing it did not help and contributed
Speaker 6: to real harm and negative polarization against trans people.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean a trans person did not speak at
Speaker 10: the twenty twenty four DNC, which was weird and not normal.
Speaker 10: Trans people have spoken at many DNC conventions in the past,
Speaker 10: but in the twenty twenty four nope, and trans issues
Speaker 10: were barely even mentioned, largely absent.
Speaker 6: And like, it doesn't need to be a key issue,
Speaker 6: but the fact that Republicans made it a key issue
Speaker 6: means that it is worth addressing in some way and
Speaker 6: affirming that you will actually stand up for the rights
Speaker 6: of trans people beyond making very kind of vague, confusing
Speaker 6: statements like Commula made that she'll follow the law, which
Speaker 6: just does not make sense to anyone. This sort of
Speaker 6: learned helplessness around like not being able to address these issues.
Speaker 6: This is the same thing with Palestine. Yes, altering course
Speaker 6: is simply not considered possible, and in part with Palestine,
Speaker 6: because Harris was the vice president, Flattery wrote quote. Given
Speaker 6: the Biden administration's position, Gaza was an impossible issue to
Speaker 6: communicate around. Protesters drove coverage away from campaign events, Digital
Speaker 6: creators or even supporters were afraid to say anything nice
Speaker 6: about Biden because their comments sections would get rocked. For
Speaker 6: many voters, watching the horrific, painful footage out of Gaza,
Speaker 6: it became a moral question one we didn't have a
Speaker 6: good answer for in ways that may not be reflected
Speaker 6: in a poll. It meaningfully reduced enthusiasm. As one person
Speaker 6: from the campaign told me, we spent the entire election
Speaker 6: with a giant rotting fish around our necks.
Speaker 1: Is Joe Biden the giant rotting.
Speaker 6: Well no, I mean it's in part, yes, But like
Speaker 6: the genocide in Gaza, like like this, like you know,
Speaker 6: well documented mass death.
Speaker 10: They didn't let a Palestinian person speak at the DNC
Speaker 10: either they had. They had one panel on it which
Speaker 10: I attended. It was phenomenal. It was the largest attended
Speaker 10: panel of the convention. And then they refuse to let
Speaker 10: a Palestinian person speak.
Speaker 6: I mean, and even beyond just letting people speak, it's
Speaker 6: like there was no real plan to actually stop this
Speaker 6: from happening. Like you can you can cut off a Israel.
Speaker 6: You can't do serious things. You can you cannot send
Speaker 6: them weapons, you can take away weapons. You can do
Speaker 6: more things. As you've seen, America is not afraid to
Speaker 6: occupy territories in that region. You could literally invade and
Speaker 6: be like, no, you have to stop. But like the
Speaker 6: not being able to even consider that, you could have
Speaker 6: an answer for this moral question, you could just change
Speaker 6: your position, not being able to even consider that. The
Speaker 6: compounding difficulty of Harris being the VP role made this
Speaker 6: the giant rotting fish around the campaign's neck. Yeah, and
Speaker 6: the fact that the autopsy does not actually address this
Speaker 6: question and flattery does, I think is another damning indictment
Speaker 6: against the autopsy and its sheering competence of the deputy
Speaker 6: campaign manager himself acknowledging that this was a serious, a
Speaker 6: serious issue that meaningfully reduced enthusiasm. And like the whole
Speaker 6: deal in this Bulwark article is that politics is now
Speaker 6: about brands, not messages. And this is kind of silly, right,
Speaker 6: because these two things are related. Yeah, but the brand
Speaker 6: of the Harris campaign was largely defined as not being
Speaker 6: Trump and just being more of the same, which in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty four wasn't exactly great. No, another of Trump's
Speaker 6: main ads featured a clip of Harris saying that she
Speaker 6: wouldn't have done anything different from Biden. So the branding
Speaker 6: issue certainly wasn't helped by the campaign's unwillingness to sever
Speaker 6: ties with Biden and criticize his policy. No Flattery argues
Speaker 6: that would have been hard, if not impossible, because of
Speaker 6: Kamala's position as sitting vice president. If she doesn't go
Speaker 6: against Biden's policy, it puts fractures within the party and
Speaker 6: the White House itself. But also it would demonstrate how
Speaker 6: she effectively held no power as vice president. So there
Speaker 6: is these issues. But if you actually have principles that
Speaker 6: would not actually be an issue. You could just blaze
Speaker 6: through that. You could actually take the real correct stance
Speaker 6: on issues like Palestine, and acknowledged the massive failures that
Speaker 6: the administration had, and you are now going against the
Speaker 6: status quo of the administration despite being the vice president. Right,
Speaker 6: that could have been an option one that was just
Speaker 6: never actually considered for whatever reason.
Speaker 10: Right, I mean, statistically speaking, at that time, Joe Biden
Speaker 10: had a very low approval rating. And so you know,
Speaker 10: Kamala running as the pro Joe candidate doesn't really resonate
Speaker 10: with voters because they're unhappy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly right. And if your message is just more
Speaker 6: of the same, then it seems pretty easy for your
Speaker 6: opponents to define what your brand is.
Speaker 10: And whenever she tried to say, you know, I'm going
Speaker 10: to change this, I'm going to change that, they were like,
Speaker 10: but you're in office now.
Speaker 6: Like Harris herself did not actually campaign on like progressive
Speaker 6: immigration policies, She did not campaign on trends rights, she
Speaker 6: didn't campaign on identity politics. No, but in absence of
Speaker 6: a real message, it's all too easy to associate the
Speaker 6: campaign with the concerns of like liberal elites disconnected from
Speaker 6: the economic realities of most Americans, and her previous statements
Speaker 6: on Bidenomics and how she wouldn't have done anything differently
Speaker 6: absolutely compounded this. Flattery wrote that the campaign underestimated just
Speaker 6: how disillusioned people were and the widespread degree of anti institutionalism.
Speaker 6: But unlike the autopsy, he at least acknowledges Biden should
Speaker 6: have never have run for reelection in the first place,
Speaker 6: and that Democrats should have run a real primary, which
Speaker 6: would have provided an opportunity to actually address all of
Speaker 6: these issues about feeling tied to the death worshiping aspects
Speaker 6: of the Biden administration with Kamala being the VP. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 6: speaking of the autopsy, let's get to the final sections
Speaker 6: of the autopsy. Yeah. Near the end of the report,
Speaker 6: a paragraph reads, building to win requires new thinking, and
Speaker 6: building to last requires thinking about more than the next election.
Speaker 6: It requires finding the best way to connect with the
Speaker 6: right voters in the right places. And twenty twenty four
Speaker 6: has proven anything. There is enough money to do it
Speaker 6: all the right way. And that's kind of the end.
Speaker 6: That's not the conclusion of the report because the final
Speaker 6: conclusion section is left blank. Super it's missing as well,
Speaker 6: So that sentence is kind of the last piece of
Speaker 6: analysis because it actually has no conclusion. I think that's
Speaker 6: the perfect the perfect representation of what this report is
Speaker 6: is that it does not have a conclusion. It's literally
Speaker 6: missing the conclusion. There is very little you can actually
Speaker 6: take away from this report positively to improve election strategy
Speaker 6: going forward, because there is no conclusion anyway. That's the
Speaker 6: twenty twenty four autopsy that turns out was real, but
Speaker 6: was just really bad.
Speaker 1: And didn't address anything real.
Speaker 6: No, did not address what I would argue were the
Speaker 6: key issues affecting the campaign, Biden's decision to run again,
Speaker 6: his age, the lack of a primary, and Israel Palestine.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that and honestly, people like to choose their candidate
Speaker 10: in a democracy.
Speaker 1: Really, and this entire thing really.
Speaker 10: Is very frustrating because who knows when a nonsense male
Speaker 10: who will be the candidate again after that?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think anyone who
Speaker 6: can address serious economic as well as these moral issues
Speaker 6: read like imperialism in the US military, it's going to
Speaker 6: serve a better chance. Yeah, because that is the situation
Speaker 6: we have we have found ourselves in.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the Democratic National Committee, it's a bummer.
Speaker 11: Hello everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. My
Speaker 11: name is Daniel Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of
Speaker 11: Arab and Tastinian politics, and today I'm joined by doctor Nagarazavi.
Speaker 11: She is a political anthropologist at the I'm going to
Speaker 11: get this right Massavar Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian
Speaker 11: Gulf Studies at Princeton University, and her work is on
Speaker 11: the role of think tanks in shaping US security policies towards.
Speaker 8: The Middle East and Iran specifically.
Speaker 11: And I've recently had the pleasure of being at a
Speaker 11: symposium with doctor Rosavi, and I thought she would be
Speaker 11: a really welcome viewpoint for our audience.
Speaker 8: Thank you for joining us, Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 11: So, I think in regards to the war on Iran,
Speaker 11: there's been such a focus on the straight up her
Speaker 11: moves and the economic impact of that that conditions on
Speaker 11: the ground have really slipped from our radars. Like I
Speaker 11: don't see it as often, and I think I'm a
Speaker 11: very well plugged in person.
Speaker 8: So can we start there.
Speaker 11: Can you tell us more about the situation and what
Speaker 11: it's like for like the average Iranian right now?
Speaker 18: Yeah, thank you so much for leading with that, because
Speaker 18: I do think that is absolutely missing in not only
Speaker 18: mainstream media but in much of the policy discussions that
Speaker 18: both of us follow closely. It's very bad on like
Speaker 18: around for ordinary Iranians on all fronts. Economically, it is
Speaker 18: very dire at the moment. Inflation is now at unbelievably
Speaker 18: high rates. The level of damage that happened to the country,
Speaker 18: the physical damage cause a lot of people to lose
Speaker 18: their jobs, if not their lives, because they hit hospitals,
Speaker 18: they hit schools, they hit factories. These are places where
Speaker 18: people work, So now all of those.
Speaker 8: People are without a job.
Speaker 18: The cost of living again has skyrocketed. People who dependent
Speaker 18: on the internet somehow to do their work are also
Speaker 18: now out of a job because it's been the longest
Speaker 18: internet shut down in Iran's history at this point. So
Speaker 18: that's the economic aspect that implicates every single person inside
Speaker 18: iron at the moment. And we're hearing that even people
Speaker 18: can't exchange the dollar, so things are really really bad
Speaker 18: at this point. And then you add on the layer
Speaker 18: of the number of people who have been killed. By
Speaker 18: the latest count I think I saw seventeen hundred civilians
Speaker 18: have been killed. Three point five million Iranians were displaced,
Speaker 18: and this was mainly people trying to escape major city
Speaker 18: centers they went to areas that were very under resource
Speaker 18: and so they were also suffering from lack of water
Speaker 18: and electricity wherever they were going. Those people have now
Speaker 18: slowly been coming back to the major cities. Many more
Speaker 18: thousands of people were injured or Maine. And then of
Speaker 18: course the entire population has been terrorized by this war
Speaker 18: and the uncertainty of whether it's going to start again.
Speaker 18: I mean, the threats that Trump has given up until
Speaker 18: just a few hours ago, was at any moment the
Speaker 18: bombings could start again. And then lastly, I want to
Speaker 18: say in terms of I touched on the infrastructure, but
Speaker 18: they hit desalination plants, they hit hospitals, they hit oil depots.
Speaker 18: People's quality of life right now inside Iran is pretty bad.
Speaker 2: And then you.
Speaker 18: Layer onto that a now even more repressive government that
Speaker 18: has been executing people they accuse of being traders at
Speaker 18: unbelievable rates, a total clamp down on levels we haven't
Speaker 18: seen previously. So again, short story, it's very bad inside
Speaker 18: of Iran right now.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I really wanted to make sure that people got
Speaker 11: that full scope. You know, we forget that there's an
Speaker 11: internet blackout, We forget that Iranians have already dealt with
Speaker 11: such a repressive crackdown right before the war started. You know,
Speaker 11: like I want people to make the connection that like
Speaker 11: conditions are super super dire. You know, since you did
Speaker 11: mention that point, maybe we can elaborate a little bit.
Speaker 11: How do you think the Iranian regime is using this moment?
Speaker 11: I know, short term they are utilizing it to just
Speaker 11: crack down on any dissent, but how do you think
Speaker 11: it'll be used kind of medium and long term?
Speaker 18: Yeah, so, you know, in our line of work, it's
Speaker 18: always hard to make predictions, but we can use past
Speaker 18: experiences as a somewhat of a guide here. So just
Speaker 18: to remind your listeners, in January there was a major
Speaker 18: uprising of Iranians against their government and there was one
Speaker 18: of the most massive crackdowns since the nineteen eighties when
Speaker 18: there was massacre against political dissidents, and so going into this.
Speaker 19: War, there was already one of the most brutal crackdowns happening.
Speaker 18: And then what people who are much more knowledgeable about
Speaker 18: irans domestic politics are telling me is that the people
Speaker 18: who are essentially replacing the leaders that were killed by
Speaker 18: US Israeli strikes are more hardliner and are more aligned
Speaker 18: with the hard line factions of the IRGC Islamic Revolutionary
Speaker 18: Guard Corps, which is one branch of the military in
Speaker 18: Iran that is very, very powerful and is loyal to
Speaker 18: the Supreme Leader, who is now the son of the
Speaker 18: previous Supreme Leader who was killed on the first day
Speaker 18: of the war actually, and so using the last time
Speaker 18: Iran was at a war, which was in the Iran
Speaker 18: Iraq War, repression is going to get so much worse
Speaker 18: under war conditions because anyone who they don't like or
Speaker 18: who anyone who speaks out can then be made a
Speaker 18: trader and an enemy of the Iranian people, and so
Speaker 18: they can use warfare as the grounds to essentially go
Speaker 18: even further in their oppression. And that's what a lot
Speaker 18: of human rights activists and people on the ground are
Speaker 18: worried about.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I also read a really interesting article I'll put
Speaker 11: in the show notes about the popular mobilization that the
Speaker 11: Iranian regime has like really fostered over many years to
Speaker 11: revert ways, whether it's through inserting you know, their forces
Speaker 11: in universities or through particular kinds of cultural practices around
Speaker 11: like martyrs and things like that. So, like the Iranian
Speaker 11: regime is also kind of mobilizing its supporters in a
Speaker 11: way that I mean, obviously for people who like want
Speaker 11: democracy and freedom like this is this is the worst
Speaker 11: case scenario we as in the United States.
Speaker 8: I shouldn't take responsibility for that at all, but neither
Speaker 8: of us should. Yeah, neither really it's not.
Speaker 11: It's not our fault, but we really have you know,
Speaker 11: given the worst actors a huge victory.
Speaker 19: And also to that point, if you don't mind me jumping.
Speaker 8: In, yeah, yeah, of course, it's also you.
Speaker 19: Know, triggered nationalism among segments of the population. The war
Speaker 19: has made.
Speaker 18: Many people who were even protesting in January against the
Speaker 18: government now coming out and defending at least not the
Speaker 18: sovereignty of their country or the integrity of their country.
Speaker 8: I mean, makes sense.
Speaker 18: Yeah, So there's all these strange now alliances forming, and
Speaker 18: the government is actually playing some parts of it smartly,
Speaker 18: where you'll see them having women without hit job coming
Speaker 18: to pro government rallies and having a Lebanese woman singer's
Speaker 18: voice at their rallies, which, for those of you who
Speaker 18: don't know, women are not allowed to sing as solo
Speaker 18: artists in Iran.
Speaker 19: They can be part of a chorus.
Speaker 18: So they're also playing this interesting imaging game where they
Speaker 18: want to also show, look, we can also be open
Speaker 18: and inclusive at the same time that they're executing people
Speaker 18: at the highest rates since the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm going to have to look for that video
Speaker 8: of the Lebanese singer. So we participated, both.
Speaker 11: Of us in a symposium at Princeton I think was
Speaker 11: titled like the Long Arch of Fascism. Very interesting set
Speaker 11: of presentations, and your presentation was about the different kind
Speaker 11: of political strands that facilitated this war underund So I
Speaker 11: just wanted to just start off with could you outline
Speaker 11: the argument of your presentation for our listeners.
Speaker 6: Yes.
Speaker 18: What I argued in the conference, which was fantastic and
Speaker 18: I really learned so much from your presentation as well,
Speaker 18: was the idea that this war was made possible in
Speaker 18: a sense because several different strands of fascism have come
Speaker 18: together in this moment. And I called it converging fascisms,
Speaker 18: just to go quickly through it, because I don't want
Speaker 18: to droll on and on. But the idea is that
Speaker 18: one of the core strands has been this growing anti
Speaker 18: Muslim sentiment that really goes across so many different fascist
Speaker 18: movements that we see, whether it's the far right in
Speaker 18: Europe here in the United States, Islamophobia is so central,
Speaker 18: and of course the shootings at the mosque in San
Speaker 18: Diego is just the latest of long string of violence
Speaker 18: the Hindutfa in India, anti Muslim sentiments racisms is central
Speaker 18: to the fascism that we see there. And then of
Speaker 18: course in Israel that's been a core element of their
Speaker 18: anti Palestinian racism generally, but also specifically anti Muslim racism.
Speaker 18: So that's kind of the big strand that I identified
Speaker 18: as coming together. And within that there's an inflection of
Speaker 18: anti Shia sentiment.
Speaker 19: And there's lots of scholars who have talked about.
Speaker 18: How really the anti Muslim project starts with the seventy
Speaker 18: nine Revolution, this like modern manifestation of it, and so
Speaker 18: it's always had this anti Shia sentiment to it.
Speaker 19: Inflection, Yeah, inflection, thank you.
Speaker 18: The second strand that I wanted to highlight was this
Speaker 18: white supremacy and aryanism, which is interesting because it actually
Speaker 18: loops in the far right of Iran in actors and
Speaker 18: Iranian diasporic actors in particular, those that are tied to
Speaker 18: the former Shah of Iran's son, Riza Pahavi.
Speaker 19: Who are really linking they're wanting to overthrow the regime
Speaker 19: in Iran to restoring this Aryan nation that existed before
Speaker 19: and this is their word, it's not mine.
Speaker 18: The Arab invasion of Islam, and this is really important
Speaker 18: for the far right movement that supported this invasion was
Speaker 18: this idea that they're going to save Iran from Islam,
Speaker 18: which again the Islamophobia, but also the racialized violence against
Speaker 18: Arabs in the region and particularly against Palestinians. There's this
Speaker 18: very strong anti Palestinian current in this movement that I'm
Speaker 18: talking about.
Speaker 19: Where they are actively recruiting.
Speaker 18: And aligning themselves with Israel in the genocide, which is
Speaker 18: so horrible. The third strand that I wanted to talk
Speaker 18: about was settler colonialism and nativism. And I think your
Speaker 18: listeners probably know enough about this, but this is essentially
Speaker 18: the bringing together of both the settler colonial violence that
Speaker 18: we see in Israel, the United States, Australia, et cetera,
Speaker 18: with the anti immigrant sentiment that has swept across much
Speaker 18: of the world, including places like South Africa. Then the
Speaker 18: next brand that I talk about is nostalgic paternalism.
Speaker 11: I call it that you always need a little bit
Speaker 11: of pictriarchy, right right, Yeah.
Speaker 18: And it's basically like the people who call Trump daddy.
Speaker 18: You know, this idea that we need some strong man
Speaker 18: in our lives, and like.
Speaker 19: Egyptians have this with CC.
Speaker 18: You know this this idea that we just need this
Speaker 18: strong man to guide us forward is so dominant in
Speaker 18: a lot of these fascist groups.
Speaker 19: Mody is somebody's you know, paternal figure.
Speaker 18: And again, Razapadavi, the self proclaimed leader of the Iranian
Speaker 18: opposition in exile, has numerous times called himself the father
Speaker 18: of the Iranian people, and he's used really cringe language
Speaker 18: around how Iran is this abused woman and he's going
Speaker 18: to come in and save it, and completely out of
Speaker 18: touch with this amazing feminist movement that came out of
Speaker 18: Iran organically in twenty twenty two called the woman Like
Speaker 18: Freedom movement. He's put himself in direct opposition against that movement,
Speaker 18: which is wild to think about. And then the last
Speaker 18: kind of fascist strand that I identified, and this really
Speaker 18: also links to Naomi Klein's work, who was also at
Speaker 18: the conference, are these techno fascists and that's like the pallinteers,
Speaker 18: the anthropic dystopian future that a lot of these techno
Speaker 18: bros want to impose on the world that is very
Speaker 18: anti and so all of these strands come together at
Speaker 18: this very particular moment to justify and advance a war
Speaker 18: that some actors have wanted for a long time.
Speaker 6: And I say that it's.
Speaker 18: Kind of the blending of these at this particular moment
Speaker 18: that enabled this war.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think the convergence is an apt description. And
Speaker 11: yet especially the patriarchal stuff, like cringe is the right word,
Speaker 11: Like it's extremely cringe, but also you know, dangerous that
Speaker 11: all of these things are coming together to facilitate this
Speaker 11: kind of violence, and then the war in Iran is
Speaker 11: facilitating the expansion of fascism here and vice versa. I
Speaker 11: wanted to just kind of get your opinion of something.
Speaker 11: I read this article by most of a by Umi
Speaker 11: in The Guardian about how in the United States what
Speaker 11: actually drives Islamophobia is at its root Antipastinian racism. I mean,
Speaker 11: and you certainly you know in your presentation talked about
Speaker 11: that and as well in the Iranian context, is the
Speaker 11: anti Palestinian racism kind of tangential to the kind of broader,
Speaker 11: racialized a Islamophobia.
Speaker 8: Yeah, how would you see that?
Speaker 18: Yeah, No, I agree to a large extent of it.
Speaker 18: Biomi is saying, I think anti Palestinian racism is central
Speaker 18: to how the opposition in Iran views itself. This hasn't
Speaker 18: been helped by the fact that the Iranian government, the
Speaker 18: current Iranian government has been at least materially and ideologically
Speaker 18: one of the biggest supporters of Palestinian liberation and has
Speaker 18: used the issue as many other dictators in the region have,
Speaker 18: by the way, has used the issue to actually suppress
Speaker 18: and oppress their own people. And so for a long
Speaker 18: time there was this sentiment inside Iran that the Iranian
Speaker 18: government is sending its resources, sending its weapons, making Uran
Speaker 18: an isolated rogue state on behalf of the Palestinians, while we,
Speaker 18: the Iranian people suffer, And so this created this people
Speaker 18: the people tension where anti Palestinian sentiment grew inside Iran
Speaker 18: and outside Iran obviously in these in these fascist movements,
Speaker 18: and then that feeds back into the Islamophobia is idea
Speaker 18: that we have nothing in common with the Palestinians because
Speaker 18: they're part of a religion that has also oppressed us,
Speaker 18: or a part of a ethnic group that has oppressed us.
Speaker 19: So it's its feedback loop. That's pretty horrible.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's good that we outline kind of
Speaker 11: the different mechanisms there. And it's really you know, it's
Speaker 11: it's so unfortunate because like you see polling of like Palestinians,
Speaker 11: and Palestinians were very much against what the Iranian regime
Speaker 11: did in Syria for example. Yeah, but like you said,
Speaker 11: there's a weaponization of these these different causes, just like
Speaker 11: the United States weaponizes the woman life freedom movement.
Speaker 8: You know, every regime uses things for its benefit.
Speaker 18: Just to add, like a slightly hopeful note is that
Speaker 18: I actually think the experience of this war has actually
Speaker 18: made more thoughtful Iranians see more of themselves now in
Speaker 18: the struggle of Palestinians. Interesting because they are actually seeing
Speaker 18: the hollowness and hypocrisy of what the US and Israel
Speaker 18: say and do, and so now I think there's been
Speaker 18: a little bit of a shift back in the direction
Speaker 18: of solidarity with the Palestinians.
Speaker 8: Oh that's excellent to hear.
Speaker 11: You know, we could talk about this all day, Like
Speaker 11: there's such a disconnect between diasporas and what happens on
Speaker 11: the ground.
Speaker 8: And this is not specific to the Iranians.
Speaker 11: But I imagine even if you lean that way, but
Speaker 11: you're in Iran being bombed by Israel, that's going to
Speaker 11: change your opinion in a way that like if you're
Speaker 11: in Los Angeles waving is Reelly flag, it's.
Speaker 8: A little bit different. Solutely, there's kind of stakes there.
Speaker 18: Yeah, yeah, you're like, who's the one dropping the bombs exactly?
Speaker 19: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that is actually a very hopeful note before I
Speaker 11: turn into a less hopeful one. So your research is on,
Speaker 11: as I said earlier, like kind of the think tank
Speaker 11: landscape in DC. I remember, by the way, finding out
Speaker 11: about you back in the heydays of Twitter and being
Speaker 11: like somebody's studying think tanks, Like that's so cool, that's
Speaker 11: so clever, Like, yes, we should be studying them in
Speaker 11: this way. And basically, like your research is like the
Speaker 11: types of knowledge and the sources of knowledge that become
Speaker 11: hegemonic in these spaces, and then that of course impact
Speaker 11: American policy. So could you I know this is kind
Speaker 11: of a hard ask, but could you tell us like
Speaker 11: some basic findings of of your research the past couple
Speaker 11: of years.
Speaker 18: Yeah, so thanks for that setup, because I actually have
Speaker 18: a book coming out on this and it's called The
Speaker 18: Geopolitics of Expertise, and that's one of the central findings
Speaker 18: of the book is that this think tank landscape needs
Speaker 18: to be understood as a transnational space. That's one of
Speaker 18: the key findings in which a lot of actors and stakeholders,
Speaker 18: especially from the Middle East or Swana region, are invested
Speaker 18: in shaping the narrative from the inside out. And this
Speaker 18: is something that I think traditional models of understanding US Empire,
Speaker 18: for example, failed in understanding, which is that you know,
Speaker 18: when you have Arab Gulf States, or Turkey or Morocco
Speaker 18: or Israel invested in ensuring the debate in Washington is
Speaker 18: shaped in a particular way that meets their interest, which
Speaker 18: is not always aligned with the US. They're going to
Speaker 18: throw millions of dollars into think tanks to essentially shape
Speaker 18: what I call the common sense on any number of issues,
Speaker 18: and so they are co constructing the imperial imagination and
Speaker 18: this is one of the key findings. And then when
Speaker 18: it comes to Iran in particular, they paradoxically want to
Speaker 18: ensure that Iran remains an unknowable enemy.
Speaker 19: That's the other key piece of the book.
Speaker 18: It's just that this constructed unknowability is key to ensuring
Speaker 18: that the US maintains a posture of confrontation with Iran.
Speaker 18: And that means that you want to have this enemy
Speaker 18: that you can never fully figure out, or this enemy
Speaker 18: that's always unpredictable, this enemy that.
Speaker 4: Never follows the rules.
Speaker 18: Because if you had a predictable, rational enemy, you'd eventually
Speaker 18: have to make some type of peace with them, because
Speaker 18: that's actually the rational course of action. But when you
Speaker 18: have weapons manufacturers, when you have foreign governments, when you
Speaker 18: have all kinds of interests shaping the debate in Washington,
Speaker 18: you don't actually do what's quote unquote the rational policy
Speaker 18: for US national security interests as narrowly defined. So sorry
Speaker 18: if that was too rambly of an explanation of the book.
Speaker 8: But no, not at all.
Speaker 11: I mean it's interesting because we come at it from
Speaker 11: different disciplines. You know, I'm a political scientist, and in
Speaker 11: the international relations landscape, there was you know, well, first
Speaker 11: and foremost, like American Empire is not really recognized in
Speaker 11: like American political science, but there was this argument that
Speaker 11: percolated and like I remember going to grad school and
Speaker 11: learning this is that, like the United States is hegemonic
Speaker 11: and we can like study hierarchy, and there have been
Speaker 11: more political scientists who have studied like global hierarchies. But
Speaker 11: it's a liberal hegemon and it can't be considered an
Speaker 11: empire because it does provide these voice opportunities for our
Speaker 11: subordinates essentially to come and shape policy interest and so
Speaker 11: it's an interesting not a flip on its head, but
Speaker 11: it's like a kind of a nuancing of that argument
Speaker 11: here is like yeah, they are here and they are
Speaker 11: shape policy and shaping kind of US empire, which I think,
Speaker 11: you know, poses some questions about like the agency of
Speaker 11: these actors of course, but also like what is the
Speaker 11: broader project of US empire? Like, yeah, we don't need
Speaker 11: to think of it all the time. Is like kind
Speaker 11: of top down in.
Speaker 19: A way, exactly.
Speaker 11: There's lots of actors implicated or coherent.
Speaker 18: Or you right or right or you know, even the
Speaker 18: Iran war is a clear example, right, there's been winners
Speaker 18: and losers, as people in DC like to say.
Speaker 8: Of this war.
Speaker 18: Oil companies are reaping the greatest profits of like the
Speaker 18: last decade because of this war, because of the shortages
Speaker 18: coming through the strait of hormones. Weapons manufacturers are doing
Speaker 18: really well right now. Private equity and AI are doing well.
Speaker 18: But the damages that we are now seeing coming out
Speaker 18: of the production side across the Gulf, including inside Iran,
Speaker 18: is going to have very long term detrimental effects for
Speaker 18: all of these same industries. Paradoxically, but in the short
Speaker 18: term they're winning. Meanwhile everybody else is losing. Food prices
Speaker 18: are going up, gas prices are going up. I have
Speaker 18: a friend who works in research with helium. There's no
Speaker 18: helium in the world right now. So if you want
Speaker 18: to go get an MRI, good luck, because there's not
Speaker 18: much healium.
Speaker 19: Most of it comes out of this one facility in Kutar.
Speaker 11: And I was just reading an article about how Tata
Speaker 11: has lost so many billions of dollars as a result
Speaker 11: of this war, as a result of the attacks on
Speaker 11: some of its facilities.
Speaker 8: And it's like doh has a ghost town.
Speaker 11: And I used to live in Doha, and for anybody
Speaker 11: who has you know, been there or whatever, I mean,
Speaker 11: like at its best is a ghost town. Like often
Speaker 11: it is a ghost town. If it's not like a
Speaker 11: busy season. So, like, what even does it mean that
Speaker 11: these places? I can't even fathom what's going to happen
Speaker 11: long term given the impact of this war.
Speaker 8: And that was with just sixty days of war, right, Yeah,
Speaker 8: so we don't.
Speaker 19: Know it's in such a short amount of time. The
Speaker 19: amount of damage it caused is unbelievable.
Speaker 11: Yeah, Like you said, it's good to start to disentangle
Speaker 11: who's benefiting in service of which actors?
Speaker 8: Here are we attacking Iran?
Speaker 11: Yeah, and this is like the most corrupt administration imaginable.
Speaker 11: It really is like kind of breathtaking the level of corruption.
Speaker 11: So yeah, hopefully, you know, historians and political scientists and
Speaker 11: political anthropologists will have years and years of research to
Speaker 11: study this moment. All right, Well, is there anything else
Speaker 11: you think people should keep an eye on when it
Speaker 11: comes to the situation in Iran moving forward?
Speaker 19: I think we need to be much more critical about
Speaker 19: who is shaping the narrative on Iran moving forward. A
Speaker 19: lot of the figures who are now disavowing the war
Speaker 19: in these thing tanks and saying, you know, war was
Speaker 19: such a bad idea. Trump fumbled it and this was
Speaker 19: a terrible idea. Had essentially been i say, hedging.
Speaker 18: For this war for a long time, which is that
Speaker 18: by constructing Iran as this enemy, you can't negotiate with
Speaker 18: an enemy that.
Speaker 19: You can never predict.
Speaker 18: You can never negotiate with an enemy that lies about everything.
Speaker 18: These are the narratives that these Iran experts have been
Speaker 18: advancing for years, and now we're expected to go and
Speaker 18: turn back to that same group to get us out
Speaker 18: of this mess. And that's what I'm going to urge
Speaker 18: all of the listeners is be much more critical about
Speaker 18: who is analyzing Iran in such a moment. Look at
Speaker 18: who they work for, look at what types of analysis
Speaker 18: they've done in the past, How do they access the Iran,
Speaker 18: How do they know what they know about Iran? It
Speaker 18: sometimes takes five extra minutes when you're reading a New
Speaker 18: York Times piece to just go through and highlight who
Speaker 18: they're quoting as experts.
Speaker 19: For example, and New York Times says all kinds of problems, but.
Speaker 18: Pick whatever Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, foreign policies, and
Speaker 18: just do five minutes of due diligence on who that
Speaker 18: piece is citing as an expert on Iran.
Speaker 19: And that's my key takeaway for people.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's such a good takeaway.
Speaker 11: I mean, I think there's so many aspects of our
Speaker 11: politics in which people are trying to convince us the
Speaker 11: same people who got us into these messes are like
Speaker 11: all we have like Democratic party operatives that like led
Speaker 11: us to Trump exactly are the ones like now pretending
Speaker 11: they really dislike the genocide and Gaza and whatever. And
Speaker 11: it's the same thing these Iranian experts. They're not even Iranian.
Speaker 11: Sometimes it's just Iran experts claiming expertise. And it's like
Speaker 11: the way that you have shaped this discussion is why
Speaker 11: we're at this point. So yeah, that's a very good takeaway.
Speaker 11: I appreciate that. Yeah, thank you so much, Naggar. This
Speaker 11: has been really enriching.
Speaker 19: Thank you so much, Danna.
Speaker 11: I will put all of the things we talked about
Speaker 11: in the show notes. Does your book have a publication
Speaker 11: date yet?
Speaker 2: Nobody?
Speaker 18: I signed the contract, so oka good good, So people
Speaker 18: be on the lookout.
Speaker 19: It will be with Stanford University Press, so.
Speaker 11: Yeah, excellent, excellent, So I will make sure to note
Speaker 11: that and flag that.
Speaker 8: Thank you.
Speaker 19: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Of course.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Executive dysfunction could happen here?
Speaker 9: No?
Speaker 2: Is that all right? Garrison? I thought we were. It
Speaker 2: was pretty close.
Speaker 6: There's another like show or column called Executive Dysfunction.
Speaker 2: Now, oh is there? Ye sons of bitches? They stole
Speaker 2: it from us.
Speaker 6: That covers like legal issues relating to the Trump administration.
Speaker 3: So okay, well that brings us neatly into a first store,
Speaker 3: or did it?
Speaker 6: This is defen here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering
Speaker 6: what's happening the White House, the crumpling world, and what
Speaker 6: it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today, joined by
Speaker 6: James Stout, Robert Evans, Mia Wong, and Sophie Licktterman. We're
Speaker 6: a covering the week of May twenty seventh to June third.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about intellectual property lawsuits.
Speaker 3: Let's right right off the bat. One who is in
Speaker 3: any capacity using ed or unnoticed It is going to
Speaker 3: be us against the Viagara people. I'm talking today about Patagonia,
Speaker 3: the brand suing Fatigonia, the drag queen.
Speaker 2: God damn, this is God.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've successfully walked you into my little world. This
Speaker 3: is a situation very reminiscent of people. Remember the north
Speaker 3: Face's lawsuit against the South But.
Speaker 2: I would argue it's actually kind of different. But okay,
Speaker 2: I get what you're saying.
Speaker 3: The self but lawsuit was funny. If people an't familiar,
Speaker 3: it's really funny. They were bound to arbitration. They arbitrated
Speaker 3: the settle, and then the guy turned around and launched
Speaker 3: the butt face like a few weeks later and they
Speaker 3: sued him again.
Speaker 2: That was a beautiful case of somebody trying to troll
Speaker 2: a company and also like trolling the concept of like
Speaker 2: intellectual property laws in like a really creative way, which
Speaker 2: is which is different from what's happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yes, what is happening here is that when Wiley,
Speaker 3: who dragged persona is Patagonia, right, does a lot of
Speaker 3: fundraising for outdoors causes, environmental causes, public lands, that kind
Speaker 3: of thing, has attempted to trademark their use of Patigonia
Speaker 3: for clothing. Patagonia is suing Wiley to protect its trademark
Speaker 3: on its logo because some of the logos that Patigonia
Speaker 3: has used are very obviously like the mirrored Patagonia logos.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's trying to get a trademark for her Patagonia logo,
Speaker 2: which is just Patagonia instead of Patagonia in the company
Speaker 2: logo for Patagonia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not sure she tried to tried to trademark,
Speaker 3: like the it's a Sarah Fitzroy right, like it's about
Speaker 3: scape or she just tried to trademark Patigonia. It looked
Speaker 3: like it.
Speaker 2: Well I'll double check that right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I think what she has offered as a
Speaker 3: settlement right now is to stop using the logo but
Speaker 3: continue using the name.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The second is whether Patagonia should be entitled a trademark
Speaker 2: registration and at least they have a picture in the
Speaker 2: trademark application of her Patagonia logo.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they've claimed it's usingly similar.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And you made you made a good point when we
Speaker 2: were talking about this earlier, James, that I hadn't thought of,
Speaker 2: because you are a better mind than I am in
Speaker 2: this way, which is that it is because my initial
Speaker 2: thinking on this was like when I saw that she
Speaker 2: was trying to trademark, just like her version of the
Speaker 2: Patagonia logo, was like, well, you just took their logo
Speaker 2: and put your name on, Like that is fucked up.
Speaker 2: But you pointed out well, Patagonia's logo includes this, like
Speaker 2: actual mountain range that she includes, and Patagonia doesn't really
Speaker 2: have the right to trademark that's sillowette of a mountain range.
Speaker 2: It is a little more nuanced than I thought initially.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there are a couple of things of stake
Speaker 3: care that people prep ton't understand. One like, I'm in
Speaker 3: a moral level, not illegal one, folks, but yes, but yeah, morally,
Speaker 3: I think we should be asking the question is it
Speaker 3: okay for a company that grossest one point four billion
Speaker 3: a year to own the rights to a skyline? Like
Speaker 3: I think we should be asking that. I think alsotinly,
Speaker 3: people maybe should look a little bit deeper into I've
Speaker 3: written about this a bunch and a bunch of outlets,
Speaker 3: But Patagonia has millions daughters of military contracts that they
Speaker 3: don't like to talk about, and they did through a
Speaker 3: different company called Lost Arrow, And like the people just
Speaker 3: need to stop seeing a giant company like this is
Speaker 3: woke that like the companies ain't going to save us.
Speaker 3: The sustainable shorts aren't going to save us. Like buying
Speaker 3: a fancy fleece is not the way that you're going
Speaker 3: to make the better world that you want to live in.
Speaker 3: That's my take.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like Patty was kind of poking the
Speaker 2: bear here. Yeah, one hundred percent, like in a massive way.
Speaker 2: Really yeah yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: No, clearly she knew what she was going for here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Pagony clearly doesn't want to be fighting this lawsuit.
Speaker 6: Where are you seeing this stuff? Is this like a
Speaker 6: blue Skydews story? Where are you seeing this? No?
Speaker 2: This is like a big this is I came into it,
Speaker 2: like I saw it first on Reddit, but it's also
Speaker 2: just been pushed into my news feed like I've never
Speaker 2: heard a five different article. It's it's a big story
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately I followed her just like generally been aware of
Speaker 3: her for probably six or seven years, six seven.
Speaker 2: The New York Times has a feature that's just on
Speaker 2: this right now. It's a sizable tale.
Speaker 6: Interesting.
Speaker 3: I did note that most of her merch has sold out,
Speaker 3: so the striking effect it's in full force here.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Like, if you wanted to find a way to sell
Speaker 3: as many Patagonia stick as it look like the Patagonia
Speaker 3: logo as possible, you would sue her.
Speaker 2: This is the way to do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're starting her for one dollar plus legal fees.
Speaker 3: People don't seem to have grasped. That doesn't mean that
Speaker 3: all that is at stake is a bug here. The
Speaker 3: fees will be very substantial.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, although the fees will be substantial. That said,
Speaker 2: this is clearly a fight Patty wanted to have. Ye, So, like,
Speaker 2: I am not in a situation where, like I feel
Speaker 2: particularly angry or disturbed about this lawsuit, like this is
Speaker 2: something that any company would have done some version of
Speaker 2: this in response, it's not good that Pedagonia is doing this.
Speaker 2: It's just what any corporation would do that has a
Speaker 2: fiduciary duty to its shareholders. And that shouldn't change your
Speaker 2: opinion of Patagonia from what it was previously. But your
Speaker 2: opinion of Patagonia shouldnt ever have been that it's like
Speaker 2: an altruistic entity, right right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Two percent of its shares are held by its Purpose Trust,
Speaker 3: which are all the voting shares, and ninety eight percent
Speaker 3: if it's shares are help by the hold Fast Collective,
Speaker 3: which is a five oh one C four. So like,
Speaker 3: I think people see that as like, you know, they'd
Speaker 3: like to say the Earth is our only shareholder, but
Speaker 3: like the purpose trust is, as you say, Robert, duty
Speaker 3: bound to make a profit to give to the C four.
Speaker 3: This is not the same thing as like activism. It's different.
Speaker 3: It's a company. It's a company that has to make profit,
Speaker 3: like you said, Robert, And I think people need to
Speaker 3: grasp that.
Speaker 2: Yes, and if they I mean literally, if they were not,
Speaker 2: if they were to not fight what she's doing here
Speaker 2: like this could cause serious issues for Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think someone tried to put their logo on
Speaker 3: a gun or I've heard. I couldn't find reporting on this,
Speaker 3: but a couple of people have mentioned it to me
Speaker 3: and obviously they'd suit about that and they got you know,
Speaker 3: so if they didn't, if they hadn't done this one,
Speaker 3: they couldn't.
Speaker 6: Do that right.
Speaker 2: And it's again, this should not I'm not you shouldn't
Speaker 2: be like, well, patagone isn't the right And but also
Speaker 2: you shouldn't be like, wow, I completely changed my opinion
Speaker 2: about this company.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's just that they're doing what they do.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I think the underlying structural thing here is something we've
Speaker 12: talked about on this show at some length, is just
Speaker 12: the underlying violence of the intellectual property system, like irrespective
Speaker 12: of this case. This is a kind of silly case
Speaker 12: of it. But you know, like there are a lot
Speaker 12: of people in the world who are dead right now
Speaker 12: because a bunch of a bunch of corporations get to
Speaker 12: hold like patents on vaccines, for example, Yeah, or insulin.
Speaker 12: This has always been an extremely violent regime that is
Speaker 12: enforced by quite like one of the most powerful international
Speaker 12: bodies that has ever existed. And yeah, if you want
Speaker 12: to hear more about this, friend of the show, Vicky
Speaker 12: Ostrowhil released a book called The Extended Universe about how
Speaker 12: Disney pioneered a whole bunch of this that, yeah, you
Speaker 12: should read about because the entire system is just pure
Speaker 12: violence and always has been.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have some episodes from you. It is good
Speaker 3: that I made about drug ip and a a greening
Speaker 3: as well. Yeah, that's a very good point. Mare moving on,
Speaker 3: we learned this week that the F fifteen E pilot
Speaker 3: who was shut down over Iran in April had been
Speaker 3: shot down the week before over Q eight.
Speaker 2: What horrible, horrible week. Think you've had a bad week
Speaker 2: at work.
Speaker 12: Versus joining just the list of all timers, like that
Speaker 12: guy who got nuked at both Roschaman and Nagasaki. There's
Speaker 12: that guy who had sunk on four consecutive ships.
Speaker 2: Is there such thing as a reverse ace? Like if
Speaker 2: this guy gets shot down three more times like an
Speaker 2: anti as.
Speaker 3: If he gets shut down three more times, he ain't
Speaker 3: gonna be able to reach the controls of the plane,
Speaker 3: Like he's already compressed his spine show much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm surprised. I didn't think they would let them.
Speaker 2: I didn't think period after getting shot down and ejecting,
Speaker 2: you would be allowed to fly a plane at all,
Speaker 2: Like yeah, quickly, I know.
Speaker 6: I was not a lad.
Speaker 2: That was my understanding is you're not normally supposed to Like,
Speaker 2: I don't think this is how normally things would be done,
Speaker 2: which kind of suggests that there was like they didn't
Speaker 2: have enough pilots.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, it's kind of remarkable that they were able
Speaker 3: to get him another at fifteen quickly, I guess. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: he probably not flying any more planes for a while,
Speaker 3: I would imagine not Yeah, I mean, who knows, maybe
Speaker 3: maybe the F fifteen to free I found.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds like it's just feeding F fifteen.
Speaker 3: He must Yeah, the desert God's demand an F fifteen
Speaker 3: sacrifice every six days. Marco Rubio in the House has
Speaker 3: claimed that Afrikaners, we spoke quite this first week right,
Speaker 3: they're raising the cap to admit Africanas as refugees. Africantisu
Speaker 3: may admitted and others not because they quote have a
Speaker 3: high likelihood of assimilation.
Speaker 20: We have gauged that there is real interest from a
Speaker 20: unique subset who would be interested to coming in the
Speaker 20: United States and who we assess have a high likelihood
Speaker 20: of rapid assimilation and success in our society, and hence
Speaker 20: this program was created. Now, that's not a program that's
Speaker 20: going to exist in perpetuity. It's a program that's designed
Speaker 20: to the fact that we are seeing the demand. We
Speaker 20: are seeing applications from South Africa. People will enter the
Speaker 20: United States, and we think this is a group of
Speaker 20: potential refugees.
Speaker 21: Our Afghan allies are refugees. They have been vetted eleven
Speaker 21: hundred versus this new seventeen thousand.
Speaker 20: But it's more than just vetting. We're also trying to
Speaker 20: determine against the immigration policy the United States. Like everything
Speaker 20: we do, has to be geared by the national interest,
Speaker 20: and it is in our national interest if we are
Speaker 20: allowing people in our country be people that can quickly
Speaker 20: assimilate into society and be successful.
Speaker 21: I can't they assimilate into society. A background been to
Speaker 21: their centers in my district in Queens they have assimilated
Speaker 21: and contribute and pay taxes.
Speaker 20: Yeah, but we've already assumed a lot of Afghan refugees,
Speaker 20: as you said, you have them in your district. We've
Speaker 20: already assumed the large number in the past. The point
Speaker 20: is that the general policy has been to limit the
Speaker 20: injury of refugees from all over the world and then
Speaker 20: to create the special track because of a unique circumstance
Speaker 20: and the short term of a high demand from a
Speaker 20: number of immigrants that we have determined if they passed
Speaker 20: the vetting and the checking, we very quickly assimilate and
Speaker 20: contribute to our society.
Speaker 3: I think it's really interesting. It's one of the more
Speaker 3: clear elucidations is the way they see immigration that we've had. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like you said, it's not about vetting, it's not about
Speaker 3: background checks. It's specifically about people who can quote unquote assimilate.
Speaker 6: I wonder what the economic strata of the Africander is
Speaker 6: getting getting refugee status are.
Speaker 12: I mean it's in terms of the way that Rubio
Speaker 12: is looking at it. Their economic strata is white, which yeah,
Speaker 12: well I wonder what I wonder what their actual economic
Speaker 12: strata is. That is an interesting aspect, Like South Africa
Speaker 12: is a place where that maps on very very cleanly.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Ways, right, it's That's what I'm saying, like, definitely a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think just having the means to apply
Speaker 3: for this.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And that's clearly like Rubio saying, like he's doing this
Speaker 3: because there is a demand. Let me tell you, there
Speaker 3: is a demand all over the world, Like I have
Speaker 3: seen demand to live in the United States in every
Speaker 3: continent on the planet apart from the ones that are
Speaker 3: covered in ice. This is as clear as you're going
Speaker 3: to get to them saying these folks are white, They're
Speaker 3: coming to America and we're going to lock out the
Speaker 3: folks who are not. Like I thought, it was very
Speaker 3: interesting to see him go right up to that line. Next,
Speaker 3: I have Medicaid work requirements. Work study of volunteering requirements
Speaker 3: of eighty hours a month will be imposed by the
Speaker 3: first of January for the forty States to expanded the
Speaker 3: program under the Affordable Care Act. This is according to
Speaker 3: a notice published today in the Federal Register today being Wednesday,
Speaker 3: this will impact millions of Americans, and the speed at
Speaker 3: which this is being done will also be very hard
Speaker 3: for state bureaucracies to keep up with. Right, we have
Speaker 3: less than six months for massive change, and like the
Speaker 3: requirement for states to monitor this, it's going to be
Speaker 3: very difficult for them to retain the stability and pivot
Speaker 3: to this and that's going to impact people, whether or
Speaker 3: not they are working. Yeah, which sucks.
Speaker 12: This is something that like particularly impacts trans people because
Speaker 12: they're a very shit tone of trans people on Medicaide
Speaker 12: and a lot of those people are also disabled and
Speaker 12: that's just been an absolute nightmare for them. If you
Speaker 12: are in a position where you can hire someone for
Speaker 12: I think the work, what's the word is like thirty
Speaker 12: hours a week? I think is the requirement?
Speaker 3: Eighty hours a month? Is eight hours twenty ish a week.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Like, if you're in a position to just hire
Speaker 12: someone for that, you should do it because that's the
Speaker 12: difference between these people like having food and not having food.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a potential and this will kill people. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like just just the fuck ups in the bureaucracy. Even
Speaker 3: if people are able to find the work of volunteer
Speaker 3: or study or whatever. Yeah, but the delay so that
Speaker 3: will cause will kill people.
Speaker 12: This is also a thing, by the way, that some
Speaker 12: unions have historically done with WW has done this, which
Speaker 12: is like getting people positions to be able to do volunteering.
Speaker 12: And if that's the thing you can do, you should
Speaker 12: do this because this is a unfathomable humanitarian crisis for
Speaker 12: a bunch of the most vulnerable people in the US.
Speaker 12: And yeah, it's real bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah it's not good to all. I think that is
Speaker 3: a good point mere that, Like, if you're in a
Speaker 3: place to help people coordinate their volunteering and document that, like,
Speaker 3: that's a good thing to start thinking about. Garrison, you
Speaker 3: got any small things?
Speaker 6: A few more small things. Trump signed an executive order
Speaker 6: to expand AI cybersecurity capabilities and protections, and last Friday,
Speaker 6: Chelsey Gabbard resigned as Director of National Intelligence citing her
Speaker 6: husband's recent cancer diagnosis. Trump has elect and Bill Poulti,
Speaker 6: head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to serve as
Speaker 6: acting Director of National Intelligence. Pulte is a Trump loyalist
Speaker 6: with no intelligence background, and even Republican senators don't seem
Speaker 6: too keen on this choice. Senate Majority leader John Thune
Speaker 6: told reporters, quote, well, we don't need a weaponized DNI,
Speaker 6: we need professionals there. If he's somebody they wanted that
Speaker 6: position permanently, he's got, as you know, a lengthy road
Speaker 6: ahead of him.
Speaker 3: Let's catch up with the war in Iran. It ran
Speaker 3: this week hit a commercial vessel with an anti ship
Speaker 3: cruise missile in the Persian Gulf, as well as firing
Speaker 3: at US facilities and hitting the international airport in Qit.
Speaker 3: But they've killed at least one person there. This comes
Speaker 3: as talks are continuing to fail to reach a resolution,
Speaker 3: at least in part because Israel refuses to stop attacking
Speaker 3: Lebanon and committing war crimes. Axios is reporting that Trump said,
Speaker 3: in a call to Nettinyahuo, quote your fucking crazy. You'd
Speaker 3: be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving
Speaker 3: your ass. Everybody hates you now, everybody hates Israel because
Speaker 3: of this. Sure In recent days, the IDF has explicitly
Speaker 3: threatened bit route and further expanded its ground campaign again
Speaker 3: right like, this war is now becoming very much a
Speaker 3: regional thing. Has been a regional thing since it started,
Speaker 3: but like the peace deal, is also a regional thing,
Speaker 3: and the fact that Israel refuses to do anything other
Speaker 3: than exactly what it wants, which seems to be killing
Speaker 3: more and more people in its neighboring countries, means that
Speaker 3: it's going to be very hard for this water come
Speaker 3: to an end, which is going to have long term
Speaker 3: economic consequences for the whole world. NBC has also reported,
Speaker 3: talking of the whole world, that it was a Chinese
Speaker 3: man pads shot down the fifteen E. That's for the
Speaker 3: second time in April that such equipment, along with long
Speaker 3: range radar was possibly supplied to Iran in the early
Speaker 3: days of the conflict by China. Obviously, this makes any
Speaker 3: kind of tent with the US and China more difficult,
Speaker 3: right and it's not clear if the particular actual manpad's
Speaker 3: man portable air defense system people aren't familiar if the
Speaker 3: particular serbs to MSR used had arrived recently or have
Speaker 3: been into doock pals for some time, But it appears
Speaker 3: that China, at least right before or early on in
Speaker 3: the conflict, was perhaps supplying some air defenses to it Ran.
Speaker 3: Maybe this can explain just a little bit about how
Speaker 3: the bombing campaign has been relatively unsuccessful in its objectives
Speaker 3: in many ways.
Speaker 6: Let's go on a break and then we can talk
Speaker 6: about the California elections and the Supreme Court. Okay, elections
Speaker 6: in California. Why is California like that? What is going
Speaker 6: on over there?
Speaker 1: It's because I left. It's my fault.
Speaker 3: Yeah, grieving Sophie.
Speaker 2: That was the last thing holding it together there.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Speaker 6: Let's start with the La mayoral race.
Speaker 10: I want to talk about it. It's my duty to
Speaker 10: talk about this. I would like to talk a bit
Speaker 10: about Spencer Pratt.
Speaker 6: Who may may be advancing, who.
Speaker 1: May be advancing, That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 10: At time of recording, which is Wednesday, June third, at
Speaker 10: around three thirty pm Pacific time, Pratt is currently in
Speaker 10: second place with thirty percent of the votes. Bass is
Speaker 10: at thirty five percent and has already been guaranteed to
Speaker 10: move forward, and I THEE Raman is in third with
Speaker 10: twenty two percent. And like I said, there's sixty percent
Speaker 10: of the votes counted. So why the fuck is Spencer
Speaker 10: Pratt a former reality TV cast member. I'm not even
Speaker 10: gonna give him star running for mayor. Pratt grew up
Speaker 10: in the Pacific Halisad's neighborhood and live there until the
Speaker 10: fires happened and he and his parents' houses were unfortunately
Speaker 10: burned down, and he started making videos on TikTok, was
Speaker 10: getting a lot of attention for it, and decided that
Speaker 10: it was his destiny to it was his According to
Speaker 10: his website, his mission to run for mayor her his
Speaker 10: own campaign website. Pratt is a media entrepreneur, questionable, outspoken
Speaker 10: advocate depends on who you're talking about, and an emerging
Speaker 10: political leader. He does have a political science degree from
Speaker 10: USC I will say that, but he does claim to
Speaker 10: be Karen Bass's worst nightmare. Now, if you're not a
Speaker 10: millennial who had television in the late two thousands, you're
Speaker 10: probably unaware of how unhinged Spencer Pratt is.
Speaker 1: Here are some highlights listeners.
Speaker 2: We apologize for what Sophie's about to make you experience.
Speaker 6: This is a lot of audio, Sophie, we need all
Speaker 6: of it.
Speaker 2: Oh god, it Garrison, just copyright.
Speaker 1: We'll just do it.
Speaker 6: Just do it for me. That was the best.
Speaker 13: Like, I was proud of myself for not doing what
Speaker 13: I wanted to do to you, because what I wanted
Speaker 13: to do and say to you, dear, I didn't because
Speaker 13: I was praying, praying like I do every day, to
Speaker 13: not say the things that I want to say to you,
Speaker 13: to your mom. I know I'm not. Do you see
Speaker 13: how I'm not saying them? Yeah, I'm very proud of myself.
Speaker 19: Take your heads about to explode.
Speaker 13: So I am sorry if I disrespected you. But I'm
Speaker 13: very emotional these days, very very so I say things
Speaker 13: that I feel.
Speaker 11: I was the one that wanted to kill anybody that
Speaker 11: would ever talk like that about.
Speaker 19: My sister, and I still would.
Speaker 16: But that goes through my mom too, and as a family,
Speaker 16: that's how we all should be.
Speaker 13: Well, I didn't say anything negative aout your mom. Your
Speaker 13: mom is just the vagina that made Heidi come on
Speaker 13: to earth. Your mom is not Jesus or God or
Speaker 13: the Creator. So why can't I say that?
Speaker 6: So why can't I say that?
Speaker 2: Why can't I say that?
Speaker 9: No, it's not it's my opinion, preacher, preacher, this isn't
Speaker 9: Bible study, this is no one's preaching, No one's preaching,
Speaker 9: No one is preaching here. You're not her sister.
Speaker 6: You're not her friend. Liar, walk away from.
Speaker 13: These lives because she's gonna sit here and keep eying you.
Speaker 13: You're the biggest poser in this town. You know what
Speaker 13: you're going to burn.
Speaker 2: I go back to the real estate job.
Speaker 19: Liar.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that was Spencer talking to his sister in law
Speaker 10: about his mother in law.
Speaker 6: All this is fake, this is all acting like this,
Speaker 6: this is I don't know this. This doesn't move me
Speaker 6: at all.
Speaker 1: Half of this is acting. Half of this is not acting.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yes, that is he here, he is talking to
Speaker 10: his own sister.
Speaker 3: Godkay, no, we've already cathlog this ship.
Speaker 10: I'm gonna leave.
Speaker 8: But I didn't get to say, Hi, are you guys good?
Speaker 8: How are you.
Speaker 11: Excellent?
Speaker 6: How are you.
Speaker 13: When?
Speaker 1: When?
Speaker 13: When?
Speaker 3: What are you crying about?
Speaker 13: Seventy? Are you crying about that? That's why you're not
Speaker 13: in my life, you crazy bitch, because you come to
Speaker 13: barbecues and just start crying. I was just enjoying myself
Speaker 13: and my wife, and I get crying sisters in front
Speaker 13: of me.
Speaker 9: She just wanted to say, but that gets a crying away.
Speaker 6: What the do I need to do to you? Drama?
Speaker 3: He didn't just ignoring me at the party. Mar What
Speaker 3: just happened?
Speaker 20: We were having a little conversation and then all of
Speaker 20: a sudden, I got people storming out of here.
Speaker 8: I'm talking now. You know it's your brother, but she's
Speaker 8: off his rocker.
Speaker 12: I don't know what's talking with her.
Speaker 9: You know what, I'm talking about, my little sister who's
Speaker 9: not relevant to my life.
Speaker 6: Oh god?
Speaker 12: Oh you know? Okay?
Speaker 10: Oh, and just to say, just to say, she has
Speaker 10: told people not to vote for her brother in modern times.
Speaker 2: Just a shacking, shocking stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he seems like he's an even tempered guy.
Speaker 10: Yeah, one less clip, just because I'll I never want
Speaker 10: to talk about him again.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to get all that.
Speaker 10: I am the managing executive producer of this podcast. Let
Speaker 10: me have this.
Speaker 8: Thank you.
Speaker 1: You're on this club, dude, relaxed, bro, Look at hell's.
Speaker 10: Wrong with me?
Speaker 2: I hate that pitch.
Speaker 6: Excuse my French.
Speaker 19: Hey, you're crazy.
Speaker 2: You're looking me in a weirdo.
Speaker 6: Bro.
Speaker 13: They just yelled at me very knowledge. I'm so loud
Speaker 13: as somebody's yelled in my face for three years.
Speaker 6: I'm over you.
Speaker 2: I don't want to hear anything together.
Speaker 6: Tell me y'all in my day.
Speaker 13: Son walked away from me before we have a problem.
Speaker 12: Walk them away.
Speaker 6: God, you bo don't know how nazor science.
Speaker 13: Like I just really outed, like oh myself smashing his
Speaker 13: head off, you know, like.
Speaker 4: My pieces, Like.
Speaker 6: All right, so this is so this is like if
Speaker 6: like Clovicular run, like ran for office in like ten
Speaker 6: years yeah right, twenty years.
Speaker 10: Yeah yeah, And you know it's a reality TV show.
Speaker 10: You're right, there's parts of it that are scripted. There's
Speaker 10: parts of it that are enhanced, there's parts of it,
Speaker 10: but you can't you can't fake that fucking vein popping
Speaker 10: out of his head.
Speaker 2: A lot of it scripted, but you don't get passed,
Speaker 2: so to speak, to be that kind of character if
Speaker 2: you're not already a giant asshole, right, I.
Speaker 6: Mean yeah, it's in some ways less explicitly scripted than
Speaker 6: like WWE, but you you fall into certain roles because
Speaker 6: that's what you are getting paid to, Like that is
Speaker 6: your job is contingent on performing this kind of real
Speaker 6: not real thing. And I honestly, you know, like the
Speaker 6: sort of like like iol streamer thing is is a
Speaker 6: very similar version of that for the contemporary age. And
Speaker 6: I think so it really there was there was one
Speaker 6: specific like like line there that really reminded me of
Speaker 6: like one of one of clivioculars, like on cam Her meltdowns.
Speaker 6: I'm like, oh, this is really just if What if
Speaker 6: you had a guy like that just run for office
Speaker 6: for like the mayor of whatever city in like twenty years. Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well I want to talk a little bit about
Speaker 10: his campaign style. He shared this video on X the
Speaker 10: Everything app, and it got millions and millions of views,
Speaker 10: with people saying it's the best campaign video of all time,
Speaker 10: and so we're gonna play it for you now.
Speaker 3: No, it's more of him than I've ever seen.
Speaker 6: This is the Batman one.
Speaker 3: I haven't seen this.
Speaker 5: She was there.
Speaker 6: He did not make this video.
Speaker 10: He did not make this. He shared it and he
Speaker 10: he's big on the AI sharing video trend.
Speaker 1: Yes, his website is filled with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there have been a lot of AI videos in
Speaker 3: LA races time.
Speaker 6: There's been a lot of these LA election like Batman videos. Yes, yes,
Speaker 6: let's I guess. Let's watch this one.
Speaker 10: Sure until we get bored with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, wait, hang on, just break that down.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think this makes sense to watch a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, we have to explain first. We start with
Speaker 2: the entire Hollywood sign of flame.
Speaker 7: You see is these these goons dressed in all black
Speaker 7: tactical gear with the white that says DSA, which is.
Speaker 6: One of the best things I've ever seen. That one
Speaker 6: of my favorite part about this game.
Speaker 2: Yes, the paramilitary DSA forces in Los.
Speaker 6: Angeles, and then it goes into this sort of dark
Speaker 6: Knight rises like courtroom.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Karen Bass in the.
Speaker 6: Middle, except Karen Bass has joker makeup and.
Speaker 10: Kamala Harris is I think drinking alcohol on one side
Speaker 10: and that's now.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, she's just like straight from the bottle too.
Speaker 3: Is that all say too?
Speaker 2: I think there's a little bit of district fucking Hunger Games,
Speaker 2: the Hunger Games, the Hunger Games Capital in that design too, anyway.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and uh, Gavin Newsom's and likes, you know, like yeah,
Speaker 6: a wrist acratic garb.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, that's Gavin.
Speaker 6: Okay, please, I'm begging you.
Speaker 10: There's homeless drug addicts in front of the schools.
Speaker 8: My children aren't safe.
Speaker 20: Look, if you were a transgender migrant, I could get
Speaker 20: you a free pussy all right.
Speaker 3: Wow, Wow, I know, holy shit, holy shit, I'm fascinated
Speaker 3: by what we've got amazing.
Speaker 6: James, have you not seen this before?
Speaker 3: Absolutely not.
Speaker 12: No, I haven't seen this either.
Speaker 6: I shared this video in our work chat like like
Speaker 6: a month and a half, like.
Speaker 12: Yeah, oh wait, no, shit, I have seen it.
Speaker 2: Oh god, I didn't watch.
Speaker 3: I've got to control my exposure to this shit. It's
Speaker 3: made me very angry. So we now have a marionette
Speaker 3: off like a Latina.
Speaker 2: Okay, god, yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 6: But there's like, d you say people? Do you say?
Speaker 6: Thugs and tact ol Gary, Plus they.
Speaker 2: Throw the woman on the ground who's complaining about Yeah
Speaker 2: that the homeless drug addicts. I think we're good.
Speaker 6: It's it's it's all that kind of stuff. It's yeah, whatever.
Speaker 10: There's like a fake Batman scene. They asked for Spencer
Speaker 10: Spencer and a fake Batman costume. Blah blah blah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, yeah, Spencer prattis Batman. That's that's Spencer
Speaker 6: Pratt's Batman.
Speaker 1: Yes, you know, that's the kind of stuff they's sharing.
Speaker 10: And you know, one of the biggest things he's run
Speaker 10: on is that his house was burned down and he
Speaker 10: was didn't have a place to live, and he claimed
Speaker 10: that he was living in a trailer on the property
Speaker 10: where his house used to be. And then it turned
Speaker 10: out that he was actually not staying in that trailer,
Speaker 10: but he was staying at the hotel bel Air, which
Speaker 10: is one of the nicest hotels in Los Angeles.
Speaker 6: Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 10: And in response to to that, he made this video.
Speaker 13: Now, this is a story all about how my life
Speaker 13: got certain upside down.
Speaker 2: The prince of itself called bel Air.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Oh god, oh, I don't know. I don't want to
Speaker 2: get me no, no, no, millions.
Speaker 1: Of views, millions of views.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this like weird.
Speaker 10: Rogue, no qualification political candidate thing is working. People are like,
Speaker 10: we need to change and I'm prott the BBC. In
Speaker 10: terms of fundraising during the race, Pratt has blown away
Speaker 10: the other two. He raised two point seven million dollars
Speaker 10: between April nineteenth and May sixteenth. That's nearly ten times
Speaker 10: what Bass, a longtime politician, raised in the same period,
Speaker 10: and approximately seven times what Nathio Raman raised.
Speaker 3: I mean, no one likes Bass, right, it's the other thing, Right,
Speaker 3: the Democrats have doubled down on doing exactly the same
Speaker 3: shit they've been doing for decades across California.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's this like feckless moderate liberalism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like cost oral libs will be how I describe
Speaker 3: the Democrats.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and just to say, like Nithia Rahm did enter
Speaker 10: the race late and she is far far left from Karen,
Speaker 10: So we're seeing that. But the thing that's really interesting
Speaker 10: to me about this is there's nine point six nine
Speaker 10: million people in La County, and you know, I'm comparing
Speaker 10: it to what I think will probably be about what
Speaker 10: it'll be for.
Speaker 1: Twenty twenty six.
Speaker 10: But in twenty twenty two, you know, Karen Bass got
Speaker 10: two hundred and seventy eight thousand votes, Rick Caruso only
Speaker 10: got two hundred and thirty two thousand votes, and Kevin
Speaker 10: dalone only got fifty thousand votes out of nine point
Speaker 10: six nine million people. That's the amount of people that
Speaker 10: actually voted in the primary in twenty twenty two. It's
Speaker 10: and it's looking to be very similar for twenty twenty six.
Speaker 6: Yeah, maybe even a little bit lower.
Speaker 10: I mean, I agree, I think it might be a
Speaker 10: little bit lower.
Speaker 6: That only has one hundred and fifty thousand votes, but
Speaker 6: he's in second place.
Speaker 10: He's in second place. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Again, this is interesting because you're seeing higher than in
Speaker 2: a lot of places, higher than average turnout, And I
Speaker 2: think part of why is just because most people voting
Speaker 2: know that, like with both the California mayor and gubernatorial elections,
Speaker 2: the likeliest outcome is like someone who isn't the worst
Speaker 2: possible choice, but isn't going to like make things better
Speaker 2: like Ella, He's not going to have a good mayre.
Speaker 2: Most people are fairly confident of that, and so there's
Speaker 2: just not a lot of there's not I don't think
Speaker 2: people are very motivated because they feel like, what the
Speaker 2: fuck is the point of caring about?
Speaker 1: Sure this?
Speaker 2: You know, and I don't. I'm not saying that's the
Speaker 2: right way to look at it. I'm just saying that
Speaker 2: that's what I think is part of what's going on here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I know, like just from the discourse around
Speaker 3: San Diego, like people they're tired of being shamed into
Speaker 3: vote for like some medio care asque candidate who will
Speaker 3: just give all the money to the cops like the
Speaker 3: last five Mays have done.
Speaker 10: Yeah, We're going to keep seeing these kind of candidates.
Speaker 10: It's going to become a regular thing. We even have,
Speaker 10: you know, Jersey Shore star Mike the situation, Sarantino saying
Speaker 10: he's thinking about running for a New Jersey governor. I
Speaker 10: hate this trend. This trend sucks. And in the words
Speaker 10: of Louren Conrad, he's a sucky person. He's a sucky person.
Speaker 10: I hate Spencer. I'm never gonna like Spencer. Please don't
Speaker 10: make him your mayor. Los Angeles do better. He's awful,
Speaker 10: he's horrific, he hates unhouse people. Terrible person, no bad shame.
Speaker 1: I'm done.
Speaker 10: I hope to never to have to talk about this
Speaker 10: person ever again.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, in case people don't know, the two top winners
Speaker 6: of the LA mayoral primary advance to a runoff. So
Speaker 6: Bath is going to be there. She is in the
Speaker 6: lead and right now is between Pratt and Raman and Presley.
Speaker 6: The second place has been sliding as more and more
Speaker 6: votes come in, but as of Wednesday afternoon, he's still
Speaker 6: in second. As for governor, Yeah, Steve Hilton, Republican is
Speaker 6: in the number one spot with one point three almost
Speaker 6: one point four million votes as of Wednesday afternoon. Sarah's
Speaker 6: in number two with twenty five percent of the vote.
Speaker 6: Tom Steyer is in number three with almost twenty percent
Speaker 6: of the vote, and this is about fifty five percent
Speaker 6: of the vote in Sero's former Biden Cabinet member, Health
Speaker 6: and Human Services secretary. Yeah, so more of kind of
Speaker 6: moderate liberal stire stire, the more progressive candidate. But it
Speaker 6: seems because he is a billionaire, that did in some
Speaker 6: ways effect like enthusiasm to vote for him. On the
Speaker 6: Democratic side, yeah, there's another Republican candidate who's in fourth
Speaker 6: place with over half a million votes.
Speaker 10: But again, the amount of votes that are actually happening
Speaker 10: compared to the amount of people is insane.
Speaker 4: It's so low.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really bad.
Speaker 3: There's a massive field of candidates, but that no one
Speaker 3: really captured the imagination of people here. No one would
Speaker 3: enthusiastic for this. No, I guess so I can cover
Speaker 3: a couple of small San Diego things quickly. San Diego
Speaker 3: Measure a missa A was a tax on second homes
Speaker 3: defined as unoccupied the majority of the year. Tear Yeah
Speaker 3: it it looks like it's going.
Speaker 6: Moving the nation. Oh it's not super sorry it's not yet.
Speaker 3: Yeah and voviously not like it's I mean, there is
Speaker 3: nothing that unite San die against more than hating tourists.
Speaker 3: But I think you have this interesting alliance of like
Speaker 3: Boomer homeowners thinking this will mess with their property prices
Speaker 3: and generally not wanting to pay taxes. Yeah, and people
Speaker 3: who understand that any money we give to our city
Speaker 3: is just going to go directly to the cops.
Speaker 6: Where do you get that idea from that? That is
Speaker 6: a sentiment among the people who voted for this, Like
Speaker 6: is this like demonstrated anywhere?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like if you go if you look on social media, right,
Speaker 3: like let's say San Diego, next Door, Reddit, et cetera. Right,
Speaker 3: and then from meetings like we've had discussions within unions
Speaker 3: I'm part of. Like, so if you look at what
Speaker 3: our city is doing right now, it's slashing the arts budget,
Speaker 3: it's slashing the park's budget. Yeah, it's slashing everything apart
Speaker 3: from the police budget, which is continuing to increase. Right
Speaker 3: Most notably in San Diego, they have started to try
Speaker 3: and charge for parking at the park and at the
Speaker 3: beach and on major thoroughfares, which, like charging sandy against
Speaker 3: go to the beach, is the most radicalizing thing that
Speaker 3: any politician could ever do. It's incredibly stupid as a
Speaker 3: revenue generating measure, Like people have people have vandalized parking
Speaker 3: machines in very boushy neighborhoods because this is just like
Speaker 3: so offensive to people, and I think there's like just
Speaker 3: a growing disgust with our mayor. And then like the
Speaker 3: idea that giving them any more money would result in
Speaker 3: better outcomes for people just doesn't kind of fly anymore,
Speaker 3: if that makes sense, Like they've they've done all these
Speaker 3: revenue generating measures.
Speaker 6: It's it's like a lost loss in faith that any
Speaker 6: revenue will actually just go towards each things. They're like
Speaker 6: cenrible thing.
Speaker 3: Our city spent I think one hundred million on a
Speaker 3: building filled with asbestos, which is worth less money than
Speaker 3: the land would be if the building wasn't on it,
Speaker 3: and from years and years tried to kind of play
Speaker 3: political football with the fact that they bought a cancer tower, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: there's a reason that San Diego is sometimes referred to
Speaker 3: as Enron by the Sea, and I think folks are
Speaker 3: folks are kind of having enough of it, reissuing under
Speaker 3: the perfect son for folks who want to read more
Speaker 3: about San Diego politics.
Speaker 6: This sort of an alliance between like small capital, you know,
Speaker 6: people who don't want to pay for a tax on
Speaker 6: the second home. That alliance with people who like lost
Speaker 6: faith in city services, right, who are going to oppose
Speaker 6: funding because they don't think it's actually like worthwhile. That's
Speaker 6: an interesting coalition of the modern moment.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah. Yeah, And it's definitely like a creation of
Speaker 3: like specifically in California, right, this idea that we don't
Speaker 3: get to choose basically we're going to get a Democrat,
Speaker 3: and that Democrat will just do whatever they want. It's
Speaker 3: made that position very appealing to people, I guess maybe
Speaker 3: go from California. I do want to mention just briefly
Speaker 3: that Sam Forstag won the Democrat primary from Montana's House district.
Speaker 3: This is really interesting. He's a progressive union organizer. He
Speaker 3: used to be a smoke jumper for a service firefighter.
Speaker 3: He is one of those folks who was, like I
Speaker 3: guess his entry into national politics came from Doge was
Speaker 3: cutting all these guys like GS two people right, people
Speaker 3: at the Forest Service, people at these big public lands
Speaker 3: management agencies who are making barely making a living. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and anson who have struggled for a long time in
Speaker 3: places like Bozeman, right, where the second homeowners have driven
Speaker 3: out the pricing significantly. That sort of pathway to progressive
Speaker 3: politics is one that's very interesting to me and when
Speaker 3: I want to do a lot more reporting on. But
Speaker 3: I thought it was a positive sign to see him
Speaker 3: winning that primary.
Speaker 6: Speaking of elections, before we go on break, I do
Speaker 6: want to talk about the Supreme Court, following up on
Speaker 6: a story from last week. Last week, our final segment
Speaker 6: on the show was on the five year battle in
Speaker 6: Alabama over two different house maps, or technically three, but
Speaker 6: the Republican ones were very similar. It was about these
Speaker 6: Republican drawn maps that have only one black majority district
Speaker 6: and a court ordered map that has two, following the
Speaker 6: Supreme Court's weakening of Section two, the Voilting Rights Actor
Speaker 6: earlier this year. Late last month, a federal district court
Speaker 6: ruled that the up drawn map in Alabama intentionally discriminated
Speaker 6: based on race and diluted the voting power of black
Speaker 6: Alabama's So they placed an injunction on that map and
Speaker 6: ordered the state to use the court approved map that
Speaker 6: was already in use in previous elections for the upcoming primaries.
Speaker 6: This ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, who on
Speaker 6: Tuesday night overruled a district court issuing a four page
Speaker 6: unsigned shadow docket ruling allowing Alabama to use the GOP
Speaker 6: map that eliminates a black majority or a black opportunity.
Speaker 6: District Supreme Court said that the state is likely to
Speaker 6: succeed on the merits of its claims quote. At this
Speaker 6: preliminary stage, the state has shown that it is entitled
Speaker 6: to interim relief from the District Court's injunction. So this
Speaker 6: is the first time the Supreme Court has evaluated another
Speaker 6: court's interpretation of their Louisiana ruling, and in this case,
Speaker 6: the Supreme Court is saying the District Court got it wrong.
Speaker 6: In the updated rules for Section two is a part
Speaker 6: of the Louisiana ruling. In order to succeed in arguing
Speaker 6: a Section two violation, plaintiffs have to submit an alternative
Speaker 6: map that must quote meet all the states legitimate districting
Speaker 6: objectives just as well as the state's own map, including
Speaker 6: quote unquote the states specified political goals and any other
Speaker 6: goal not prohibited by the Constitution. So the alternative map
Speaker 6: that plaintiffs need to submit when challenging them at based
Speaker 6: on Section two has to have the same like partisan
Speaker 6: goals represented. Is what these updated rules in the Louisiana
Speaker 6: ruling instead, and Supreme Court said that this was not
Speaker 6: followed by the District Court's ruling. Section two challenges must
Speaker 6: also quote provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation
Speaker 6: and quote show that voters engage in racial block voting
Speaker 6: that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation. So, basically, the
Speaker 6: Supreme Court claimed that the district court ordered map fails
Speaker 6: to do all this by not maintaining the state's quote
Speaker 6: constitutionally permissible community of interest on the Gulf Coast by
Speaker 6: cutting into a section of the Gulf Coast in the
Speaker 6: Black Opportunity District, also failing to avoid contests between incumbents.
Speaker 6: The Supreme Court said that the District Court's ruling quote unquote,
Speaker 6: departed from the updated standards set in the Louisiana ruling.
Speaker 6: Quote as to intentional vote dilution, the District Court did
Speaker 6: not heed the presumption of legislative good faith because it
Speaker 6: interpreted the state's legal disagreement with the court's earlier remedial
Speaker 6: order as proof of discriminatory animus unquote. Scotus is basically
Speaker 6: saying that just because it was definitively demonstrated to Alabama
Speaker 6: Republicans that their map had a discriminatory effect, and then
Speaker 6: they pass it anyway, that itself does not qualify as intent.
Speaker 6: So showing quote unquote intent is effectively impossible, like at
Speaker 6: this point, because we maps can be sliced uff like crazy,
Speaker 6: and they can just do that based on party. And
Speaker 6: this is what the Supreme Court is saying, quote. The
Speaker 6: District Court also failed to follow our instructions that the
Speaker 6: mere fact that voters of different races vote for different
Speaker 6: parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns unquote.
Speaker 6: And this was specifically the thing I was most curious
Speaker 6: about is if this idea that the District Court wrote,
Speaker 6: if this idea that showing someone that their map is
Speaker 6: doing discrimination, if you show someone that and then they
Speaker 6: pass it anyway, does that prove that that person then
Speaker 6: had intent because they knew it was discriminatory. And the
Speaker 6: Supreme Court is saying, no, that does not That does
Speaker 6: not actually show intent. That is the main way that
Speaker 6: the Supreme Court has overruled the district court ruling. They
Speaker 6: also argue that the district Court meddled in the state
Speaker 6: election too close to the primary, even though it's actually
Speaker 6: the Supreme Court ruling that is green lighting with this
Speaker 6: redistricting midway through the primary process. But that's kind of
Speaker 6: the added on at the very end of the of
Speaker 6: the four page on sign shadow docket ruling.
Speaker 12: The macro level implication of this is that the Voting
Speaker 12: Breich's Tract is unenforceable, like the parts of the Voting
Speaker 12: Right DAC that are supposed to protect from literally this
Speaker 12: specific thing, this specific thing of intentionally deluding black people's
Speaker 12: votes so that they can't elect candidates was the Jim
Speaker 12: Crow practice. At this part YEP of the Voting Right
Speaker 12: track was specifically designed to do, and you can't do
Speaker 12: it anymore. It is just the Supreme Court has decided
Speaker 12: that this part of the Voting Right Zack doesn't exist. Yeah,
Speaker 12: And and they've decided this because they want to they want
Speaker 12: to do racist Jerry Manderin's Republicans can win elections. And
Speaker 12: that's I don't know, I mean, like arguably the death
Speaker 12: of multiracial like any semblance of multi racial democracy in
Speaker 12: the US, which is not great. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 12: it's it's really really bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's it's what they've been working for
Speaker 2: for decades, right, It's what the Yarban's always talking about right,
Speaker 2: it's repealing the twentieth century, you know, like that has
Speaker 2: been the goal for a very long time, and they
Speaker 2: see this as one of the most important steps towards
Speaker 2: doing that.
Speaker 3: Yes, he's pretty devastating.
Speaker 6: I think there is a way to do. I think
Speaker 6: some more in depth analysis, like on this topic that
Speaker 6: might have to be in the future.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean I did a full episode on this,
Speaker 12: like a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 6: I mean specifically the way that the interpretation in the
Speaker 6: shadow Dotocket ruling, how it clarifies certain things, like, you know,
Speaker 6: just because statistically different races may vote for different parties,
Speaker 6: that does not actually prove racially polarized voting powdern like's
Speaker 6: there's certain things here that we can do a lot
Speaker 6: more analysis of, and like in terms of proving an intent,
Speaker 6: a lot of states don't even need to do like
Speaker 6: mustache twirling, I'm going to look at race maps and
Speaker 6: draw it based on race maps. They can just draw
Speaker 6: based on party affiliation, and that is going to get
Speaker 6: the party the actual effect right, because these maps are
Speaker 6: passed by the party that's in control of the state
Speaker 6: legislature and they want to maintain power with their party,
Speaker 6: So that's going to be the most effective way to
Speaker 6: do that. And if they just do that, then there
Speaker 6: leaves very little ground for these maps to be challenged
Speaker 6: on any sorts of racial grounds, even if there is
Speaker 6: racial discrimination as an effect. Right, And this was the
Speaker 6: biggest change of the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana. It
Speaker 6: was a Ledo right who technically wrote that one. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: but being like, like, we are in a different place,
Speaker 6: we are in a different social place now than when
Speaker 6: the Voterarts Act was passed, and so therefore we are
Speaker 6: going to update these rules accordingly. Even though literally, you know,
Speaker 6: three years ago the Supreme Court was ruling in the
Speaker 6: opposite way in Alabama in a very similar situation. The
Speaker 6: change in those few years is very stark. And this
Speaker 6: is all goes downstream from the ruling in twenty nineteen
Speaker 6: that specifically allows partisan jerrymandering, because there's no law in
Speaker 6: the United States disallowing that. So like the Supreme Court
Speaker 6: is like, we cannot make a new law by saying
Speaker 6: this isn't allowed, because there's just no law in the books.
Speaker 6: So if if legislation wants to pass laws against that,
Speaker 6: then they can but we cannot disallowed partisan jerry manoring
Speaker 6: in the courts effectively because there's no law preventing it.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and it's worth keeping in mind that the specific
Speaker 12: standard in the Voting Rights Act literally says effects, which
Speaker 12: was just specifically an effects based test and not an
Speaker 12: interpretation or like not a like proving intent test. And
Speaker 12: the Supreme Court was just like, no, fuck you. So
Speaker 12: that's sort of just where we are now legally, is
Speaker 12: that they're just making up what they think the test
Speaker 12: should be and making everyone else follow that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean three three justices did dissent in this
Speaker 6: recent ruling, sort of aur Kagan and Jackson, they wrote,
Speaker 6: quote before the Court are two paths. Down one lies
Speaker 6: an orderly election held under a tried and tested congressional
Speaker 6: map that protects black Alabama's right to vote and with
Speaker 6: which all voters, election officials, and candidates alike are familiar.
Speaker 6: Down the other lies a chaotic election held under a
Speaker 6: never before use congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black
Speaker 6: Alabama's that Alabama adopted in unabashed defiance of a prior
Speaker 6: court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will
Speaker 6: require official to change the voter registrations of hundreds of
Speaker 6: thousands of voters in just days at best, a task
Speaker 6: Alabama previously represented would take months. The majority chooses the
Speaker 6: second path and disregards both democratic values and the rule
Speaker 6: of law. I respectfully dissent. We'll go on a break
Speaker 6: now and conclude with one more section of the.
Speaker 1: And we are back.
Speaker 12: So, all right, we need to talk about a fairly
Speaker 12: obscure bureaucratic rule change that is being rushed out by
Speaker 12: the Office of Management and Budget OMB, which is where
Speaker 12: it's the management bureaucracy office that's currently headed by one
Speaker 12: of the guys who wrote Project twenty twenty five. This
Speaker 12: change that they are proposing right now is effectively the
Speaker 12: formalization of all of the sort of DOGE cuts and
Speaker 12: then sort of post DOGE departmental cuts of grants from
Speaker 12: the US government. The way this is largely being covered
Speaker 12: right now, and I understand why we're going to run
Speaker 12: through that one first, is that this is effectively the
Speaker 12: death of American science. Because one of the things that
Speaker 12: this does, it's like a four hundred page document. One
Speaker 12: of the early sessions of it is that instead of
Speaker 12: the current system where grants for scientific projects go before
Speaker 12: a peer review committee of scientists that are usually independent,
Speaker 12: and then those scientists give their recommendations to the department
Speaker 12: on whether or not this is a good use of funds,
Speaker 12: and then department executes those recommendations. Right, so grants are
Speaker 12: determined by scientific by a scientific peer review process. This
Speaker 12: kills that and says that instead of agent the way
Speaker 12: that it has worked, which is that agencies adopt the
Speaker 12: recommendations of it. This has not been how it works formally, like,
Speaker 12: it hasn't been a legal stipulation that this is how
Speaker 12: it works. But this is just literally how all science
Speaker 12: has worked since World War Two, basically, with the exception
Speaker 12: of the McCarthy era, is that these independent committees do
Speaker 12: the review of the grants and then the federal agencies
Speaker 12: submit the grants. Instead of that, the heads of federal
Speaker 12: agencies will appoint one person who will individually look through
Speaker 12: every single grant and approve or deny them. So this
Speaker 12: is the formalization of the DOGE process. This is the
Speaker 12: administration basically centralizing control of the entire scientific grant process.
Speaker 12: And this actually turns out, it turns out is for
Speaker 12: all grants, which we'll get to in a second. But
Speaker 12: what this means is that instead of again like scientific
Speaker 12: peer review being the thing that decides what science gets funding,
Speaker 12: it's now political appointees, and specifically Trump administration political appointees.
Speaker 12: There are a whole in this ruling. There are a
Speaker 12: whole bunch of absolutely or not other's really the pros change.
Speaker 12: There is just a bunch of just absolutely unhinged creeds
Speaker 12: about the US anti AIDS programs turning into woke left
Speaker 12: mobs in Africa that support like gender politics and stuff.
Speaker 12: I've found very incoherent explaining that, I swear to God,
Speaker 12: I am more coherent than actually reading out the quote.
Speaker 12: It's just it's completely unhinged, like weird right wing conspiracy
Speaker 12: stuff for like half of it, and half of it
Speaker 12: is like extremely technical budget change stuff.
Speaker 6: I know that in the Doge stuff this has been
Speaker 6: talking about like, you know, sexual health clinics in like
Speaker 6: a country in Africa that's supported by the US government.
Speaker 12: Right, yeah, yeah, they're they're they're pulling all these examples
Speaker 12: and then just like screaming stuff about how they're like
Speaker 12: abortion centers and you know, like doing like genital mutilation
Speaker 12: or whatever. There's been some good reporting on this by
Speaker 12: Elizabeth Janexi, who used to do like program reviews for
Speaker 12: the NIH before a lot of things, including this administration,
Speaker 12: took over. This is effectively the centralization of all of
Speaker 12: the grants given up by the US government. Right, And
Speaker 12: if you remember, if we think back to like the
Speaker 12: early days of DOGE, right, well you'd find these giant
Speaker 12: lists of grant that they've gone through and just cut
Speaker 12: and they had apps no legal authority to do that,
Speaker 12: they just did it. This is the formalization of that process.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 12: This is setting up to bureaucratic apparatus to allow just
Speaker 12: one random groper they've like hired and stashed off at
Speaker 12: a room and like benih or something, to just go
Speaker 12: through and cut whatever grants they want. They also have
Speaker 12: the power to terminate grants that have already been given
Speaker 12: out at will. There's other even weirder things where they're
Speaker 12: also very paranoid about, like scientific collaboration with other countries,
Speaker 12: which is just the basis of how all science is done.
Speaker 12: There's like restricted countries effectively where you can't collaborate with
Speaker 12: scientists from those countries, which even by US standards, is
Speaker 12: like not how things work. That's like messed up by
Speaker 12: the standards of like American foreign policy. And then also
Speaker 12: if you are doing any collaboration with any scientists from
Speaker 12: another country and there's money involved in it, that grant
Speaker 12: has to be individually approved by like this person that
Speaker 12: they've set up. So this makes scientific collaboration effectively impossible,
Speaker 12: right because most of those things aren't going to happen,
Speaker 12: because this is going to reproduce the sort of doge
Speaker 12: bottle decks that we saw where suddenly all these grants
Speaker 12: are disappearing, even ones that would eventually get approved. The
Speaker 12: people who were supposed to be getting them are completely
Speaker 12: screwed because their reliance on that grant coming in order
Speaker 12: to do their research, and the pivot in control of
Speaker 12: how these grants are being given out from people who
Speaker 12: are at the very least scientists to you know, just
Speaker 12: the people who are currently running the NIH who are
Speaker 12: like RFK Junior, Right, it's those kind of people who
Speaker 12: are going to be running these kinds of grants, and
Speaker 12: they are going to be able to do damage to
Speaker 12: this that is quite frankly incalculable. This is the destruction
Speaker 12: of the entire system of American science, like almost like vast,
Speaker 12: vast percentages of all the science in the US is
Speaker 12: done off of government grants. Either it's either it's done
Speaker 12: by the NIH or like by by government institutions or
Speaker 12: not entirely all, but a huge portion of science that's
Speaker 12: done at research universities, which is again how like most
Speaker 12: science happens, is also supported by these grants. And if
Speaker 12: we're in this situation now where all of these grants
Speaker 12: are again going through one person who is like solely
Speaker 12: motivated by political factors as to whether Arthur going to
Speaker 12: approved this, which is what the system Maaey're attempting is
Speaker 12: set up. This is the death of American science. And
Speaker 12: it's worse than that too, because and this is the
Speaker 12: thing where I'm going to do a full episode about
Speaker 12: this next week because there are a lot more implications.
Speaker 12: But the section of rules that's being changed here by
Speaker 12: the Office of Management and Budget, this is not the
Speaker 12: session for the grant allocation for science, right, this is
Speaker 12: the section for all grants given out by the US
Speaker 12: by the US government. So for example, medicaid, Yeah, so
Speaker 12: all of that is now subject to this stuff, right,
Speaker 12: like disaster aid, you know, like any money the government
Speaker 12: is giving out right, that this is going through the
Speaker 12: grant system is now going through this process. Yeah, there's
Speaker 12: I think public comment on this ends July seventh, So
Speaker 12: I guess if you want to scream at them, that's
Speaker 12: technically possible. It's really not clear if democratic politicians are
Speaker 12: going to actually try to substantively do something to stop this,
Speaker 12: which there's no direct legal mechanism for them to stop this.
Speaker 12: They could do another government shutdown or something. But yeah,
Speaker 12: this is just sort of the state of things, which
Speaker 12: is that a lot and a lot of this stuff
Speaker 12: has already been happening. It's worth saying, right, like a
Speaker 12: lot of these funding for everything from like vaccine programs
Speaker 12: to like the very small amount of help research that
Speaker 12: was going in the trans healthcare or like Queer healthcare
Speaker 12: in general, Like those grants are as gone. And you know,
Speaker 12: we've already seen a whole bunch of chaos from the
Speaker 12: interruption of the grant system on the sort of university
Speaker 12: level for scientists. But this is all just going to
Speaker 12: get significantly worse as this rule change rolls out.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, So on that happy note.
Speaker 3: Last week, the former chief patrol agent for the El
Speaker 3: Centro sector and also Commander of Voy Patrols Operation at Large,
Speaker 3: Gregory Bovino took to X the Everything app to announce
Speaker 3: that he was on his way to Delaney Hall. Wasn't
Speaker 3: exactly clear why, because Pavino is no longer a serving
Speaker 3: law enforcement officer. In fact, he was en route to
Speaker 3: a remigration summit in Portugal. That the conference, Baveno joined
Speaker 3: politicians from Fox and Afteray they spoke sort of behind
Speaker 3: closed doors. Journalists who wanted to cover the event had
Speaker 3: to stay in a car park outside, where they were
Speaker 3: harassed by a drone. He's not listed on the website,
Speaker 3: but it's like a sort of mystery speaker, and I'm
Speaker 3: guessing that that that was him, right, remigration people, I'm familiar.
Speaker 3: We're going to do a whole episode on this next week.
Speaker 3: But the website for the conference sets it out as
Speaker 3: a set of fiscal, cultural, economic, social, political, and logistical
Speaker 3: policies whose objective is to prevent population and replacement through
Speaker 3: the reversal of migratory flows. It is very explicitly about undocumented, documented,
Speaker 3: and naturalized people. It's not about following the law. It
Speaker 3: is explicitly racial. It's about race, nicity, religion, and the
Speaker 3: idea of national purity and cleansing the nation of people
Speaker 3: who it considers not to be pure. If you think
Speaker 3: this is something that has maybe happened before in European history,
Speaker 3: you would not be alone. Greg Bavino took the chance
Speaker 3: to compare himself to rommel in one interview. Free also
Speaker 3: compared himself to T Lawrence and pattern, which is a
Speaker 3: fairly remarkable set of yes, yeah, right, without without skipping
Speaker 3: a bee. Maybe he's one of those guys who's like
Speaker 3: a clean ver guy. He also sort of it was interesting,
Speaker 3: Like I said, I'm going to break this down more
Speaker 3: next week. I think what was more interesting than like
Speaker 3: Greg Bavino talks to Nazis about Nazi shit, which that
Speaker 3: come on, what does one expect is the way he
Speaker 3: talked about stuff in terms of like the role he
Speaker 3: sees Border Patrol having. He referred to them. He said
Speaker 3: they are often referred to as a federal law enforcement
Speaker 3: marine corps. The Border Patrol can operate anywhere in the
Speaker 3: United States and associated territories and simultaneously fulfill all enforcement missions.
Speaker 3: It goes on. He goes on to talk about them.
Speaker 3: He says that they are the only organization capable of
Speaker 3: planning and executing this type of operation.
Speaker 2: He's not wrong.
Speaker 3: They are the only agency that could do something like
Speaker 3: a mass deportation campaign like we're seeing. But like this,
Speaker 3: this Marine Corps, of the Internal Marine Corps is interesting, right,
Speaker 3: that is how they have been used, especially by the
Speaker 3: Trump administration. Right, think of Portland in twenty twenty, right,
Speaker 3: Like these are the government's goons. Like when they need
Speaker 3: a hit squad to fuck people up, this is who
Speaker 3: they go to. Yeah, and that identity is something that
Speaker 3: Baveno out have clearly embraced. Right, But Brevna was in Bortach.
Speaker 3: Not not extremely recently, but he has points in his
Speaker 3: career been in Bortech. He also kind of tried to
Speaker 3: set distance between BP and ICE, which is interesting. He
Speaker 3: called them. He said, the New York fiasco last night
Speaker 3: in New Jersey illustrates what happens when untrained investigators are
Speaker 3: sent to handle a situation that is the responsibility of
Speaker 3: uniform specialists. He's there suggesting that the ICE employees lacked
Speaker 3: the necessary training to do what I guess they would
Speaker 3: call crowd control.
Speaker 12: Which which is really funny because that's also the Democrats line.
Speaker 6: It's like, oh, well enough, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well his line is therefore like turn it over to
Speaker 3: the people who are well trained enough so we can
Speaker 3: suck them up, which I guess is also kind of
Speaker 3: what the Democrats are. It's not a million miles part.
Speaker 3: Butveno has also been doing some right wing podcast want
Speaker 3: on the border Hawk podcast, where he appeared seemingly from
Speaker 3: his office behind him, he had a shadow box. Does
Speaker 3: anyone want to hazard a guess what was in the
Speaker 3: shadow box? Military memorabilia of a certain kind. Yeah? Is
Speaker 3: it German Nazi cross? No, it is. It is contemporary,
Speaker 3: it pertains to his career. That's good.
Speaker 2: Is it his one of his challenge coins that he
Speaker 2: got from fucking Chicago or wherever.
Speaker 3: They're probably smart enough not to put their challenge coins
Speaker 3: on public display anywhere.
Speaker 19: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, it's a bunch of left lisal grenades. Ah okay,
Speaker 3: of course, like the thing with which I guess he
Speaker 3: wishes to be associated.
Speaker 2: I have a lot of those in my house too,
Speaker 2: he used once.
Speaker 3: It's just like taking pride in being the guy who
Speaker 3: stamped down harder on the First Amendment than anyone has
Speaker 3: in recent history.
Speaker 6: Cool.
Speaker 3: He's also been very critical of current DHS leadership, right
Speaker 3: after Buffino and Nome took to the national media to
Speaker 3: lie about Alex pretty in the hours to Alex Pretti Guide,
Speaker 3: they both became too toxic even for this administration, and
Speaker 3: he clearly has some hard feelings about this.
Speaker 14: He mentioned the twenty million figure. My figures one hundred million.
Speaker 14: His is twenty million. Now, let's take a look at
Speaker 14: that number. Dan, So we've got, by Tom Holman's estimate,
Speaker 14: twenty million illegal aliens. If that's the case, then he's
Speaker 14: already arrested one tenth of all illegal aliens present in
Speaker 14: the United States. Do you see that with your eyes
Speaker 14: on the streets? Do I see that with my eyes
Speaker 14: on the streets? If it's really going that good? A
Speaker 14: tenth of all illegal aliens and they're all legal aliens,
Speaker 14: they're not immigrants or anything else, illegal aliens A tenth.
Speaker 14: If there were a tenth already deported, the rest would
Speaker 14: be buttoned up tighter than you can imagine. Those lines
Speaker 14: southbound for self deportation would be out the door.
Speaker 19: That's not happening.
Speaker 6: This is really interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll go into this specific episode. The way he
Speaker 3: arrives at that number is through the number of traffic
Speaker 3: delays in Charlotte, North Carolina, during the border patrol operation there.
Speaker 3: What this is the evidence he cites? Yeah, wow, Okay,
Speaker 3: it's fascinating. Like he talks about how he thinks a
Speaker 3: number is higher because of his time at border patrol rate.
Speaker 6: He may think there is like one hundred million illegal immigrants.
Speaker 3: So he believes this in his yeah, like deep down
Speaker 3: in Yeah, Like he's interesting. Yeah, this is a one hundred
Speaker 3: what he believes, and he wants to deport that many people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know if it's that he believes there's
Speaker 2: that many people who are illegal in the way, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he doesn't differentiate or he's just considering everyone who is
Speaker 2: not you know, white here.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, I mean he he did differentiate in this video, well,
Speaker 6: which is interesting.
Speaker 2: He did. No, no, no, that's not what that meant.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, he was making the case that anyone
Speaker 2: border patrol goes after as an illegal alien I think, I.
Speaker 6: Mean, but that's not what he said.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean what he said was the term that
Speaker 2: you should use for these people is illegal alien. It's
Speaker 2: not migrants or something like. He does not like that.
Speaker 2: A lot of folks think it's wrong to refer to
Speaker 2: a human being as illegal. That's specifically what he's saying,
Speaker 2: Like he's not making a deeper point than that, but
Speaker 2: I do think his belief is that that one hundred
Speaker 2: million number includes a lot of people who were for example,
Speaker 2: naturalized or who were made citizens through like juice solely,
Speaker 2: which we've seen, like he thinks should go away, and
Speaker 2: so does the administration.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or indeed like people on thesis right, yes, well,
Speaker 3: but I.
Speaker 12: Mean more like like if you're if you want to
Speaker 12: get you one hundred million, you're you're deporting people who
Speaker 12: are just non white, like you can't there aren't a
Speaker 12: hundred million like natural like.
Speaker 6: But it's it sounds like he just believes there is
Speaker 6: like way more undocumented immigrants in the United States than
Speaker 6: what there actually is, like that is in this short clip,
Speaker 6: but that is what he's like referring to.
Speaker 2: In part because he believes a lot of people who
Speaker 2: everyone else would consider legally immigrating have not like that
Speaker 2: is part of why he's saying. And now there's also
Speaker 2: a belief that like the number that the government's lying
Speaker 2: to you about how many of them there are, the
Speaker 2: vastly more. But part of it is he does not
Speaker 2: believe a lot of the ways that people become citizens
Speaker 2: who are not white are legitimate, Like that is an
Speaker 2: aspect of what he's saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he spoke about this at length in his interview. Right,
Speaker 3: he was saying how many people he'd seen. He talks
Speaker 3: about whole villages in Mexico coming across the border. He
Speaker 3: loves It is fairly familiar rhetoric, right, I can. I'm
Speaker 3: just scrotting down here if I can find his one hundred
Speaker 3: million claim. One hundred million pure researchers figure hasn't changed
Speaker 3: since the nineteen seventies, he said. He says thirty years ago,
Speaker 3: illegal immigrants were absent from large portions of American territory.
Speaker 3: I don't know where he's getting that information. He said.
Speaker 3: He began seriously examining these numbers in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: He then says that around two thousand and six he
Speaker 3: found some information from bear Stearns. That's a bank. They're
Speaker 3: like an investment bank. I think. He claims that drove
Speaker 3: his number. He saw an uninterrupted flow of illegal immigrants
Speaker 3: across the border without any internalation capable of producing mass
Speaker 3: expulsions from two thousand and six to twenty twenty six,
Speaker 3: Our borders were nothing but speed bunks. Illegals and smugglers
Speaker 3: knew that once across the border, they were virtually saved
Speaker 3: from any consequences. Of course, that does include Trump's first term.
Speaker 3: But then he goes on to cite these bizarre statistics
Speaker 3: like I'll just I'll give you the Charlotte traffic example.
Speaker 3: One of the indicators away looking at is commuting times.
Speaker 3: For these times to be considered quote unquote good, between
Speaker 3: fifteen and twenty percent of commuters must be taken off
Speaker 3: the road. In Charlotte, there a one hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: three thousand commuters per day. Approximately as soon as we
Speaker 3: launched operations, Charlotte's web travel times did not move into
Speaker 3: the good category. They moved into the excellent category. Estimates
Speaker 3: indicated that thirty percent or more of commuters were no
Speaker 3: longer traveling. This means that at least thirty percent of
Speaker 3: them were most likely legal immigrants. That is a logical yeah,
Speaker 3: across the grand canyon of logic.
Speaker 2: Jesus ChRI Christ, I'd read that that's how he's calculator,
Speaker 2: which you know, cuts out a lot of obvious reasons
Speaker 2: people might not drive during this who are legal, like
Speaker 2: the fact that ICE has undeniably deported citizens and taken
Speaker 2: people into custody for long periods of time it were citizens,
Speaker 2: you know, Yeah.
Speaker 3: That they've pulled random brown people out of cause that
Speaker 3: they've shot and killed people, Like yes, yeah, this happened
Speaker 3: also in late November of twenty twenty five, a time
Speaker 3: where people travel, a time when people get sick. Yeah,
Speaker 3: commutes generally go down in late November. Commuters fluctuate.
Speaker 6: Yeah like that.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's just gibberish.
Speaker 2: It's an insane way to draw the conclusion he's drawn.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's it's bunkers.
Speaker 12: It's also it's also this thing where it's like in
Speaker 12: order to like think this is what's going on, Like
Speaker 12: one of the premises of this is like, oh, it's
Speaker 12: like the illegal aliens that are like making every single
Speaker 12: problem bad, Like you see this with yeah, like the
Speaker 12: people who support this on lines who are like, oh,
Speaker 12: the housing crisis would end if we just deported everyone,
Speaker 12: and it's like yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously no, But like
Speaker 12: they're coming at it from the motivated reasoning of I
Speaker 12: want to do an ethnic cleansing, and then they're sort
Speaker 12: of post hawk creating justifications for it.
Speaker 3: This is what fascism does, right. It blames yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: all the pro blooms of the chosen group on the scapegroat.
Speaker 6: Claims these economic problems.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yes, like they've seen in Quannata fascism and
Speaker 3: it's very core. Is this, This the idea of a
Speaker 3: chrosen group and a scapegoat group, and escapegoat group are
Speaker 3: responsible for the decline of the chosen group and if
Speaker 3: they can be removed, the chosen group will return to
Speaker 3: its former glory. Like that is yeah, fascism in five minutes,
Speaker 3: and that's what we're seeing, right, unsurprisingly given that he's
Speaker 3: at a conference with straight up Nazis. But I think
Speaker 3: this one hundred million number is interesting, and like what's
Speaker 3: interesting is him talking in a way that he didn't
Speaker 3: talk to the press when he was in charge of
Speaker 3: Border Patrol, but he probably did, believe, but Vino is
Speaker 3: popular among Border Patrol agents, right. There are a number
Speaker 3: of them who feel that he was the leader that
Speaker 3: they needed. He showed up in the field, right, He
Speaker 3: had the support of agents because he was there with them,
Speaker 3: and like him believing this tells us a lot about
Speaker 3: the agency, And I think that's something I want to
Speaker 3: dive deeper into next week. Okay, and email us with
Speaker 3: your news tips cool Zone Tips at proton dot me.
Speaker 12: Yeah, put a transcroll on your couch.
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