Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 2: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 2: and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today.
Speaker 2: I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: Who do we do?
Speaker 3: This episode? We're covering the week of August twelfth through
Speaker 3: August nineteenth, So I guess I'll start with I've seen
Speaker 3: reports that ICE is using parked vehicles, I guess as
Speaker 3: staging points for cameras. And I've seen videos of what
Speaker 3: appeared to be licensed plate flippers on ICE vehicles. If
Speaker 3: you're not familiar, right, like, there's been lots and lots
Speaker 3: of reports of ICE agents like manually changing license plates.
Speaker 3: This just appears to be a device goes whoop, rotates
Speaker 3: one hundred and eighty degrees, so you got two license
Speaker 3: plates available. A lot of the pitches, we saw a
Speaker 3: man being I'm not sure if he was arrested or
Speaker 3: just like harassed for saying like, why don't you have
Speaker 3: a license plate on your vehicle? Why don't you have
Speaker 3: a plate on your vehicle? And it very much appears
Speaker 3: if that vehicle had a license plate flipper on the front. Secondly,
Speaker 3: CBP is pausing all construction in Big Bend. This is
Speaker 3: according to Rodney Scott, who's the CVP commissioner, who says
Speaker 3: he is personally on his way there to conduct a
Speaker 3: quite personal evaluation. It's entirely unclear like what that means
Speaker 3: and what are the criteria for this evaluation? Right, Like,
Speaker 3: there are dozens of laws, treaties and regulations that cover
Speaker 3: the kind of thing that they are doing in the
Speaker 3: place that they are doing it, and they have waived
Speaker 3: all of them. So this is what we get now, right,
Speaker 3: we get Rodney Scott going on a plane and just
Speaker 3: like giving it the like the imperial thumbs up or
Speaker 3: thumbs down like some kind of Roman emperor. I guess,
Speaker 3: like this is a thing that wouldn't fly in like
Speaker 3: a hereditary monarchy like the UK, right where we now
Speaker 3: have one person making this choice that everyone will have
Speaker 3: to live with forever. They are destroying a place which
Speaker 3: is beautiful and one of the places that has not
Speaker 3: been ruined by like capitalism, and the one of the
Speaker 3: few large areas of public land in Texas. So I
Speaker 3: will keep you updated on what Rodney Scott decides to
Speaker 3: do I will probably do an episode on my other
Speaker 3: show Natural Causes about Big Bend soon. And then finally,
Speaker 3: I guess, as we're talking about border wall stuff from me,
Speaker 3: people are conducting a tree sit in a cottonwood tree
Speaker 3: in Arizona. The cottonwood tree. It's a very old cottonwood tree,
Speaker 3: sometimes called Grandmother tree. These people are trying to protect
Speaker 3: it from being destroyed due to border wall construction. They've
Speaker 3: been sitting in that tree for several weeks. Now I
Speaker 3: will eventually go visit them. It's going to go visit them,
Speaker 3: but I went to Spokane when those fires struck. Instead,
Speaker 3: they have been joined by someone on the Mexican side,
Speaker 3: So now there are two tree sitters, making this the
Speaker 3: first international tree sit that I am ever aware of.
Speaker 3: That rules Yeah, no, it's great. Oh yeah, hell yeah.
Speaker 3: Well like trees don't know borders, right. Yeah. As I
Speaker 3: highlighted in my other podcast, Natural Causes, the US left
Speaker 3: really fucked up. NAFTA came in by not saying, if
Speaker 3: you're going to try and pay people less in Mexico,
Speaker 3: then we will try and organize people in Mexico and
Speaker 3: together that we will demand dignified wedges and conditions. I'm
Speaker 3: glad that people are not taking that approach anymore because
Speaker 3: they didn't get us anywhere. Yeah, I'll keep covering the
Speaker 3: situation there as well.
Speaker 4: So, speaking of I guess the long range effects of
Speaker 4: NAFTA KOSB, which is the Korean stock index, hit its
Speaker 4: circuit breaker, which is the breaker that hits if you
Speaker 4: lose too much percentage of the stock market's value again
Speaker 4: on Wednesday. I genuinely have lost count of the number
Speaker 4: of times that it has been triggered over the past
Speaker 4: few months. This has become a regular recurrence in one
Speaker 4: of the largest and most important stock markets in the world.
Speaker 4: This time it was fueled by a collapse of tech
Speaker 4: stocks and the Brett Fruit Index hitting ninety dollars a barrel.
Speaker 4: We will be getting into some more of the impacts
Speaker 4: of that later.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: My guess is that it's going to rebound as everyone
Speaker 4: buys the dip tomorrow. But any one of these could
Speaker 4: be the one where it does rebound, and we will
Speaker 4: let you know whether the global economic collapses on.
Speaker 1: Yay, Yeah, what happens if there's not a rebound? What
Speaker 1: is that going to look?
Speaker 3: Like odd, everyone's fucked.
Speaker 1: No, I mean like in terms of like what is
Speaker 1: your expecting cascade of events?
Speaker 4: If that goes down, Oh, the entire global economy goes under,
Speaker 4: because the Korean stock market right now is basically a
Speaker 4: kind of tragedy as forest version of the American market
Speaker 4: where most of almost all of the value is congealed
Speaker 4: into these three AI yeah, three three companies that yeah,
Speaker 4: basically make AI chips, right, and then the rest of
Speaker 4: the value down the chaine is people doing weird gambling
Speaker 4: stuff on different AI components. If the market just actually crashes,
Speaker 4: that is those three companies, and you know we're talking
Speaker 4: like Samsung here, right, these are vital components in the
Speaker 4: entire AI. I mean not just the AI sere obviously
Speaker 4: the Samsung, right, Like we're talking about you know, things
Speaker 4: that are vital components and the big tech companies yeah yeah,
Speaker 4: in like all the manufacturing of tech all over the world.
Speaker 4: If that stuff goes down, that takes the American markets
Speaker 4: with it, That takes all of all global markets that
Speaker 4: are reliant on these AI surges go with it. And
Speaker 4: that's kind of just the beginning of the poppy of
Speaker 4: the tech bubble.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to get to that because it's like
Speaker 1: it is this mirror of exactly what's gone on in
Speaker 1: the United States. I guess the big difference is that
Speaker 1: so far, the obvious signs of trouble in South Korea
Speaker 1: have not set off alarm bells in at least in
Speaker 1: American investors to the extent that you might expect. But
Speaker 1: I'm sure.
Speaker 4: There's been some Like it tends to be the other
Speaker 4: way around, where Kosby tends to kind of be following
Speaker 4: the American markets, But there have definitely been days where, like,
Speaker 4: because of the time difference in Korea, all of the
Speaker 4: American investors wake up to watch like ten percent going down,
Speaker 4: like ten percent of the value of the Korean stock
Speaker 4: market disappearing in one night, and in that like lowers
Speaker 4: American stocks, and then Trump says something about the war
Speaker 4: ending and it goes back up again. So there has
Speaker 4: been some notice it, but our grand collective delusion to
Speaker 4: maintain the functioning of capitalism continues.
Speaker 3: Great, good, good good.
Speaker 2: On Tuesday, there was a JP debate for the South
Speaker 2: Carolina US Senate special runoff election. So it's a special
Speaker 2: election and a runoff, and in this debate, sister of
Speaker 2: the fallen Lindsay Graham, Darlene Graham, could not answer a
Speaker 2: pretty rudimentary foreign policy question because it is not her
Speaker 2: area of expertise. Let's take a lesson, Senator, Are Taiwan
Speaker 2: in the South China Sea national security issues for the
Speaker 2: United States?
Speaker 5: If so, why, I'm sorry, could you repeat the good
Speaker 5: our Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues
Speaker 5: for the United States? And if so, why or how?
Speaker 5: I'm just going to be honest to you. I'm not
Speaker 5: on national security that I'm not informed on national security,
Speaker 5: so but I do support the military. My brother was
Speaker 5: in the Air Force for thirty three years, so I
Speaker 5: will do everything I can to support the military.
Speaker 3: Great stuff.
Speaker 1: You know what, honesty, that's what we need in politicians.
Speaker 4: Is I love hereditary seats. This is an amazing feature
Speaker 4: of what is supposed to be a representative democracy. It's
Speaker 4: so good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I don't know shit about fuck, but I
Speaker 1: love the army.
Speaker 2: That's incredible. She later goes on to literally say it's
Speaker 2: on her quote unquote area of expertise. It just talks
Speaker 2: about how regardless she will always support the US military
Speaker 2: it's a townded Lindsay Graham rolling over in his grave.
Speaker 2: So that is Darley and graham sister Lindsay Graham, who
Speaker 2: is facing Republican Ralph Norman in this runoff election, winner
Speaker 2: of which will then face the Democrat doctor Annie Andrews
Speaker 2: for this general election in November to replace Lindsay's seat.
Speaker 4: Pretty cool, God, I hope she wins the primary. I
Speaker 4: want to see more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this will be highly amusing if nothing else.
Speaker 2: Oh man, I want to briefly mention some new information
Speaker 2: regarding the federal investigations into anti ice protests in the
Speaker 2: Twin Cities, based on some newly released court documents. This
Speaker 2: was first reported in the New York Times, and I
Speaker 2: have read through the like thirty page motion filed by
Speaker 2: the defense that unveiled these documents and a number of
Speaker 2: the thirty some exhibits. And I'll report on this in full,
Speaker 2: probably next week with its own episode. But I do
Speaker 2: want to discuss with the group here a little bit.
Speaker 2: So four days after CPB killed Alex pretty DHS open
Speaker 2: investigation into labor unions and left wing activist groups that
Speaker 2: they thought were involved in funding the anti ice protests
Speaker 2: and quote providing material support to violent opportunists unquote. This
Speaker 2: HSI investigation amounted to a massive spying operation called Operation
Speaker 2: puppet Master and later Operation Whipple Shield. Whipple is the
Speaker 2: name of the federal building that was at the heart
Speaker 2: of a lot of the protests in the Twin Cities,
Speaker 2: and these operations ended up probing three years of financial
Speaker 2: records from organizations like Sunrise Movement, the Communication Workers of America,
Speaker 2: and the Healthcare Union SCIU as a part of a
Speaker 2: quote unquote financial investigation into quote unquote domestic terrorist financing.
Speaker 2: I think it's really important to point out here is
Speaker 2: that this three year time span of of documents extends
Speaker 2: far beyond the time span of Operation Metro Surge and
Speaker 2: the protests. Right this, this, this, this is not a
Speaker 2: probe into into financing specific protest groups responding to us.
Speaker 2: This is just a general drag net into labor unions,
Speaker 2: into left wing nonprofits, environmental groups, a racial justice activist
Speaker 2: group in the area like this is this is a
Speaker 2: huge probe. They're looking into VENMO transactions, They're requesting bank
Speaker 2: records like this is a massive probe of like the
Speaker 2: the interior of like some very major national unions.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting when you look at who they're looking into, right,
Speaker 4: because it's it's a really really wide swath like across
Speaker 4: the political spectrum of the left, like s CiU. Like
Speaker 4: obviously there are like locals of s CiU that like
Speaker 4: do good work, but like nationally, s CiU is not
Speaker 4: like a radical organization, right, like yea of the major unions,
Speaker 4: this is just like it extremely extremely mill toast union, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I guess contexts of SEIU particularly would be that
Speaker 3: they arrested David Wuerta in Los Angeles in June of
Speaker 3: last year, right, it's union leader. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I know because Alex Preddy was a healthcare
Speaker 2: worker SIUs, a healthcare union, Like I went to like
Speaker 2: a solidarity protest put together by a bunch of different
Speaker 2: unions in New York City following the death of Alex.
Speaker 2: Pretty Yeah, it's interesting that the federal government picked up
Speaker 2: on that sort of union solidarity and then started investigating it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think that is that is really telling.
Speaker 4: Yeah, part of what I'm getting at here is like
Speaker 4: they're just going after everyone who's even like tangentially involved
Speaker 4: in these protests, right. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The way the state sees this is they're incapable of
Speaker 3: organizing like spontaneous and like horizontal solidary. Seeing that, right
Speaker 3: they understand. Yeah, SEIU folks showed up in New York
Speaker 3: where Garrison is, and I think they're not called the AFT.
Speaker 3: In Minneapolis, maybe they called the Federation of Edgy Cats
Speaker 3: or something like that. MFE looks like, yeah, like another
Speaker 3: union right for educators evidently, and fifty to fifty one
Speaker 3: and some more explicitly socialists and leftist groups showed up
Speaker 3: against us, showed up in solidarity off adlex Pretti was killed.
Speaker 3: And the way the state sees this is therefore they
Speaker 3: are nationally and vertically integrated and someone is pulling the
Speaker 3: strings and paying the funds, not like they are fucking mad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like it's like the way that they see
Speaker 4: it is like yeah, like Seiu National has like handed
Speaker 4: down like the riot orders just like no no CiU.
Speaker 3: Like, but she's right, Like that is how they understand it.
Speaker 4: If like time traveling militants for the nineteen seventies kidnapped
Speaker 4: SEI used leadership and held them at gunpoint and said
Speaker 4: we will let you go if you order mass riots,
Speaker 4: they still wouldn't do it like.
Speaker 3: That's not that's not what this is.
Speaker 4: But yeah, the Feds have a hammer and they're trying
Speaker 4: to hammer down every single thing that even vaguely looks
Speaker 4: like a nail. Yea, so they can do sort of
Speaker 4: the broadest and widest ranging oppression that they can deal with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we have like an example of how HSI
Speaker 2: is envisioning this sort of conspiracy like what we're talking about,
Speaker 2: because as a part of the new exhibits that were
Speaker 2: released to the public, we have this slide that was
Speaker 2: sent to grand jurors for the indictment which we'll soon
Speaker 2: talk about, that targeting fifteen protesters. The grand jury was
Speaker 2: shown this slide that is labeled the conspiracy that has
Speaker 2: about fifteen different organizations with all with arrows pointing towards
Speaker 2: Direct Action Minnesota DAM, which is the protest group that
Speaker 2: the government alleges the fifteen people indicted were involved with
Speaker 2: in some way. I want to read through some of
Speaker 2: these organizations that are part of this conspiracy diagram. There's
Speaker 2: the Monarca Rapid Response Line. There's Ray Rainbolt Memorial, Gun Club,
Speaker 2: Red Pine Revolutionary Collective SCIU twenty six showing it for
Speaker 2: racial justice, Socialist Alter of Veterans for Peace, Whipple Watch,
Speaker 2: Workers Solidarity Circle, AFL CIO, Black Cat Workers Collective, all
Speaker 2: of it, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Grease Pit,
Speaker 2: which is a local bike shop. Hell yeah, Minute Left CHAB,
Speaker 2: Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local fifty nine, Minnesota Association of
Speaker 2: Professional Employees, Minnesota Ice Watch, and Minnesota five oh five
Speaker 2: oh one.
Speaker 3: Pretty incredible, Uh, pretty incredible collection.
Speaker 4: They're all supposed to be like sending like a council member.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: The diagram has is that there's a council member these organizations,
Speaker 6: council that like is part of Direct Action Minnesota that
Speaker 6: is like orchestrating all these protests.
Speaker 3: It's incredible. I love to see like kreminology overcoming like
Speaker 3: a DIY bike shop that had been for a few hours,
Speaker 3: a few afternoons a week, like it's the Pollit Bureau
Speaker 3: of Minnesota is populated by like bike co ops. It's
Speaker 3: just a shadow council, James Shadow. They're running everyway. It's incredible.
Speaker 2: This is what happens when Socialist Alternative and DSA can
Speaker 2: overcome their differences and support Council copyedism to send a
Speaker 2: member to Direct Action Minnesota. High Council, Black and Red
Speaker 2: United Yet it's incredible stuff. Now, of course, none of
Speaker 2: these organizations themselves have actually faced charges stemming from this investigation.
Speaker 2: But this investigation did result in fifteen people being indicted
Speaker 2: on quote, conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer
Speaker 2: for allegedly planning to block a roadway, among a few
Speaker 2: other charges against specific individuals for participating in ice rapid response.
Speaker 2: So although DSA, the Grease Pit and like SCIU are
Speaker 2: not themselves as organizations you know, charged this this sort
Speaker 2: of huge, like a very broad investigation into into into
Speaker 2: nonprofit organizations, into electoral organizations, into labor unions, this did
Speaker 2: result in charges against specific people, many of whom are
Speaker 2: not part of these you know, fifteen fifteen council member organizations.
Speaker 2: The defense lawyer Kevin Riach wrote in emotion, quote Homeland
Speaker 2: Security Investigations investigation extended far beyond any potential threat to
Speaker 2: law enforcement safety. It concluded, with no evidence but obvious
Speaker 2: political animus, that numerous Twin cities, unions, and nonprofit organizations
Speaker 2: were involved in a widespread conspiracy to violate eighteen USC.
Speaker 2: One one one assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees,
Speaker 2: and it surveiled and surptitiously gathered financial records generated by
Speaker 2: these organizations, despite the lack of any connection between those
Speaker 2: organizations and criminal conduct.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's co intel pro shit. Just it never ended.
Speaker 4: They're just doing it again. I've always been doing it.
Speaker 2: Yes, And part of what these new docs reveal is
Speaker 2: is much more details on like the covert surveillance of
Speaker 2: organizer meetings at libraries and churches, and the way in
Speaker 2: the extent that Homeland Security infiltrated signal chats and how
Speaker 2: undercovers tried to entice people into discussing or committing crimes,
Speaker 2: and I want to discuss that in more detail in
Speaker 2: its own episode.
Speaker 3: I think that requires a.
Speaker 2: Very careful focus on, likew how that actually went about,
Speaker 2: because I think that can very easily be turned into
Speaker 2: you know, panicking or maybe overstating certain things regarding you know,
Speaker 2: where ICE the ones actually you know, directing all the
Speaker 2: protests against Ice, and like no, obviously not so. I
Speaker 2: think that that requires a distinct focus. Specifically in these
Speaker 2: core documents, there's a there's a reference to an undercover
Speaker 2: discussing with someone at like a sunrise movement meeting about
Speaker 2: getting more involved in direct actions and maybe building quote
Speaker 2: unquote devices for direct actions. So it's that kind of
Speaker 2: stuff and I want to discuss that more in detail.
Speaker 2: But this new Batchel Corps documents in this case has
Speaker 2: revealed a lot about about how this investigation went. How
Speaker 2: it started off very very broad against a lot of
Speaker 2: organizations and like what you know, national security presdential memory
Speaker 2: and them number seven wrote about, you know, looking to
Speaker 2: the finances of a lot of different nonprofit groups. But
Speaker 2: then from there realizing that maybe they are not going
Speaker 2: to be able to prosecute all these unions for terrorist financing.
Speaker 2: Instead they find fifteen people who are engaged in firstmen
Speaker 2: in activity that they think they could maybe you know,
Speaker 2: turn into an Antifa boogieman and get that past a
Speaker 2: grand jury, because you certainly could not get the rest
Speaker 2: of this shit past a grand jury.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Talking of like pushing the back boundaries of the
Speaker 3: Constitution with regards to policing as a good tie into
Speaker 3: this next piece that I have, which is to talk
Speaker 3: about the national defense areas. So the DOJ has issued
Speaker 3: a new opinion this week suggesting the military forces in
Speaker 3: the national defense areas that span that much of the
Speaker 3: border can now detain people not just inside the NDA,
Speaker 3: but also near the NDA who leave it before they
Speaker 3: have time to arrest them. If you're not familiar with
Speaker 3: the NDA, these areas along the border wall that have
Speaker 3: been transferred to the military and are being managed as
Speaker 3: extensions of military bases. For example, NDA number three, the
Speaker 3: California NDA begins I think at the western edge of
Speaker 3: Otai mount of Wilderness, stretches all the way to the
Speaker 3: Arizona border in Imperial County. That is an extension of
Speaker 3: Nafel Centro So. That's Naval Air Facility El Centro So
Speaker 3: that's patrolled by marines. The New Mexico one is an
Speaker 3: extension of Fort Huachuca and that's patrolled by the Army.
Speaker 3: There is one Texas, which is an extension for Bliss
Speaker 3: for bless Spanzer's two states. Better that it goes that
Speaker 3: NDA goes into Texas. More the bases themselves are being extended. Therefore,
Speaker 3: the logic goes from the Justice Department that they are
Speaker 3: not violating the Poscomatatis Act because there are recognized exemptions
Speaker 3: they say for military installations. So they're saying because the
Speaker 3: base is being extended to generally but not always. It
Speaker 3: is the Roosevelt Reservation, right, which is a sixty foot
Speaker 3: area to the north of the physical border, but some
Speaker 3: of these NDA's span areas larger than that. They are
Speaker 3: claiming that that area is therefore exempt from PCA. If
Speaker 3: the military is prosecuting or in this case, arresting or
Speaker 3: detaining people for trespassing on a military installation, right, they
Speaker 3: think that the military can also enforce federal law on
Speaker 3: its installation. So by definition, anyone ewie entry without inspection right,
Speaker 3: so that someone entering between ports of entry, anybody doing
Speaker 3: that in an NDA, which is a large amount of
Speaker 3: southern border right now, would be trespersoning on military installation. Right.
Speaker 3: You can also see in this opinion they they're like
Speaker 3: hinting it, adding more NDAs soon. This is the same
Speaker 3: legal reasoning that they are using. Claim it is illegal
Speaker 3: to photograph things inside an NDA. I think this one
Speaker 3: is incredibly suspect. Right, So the statutory law does ban
Speaker 3: photography of quote, certain vital military or naval installations or equipment.
Speaker 3: But I think you'd have a very hard time arguing
Speaker 3: in court that like a pile of razor wire ands
Speaker 3: and rocks is vital military equipment. But that's what they're
Speaker 3: going with. Right. This is important because what we are
Speaker 3: seeing here is the Trump administration pushing at the boundaries
Speaker 3: of constitutionally what it can do. And as I've said
Speaker 3: hundreds of times on the show over the last four years,
Speaker 3: this always starts at the border, and it never stays
Speaker 3: at the border. Right. Everything we see with mass surveillance
Speaker 3: now has been a reality in border communities for some time.
Speaker 3: Everything we see with the increased presence of ICE of CBP,
Speaker 3: this has been something that border communities have dealt with.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: This is this particularly violent form of law enforcement that
Speaker 3: is particularly unaccountable. If we see this at the border,
Speaker 3: and they get away with it at the border, then
Speaker 3: I'm sure it will continue in other places. It doesn't
Speaker 3: take like a brain genius to look at, for instance,
Speaker 3: what happened in Portland six years ago, right, and see
Speaker 3: how we could edge towards the PCA Poscombat Artist Act
Speaker 3: waivers in other parts of the United States as well.
Speaker 3: So I think this is worth keeping an eye on,
Speaker 3: and like I would like it to get more attention
Speaker 3: in reporting.
Speaker 2: Let's go on an ad break and then we'll discuss
Speaker 2: in honor of Lindsagram the US military.
Speaker 3: Who we support, but we don't know where they go.
Speaker 2: All right, there's a lot of military news this week.
Speaker 2: That ship does not look like it's doing too well.
Speaker 2: Let's let's start with the sad boat.
Speaker 1: That sad boat. Anyone here old enough to have watched
Speaker 1: the Love Boat on Nick at Night?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 1: No, okay, all.
Speaker 3: Right, well he just didn't have that where I grew robot.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's hurtful. This is all very hurtful. Anyway, The
Speaker 1: sad boat is the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 3: How sad is this? Yeah? Yeah, where is it? Sad? Well?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, miya, you want to you want to start?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So so the US is Abraham Lincoln. It's it's
Speaker 4: actually funny because we have now reached a point where
Speaker 4: when you say the sad boat, I actually couldn't tell
Speaker 4: which of the boats you were referring to, because.
Speaker 1: It was the Jerry Ford before it was the Abraham Lincoln,
Speaker 1: and the Jerald Ford had longer to be sad.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: There was also a destroyer deployee. This is all trying
Speaker 4: to see where the power was out for three days?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they didn't have running water, which one was
Speaker 3: it where they were blocking up all the toilets, but
Speaker 3: like jamming, there was toilet paper.
Speaker 1: That's the Jerry Ford and I think the Lincoln, all
Speaker 1: of our newest supercarriers have serious issues with the bathroom plumbing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the primary means of First Amendment expression that
Speaker 3: is available to say.
Speaker 1: They practice the two man poop over the side technique,
Speaker 1: which is an actual thing they have to do whenever
Speaker 1: the bathrooms don't work.
Speaker 4: Which it's it's so funny reading about these ships and
Speaker 4: being like this, this is shit from like my like
Speaker 4: slumlord fucking apartments in Chicago.
Speaker 1: They're happeningxcept for the dods your slum lord.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like they're happening. Award like the most like the most.
Speaker 4: Advanced and expensive military and human history. Oh god, where
Speaker 4: do we even want to start with with the USS
Speaker 4: Abraham Lincoln. I I guess, I guess, I guess we
Speaker 4: could start with the fact that they have been hanging
Speaker 4: nets over the side of of the aircraft carrier because
Speaker 4: sailors keep trying to jump off to kill themselves, a
Speaker 4: thing that I last saw with like Fox Confactories and Shensen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the last time I heard that as well. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but at least in Shenzend, to my knowledge, nobody is
Speaker 3: shitting into the nets, which appears to be from what
Speaker 3: Roba has said.
Speaker 1: You know, the shitting would be incidental.
Speaker 3: We have covered on this show before.
Speaker 4: I think it was was it ten, I think was
Speaker 4: the one where they're they're they're their Chinese branch had
Speaker 4: like timers over the toilets to show how long you
Speaker 4: say that would not would not rule that out in
Speaker 4: Shenzend as well. Yeah, but this ship has not been
Speaker 4: getting resupplied. It has been out for significantly longer than
Speaker 4: the the the original plant duration. The sailors are just
Speaker 4: kind of trapped on board. Sailors who have you know,
Speaker 4: attempted to commit suicide because they've been stuck on this
Speaker 4: fucking ship are getting like like their careers destroyed because
Speaker 4: of this. Oh wow, it's just a nightmare. And this
Speaker 4: is running into one of the what I guess is
Speaker 4: turning into one of the themes of this week's episode,
Speaker 4: which is that there were a whole bunch of elements
Speaker 4: of the US Navy and also of the world economy
Speaker 4: where them functioning correctly are based on the US not
Speaker 4: fighting of forever war in Iran and are based on
Speaker 4: the assumption that eventually this is going to end. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and it's just not. And so this ship is just
Speaker 4: also just physically breaking down.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, they're running low on all of the necessities,
Speaker 1: and part of that is because of the success of
Speaker 1: Iran's attacks on bases like US bases overseas and US
Speaker 1: bases and like foreign countries. There was an article that
Speaker 1: came out just within the last couple of days on
Speaker 1: August fourteenth in the New York Times by John Ismay
Speaker 1: that traced a lot of the supply issues that the
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln's been having for its entire deployment to like
Speaker 1: right after the first day of the war, when Iran
Speaker 1: launched a massive attack on a US Navy base in Bahrain,
Speaker 1: which destroyed a massive logistics hub that the Navy has
Speaker 1: relied on basically the entirety of the Global War on
Speaker 1: tear up to the present moment, and that's what's forced
Speaker 1: them to switch over to using Diego Garcia as a
Speaker 1: supply hub. If you remember, Keir Starmer over in the
Speaker 1: UK initially was like, no, you guys can't use Diego
Speaker 1: Garcia as as like the supply hub for your legal war,
Speaker 1: and then immediately changed his mind when he got threatened
Speaker 1: a little.
Speaker 3: Bit hub bravest, who are in good stuff? Good stuff? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I think, like I mean, it's so obvious right that Iran,
Speaker 3: a country which like the US has been saber rattling
Speaker 3: out for decades, would very obviously have a plan of
Speaker 3: what to do in the event that the United States
Speaker 3: struck it and they executed their plan.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly stated that the
Speaker 1: length of the deployment of the Lincoln and the Ford
Speaker 1: before it are not big deals. When he was asked
Speaker 1: earlier this week if carry deployments were too long, he responded, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: not nearly long enough.
Speaker 3: See he's really gonna get into it with Linday Graham's
Speaker 3: sister over this one.
Speaker 4: No, she's it's also she's just been very personally meddling
Speaker 4: with and fucking with a bunch of Navy stuff that
Speaker 4: there's there's a whole kind of there's a whole kind
Speaker 4: of side drama to this story where Trump has ordered
Speaker 4: the Navy to go back to using steam catapults to
Speaker 4: like launch aircraft off of the deck of the ship,
Speaker 4: which is like a significantly worse thing than the electromagnetic
Speaker 4: systems that the Navy has been using. But Trump like
Speaker 4: heard that that some pilot liked them a long time ago,
Speaker 4: and so he's been trying to force the entire Navy
Speaker 4: to do this since the first administration, and he's finally succeeded,
Speaker 4: which means they're going to have to like refit like
Speaker 4: forty percent of these ships, and they're probably gonna have
Speaker 4: to just design new ships because the ships are not
Speaker 4: designed around having these things, and they're just going to
Speaker 4: be worse because the Emperor has decided that he likes
Speaker 4: steam catapults.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, no, no, there's there's a piece in
Speaker 1: the Guardian. Just about a week ago, Trump orders Pentagon
Speaker 1: to redesigned US aircraft carriers to use steam.
Speaker 3: Catapult solage jests yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because he thought the digital systems were too complicated.
Speaker 1: I had missed this in the long list of like
Speaker 1: bullshit insane military stuff.
Speaker 3: He's reason yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He signed a National Security memorandum directing Pete Hegseth and
Speaker 1: the acting Navy Secretary to make this change. That's great,
Speaker 1: that's good.
Speaker 4: It's this astonishing combination of like, she's made the cardinal
Speaker 4: mistake that all of these people make, which is that
Speaker 4: American military and economic supremacy is premised on having the
Speaker 4: world's most expensive army and not using it. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: now he's used it. And then also he's doing all
Speaker 4: of this weird emperor fucking with it stuff at the
Speaker 4: same time.
Speaker 1: There's amazing quotes from this Apparently it started back in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen when he told Time magazine about a conversation
Speaker 1: that he'd had with an unnamed Navy officer. Quote, So,
Speaker 1: I said, what's this, sir? This is our digital catapult system.
Speaker 1: Trump went on. It sounded bad to me. Digital. They
Speaker 1: have digital? What is digital? And it's very complicated. You
Speaker 1: have to be oured Einstein to figure it out. And
Speaker 1: I said, And now they want to buy more aircraft carriers.
Speaker 1: I said, what system are you going to be, sir?
Speaker 1: We're staying with digital. I said, no, you're not. You're
Speaker 1: going to goddamn steam. The digital costs hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars more money, and it's no good.
Speaker 3: He's also trying to get them to move the fucking
Speaker 3: controlled how of the aircraft carriers into the middle of
Speaker 3: the ship. According to the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: This is beautiful stuff. I hope he gets his way.
Speaker 1: I hope he gets his way to'll protect the rest
Speaker 1: of the world from us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the rest of the world would do better if
Speaker 3: all these ships were not deployed right now. This isn't Yeah, outstanding,
Speaker 3: great stuff.
Speaker 1: Great, amazing shit, Oh god.
Speaker 3: Very normal. This is how this is how successful military
Speaker 3: is organized.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I should point out that, like the latest statistics
Speaker 3: on people winted in action now suggested they're about seven
Speaker 3: hundred US people who've been wounded in a six month operation.
Speaker 2: Allegedly, the Washington is coming in to replace the Lincoln.
Speaker 2: Unclear what will happen to the destroyers and also unclear
Speaker 2: when this is actually going to happen.
Speaker 3: The destroyers have to come back so they can put
Speaker 3: a mast on them, yeah, because that looks more epic,
Speaker 3: and a big fucking cannon, like a black powder cannon
Speaker 3: on the front. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The last I heard from Trump, he said that a
Speaker 1: replacement for the Lincoln is quote moving right now or
Speaker 1: very shortly, and it's being replaced with another very similar ship.
Speaker 1: So that's what we've got so far. It is worth
Speaker 1: noting just in terms of a general update on the
Speaker 1: situation in Iran, that the cease fire that no one
Speaker 1: has really been holding to has come to an end
Speaker 1: or is in the process of coming to an end,
Speaker 1: and does not look like it's going to be renewed.
Speaker 1: For all of the good that that did everybody over
Speaker 1: the last sixty days or so. Yeah, the Trump administration
Speaker 1: has gone back and forth. Up until earlier this week,
Speaker 1: he had been claiming that he was in that the
Speaker 1: US was in active talks with Iran, but he said
Speaker 1: earlier this Tuesday that the US is not in any
Speaker 1: talks with Iran and has no plans to start new ones.
Speaker 1: This is around the same time that he started saying
Speaker 1: that the Strait of Hormus is open and that the
Speaker 1: US is going to take it and make it a
Speaker 1: new US territory. This has just been something he released
Speaker 1: as a series of truth posts or truths, including one
Speaker 1: showing a map that circled the Strait of horm Moves
Speaker 1: with the words new US territory straight of Hormos above
Speaker 1: and below.
Speaker 2: It.
Speaker 1: So, again hard to say what's going to happen here
Speaker 1: other than that oil prizes are continuing to rise. The
Speaker 1: same day, that he announced that there was no we're
Speaker 1: no talks going on, and that the ceasefire was not
Speaker 1: going to be extended. US forces fired on a Panama
Speaker 1: flag ship, and around the same time Iran struck a
Speaker 1: ship as well, killing at least one sailor. Since the
Speaker 1: war began, seventeen sailors have been killed in sixty five attacks.
Speaker 1: Most of those have been the result of Ranian strikes,
Speaker 1: but three of those deaths have been caused by a
Speaker 1: US Navy ship that struck a merchant ship in June.
Speaker 1: So sailors are getting killed all around the USS. Abraham
Speaker 1: Lincoln's probably getting rotated out. The CeaseFire's over, and I
Speaker 1: guess we're trying to take the straight although it's I mean,
Speaker 1: there's no way to know what any of this actually
Speaker 1: means or what Trump's going to do. He could announce
Speaker 1: that they've got a new ceasefire tomorrow, like it would
Speaker 1: be silly to take any of this as a final
Speaker 1: word on anything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me pick up on that where Robo left
Speaker 3: off fairly, it does appay of it. In response to
Speaker 3: Trump continuing to just post insane stuff, Iran has been
Speaker 3: having talked with Aman, probably talking about like joint tolling
Speaker 3: the Strait, right, which is something we spoken about a
Speaker 3: lot on in this podcast. Trump did interview with Trey Yinks.
Speaker 3: If you're not familiar with Trey Yinks, his job is
Speaker 3: to kind of be a credulous, nodding head to broadcast
Speaker 3: shit that Donald Trump says. His chief foreign correspondent Fox Now.
Speaker 8: I asked the President about these parallel talks that are
Speaker 8: taking place between Iran and Oman about control of the
Speaker 8: Strait of hor moves, and the President told Fox News,
Speaker 8: if Oman gets in the way, we'll bomb the s
Speaker 8: out of them.
Speaker 3: That is Donald Trump threatening to bomb the shit out
Speaker 3: of Amman. A fantastic u turn in the United States policy.
Speaker 3: This is a wild thing for him to be saying. Right,
Speaker 3: this is a country that obs the US has had
Speaker 3: previously good relations with. Yeah, this is this is like
Speaker 3: a CIA outpost, like brand new country to do to
Speaker 3: do Middle East war with. Yeah, exactly right. We've we're
Speaker 3: running out of countries. We're having to turn on our own.
Speaker 3: Trump has also claimed in the same interviews Tree y
Speaker 3: Inks he has a back channel to the IRGC.
Speaker 8: Interestingly, President Trump confirmed to Fox News that there is
Speaker 8: a back channel.
Speaker 3: With the IRGC.
Speaker 8: These are the hardline officials inside of Iran, and that
Speaker 8: the United States and officials in Washington are speaking directly
Speaker 8: with IRGC officials in Iran.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there he's talking about the United States negotiate
Speaker 3: directly with IGC. I would assume that they have had
Speaker 3: back channels in the IIGC, right like that, That is
Speaker 3: something one would assume. Yeah, this is very normal when
Speaker 3: you have two states of this size which are frequently
Speaker 3: kind of squaring off against each other, and generally it
Speaker 3: is something that can be used to de escalate conflict. Obviously,
Speaker 3: that ain't happening right now. It was later reported that
Speaker 3: these and you don't have to be a brain genius
Speaker 3: to work out that these probably came through the Kurdistan
Speaker 3: Region of Iraq, right southern Kurdistan. In related news, Iran
Speaker 3: then attempted a drone strike on Barzani. What yes, President
Speaker 3: of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Yeah, they sent two
Speaker 3: drones to Barzani's residents, I believe. What the fuck? Yeah,
Speaker 3: sorry I missed this. Why was this not for a pigeon?
Speaker 3: What the hell? Yes, they sent two drones to the
Speaker 3: office of the Kurdistan Region Prime Minister of sil Barzani
Speaker 3: and the residents of the head of the Kurdistan Region's
Speaker 3: Security Agency. The drones obviously did not cause any casualty.
Speaker 3: They think they were intercepted. This was reported by Axios
Speaker 3: right that this this link between Southern Kurdistan and the
Speaker 3: ILGC back channel was reported by Axios on the sixteenth
Speaker 3: and then on the seventeenth, Iran attempted to drone strike
Speaker 3: masou Bazani, the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they attempt to drone strike his office and the residents
Speaker 3: of the Kurdistan Region Security Agency, both in the bill
Speaker 3: province of Kurdistan. And like this again is like I
Speaker 3: have've reported extensively. I think that Iran is bombing southern
Speaker 3: Kordistan and has been for some time. But this is
Speaker 3: a hell of an escalation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've tried to assas like, but Brazoni is like
Speaker 4: the political figure in this part of Kurdistan. Like yeah,
Speaker 4: and like the Brazoni family has been has been a
Speaker 4: political faction powerful enough that like a lot of politics
Speaker 4: revolves around whether you're not you're like in their client
Speaker 4: networks for a long long time. This is this is
Speaker 4: kind of like trying to like, I mean again, he
Speaker 4: literally is like the prime Minister of Raki Kursia, Like
Speaker 4: this is this is like attempting to assassinate the prime minister.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, staggering escalation. Like Barzani zeated I tweeted next
Speaker 3: that it was dangerous escalation, a direct threat to the
Speaker 3: security instability of the curds down region. He's not wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 3: When you combine this with the US having a scheduled
Speaker 3: withdrawal from Iraq, right, like this is bad and like
Speaker 3: it is very clear that Iraq is continuing and even
Speaker 3: escalating its policy of punishing the Curds for United States aggression. Right,
Speaker 3: there's this perception that the curds in US are like
Speaker 3: always aligned. As Roberts said, Iran has continued to strike
Speaker 3: vessals and straightforward moves. What interesting about this recent strike
Speaker 3: and the number of strikes that came in the days
Speaker 3: before it is that normally there has been a pattern
Speaker 3: by which the bombing relaxes. Iran strikes a vessel, the
Speaker 3: US bombs Iran, things peter out lower intensity, Iran strikes
Speaker 3: a vessel, the US hits Iran, right, Like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: the US has not hit Iran yet in response to
Speaker 3: these most recent ones. And I think part of the
Speaker 3: reason that might be is something we've talked about before,
Speaker 3: that the United States is not capable now of doing
Speaker 3: what it did in February, Like it has significantly diminished
Speaker 3: it's stockpiles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, by an estimate around seventy percent plus depending on
Speaker 1: the munition. In terms of like our long range like
Speaker 1: cruise missiles and our interceptors.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so like just to dejog in that for people,
Speaker 3: that's like attack and defense. Right, it's your ability to
Speaker 3: hit Iran and also your ability to stop Iranian.
Speaker 1: It's all the stuff that lets us Hitterron without endangering
Speaker 1: the lives of US airmen, And it's what allows us
Speaker 1: to defend our bases and all of the Allied bases
Speaker 1: and increasingly fuel infrastructure in the region. Right. And it's
Speaker 1: low enough that in part why they don't want to
Speaker 1: continue burning more even though they have like a third
Speaker 1: or more left, is that they have to keep a
Speaker 1: stockpile in case shit goes down with China or expands
Speaker 1: with Russia. Right, Like these are our our primary weapons
Speaker 1: with Iran, they're completely unnecessary.
Speaker 3: Or a man yeah, or are new worth of moont Yeah,
Speaker 3: if we.
Speaker 1: Were to theoretically get into any kind of anything approaching
Speaker 1: a near peer conflict when on a good spot, would
Speaker 1: be our only weapons other than nukes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I know we're going to come back to
Speaker 3: the US like defense procurement situation. But I do want
Speaker 3: to just point out that the President. I don't know
Speaker 3: if this is related to the fact that gas prices
Speaker 3: are still bonkers six month into this, but he has
Speaker 3: posted an air image of a trima version of himself
Speaker 3: ripping the Keystone pipeline out of the ground with a
Speaker 3: banner reading buried by Biden in the background. Not clear
Speaker 3: if he understands how pipelines work. What, Yeah, your guess
Speaker 3: is as good as mine on that one. Like it's
Speaker 3: it's it's I mean, yeah, let me just draw up
Speaker 3: the link. I guess sometimes I'll just scroll this true
Speaker 3: social page. It's it's it's it's wild up in there.
Speaker 3: But that is not a task for the faint of heart. No, Like,
Speaker 3: this is one of the things I do for work.
Speaker 3: You know that traumatizes me. I've put it in the chat,
Speaker 3: the zoom chat.
Speaker 2: We don't want our oil in the ground in those pipespeet,
Speaker 2: we want it straight from the straight of horror moves
Speaker 2: in barrels.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, right, like what is he thinking? What if
Speaker 3: you think the Keystone pipeline I should have not also
Speaker 3: has a plaque fixed to it that says Keystone pipeline
Speaker 3: completely free energy jobs America first now, and they're they're
Speaker 3: buried by Biden is on a gravestone. The pipeline also
Speaker 3: has some handles. Trump's kind of in sort of a
Speaker 3: stable wide stance. They're pulling it out the ground like
Speaker 3: it's got roots on it. I don't know what the
Speaker 3: fuck is going on here, But there are also some
Speaker 3: soldiers in the background, like underneath an American flag.
Speaker 4: So yeah, this is the guy who just decided we
Speaker 4: were at warworth a run and now was killed a
Speaker 4: shit ton of.
Speaker 3: People over it. Yeah, I guess now the response to
Speaker 3: the war with the run and gas prices being up
Speaker 3: is more pipelines at home, which is sick. Like I
Speaker 3: should add, I guess there is a continuing ecological disaster
Speaker 3: in the straight uform moves because people keep shooting boats
Speaker 3: which are full of fuel. Yeah, and Iran it's having
Speaker 3: to clean up these oil spills.
Speaker 1: Well, there's also a further ecological disaster, and that you
Speaker 1: have an enormous fleet of vessels that are just sitting
Speaker 1: around waiting and accumulating a huge number of different kind
Speaker 1: of like mollusks that you don't want to spread around
Speaker 1: the world that are definitely and it's also getting stuff
Speaker 1: is getting sucked into like their water tanks and they're
Speaker 1: what we call their ballast tanks and shit that's going
Speaker 1: to get shut squirted out somewhere else. Like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of potential problems.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are some procedures for like dumping ballast and stuff,
Speaker 3: but yeah, this is all the problem is, right, everything
Speaker 3: is delayed. Every shipping company is losing money handover fist. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and they're gonna want to get moving pretty fast when
Speaker 3: if the straightform moos ever opens again. And yeah, we
Speaker 3: will see more environmental damages. Like every war is an
Speaker 3: ecological disaster, but this one that isn't getting as much
Speaker 3: reporting on. But it's great that we're bringing that home
Speaker 3: with the Keystone pipelines, so we'll get a little piece
Speaker 3: of that too.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to give an update on a story
Speaker 1: because I talked about two weeks ago something like that
Speaker 1: about the General Dynamics Artillery shell factory in Meisquite, Texas
Speaker 1: that was meant to by now be producing somewhere between
Speaker 1: twenty and ideally thirty thousand shells a month of specifically
Speaker 1: the kind that we're being used most rapidly in Ukraine
Speaker 1: before Ukraine pivoted to using drones for a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're still burning through one fifty five's but
Speaker 1: like that was, I mean, they incurred a shell debt
Speaker 1: of something like three point six million shells in the
Speaker 1: United States as a result of that, And so it's
Speaker 1: a massive issue to get these shells being produced because
Speaker 1: in any kind of modern war we're going to be
Speaker 1: burning through a shitload of them. We have one hundred
Speaker 1: something years worth of heavy artillery in warfare to know
Speaker 1: that you never have enough shells. So this is a
Speaker 1: problem the US has been trying to get its handle
Speaker 1: on for a while, and as I noted, this factory
Speaker 1: that was supposed to be producing like a third of
Speaker 1: the total of all the shells in the uni United
Speaker 1: States has not produced any so far. And a few
Speaker 1: days after I discussed that on ed Jesse Coburn at
Speaker 1: Pro Publica published a beautiful investigation into that General Dynamics
Speaker 1: factory and.
Speaker 3: Mesquite that opens with just a great lead.
Speaker 1: A robot was on fire again, and it's talking about
Speaker 1: the fact that all of this factory is filled with
Speaker 1: Jesus because it was supposed to meant to be heavily automated,
Speaker 1: which is why it was supposed to be able to
Speaker 1: keep up with such a high level of production. It
Speaker 1: was automated using these robots that had like giant metal
Speaker 1: arms with clamps for hands, and because of the way
Speaker 1: they were designed, wound up soaked in oil constantly, and
Speaker 1: that oil would combust because they were moving steel blocks
Speaker 1: that had been heated to about eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit
Speaker 1: into and out of a machine that also would periodically
Speaker 1: beuch flame at them, and the robots were not proofed
Speaker 1: against this much flame. Per car publica article one blaze
Speaker 1: that summer melted a robots cables, putting an advocamission for
Speaker 1: a week.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 1: This series of fires in the factory came just a
Speaker 1: few weeks before Trump administration. Defense officials and executives for
Speaker 1: General Dynamics, the company that made the factory, toured and
Speaker 1: through a gala opening event there to celebrate that it
Speaker 1: was supposed to be up and running by now. Exploding
Speaker 1: robots were not the only method of uncontrollable failure that
Speaker 1: workers had documented at the factory by that point. For
Speaker 1: one thing, the robotic arms had a tendency to flail
Speaker 1: uncontrollably and destroy equipment. They also would periodically drop heavy
Speaker 1: loads at random. The most sensitive and expensive equipment in
Speaker 1: the entire factory was a machine that was meant to
Speaker 1: stretch metal in order to make artillery shells. It cracked
Speaker 1: them nearly constantly. The factory was filled with smoke at
Speaker 1: all times and was usually over one hundred degrees inside.
Speaker 1: Every description of the state of the art Arms factory
Speaker 1: sounds worse than the ones that were operating in World
Speaker 1: War One. This is probably my favorite part of that article.
Speaker 1: Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular
Speaker 1: pounding with a sledgehammer to function property the shaping of
Speaker 1: nearly every shell. We didn't really have any standardized practice,
Speaker 1: said Quantel White, a former employee. It was just a
Speaker 1: bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with
Speaker 1: a sledgehammer every night.
Speaker 4: This is warhammer.
Speaker 3: Forty k shit morehammer forty K works a lot better
Speaker 3: than this.
Speaker 1: There would be a priest be reading from a Bible,
Speaker 1: there'd be ungeons and oil. Well, there's lots of oil.
Speaker 3: I love this now.
Speaker 1: By last summer, which is when reports first started coming
Speaker 1: out about the difficulties the factory was having, by that point,
Speaker 1: General Dynamics had missed eight deadlines to get this thing
Speaker 1: up and running. Their factory still has yet to produce
Speaker 1: a single usable shell, despite five hundred and thirty three
Speaker 1: million dollars in Pentagon funds going towards refurbishing old machines
Speaker 1: and ordering new ones from Turkey. Even so, the Pentagon
Speaker 1: continues to sign contracts with General Dynamics, and two months
Speaker 1: ago the company announced us new solution to all of
Speaker 1: their ill fortune factories many issues. You guys, guess what
Speaker 1: the magic bullet that finally is going to fix everything
Speaker 1: that this factory that doesn't work is supposed to be AI.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's AI.
Speaker 1: It's it's fucking.
Speaker 3: AI, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Quote a news release from General Dynamics and the new company.
Speaker 1: The terrence was filled with techno business jargon. AI enabled
Speaker 1: capabilities and intelligence and connectivity would be added at Mesquite
Speaker 1: and other General Dynamics factories. The companies wrote, AI transforms
Speaker 1: production facilities into strategic assets. To Terrence's CEO said on
Speaker 1: the release, we're building autonomous manufacturing systems that learned, adapt
Speaker 1: and scale in real time.
Speaker 3: By the way, what that CEO said.
Speaker 1: I'll guarantee was written by Chad Gpt. The whole AI
Speaker 1: transformed that that's yeah, very clearly. Yeah, these pronouncements have
Speaker 1: baffled former Mesquite workers. What are they talking about. There's
Speaker 1: nothing to learn or adapt or scale one set. It's
Speaker 1: all broken, pro publicized.
Speaker 3: It's really fun because no one who actually works at
Speaker 3: the factory, and no US military officials who are allowed
Speaker 3: to speak their minds openly, have had anything positive to
Speaker 3: say about General Dynamics and how they've proceeded with this project.
Speaker 1: The article quotes a former official in an Army office
Speaker 1: supervising the factory as saying it's an absolute disaster. The
Speaker 1: Army should have gone after recovering money from General Dynamics. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean they should have.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But that gets the central contradiction of the American
Speaker 4: war machine, which is that the point of it is
Speaker 4: to give money to defense contractors. You're not actually supposed
Speaker 4: to have to use the stuff.
Speaker 3: I should say here.
Speaker 1: General Dynamics is one of the companies most responsible for
Speaker 1: inventing that state of affairs. This is we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about these folks because they keep coming up when
Speaker 1: you look into like defense related golduggery and fuckery and
Speaker 1: like us history. I feel like now is probably is
Speaker 1: a good time to talk a little bit about their history.
Speaker 1: We're gonna I'm gonna give a brief overview of these
Speaker 1: guys because we're in an illegal war that's currently shuffling
Speaker 1: a fortune to defense contractors, and we should probably talk
Speaker 1: about one of the most corrupt members of that family.
Speaker 1: The General Dynamics Corporation was founded at the tail end
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century by Isaac Leopold Rice, a businessman
Speaker 1: and a music coologist who was born in Bavaria and
Speaker 1: raised in Milwaukee. He made his fortune doing a mix
Speaker 1: of railroad law and publishing sheet music, and eventually got
Speaker 1: into the electric battery and vehicle business. This ended with
Speaker 1: him involved in submarines, because early Navy subs ran on
Speaker 1: electric power when submerged. In eighteen ninety nine, he purchased
Speaker 1: the Haulland Torpedo Boat Company and named it the Electric
Speaker 1: Boat Company. The Electric Boat Company remained a submarine manufacturer
Speaker 1: after his death in nineteen fourteen, providing subs for not
Speaker 1: just the US government but the Peruvian government, and gradually
Speaker 1: spinning up to produce other kinds of boats, including PT
Speaker 1: boats for the US and Canadian militaries. After World War II,
Speaker 1: it purchased Convair, which made anti aircraft missiles, jet fighters,
Speaker 1: and the Atlas rockets used in the first US crewed
Speaker 1: orbital flight. This new company, a mix of the Electric
Speaker 1: Boat Company and Convair, became General Dynamics. In more recent decades,
Speaker 1: General Dynamics became the manufacturers of the feared Tomahawk cruise missile,
Speaker 1: arguably the most iconic ballistic missile in the entire US arsenal.
Speaker 1: It also kept making subs, including the famous Los Angeles Class,
Speaker 1: and as time went on, the company got really really
Speaker 1: good at corruptly fucking US taxpayers out of their money.
Speaker 1: Investigative reporting first started shining a light on constant cost
Speaker 1: overruns and blown budgets in a series of GD defense
Speaker 1: contracts for a nineteen eighty five Time article by Charles Alexander.
Speaker 1: A federal grand jury first started investigating the company's cost
Speaker 1: overruns on submarines in nineteen seventy nine, but dropped the
Speaker 1: probe in nineteen eighty one for lack of enough evidence
Speaker 1: of fraud. Now the Justice Apartment has reopened the case
Speaker 1: in light of new information from p Tecis Veliattis, who
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven became head of Electric Boat, the
Speaker 1: company's subuilding division in Groton, Connecticut. His word is hardly unimpeachable.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty three he fled to his native Grease
Speaker 1: to avoid being tried on charges of perjuring himself before
Speaker 1: a grand jury and taking one point three million in
Speaker 1: kickbacks from a subcontractor. Velliadis has produced tapes in company
Speaker 1: documents that he claims reveal a pattern of waste, corruption
Speaker 1: and cover up at General Dynamics. In a tape of
Speaker 1: one talk he had with Lewis the chairman, for example,
Speaker 1: the chairman suggests that Velliotis reassured James Ashton, a discontented
Speaker 1: Electric Boat executive, that he is still in the running
Speaker 1: for a promotion, in order to keep him from popping
Speaker 1: off about shoddy work at the yard. So we have
Speaker 1: all of these tapes from this equally shady dude, Velliadis,
Speaker 1: because nobody who's in a high position in the defense
Speaker 1: contracting industry is not constantly committing crimes. And the tapes
Speaker 1: that he provided showed several things that are very familiar
Speaker 1: to the Mesquite factory case. For one thing, Villiadis provided
Speaker 1: a nineteen seventy seven tape with the company's executive vice president,
Speaker 1: Gordon MacDonald, telling him that the company had issued an
Speaker 1: impossible delivery timetable for the first Trident submarine because the
Speaker 1: CEO of General Dynamics wanted to quote keep our stock
Speaker 1: price from sliding. In other words, every time that the
Speaker 1: stock price slides, you can announce, oh, we're about to
Speaker 1: release the Trident, and you can get a quick boost
Speaker 1: in the stock price.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: As a result of this kind of fuckery, the sub
Speaker 1: was not produced until two years after this date. Now
Speaker 1: that's pretty bad. But the incident that actually sparked the
Speaker 1: first known criminal investigation of a defense contractor came in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three when General Dynamics tried to charge the
Speaker 1: Air Force ninety six hundred dollars for a four inch
Speaker 1: long wrench. And this revealed a bunch of If you've
Speaker 1: ever heard stories of like six thousand dollars wrenches and
Speaker 1: ya dah, yeah, no, forty four thousand dollars plungers. It's
Speaker 1: General Dynamics that people are talking about. That was a
Speaker 1: real series of like news articles and eventually congressional investigations
Speaker 1: into the fact that they were charging cerred amounts of
Speaker 1: money for bullshit. Now, part of the reason for this
Speaker 1: was that, like Navy and Air Force, procurement was completely
Speaker 1: fucked in this point, and they just did not keep
Speaker 1: a backlog of like the material they needed to repair
Speaker 1: their shit on hand. But a lot of it was
Speaker 1: just massive rampant corruption with companies like General Dynamics in particular. Now,
Speaker 1: charges like this inspired further investigations into how GD functioned,
Speaker 1: and this eventually led to a congressional inquiry. It came
Speaker 1: out that in nineteen eighty two, General Dynamics had asked
Speaker 1: the Pentagon to pay almost nineteen million dollars in overhead
Speaker 1: costs for their company HQ. These were not what you'd
Speaker 1: call unavoidable expenses. Quote four hundred and ninety one eight
Speaker 1: hundred and forty dollars for Lewis's that's the chairman's personal
Speaker 1: flights on corporate jets, often to and from his farm
Speaker 1: in Albany, five hundred and thirty eight thousand, seven hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty one dollars for contributions in memberships, including country
Speaker 1: club fees for top executives, and one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: five dollars for the kinneling of a dog named Firston
Speaker 1: while its owner, a General Dynamics executive, attended a company
Speaker 1: conference at a South Carolina resort. At last week's hearing,
Speaker 1: Congressman Dingle Quiz Lewis out a five hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: one dollars charge for a king size sert, a perfect
Speaker 1: sleeper mattress, and a box spring set, which was delivered
Speaker 1: to the Clayton Inn in suburban Saint Louis. It was
Speaker 1: for mister Velliadis, SI Lewis, who explained that the executive
Speaker 1: said he needed the bed for times he came to
Speaker 1: Saint Louis for meetings, added Gordon McDonald, a General Dynamics
Speaker 1: executive Vice president. Mister Velliattis, being a very large man,
Speaker 1: complained so much to the secretary of the company that
Speaker 1: he got tired of hearing it and bought the bed.
Speaker 1: Valiatdis denied that the bed was for him. Just very
Speaker 1: funny stories consistently when you look into like eighties defense
Speaker 1: contractor procurement issues, specifically around General Dynamics. Now, I know
Speaker 1: what you're wondering, how did they get away with such corruption? Well,
Speaker 1: that nineteen million dollars the US government spent on complete
Speaker 1: bullshit fees was matched with one point twenty four million
Speaker 1: dollars in the General Dynamics accountman purely to entertain Pentagon officials,
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven, they gave a twenty five dollars
Speaker 1: diamond earring set to the wife of Admiral Hyman rickover
Speaker 1: head of the nuclear propulsion program.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 1: To be fair to Hymen, the real reason they were
Speaker 1: trying to butter him up is that he had repeatedly
Speaker 1: complained about the company. But this is the kind of
Speaker 1: shit that they have been doing forever. Like the fact
Speaker 1: that they have now spent half a billion dollars of
Speaker 1: taxpayer money on a factory that does not work is
Speaker 1: nothing new to General Dynamics. And I'm sure they've now
Speaker 1: promised to put another two hundred million dollars into the
Speaker 1: factory and that it'll be producing twenty thousand shells a
Speaker 1: month at least within a year. I'm sure at some
Speaker 1: point they'll get at working if they keep shoveling a
Speaker 1: bunch of money into it. But make no mistake, it
Speaker 1: will not be General Dynamics money. It will be money
Speaker 1: one way or the other that US taxpayers have given
Speaker 1: them that winds up eventually maybe making this factory produce
Speaker 1: a single shell. Anyway, General Dynamics.
Speaker 2: Oh, let's go on one more hat break and then
Speaker 2: talk about bones in Florida.
Speaker 3: I guess yeah, wild.
Speaker 4: Speaking of unbelievably corrupt bullshit that is directly tied to
Speaker 4: the American war efforts in Iran. Okay, so bonds are
Speaker 4: not normally an extremely exciting topic. So let's start off
Speaker 4: with the glaring part, which is that early this week,
Speaker 4: the yields on US Treasury bonds, specifically thirty year teen notes,
Speaker 4: hit highs not seen since two thousand and seven, several
Speaker 4: weeks before the collapse of the American stock markets. It's
Speaker 4: also noted by several analysts that the other times that
Speaker 4: we've seen peaks like this were like nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 4: right before that, and I think there was another one
Speaker 4: of these I forgot I forgot the other economic collapse
Speaker 4: where there was a there was a giant one of
Speaker 4: these right before it.
Speaker 3: Like the nineteen twenty nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 4: Is that like black fry, Yeah, there's one more. I
Speaker 4: think it might have been like the dot com bubble
Speaker 4: or something. I forget WHI judtle. But the experts suggests
Speaker 4: that bond markets only do this when they are in
Speaker 4: extreme distress. So what does this actually mean. Bonds are
Speaker 4: a thing that, in this case, you can get from
Speaker 4: the governments and you pay the government money and the
Speaker 4: government promises you to pay back more money later, and
Speaker 4: the yield is like how much more money they're they're
Speaker 4: giving you back? Right, High yields on bonds means, you know,
Speaker 4: an increase of the cost of borrowing, and high yields
Speaker 4: on US government bonds is a sign of growing distrust
Speaker 4: in a long run economic feature of the US. Usually,
Speaker 4: these bonds pay like absolute shit. But the reason they
Speaker 4: pay like shit is that it's the US government. You're
Speaker 4: guaranteed to get your money back, so they're supposed to
Speaker 4: be an extremely safe asset, right, And when these rates
Speaker 4: are up, it's because everyone is, you know, looking at
Speaker 4: something happening in the market and something happening structurally in
Speaker 4: the US economy and panicking. Now one of those things
Speaker 4: is they're looking at the US debt and panicking, and
Speaker 4: you know, whether or not that's like a great way
Speaker 4: to evaluate how panicky they have to be is an
Speaker 4: open question. This has been one of the lines that's
Speaker 4: been coming out is that they're looking at you know,
Speaker 4: the US date and increasing faster, if than expected. The
Speaker 4: main thing, however, that has been setting off this particular
Speaker 4: wave of like mass selling of bonds is the collapse
Speaker 4: of that sixty day piece deal that Robert was talking
Speaker 4: about earlier, which you know, I don't think anyone who
Speaker 4: was actually following the conflict really thought that was going
Speaker 4: to go anywhere. But the thing that was important about it,
Speaker 4: strategically from the American side was that this was this
Speaker 4: was the thing that investors in financial annas were hanging
Speaker 4: their hat on. And you know, these these people had
Speaker 4: convinced themselves that this process was actually going to result
Speaker 4: in the end of the war, and that quickly ending
Speaker 4: the war was going to you know, restore economic growth, etc.
Speaker 3: Etc.
Speaker 4: And stave off inflation. And this was sort of the
Speaker 4: week as as as I mentioned earlier, the Brent crude
Speaker 4: index eight ninety dollars a barrel, and the peace talks
Speaker 4: formally completely collapsed.
Speaker 3: That there was a growing real lization that this war
Speaker 3: is not going to end.
Speaker 4: The economic conditions caused by the war not ending out
Speaker 4: going to continue, which means inflation is going to increase
Speaker 4: and it's going to have sort of far reaching and
Speaker 4: long lasting economic impacts. Now, this is a global squeeze
Speaker 4: that's been hitting most developed countries. Japan has also been
Speaker 4: very badly hit by these sort of shocks in bond yields. Now,
Speaker 4: what's interesting reading analysis of it is that you're actually
Speaker 4: starting to see a lot of firms. JP Morgan is
Speaker 4: a good example of this. Were JP Morgan for like,
Speaker 4: basically since the war has started. JP Morgan's analysis has
Speaker 4: been the war is going to end, and when the
Speaker 4: war ends, things will go back to normal. So we're
Speaker 4: just going to keep projecting things are going to be fine.
Speaker 4: They are finally pointing out the things that we've been saying,
Speaker 4: which is that yeah, no, the war is not ending
Speaker 4: and it's wreaking havoc on global supply chains. Now, the
Speaker 4: other thing that's been causing this run up there's two
Speaker 4: sides of this back to back that seem very con
Speaker 4: which is, on the one hand, there is growing fear
Speaker 4: over the fact that the AI bubble looks like it's
Speaker 4: going to collapse, right and we've seen this was sort
Speaker 4: of like the kost b shock I was talking about earlier,
Speaker 4: where you know, the stock market like ten five to
Speaker 4: ten percent of the stock markets creates stock markets value
Speaker 4: keeps disappearing overnight and then reappearing the next day. But
Speaker 4: then and this is sort of fascinating. One of the
Speaker 4: other things that's been happening is that there has been
Speaker 4: an unbelievable proliferation of bonds issued by AI companies because
Speaker 4: these AI companies are having to go to the finance
Speaker 4: markets to like fund all of their weird data center bullshit.
Speaker 4: And this has gotten a bunch of investors to pull
Speaker 4: their money out of very safe US bonds and put
Speaker 4: them into hideously unsafe AI bonds, a thing which I
Speaker 4: don't even this obviously is going to go catastrophically wrong.
Speaker 4: I don't have a sophisticated analysis for why, like taking
Speaker 4: money out of the US government and putting it into
Speaker 4: this AI company is going to create a transcendent God
Speaker 4: is a terrible idea. And what we've kind of seen
Speaker 4: in the past couple of days as these bond yields
Speaker 4: have risen as from a combination of these factors, is
Speaker 4: it looks like the beginning of the moment where wildly
Speaker 4: coyote like looks down and realizes that he's off the cliff. Now,
Speaker 4: on Wednesday, the Treasury began a massive buyback of treasury bonds.
Speaker 4: I going to quote from CNBC here. Under the accelerated
Speaker 4: buy back, Treasury, led by Secretary Scott Bessant, will target
Speaker 4: the ten to twenty year and twenty to thirty year
Speaker 4: portion of the market, which has seen a buyer strike
Speaker 4: since late June. The government will at least double the
Speaker 4: maximum size of its buyback operations from two billion to
Speaker 4: quote at least four billion dollars, according to an announcement
Speaker 4: from the Department. Now, in terms of the actual size
Speaker 4: of this buyback, which is like not a great sign
Speaker 4: when the is buying back its own debt in an
Speaker 4: attempt to stabilize the market. But that's not you know,
Speaker 4: in terms of the size of like the US bob market,
Speaker 4: that's really a drop in the bucket. But it does
Speaker 4: seem to have temporarily sort of stabilized the markets on
Speaker 4: the belief that if things continue to go run, the
Speaker 4: government will step in. However, the actual underlying economic metrics
Speaker 4: remain bad for everything in the economy that isn't ai
Speaker 4: and this is one of the things that traditionally heralds
Speaker 4: a fall in economic collapse. Now, it's also worth noting that,
Speaker 4: you know, cos B, for example, keeps hitting its circuit breaker,
Speaker 4: and that's something that also traditionally has been like the
Speaker 4: prelude to collapse, and it hasn't yet. So you know,
Speaker 4: we're we're in it. We're in a deeply weird and
Speaker 4: semi unprecedented time in the markets and in sort of
Speaker 4: the behavior of these investors and financial actors.
Speaker 3: But it's not good. It's my, it's my.
Speaker 4: It's like a conclusion on the state of the US
Speaker 4: bond market and the global economy at large.
Speaker 2: Let's close with elections, and I want to start with
Speaker 2: a quick correction for one or two of my last
Speaker 2: election segments. I keep calling Governor Tim Walls Mike Walls,
Speaker 2: and I don't know why this keeps happening. I picture
Speaker 2: his face in my mind, and I just like autocreks
Speaker 2: to Mike. I've caught this a few times and fixed
Speaker 2: it before the episode goes out, but this pastime I
Speaker 2: did not. Now Slightly more importantly, I also accidentally referred
Speaker 2: to Mike Rogers in Michigan as the incumbent, and that
Speaker 2: is not true. This Senate race is open and Rogers's
Speaker 2: former congressmen. I know these are smaller details and stories
Speaker 2: that are focused more on how DSA and left wing
Speaker 2: candidates are running their campaigns, but these types of details
Speaker 2: are still important to get right, and I regret the error.
Speaker 2: Let's turn to Florida, where I'm sad to say the
Speaker 2: resistance has been defeated.
Speaker 1: Now, Garrison, are you talking about Florida the state or
Speaker 1: flow Rida of the musical? Since now you.
Speaker 3: Missed a good chance to pivot with talking of regret,
Speaker 3: and then.
Speaker 2: I thought about doing that, but I'm like, no, I
Speaker 2: would rather not, because I'm just saying I still think
Speaker 2: there's hope for Florida. I said, bold take, but American
Speaker 2: hero Alexander Vinman will not be that hope.
Speaker 3: You'll be assuring another correction for that bad boy. Let
Speaker 3: me tell you.
Speaker 2: I'm talking in the grands Okay, I'm talking about in
Speaker 2: the cosmic sense, not in the short term.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, I agree with you. I have hope for
Speaker 3: the Ferridianes.
Speaker 2: The resistance has been defeated. American hero Alexander Vinman, the
Speaker 2: whistleblower who testified in Trump's first impeachment hearings, has lost
Speaker 2: the Democratic nomination for US Senate in an upset to
Speaker 2: Angie Nixon, a state representative from Jacksonville and a Democratic socialist.
Speaker 2: Nixon won by one hundred and fifty thousand votes. Oh wow,
Speaker 2: fifty six point one percent to Vinman's forty three point nine.
Speaker 2: And this, this, this is a big upset because Nixon
Speaker 2: was out fundraised sixteen to one. She had just under
Speaker 2: a million dollars while vinmin raked in over sixteen million.
Speaker 2: And I think, like a resist lib hero, losing a
Speaker 2: primary to a socialist in Florida is astounding.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, Nixon's a union organizer who's running on Medicare for all,
Speaker 2: taxing billionaires for childcare, universal jobs program, and opposition to Israel.
Speaker 2: She was endorsed by Alano mar Or. She had a
Speaker 2: t leave needed Turner, Cory Bush, and Miss Rachel who's
Speaker 2: listed in the National Leaders section of Nixon's.
Speaker 4: Website good for her, our only truly good national leader.
Speaker 3: No complaints with her. Miss Rachel show more spine than
Speaker 3: most of Congress in the last few years.
Speaker 2: Nixon was also endorsed by Working Families Party, Local Union's JVP,
Speaker 2: Jewish Hoyscher, Peace and track Apak. She joined DSA this
Speaker 2: past June, but did not pursue an endorsement, so is
Speaker 2: a relative newcomer to DSA as an organization. Do you
Speaker 2: want to play this clip from her back in November
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three, a month into Israel's attacks on Gaza,
Speaker 2: we are at ten thousand dead Palestinians.
Speaker 3: How man it will be enough?
Speaker 7: I also.
Speaker 2: One of the lawmaker's Republican Michelle Saltzman, just shouted out
Speaker 2: to all of them in the hearing. I'll continue the clip, Jesus.
Speaker 3: One of my colleagues just said all of them.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 3: One of my colleagues said all of them.
Speaker 2: One of my colleagues also stated that this is gonna
Speaker 2: dry up their fundraising if we vote on this resolution.
Speaker 3: I also want that like, that's what we've become in
Speaker 3: this st eight, That's what we've become.
Speaker 2: An estate well, we don't care about innocent babies that
Speaker 2: don't even get the opportunity to blow out their first birthday, Candell.
Speaker 3: So this was a ceasefire resolution just a month in
Speaker 3: two the war. Do you have the sense of like
Speaker 3: turnout versus like electoral Like I'm wondering, is this a
Speaker 3: like people who turn out for primaries tend to be
Speaker 3: like a more politically engaged and people who turn out
Speaker 3: for generals or is this a like this because it's
Speaker 3: she clearly has, like just looking at that speech, she
Speaker 3: has a genuine commitment what she's talking about, and I
Speaker 3: think people yes, appreciate that more than like you said,
Speaker 3: a resist lib hero.
Speaker 2: Definitely, and I mean certainly, I think in generals can
Speaker 2: attract a bigger portion of the electorate. Yeah, but there's
Speaker 2: there's a few things going on that created this this
Speaker 2: pretty pretty big difference invots, like over one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty thousand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's big and.
Speaker 2: Like in my mind, this relates to two of the
Speaker 2: elections last week in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The my Pillow primary,
Speaker 2: where Trump endorsed Mike Lindell lost the Republican governatorial primary
Speaker 2: to the state Speaker of the House and like this
Speaker 2: this is kind of like the idea that a national
Speaker 2: political celebrity can just like waltz into your state and
Speaker 2: gobble up a nomination. Both Lindell and Alexander Vinman, you know,
Speaker 2: come from like the Trump world, albeit on opposite side,
Speaker 2: but it's still part of like like you know, the
Speaker 2: Trumpian political circuit, and voters rejected both of them in
Speaker 2: favor of proven state lawmakers, you know, Juanio, a more
Speaker 2: like regular state level Republican, and Angie Nixon, who's like
Speaker 2: a community organizer with like deep connections to a lot
Speaker 2: of a lot of different communities in the state and
Speaker 2: specifically the working class black community. Now, the other interesting
Speaker 2: thing that this race kind of continues the conversation on
Speaker 2: relates to Francesca Hung's loss last week. As as I
Speaker 2: discussed last week, did not pay for any TV ads,
Speaker 2: and Nixon only spent sixty thousand on ads, was zero
Speaker 2: spent on broadcast or cable. Meanwhile, Vinman spent two point
Speaker 2: two million on ads. That's thirty six times as much
Speaker 2: as Nixon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Nixon.
Speaker 2: Still wants dumping money off a cliff. That's because she
Speaker 2: actually ran a real campaign, like on the ground and
Speaker 2: Vinman did not. He ran an incredibly lazy campaign. He
Speaker 2: really thought he could just like coast to the nomination
Speaker 2: based on his resist Live credentials, and you know, while
Speaker 2: that maybe helped in Palm Beach, it did not help
Speaker 2: him in the rest of the state, where just he
Speaker 2: got absolutely trounced by Nixon. Like if you look at
Speaker 2: like the county map, it's like whoa.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So come November, Nixon will face the incumbent sener their
Speaker 2: Ashley Moody, the former state ag who Ron de Santis
Speaker 2: appointed to fill Marco Rubio's Senate seat after he was
Speaker 2: tapped for Secretary of Stife. And like Rubio is, Rubio
Speaker 2: has had a strong hole in that seat for decades.
Speaker 2: So the hope for Florida Democrats is that Ashley Moody
Speaker 2: won't command as much loyalty at the ballot box as
Speaker 2: Rubio does, or as Rubio did. Yeah, and maybe and
Speaker 2: maybe maybe, like a critical one percent of the Republican
Speaker 2: vote thinks that she's another Nixon. Yeah, yeah, hopefully you
Speaker 2: never know, but like this could very likely be a
Speaker 2: much harder uphill battle than even you know, like the
Speaker 2: Texas Senate race was Hilario. In this recent election, there
Speaker 2: were around three hundred thousand fewer votes in the Democratic
Speaker 2: primary than the GOP primary. Like this is this is
Speaker 2: gonna be a very difficult race to win. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't want to, you know, understate how impressive this primary
Speaker 2: win like really is. And like I don't think anyone
Speaker 2: will false Nixon or her politics if she loses in
Speaker 2: the general.
Speaker 3: I mean someone will someone right a shitty like is
Speaker 3: this the end of the leftop ed right? They always
Speaker 3: do it does a massive They will, they will try.
Speaker 2: But like a lot of centrists do not expect Vinman
Speaker 2: to win if he wins the primaries.
Speaker 4: So like it's it's a Senate seat in Florida. It's
Speaker 4: like that's right, that's the thing.
Speaker 3: It's It's just I'm reflecting on the fact that like
Speaker 3: people have taken Hong's result and been like, oh, the
Speaker 3: progressive left is dead, and then they're still treating Tallarico
Speaker 3: like he's like the presumptive victor.
Speaker 1: Yes, and then they'll say yeah, but like yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think one thing we probably should take from Hong's
Speaker 1: election is that television ads cannot be disposed of so
Speaker 1: quickly yet at the general. Yeah, I mean it, I
Speaker 1: mean period like it. I think that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that definitely hurt her campaign is that they made
Speaker 1: a big choice not to do TV ads.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to write everything down to that, but yeah.
Speaker 2: That was certainly a factor in Wisconsin. Nixon's like ground
Speaker 2: game in Florida was able to overcome the massive deficit
Speaker 2: in spending and just not really many fun for TV ads.
Speaker 2: And I think yeah, because this is a Florida Senate
Speaker 2: see that Vindman was not expected to win into general
Speaker 2: and he was the presumptive nominee. But because this race
Speaker 2: will be so hard to win, it'll be harder to
Speaker 2: blame her or her politics specifically for losing. I think
Speaker 2: this race can also be a big opportunity to push
Speaker 2: the overtin window in Florida and I come November, it
Speaker 2: will be really interesting to see what the results of
Speaker 2: this election are because this is a super close race.
Speaker 2: Even if she still loses, hopefully she will not lose,
Speaker 2: but if this race even gets to be where it's
Speaker 2: like more competitive than what it's been for the past
Speaker 2: like ten fifteen years, I think that could be an
Speaker 2: interesting look at how much Trump is hurting Republicans in elections,
Speaker 2: like exactly how upset parts of his base are at
Speaker 2: the current state of things and to what degree that
Speaker 2: affects turnout. But also, on the other hand, if Nixon
Speaker 2: and her politics are able to form a new coalition
Speaker 2: and attract voters that might not usually vote for debtmocrats,
Speaker 2: might not usually vote for socialists, or might not vote
Speaker 2: at all. Because even just in this primary, her core
Speaker 2: voter base was very different than what's currently considered to
Speaker 2: be DSA's most reliable voters. Nixon did best in districts
Speaker 2: that were majority non college educated, and that's usually the
Speaker 2: reverse for a lot of DSA type candidates in other states.
Speaker 2: So she was getting out a slightly different voter base
Speaker 2: than what LSIID was getting out than what DSA candidates
Speaker 2: in New York have been getting out, especially in the primaries.
Speaker 2: So I think she is someone to watch and could
Speaker 2: alter what's seen as politically possible in Florida.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I want to say briefly also that there is
Speaker 4: a chance that you know, with how badly the Republicans
Speaker 4: are doing on generic ballots, I mean, like the good
Speaker 4: projections right now have them down seven points on just
Speaker 4: like a generic Democrat orus the publican ballot, like there
Speaker 4: is a small chance that we get a two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight style blowout she wins. Which it's not impossible
Speaker 4: in a way that it usually is. It would be historic, right,
Speaker 4: it would. Yeah, no, it's it's possible, just extremely unlikely.
Speaker 4: But like a I don't think it's likely, but it
Speaker 4: would be like a story, it's more likely than any
Speaker 4: of the times people have said that Democrats are going
Speaker 4: to take Texas. So I'll say about this like it's
Speaker 4: like actually technically possible. So while this is a big
Speaker 4: win for the left, statewide, DSA candidates did not fare
Speaker 4: as well in the recently redistricted US House races in Florida.
Speaker 4: Let's prazily talk about my boy, Oliver Larkin. Larkin was
Speaker 4: running for House District twenty five. That's Miami, Dodd, Palm
Speaker 4: Beach and Broward County, not exactly the friendliest waters for
Speaker 4: an anti Israel socialist. Larkin got sixteen two hundred and
Speaker 4: eighty four votes, while the incumbent House Rep. Jared Moscowitz
Speaker 4: won with twenty eight two hundred and ninety four votes.
Speaker 4: Larkin is DSA endorsed, and he ran a solid campaign
Speaker 4: with an impressive ground game. Over five hundred volunteers, forty
Speaker 4: thousand doors knocked seven hundred and fifty thousand calls. He
Speaker 4: campaigned with Angie Nixon. Also this past month, A Larkin
Speaker 4: has gone and this is a technical term, a beast
Speaker 4: mode in TV news interviews. Here's Larkin getting some pushback
Speaker 4: from a Fox News anchor on abolishing and prosecuting ice.
Speaker 10: What is the number that is fine with you? Is
Speaker 10: there is there a benchmark? Is it fine how many
Speaker 10: children can be raped? And it's fine if you're in
Speaker 10: relation to the immigration community.
Speaker 9: If we're going to talk about children being raped, then
Speaker 9: we need to hold this pedophile president Donald Trump accountable
Speaker 9: and all those that have been implicated by the Epstein
Speaker 9: fissales that the Department of Justice is still not leaking
Speaker 9: and they've sent a pack after Thomas Massey for having
Speaker 9: the temerity to accountable pedophiles that are in control of
Speaker 9: our government.
Speaker 3: Cue, oh, you appreciate your time very much.
Speaker 2: So beyond like attention grabbing moments like that, he's also
Speaker 2: very clearly articulated the details of his platform and defended
Speaker 2: it and dsay against bad faith attacks. He's talked about
Speaker 2: the need for a new past to citizenship and just
Speaker 2: how cost prohibitive it is for immigrants to maintain the
Speaker 2: documented status and Trump has made things even harder on
Speaker 2: purpose to manufacture a political crisis. On Foxy, argued very
Speaker 2: eloquently against providing Israel with so called defensive weapons, which
Speaker 2: he rejected as a categorical term. And he's gone toe
Speaker 2: to toe with Sean AKA Scott Hannity on tax reform
Speaker 2: earlier this week.
Speaker 3: On Local ten.
Speaker 2: This week in Florida, host Glenna Milberg abruptly cut off
Speaker 2: her interview with Larkin after he said that Israel has
Speaker 2: committed a genocide, which she claimed was quote unquote factually incorrect. Now.
Speaker 2: Also late last week, Lower Lumer and Democrat state Representative
Speaker 2: Michael Gottlieb tried to shut down a get out the
Speaker 2: vote rally for Larkin, Angie Nixon, and another DSA candidate,
Speaker 2: Elijah Manley, called chomp the oligarchy with a I want
Speaker 2: to say alligator or crocodile on front.
Speaker 3: Don't don't at me. It's going to be an alligator, right,
Speaker 3: whatever the ones are in Florida, alligator anything we have
Speaker 3: any indigenous crocodiles.
Speaker 2: Democrats stage Rep. Michael Gottlieb said the rally was quote
Speaker 2: unquote anti jew and told his constituents to not support
Speaker 2: the venue hosting the event. Laura Lumer led an online
Speaker 2: harassment campaign targeting quote jee Hottist Congresswoman Rashida Talib, who
Speaker 2: was slated to speak at the rally. Lumer said that
Speaker 2: Telib was quote bringing her band of jew haters to
Speaker 2: South Florida and said that Oliver Larkin quote unquote hates
Speaker 2: Jewish people and that he's tried to primary Jared Massowitz
Speaker 2: because he is Jewish. Now, the venue originally contracted for
Speaker 2: the rally canceled. They pulled out when the organizers wouldn't
Speaker 2: remove Rashida Talib as a speaker. The rally was rescheduled
Speaker 2: for August fourteenth, and the organizers secured a second venue,
Speaker 2: which also canceled the night before the chomp. The Oligarchy
Speaker 2: rally was supposed to take place next morning. The organizers
Speaker 2: found a third location, which was kept secret until hours
Speaker 2: before the rally, which was then also streamed live, and
Speaker 2: the owner of that third venue, which did ultimately host
Speaker 2: the event, said that within hours his phone was bombarded
Speaker 2: with like six hundred messages from people protesting the rally.
Speaker 2: This kind of shows, like this, the speed and scale
Speaker 2: of the harassment campaign led by Lumer and this state Democrat.
Speaker 2: So unfortunately, you know, Larkin did not win. I'm interested
Speaker 2: to see what he does next. I think it would
Speaker 2: be a mistake if he just completely disappears. Think he's
Speaker 2: a good communicator, whether you know something like DSA national
Speaker 2: wants to tap into that, or if he wants to
Speaker 2: work on some other campaigns like Angie Nixon's case campaign,
Speaker 2: which I think he's he's indicated he'll do. But but
Speaker 2: after the general be very interested to see what what
Speaker 2: he does in the future and to close Like at
Speaker 2: this point in like big cities, you know, in blue states,
Speaker 2: DSA are left socialist candidates can only really like run
Speaker 2: to win, like that's that's what you have to do.
Speaker 3: Now, there's no more of this like participation trophies. It's
Speaker 3: it's you have to you have to win.
Speaker 2: But it's it's also really important for DSA to expand
Speaker 2: their electoral efforts into red states and districts that are
Speaker 2: not solid blue and in that vein. I think what
Speaker 2: DSA has done in Florida. This primary reminds me of
Speaker 2: what nyc DSA was doing in New York like a
Speaker 2: decade ago, experimenting, building, organizing campaigns, running candidates. Even if
Speaker 2: there is a huge uphill battle, campaign volunteers get to
Speaker 2: you know, get experience, and you find your base of
Speaker 2: sport that can be built on in future races. And
Speaker 2: in that sense, I think what they were able to
Speaker 2: able to pull off, including in some very hostile districts,
Speaker 2: was was impressive. Now will will continue in some form
Speaker 2: with Angie Nixon running for Senate these next few months. Finally, finally,
Speaker 2: before we close, I should mention James fish Back, Enemy
Speaker 2: of the Pod, the Groyford candidate for governor, came in
Speaker 2: third place in the GOP gobernatorial primary. He was expected
Speaker 2: to come in second, so that that is interesting. But
Speaker 2: Jay Collins instead got second place with almost half a
Speaker 2: million votes. Oh, he got waxed Byron Donald's the expected
Speaker 2: winner one with eight hundred and ten thousand votes. Fishback
Speaker 2: got just less than two hundred thousand, which is way
Speaker 2: too many votes. Yeah, he should not be He should
Speaker 2: not be getting that number of votes.
Speaker 3: That is not great.
Speaker 2: His campaign was very tailored to a type of voter
Speaker 2: and also like places online and locations in the state
Speaker 2: that the other candidates were not tailoring for. So I
Speaker 2: don't want to like overstate the sort of impact fishbacks
Speaker 2: campaign because there was really no one else kind of
Speaker 2: going after that block, like especially late if Fishback was
Speaker 2: pivoting very hard into like anti data center stuff very
Speaker 2: late into the race to try to, you know, attract
Speaker 2: more voters. Really, so like he was, he was doing
Speaker 2: stuff that other Republicans just were not doing, and you know,
Speaker 2: using that sneak o Nick Fuentes asthma Goold endorsement, which
Speaker 2: which which got him more than one hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 3: Votes, which is not not great. Yeah, it is, it is.
Speaker 3: It is just over ten percent of the Republican vote.
Speaker 3: I think Garrison and I made an episode about fish Back,
Speaker 3: god knows how long ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know what he'll He'll he might just
Speaker 2: try to get some sort of like right wing, far
Speaker 2: right pundit job in the future.
Speaker 3: We'll see.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I want to. I want to also convey
Speaker 4: Sophie's message of fuck Byron Donald's this guy also sucks.
Speaker 4: But yeah, yeah, it's it's a Republican primary. They're all
Speaker 4: going to be like, you're you're in a race with
Speaker 4: the worst, second worst, and third worst person you've ever seen.
Speaker 2: So yeah, but yeah, that is that is Florida. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that is our our buy buy annual Florida.
Speaker 3: Check it. If you are in Florida or elsewhere, you
Speaker 3: can email us. You're seeing the email address cool Zone
Speaker 3: tips at Proton don't meet. Hey you want it to
Speaker 3: be encrypted? Sent it from noo the Proton address. Yeah,
Speaker 3: have fun with that, don't. It's still doing it with
Speaker 3: the fucking marketing emails. By the way, like every time
Speaker 3: I think I've blocked a you bastards. Unbelievable.
Speaker 4: Put a transgirl on your couch.
Speaker 3: We reported the news.
Speaker 10: We reported the news.
Speaker 7: It could happen here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 7: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 7: cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 7: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 7: You can now find sources where it could happen here
Speaker 7: listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.