Speaker 1: A media Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. Hey, everybody, this is
Speaker 1: it could happen here and I am Robert Evans, and
Speaker 1: initially this is supposed to be a slightly different episode.
Speaker 1: I have been pondering over the fact recently that I
Speaker 1: feel weirdly optimistic, particularly in the last couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: especially compared to a lot of the people that I
Speaker 1: know and spend time around. And I think it's because
Speaker 1: I've been interpreting some of the same pieces of news
Speaker 1: differently than they have, and because I've been coming across
Speaker 1: some different pieces of information than they have. And I
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of walk people through why I've been
Speaker 1: feeling so optimistic, and so I wrote something and I
Speaker 1: recorded it around Thursday of last week, and then over
Speaker 1: the weekend a gunman attack the White House Correspondence dinner,
Speaker 1: and actually, this hasn't really changed any of my overall feelings.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that this week, probably on ED, but
Speaker 1: I did make some alterations to the episode as a
Speaker 1: result of that, although I do think it reinforces my
Speaker 1: primary point, which is that the political era that we
Speaker 1: now find ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles. Extremophiles
Speaker 1: are organisms with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow
Speaker 1: them to survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about places like volcanic events at the very bottom of
Speaker 1: the ocean, or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered
Speaker 1: why it's called the dead sea, it's because for a
Speaker 1: very long time, people thought it was too salty to
Speaker 1: host any life. Modern research has disabused us of this notion.
Speaker 1: The dead sea hosts life. It's just weird life, because
Speaker 1: the dead Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile
Speaker 1: was coined in nineteen seventy four by R. D. McElroy
Speaker 1: to describe microorganisms scientists were increasingly finding in places that
Speaker 1: should have been devoid of life. The word is a
Speaker 1: hybrid term that literally means love of extremes, and while
Speaker 1: it is usually used in a scientific context to describe
Speaker 1: small organisms and very odd locations, some experts have over
Speaker 1: the years pointed out that the label might well apply
Speaker 1: to humans too. In the journal article all about Extremophiles JOHNS.
Speaker 1: Hopkins Universities, James A. Koker wrote that quote, despite common perception,
Speaker 1: most of Earth is what is often referred to as
Speaker 1: an extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these
Speaker 1: places home, it is simply that home. They have adapted
Speaker 1: to thrive in these environments, and in the process have
Speaker 1: evolved many unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level.
Speaker 1: In our human centric view of the planet Earth, we
Speaker 1: tend to think of ourselves as being in the Goldilock zone,
Speaker 1: not too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and
Speaker 1: filled with all the things next necessary for life to exist.
Speaker 1: To some extent, this is true. However, this view keeps
Speaker 1: us from acknowledging several basic facts, including that the Earth
Speaker 1: is mostly a cold place. Over ninety percent of its
Speaker 1: oceans are at or below five degrees celsius, and it
Speaker 1: has an average temperature of around fifteen degrees celsius, and
Speaker 1: several conditions we humans consider normal i e. Twenty percent
Speaker 1: oxygen in the air actually make us extremophiles from the
Speaker 1: point of view of other species.
Speaker 2: End quote.
Speaker 1: Now, I have a bad tendency to want to apply
Speaker 1: literal knowledge like this metaphorically to my understanding of politics.
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a sickness, but it also makes
Speaker 1: more sense sometimes than you'd expect. There's a tendency among
Speaker 1: many millennials and even Gen Z and Alpha kids too
Speaker 1: young to have known the nineties to look back on
Speaker 1: that decade as a sort of cultural goldilock zone, as
Speaker 1: if the brief period post Cold War and pre nine
Speaker 1: eleven was some sort of cultural peak for our species,
Speaker 1: and everything since has been a slow downhill slide. People
Speaker 1: have different reasons for this. Some of them blame nine
Speaker 1: to eleven. Some people will argue that we were in
Speaker 1: that sweet spot where the Internet existed and could tap
Speaker 1: you into cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't
Speaker 1: come along yet and ruined it all. You know, different
Speaker 1: people come up with different justifications for this, but this
Speaker 1: view keeps people from acknowledging some very basic facts about
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties, which is that they were full of
Speaker 1: genocides and Rwanda and Bosnia just named two, and repeated
Speaker 1: US military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe,
Speaker 1: some of which ended disastrously, as in Mogadishu. Our president
Speaker 1: for most of the nineties was a sex pest, and
Speaker 1: members of the far right staged a series of bloody
Speaker 1: terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic Park bombing.
Speaker 1: And while all this was happening, a new and more
Speaker 1: openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress, while hapless outmaneuver Democrats
Speaker 1: gawked in awe. The reality is that the nineties were
Speaker 1: a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just
Speaker 1: like every other period of human existence, and the extremity
Speaker 1: of the era helped birth a new conservative movement, one
Speaker 1: radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring
Speaker 1: us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today,
Speaker 1: those same neo conservatives seemed tame next to their modern descendants,
Speaker 1: the Maga movement, But in their own time, they were
Speaker 1: the craziest bastards out there. And this hits at a
Speaker 1: fundamental reality in American politics. If survival in extreme times
Speaker 1: requires extreme adaptations, then It's no wonder that for much
Speaker 1: of our lives, the extremists are the ones who have
Speaker 1: primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this, but Bill
Speaker 1: Clinton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting
Speaker 1: the era of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,
Speaker 1: just as Barack Obama was seen as the most extreme
Speaker 1: choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact,
Speaker 1: he was such an extreme choice that the Conservative movement
Speaker 1: had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the Maga
Speaker 1: Movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party and repeal
Speaker 1: the changes from the Obama years in power. I like
Speaker 1: thinking about this stuff because I find it interesting that
Speaker 1: one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics is
Speaker 1: this in extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive.
Speaker 1: We Homo sapiens, have been in the business of extreme
Speaker 1: adaptations for as long as we've existed.
Speaker 2: That's all.
Speaker 1: Central heating and air, vaccines, antibiotics, and the AR fifteen
Speaker 1: are adaptations to extreme environments and situations, many of them
Speaker 1: extreme environments and situations that we created for ourselves. The
Speaker 1: problem is our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive
Speaker 1: even more extreme circumstances, which in turn foster further adaptations,
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth until we invent the
Speaker 1: Internet and satellite guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not
Speaker 1: always good, but once you've found yourself thrown into an
Speaker 1: extreme environment, you can't just wish the weather was different.
Speaker 1: You've got to adapt. That's the bad news about our
Speaker 1: current political situation. The good news is that the pendulum
Speaker 1: has started to swing back our way. The extremism of
Speaker 1: the Trump era is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction,
Speaker 1: and you can see the first stirrings of that and
Speaker 1: the popularity of Zoron Mandani, or the fact that a
Speaker 1: former pillow of neo conservatism like Bill Crystal is currently
Speaker 1: advocating for the abolition of ice. We are in the
Speaker 1: process of deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics,
Speaker 1: which means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies
Speaker 1: and changes that are every bit as good as the
Speaker 1: ones that Trump administration has forced through our bad To
Speaker 1: do that, we're going to have to be brave and
Speaker 1: we're going to have to start getting our shit together now,
Speaker 1: because this window of opportunity won't last long. The way
Speaker 1: I see it. The GOP entered office this time around,
Speaker 1: intent on waging the political equivalent of a shock and
Speaker 1: awe campaign. They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of
Speaker 1: the doubt they might have had in an orgy of
Speaker 1: careless and brutal cuts to basic government functions carried out
Speaker 1: by the least sympathetic group of Groper's imaginable, one of
Speaker 1: whom was nicknamed big Balls. A fleury of state and
Speaker 1: local legislative pushes and criminal investigations aimed at hurting left
Speaker 1: wing activists and queer, particularly trans people have done tremendous damage,
Speaker 1: as have relentless ice raids on mostly non white Americans.
Speaker 1: It's been bad, and yet we're still here. I won't
Speaker 1: pretend we're in a good situation today, not at least
Speaker 1: in terms of what we'd like good to mean in
Speaker 1: the everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't
Speaker 1: survived the first sixteen months or so of the Second
Speaker 1: Trunk presidency. Fewer of us are going to make it
Speaker 1: to the end. But this regime came to power with
Speaker 1: the knowledge that their success or failure hinged on speed
Speaker 1: and violence of action. They had a limited window to
Speaker 1: make resistance impossible, and they missed it. You can see
Speaker 1: some evidence of this in our War of Choice against Iran.
Speaker 1: President Trump wanted a quick, brutal triumph that would look
Speaker 1: good on the evening news, so he told his military
Speaker 1: to bear down on Iran with all the speed and
Speaker 1: violence of action they could muster. That plan failed, and
Speaker 1: the reasons why are weirdly similar to how the Republican
Speaker 1: Party has overplayed their hand in our ongoing culture war.
Speaker 1: Back in Trump's first term, the DoD established the Algorithmic
Speaker 1: Warfare cross functional team nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of
Speaker 1: the project, as per Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was to
Speaker 1: automate the analysis of drone footage and other data humans
Speaker 1: previously would have gone over by hand, in order to
Speaker 1: speed up the rate at which targets were identified and
Speaker 1: struck in wartime. Project Maban from the Jump was a
Speaker 1: product of the worst kind of military thinking, How can
Speaker 1: we automate as much of our planning of warfare as possible.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of project you pursue when your
Speaker 1: finest military minds still believe that victory is as simple
Speaker 1: as killing or destroying a preset number of bad guys,
Speaker 1: causing them to give up. The goal was to create
Speaker 1: a system that could collate and synthesize huge quantities of
Speaker 1: data in order to allow one thousand targeting decisions per hour.
Speaker 1: Kevin Baker, writing for The Guardian, notes that this means
Speaker 1: quote three point six seconds per decision, or from the
Speaker 1: individual targeteer's perspective, one decision every seventy two seconds. Now,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about where this kind of thinking
Speaker 1: has led us in our conflict with Iran. But first,
Speaker 1: here's some ads we're back. Now. If you listen to
Speaker 1: the advocates of this kind of military build up that
Speaker 1: people who are really bullish on AI for military purposes
Speaker 1: talk and their podcasts and on their blogs, the reasoning
Speaker 1: behind why you need to be able to make a
Speaker 1: thousand targeting decisions per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed
Speaker 1: with the idea that a future war between the US
Speaker 1: and a peer or near peer adversary, most prominently China, right,
Speaker 1: that's what they're planning on now. The Chinese military is
Speaker 1: also heavily invested in AI. There was a major New
Speaker 1: York Times article earlier this month, in April of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six, titled Mutually Automated destruction the escalating global AI
Speaker 1: arms race.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from that.
Speaker 1: Now. China and Russia are experimenting with letting AI make
Speaker 1: battlefield decisions on its own. Two US officials said China
Speaker 1: is developing systems for dozens of autonomous drones to coordinate
Speaker 1: attacks without human thought will Russia is building Lancet drones
Speaker 1: that can circle the sky and autonomously pick targets, they said.
Speaker 1: Even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the
Speaker 1: intentions are clear. In twenty seventeen, mister Putin declared that
Speaker 1: whoever leads a AI will become the ruler of the world.
Speaker 1: Mister z said in twenty twenty four that the technology
Speaker 1: would be the main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January,
Speaker 1: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed all branches of the US
Speaker 1: military to adopt AI, saying they needed to accelerate like hell.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: My interpretation of what I've read from most of these
Speaker 1: guys is that they see future conflict as a massive
Speaker 1: but almost instantaneous chess game. Right, Whoever has the AI
Speaker 1: that can most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence,
Speaker 1: come up with target packages, and then strike those targets first, wins.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand
Speaker 1: strikes in an hour and they can only make eight hundred,
Speaker 1: then we'll destroy more of them and will win the war. Right,
Speaker 1: It all be decided right at the start. And this
Speaker 1: may well be how a shooting war between China and
Speaker 1: the US would proceed. But given that very few people
Speaker 1: in either country want that war to happen because it
Speaker 1: would kill us all, I think we might do best
Speaker 1: focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where
Speaker 1: this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure for at
Speaker 1: least the second time in my life. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, the United States invaded Iraq. After more than
Speaker 1: a year of build up, in years of intelligence gathering,
Speaker 1: our military planners put together a list of fifty high
Speaker 1: value targets. The idea was, if we could use our
Speaker 1: incredible super advanced spying equipment and our precision guided weapons
Speaker 1: to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq,
Speaker 1: we could hobble any response to the invasion. All fifty
Speaker 1: targets were struck, none of the people targeted were killed.
Speaker 1: Now that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just
Speaker 1: means we missed all the people we thought we were
Speaker 1: going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article, again,
Speaker 1: the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit fifty
Speaker 1: buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the
Speaker 1: wrong ones. Fast forward earlier this year, Administration orders the
Speaker 1: launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal
Speaker 1: of hyper advanced weaponry on the people and leaders of
Speaker 1: Iran alongside the Israeli Air Force. In the first two weeks,
Speaker 1: US forces hit six thousand targets picked with the help
Speaker 1: of Project Mavin. One of them was the Monob Girls
Speaker 1: Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty six and wounding ninety five. Now, Alex Karp,
Speaker 1: the CEO of pallanteers hyper advanced AI and a multi
Speaker 1: billion dollar network of satellites backed up by decades of
Speaker 1: intelligence gathering by the CIA, and the massade wasn't enough
Speaker 1: to drop us from striking a school that we knew
Speaker 1: contained none of our targets. We had data that the
Speaker 1: people we thought were there at one point were no
Speaker 1: longer there, and it was a school now. But some
Speaker 1: of the data Maven relied on was old and outdated.
Speaker 1: And these machines aren't capable of real judgment and the
Speaker 1: way we think of it. And because people trusted them
Speaker 1: so much, no one thought to check before ordering the strikes.
Speaker 1: This is a human error. This is not an AI error,
Speaker 1: but it illustrates a massive law in the fantasy that
Speaker 1: winning a war could be as easy as building a
Speaker 1: smarter machine. Got to be accurate, and it is important
Speaker 1: to note a lot of those six thousand targets were
Speaker 1: what we thought, and they were accurately struck and killed.
Speaker 1: In the opening salvel of the war, President Trump and
Speaker 1: his mouthpieces celebrated their successful assassination of Iron Supreme Leader,
Speaker 1: alongside many other prominent military and governmental officials. This seemed
Speaker 1: at first to be way more successful than the opening
Speaker 1: strikes against a Rock. They didn't get any of those
Speaker 1: fifty guys. We got a bunch of our initial targets
Speaker 1: in this first wave of strikes. Maybe we just didn't
Speaker 1: have the right technology when we invaded Rock. Maybe now
Speaker 1: we're doing it right, you know, finally we'll be able
Speaker 1: to win a war this way. However, that quickly proved untrue.
Speaker 1: All of those strikes put together were not enough to
Speaker 1: break Iran's will or its capacity to fight and fight
Speaker 1: back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself trapped in an
Speaker 1: expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding him advanced munitions
Speaker 1: and equipment while it crashes the global economy. The most
Speaker 1: recent ap the NARC poll, puts Trump's overall approval at
Speaker 1: thirty three percent, which is down five percent since just
Speaker 1: back in March. Only thirty two percent of Americans approve
Speaker 1: of his leadership on Iran. Because most of this country
Speaker 1: can still see a man shooting himself in the dick
Speaker 1: for what it is. Pete Hegsath is our most lethality
Speaker 1: obsessed Secretary of Defense and History, and in him we
Speaker 1: see the result of a long sickness first incubated during
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War, when embarrassed generals needed to spin their
Speaker 1: failure to make progress as a kind of victory, so
Speaker 1: they turned to bragging about how many fighters they had killed,
Speaker 1: inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants, and bragging
Speaker 1: about the tonnage of trucking that they destroyed based on
Speaker 1: wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this calamitous era.
Speaker 1: Informed students of military theory have seen doing body counts
Speaker 1: as the death knell of a military entity's ability to
Speaker 1: make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer to victory.
Speaker 1: But because the entire conservative project in this country is
Speaker 1: built on the thoughtless worship of military pat prowess in power,
Speaker 1: we've seen this kind of thinking trickle down to the
Speaker 1: sarey cadra of influencers who call themselves right wing intellectuals. Today,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh and Chris Ruffo
Speaker 1: who've built their reputations on picking targets to drum up
Speaker 1: mobs against and uses the basis of attack ads. These
Speaker 1: people have proven legitimately good at stirring up haate and
Speaker 1: forcing laws all over the country restricting things like drag
Speaker 1: shows or the use of chosen pronouns and government documents.
Speaker 1: All these people are by definition huge assholes, and so
Speaker 1: are their followers, and thus when those people get radicalized
Speaker 1: to take action in their communities, they make those communities worse.
Speaker 1: This pisses off their neighbors, which has resulted in significant
Speaker 1: backlash across the country. As an example, Moms for Liberty
Speaker 1: was formed in Florida on January first, twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: by Republican activists and former school board members who were
Speaker 1: outraged about pandemic safety protocols and schools. They became a
Speaker 1: vehicle for the parental rights movement, a nebulous and deeply
Speaker 1: toxic force in American political life. It sees the parent
Speaker 1: as a kind of absolute sovereign over the life and
Speaker 1: mind of their child. Any influence that might lead that
Speaker 1: child to become a different kind of person than the
Speaker 1: parent envisions must be pruned away. The group used the
Speaker 1: then fresh moral panic over critical race theory as a
Speaker 1: lever from which to force themselves into American life. In
Speaker 1: June of twenty twenty one, they started filing what would
Speaker 1: become a long series of criminal complaints against books available
Speaker 1: in specific school libraries across the nation. Schools started removing books,
Speaker 1: and Moms for liberty inspired candidates began winning school board
Speaker 1: elections around the country. It looked, for a little while
Speaker 1: like a popular wave of hysterical fear might yank America
Speaker 1: into a Fahrenheit four to fifty one style future, slightly
Speaker 1: ahead of schedule, but just a couple of years later,
Speaker 1: a funny thing happened, Moms for Liberty backed candidates started
Speaker 1: losing major elections, first a series of school board races
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Iowa. But
Speaker 1: even as the Biden administration kareemed towards a disastrous new
Speaker 1: election in twenty twenty four, one in which the far
Speaker 1: right seemed to have all the momentum, regular people kept
Speaker 1: rising up and organizing to protect their schools. One of
Speaker 1: the first was karen's Foboda, a mother of seven in
Speaker 1: Duchess County, New York. In twenty twenty three, she told
Speaker 1: NPR reporter Jim Zaroli, I looked into the local Facebook
Speaker 1: page of Moms for Liberty and just browsed through some
Speaker 1: of the social media of some of these individuals, and
Speaker 1: what I saw was very upsetting. As a mom of
Speaker 1: kids who were members of that community, it was very
Speaker 1: concerning to think that these people would be trying to
Speaker 1: get onto the school board, because what does that mean
Speaker 1: for my kids? So she started a group of her own,
Speaker 1: Defensive Democracy, which organized like minded parents in her community
Speaker 1: to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. It defeated
Speaker 1: an entire slate of Moms for Liberty backed candidates in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook
Speaker 1: page and weekly zoom calls. And the really remarkable thing
Speaker 1: is that even while the twenty twenty four election took
Speaker 1: over the national discourse and the Democratic Party completely shat
Speaker 1: the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts
Speaker 1: across the country to fight for their children's educations. In
Speaker 1: November of twenty twi, the Houston suburb of Cyprus, Texas,
Speaker 1: saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take
Speaker 1: the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance. This trend
Speaker 1: was repeated elsewhere that same month, per a political article
Speaker 1: by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez quote in Pennsylvania, Democrats
Speaker 1: slipped at least two dozen school board seats, per an
Speaker 1: ongoing tally from progressive recruitment group Pipeline Fund. The under
Speaker 1: the radar trend was enabled by voters increasing weariness with
Speaker 1: the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school
Speaker 1: board takeovers and generate hyper local interest in politics as
Speaker 1: the COVID nineteen pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans
Speaker 1: lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio and the
Speaker 1: national battleground of Pennsylvania the result of well funded campaigns
Speaker 1: orchestrated by local leaders. Now, one of my favorite details
Speaker 1: from that piece is a quote from one of the
Speaker 1: new school board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated, folks just
Speaker 1: wanted their school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy.
Speaker 1: Once the board was taken over by a superpartisan, extremist majority,
Speaker 1: folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now, I continue
Speaker 1: to be an advocate of the thought that Tim Walls
Speaker 1: might have made a more effective vice presidential candidate if
Speaker 1: he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks because
Speaker 1: they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of
Speaker 1: their fellow citizens and their naked slavering need to control
Speaker 1: their neighbors is upsetting, an unnatural.
Speaker 2: The way I see.
Speaker 1: It, we're in a time of incredible opportunity right now.
Speaker 1: The devil has played his hand and wound up slipping
Speaker 1: on a puddle of his own flop sweat along the way.
Speaker 1: The momentum is with anyone but these fucks, at least
Speaker 1: right now, which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump
Speaker 1: supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did
Speaker 1: the thing fascists off and do. He kept reaching until
Speaker 1: he reached for something that exceeded his grasp.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going to happen next in our
Speaker 1: absolutely unnecessary struggle with Iran. I think there's a non
Speaker 1: zero chance Trump tries to extricate our forces save for
Speaker 1: some token s is rule, won't say we abandon them,
Speaker 1: and tries to take out the Cuban government next. Falso possible,
Speaker 1: Wh'll escalate the violence against Iran in some massive, apocalyptic,
Speaker 1: hideous way. In either case, the human cost will be nightmare,
Speaker 1: But either action would just be the flailing of a
Speaker 1: busted gambler putting everything he has on a fantasy that
Speaker 1: Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't
Speaker 1: afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of
Speaker 1: the American people seems to suggest that most of us
Speaker 1: as a pretty low appetite for unnecessary wars. Outside of Florida,
Speaker 1: it's hard to find regular people who are scared of
Speaker 1: the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind
Speaker 1: of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd
Speaker 1: on its face. The further Trump reaches, the angrier people get.
Speaker 1: Fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses even
Speaker 1: more than their enthusiastic support. And many Americans have proven
Speaker 1: themselves unwilling to be complicit in most of what the
Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation and their friends want for this country. And
Speaker 1: that's a nice note to roll to ads on.
Speaker 2: We're back.
Speaker 1: If you want a direct example of how weak the
Speaker 1: cultural conservatives are right now, think back to the stunt
Speaker 1: President Trump pulled with door dasherler in April. He ordered
Speaker 1: several bags and had them delivered by a dasher who
Speaker 1: was there to get photographed praising the president's no tax
Speaker 1: on tips policy. While they were standing outside the Oval office,
Speaker 1: Trump asked the dasher if they thought trans women should
Speaker 1: be allowed to compete in women's sports. And the dasher
Speaker 1: in question was fifty eight year old Sharon Simmons, who
Speaker 1: was a I Mean, it's been widely reported, is a
Speaker 1: Republican activist. She'd previously spoken out in favor of the
Speaker 1: no tax on tips policy at the House Ways and
Speaker 1: Means Committee field hearing, and even when she was under
Speaker 1: the gun next to the President, Simmons wasn't willing to
Speaker 1: agree with him on the weird anti trans stuff. She replied,
Speaker 1: I don't really have an opinion on that, and I'm
Speaker 1: not here to call her a hero for that.
Speaker 2: She's not.
Speaker 1: But it shows a crack in the rhetorical wall these
Speaker 1: people have built for themselves. A Republican can't just support
Speaker 1: low taxes. Now they have to endorse a whole raft
Speaker 1: of psychotic vengeance politics and anti scientific views that are
Speaker 1: deeply alienating to anyone who has a chance of being
Speaker 1: called normalcushion of life after Trump nowadays has to include
Speaker 1: an acknowledgment of the big, lurking question of our age
Speaker 1: what if he won't give up power? And that's a
Speaker 1: bigger question than the just Trump. A large number of
Speaker 1: government officials, of elected leaders, military officers, and law enforcement
Speaker 1: officers have implicated themselves in the crimes and what we
Speaker 1: might call the oughta be crimes of this administration. It's
Speaker 1: not unreasonable to ask what if they won't leave power
Speaker 1: without a fight? And I don't have a comprehensive answer
Speaker 1: for you that I feel comfortable putting in the last
Speaker 1: couple of pages of a podcast script, but I will
Speaker 1: point out that just In the last month. As I
Speaker 1: write this, Victor Orbon and his entire political movement faced
Speaker 1: sweeping defeat at the polls. Orbon had been previously referred
Speaker 1: to as a quasi dictatorial figure. He was the leader
Speaker 1: of the Hungarian government, and he had led a massive
Speaker 1: right wing crack down the detacked schools that attacked the
Speaker 1: LGBT movement, and that became a major funder for much
Speaker 1: of our own right wing movement. It's come out that
Speaker 1: the Orbon government was sending money helping to fund Sea Pack.
Speaker 1: They were sending money to specific right wing influencers like
Speaker 1: Rod Dreyer. And despite the fact that Orbon was the
Speaker 1: guy that people like Tucker Carlson a couple years ago
Speaker 1: was saying, this is the future of American politics, Orbanism
Speaker 1: is what we want. Despite that fact, when they lost
Speaker 1: an election, he and his cronies back down without a fight. Now,
Speaker 1: ultimately they did this because they still think they're bulletproof.
Speaker 2: Right, We've got enough people in.
Speaker 1: The government that we can stop Peter Magyar, the new guy,
Speaker 1: from doing any damage to us right and thus temporarily
Speaker 1: leaving power is an acceptable sacrifice because that lets us
Speaker 1: avoid a civil war and the rest of the EU
Speaker 1: who won't look kindly on that. I'm sure that's a
Speaker 1: lot of their thinking. And obviously the US is in
Speaker 1: a very different position geopolitically. But the rapidity with which
Speaker 1: some former Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Green and Alex
Speaker 1: Jones and Tucker Carlson have abandoned MAGA suggests one thing.
Speaker 1: They think it's more personally profitable for them to not
Speaker 1: be seen standing next to the president or the MAGA
Speaker 1: movement right now. And here's more good news. Remember how
Speaker 1: basically every social network is now owned by an openly evil,
Speaker 1: right wing billionaire.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: Americans have responded to this by discarding social media and
Speaker 1: ever growing numbers. This has been about one of the
Speaker 1: most consequential shifts of the last few years, and just
Speaker 1: this week, University of Amsterdam professor Peter Tornberg published a
Speaker 1: study on shifts in US social media use from twenty
Speaker 1: twenty to twenty twenty four. Quote online platform reached aclinent,
Speaker 1: driven by growth in the share of Americans, especially the
Speaker 1: youngest and oldest cohorts who report using no social media.
Speaker 1: Visiting and posting activity on Twitter, slash x, and Facebook
Speaker 1: have fallen by nearly fifty percent since twenty twenty, with
Speaker 1: the decline on Twitter x driven primarily by reduced participation
Speaker 1: among democratic users. Now, this is broadly speaking a good
Speaker 1: thing for the mental health of Americans overall and for
Speaker 1: the future of our body politic but the Americans who
Speaker 1: remain in social media aren't all doing so hot. Over
Speaker 1: the same time period, traffic on Twitter and Facebook grew
Speaker 1: markedly more right wing as both sites shrank. In his paper,
Speaker 1: Tornberg warns as casual users disengaged while polarized partisans remained vocal,
Speaker 1: online discourse comes narrower and more ideologically extreme, or in
Speaker 1: other words, as the algorithms that govern what gets seen
Speaker 1: on these shrinking social media sites reward more extreme content.
Speaker 1: Less extreme users leave, and the ones who succeed and
Speaker 1: become more widely shared are the most extreme. It's, you know,
Speaker 1: another extremeophile kind of situation. Part of why the people
Speaker 1: near Trump all believe they're winning is they live in
Speaker 1: these same Internet fever swamps, and they've gotten used to
Speaker 1: the Internet mattering a lot more than.
Speaker 2: It does right now.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to suggest that what happens online is
Speaker 1: an important but that importance has been softened by the
Speaker 1: sheer deluge of AI, slop, spam, and weird right wing
Speaker 1: propaganda that we've been forcibly drowned in for years. Less
Speaker 1: people are using these things than they used to, which
Speaker 1: means their reach has declined because people find them off
Speaker 1: putting and gross. The data shows that folks, particularly over
Speaker 1: sixty five and under twenty four, are increasingly fed up
Speaker 1: with not just social media, but the whole state of
Speaker 1: affairs we've been locked in politically. In the recent Virginia
Speaker 1: governor's Racemocrat Abigail Spanberger won by a comfortable margin. Republicans
Speaker 1: devoted a huge amount of their budget against her to
Speaker 1: anti trans attack ads, writing high off their inaccurate belief
Speaker 1: that anti trans propaganda had one trump the reelection in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, but only four percent of voters in
Speaker 1: that election listed transgender policies as a top issue. Now,
Speaker 1: that alone might just point to the overwhelming impulse towards
Speaker 1: centrism shared by much of the American middle class. People
Speaker 1: don't like to stand out, particularly as a political radical.
Speaker 1: But a year after Spanberger's election, a majority of Virginia
Speaker 1: voters approved a radical redistricting measure. This was entirely framed
Speaker 1: as a response to the Republican party fighting for their
Speaker 1: right to redistrict several states in their favor. The usual
Speaker 1: chorus of voices piped up to say, Oh, I don't know, guys,
Speaker 1: we shouldn't do the same thing they keep doing in
Speaker 1: order to defend ourselves. That doesn't seem fair. And this time,
Speaker 1: thank goodness, most people ignored them. The controversial measure outperformed
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris by eight points. And yes, the federal judge
Speaker 1: did immediately rule the measure unconstitutional, but you know how
Speaker 1: these things go. We're off to a series of court
Speaker 1: battles now, and however those end up. Two useful things
Speaker 1: have been accomplished. The liberal majority of a state has
Speaker 1: banded together to fight the Republicans on their own terms,
Speaker 1: and a clear message has been sent to those same
Speaker 1: people that Republicans benefit from a different set of laws
Speaker 1: than democrats. Now, any anarchist or left as political organizer
Speaker 1: you've ever known would have told you the right wing
Speaker 1: always benefits from an interpretation of the law that she
Speaker 1: shucks seems to deny their opponents the right to do
Speaker 1: the same things in self defense. It's bad that things
Speaker 1: work this way, But good for rank and file liberals
Speaker 1: to be reminded of that reality. If it weren't, the
Speaker 1: current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn't be rallying so
Speaker 1: hard against this measure. The same day I wrote all
Speaker 1: of this, the Washington Post published an opinion column by
Speaker 1: Theodore Johnson titled Why Virginia went back on its word.
Speaker 1: It opens with a particularly idiotic paragraph. Partisanship died its
Speaker 1: best impression of democracy in Virginia. On Tuesday, voters approved
Speaker 1: a referendum permitting the state's congressional districts to be redrawn
Speaker 1: to help Democrats win four additional seats. It's retaliation to
Speaker 1: recent redistricting by Texas to hand Republicans five more seats.
Speaker 1: At the best of President Donald Trump. It's a red
Speaker 1: versus Blue tit for tat over who can jerrymander more efficiently?
Speaker 1: A necessary evil, the parties say, to protect democracy. It's
Speaker 1: actually not necessarily I mean, not that it's a necessary evil.
Speaker 1: The parties say. It's that one party was already doing
Speaker 1: this for years. The Republicans and you didn't speak up
Speaker 1: the Washington Posts. You know, this guy didn't write the
Speaker 1: same column when this shit's been happening in other states.
Speaker 1: He only does it when Democrats do it in Virginia, right,
Speaker 1: And I also might point out to a majority of
Speaker 1: voters approving a measure is democracy. You know, if your
Speaker 1: only concern is the overall health of democracy, Redistricting that
Speaker 1: favors democrats really corrects a structural imbalance in our political
Speaker 1: system that favors loosely populated rural areas with an unfair
Speaker 1: proportion of political power and marginalizes the greater number of
Speaker 1: citizens who live in urban areas and tend to vote Democrat. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there are other good reasons to see hope for a
Speaker 1: fierce swing in American politics, not merely back to the middle,
Speaker 1: but far to the left. Simply as a matter of
Speaker 1: practical necessity, the Republicans have spent their time and power
Speaker 1: gutting the Parks Department, the Post Office, the VA, the FAA,
Speaker 1: and every other useful part of our state structure. And
Speaker 1: this is a big part of what's radicalized people, because
Speaker 1: they've very quickly come to notice that things are missing
Speaker 1: and shit is not working right. For decades, the government
Speaker 1: has been the enemy to millions of Americans who went
Speaker 1: out in the world and relied on government services every
Speaker 1: day of their lives, and yes, that's irritating and unfair,
Speaker 1: and no, we don't have time to fix that up
Speaker 1: right now. What we can do is use the fact
Speaker 1: that the Republicans broke all these systems to point out
Speaker 1: to people, actually, you don't hate it when the government
Speaker 1: does stuff, You just hate the way Republicans run the government.
Speaker 1: And the fact that the Democrats have usually been too
Speaker 1: scared to push for policies as extreme as they need to.
Speaker 1: Right this is an opportunity to convince a lot of people,
Speaker 1: oh shit, paying taxes to support a vibrant civil society
Speaker 1: with the extensive and functional infrastructure is a lot better
Speaker 1: than letting big balls de leete half of civil service,
Speaker 1: right like. That's I think the opportunity we have right now,
Speaker 1: and pushing that basic line on as many Americans as
Speaker 1: possible in the next two years is I think one
Speaker 1: of the most important things we can do at the moment.
Speaker 1: Along with that, we need to keep building support for
Speaker 1: enforcement of consequences against the cadra of billionaires and their
Speaker 1: lackeys who have been robbing our shared heritage blind this
Speaker 1: whole while. If I had my way about it, I'd
Speaker 1: point out to people that there are an awful lot
Speaker 1: of billionaires who we knew colluded to take over the
Speaker 1: federal government put something like Elon Musk's doge in place.
Speaker 1: You can just see that in some of the texts
Speaker 1: between Mark Zuckerbergeting and Elon Musk. These people are enemies
Speaker 1: of the state with an awful lot of money that
Speaker 1: we could confiscate to do things like replace the books
Speaker 1: Moms for Liberty tore out of public libraries. Now, we
Speaker 1: also need to see consequences for the criminals who have
Speaker 1: weaponized the organs of the state to fight their war
Speaker 1: against transgender Americans. This is an issue you can, in fact,
Speaker 1: get centrist voters to support. The average swing voter may
Speaker 1: not be particularly woke on gender theory, but they don't
Speaker 1: like seeing the government bully people who are just trying
Speaker 1: to get by. The widespread suffering created by the MAGA
Speaker 1: movement also creates potential for widespread solidarity between its victims.
Speaker 1: If the midterms go badly for the GOP and the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight elections go even worse, the USA's new
Speaker 1: elected officials and surviving citizens will find themselves in the
Speaker 1: same situations. The man who just unseated Victor Orbon and
Speaker 1: his supporters, we all learned how temporary a victory can be.
Speaker 1: After twenty twenty four, I've seen more than a few
Speaker 1: comments online by liberals who decided Orbon's defeat was a
Speaker 1: good time to attack a straw man caricature of a leftist,
Speaker 1: and these posts were generally laughing at this idea that
Speaker 1: a lot of people on the left express that electoralism
Speaker 1: can't defeat fascism. Now, I do share a frustration with
Speaker 1: the blanket rejection of electoral politics that some people on
Speaker 1: the left champion, but every online and real life lefty
Speaker 1: that I know was thrilled to see Orbonde get the boot. However,
Speaker 1: they all did share a fear us. This one fear
Speaker 1: that I've seen in common with every analyst and expert
Speaker 1: on Hungarian politics that I've read, which is winning the
Speaker 1: election isn't going to be enough for Magyar Orbon is
Speaker 1: an extremist, someone who took power because things were extremely
Speaker 1: shitty in Hungary and voters got angry enough to vote
Speaker 1: for a guy who promised to burn things down. They
Speaker 1: did come to regret that, but things are still extremely
Speaker 1: bad in Hungary. Joe Biden was a moderate who tried
Speaker 1: to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His promise
Speaker 1: was that he would bring things back to the normal
Speaker 1: of the Obama era. He failed to do that because
Speaker 1: it's impossible, and his failure opened up the way for
Speaker 1: Trump two point zero. If we don't want to repeat
Speaker 1: that cycle, the failures and ultimate collapse of the MAGA
Speaker 1: movement have to be met with new strategies, new tactics,
Speaker 1: and new politics as we seek to fill the void
Speaker 1: that they're going to leave behind. I wrote and recorded
Speaker 1: the first draft of this piece, as I said earlier,
Speaker 1: just a few days before, a gunman stormed into the
Speaker 1: Correspondence dinner. His manifesto has made it clear that he
Speaker 1: wanted to arm the President and members of his cabinet.
Speaker 1: Within hours, his social media accounts were archived and his
Speaker 1: life was put under a microscope, as it always happens
Speaker 1: with gunmen these days. All of this revealed a liberal man,
Speaker 1: one who had previously expressed very common centrist opinions, including
Speaker 1: a dislike of firearms. I've seen this used by people
Speaker 1: to justify a conspiratorial narrative that immediately followed the attack.
Speaker 1: This guy is a perfect patsy. Obviously they cooked this
Speaker 1: up in a lab as an excuse to crack down
Speaker 1: on Democrats. I don't believe that, and here is not
Speaker 1: a place for an argument as to why.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that, I'm sure later this week. What
Speaker 1: is interesting to me is that before any of this happened,
Speaker 1: I had been planning to revise the ending of this
Speaker 1: episode by commenting on an article that came out in
Speaker 1: April of twenty twenty five. It's published by Oxios and
Speaker 1: the title was Democrats told to get shot for the
Speaker 1: anti Trump resistance. Here's a quote from that article. At
Speaker 1: town halls in their districts and in one on one
Speaker 1: meetings with constituents and activists, Democratic members of Congress are
Speaker 1: facing and growing thrum of demands to break the rules,
Speaker 1: fight dirty, and not be afraid to get hurt. One
Speaker 1: of the lawmakers that they talked to for that article
Speaker 1: related a conversation that he'd had in a meeting with
Speaker 1: a constituent.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: I actually said in a meeting, when they light a fire,
Speaker 1: my thought is grab an extinguisher. And someone at the
Speaker 1: table said, have you tried gasoline? So many regular Liberals
Speaker 1: are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today because they know
Speaker 1: on some level that that's the only way you survive
Speaker 1: in an extreme environment. We see this in the thousands
Speaker 1: of normies in Minneapolis who have been willing and eager
Speaker 1: to confront armed federal agents in bathrobes and risk their
Speaker 1: own life and limb to protect their neighbors from ice.
Speaker 1: And we've also seen a very dark reflection of that
Speaker 1: in the actions of that gunman last weekend. Now, the
Speaker 1: fact that an educated and informed thirty one year old
Speaker 1: man decided to buy a firearm that he hated and
Speaker 1: attack the president represents many failures. One of them is
Speaker 1: a failure of the Democratic Party and the Liberal project
Speaker 1: to provide him with anything that felt like a useful
Speaker 1: outlet for his rage and hopelessness. People start talking and
Speaker 1: acting like this guy was acting, you can either throw
Speaker 1: your hands up and back away, or you can try
Speaker 1: like hell to present them with a counter offer. In
Speaker 1: this case, I mean a set of policies, activist campaigns,
Speaker 1: and organized actions to make this country a less horrific place.
Speaker 1: The victory and wild popularity of Zoran Mamdani is proof
Speaker 1: that you can, in fact do this even in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six. The widespread support for formerly extreme positions like
Speaker 1: abolishing ice, taxing billionaires, radically redistricting states, halting the construction
Speaker 1: of data centers, and expanding and packing the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: are more than enough evidence to show that people will
Speaker 1: get in line to back a candidate and a party
Speaker 1: who promises radical change. Moreover, everything I've seen lately suggests
Speaker 1: that people are starving for a movement like this, Hungry
Speaker 1: for their own candidate who feels like Mamdanni, hungry more
Speaker 1: than anything to feel hopeful again. When Oregon Senator Ron
Speaker 1: Whiten posted see you at Nuremberg two point zero after
Speaker 1: Christy Nome got fired, I watched a coalition of left
Speaker 1: wing radicals and centrist dims who never came together over
Speaker 1: anything else, express wild glee at the very thought we
Speaker 1: can do this. We have the tools, and we have
Speaker 1: the opportunity. It's going to take a big old step
Speaker 1: into the unknown, but that's our only option besides waiting
Speaker 1: until we get another chance to look through the social
Speaker 1: media ar types of a gunman.
Speaker 4: So by the time you hear this, the situation may
Speaker 4: have evolved in any number of directions. I'm speaking in
Speaker 4: the immediate week of the United States and Israel's brutal
Speaker 4: invasion of Iran. Thus far, over a thousand have been killed,
Speaker 4: including over one hundred school children and the Supreme leader
Speaker 4: of Iran, Ayatolda Ali Kameni. In response to this American
Speaker 4: is really aggression, Iran has retaliated by targeting both American
Speaker 4: bases and civilian and energy infrastructure in the neighboring countries
Speaker 4: that have facilitated American presence in the region. With the
Speaker 4: strategically and economically critical straight off home moods in jeopardy,
Speaker 4: with France, the UK, and Germany aka the usual suspects
Speaker 4: indicating potential involvement, and with the potential Russian and Chinese
Speaker 4: involvement also being floated in some circles, it seems to
Speaker 4: me that without any formal announcement, the war on the
Speaker 4: world has escalated potentially to a point of no return. Hello,
Speaker 4: and welcome to it grappen Here. I'm andrews Age andrewism
Speaker 4: on YouTube, and I'm joined again by It's James Hi,
Speaker 4: and how are you doing as well as I can be?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's about the best we can hope for these days.
Speaker 2: Isn't it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And in a time like this, I want to
Speaker 4: take a look back at history, particularly how past US
Speaker 4: interventions have left devastation in their week. Today I wanted
Speaker 4: to look at the fate of Libya, a country still
Speaker 4: dealing with his similar intentions following the end of the
Speaker 4: post intervention civil War. So I suppose we should begin
Speaker 4: in mid February in twenty eleven, and the Arab of
Speaker 4: Spring was sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Among
Speaker 4: the countries caught up in the fuva against the prevailing
Speaker 4: states was Libya, a North African state ruled for the
Speaker 4: previous forty two years by the Colonel Mumar al Gaddafi's government.
Speaker 4: Masses had taken to the streets across the country, starting
Speaker 4: in Benghazi. The government had some successes in putting down
Speaker 4: the revolt, killing hundreds of rebels and demonstrators alike, and
Speaker 4: some failures as the masses managed to hold position. The
Speaker 4: people had many motivations Spanish Islamist democratic SI militant to tribal,
Speaker 4: to just disaffected against a government intent on its continued survival. Revolutions, uprisings, protests, revolts.
Speaker 4: They tend to messy your fears. I'm sure James, you're
Speaker 4: well away of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's really easy of like outside observers
Speaker 2: or when we're looking back at history to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: this revolution was an Islamist revolution, this was a Marxist
Speaker 2: learning this revolution, this one was an anarchist revolution. But
Speaker 2: every revolution that I have been at that I have
Speaker 2: witnessed happening, it's an everything revolution when it starts and
Speaker 2: it later becomes a something revolution. But especially in the
Speaker 2: Arab Spring, right like in that time, it was just
Speaker 2: like we've had enough of being under the boot of
Speaker 2: these regimes and it was extraordinarily heterodox, and that was
Speaker 2: quite beautiful in the early days.
Speaker 4: Exactly exactly. The heterodox nature of revolutions is really what
Speaker 4: I want to drill here, because I think it's it's
Speaker 4: very easy for people to caricaturize and sleep a broad
Speaker 4: brush and it's the t or this is and it
Speaker 4: gets to be around people are saying, oh, it's only monarchists,
Speaker 4: it's monarchists and Zionists going out in the streets when
Speaker 4: they will protesting when the situation on the ground is
Speaker 4: always more complex than that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe I'll just take a second to address the
Speaker 2: annoying campus tendency. I understand that every time the United
Speaker 2: States ranged down death on some part of the world,
Speaker 2: it's terrible, right, it's sad, as you just said, Andrew.
Speaker 2: In Iran, we've seen a girls' school bombed, not once
Speaker 2: but twice, it seems, right, like what they call a
Speaker 2: double tack attack. That doesn't mean that your response has
Speaker 2: to be to support the other people who are killing
Speaker 2: those same civilians in that same place. It is possible
Speaker 2: for two things to be bad, and like in Iran, Yeah,
Speaker 2: there is a monarchist opposition. It sucks. I spoke just
Speaker 2: this morning to a Kurdish group which is opposing the
Speaker 2: regime in Iran, and they had nothing but bad things
Speaker 2: to say about the monarchists. Right, they said, this is
Speaker 2: the PAK write the coast down Freedom Party I'm quoting here.
Speaker 2: They do not have a foothold in society to actually
Speaker 2: achieve anything. The lies and delusions of a group of
Speaker 2: people sitting in nightclubs cannot make any real impact. That
Speaker 2: You're free to use that one next time someone tells
Speaker 2: you all the opposition in around its monarchist, it's nonsense.
Speaker 4: Exactly, I mean, just on its face, it's obviously nonsense.
Speaker 4: This notion that these people are high minds. It's hilarious
Speaker 4: as notion that you see popping up again and again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very orientalist.
Speaker 4: Yeah, anytime people step outside and they have something that
Speaker 4: they're upset about, they just get labeled with this one
Speaker 4: broad sweeping ideological monarcha, whether they subscribe to it or not. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And even within the ideological monikers, there's always a lot
Speaker 4: of nuance and how people understand those ideologies. You know,
Speaker 4: no to Islamists are necessarily not two monarchists ivan a
Speaker 4: necessarily alike, and those are both ideologies that I absolutely abhor,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I don't understand how you can be a
Speaker 2: leftist and spend your life like as such and then
Speaker 2: also think that in other parts of the world people
Speaker 2: don't want the same things like I believe it is
Speaker 2: inherently human, yeah, to want dignity and respect and the
Speaker 2: same for others, and to want our communities to govern themselves.
Speaker 2: And I don't believe that it's any less human if
Speaker 2: you live in North Africa or the Middle East, or
Speaker 2: South Africa, or an island in the Caribbean or an
Speaker 2: island in a Pacific like I believe it comes from
Speaker 2: our human nature, and so it strikes me as therefore
Speaker 2: obvious that there cannot be a country where people's human
Speaker 2: nature is fundamentally distinct and they're all just like knee
Speaker 2: jerk monarchists. I wouldn't see the world the way I
Speaker 2: see it if I was able to believe that. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, these movements, they're always composed by the choices and
Speaker 4: actions of sometimes millions of people, each with their own motivations.
Speaker 4: And now it's easy, particularly in retrospect, to pick particular
Speaker 4: leaders or organizations as representative of them all. That doesn't
Speaker 4: make it so. One of the things that defined the
Speaker 4: Art of Spring, as you mentioned it, was its leaderless nature.
Speaker 4: You had new liberals, you had monarchists, you had socialists,
Speaker 4: you had most of all, I would say, people without
Speaker 4: any ideological commitments at all. The majority of the human
Speaker 4: population is not ideologically committed one way or the other.
Speaker 4: Most people are just trying to live their lives and
Speaker 4: meet their basic needs, and they're submerged in society that
Speaker 4: lends them towards a particular inclination. But that's not set
Speaker 4: in stone. Most people in the Arab of Spring likely
Speaker 4: sought just the end of whatever it was they were
Speaker 4: suffering under before. And of course in these kind of incidents,
Speaker 4: geopolitical actors will choose to back particular factions, lend them
Speaker 4: creedoms and prominence according to their geopolitical interests, but don't
Speaker 4: give them undue credit. You know, during the Cool War,
Speaker 4: for example, the US would have backed rebellions they believe
Speaker 4: benefit them, and vice booths of the USSR backed rebellions
Speaker 4: they thought would benefit them. And even today, the US
Speaker 4: is claimant to care about freedom but has continued to
Speaker 4: work with the Saudis, who infamously invaded Bahrain to crush
Speaker 4: the Arab spring that occurred there. At the time, France's
Speaker 4: love for democracy didn't exactly match their offer to aid
Speaker 4: Algeria and Tunisia in putting down their own Arab springs. Now,
Speaker 4: as I've been saying quite often pointing out hypocrisy, it's
Speaker 4: kind of a baby's first geopistical analysis, right, none of
Speaker 4: these governments have any consistent values beyond their own interests.
Speaker 4: But I think it's important to make this kind of
Speaker 4: heterodoxy in movements clear to contextualize what happened next. There's
Speaker 4: another notion that the US intervention is entering these countries
Speaker 4: during these conflicts ahold humanitarian and aims to liberate the
Speaker 4: women or to liberate minorities in that region. The United States,
Speaker 4: like all the cover months, is opportunistic right. It is
Speaker 4: taking advantage of often genuine struggles by people to serve
Speaker 4: its own situation or goals without a care for what
Speaker 4: happens those people, either openly intervene in or covidly intervening.
Speaker 4: The most obvious recent example is with the goods in Syria.
Speaker 4: At the time, they were convenient to the United States
Speaker 4: interests until they weren't and they were abandoned. And this
Speaker 4: is especially the case when resources like oil come into
Speaker 4: the picture, and Libya is extremely oil rich. So tragically,
Speaker 4: the West saw this uprising in Libya as an opportunity.
Speaker 4: On a timeline and Encyclopedia Britannica. On the nineteenth of
Speaker 4: March twenty eleven, Libya was attacked by the combined forces
Speaker 4: of the United States, the UK, and France. These countries
Speaker 4: now condemned Kadafi as an oppressor of the civilians they
Speaker 4: were swooping in to say, though for years before the
Speaker 4: UK and France were selling in weapons they, alongside the
Speaker 4: Katari and Saudi allies, took advantage of the protests to
Speaker 4: assert their military might. This move was authorized by the
Speaker 4: UN Resolution nineteen seventy three, and NATO would soon take
Speaker 4: command of the operation. While claiming to protect civilians under
Speaker 4: a responsibility to protect doctrine, they bombed them. An allegedly
Speaker 4: humanitarian intervention led to the deaths of tens of thousands
Speaker 4: of a national population of just over six million. Key
Speaker 4: infrastructure was devastated by the Natal Woman campaign and by
Speaker 4: the struggles between the government and the now armed rebels
Speaker 4: of the National Transitional Council or NTC. A quick by
Speaker 4: the way, the NTC appointed themselves as the leaders of
Speaker 4: the movement, and despite the struggle being kickstarted by mostly
Speaker 4: working and middle class militants, often of an Islamic orientation,
Speaker 4: the NTC was composed mainly of regime defectors, businessmen and
Speaker 4: exiles who had a broadly pro Western, conservative and free
Speaker 4: market stance. Some of the elements in Gaddafi's government and
Speaker 4: military had defected to the rebels and equipped those previously
Speaker 4: unarmed protesters with firepower, and so up to now we
Speaker 4: only have estimates regarding the civilian death doll infrastructural devastation,
Speaker 4: and arbitrary detentions, disappearances and kidnappings carried out by both
Speaker 4: Progadafi and anti Gaddafi forces, not to mention the Liberate
Speaker 4: targeting of black Libyans and Sub Saharan African migrants by
Speaker 4: rebel forces that took place during and after the twenty
Speaker 4: eleven war, with the claim that they were Gaddaffi's hired mercenaries.
Speaker 4: Many of those Africans attempts to escape were met with
Speaker 4: callous disregard by Europe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, callous disregarded. I mean, there are no words strong
Speaker 2: enough to express the way I feel about the way
Speaker 2: the European Union has treated migrants in Liberated is absolutely
Speaker 2: disgusting and continues to be despicable. Yeah. Have you read
Speaker 2: Sally Hayden's book about this?
Speaker 4: No, I haven't.
Speaker 2: It's called My Fourth Time We Drowned. Very good book,
Speaker 2: difficult read, I would say, very much. It's some of
Speaker 2: the type of reporting that I try and do myself
Speaker 2: on migration, and that it talks about people, not numbers,
Speaker 2: and its centers migrants as individuals with stories. It's a
Speaker 2: great book, but probably not want to read, you know.
Speaker 2: Right before bed.
Speaker 4: I could imagine it sounds heavy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely heavy gooing and so.
Speaker 4: Following steelmates between the pro and Goodafi camps, in late
Speaker 4: spring of twenty eleven, the rebels, assisted by netile forces,
Speaker 4: took Tripoli and toppled Goodaffi's got and the NTC was
Speaker 4: recognized internationally almost immediately as the legitimate government of Libya.
Speaker 4: As Matt will Gress notes in jackbn quote on the
Speaker 4: day Tripoli fell, the New York Times headline the scramble
Speaker 4: for access to Libya's oil wealth begins was telen Libya's
Speaker 4: vast oil reserves, along prized by the West for being
Speaker 4: the largest in Africa and incredibly close to Europe, were
Speaker 4: now open to business for foreign investors. As is the
Speaker 4: case with all imperial interventions, the attempts to get profits
Speaker 4: flowing from multinational corporations comes long before any ideas of
Speaker 4: reconstructure such as es central infrastructure projects or insurance services
Speaker 4: end quote. And really up to now that infrastructure has
Speaker 4: not been established, and even access to Libya's oil is
Speaker 4: not yet secured, even though they allegedly managed to loot
Speaker 4: some of that oil. In twenty twelve, Nakadafi himself fled
Speaker 4: after the fall of Tripoli, but he was found NATO
Speaker 4: bombed his convoy and he was captured alive, then executed
Speaker 4: by NTC forces in October twenty eleven, after which the
Speaker 4: war was declared over and the ANTC declared Libya and
Speaker 4: Islamic democracy in their constitutional declaration. The NTC estimated thirty
Speaker 4: thousand dead, and a UN report from twenty twelve estimated
Speaker 4: that more than nine hundred thousand people had to leave
Speaker 4: the country since February of twenty eleven. Many were not
Speaker 4: Libya nationals, but more than six hundred and sixty eight
Speaker 4: thousand Libyans also fled, and an estimated two hundred thousand
Speaker 4: people had been internally displaced, continuing without timeline. In twenty twelve,
Speaker 4: the NTC handed power over to the General National Congress,
Speaker 4: or GNC, and despite a formal end to the war,
Speaker 4: Grafi loyalists, local militias, and tribes shaped against each other
Speaker 4: and the GENC. The militias wouldn't disarm. The Graffi loyalists
Speaker 4: continued to fight, and the GNC failed to put forward
Speaker 4: a new constitution, so in twenty fourteen they were ousted
Speaker 4: by the newly elected House of Representatives and in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 4: a second civil war would begin in Libya, with the
Speaker 4: nation split mainly between the House Representatives or HR, with
Speaker 4: its Libya National Army or LNA, based in Tobruk to
Speaker 4: the east, and their rival, made up of mostly Islamists
Speaker 4: from the former gen C with their Libya Dawn Militia
Speaker 4: based in Tripoli to the west. They didn't win the election,
Speaker 4: they didn't consider it legitimate because of its low turnout,
Speaker 4: and they didn't appreciate the amount of former Gaddafi supporters
Speaker 4: in the new government, so they rose up to fight,
Speaker 4: claiming to be the National Salvation Government or NSG. So
Speaker 4: you have the HR and they have the NSG. Beyond
Speaker 4: these two factions, yours had an al Qaeda affiliated militia
Speaker 4: and the Islamic State, both engaged in insurgent struggle around
Speaker 4: the country, sometimes holding entire cities. Eventually, the two governments
Speaker 4: came together to sign the LPA, the Libyan Political Agreement
Speaker 4: to form the Interim Presidential Council and Government of National
Speaker 4: Accord or GNA in late twenty fifteen. With that attempt
Speaker 4: at cohesion didn't really work out, as the U went
Speaker 4: back to GNA, now based in Tripoli, couldn't consolidate power.
Speaker 4: By the end of twenty sixteen, factions affiliated with the
Speaker 4: NSG still resisted the GNA, and the HR, still based
Speaker 4: in Tobrook, refused to endorse the GNA's appointments, so they
Speaker 4: went from having two competing governments to kind of having three,
Speaker 4: though the main opposing forces when all the GNA and
Speaker 4: the HR. The JNA was backed by Tihi Qatar and
Speaker 4: the EU, especially Italy and the UN, while the HR
Speaker 4: was backed by Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Emirates,
Speaker 4: and to some extent, France, who technically recognized the GNA
Speaker 4: but also provided support to the HR for their struggle
Speaker 4: against the Isthmists. The US was also supposed to be
Speaker 4: back in the GNA, but Trump jumped out to praise
Speaker 4: the HR at one point, so the US's position was
Speaker 4: exposed as a lot more ambiguous in practice. Yeah, so,
Speaker 4: the GNA and the HR would keep on struggling against
Speaker 4: each other for control over the central bank and oil
Speaker 4: companies and territory over the years. By the end of
Speaker 4: one particularly significant offensive in twenty nineteen, which saw the
Speaker 4: country's largest oil field brought under HR control. The situation
Speaker 4: was such that the HR's leverage came from their control
Speaker 4: over the oil field, and the GNA's leverage was that
Speaker 4: it was internationally recognized and could legally sell the oil.
Speaker 4: GNA leader Fayez Al Seraje and HR leader Shalifa Afta
Speaker 4: seemed to be developing in cooperative relations, and in March
Speaker 4: or twenty nineteen they were supposed to have a national
Speaker 4: unity conference, but then the HR tried to take Tripoly whoopsie,
Speaker 4: so they and I had to put spone in that conference.
Speaker 4: The resultant fight and led to the hrt in st
Speaker 4: a major city between the Libya's east and west halves.
Speaker 4: With Turkish support, the JNA successfully repelled the HR from
Speaker 4: the Atropoli and situation was stabilized with a battle line
Speaker 4: just east oft.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty, yeah, not just Turkish support, Turkey deployed
Speaker 2: the Syrian National Army aka the TFSA the Turkish Free
Speaker 2: Syrian Army. They are widely believed to be rebadged Islamist
Speaker 2: from previous iterations of various Islamist groups in Syria that
Speaker 2: Turkey has formed into kind of its own proxy force.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure if you go to the Wikipedia
Speaker 2: page there are like seventeen million different war crimes listed,
Speaker 2: like they are there. They are well known for their
Speaker 2: affinity for war crimes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can imagine the fact that Turkey Turkey's back
Speaker 4: and then tells me everything I need to know I.
Speaker 2: Think, yeah, right, yeah, and that they're considered like a
Speaker 2: deniable proxy, right, like they could be like you can
Speaker 2: be like, oh, well that wasn't us, That was these
Speaker 2: Syrian guys who we happen to arm and equip and
Speaker 2: run air support for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what is the situation now? Now that Turkey is
Speaker 4: kind of back in the new government in Syria.
Speaker 2: They have largely been folded into the stg's armed forces.
Speaker 2: So like Abu Humpsa is I think a general or
Speaker 2: brigadier I can't quite remember his rank, but as a
Speaker 2: guy who has been widely condemned is now a military
Speaker 2: officer within the stg's Ministry of Defense.
Speaker 4: Huh okay, So a more a great description than would
Speaker 4: be that Turkey sent their what criminal proxy is to
Speaker 4: support the GNA in repellent nat or premiature folie. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and the situation stabilized the battle line just east of
Speaker 4: thirty in twenty twenty, and after other times to reach
Speaker 4: an agreement field they agreed to share oil revenue, establish
Speaker 4: a prominencies fire, and get both Turkish forces and Russian
Speaker 4: mercenaries out of the country. So the Second Civil War
Speaker 4: was officially over in October twenty twenty. According to reporting
Speaker 4: by Al Jazeera. The UN initiated a new attempt at
Speaker 4: a unifying government in twenty twenty one, which was approved
Speaker 4: originally by both rival parliament, leading to the establishment of
Speaker 4: the Interim Government of National Unity or GNU in March
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one, thus replacing the previously un baked GNA.
Speaker 4: So we went from GNA to GNU, but then the
Speaker 4: GNU would be opposed by the HR, which withdrew from
Speaker 4: the GNU in September twenty twenty one and established the
Speaker 4: Government of National Stability or GNS in March twenty two.
Speaker 4: So the GNA was replaced by the GNU, and the
Speaker 4: GNU was now opposed by the GNS, and thus the
Speaker 4: country remained split into up to today between the UN
Speaker 4: back to GNU and the HR slash Libya National Army
Speaker 4: backed GNS. And in all of this chaos, people on
Speaker 4: the ground have been suffering they've been suffering human rights
Speaker 4: of uses, disappearances up to recently, the GNU imposed a
Speaker 4: morality police, and they even numerous reports about open slave
Speaker 4: markets in Libya where migrant Black Africans are auctioned to
Speaker 4: the highest bidder. This is a result of human trafficking
Speaker 4: and debt bondage, so not exactly the same as chattel slavery,
Speaker 4: but the experience and racial undertones are all too familiar.
Speaker 4: The suffering in Libya has also spread beyond its borders.
Speaker 4: Following Gaddafi's fall, the weapons of his military stockpiles ended
Speaker 4: up in the hands of militants across the Sahel region
Speaker 4: of Africa and even in Syria. You'll remember in my
Speaker 4: episode on the situation in Nigeria, some of those weapons
Speaker 4: ended up in the hands of Bokoharam and other Islamic
Speaker 4: militant groups in the region, Pulani herdsman as so on. Tragically,
Speaker 4: because Libya just cast seem to catch a break at all,
Speaker 4: September twenty three also saw catastrophic floods devastating the country.
Speaker 4: The hurricane strong Storm Daniel caused two dams to burst
Speaker 4: in the coastal city of Durna, which is within Jena's
Speaker 4: territory in eastern Libyia. The flooding killed at least four
Speaker 4: thousand people, though potentially even more, left on thousands missing
Speaker 4: and displaced more than forty thousand others. The nation, still
Speaker 4: wrought by civil war and still unrecovered from the devastation
Speaker 4: of the NATO Obomban campaign, surely could have mustered a
Speaker 4: more adequate response to the tragedy if not for those conditions.
Speaker 4: In fact, it is theorized that the tragedy could have
Speaker 4: been avoided altogether because, according to reports by the Middle
Speaker 4: East Eye, a Turkish company was supposed to reability to
Speaker 4: field dams, but the their works were reportedly interrupted by
Speaker 4: the twenty eleven uprising and subsequent civil war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's always the cost of war that we don't count,
Speaker 2: right Like, if you look at the twenty twenty three
Speaker 2: earthquake that killed people in Syria and Turkey, right Like,
Speaker 2: undoubtedly that would have done a lot less damage if
Speaker 2: that hadn't been for the fact that war had been
Speaker 2: raging in those places for so long, So like everything
Speaker 2: else got put on hold. All the normal infrastructure repair
Speaker 2: and in such that you would expect had to stop
Speaker 2: because of that. War that made things like the earthquake worse. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I don't think the people who rose up against Gaddafi
Speaker 4: and fought and died back in February or twenty eleven
Speaker 4: I'd sought this out come. Unfortunately, in a world dictated
Speaker 4: by the whims of imperiali spowers, this was the end
Speaker 4: of their actions. I don't want people to get it
Speaker 4: twisted though, because in the time since, as people have
Speaker 4: observed the devastation wrought by the civil wars, there has
Speaker 4: been an effort to most whitewash Kaddafi and to limit
Speaker 4: our vision of possibilities to a binary of either perpetual
Speaker 4: Gaddaffi rule on one end or perpetual civil war on
Speaker 4: the other end. Those are not the only possibilities. So
Speaker 4: we've discussed the legacy of nature intervention, which deserves condemnation
Speaker 4: in this episode, and it should be an indication that
Speaker 4: to the Western invasions and wars not going to liberate anyone.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But aside from that accurate analysis of Libya since the
Speaker 4: fall of Gaddafi, I want to bring in some conversation
Speaker 4: on the man himself in the next episode. Until then,
Speaker 4: all power to all the people. This has been it
Speaker 4: could happen here, have been Andre Sage peace, Hello and
Speaker 4: welcome to it happen here. I am andresige andraism on
Speaker 4: YouTube and joined again.
Speaker 2: By James again.
Speaker 4: Yes, I've noticed a phenomenon I'm not sure if you've
Speaker 4: noticed it too, where anti imperialists solidarity somehow goes a
Speaker 4: step beyond opposing imperialist aggression itself and crosses into lionizing
Speaker 4: or whitewashing the targets of that aggression, or rather the
Speaker 4: asensible leaders of the target to that aggression.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I have noticed this too. It's one of
Speaker 2: the things that makes me most angry in the world.
Speaker 2: What's been referred to as the anti imperialism of idiots. Yes,
Speaker 2: not so relevant now that I used to like to
Speaker 2: apply the sad test to anybody who claimed to be
Speaker 2: interested in the politics of liberation. Right if you if
Speaker 2: you think Bashar Alasad is a based anti imperialist people's
Speaker 2: socialist hero, then your politics are shit. I have nothing
Speaker 2: good to say about that. Like, you're an idiot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it should be a fringe phenomenon, right, but
Speaker 4: I haven't seen it get an increase intraction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even in like relatively you know, like I won't
Speaker 2: kind of start a war with various US leftist publications.
Speaker 2: But I went to pitch some people this last week,
Speaker 2: thinking like, there is speculation that the United States will
Speaker 2: once again ally itself with Kurdish groups. So I'm sure
Speaker 2: it had then planned to once again abandon when that
Speaker 2: became politically more expedient. But I happened to have some
Speaker 2: insight into these various Kurtish groups, having spent some time
Speaker 2: there and having contacts there, And so I went to
Speaker 2: the website of these various you know, big publications which
Speaker 2: are left or left leaning or even sort of liberal,
Speaker 2: and I saw these borderline campus takes on what's happening
Speaker 2: in Iran. And it's just so so frustrating to me, Like,
Speaker 2: it makes me so angry that people continue to view
Speaker 2: the world through this binary Marvel movie lens, which sees
Speaker 2: it as impossible that two things could be bad at
Speaker 2: the same time. Yeah, it's infuriating to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And if I was more inclined to conspiracy, I
Speaker 4: might say that this binary is intentionally constructed, you know,
Speaker 4: that it's it's by design that the most vocal anti
Speaker 4: imperiodist voices also just so happened to align themselves with
Speaker 4: state power. Yeah, and camp is on. But I'm not
Speaker 4: inclined to conspiracy, so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, one can make a pretty reasonable argument.
Speaker 4: For that, right, One could make that argument. Yeah, I won't,
Speaker 4: but one could.
Speaker 2: I might.
Speaker 4: I think one of the best examples of this is
Speaker 4: this sort of odd obsession that some people have with
Speaker 4: Colonel Wumar Algadafi. Now, last episode, we spoke about the
Speaker 4: long term consequences of Western intervention in Libya, beginning with
Speaker 4: the twenty eleven uprising during the Arab Spring against the
Speaker 4: forty two year rule of more Markedafi. What began as
Speaker 4: a broad, largely lead less protest movement was quickly shaped
Speaker 4: by foreign intervention. In Marshal twenty eleven, the US, the UK,
Speaker 4: and France launched a military campaign through NATO under the
Speaker 4: UN mandate to protect civilians. The war toppled Gaddafi, but
Speaker 4: killed tens of thousands and devastated infrastructure. In the aftermath,
Speaker 4: Libya fractured into rival governments, militias, and foreign backed factions,
Speaker 4: triggering yet another civil war in twenty fourteen, and despite
Speaker 4: a cease fire in twenty twenty, the country remains divided
Speaker 4: between competing administrations. While ordinary Libyans face instability, human rights abuses,
Speaker 4: and economic hardship. I think it's fair to say that
Speaker 4: the NATO intervention was a net negative for the country.
Speaker 4: But in this same breath, I cannot agree with those
Speaker 4: who seem to believe that Gaddafi's rule could have continued
Speaker 4: either that he was some force for good in the country.
Speaker 4: And in this episode, I really want to get into
Speaker 4: the y to identify and dissect the actions of the
Speaker 4: man Kaddafi. According to his biography and en Psycopoedia Britannica,
Speaker 4: Murma al Kaddafi was born in nineteen forty two near Sirte, Libya.
Speaker 4: Sixty nine years later, he would be captured and killed
Speaker 4: in Sirte, Libya. After spending his early years in at
Speaker 4: tent he graduated from the University of Libya in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty three and then graduated from a military academy in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty five. In nineteen sixty nine, at the age
Speaker 4: of twenty seven, Gaddafi pulled off a blood less coup
Speaker 4: to seize power from King Idris, the First of Libya.
Speaker 4: For the next four decades plus, he would be the
Speaker 4: de facto ruler of Libya. Gidraffi was both a passionate
Speaker 4: Arab nationalist and a Muslim in power, he tried to
Speaker 4: push both of his ideologies. He expelled Western military forces,
Speaker 4: expelled remaining Italian settlers and Jewish communities in Libya, nationalized
Speaker 4: the country's oil industry, banned alcohol and gambling, tried to
Speaker 4: unify with his Arab neighbors occasionally by attempting coups in
Speaker 4: their countries, and stood against normalization with Israel. So a
Speaker 4: very mixed bag. So far. Until nineteen seventy seven, Gaddafi
Speaker 4: ruled the Libyan Arab Republic, but the culmination of his
Speaker 4: Cultural Revolution period from nineteen seventy three to nineteen seventy
Speaker 4: seven would sideline his political and religious opponents, who would
Speaker 4: begin in to see him as unstable, huboristic, and authoritarian.
Speaker 4: That period would instead cement Gaddaffi as the sole ruler
Speaker 4: of what he would rename the Socialist People's Libya and
Speaker 4: Arab Jamahiria, as recounted in Libya The History of Gaddafi's
Speaker 4: Pariah State by John Oakes. Jamahiria was a term he
Speaker 4: coined in his Green Book, likely inspired by Mao's Little
Speaker 4: Read Book, published during the Libyan Cultural Revolution period. Jamahiria
Speaker 4: was his idea of a state of the masses governed
Speaker 4: by people's congresses and popular assemblies. And if it's one
Speaker 4: thing that makes a political movement, it's empowering. It's slapping
Speaker 4: the people's and popular label on everything, regardless of any
Speaker 4: additional context. So they had these democratic local assemblies called
Speaker 4: basic People's Congresses that met three times a year, and
Speaker 4: those congresses appointed executive people's committees which did most of
Speaker 4: the day to day stuff, and above it all was
Speaker 4: the General People's Congress. This period was simultaneously an effort
Speaker 4: to encourage popular participation through these congresses while suppressing descend
Speaker 4: through his control over the secret services. It was clear
Speaker 4: that Gaddaffi was still in charge even after he stepped
Speaker 4: down from his formal position as Secretary General in nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy nine and simply and humbly dubbed himself the brotherly
Speaker 4: leader and guide of the revolution.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he gets some of his like hubristic stuff, Like
Speaker 2: his rhetoric is his outfit. His reference to himself is
Speaker 2: like you couldn't parody some of it. It is where
Speaker 2: like the parodies of dictators in this part of the
Speaker 2: world come from. Is Goaddafi's kind of affect.
Speaker 4: I guess, yeah, he was a character, Yes, that he
Speaker 4: was here, he was a definitely a character. Yeah so,
Speaker 4: I mean, anarchist critiques of democracy are easy to find,
Speaker 4: and although Gadaffi's Libya is never solely directly democratic, even
Speaker 4: in his project, you could see some of the flaws
Speaker 4: and the issues that anarchist of identify guide in this
Speaker 4: approach to popular power as the congresses, the People's Congresses
Speaker 4: were poorly attended and easily manipulated. Issues were often raised
Speaker 4: and rarely resolved, And of course compounding those flaws was
Speaker 4: the fact that these people's Congresses had no actual power
Speaker 4: over the things that mattered in Libya, the oil industry,
Speaker 4: the armed forces, the security services, and foreign policy, where
Speaker 4: Kadafi and his compatriots still ruled. Gaddaffi decided where the
Speaker 4: oil money went, and he directed some of it to
Speaker 4: a great man made of a project that would extract
Speaker 4: from the ancient and non renewable aquifer under the Libyan
Speaker 4: desert to supply the course for some more stable water supply.
Speaker 4: Frustratingly for him, I could assume Kaddafi did not get
Speaker 4: what he wanted out of the revolutionary people's congresses, so
Speaker 4: he created revolutionary committees to mobilize the people and safeguard
Speaker 4: their rule through commandos that answered to Gaddafi directly. These
Speaker 4: revolutionary committees could arrest counter revolutionaries, establish revolutionary courts, and
Speaker 4: eliminate enemies of the revolution at home and abroad. The
Speaker 4: people he called stray dogs. All of this for the people,
Speaker 4: of course, and for the revolution.
Speaker 5: So on.
Speaker 4: People his system had some degree of people power and
Speaker 4: people voice, but in practice he exercised near total control
Speaker 4: and suppression of opposition, both within the country and outside
Speaker 4: the country. The same went for workplaces.
Speaker 2: Of course.
Speaker 4: He spoke about worker partnership and power in the Green Book,
Speaker 4: but it was a state controlled and state distributed economy
Speaker 4: in Libia, run by oil money, with very few worker
Speaker 4: run enterprises. There was also no real freedom of organization
Speaker 4: or strike in Libya, as independent unions were banned and
Speaker 4: Gadaffi explicitly rejected class struggle despite claiming to be a socialist.
Speaker 4: So in the Return of Mormon Gadaffi by Tunisian academic
Speaker 4: hate M. Gussemi, he hadised the cult of personality that
Speaker 4: was forged over the years of Gaddafi's rule that has
Speaker 4: resurfaced up to today. His opponents often pointed the good
Speaker 4: that he did for the country, establishing basic social services,
Speaker 4: free health, gain, education, howies in and land distribution, accessible
Speaker 4: loan programs, women's rights and so on, and with that
Speaker 4: welfare state came naturally some base of popular support for
Speaker 4: people who had little to nothing before. Other fans of
Speaker 4: Gadaffi point to what I like to call hype moments
Speaker 4: and aura. So there was a time when he was
Speaker 4: in the UN General Assembly and he was supposed to
Speaker 4: be a short time to speak, and he just went
Speaker 4: on and on and on and on and on and on,
Speaker 4: and he tore up the UN chatter hyperments and aura, right,
Speaker 4: and yeah, that's like something that a lot of people
Speaker 4: point to. He was also, at one point in time
Speaker 4: the Chairman of the African Union, and he wanted to
Speaker 4: keep that position permanently, and he was proposing a whole
Speaker 4: United States of Africa, like he had a whole period
Speaker 4: of African solidarity, which we'll get to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, good, Yeah, His Pan Africanist arc is is fascinating.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So none of this, however, erases his dark dark side.
Speaker 4: For one, for all the women's rights that he put
Speaker 4: forward in Libya. He was not that great to women.
Speaker 4: The Green Book presents Gaddafi as someone who cared about
Speaker 4: women's dignity and rights. But even in that book you
Speaker 4: see a very complimentarist take on women's place in society.
Speaker 4: It's like, yeah, the equals to men, but also their
Speaker 4: role is in the household. They're supposed to be mothers
Speaker 4: above everything else. Yeah, he was like, they need to
Speaker 4: be mothers, but they shouldn't be treated as property or objects.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think he based a lot of this in
Speaker 2: like his interpretation of Hadi thought the Kuran, like his
Speaker 2: idea that like there was some kind of divine guidance
Speaker 2: on gender roles.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: I've actually seen this in recent days, Like you can
Speaker 2: go and find harmonised tweets, right, like like Ayatollah Hamani
Speaker 2: not his son, and like you can see his stuff
Speaker 2: where he's like you should not mistreat your wife. You
Speaker 2: can literally find in his timeline on Twitter. Right. He
Speaker 2: was a big poster and people have somehow attempted to
Speaker 2: like construe this as like he was a leader of
Speaker 2: enlightened feminist regime like in Iran, which I don't know.
Speaker 4: It's benevolent patriarchy. Alough again, Yeah, I like you.
Speaker 2: You have to be really on a special fucking truth
Speaker 2: trajectory to convince yourself that that is the case. Like,
Speaker 2: it takes a remarkable capacity for self delusion to rather
Speaker 2: than listening to women in Iran, women from Iran, many
Speaker 2: of whom I have spoken to, to look at the
Speaker 2: evidence of the killing, for example, with you know, Amini
Speaker 2: right to be like, I know, I found this tweet
Speaker 2: from twenty thirteen, so we were good. Here is this
Speaker 2: is fine. It's just remarkable people's tendency to do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's remarkable and stupid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, stupid It is a good word.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And going back to Gaddafi aside from that sort
Speaker 4: of benevolent patriarchy take on women's equality.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Investigative reporting by anaka Jin also gathered testimony since his
Speaker 4: fall that alleged his procurement, collusion, and sexual abuse of
Speaker 4: women inside his compound, heeded by a network of officials. Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: many of these women are far too a free to
Speaker 4: come forward even all these years after his death, due
Speaker 4: to the persistence of prograd Afi sentiment in the country
Speaker 4: up to today. So not the best for women. What
Speaker 4: about for Africa, right, his whole pan Africanist are He
Speaker 4: styled himself as a Pan African who would support the
Speaker 4: struggles of people like Mandela and would fund infrastructure projects
Speaker 4: around the continent. But he had a history of attemptant
Speaker 4: over through governments in Africa and support oppressive ones, including
Speaker 4: Idi Amin of Uganda and Charles Taylor of Liberia. So
Speaker 4: his Pan Africanism was never concerned with the freedom or
Speaker 4: well being of African people. It was I think very
Speaker 4: much according to his own self aggrandizement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, didn't He proposed like an African Union, which was
Speaker 2: more akin to like a United States, like Federal Africa.
Speaker 4: The United States of Africa. That was his proposal.
Speaker 2: Fantastic, Yeah, yeah, correct.
Speaker 4: And as he is proposing this Pan African vision within
Speaker 4: Libya itself, he was pushing for an Arablivia. Yeah, the
Speaker 4: Amazek and other non Arab Africans in Libya were mistreated,
Speaker 4: you know. His vision of an Arab Libya led to
Speaker 4: this suppression of the Toaregs, the tables and the Amazek.
Speaker 4: He had policies, as reported in the BBC in New
Speaker 4: Internationalists aljaz right elsewhere, he had policies that included the
Speaker 4: bannon of minority languages, the bannon of minority names, the
Speaker 4: discourageon of cultural expression, and sometimes denying citizenship to groups
Speaker 4: outside the Arab identity. So naturally, many of these minorities
Speaker 4: took part in the twenty eleven movement, and after Gaddafi's
Speaker 4: fall there was a revival of language, cultural institutions and publications. However,
Speaker 4: the NTC and these that followed have continued to ignore
Speaker 4: the minority plight. Minority groups are still struggling for constitutional recognition, representation,
Speaker 4: and equal rights in a country that is, of course
Speaker 4: still divided, and some minorities have chosen to boycott the
Speaker 4: national political process entirely in favor of pursuing local self governance. Also,
Speaker 4: minorities were not the only people being persecuted in Gaddaffi's Libya.
Speaker 4: On the political front, Despite coal and himself a socialist,
Speaker 4: Gaddaffi was really all over the place ideologically now internationally,
Speaker 4: he may have backed the Palestinian struggle, the Irish struggle,
Speaker 4: the African American struggle, but he was consistent in suppressing
Speaker 4: actual leftists in Libya. Marxis dot Com identified some of
Speaker 4: these repressive efforts in their article on Gaddafi quote. Gaddaffi
Speaker 4: was very clear in expressing his anti communism. In nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy one, he sent a plane full of Sudanese communists
Speaker 4: back to Sudan, where they were execut by Nimri. In
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy three, the regime publish an official document to
Speaker 4: commemorate the fourth anniversary of Gadaffi's rise to power under
Speaker 4: the title Holy War against Communism end quote quite the center.
Speaker 4: Later on, however, he would get more chummy with the ussry.
Speaker 4: But Gadaffi was no marxisilatist, and communists and leftists and
Speaker 4: workers were not legally capable of organizing independently in Libya.
Speaker 4: Aside from them, you also had the murder and torture
Speaker 4: of civilians and journalists, the assassinations of rivals and Libya
Speaker 4: and around the world. It was not the free speech
Speaker 4: utopia that Kadafi tried to paint that as instead of
Speaker 4: emboldening the left to sermons, he emboldened these tribal groups
Speaker 4: and set the foundation for the Libya that we see today.
Speaker 2: His consistent through line is that he liked strong men
Speaker 2: and sees himself among them and wants to associate himself
Speaker 2: with them. At some point in the early two thousands,
Speaker 2: he was supporting Yorg Hyder, a neo fascist in Austria,
Speaker 2: and telling Europeans they needed to get past their obsession
Speaker 2: with the Second World War. He had no like consistent politics.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean that tracks with his expulsion of Jewish
Speaker 4: communities in Libya. Yeah, he didn't only expel Jewish settlers,
Speaker 4: He expelled Jewish communities that had arrived prior to Italian colonization,
Speaker 4: that had existed in Libya for centuries.
Speaker 2: Yeah that maybe, I guess Anti Semitism can often be
Speaker 2: the link that brings terrible people together.
Speaker 4: He had a lot of other notorious incidents of suppression,
Speaker 4: but one of the most significant was the Abu Salem massacre.
Speaker 4: In short, as recounted by John Ooks, Abu Salem was
Speaker 4: the site of a prisoner's protest on the twenty eighth
Speaker 4: of June nineteen ninety six. The prisoners escaped their cells
Speaker 4: and were protesting them as treatment as gods shot at
Speaker 4: them from the roof. Two tops of officials came and
Speaker 4: took command, ordering the shooting to stop and promising to
Speaker 4: address the prisoner's complaints if they returned to their cells
Speaker 4: and gave up the guards they had hostage, and the
Speaker 4: following day shots fired from eleven am to one thirty
Speaker 4: five pm, a mass slaughter of approximately one thy two
Speaker 4: hundred of the sixteen to seventeen hundred prisoners in Abu Salins.
Speaker 4: The families who suffered a blow were among the first
Speaker 4: on the streets of Benghazi twenty eleven, but those families
Speaker 4: were not originally told that they loved ones had been killed.
Speaker 4: Some of them continued to visit the prison for weeks, months,
Speaker 4: years after, bringing gifts for their relatives who were already
Speaker 4: long dead. In the twists and turns of Gaddafi's ideological
Speaker 4: development or lack their of. Following the fall of the USSR,
Speaker 4: Gaddafi would also pursue economic liberalization. He started opening up
Speaker 4: to the West slightly. There was slow progress and a
Speaker 4: brief hiccup, but by two thousand and three, free market
Speaker 4: advocate Chukri Ganim was appointed Prime Minister. Before long, three
Speaker 4: hundred and sixty state enterprises were privatized. By two thousand
Speaker 4: and seven, Libya was laying off as many as a
Speaker 4: third of the government workforce four hundred thousand public sector workers.
Speaker 4: According to a New York Times article from twenty eleven.
Speaker 4: The IMF had actually praised Libya's economic reforms, So why
Speaker 4: twenty eleven conditions were so unbearable for so many workers,
Speaker 4: especially young people. There's no wonder that some of them
Speaker 4: fought with nothing to lose. The last aspects of Goodaffi's
Speaker 4: rule that I want to touch on was his complex
Speaker 4: relationship with Western powers Billionais rule in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 4: He did style himself an anti imperist revolutionary, and that
Speaker 4: is the image that our people uphold of him to
Speaker 4: this day. Libya funded an armed revolutionary and Milson movements worldwide,
Speaker 4: from the African National Congress or the ANC, to the
Speaker 4: Palestine Liberation Organization or PILO, to the Irish Republican Army
Speaker 4: or IRI. He aligned himself with the so called radical
Speaker 4: camp in the Middle East, including Bathist Syria and Iran,
Speaker 4: and Western governments accused Libya of supporting international terrorism. Libya
Speaker 4: was considered a rogue state, but as noted by Syrian
Speaker 4: anarchist Mazen Kamalmas in an interview with Jose Antonio Guitairez quote,
Speaker 4: even when Gaddafi was declaring himself an anti imperialist long ago.
Speaker 4: It was just a lip service while he engaged as
Speaker 4: an authoritarian in trivial terrorist acts that never meant to
Speaker 4: support the libertarian objectives of the victims of imperialism end quote. Still,
Speaker 4: Reagan called him a mad dog, and the US bombed
Speaker 4: Libya in nineteen eighty six after attacks in a West
Speaker 4: Berlin nightclub were attributed to Libyan agents. Those bombans narrowly
Speaker 4: missed Gaddafi himself, but they killed his adopted baby daughter.
Speaker 4: Libya was also blamed for the nineteen eighty eight bombing
Speaker 4: of PanAm Flight one O three over Lockerby, which led
Speaker 4: to sanctions both the United Nations and the US, which
Speaker 4: isolated Libya economically and diplomatically. In the nineties, however, with
Speaker 4: four of the USSR, Libya began solely shifting toward cooperation.
Speaker 4: They handed over the suspects in the Lockerby bombing, and
Speaker 4: sanctions began to loosen as they attempted to normalize relations.
Speaker 4: Western intelligence services soon started cooperating with Libyan intelligence against
Speaker 4: Islamist militon groups, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which
Speaker 4: is a thorn in Gaddafi's side. The early two thousands
Speaker 4: had Libya renounce its weapons of mass destruction program following
Speaker 4: the invasion of Iraq. The US and the unsuresequently lifted
Speaker 4: sanction and diplomatic relations were restored fully with Western countries.
Speaker 4: Gadaffi hosted Tony Blair of the UK, Nicholas Sarkozia France,
Speaker 4: and met with Obama as well, and many of these
Speaker 4: meetings with Western leaders produced multi billion dollar energy in
Speaker 4: business deals BP Royal, Dot Shell, Excellent, Mobile, Chevron, Total Energies.
Speaker 4: They were all get in pieces of Libya's wealth. As
Speaker 4: Libya began adopting more neoliberal economic reforms like currency devaluation,
Speaker 4: trade liberalization, and more openness to foreign investment. Libya was
Speaker 4: also able to cooperate closely with Western intelligence during the
Speaker 4: war and terror, including assist in the CIE and MI
Speaker 4: six in rendition and torture, as uncovered by Human Rights Watch.
Speaker 4: So by the mid two thousands, Libya had mostly reintegrated
Speaker 4: into the Western their global system, and the West, for
Speaker 4: their part, simply ignored Gdaffi's continues. Human rights abuses. The
Speaker 4: counter terrorism cooperation, the oil and gascon tracks, and don't
Speaker 4: forget the brutal African migrant control were all too valuable
Speaker 4: for America and Europe.
Speaker 2: I remember this this period quite well. It was when
Speaker 2: I was in my undergraduate university and Gaddafi was invited
Speaker 2: to speak the Oxford Union. I did my undergraduate there
Speaker 2: and myself and a number of friends.
Speaker 4: So you met Gadafi.
Speaker 2: No, he spoke. He spoke via video conference, okay, which
Speaker 2: they paused while they removed us for protesting Gaddafi's Like,
Speaker 2: it just seemed like this decade of abuse of his
Speaker 2: own people have been completely forgotten, right, because he was
Speaker 2: now prepared to do abuse of other people that was
Speaker 2: beneficial to the United Kingdom of the United States. And
Speaker 2: we felt like that was apparent and wrong, so we
Speaker 2: went to make our feelings known. And the Oxford Union's
Speaker 2: very silly institution, right, which prizes itself on free speech,
Speaker 2: and really it just does kind of class reproduction for
Speaker 2: the most part, right, And of course there was not
Speaker 2: freedom of speech for people who are going to be
Speaker 2: rude to someone who was in charge of a state,
Speaker 2: even if they were being rude on behalf of the
Speaker 2: thousands of people he's had murdered and tortured. And yeah,
Speaker 2: that was my little personal running with Goodafi when I
Speaker 2: was what like eighteen. But yeah, I can't remember if
Speaker 2: we were like not allowed in or we were booted out,
Speaker 2: because I am like two decades and half a dozen
Speaker 2: traumatic brain injuries since my teenage years. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: do remember just being like, people are triating with I
Speaker 2: guess some kind of fucking novelty, and this person has
Speaker 2: real blood on his hands, like real people have suffered
Speaker 2: tremendously and died because of actions he's taken, like it's
Speaker 2: not funny or cute.
Speaker 4: Wow, what year was that?
Speaker 2: It would have been in the early two thousands, the
Speaker 2: Bush era, because that's when I was in my undergraduate
Speaker 2: second Bush term, so like it would have been brought
Speaker 2: in two thousand and six some of somewhere there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thankfully I never had any run ins with good Yea.
Speaker 2: Even at that time, I can remember just being sort
Speaker 2: of somewhat pulled by the Marxist learning this tendency to
Speaker 2: excuse crimes against humanity if as long as they were
Speaker 2: done by people who who said the right things, who
Speaker 2: had the right vibes, who condemned the right people, and
Speaker 2: the liberal tendency to excuse crimes against humanity so long
Speaker 2: as they were done in service of capitalism and the state.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, shockingly similar tendencies in some ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, like this fundamentally not rooted in the idea
Speaker 2: that people have a right to dignity. Both of them
Speaker 2: hold people as less valuable than other things, right, be
Speaker 2: it capital or I mean the Marxis learnings tendency, honestly, Like,
Speaker 2: it's not even the revolution that they believe it's more
Speaker 2: valuable than people. It's the revolutionary rhetoric. Yeah, like with
Speaker 2: a sad right, Like you can murder your own people
Speaker 2: with chemical weapons so long as you pretend to give
Speaker 2: a single shit about Palestinians, even though you've spent decades
Speaker 2: using your weapons to kill your own people and never
Speaker 2: once use him to actually help the people of Palestine,
Speaker 2: to actually protect.
Speaker 4: People, exactly exactly, So at this point, now you know, good,
Speaker 4: after he's trying to be your chummy with dus after
Speaker 4: he spent some time being chummy with Africa, and spend
Speaker 4: some time being chummy with USSR and with rebel groups
Speaker 4: around the world. But that was just the thing, right,
Speaker 4: he had this track record of flip flopping, you know,
Speaker 4: and even though relations had normalize, these Western powers could
Speaker 4: not trust him. They still saw him as that mad dog.
Speaker 4: They still saw him as unpredictable and unreliable. In fact,
Speaker 4: even while he was cutting deals with these multi billion
Speaker 4: dollar corporations for the oil contracts and so on, when
Speaker 4: he wasn't getting what he wanted, he would threaten to
Speaker 4: nationalize to get what he wanted. And so to West,
Speaker 4: being opportunistic, we're just waiting for an opportunity. They were
Speaker 4: done with playing his game, and that opportunity came when
Speaker 4: the people organically rose up against Kadafi in twenty eleven,
Speaker 4: not long after NATO intervened, and the years since Libyans
Speaker 4: have suffered and died with no end in sight. It
Speaker 4: shouldn't be uncontroversial to say this Gadafi was not a
Speaker 4: true antime perialist. I don't think it's possible for a
Speaker 4: statesman or a government to be truly anti perialist. Government
Speaker 4: is foundationally exploitative internally and when turned externally, that drive
Speaker 4: exploitation is what we understand as imperialism. All the markers
Speaker 4: of imperialism worthy of condemnation, be it economic exploitation, cultural dominance,
Speaker 4: military violence, et cetera, is carried out under the label
Speaker 4: of governance when done within its own borders when done against,
Speaker 4: for example, the non Arab minorities in Libya. I think
Speaker 4: what's missing from now popular anti imperialist narratives is that connection,
Speaker 4: that analysis and a gap in the analysis is what's
Speaker 4: creating this false consciousness that leads people to combs to
Speaker 4: conclusion that anti imperialism means that XYZ government is anti
Speaker 4: imperialists and good, and ABC government is imperialists and bad.
Speaker 4: That's not how the world works. States are never going
Speaker 4: to be liberatory. They're not able to produce a liberatory framework.
Speaker 4: At their best, they function as a welfare state. At
Speaker 4: their worst, you get mass suppression and culture personality. Sometimes
Speaker 4: you get a combination of both, as with Libya and
Speaker 4: a Giraffi. And that's my message for today. Please stop
Speaker 4: Lionis and leaders stay woke. Yeah, and all power for
Speaker 4: all the people. I've been and youre siege. This is
Speaker 4: a Kapania peace.
Speaker 6: On Sunday, April twelfth, I went to the Basement nightclub
Speaker 6: in Queens. Like usual, someone scanned my ticket at the
Speaker 6: Big gate off Flushing Avenue. I had to wait in
Speaker 6: a winding line outside the door, went through security, and
Speaker 6: finally reached the DJ and bar, but instead of the
Speaker 6: regular collection of twinks, dolls, and bisexuals, the room was
Speaker 6: full of city workers, politicians, journalists, and DSA members, a
Speaker 6: decent number of which probably were bisexual. I suppose technically
Speaker 6: we were directly above the Basement nightclub in the Knockdown
Speaker 6: Center event venue. Gathered this Sunday afternoon to attend Mayor
Speaker 6: Zoron Mamdani's one hundred day address. I'm Garrison Davis. This
Speaker 6: is it could happen here. I show about things falling
Speaker 6: apart and sometimes putting stuff back together. This one is
Speaker 6: one of those rare episodes focused on the latter. Earlier
Speaker 6: this April marked Mayor Mamdani's first one hundred days in office.
Speaker 6: This episode, I'll discuss what Zoron has done these first
Speaker 6: one hundred days, some of the challenges he's faced, if
Speaker 6: he's been able to deliver on the promises of his campaign,
Speaker 6: and how he's adapted to the power and constraints of
Speaker 6: running the biggest city in the country, and finally, what
Speaker 6: all this could mean for the future of working class
Speaker 6: and left wing politics in the United States. Let's first
Speaker 6: return to the one hundred day Address above the Basement nightclub,
Speaker 6: upon entering the venue, you found yourself in a museum
Speaker 6: of the administration's first one hundred days. This little installation
Speaker 6: displayed the Mayor's snowshovel from the historic blizzard during Zoron's
Speaker 6: first few weeks in office, a tenant organizing suggestion board
Speaker 6: from the rental ripoff hearings, and a child sized mayoral
Speaker 6: podium used to announce a new free childcare program for
Speaker 6: two year olds. Museum plaques detailed victories for labor and
Speaker 6: tenants rights, as well as infrastructure accomplishments like scaffolding reform
Speaker 6: and a pothole blitz that filled over twenty thousand potholes
Speaker 6: in just three days. Before the mayor's speech, a Bronx parent,
Speaker 6: two tenant organizers, and a city worker from the Department
Speaker 6: of Transportation spoke to the crowd about how life is
Speaker 6: different under the new administration. Mamdani's speech was effectively a
Speaker 6: state of the Union for New York City. The mayor
Speaker 6: outlined the campaign promises the administration has fulfilled so far
Speaker 6: in their short time in office, and connected his style
Speaker 6: of governing to the Sewer Socialists of Milwaukee from the
Speaker 6: first half of the twentieth century. Who focused on strengthening
Speaker 6: public services.
Speaker 5: Because for too long, City Hall had not just failed
Speaker 5: to meet expectations, it had low them. After years of
Speaker 5: broken promises, no one in this city could be blamed
Speaker 5: for doubting that government held either the ability or the
Speaker 5: ambition to upend the status quo.
Speaker 7: It.
Speaker 5: As I said on that freezing January afternoon to more
Speaker 5: than eight and a half million New Yorkers, we will
Speaker 5: make no apology for what we believe. I was elected
Speaker 5: as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a
Speaker 5: democratic socialist.
Speaker 6: This speech was really the first time since the inauguration
Speaker 6: that the Mayor has talked at length about what it
Speaker 6: means to govern as a democratic socialist and the example
Speaker 6: that New York City can set for the rest of
Speaker 6: the country. The address was mostly attended by city workers,
Speaker 6: who the Mayor invited to enter into a ticket lottery.
Speaker 6: For most of the speech, I was pinned between a
Speaker 6: group of uniformed Department of Sanitation employees and workers from
Speaker 6: the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The event in
Speaker 6: general was focused on uplifting civil servants and celebrating public service,
Speaker 6: whether that be bus drivers, school teachers, or the sanitation
Speaker 6: workers that kept the city running during the worst snowstorm
Speaker 6: in years. It feels like for the past few decades,
Speaker 6: the only public sector job that gets regularly celebrated as
Speaker 6: noble by those in government or in the media and
Speaker 6: promoted by pop culture is being a police officer. Being
Speaker 6: a cop is the only public sector job that gets
Speaker 6: uplifted with propaganda. Zoron's little videos promoting three point one
Speaker 6: city call center workers is to quote front of the
Speaker 6: pod Ben Lorber, rolling back decades of neoliberal propaganda reasserting
Speaker 6: the dignity of public sector work and workers. A common
Speaker 6: turn of phrase uttered by Mayor Mumdani is if you
Speaker 6: can't solve the smallest task in someone's life, why would
Speaker 6: they ever trust you to solve the biggest one. So
Speaker 6: let's go over some things big and small that Mamdani
Speaker 6: has been able to do in his first one hundred days.
Speaker 6: One of Mamdani's core campaign promises was to freeze the rent.
Speaker 6: On February eighteenth, Mayor Mamdani appointed six new members to
Speaker 6: the nine member Rent Guidelines Board, which each year is
Speaker 6: tasked with determining the rent increase percentages for the more
Speaker 6: than one million rent stabilized apartments. In the city under
Speaker 6: airic Adams, the board approved a three percent rent increase
Speaker 6: for one year leases and a four point five percent
Speaker 6: increase for two year leases in just a few weeks.
Speaker 6: The new board will hold a preliminary vote to freeze
Speaker 6: or raise rents before their final vote in June. Public
Speaker 6: testimony on rent adjustments is currently underway. Housing in general
Speaker 6: is one of the top issues affecting affordability in the city,
Speaker 6: and the Mayor's approach has not been limited to filling
Speaker 6: vacancies on the Rent Guidelines Board. After Zora's and aaugurations
Speaker 6: beach on January first, he went to a neglected apartment
Speaker 6: building just east of Prospect Park to sign an executive
Speaker 6: order revitalizing the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants and appointed
Speaker 6: a tenant organizer to lead the office. This apartment building
Speaker 6: was owned by a literally bankrupt landlord called the Pinnacle Group,
Speaker 6: who was responsible for more than five thousand housing violations
Speaker 6: and fourteen thousand complaints. The revamped Office to Protect Tenants
Speaker 6: and the Mayor intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings and successfully
Speaker 6: secured thirty million dollars in repairs and upgrades for tenants
Speaker 6: as well as protection from future displacement. Through this office,
Speaker 6: the administration has continued to crack down on bad landlords
Speaker 6: who violate New York City law and mistrey tenants. Just
Speaker 6: a few weeks after the inauguration, Momdanni announced a two
Speaker 6: point one million dollar settlement from A and E real
Speaker 6: Estate Properties for tenant harassment and hazardous conditions across fourteen
Speaker 6: buildings in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queen's As a part of
Speaker 6: the settlement, A and E was also required to correct
Speaker 6: more than four thousand building condition violations. In February, the
Speaker 6: Department of Housing, Preservation and Development released a public list
Speaker 6: of the two hundred and fifty buildings with the most
Speaker 6: severe housing code violations a city wide and put them
Speaker 6: under heightened oversight via the Alternative Enforcement Program, with the
Speaker 6: city stepping in to make repairs, then billing the landlords
Speaker 6: if they failed to address violations.
Speaker 5: Since January first, we have won more than thirty four
Speaker 5: million dollars in settlements, judgments and repairs for tenants, delivered
Speaker 5: improvements to six thousand and seventy apartments so far, and
Speaker 5: issued one hundred and ninety five thousand, eight hundred and
Speaker 5: twenty nine violations New York City will no longer tolerate
Speaker 5: exploitation as a business model.
Speaker 6: In March, Mayor Mumdani announced a quote unquote landmark victory
Speaker 6: against famously bad landlord Seth Miller of Egis Realty. You
Speaker 6: can say the landlord was egregious at Realty. The city
Speaker 6: brought a case against Miller for dangerously direct conditions at
Speaker 6: nine to one to nine Prospect Avenue in the South Bronx,
Speaker 6: and for the first time ever, courts imposed the maximum
Speaker 6: penalties under the city's nuisance abatement law, a one thousand
Speaker 6: dollars fine per day until housing violations are addressed and
Speaker 6: two point one seven four million dollars in retroactive penalties.
Speaker 6: During the first one hundred days, the city held five
Speaker 6: rental ripoff hearings, one in each borough, providing New Yorkers
Speaker 6: a platform to discuss various problems with their landlord, from
Speaker 6: poor conditions to repair delays or junk fees. This was
Speaker 6: a dedicated public forum for tenants to speak directly to
Speaker 6: city officials and collectively shape housing policy going forward. A
Speaker 6: month into office, the mayor announced a thirty eight million
Speaker 6: dollar investment to install modern heating and cooling in seven
Speaker 6: hundred and twelve of New York City's public housing units
Speaker 6: at the Beach forty first Street houses in Queens And
Speaker 6: technically this is after the first one hundred days, but
Speaker 6: I think it's worth mentioning that just a few days ago,
Speaker 6: zorunannounced a two point five billion dollar investment in public
Speaker 6: housing to deliver new energy efficient lighting and faucets to
Speaker 6: forty five thousand homes, heat pumps in twenty thousand, and
Speaker 6: ten thousand new induction stoves, all affecting the Nische public
Speaker 6: housing in New York City. On Zoron's very first day
Speaker 6: in office, he also signed two executive orders to accelerate
Speaker 6: housing construction by building on city owned properties to increase
Speaker 6: the supply of affordable housing and cutting red tape to
Speaker 6: make it faster and more affordable to build. The development
Speaker 6: approval process for building affordable housing has been reduced by
Speaker 6: more than two years by the administration's implementation of the
Speaker 6: new voter approved Expediated Land Use Review recedure, combined with
Speaker 6: a new program called the Neighborhood Builder's Fast Track, which
Speaker 6: will pre select qualified developers to shorten the pre development
Speaker 6: timeline by eight months for certain projects. On city owned land.
Speaker 6: Another of Zorn's core campaign promises was universal childcare. On
Speaker 6: his eighth day in office, Mayramdani announced a partnership with
Speaker 6: Governor Kathy Hockel to provide free childcare for thousands of
Speaker 6: two year olds in New York City with a one
Speaker 6: point two billion dollar increase in state funding. Since then,
Speaker 6: the mayor has expanded the free three K program for
Speaker 6: three year olds to more than half of all school
Speaker 6: districts in the city, and announced two K fall enrollment
Speaker 6: for school districts eighteen, twenty three, ten six, and twenty seven,
Speaker 6: which serve lower income neighborhoods. Two K applications open for
Speaker 6: the first time on June second, with the program operating
Speaker 6: on a full day schedule from eight am to six
Speaker 6: pm all year round. As a part of the three
Speaker 6: K expansion, seven new early childcare education centers are opening
Speaker 6: in Western Queens, Staten Island, South Brooklyn, and the South
Speaker 6: Bronx and On March thirtieth, the mayor announced the city's
Speaker 6: first pilot program for free on site childcare for city workers,
Speaker 6: based at the David Dinkins Municipal Building, with applications opening
Speaker 6: on April thirtieth. The city also created a new accessible
Speaker 6: childcare provider map with interactive features to filter by location,
Speaker 6: age group, and cost. The mayor says that all these
Speaker 6: steps will lead to free childcare for every three year
Speaker 6: old and two year old in the city by the
Speaker 6: end of his first term. Another key promise was fast
Speaker 6: and free buses. The administration is making headway on the
Speaker 6: fast part by building more bus lanes, redesigning streets, as
Speaker 6: well as adding protected by clanes on mcguinnis Boulevard, thirty
Speaker 6: first Street in Astoria, Ashland Place across Flatbush, East, Flatbush, Midwood,
Speaker 6: and Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues in central Brooklyn. Amdani restarted
Speaker 6: the Stall Madison Ave bus lane redesign to make buses
Speaker 6: faster and more reliable for ninety two thousand daily riders.
Speaker 6: The city announced a new bus lane for the Bronx
Speaker 6: crosstown bus service to Yankee Stadium and restarted the Fordham
Speaker 6: Road bus Lane project to improve the busiest bus corridor
Speaker 6: in the Bronx, servicing an average of one hundred and
Speaker 6: thirty thousand daily riders across four routes. Just this week,
Speaker 6: construction began in Brooklyn for the redesign of Flatbush Avenue
Speaker 6: with the goal of improving bus speeds by over forty
Speaker 6: percent for one hundred and thirty two thousand daily riders,
Speaker 6: and before the World Cup this summer, Zoron has promised
Speaker 6: to complete new bike lanes and pedestrian upgrades in Lower Manhattan.
Speaker 6: As for the free part, that will be a bit harder.
Speaker 6: Mamdani maintains that his administration is working with the state
Speaker 6: government in Albany and the MTA to eventually make New
Speaker 6: York City buses free, and proposed a five week free
Speaker 6: bus pilot program during the World Cup. Nope, it's unclear
Speaker 6: if that will happen. It's not all sunshine and rainbows
Speaker 6: in New York City. Upon taking office, Mayor Mumdani discovered
Speaker 6: the city was facing an unexpected financial crisis in the
Speaker 6: form of a hidden twelve billion dollar deficit left by
Speaker 6: former Mayor Eric Adams, stemming from years of fiscal mismanagement
Speaker 6: and the under budgeting of essential services like rental and
Speaker 6: cash assistance, shelters, health insurance, and special ad as. Mayor
Speaker 6: Eric Adams covered up this massive budget deficit by leaving
Speaker 6: the gaps grossly understated, gaps that were made worse by
Speaker 6: divestment in New York City by the state under former
Speaker 6: Governor Andrew Cuomo. The mayor is actually required by law
Speaker 6: to have a balanced budget, so rather than sweeping this
Speaker 6: under the rug by continuing to cook the city's books
Speaker 6: like his predecessor, Zoron chose transparency about the financial crisis
Speaker 6: he's inherited and signed an executive order to designate chief
Speaker 6: savings officers in every city agency to streamline processes and
Speaker 6: eliminate waste. Some of these savings so far include canceling
Speaker 6: twenty thousand dollars of Slack subscriptions to saving one hundreds
Speaker 6: of thousands of dollars by foregoing vacant office space. Through
Speaker 6: his relationship with Governor Kathy Hochel, the mayor secured one
Speaker 6: point five billion dollars in state aid in February that,
Speaker 6: combined with higher than expected Wall Street revenues and savings measures,
Speaker 6: shrunk the deficit to five point four billion. Zoron's preliminary budget,
Speaker 6: released last February, sparked criticism for failing short of promises
Speaker 6: to increase funding to parks and libraries. While campaigning, Zoron
Speaker 6: advocated for city libraries to receive zero point five percent
Speaker 6: of the city budget, but the preliminary budget only allocated
Speaker 6: point three nine percent, which is actually a twenty nine
Speaker 6: nine million dollar cut from the last Adams budget down
Speaker 6: to four hundred and fifty six million dollars. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 6: park budget remained effectively flat at about zero point five percent,
Speaker 6: rather than boosting it to one percent of the total
Speaker 6: budget as Mamdani previously hoped. Though in March, Mayor Mamdani
Speaker 6: announced new capital investment of fifty million dollars to reconstruct
Speaker 6: ten parks in underserved neighborhoods. This February budget is preliminary
Speaker 6: and subject to change as Zoron's negotiations with the city
Speaker 6: council and the state continue. In February, Mamdani reversed a
Speaker 6: previous policy against the force removal of homeless encampments after
Speaker 6: twenty people died in the street during a horrific blizzard
Speaker 6: and sudden cold snap in late January. Despite the efforts
Speaker 6: of outreach workers visiting known homeless people every two hours
Speaker 6: to offer warm shelter and check if they needed help,
Speaker 6: fourteen hundred people were placed into shelters and warming centers
Speaker 6: during that first time freeze, with eighty five people involuntarily
Speaker 6: moved or hospitalized. The new encampment SPEEP policy will be
Speaker 6: led by the Department of Homeless Services rather than the
Speaker 6: NYPD as they were under Eric Adams, which mcdonnie said
Speaker 6: put homeless New Yorkers in danger and was ineffective in
Speaker 6: moving people into shelter or housing. Under the new plan,
Speaker 6: after posting a removal notice, outreach workers will visit encampments
Speaker 6: every day for a week with the goal of connecting
Speaker 6: people to shelter and establishing a pipeline to stable housing,
Speaker 6: while opening new shelters across the city, including New York
Speaker 6: City's first ever pet inclusive transitional housing facility for families.
Speaker 6: Much of the criticism levied at Zoran revolves around his
Speaker 6: choice to retain NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tish, something he announced
Speaker 6: before of the election. Zoron did cancel and Eric adams
Speaker 6: plan to add five thousand more NYPD officers, but as promised,
Speaker 6: their budget remained effectively the same despite the financial deficit.
Speaker 6: But Tish specifically has been seen as a rare moderating
Speaker 6: force in the administration, an outlier that may be preventing
Speaker 6: police reforms that Zoron campaigned on like disbanding the SRG,
Speaker 6: the Strategic Response Group tasked with responding to both protests
Speaker 6: and terrorism, as well as getting rid of the NYPD
Speaker 6: gang database. Critics have noted that Zoron seems to be
Speaker 6: moving towards quote unquote reforms of the gang database rather
Speaker 6: than his previous call to get rid of it, saying
Speaker 6: in early April, quote I've made my critiques of the
Speaker 6: database clear, and the NYPD has also implemented a number
Speaker 6: of reforms as per the recommendation that came through, and
Speaker 6: the implementation of those reforms and the results of that
Speaker 6: are part of the active discussion that we are having unquote.
Speaker 6: The gang database in New York has shrunk by forty
Speaker 6: percent in the last two years. As for the SRG,
Speaker 6: Mayor Mamdani still maintains that he remains quote steadfast in
Speaker 6: my commitment to disband the SRG, to do so in
Speaker 6: a manner that upholds both First Amendment rights of New
Speaker 6: Yorkers and keeps New Yorkers safe, and that is the
Speaker 6: subject of an active conversation that we are having unquote.
Speaker 6: Commissioner Tish has been particularly resistant to the idea of
Speaker 6: disbanding the SRG, though earlier this month, Mayor Mumdani's chief
Speaker 6: of staff, Elbasgard Church, said on the News that the
Speaker 6: administration remains committed to fulfilling the campaign promise of disbanding
Speaker 6: the SRG, and that a delegation of City Hall and
Speaker 6: NYPD officials traveled to Columbus, Ohio to learn about their
Speaker 6: protest policing model focused on quote communication and quote de
Speaker 6: escalation over mass arrests and aggressive force.
Speaker 3: The commitment is to disband the SRG, and I think
Speaker 3: that the Columbus visit showcases that we are committed to
Speaker 3: a really disciplined approach here. We want it to work,
Speaker 3: and we want to do it in collaboration with the NYPD.
Speaker 3: So the Mayor is in regular conversation with his police Commissioner,
Speaker 3: and our teams also meet regularly so that we can
Speaker 3: design something that is best suited to that commitment being
Speaker 3: fulfilled and not compromising any of the safety and the
Speaker 3: protection that New Yorkers deserve.
Speaker 6: In an April interview, may Or mam Donni did express
Speaker 6: to The New York Times that when unable to reach
Speaker 6: an agreement with TISH, he does have the power to
Speaker 6: overrule her on police policy if needed. Quote. Ultimately, I
Speaker 6: hold the final decision, no matter which department or agency
Speaker 6: we're speaking about. On quote, Mam Donnie has not exercised
Speaker 6: this power with the NYPD as of yet. In March,
Speaker 6: Zoron took the first step in establishing the Department of
Speaker 6: Community Safety by opening the Office of Community Safety, led
Speaker 6: by Deputy Mayor Ronita Francois, who directed de Blasio's Action
Speaker 6: Plan for Neighborhood Safety and advised Campaign Zero, which opposes
Speaker 6: the Gang Database. The new Office of Community Safety will
Speaker 6: develop strategies and coordinate efforts to combat gun violence, mental health,
Speaker 6: crisis response, hate crimes, and substance abuse issues. At the announcement,
Speaker 6: Francois said, quote, the evidence is clear. Addressing what ails
Speaker 6: our communities, whether that be crumbling physical infrastructure, social disconnection,
Speaker 6: or a lack of access to economic opportunity, is how
Speaker 6: we best ensure that our communities are safe.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 6: It's too early to judge the impact of the office,
Speaker 6: but such an office or city department has the potential
Speaker 6: to challenge the police's monopoly on public safety. The other
Speaker 6: common critique of Mumdani is based on his endorsement of
Speaker 6: liberal Governor Kathy Hochel and his decision to focus on
Speaker 6: governing rather than dedicating resources and political capital towards further
Speaker 6: uphill primary challenges. Zoran has said, quote, the success of
Speaker 6: our movement will be defined by the success of our government.
Speaker 6: Through his working partnership with Governor Hokeel, the mayor has
Speaker 6: been able to extract wins from the state, particularly for
Speaker 6: universal childcare and the one point five billion dollars in
Speaker 6: state aid. In the realm of discourse, some leftists, anarchists
Speaker 6: or ultras have jumped on any fault or policy shift
Speaker 6: as a sign that Zoron has wholly moved to the
Speaker 6: right or betrayed the movement. Such opinions are rewarded by
Speaker 6: the social media economy, which tends to encourage whatever is
Speaker 6: seen as the most radical, extreme, or divisive opinion. This
Speaker 6: tendency has been present even among some of Zoron's earliest
Speaker 6: online supporters. Behind this tendency is a willingness and frankly
Speaker 6: hunger to turn on Zoron, not necessarily for anything he
Speaker 6: has or has not done, but because of the position
Speaker 6: he now occupies. Zoron used to be an outsider challenging
Speaker 6: the democratic establishment embodied by Andrew Cuomo, but now he's
Speaker 6: one of the most popular Democrats in the country. DNC
Speaker 6: social media accounts are hosting Zoron memes and hype videos.
Speaker 6: This could be viewed as a massive accomplishment evidence that
Speaker 6: the Democratic Party can be forced to bend toward left
Speaker 6: wing populism because of the working class voters and mass
Speaker 6: organizing that put Zoron in the position he's currently in.
Speaker 6: But others view Zoron's acceptance and select promotion within the
Speaker 6: party as a sign he's been corrupted, co opted, recuperated,
Speaker 6: or made palatable. Both of these things can be partially true.
Speaker 6: The Democratic elite certainly have their own motives for dipping
Speaker 6: their toes into the Mamdani hottub, just as Zoron and
Speaker 6: the New York City DSA have their own aspirations for
Speaker 6: influencing the direction of the party towards social democracy and
Speaker 6: democratic socialism. In general, there's a lot of confusion or
Speaker 6: disagreement on what it means to be a democratic socialist
Speaker 6: in a position of power. As an executive, Zoron is
Speaker 6: in a unique position that not many other DSA members
Speaker 6: have ever had, being in such a position of power
Speaker 6: informs and shapes the way someone interacts with the systems
Speaker 6: of party and state in a way that those outside
Speaker 6: of power cannot fully understand. It filters ideology into material actions.
Speaker 6: This idea frightens many, but differences in political horizons also
Speaker 6: affect the way people interact and move with these systems.
Speaker 6: The question is not what should Zoron do if there
Speaker 6: were no constraints on his power, because then obviously he
Speaker 6: should just implement utopian communism. But his power obviously does
Speaker 6: have constraints if the goal for the left is to
Speaker 6: build a working class movement to that end, as a
Speaker 6: function of Zoron's constraints, it may actually be more effective
Speaker 6: for him to operate down certain state pathways that allow
Speaker 6: him to facilitate the building of a working class movement
Speaker 6: and avoid other more extreme pathways that, because of the
Speaker 6: current constraints on executive power, would either be in af
Speaker 6: fect at best or self destructive at worst. As the mayor,
Speaker 6: Zoron's job is to run the biggest city in the country,
Speaker 6: and as a democratic socialist that means using government to
Speaker 6: make life better for the working class. His task is
Speaker 6: to govern in a way that alleviates economic conditions to
Speaker 6: make it easier to organize and build a working class movement.
Speaker 6: But building that movement is not his job. It's yours.
Speaker 6: It's the job of the people, and such a movement
Speaker 6: is the only way of holding elected leaders like Zoron accountable.
Speaker 6: Zoron is not a revolutionary nor is he an organizer.
Speaker 6: He's the mayor of New York City, and as mayor,
Speaker 6: he has to serve more than eight million New Yorkers,
Speaker 6: not just the fourteen thousand members of New York City DSA.
Speaker 6: The mayor may join the picket line with striking nurses
Speaker 6: and fight for working class New Yorkers in city Hall,
Speaker 6: or even open an office of mass Engagement, like Zoron
Speaker 6: has done, but it is up to those outside city
Speaker 6: Hall to move in tandem by working to rebuild a
Speaker 6: labor movement. Assuming that Zoron or some random public official
Speaker 6: can just do whatever is the most extreme radical thing
Speaker 6: mistakingly sees the state as having more power than it
Speaker 6: actually does. People often see the state as an ahistorical,
Speaker 6: abstracted seat of power, but no, the state is just
Speaker 6: the mediator between capital and labor. The power of the
Speaker 6: state to support labor is exercised by doing things that
Speaker 6: are in the interest of labor and society as a whole,
Speaker 6: rather than just capital. But this ability is directly linked
Speaker 6: to the extent that labor is organized. So if labor
Speaker 6: is largely unorganized, then Zoron is more restrained in what
Speaker 6: he can do. What he can do then is use
Speaker 6: his position to help build working class power, which will
Speaker 6: then enable him further so on and so on. The
Speaker 6: state has no power against capital outside of the power
Speaker 6: that labor gives it. Our situation is one where capital
Speaker 6: is very strong, which means when the state serves capital
Speaker 6: it's quite strong, but in its function of serving labor
Speaker 6: it's rather weak. Because the left is failed to reckon
Speaker 6: with the fact that right now labor is actually quite weak,
Speaker 6: which means that state actors, even those on the pro
Speaker 6: labor left, are very constrained. So the main thing they
Speaker 6: can do to strengthen labor is providing better conditions for
Speaker 6: which labor power may be built, and importantly, organizers must
Speaker 6: utilize those conditions to build the labor movement. Zorn's other
Speaker 6: task is to demonstrate that left wing working class politics
Speaker 6: can actually govern, not just critique whether or not he
Speaker 6: succeeds at governing and delivering for working class New Yorkers,
Speaker 6: determines the perceived viability of democratic socialist politics nationally going forward.
Speaker 6: As Mamdani has said, the worth of an ideology can
Speaker 6: only be judged by its delivery. Mamdani is not the
Speaker 6: first democratic socialist to be put in such a position.
Speaker 6: In his one hundred day address, Mayor Mumdanni spoke about
Speaker 6: the so called sewer socialists of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who one
Speaker 6: hundred years ago quote built the greatest public park system
Speaker 6: in the nation, and whether the Great Depression better than
Speaker 6: almost any other American city, Milwaukee purged corruption, built the
Speaker 6: first municipally sponsored public housing development in the nation, and
Speaker 6: transformed the city's sewage disposal system unquote. Mayor Mamdani is
Speaker 6: trying to revive this legacy of municipal socialism by acting
Speaker 6: on his mantra there is no problem too big, no
Speaker 6: task too small. On day six of office, Mamdani fixed
Speaker 6: the infamous Williamsburg break bump that has long plague cyclists,
Speaker 6: and in response to the historic winter damage affecting city streets,
Speaker 6: the administration launched a five borough pothole blitz filling one
Speaker 6: hundred thousand potholes in less than one hundred days.
Speaker 5: This is pothole politics, our twenty twenty six answer to
Speaker 5: sewer socialism, where government is not too busy, not too
Speaker 5: self important, not too mired in paperwork, to fix the
Speaker 5: problems of the city, no matter their size.
Speaker 6: This quote unquote pothole politics has extended to scaffolding reforms,
Speaker 6: reducing the time that sheds clutter our sidewalks. In January,
Speaker 6: the mayor announced a new program to expand modular public restrooms,
Speaker 6: and starting this summer, the roof of the historic David
Speaker 6: Dinkin's Municipal Building will be open to the public for
Speaker 6: free viewing and tours. Fighting for workers from within city
Speaker 6: Hall isn't just an abstract ideal. In the first one
Speaker 6: hundred days, the administration secured nine point three million dollars
Speaker 6: in restitution.
Speaker 5: No longer will city government be afraid of its own shadow.
Speaker 5: If anyone should be afraid, it is those who take
Speaker 5: advantage of working people.
Speaker 6: On January fifteenth, the city filed a lawsuit against a
Speaker 6: predatory delivery app called Moto Click for violating worker laws
Speaker 6: like minimal pay rate. At the end of January, Zoron
Speaker 6: announced more than five million dollars in worker restitution and
Speaker 6: penalties due to minimum pay rate violations from three major
Speaker 6: restaurant delivery apps, Uber Eats, Phanton and Hungry Panda. This
Speaker 6: money will be paid to almost fifty thousand workers, and
Speaker 6: as a part of the settlement, Uber also agreed to
Speaker 6: reinstate ten thousand wrongfully deactivated delivery workers. In March, the
Speaker 6: administration won almost two million dollars for over eight hundred
Speaker 6: fast food workers at Taco Bell and retail workers for
Speaker 6: violations of worker protection laws against unpredictable scheduling. The mayor
Speaker 6: signed executive orders strengthening consumer protections by targeting hidden junk
Speaker 6: fees and impossible to cancel subscriptions, and expanded the protected
Speaker 6: time off law to four point three million previously unprotected
Speaker 6: workers and issued compliance warnings to nearly sixty thousand employers.
Speaker 6: Speaking of sewer socialism, at the end of March, Mayrormamdani
Speaker 6: announced a one hundred and eight million dollar investment to
Speaker 6: upgrade and replace more than six thousand and seven hundred
Speaker 6: water catch basins to combat flooding. This quote unquote pothole politics,
Speaker 6: least the groundwork of public trust needed for larger systematic transformations.
Speaker 5: If government can't do the small things, how could you
Speaker 5: ever trust it to do the big ones? How can
Speaker 5: we promise to transform our city if we can't pave
Speaker 5: your street.
Speaker 6: At the end of the one hundred day Address, Mayor
Speaker 6: Mamdani made a series of announcements. The administration is restarting
Speaker 6: trash containerization and will make buses faster for one million
Speaker 6: New Yorkers by speeding up buses by twenty percent along
Speaker 6: forty five priority corridors and constructing new rapid bus routes
Speaker 6: for one hundred thousand New Yorkers who live more than
Speaker 6: half a mile away from a subway or rail stop.
Speaker 6: But the big announcement was an update to another of
Speaker 6: Zoron's core campaign promises. The first of five city owned
Speaker 6: grocery stores will open next year, with one store being
Speaker 6: opened in each borough by the end of Mamdani's first term.
Speaker 6: The location of the Manhattan Municipal grocery store has already
Speaker 6: been selected. Le Marquetta in East Harlem, a public market
Speaker 6: opened by the New Deal era Mayor Pharaoh LaGuardia. The
Speaker 6: city will build a nine thousand square foot store at
Speaker 6: the site to offer cheaper groceries than the capitalist competitors.
Speaker 5: I know there are many who use socialists as a
Speaker 5: dirty word, something to be ashamed of. They can try
Speaker 5: all they want, but we will not be ashamed of
Speaker 5: using government to fight for the many, not simply the few.
Speaker 5: We will not be ashamed of adding more heat pumps
Speaker 5: to knights of buildings in the Rockaways, or building more
Speaker 5: supportive housing in Harlem, or standing steadfast alongside our trans neighbors.
Speaker 5: We will not be ashamed of investing in youth mental
Speaker 5: health clinics, or working to close rikers, or fighting for
Speaker 5: immigrants targeted by ice. To any New Yorker, whether you're
Speaker 5: under attack from the federal government's cruelty or suffocating under
Speaker 5: the affordability crisis, we will stand beside you because government
Speaker 5: is a series of choices, and socialism is the choice
Speaker 5: to fight for every New Yorker to extend democracy from
Speaker 5: the ballot box to the rest of our lives.
Speaker 6: Three days after Mamdanie's one hundred day address, on Tax Day,
Speaker 6: April fifteenth, the mayor announced that he and Governor hokel
Speaker 6: had agreed to a new tax the Rich proposal. New
Speaker 6: York State will have its first ever heated tear tax,
Speaker 6: a wealth tax on second homes in New York City
Speaker 6: valued above five million dollars owned by out of state elites.
Speaker 6: This tax on the ultra wealthy is projected to generate
Speaker 6: five hundred million dollars in annual revenue. And if owners
Speaker 6: want to avoid the tax by moving into the residence,
Speaker 6: that's fine too, because then they'll have to pay New
Speaker 6: York resident taxes, So you get taxed either way. Part
Speaker 6: of pushing back against the libertarian ethos in America by
Speaker 6: showing that government can actually make your life better is
Speaker 6: actually showing people what local government is doing. Since taking office,
Speaker 6: Zoron has employed the same widely successful messaging style that
Speaker 6: helped get him elected to make psays and inform New
Speaker 6: Yorkers about what the administration has been able to accomplish.
Speaker 6: This is something Democrats have largely failed to do by
Speaker 6: either just not doing this sort of outreach while governing,
Speaker 6: making any outreach inaccessible or hard to understand, or having
Speaker 6: your outreach come off as cringe or out of touch.
Speaker 6: Regardless of how much effort is put into outreach, the
Speaker 6: people have to also see the improvements being talked about
Speaker 6: in their own lives or in their own neighborhoods. A
Speaker 6: dense population and having a cohesive city culture like New
Speaker 6: York helps with that. Millions of cyclists cross the Williamsburg
Speaker 6: Bridge every year, so when the mayor fixes the bump
Speaker 6: during his first week in office, that's an easy reference
Speaker 6: point for people. The success of the administration's comm strategy
Speaker 6: has been by using Zoron's popularity to promote the public
Speaker 6: sector and public sector workers while actually showing people how
Speaker 6: social services help city residents. As the mayor says, New
Speaker 6: York belongs to all who live in it. While in office,
Speaker 6: Zoron has largely declined to explicitly talk about how his
Speaker 6: administration may impact the future of democratic socialism across the country,
Speaker 6: instead keeping his vision laser focused on improving the lives
Speaker 6: of working New Yorkers and making this city more affordable.
Speaker 6: To quote the mayor, we cannot burden ourselves with the
Speaker 6: question of what this means beyond this city. But before
Speaker 6: the mayor went on stage at the one hundred day address,
Speaker 6: they played a clip of the Progressive New Deal Mayor
Speaker 6: Fiorello LaGuardia saying that the greatness of New York City
Speaker 6: is in the services to its people, where public problems
Speaker 6: are really the problems of all the people, quote. And
Speaker 6: if we succeed here, surely it can be done elsewhere.
Speaker 6: When former Socialist Mayor Bernie Sanders made a surprise appearance
Speaker 6: during Zoron's speech, the Senator spoke about how what's happening
Speaker 6: in New York is influencing those outside the city.
Speaker 7: And I want to tell all of you and the mayor,
Speaker 7: but what you guys are doing here in New York City,
Speaker 7: it's important not only to the people here.
Speaker 2: What you are doing, what the mayor is.
Speaker 7: Doing, is providing hope and inspiration not only to people
Speaker 7: all across our country, but honestly all across the world.
Speaker 6: As a part of Mamdani's first one hundred days press circuit,
Speaker 6: he was asked on CBS News about the future of
Speaker 6: the Democratic Party and if his socialist politics are really viable.
Speaker 5: You know, what I find is that New Yorkers asked
Speaker 5: me less about how I describe my politics and more
Speaker 5: about whether my politics includes them. And I think what
Speaker 5: we can see is that a democratic socialist politics is
Speaker 5: one that should be judged on its delivery, like any ideology,
Speaker 5: and what we're showing in this city is we can
Speaker 5: pursue the big things like universal childcare and do the
Speaker 5: pothole politics at the same time that we're showing and
Speaker 5: not just filling in the potholes, changing the catch basins,
Speaker 5: but also repaving over a thousand miles of roadway.
Speaker 4: But mister Mayor, presidential and statewide elections are often decided
Speaker 4: in battleground regions that do not look like New York City.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'll be honest with you. Before I was the mayor,
Speaker 5: I was an assembly member of a story in Long
Speaker 5: Island City. At that time, I was told that you
Speaker 5: could only be a Democratic socialist in Northwest Queens. Then
Speaker 5: I became the mayor. Now the next question is the state.
Speaker 5: Then it'll be the next question will be the country.
Speaker 5: I think that this is a politics that can flourish
Speaker 5: anywhere because, frankly, there is only one majority in this
Speaker 5: country that's the working class, and it's time we have
Speaker 5: a politics that puts them at the heart of what
Speaker 5: it is that we're pursuing and not.
Speaker 6: As part of the appendix, Mamdanie still has over thirteen
Speaker 6: hundred days left in his first term, and there will
Speaker 6: be more challenges along the way, Challenges with the NYPD,
Speaker 6: the MTA, state government, federal government, the billionaires, and the
Speaker 6: bloodsucking monsters among the Democratic Party elite. Attempts to hold
Speaker 6: politicians like Zoron truly accountable to their politics will require
Speaker 6: more than Twitter, maoists and your small DSA caucus. Navigating
Speaker 6: all these problems will require not just principal leadership with
Speaker 6: a commitment to working class politics, but also growing the
Speaker 6: mass organizing apparatus that helped get Zora elected, and continuing
Speaker 6: to build power in city hall, state government, and in.
Speaker 2: The workplace.
Speaker 6: That does it today.
Speaker 2: For it could happen here, see you on the other side.
Speaker 6: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 6: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, They're crumbling world,
Speaker 6: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today
Speaker 6: I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. This episode
Speaker 6: recovering the week of April twenty second April thirtieth. Anything
Speaker 6: anything interesting happened this week?
Speaker 2: Very little? Not much news? Oh not much?
Speaker 1: I mean, Garrison, you've joined the ranks of the vaccine injured, right.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, yeah, got full, so joining us of four
Speaker 2: live vaccines inside Garrison's podies.
Speaker 6: Thank you, thank you for having me and my four
Speaker 6: live vaccines, which have obliterated my body and mind this
Speaker 6: week as I scrambled to finish them.
Speaker 2: I'm Donnie piece.
Speaker 6: But news happens whether or not I feel bad, So
Speaker 6: let's get to it.
Speaker 2: In fact, I seem to happen a lot when we've
Speaker 2: they need you sometimes conspire us that way.
Speaker 6: Now we will talk about the thing. Obviously, we'll talk
Speaker 6: about the thing, but first some smaller news items to start.
Speaker 6: Congress has voted to end the seventy six day DHS
Speaker 6: shut down without funding for ice or border patrol. The
Speaker 6: bill now goes to Trump today and if he signs it,
Speaker 6: the shutdown will be over. The House voted to reauthorize
Speaker 6: FAIZA section seven oh two, the warrant list of surveillance authority.
Speaker 6: Forty two House Democrats voted to reauthorize twenty two Republicans
Speaker 6: voted against the bills, expected to be stalled in the
Speaker 6: Senate at least this version of the bill, as it
Speaker 6: included an amendment about digital currency, which the Senate will
Speaker 6: fight over. The ATF released a new list of proposed
Speaker 6: reforms and regulations repealing the Biden pistol brace rule, as
Speaker 6: well as requiring quote unquote biological sex be used on
Speaker 6: ATF forms. The State Department is releasing a limited edition
Speaker 6: passport for the United States two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,
Speaker 6: featuring a portrait of President Trump superimposed on the Declaration
Speaker 6: of Independence and an American flag with his golden signature below.
Speaker 6: Google Trump Golden Signature for more.
Speaker 1: Look, I'm just gonna say, if we have any foreign
Speaker 1: border Control agents listening, you have to detain anybody you
Speaker 1: can see that pass forward.
Speaker 2: It is now possible for Nicki Minaj, and only Nicki Minaj,
Speaker 2: to assemble the most unique collection of United States government
Speaker 2: documents in history if she becomes a citizen, because she
Speaker 2: is apparently the only recipient of the Gold Card that's
Speaker 2: the Golden Visa. Yeah, yeah, she could, really, she could
Speaker 2: really get a unique but you know, Pokemon combination here
Speaker 2: of I guess she'd have to advance pretty quickly for
Speaker 2: a moment you would. I'm not clear how one goes
Speaker 2: from Gold Card citizenship, and the only way we'll find
Speaker 2: out is by closely following Nicki Minaj.
Speaker 6: The DOJ indicted former FBI doctor James Colemy for the
Speaker 6: second time, this time for posting an Instagram image with
Speaker 6: the numbers eighty six forty seven.
Speaker 2: Once again.
Speaker 6: Trump's FCC is going after Disney's ABC licenses by directing
Speaker 6: Disney to file an early renewal order after Jimmy Kimmel
Speaker 6: made a joke a few days before the White House
Speaker 6: Correspondents Dinner about First Lady Milania Trump having the quote
Speaker 6: glow of an expectant widow. It pains me to say
Speaker 6: critical support to Jimmy Kimmel. President Trump, David Allison, Todd
Speaker 6: Blanche Stephen Miller, Barry Weiss, Paramount's chief legal officer, and
Speaker 6: several CBS journalists met in a closed door dinner in Washington,
Speaker 6: d C. Last week, as the Paramount buyout of Warner
Speaker 6: Brothers and CNN progresses nightmare blunt rotation. Main Governor Janet
Speaker 6: Mills vetoed the state's eighteen month data center moratorium, the
Speaker 6: first of its kind in the country. Days later, Mills
Speaker 6: dropped out of the Senate race, paving the way for
Speaker 6: populist candidate Graham Plattner to receive the Democratic nomination and
Speaker 6: go up against Susan Collins in the midterms.
Speaker 2: Mister dem seemed to already be behind Amosaur post from
Speaker 2: the Democrats account Patrick Graham.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party kind of falls in line behind this guy,
Speaker 1: given the fairly unique degree of controversy over the Nazi
Speaker 1: tattoo and a couple of other things that have come up.
Speaker 1: But this has been in general, the gap between kind
Speaker 1: of how random progressives and Democrats online talk about Platner
Speaker 1: and how people in Maine feel about him has been
Speaker 1: massive from the jump, and I think a lot of
Speaker 1: it has to do just with the fact that this
Speaker 1: guy went about campaigning in a very dedicated way. He
Speaker 1: visited basically every county that like he could, and it
Speaker 1: goes to show that the consensus that builds online around
Speaker 1: candidates will never matter as much as like what they're
Speaker 1: out there actually doing in the world. And it's useful
Speaker 1: to get a reminder of that, whether or not you
Speaker 1: think this is a tremendous disaster, just the degree to
Speaker 1: which all of the talk about this guy online had
Speaker 1: no impact on his ability to actually like win. Now,
Speaker 1: this is a unique case. There aren't a whole lot
Speaker 1: of seats that are like the seat that he's going
Speaker 1: to be taking, right in terms of like both the
Speaker 1: weakness of your primary right and the weakness of the
Speaker 1: other party if you should happen to win the primary. Like,
Speaker 1: this is not every congressional district, but it's still kind
Speaker 1: of an interesting case study.
Speaker 2: Maine is also like it's not California, you know, like Californian,
Speaker 2: so discourse happens on LANs We're of vast state and
Speaker 2: you know these big cities Inserche and Maine is different.
Speaker 2: Like he has good ground game and that matters more there,
Speaker 2: it seems.
Speaker 6: And this signifies like a rejection of democratic establishment, yes,
Speaker 6: sessions like a hunger for change yep. And the fact
Speaker 6: that someone with all the controversies that come with Platner
Speaker 6: was able to beat the Democratic establishment I think shows
Speaker 6: how hungry, how hungry people are to upseat these these
Speaker 6: bloodsucking monsters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll keep reporting on that. I'm kind of interested
Speaker 2: in this race.
Speaker 6: Yes, no, absolutely, I mean Susan Collins plays a unique
Speaker 6: role in the Senate right now. M Finally for me,
Speaker 6: On Saturday, a car bomb exploded at a police station
Speaker 6: in Dunmurrae, Northern Ireland outside Belfast. A group calling itself
Speaker 6: the quote unquote New IRA claimed responsibility and a sixty
Speaker 6: six year old man has been arrested.
Speaker 2: Yeah, new IRA, sixty six year old man. Well, the
Speaker 2: new IRAS's it grows out of the real IRA. Right.
Speaker 2: Was it the new IRA who killed the journalist a
Speaker 2: few years back in Belfast? You know what, I don't know?
Speaker 1: The new Ira yep admitted responsibility. Yeah, yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: new IRA as well. Lara McKee is the name of
Speaker 1: the journalist who was killed. Okay, I think just out
Speaker 1: of negligence and incompetence during an action these people were
Speaker 1: a part of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is like just before COVID at times. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I do remember.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 2: Two large vessels, including a tanker, have been seized by
Speaker 2: pirates off Somalia. Another attempted hijacking by pirates was prevented.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to quote the ukmto here quote the
Speaker 2: master of a cargo vessel was approached by two small
Speaker 2: fishing vessels with armed persons support. One vessel approached within
Speaker 2: six hundred meters, warning shots were fired and the suspicious
Speaker 2: craft returned fire. The suspicious boat moved away and made
Speaker 2: clear of the vessel. All crew are safe and accounted for.
Speaker 2: Vessels are advised to transit with caution and report and
Speaker 2: the suspicious activities to UK MDO authorities are investigating. I
Speaker 2: saw another incident where a ship had fired a flare
Speaker 2: people who were allegedly attempting to board it right that,
Speaker 2: it seems like there has been an uptick an incidant,
Speaker 2: especially as ships generally are having a hard time right now.
Speaker 2: The United States has also been boarding a number of
Speaker 2: vessels to inspect them as part of its blockade on
Speaker 2: Iran and Iranian goods. Secondly, j NIM that Ali Islam
Speaker 2: while Muslimin and the Asquad Liberation Front in Mali launched
Speaker 2: a shock offensive this week that saw them sweep into
Speaker 2: Mali's capital, assassinate the defense minister, and force the military
Speaker 2: Hunter and its allied Russian forces to abandon whole cities.
Speaker 2: They also abandoned a number of bases right there. J
Speaker 2: and I AM have captured like massive amounts of Russian
Speaker 2: Africa core material. But this is a pretty ground shaking offensive,
Speaker 2: a big change for Mali. The Hunter in the Ammar
Speaker 2: I still keep calling them that they've rebranded themselves as
Speaker 2: a civilian government. They're not now min A Lang gets
Speaker 2: retired as a general and just become president and change
Speaker 2: closed and done the same shit like the Hunter reclaimed
Speaker 2: Falam this week, which using Chin State. It's capital of
Speaker 2: Chinn State. Fighting has been happening there for months. I've
Speaker 2: been talking to people pretty regularly who are taking part
Speaker 2: in the in the battle there. They're obviously, you know,
Speaker 2: they lost friends in the battle. They are not happy
Speaker 2: about this, but I think it's fair to say that
Speaker 2: spirits among the resistance generally remain pretty high, and they
Speaker 2: hope that they will return to Palam soon enough. Doug
Speaker 2: Bergham has announced a United States Geographic is it geographical
Speaker 2: or geological USGS geological server?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know that because of the film Evolution starring
Speaker 1: David Dukovn not familiar. This is an important piece of
Speaker 1: news for the listeners. There was a brief period of
Speaker 1: time in between X Files and Californication where we thought
Speaker 1: that David Duchovny might have a career as a comedic actor.
Speaker 2: And no, he did not that he might have a career.
Speaker 6: I loved he said a great.
Speaker 2: Just not as a comedic actor. Yeah, Okay, So, Doug
Speaker 2: Bergen has announced that the United States Geological Survey found
Speaker 2: enough lithium to replace three centuries of imports in Appalachia.
Speaker 1: Enough left the end to do that or make one
Speaker 1: American small town normal for a weekend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to read from this because it's kind
Speaker 2: of interesting. Quite the southern Appalachians hold an estimated one
Speaker 2: point four to three million metric tons of lithium oxide
Speaker 2: concentrated in the Carolinas, and the Northern Appalachians estimated nine
Speaker 2: hundred thousand metric tons concentrated in Maine and New Hampshire,
Speaker 2: according to estimates in a new USGS scientific paper. That
Speaker 2: is like, I guess Big Appalachia like going up into
Speaker 2: Maine there Leaving that aside. Lithium mining is incredibly disruptive
Speaker 2: to the environment. Right Generally, there's two ways you could
Speaker 2: do it. You can extract it from brine like they
Speaker 2: do in Chile, and I think other places think they're
Speaker 2: trying to do that in California. Otherwise it's open pit mining.
Speaker 2: The water use, energy use, ecological damage will be huge.
Speaker 2: Potential for disasters is not zero, and the people of
Speaker 2: apple Lecture should be more than familiar with how this
Speaker 2: tends to go right. This is the long history of
Speaker 2: mining and mining disasters. Moving on, Donald Trump has reposted
Speaker 2: a tweet about changing the name of Ice to nice
Speaker 2: nice Agents. They should do this. I want them to
Speaker 2: do this. It would be absolutely disastrous for audio journalism.
Speaker 1: It's it's it'd be like, look, we understand, you know,
Speaker 1: it's nineteen forty three. People have a lot of issues
Speaker 1: with the Gestapo. We're gonna call them the funestoppo now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the nice stoppo. Yeah, the great style process now
Speaker 2: stands for super sweet.
Speaker 6: Actually, the White House account and the DHS account have
Speaker 6: posted nice images or hype videos since this as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have to consider there's like a forty chance
Speaker 1: this happens at least.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, this might happen.
Speaker 1: If this could very much happen, Like we're laughing, but
Speaker 1: this could be the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah. What does the END stand for national? National? It's
Speaker 2: just it's what they call a backronym. I know, Garrison
Speaker 2: with these guys, the N could have stood for a
Speaker 2: couple of things, you thinks. Yeah, so, uh Trump truth,
Speaker 2: great idea do it? That is how policy is made
Speaker 2: these days.
Speaker 6: This is hugover and policy works now via via truth.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this has made something clear to me that I
Speaker 1: was kind of dancing around for all, which is that
Speaker 1: I am in support in general of any policy that
Speaker 1: just pulls the wool off of people's eyes like this.
Speaker 1: This is one of those things where it's now should
Speaker 1: be clearer to even the really stupid people, where we
Speaker 1: are as a country when we do so, when something
Speaker 1: like this happens, and so I'm supportive of it, Like
Speaker 1: we can't have any artifice. The more you dress things up,
Speaker 1: the more people get deranged. So at least this everyone
Speaker 1: knows what's happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, really clear. I'm also Germany in favor of like
Speaker 2: they have a budget, it is vast, but it is
Speaker 2: fixed and if they want to spend it all rewrapping
Speaker 2: their vehicles to say nice, yeah fine. Also it's gonna
Speaker 2: make them feel lame.
Speaker 6: Are they gonna do that by buying end stickers or
Speaker 6: do they have to get the whole new sticker? Do
Speaker 6: you think right? Are they slap the end?
Speaker 2: I hope they just slap it in. I know, if
Speaker 2: we want to open the open door and I'm having
Speaker 2: stickers with in on that, yeah, who knows? Garrison they
Speaker 2: had previously spent quite a lot of money wrapping vehicles,
Speaker 2: so it's not beyond them to get Maybe they'll get
Speaker 2: a whole rebrand. Maybe it'll be nice and a picture
Speaker 2: of someone like holding cake. Or they got to find
Speaker 2: some way to spend the seven bajillion dollars. Yeah they have, so.
Speaker 1: Either that or you know, when we get someone better
Speaker 1: in We could keep the name, but just create like
Speaker 1: a brand partnership with the city of Nice. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to say that like it's like and turn them
Speaker 1: into advertising instead of pulling people away from their families.
Speaker 1: They can tell people about all of the new deals
Speaker 1: on airfare to France that are available right now.
Speaker 6: We don't even need to abolish Nice.
Speaker 2: We can just perform it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we could just we could just perform it to
Speaker 1: a totism agency for one city in France.
Speaker 2: There is a type of biscuit in Britain which I
Speaker 2: suspect maybe comes from Nice Finish Germany referred to as
Speaker 2: a Nice biscuit because it has Nice stamped on the biscuit. Sure,
Speaker 2: so perhaps we could instead of guns, give them biscuits
Speaker 2: and they can hand those out.
Speaker 1: Think of how much better it'll be Some guy shows
Speaker 1: up for his like, you know, immigration court meeting, and
Speaker 1: he finishes that. On his way out, there's a delegation
Speaker 1: of guys from from Nice just being like, you want
Speaker 1: to go on vacation from one of France's top five
Speaker 1: or six cities.
Speaker 2: I assume the niceise cops. Yeah, they give you like
Speaker 2: one of their special salents they make there with. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so many. Yeah, it could be great. Hit us up,
Speaker 2: it could be this could work. Yeah, if you're the
Speaker 2: mayor of Nice, we can we can introduce you. Yeah. Finally,
Speaker 2: the United States has indicted the governor of Sino Law
Speaker 2: on drug grafficking charges, which is a pretty significant thing.
Speaker 6: Well that's not as funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, no, Well I'm not going to be
Speaker 2: brand rebranding it as clearly are they.
Speaker 6: Speaking of not being funny? Let's actually talk about the
Speaker 6: bad news this week.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana voting
Speaker 6: map as a quote unconstitutional racial gerrymander unquote that effectively
Speaker 6: created a black voting district. The ruling was split six
Speaker 6: three on ideological lines. Alito, who wrote the majority opinion,
Speaker 6: saying that the district violated the equal Protection Clause of
Speaker 6: the Constitution. The new ruling substantially undermines the nineteen sixty
Speaker 6: five Voting Rights Act, reinterpreting Section two provisions against racial
Speaker 6: discrimination to require evidence of intentional racial discrimination, not just
Speaker 6: discrimination as the effect, so in the future, proving discriminatory
Speaker 6: motives may be needed in order to win legal challenges
Speaker 6: against gerrymandering. By citing the Voting Rights Act. This ruling
Speaker 6: specifically depowers black voters while enabling Republican jerrymandering to continue.
Speaker 6: Republicans in the South will now be able to redraw
Speaker 6: house district maps that lean Democrat that have a high
Speaker 6: number of Black voters, and pr strates. At least fifteen
Speaker 6: house districts are now at risk of elimination. In the dissent,
Speaker 6: Justice Alanna Kagan wrote that court's decision will set back
Speaker 6: the foundational right to Congress rented of racial equality in
Speaker 6: electoral opportunity unquote. Yeah, this is that this is possibly
Speaker 6: the worst escalation of the continued undermining of the Voting
Speaker 6: Rights Act.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, I mean, this is inarguably the
Speaker 1: most important thing going on this week, even with the
Speaker 1: shooting that we haven't talked about, like the gutting of
Speaker 1: laymore people died for like the Voting Rights Act has
Speaker 1: a body count attached to it. Yeah, the court has
Speaker 1: to be packed the next Like, if there's ever another
Speaker 1: democratic or left of center administration and they don't pack
Speaker 1: the court, there's simply no chance of improving or fixing
Speaker 1: any of the problems this country has.
Speaker 2: Like it's a necessary prerequisite. It's no coming back from this.
Speaker 6: DC and Porto ricurls need to become states to have
Speaker 6: their own congressional representation. Any future opposition administration has to
Speaker 6: go completely glove sauce like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we have to imprison a bunch of the
Speaker 1: people currently running things. Yeah, Like, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff that has to happen, but one of those is
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court needs to get packed, because by god,
Speaker 1: these people are not going to approve of anything that
Speaker 1: isn't insane.
Speaker 6: It's unclear if this rulely will have immediate impacts on
Speaker 6: the upcoming midterms, but by twenty twenty eight they will
Speaker 6: certainly have impacts.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they had filed for an emergency decision on
Speaker 2: redistruting or I guess not redistruting like predistricting. I don't know.
Speaker 2: What you would call that, but to get this in
Speaker 2: effect before the midterms.
Speaker 6: Basically, Yeah, the Supreme Court also sent us to a
Speaker 6: lower court to work out more details. It's going to
Speaker 6: obviously be ongoing little litigation about it, just as there
Speaker 6: will be about Florida's redistricting measure that they are trying
Speaker 6: to finalize before the midterms as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and indeed, Californias, I think there have been some arguments,
Speaker 2: may like, now that this decision has been made by
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court, right, like, other states will have to
Speaker 2: consider this in their redistricting.
Speaker 6: Should we take a break, we shall, and then we
Speaker 6: can talk about the dinner. Yeah, okay, we are back.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about the dinner. Let's talk about the shooting
Speaker 6: that happened at the dinner, the thing that everyone else
Speaker 6: has been talking about for the past five six days.
Speaker 6: So yeah, on April twenty fifth, during the White House
Speaker 6: Correspondence dinner, Everyone's favorite event.
Speaker 2: It's a shame we weren't there.
Speaker 6: It is unfortunate that we were not there to point
Speaker 6: our vertical video at our face as the news happens
Speaker 6: in front of us.
Speaker 2: Oh, I would have been filming just your face.
Speaker 1: Garrison and just like really tight in like to the
Speaker 1: point where it's it's difficult for you to get up
Speaker 1: and move. I keep wedging, no garrison, face the camera.
Speaker 1: Come on, people need to see this.
Speaker 2: I'd be assuming the war fight aposture.
Speaker 6: You're gonna get up like Haanksteth and the storm around. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would also be shielding myself behind Stephen Miller's wife.
Speaker 6: Hed have been protecting the white I know either way.
Speaker 2: Ye, yeah, yeah, it's funny.
Speaker 6: Yeah, at least at least Miller wasn't wasn't getting cooked,
Speaker 6: unlike the FBI director.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is funny that he abandoned his wife. Yeah yeah, girlfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I guess we should just go. Let's recap the events
Speaker 1: for people who live under a rock.
Speaker 6: So shortly before eight thirty pm, the alleged shooter approached
Speaker 6: the Secret Service security screening checkpoint located on the terrace
Speaker 6: level of the hotel. This was the level above the
Speaker 6: ballroom level where the actual dinner was taking place. James,
Speaker 6: we should probably just read from the court document.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'm just yet, I'm going to read
Speaker 2: this straight from the government's DFJ statement in the court
Speaker 2: right before the dependent approach to checkpoint, he discarded a
Speaker 2: long black coat that concealed a twelve gage pump action shook.
Speaker 2: That defendant then sprinted through one of the magnetometers at
Speaker 2: the checkpoint and ran in the direction of the stairs
Speaker 2: leading to the ballroom, where the President and members of
Speaker 2: his family and cabinet were located. As the defendant did so,
Speaker 2: he held a shotgun in both hands in a raised
Speaker 2: position parallel to the ground. A United States Secret Service
Speaker 2: officer observed the defendant fire the shotgun in the direction
Speaker 2: of the stairs leading down to the ballroom. The Secret
Speaker 2: Service officer and others at the checkpoint heard the gun shot.
Speaker 2: The Secret Service officer drew his service weapon and fired
Speaker 2: five times the defendant. The defendant fell to the ground
Speaker 2: and was restrained by law enforcement and was placed under arrests.
Speaker 2: The defendant suffered a minor injury to his knee, but
Speaker 2: was not shot. We can in a second talk about
Speaker 2: whether he shot the Secret Service officer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because there's an interesting Washington Post review that's out
Speaker 1: too now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a couple of court documents just filed today. Yeah,
Speaker 2: let's talk a little bit about the just circumstances this right,
Speaker 2: this person had purchased. According to court documents, he purchased
Speaker 2: two weapons from separate firearm stealers in California, buying the
Speaker 2: shotgun on or about August seventeenth, twenty twenty five, and
Speaker 2: the pistol on or about October sixth, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the pistol for a while. The shotgun was a
Speaker 6: more of a recent purchase.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. The pistol is a fascinating choice, amazing choice.
Speaker 2: Thirty eight super Yeah, I have never seen a thirty
Speaker 2: eight super hanggun outside of the They're they're common in
Speaker 2: Mexico because they have a certain cachet and cultural value.
Speaker 2: Every thirty eight superhandgun than I have personally held was
Speaker 2: embossed in gold and silver. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and usually a Mexican flag, but not exclusively.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or like some sort of heraldry that denotes but
Speaker 2: it's associated sometimes with organized crime, Like I'm not when
Speaker 2: I say associated with organized crime. A few weeks ago, right,
Speaker 2: I talked about a material support for terrorism case which
Speaker 2: centered on on a firearms dealer who was selling grips
Speaker 2: for thirty thirty eight super pistols with images that are
Speaker 2: associated with cartels, Like when you buy a thirty eight super.
Speaker 2: Someone at the ATF gets an email. I bet like
Speaker 2: these things that are very rare and they have a
Speaker 2: certain consumer base.
Speaker 1: Now, obviously there are normal thirty eight super pistols that exist.
Speaker 1: They're just like today, most people buy because it's a
Speaker 1: weird moon round too. There's not a it's not a
Speaker 1: normal like. It's not there's nothing wrong with it, but
Speaker 1: it's not a round that's commonly carried. It's expensive. It's
Speaker 1: primarily something that has like cachet for drug dealers. But
Speaker 1: I guess also my interpretation and I guess we're I know,
Speaker 1: maybe this is getting too much into my SA side
Speaker 1: of things, But I do have a theory as to
Speaker 1: why he would have picked this gun and the shotgun
Speaker 1: that he picked.
Speaker 2: But we can talk about that later if you want.
Speaker 6: We'll get that in the sac.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he also had a I believe, two knives and
Speaker 2: four daggers. Yeah, six bladed weapons. Really want to see
Speaker 2: pictures of those bladed weapons? They are in the court documents, buddy,
Speaker 2: let me have you. Let me let me just find
Speaker 2: those for you.
Speaker 6: We have an enhanced image of some of them too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we should talk about this. The government submitted
Speaker 2: a quote unquote enhanced image. In the court case, mister
Speaker 2: Allen took a picture of himself at about eighth three pm,
Speaker 2: so about half an hour before he rushed past the magnetometer. There.
Speaker 2: In the picture we can see he is wearing black
Speaker 2: suit pants. He is wearing a black shirt. He has
Speaker 2: a red tie which inexplicably is tucked into his pants.
Speaker 2: He has a shoulder holster and a large k by
Speaker 2: knife in a in a downwards draw configuration. He is
Speaker 2: carrying a pair of pliers and a pair of wirecutters
Speaker 2: in a holster on his left side. On his right side,
Speaker 2: he is carrying a small leather bag which allegedly contained
Speaker 2: more shotgun rounds, and the nineteen leve is in a
Speaker 2: crusteral showd to holster right. None of this screams highly trained.
Speaker 6: The quote unquote enhanced image was basically a zoomed in
Speaker 6: the oh yeah copy of this photo that, if I
Speaker 6: were to guess, the word enhanced means that they use
Speaker 6: some kind of sharpening or AI image sharpening tool.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, none of which are real In terms of like,
Speaker 1: none of which are actually enhancing or sharpening.
Speaker 6: The details that you are seeing should not be allowed
Speaker 6: in to be like viewed in court, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The AI is guessing there's not extra data in the photo.
Speaker 1: The AI is uncovering, Like, the AI is basically attempting
Speaker 1: to clean up an image. Which is fine if you
Speaker 1: have like a blurry photo of you and like your
Speaker 1: wife when you got in your first apartment together that
Speaker 1: you want cleaned up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's not it's not should not be, should
Speaker 2: not be. Yeah, I'm sure we'll see the defense challenge
Speaker 2: and I'll be interested to note, like what AI they
Speaker 2: used and did they did they also very iterations of
Speaker 2: the enhancement or did they you know, like this will
Speaker 2: be interesting. I don't think it materially inserty anything. We
Speaker 2: can see the same Samsung phone. I can see the
Speaker 2: handle of the knife in both imagies. I can see
Speaker 2: the handle of their hangguns.
Speaker 6: This is more of like a principal thing. Yeah, then, like,
Speaker 6: did this specifically affect the photo in this case in
Speaker 6: any way that would lead to the evidence being more useful?
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, this is a bad slippery slope.
Speaker 2: So talking of his phone, he kept it with him
Speaker 2: as he traveled across the country on a train, taking
Speaker 2: notes about the landscape as he went Amtrak. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: he took Amtrak and like he was enchanted by like
Speaker 2: the deserts and the he liked Chicago. He thought the
Speaker 2: woods on the East coast were greatly.
Speaker 6: He kept like a like a journal where he wrote
Speaker 6: about the trap.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the notesap of his phone. Yeah, and then
Speaker 2: the day of his attempted shooting, he used open sources
Speaker 2: to track the present movements. Should we move on to
Speaker 2: did he fire his gun?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 6: That's a big because because that is that's a big
Speaker 6: question right now. Yeah, that's one half the question. The
Speaker 6: other half is did he shoot a Secret Service agent?
Speaker 4: Which?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 2: Did he shoot anybody?
Speaker 6: H The DOJ is saying he fired a gun.
Speaker 2: The DOJ claims that, but is not really affirmatively saying that.
Speaker 6: He shot an agent.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, they they've said a couple of different things. They've
Speaker 1: said that an agent was struck by gunfire. They've said
Speaker 1: that it was not friendly fire. But they have not
Speaker 1: said that he was struck by the assailant shotgun, by
Speaker 1: the gunman's actual weapon. And that's partly because there's not
Speaker 1: hard evidence yet that the gunmen actually fired his shotgun.
Speaker 2: Let me read you what they fired in court today. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the evidence gathered analyzed to date establishes your client fired
Speaker 2: his Mossburg twelve gage pumpatch and shotgun at least one
Speaker 2: time as he rampast some magnetometis on the terrace level
Speaker 2: of the Washington Hilton on April twenty fifth, twenty twenty six,
Speaker 2: when the weapon was recovered, had once been ard case
Speaker 2: in the chamber, which has been identified as having been
Speaker 2: fired in the mos Bog shotgun. The government's preliminary ballistics
Speaker 2: video analysis show that your client fired his shotgun in
Speaker 2: the direction of Secret Service Officer VG, which Officer VEG observed. Additionally,
Speaker 2: at least one fragment was recovered from the crime scene
Speaker 2: that was physically consistent with a single buckshot pellet. That
Speaker 2: fragment was recovered from a location at the scene consistent
Speaker 2: with your client firing his shotgun in the direction of
Speaker 2: Oppicer VEG. The government is aware of no physical evidence,
Speaker 2: digital video evidence, or witness statements that are inconsistent with
Speaker 2: the theory that your client fired his shotgun in the
Speaker 2: direction of Officer VG or the officer of VEG was
Speaker 2: indeed shot once in the chest while wearing a ballistic vest,
Speaker 2: they go on them further to say, the government also
Speaker 2: recovered five spent nine millimeters LUGA cartridge cases, each of
Speaker 2: which was determined to have been fired from Officer Veg's
Speaker 2: service weapon. The government also identified five separate bullet holes
Speaker 2: in the walls opposite from Officer VG, consistent with the
Speaker 2: direction of Sevigi fired his service weapon. That's like the
Speaker 2: most Yeah, that's the most detail that we've seen from
Speaker 2: them of their case.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: His defense had previously suggested that the because of some
Speaker 2: of the public statements Attorney General Blanche have made, the
Speaker 2: government may have exculpatory evidence either that he didn't fire
Speaker 2: his gun or that he didn't shoot the Secret Service
Speaker 2: agent in question.
Speaker 6: Which administration officials have gone on in the news to
Speaker 6: say that the Secret Service agent did not shoot himself,
Speaker 6: which yes, is not saying that another Secret Service agent
Speaker 6: did not shoot him though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And it doesn't seem like he shot into
Speaker 2: a plaster board wall, it seems right, so he didn't
Speaker 2: maybe get splashed back, which.
Speaker 1: Is you know, the only holes we've seen look like
Speaker 1: they came from pistols, and that's something the Washington Posts
Speaker 1: actually did like look into, because there's at least one.
Speaker 1: There's a couple I think of livestream videos that showed
Speaker 1: like holes from a bullet in the wall. But the
Speaker 1: Post talked to Rick Vasquez, the firearms consultant and former
Speaker 1: chief of the firearms Technology branch at the ATF or
Speaker 1: what was then the ATF, who said that the holes
Speaker 1: were consistent with handgun rounds. Now, that's not like a
Speaker 1: firearms technology. There's a lot of WU there, but it's
Speaker 1: also pretty easy to look. I mean, sometimes it could
Speaker 1: be kind of messy because like the balls and like
Speaker 1: a double lot buck shotshell are kind of similar in
Speaker 1: size to nine.
Speaker 2: Millimeter right somewhere in the thirty caliber range, right, but
Speaker 2: they don't tend.
Speaker 1: To hit with the same kinds of patterns, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there does tend to be a significant difference, especially that
Speaker 1: kind of range. The night of the shooting or within
Speaker 1: a few hours of a Trump posted security camera footage
Speaker 1: and the Post got a hold of a higher resolution
Speaker 1: copy of that footage and they went through like a
Speaker 1: frame by frame analysis of it because, as you noted, James,
Speaker 1: they claimed that cold has charged his shotgun while he
Speaker 1: was passing through the magnometers. The magnetometers, right, they didn't
Speaker 1: say it happened to elsewhere. They said it like as
Speaker 1: he was going to that checkpoint that you can watch
Speaker 1: him sprint through like he's fucking rudo running his way
Speaker 1: into the correspondence dinner. And in their frame by frame analysis,
Speaker 1: the Post only found evidence of four muzzle flashes, all
Speaker 1: of them from the agent who was allegedly struck by
Speaker 1: something's weapon.
Speaker 2: Right, So, first off, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, and you can hear in other footage, you can
Speaker 1: clearly hear more shots than that, Like I don't doubt
Speaker 1: that there were that he discharged five shots, but the
Speaker 1: video only shows four, and crucially, it does not show
Speaker 1: Cole's shotgun firing, and the video follows him until he
Speaker 1: goes off screen. So maybe whoever wrote that out should
Speaker 1: have written after passing through the magnanometers.
Speaker 2: But they seem to pretty clearly be saying.
Speaker 1: It was while he was in that little security area,
Speaker 1: and there's not evidence in the footage of him firing.
Speaker 1: We don't see anything that looks like firing, Like nobody
Speaker 1: reacts as if he has fired, Like there's just no
Speaker 1: evidence that he shot. And you know, they're hinging a
Speaker 1: lot on the fact that there's this spent cartridge in
Speaker 1: the chamber of his twelve gauge. But number one, that's
Speaker 1: actually not an uncommon way to store that kind of
Speaker 1: twelve gage shotgun with a spent shell in the in
Speaker 1: the breach, because it makes it easy if something were
Speaker 1: to happen. It makes it easier to basically get a
Speaker 1: fresh round in without needing to have a chambered round
Speaker 1: at all times, which a lot of people, most people don't.
Speaker 2: Like to do. Yeah, and that'll drop say five that like,
Speaker 2: it's a bad idea to do that.
Speaker 1: You don't want to do that with a shotgun, you know.
Speaker 1: Is it possible that he was storing it that way?
Speaker 1: Is it possible that he loaded one an empty round
Speaker 1: in there intentionally because he didn't actually he was hoping
Speaker 1: to do a suicide by cop and he didn't intend
Speaker 1: to actually shoot anybody. Is it possible he just fucked up.
Speaker 1: It's also perfectly possible he fired later. But it's really
Speaker 1: weird that they wrote it out that way if that's
Speaker 1: what they're alleging, because we see him when he's at
Speaker 1: the security checkpoint at the magnanometer and he doesn't fire
Speaker 1: in the footage.
Speaker 3: That we have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's been a lot of press statements that are
Speaker 2: sort of talking around exactly not making the explicit statement
Speaker 2: he fired his shotgun and he shot the officer in
Speaker 2: the chest, right, and certainly, like I'm not sure about
Speaker 2: the distance we're talking about, Like, and then then thus
Speaker 2: the spread that would happen with that, it.
Speaker 1: Would be minimal spread even with a sod off in
Speaker 1: a narrow corridor like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you go by an inch per yard, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's the amount that yeah, really spreads. And then it's
Speaker 2: so if you hit this person once, assuming this person
Speaker 2: has a chest at twenty inches wide, Yeah, that doesn't
Speaker 2: line up, right, Yeah, it might be different with bugshot.
Speaker 6: I mean, obviously, if they had evidence that the secret
Speaker 6: cerviationent was shot by mister Allen, we'd have seen it.
Speaker 6: They would be running with that. The fact that they
Speaker 6: do not have evidence that the agent was shot by
Speaker 6: Allan is shown in the way that they're like talking
Speaker 6: about this, like.
Speaker 1: He was shot, yeah, and the guy discharged to separate
Speaker 1: statements exactly two separate statements. Yeah, they're still affirming that
Speaker 1: the agent did not shoot himself, which does not mean
Speaker 1: that he was not shot by another agent. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's a in that Washington Post article. They talked
Speaker 1: to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and asked him to explain,
Speaker 1: like why why are you guys never willing to say,
Speaker 1: like where the round.
Speaker 2: That hit the officer came from? Right?
Speaker 1: They asked him the question that we've been asking, and
Speaker 1: Blanche answered, we want to get that right.
Speaker 2: We're still looking at that. There you go, right, And
Speaker 2: that is a big change.
Speaker 1: As the Post notes of a day earlier, he told
Speaker 1: ABC that officials believe the gunman had shot the officer,
Speaker 1: so he has pulled back, which leads me to think
Speaker 1: maybe this guy didn't shoot at all, or maybe he
Speaker 1: fired later, maybe even totally by accident, maybe when he
Speaker 1: was falling down he like discharged. But so also you
Speaker 1: would think there'd be a photo somewhere of where he
Speaker 1: discharged the shotgun. It's surprisingly easy for bullets to get lost, right,
Speaker 1: and by that, I mean just get so destroyed and
Speaker 1: what not by impact that there's not really much of
Speaker 1: anything to find. That happens all the time. It's really rare,
Speaker 1: and I would argue impossible to discharge a twelve gage
Speaker 1: shotgun with any kind of shot shell in a fucking
Speaker 1: hotel like this and not have there be some sign
Speaker 1: of what you They make holes in things, that's what
Speaker 1: they're full. They make multiple holes. Yeah, unless it's a slug,
Speaker 1: but then they make a really big hole. And cold
Speaker 1: had specifically written that he was not intending to use
Speaker 1: slugs in his manifesto suicide know, whatever you want to
Speaker 1: call it. He specifically stated that he was using a
Speaker 1: twelve gage loaded with buckshot because he wanted to reduce
Speaker 1: the chances of overpenetration and of injuring or killing someone
Speaker 1: he did not intend to hit.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about his background, maybe
Speaker 6: a few other things from that manifesto. I know, Robert,
Speaker 6: you've done some digging into that. I did the.
Speaker 1: Normal thing that at least one of us does, generally
Speaker 1: all of us do in some form. Ever, after every
Speaker 1: kind of mass shooting or like publicly notable terror attack
Speaker 1: or whatever.
Speaker 2: And just found myself looking through a stranger social media.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's been a bunch a couple of good articles
Speaker 1: out about him now most of like the first things
Speaker 1: that we knew about this guy, Like the very first
Speaker 1: fact is when his name came out, there were two
Speaker 1: different guys who kind of lived in the Torrents.
Speaker 2: Area who were immediately like there were.
Speaker 1: Responses under Cole Thomas Allen or Cole Allen, and one
Speaker 1: of them was like some fucking white dude who worked
Speaker 1: at it was a consulting firm or something.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 1: It wasn't very but he just looked like he might
Speaker 1: have been thirty. And the other was Cole Thomas Allen
Speaker 1: and it was him winning a Teacher of the Year
Speaker 1: award at the He worked at a company that was
Speaker 1: basically doing like top college test prep tutoring.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, so he was a teacher.
Speaker 1: Some people that are really angry at the description of
Speaker 1: him as a teacher because they're being like, he's trying
Speaker 1: to like bad mouth public school teachers. He's not a
Speaker 1: public school teacher, but there are other kinds of teachers.
Speaker 1: He was a teacher of the months at the tutoring
Speaker 1: academy that he worked at. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had
Speaker 1: found by the time I got there, which is like
Speaker 1: twenty minutes after the name started spreading the Facebook page
Speaker 1: of the school that he worked or of the tutoring
Speaker 1: academy whatever that he worked at, which I'm not going
Speaker 1: to name, but it was hundreds of posts already being
Speaker 1: like good to see this is who's teaching your kids,
Speaker 1: you know, like you hired a terrorist all this kind
Speaker 1: of like yeah, yeah, it's it's it's bleak. It's the
Speaker 1: normal thing that happens, you know, with anything related to
Speaker 1: this in this case. Right after that, Trump posted a
Speaker 1: picture of the detained and stripped, mostly naked gunman that
Speaker 1: was obviously the Cole Allen who had won the Teacher
Speaker 1: of the Month, like immediately visible, like you could do.
Speaker 1: It was a positive idea was very quick from that
Speaker 1: point on. So at that point a couple other things
Speaker 1: started coming out because you know, I had looked through
Speaker 1: from that Facebook page, I had found a couple other
Speaker 1: posts about Cole Thomas Allen or different places where he
Speaker 1: had accounts, which made a couple other details of his
Speaker 1: background obvious. He was a mechanical engineering student in Caltech
Speaker 1: kind of during the first Trump administration. Yep, you know
Speaker 1: that was honestly, like most of what was like immediately
Speaker 1: obvious is that like he'd been an engineering student at Caltech,
Speaker 1: he'd worked as a teacher, and he'd been a part
Speaker 1: of In his LinkedIn, you can see that he'd been
Speaker 1: a part of Caltech's Christian Fellowship and the NERF Club.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, now, Ken Klippenstein talked to one of his
Speaker 1: co fellow peers during this period of time. He knew
Speaker 1: that while he was at NERF Club, cal had like
Speaker 1: kind of led there was like a conflict within the
Speaker 1: club over people modifying and otherwise altering their NERF guns
Speaker 1: to make them more resemble real weapons, as NERF has
Speaker 1: also come out with more guns that look like real
Speaker 1: guns over the years, and he was really against this, Like,
Speaker 1: he was very against the idea of like NERF guns
Speaker 1: that were modified to look like real guns, or just
Speaker 1: like people playing with things that looked like real guns.
Speaker 2: Now, fast forward to the actual day of the shooting.
Speaker 1: His blue sky account got found fairly quickly alongside the LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: Obviously that got deleted in very short order, but it
Speaker 1: was archived, thankfully by a very nice person who realized
Speaker 1: that it would probably be useful to have actual documentation
Speaker 1: about what this guy was doing online rather than rely
Speaker 1: on a bunch of different articles making claims. So I
Speaker 1: went through all of that, you know, as soon as
Speaker 1: it came out. He had about five hundred followers who
Speaker 1: was following about one hundred and fourteen people. He did
Speaker 1: not post often on his own, but when he did,
Speaker 1: in like the two different occasions I could find of
Speaker 1: him like posting on his own in this incomplete archive
Speaker 1: of his Blue Sky. One of them was him posting
Speaker 1: in like sympathy and solidarity with Ukraine, which is something
Speaker 1: that was very consistent. He reposted a ton of different
Speaker 1: fundraisers from different Ukrainian military units that was.
Speaker 6: At his user bio as well's support for Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was massively supportive of Ukraine and very angry
Speaker 1: at the Trump administration's failure to follow through with US
Speaker 1: obligations in that regard. And the only other post of
Speaker 1: his that was like him writing something that I I
Speaker 1: saw was him basically critiquing an article about using AI
Speaker 1: in the classroom, and like people who were advocated use
Speaker 1: of AI in the classroom, he's very much against that.
Speaker 1: He was a reposter, though he was a reposter, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about like some of the things he reposted.
Speaker 1: His bio read hi, I'm a random Californian guy, with
Speaker 1: posts about American politics, support for Ukraine, and observations of
Speaker 1: small creatures. And then he includes a quote, I choose
Speaker 1: my own battlefields, not through my blood, but with my heart.
Speaker 1: I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want.
Speaker 1: So that is I like type that quote in and
Speaker 1: that is a quote from an anime, the same anime
Speaker 1: that his his profile picture was also from this specific anime,
Speaker 1: which is Kagura. I don't know how that's pronounced. I
Speaker 1: think the character that he had is PfP of was Kagura.
Speaker 1: It's this like red haired lady with these weird like
Speaker 1: ball things on either side of her hair. Like I
Speaker 1: don't fully know how to describe this lady's hairstyle. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like vaguely Princess Leiah esque. And that appears
Speaker 1: to be whos his PfP photo is. Okay, the series
Speaker 1: is called Gintama. I don't know much about this. I've
Speaker 1: heard people online being like, oh, he was a fan
Speaker 1: of like this anime that means something or other, but like,
Speaker 1: I don't actually understand enough about the anime to give
Speaker 1: much of an analysis of that. I think it's just
Speaker 1: people being like, because of the character he likes, it
Speaker 1: makes sense that he's a guy who would do something
Speaker 1: very extreme. I don't know enough about the anime to
Speaker 1: say how relevant that is, But the quote kind of
Speaker 1: does sound relevant to what he actually did, Like I
Speaker 1: stand on the battlefield to protect what I want.
Speaker 2: And you can read stuff like that in his manifesto.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can read stuff like that as manifesto, which
Speaker 1: we'll talk about. His actual reposts are very normal lib coded. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a liberal hugueally supportive of Ukraine. Nothing about Palestine
Speaker 1: in there, nothing about Israel in there. Photo has since
Speaker 1: come out that appears to be a legitimate of him
Speaker 1: wearing like an IDF shirt some time ago.
Speaker 2: He doesn't say anything. Again in the.
Speaker 1: Limited we don't also have we don't have his whole
Speaker 1: bluesky in here. In the limited archive we have, I
Speaker 1: don't see anything of him like him talking at all
Speaker 1: about Israel. So I don't have enough to say that,
Speaker 1: like he was strongly supportive, but he certainly there's a
Speaker 1: real discrepancy between how he talks about Ukraine and and
Speaker 1: him mentioning anything at all about what's happening in Gaza.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what is believed to be his Twitter accountter has
Speaker 6: also been scraped and not as well archives, but there's
Speaker 6: there's screenshots of reposts on Twitter reposting Brianna Wu with
Speaker 6: some criticism of pro Palestine protesters or things that are
Speaker 6: critical of Palestine and in a nominal way supportive of Israel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's kind of hard to tell.
Speaker 1: Was he just more quiet about this online because he
Speaker 1: wanted to avoid, you know, getting dogpiled, or is this
Speaker 1: just something that as the genocide gout worse and worse,
Speaker 1: he became less willing to talk about. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but it's it's kind of it's just noteworthy how much
Speaker 1: like how absent that kind of discussion is next to
Speaker 1: how often he talks about grain.
Speaker 6: Next to the Ukraine stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He also posted a bunch of very normal posts. There
Speaker 1: was one from a user you know, if you guys remember,
Speaker 1: like a week or so ago, the New York Times
Speaker 1: published an interview with Hassan Piker, the streamer, and the
Speaker 1: article was titled the rich don't play by the rules,
Speaker 1: So why should I? Why petty theft might be the
Speaker 1: new political protest. It's where Hassan tried to introduce the
Speaker 1: term micro alluding to the discourse, which I don't support
Speaker 1: at all, but it was like a pro shoplifting kind
Speaker 1: of like are you kind of getting a casual and
Speaker 1: jokey pro shoplifting argument, right, I don't want to People
Speaker 1: have blown this out of proportion, but it's interesting that
Speaker 1: he came down against Hassan's side on that. He was
Speaker 1: basically reposting someone who was like, Hey, I've spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time in countries where graft and grifting are
Speaker 1: like normal, and it's really bad for that to happen.
Speaker 1: You don't want that to happen to your country. So
Speaker 1: he's certainly not like the on the far left, like
Speaker 1: direct action is good. I love committing crimes anarchist side
Speaker 1: of things. He is not at all that kind of guy.
Speaker 1: He's a Will Stancilite. He is a lot of Will
Speaker 1: Stancel reposts, a lot of Will stancil posts. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he reposted me a couple of times. He posted me
Speaker 1: like talking about like the Pope, right, like because making
Speaker 1: fun of Trump for calling the Pope soft on crime,
Speaker 1: like not any of my like spicy.
Speaker 6: Takes, right, just like viral posts on Blue Sky.
Speaker 1: He didn't do a lot of spicy tapes. He reposted
Speaker 1: a lot of normal viral stuff you'd expect. He was
Speaker 1: really angry about COVID nineteen. He hates Elon Musk. He
Speaker 1: reposted a lot of like, you know, Elon Musk wants
Speaker 1: poor African children to die, like kind of content talking
Speaker 1: about that after some of the more recent articles about
Speaker 1: how many people died as a result of like the
Speaker 1: American like aid cuts, that Musk was a major pardon.
Speaker 1: He was very angry about that. He reposted Bill Crystal
Speaker 1: saying abolish ice, okay. And there's a couple of different
Speaker 1: posts that he shared about or from people who were
Speaker 1: criticizing the White House Correspondence dinner, and particularly like when
Speaker 1: Jake Tapper fucking made a post about, like here's the
Speaker 1: napkins that we've got that have like freedom of the press,
Speaker 1: you know, the First Amendment stuff on it that like
Speaker 1: is supposed to be like this is our protest against
Speaker 1: the president, right, Like we've got these these monogram napkins,
Speaker 1: And he made fun of that, like a lot of
Speaker 1: people did. He was generally critical of anyone who would
Speaker 1: be at the correspondence dinner, which was reflected in his
Speaker 1: manifesto where he said that like the journalists and the
Speaker 1: other people at the event who are not in the
Speaker 1: administration aren't my targets. And you know, he said he
Speaker 1: didn't want to hit them, but also he was quote
Speaker 1: I would still go through most everyone here to get
Speaker 1: to the targets if it were absolutely necessary, on the
Speaker 1: basis that most people chose to attend a speech by
Speaker 1: a pedophile, rapist and trader and are thus complicit.
Speaker 2: But I really hope it doesn't come.
Speaker 3: To that, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Another interesting bit from his manifesto's quote administration officials,
Speaker 6: not including mister Fatel, they are targets prioritized from highest
Speaker 6: ranking to lowest.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Interesting, interesting parenthetical.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's just because some people were joking
Speaker 1: after that article came out about how Cash betel they
Speaker 1: had to like break down his door because he was
Speaker 1: too drunk to reach. People were joking like, maybe it's
Speaker 1: best if Cash stays in office because he's so I
Speaker 1: wonder if that was.
Speaker 2: The joke he was making.
Speaker 1: Unclear what he meant by that, But he doesn't give
Speaker 1: us any reason to believe aso, and he doesn't share
Speaker 1: any jokes like that, right, So that is kind of
Speaker 1: legitimately baffling.
Speaker 6: Now, most of the manifesto is like apologizing to people
Speaker 6: he knows yep, for how this will be like disruptive, yeah,
Speaker 6: and then talking about his own rules of engagement, yes,
Speaker 6: which he says, quote probably in a terrible format, but
Speaker 6: I'm not military, so too bad un quote Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting because he had also shared at
Speaker 1: least one post on Blue Sky that was like kind
Speaker 1: of pro gun control, that was like talking about how
Speaker 1: it's bad to have a gun, basically like it increases
Speaker 1: the danger that you're in, which it did for this guy.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting in terms of the firearms he chose,
Speaker 1: because this is clearly a guy who supports more gun control.
Speaker 1: He seems to find it distasteful certainly to like celebrate
Speaker 1: guns right and celebrate like military style weapons. I kind
Speaker 1: of wonder if he picked the firearms he picked because
Speaker 1: they did not look like the pistol didn't look like
Speaker 1: a glock or like the standard police guns that he
Speaker 1: sees people owning, and a shotgun doesn't look like an
Speaker 1: AR fifteen AAR fifteen. Yeah, I kind of wonder, although
Speaker 1: he says it was to minimize penetration, so maybe that's
Speaker 1: more likely.
Speaker 6: The other thing I want to mention is because the
Speaker 6: shotgun was purchased in August, and he does make a
Speaker 6: few references in the manifesto too, Yes, like thinking of
Speaker 6: having done something like this for quite a while, but
Speaker 6: this was his first opportunity that he saw that seemed
Speaker 6: semi possible.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I also had the thought that, well, when he
Speaker 1: bought the shotgun, because he specifically states that he wants
Speaker 1: to use a shotgun to minimize like casualties, then the
Speaker 1: date at which he bought the shotgun might be the
Speaker 1: date at which he decided he was going to do this, right,
Speaker 1: or it might be the point which he started taking actions.
Speaker 1: It would make some that maybe that would be around
Speaker 1: when he had started planning to do this. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's so much different shit happened around August of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, it's kind of impossible to say this is
Speaker 1: definitely it. I did notice that August twenty fifth, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, is when Trump issued his additional measures to
Speaker 1: address the crime Emergency in the District of Columbia Executive Order.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the military occupation of DC.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, and this is when Trump is really and a
Speaker 1: bunch of there's a bunch of different news stories around
Speaker 1: Trump trying to deploy the National Guard in US cities,
Speaker 1: And I kind of wonder if maybe that's when he
Speaker 1: but that's purely theoretical. There was a lot of other
Speaker 1: bad stuff happening that, you know, so who's to say.
Speaker 1: He also seems to be angry about our war against Iran,
Speaker 1: like the fact, like the war of choice that Trump
Speaker 1: launched against Iran. He didn't get a post a lot
Speaker 1: about it. But there are some references in the manifesto
Speaker 1: that kind of make me feel like that that may
Speaker 1: have also been like a major thing that helped push
Speaker 1: him to make this decision, because he specifically stated that
Speaker 1: I'm a citizen of the United States of America. What
Speaker 1: my representatives do reflects me, and I am no longer
Speaker 1: one to permit a pedophile, rapist, and trader to coat
Speaker 1: my hands with his crimes, right, Like, there's some reasons
Speaker 1: to believe that that probably played into it as well.
Speaker 6: Interestingly, he does sign the manifesto with his blue sky username.
Speaker 6: Sure does Cold Force.
Speaker 2: Yeah he thought that was cool. Yeah, perhaps that was
Speaker 2: her name he used. I don't know, and there's nothing
Speaker 2: activities or like it was. Maybe that's something to him.
Speaker 1: Another thing that's probably worth talking about because Trump has
Speaker 1: made the claim several times. This guy was anti Christian.
Speaker 1: That hatred of Christianity is what drove him. As I
Speaker 1: said before, in Caltech he was a member of the
Speaker 1: Christian group. I'll talk about that in a second. But
Speaker 1: in his manifesto he specifically justifies what he's doing as
Speaker 1: a Christian. There is a segment in there where he's
Speaker 1: going through like some objections he knows people in his
Speaker 1: life will have, and kind of rebutting them. An objection
Speaker 1: one is as a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.
Speaker 1: Rebuttal turning the other cheek is for when you yourself
Speaker 1: are oppressed. I'm not the person raped in a detention camp.
Speaker 1: I'm not the fisherman executed without trial. I'm not a
Speaker 1: school kid blown up, or a child starved, or a
Speaker 1: teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Right,
Speaker 1: So he specifically is justifying this as a Christians on
Speaker 1: Christian grounds. He thanks his church, which seems to have
Speaker 1: been a major part of his life. So there's a
Speaker 1: quote from Ken Klippenstein's article about his time at Caltech.
Speaker 1: He was pretty prominent at the Caltech Christian Fellowship, pretty
Speaker 1: Christian and mellow. If I didn't see his face eating carpet.
Speaker 1: I would have never believed it. And then I found
Speaker 1: a Christianity Today piece that just came up a few
Speaker 1: hours ago, and a line from that is Alan's father,
Speaker 1: Thomas Allen, was listed as an elder at Grace United
Speaker 1: Reformed Church and Torrance and an evangelical congregation that describes
Speaker 1: itself as preaching a gospel that is Christ centered, covenental,
Speaker 1: and confessional. The church's leadership page and social media pages
Speaker 1: have been pulled down, and yeah, it's fucked up. They
Speaker 1: had to have like security guards, armed guards, like escort
Speaker 1: worshippers inside and out this weekend just because of like
Speaker 1: all of the press around this. Elizabeth ter Linden, who
Speaker 1: also knew him at the time, told The New York
Speaker 1: Times he was definitely a strong believer in evangelical Christianity.
Speaker 1: At the time that I knew him, she was in
Speaker 1: the Caltech Christian Fellowship with him. So this guy appears
Speaker 1: to have been like a very strong evangelical Christian, like
Speaker 1: a liberal Christian.
Speaker 2: We don't exactly know.
Speaker 1: Was he always was his Christianity always like progressive and
Speaker 1: liberal tinted, or was he kind of more conservative at
Speaker 1: a different point in his life we do know that
Speaker 1: within the last couple of years he got involved in
Speaker 1: left wing activism in Los Angeles. His sister told law
Speaker 1: enforcement that after he got more involved in left wing activism,
Speaker 1: particularly a group who called themselves the White Awakes, which
Speaker 1: was referencing an anti slavery protest in the eighteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, right, Like these were some of the
Speaker 1: people who like back Lincoln. So he joined some group
Speaker 1: and Alick has called the White Awakes for some period
Speaker 1: of time, he starts talking more radically, starts showing up
Speaker 1: to more protests, and I think he's helping with a
Speaker 1: couple of different kinds of things with the cup different groups.
Speaker 1: But that's when his sister says, he starts making like
Speaker 1: a lot more radical statements and maybe sometimes aggressive statements.
Speaker 1: And that lines up with when he buys a gun
Speaker 1: and he starts training after twenty twenty three. So this
Speaker 1: may have just been a thing where he he didn't
Speaker 1: have a full plan at that point, but he accepted
Speaker 1: the possibility that he might need to do violence in
Speaker 1: order to support, you know, his his ideals. We don't
Speaker 1: really know, but that's that's all we've gotten in terms
Speaker 1: of a journey.
Speaker 6: Yeah, in October of twenty twenty four, he did make
Speaker 6: one donation to the themircial campaign via.
Speaker 2: Act twenty five dollars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but not a lot of not a long history
Speaker 1: of donations to the party, not a long history of
Speaker 1: like volunteering for the Democratic Party specifically. Seems to have
Speaker 1: been a pretty loyal voter. Yeah, but this is a
Speaker 1: guy who I think really, during like the it would
Speaker 1: be during the Biden years, gets more involved in like
Speaker 1: left wing protests and organizing. He becomes angrier, and then
Speaker 1: after twenty twenty four, he gets really really angry at
Speaker 1: Trump and Evince, probably some time late last year, decides
Speaker 1: to take action, and for whatever reason, picks the Correspondent's
Speaker 1: dinner to do it. It's probably also worth noting that
Speaker 1: he sends this manifesto thing out right before he carries
Speaker 1: out the attack, Like he's staying in the hotel for
Speaker 1: a couple of.
Speaker 2: Days before all this happens. He booked two nights.
Speaker 1: We actually get him to reflect a little on the
Speaker 1: security that he's experienced while he's been there, and that's
Speaker 1: a really interesting part of this. He says, I expected
Speaker 1: security cameras at every bend bugged hotel rooms, armed agents
Speaker 1: every ten feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got,
Speaker 1: who knows, maybe they're pranking me, is nothing. No damn security,
Speaker 1: not in transport, not in the hotel, and not in
Speaker 1: the event.
Speaker 7: Like.
Speaker 1: The one thing that I immediately noticed walking to the
Speaker 1: hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with
Speaker 1: multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the
Speaker 1: possibility that I could be a threat.
Speaker 2: Crazy stuff.
Speaker 6: Most of the security seemed to be isolated around the
Speaker 6: actual ballroom and the levels immediately above and below.
Speaker 1: And again, he doesn't get anywhere close to the president
Speaker 1: or any other important person, right, So you could argue
Speaker 1: the security did its job. He was just in the
Speaker 1: same hotel. But yeah, crazy stuff.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't have anything else.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's go on ad break and then return to
Speaker 6: briefly discuss some of the conspiracy theories that have spawned
Speaker 6: after this alleged shooting. Love it, okay, we are back.
Speaker 6: Immediately after the event took place, tons of conspiracy theories
Speaker 6: started cropping up, obviously piggybacking off of the Butler Pennsylvania ones.
Speaker 6: This was not helped by the confusion in early reports,
Speaker 6: because once you get every journalist in DC in one
Speaker 6: room and then an event happens, that means every journalist
Speaker 6: has a kind of different version of the event that
Speaker 6: gets immediately blasted out online and on the news. So
Speaker 6: there was no not a clear sequence of events. In
Speaker 6: the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there was reports that
Speaker 6: maybe was just dishes being dropped. Eventually it was clear
Speaker 6: that no, there was an actual shooting, and Wolf Flitzer
Speaker 6: did lose a shoe in the course of the events.
Speaker 2: He sure did.
Speaker 1: Poor Wolf.
Speaker 6: Now also not helping things. Trump was basically live truthing
Speaker 6: this investigation on the night of the shooting, uh huh,
Speaker 6: And it was not clear to many people that the
Speaker 6: shooting did not happen on the ballroom level, yeah, and
Speaker 6: that the shoot did not get close to the targets.
Speaker 7: Well.
Speaker 1: Also, the people in the main room were still very
Speaker 1: scared because like, oh, they had no real context on
Speaker 1: what was happening, and everyone around them just started freaking out.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because there's the military running around, secret Service running around.
Speaker 6: They heard gunshots. Yeah, it is a frightening thing. You're
Speaker 6: seeing jd. Vance get pulled off stage. Trump's stucking down.
Speaker 1: What I do feel is kind of interesting about this
Speaker 1: is you've got this whole DC class of like press
Speaker 1: and other important people who are not empower themselves but
Speaker 1: are close to it, and they do a lot of
Speaker 1: the things that they do because they like being close
Speaker 1: to power, and there's this illusion that comes with that.
Speaker 1: I think for a lot of these people of importance
Speaker 1: that gets ripped away when the Secret Service pulls all
Speaker 1: of the people who are important out of the room
Speaker 1: and you're just left wondering if you're in danger, Like
Speaker 1: that's what it'll be like if there's a nuclear war.
Speaker 1: All of these people will suddenly have the few folks
Speaker 1: who have a detail get ripped out of the room,
Speaker 1: and then you'll just hear the sirens start and have nothing,
Speaker 1: no idea what's happening, and realize that your whole life
Speaker 1: in pursuit of being close to power has brought you
Speaker 1: no security. Crazy stuff, wild times anyway, Garrison.
Speaker 6: What are the core pieces of quote unquote evidence that
Speaker 6: was used to assert that the shooting was some kind
Speaker 6: of false flag or syop? Was a comment made by
Speaker 6: Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt shortly before the dinner. This speech
Speaker 6: tonight will be classic Donald J.
Speaker 8: Trump.
Speaker 1: It'll be funny, it'll be entertaining, there will be some
Speaker 1: shots fired tonight.
Speaker 2: Great stuff.
Speaker 6: Poor choice of words. There on behalf of the press secretary.
Speaker 2: Excellent choice of words.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also, though, like it's not a Dann Brown level when
Speaker 2: people are actually plotting conspiracy, they did go around leaving
Speaker 2: the little easter eggs for you to find, of course.
Speaker 6: Yeah, why why else would there why else would the
Speaker 6: deep state orchestrate like a top a top level secret
Speaker 6: secret syop and not not decide to leave little clues beforehand?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they got they have to leave little clues, Garrison.
Speaker 1: Have you listened to Alex Jones. That's part of the
Speaker 1: deal they make with the demons is that they have
Speaker 1: to They have to leave little clues for the evil.
Speaker 2: That they're doing while they're doing it.
Speaker 6: They call that the Riddler's law.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, that's right now.
Speaker 6: Another thing that got amplified in the conspiratorial miliu was
Speaker 6: a Twitter account with a Pepe profile picture wearing the
Speaker 6: same outfit as President Trump for the night of the Dinner,
Speaker 6: who tweeted the alleged shooter's name about two and a
Speaker 6: half years ago. This post is the account's only visible post.
Speaker 6: The banner image of the account is a bunch of
Speaker 6: streaks of color. But if you overlay the image of
Speaker 6: Trump holding its fist up in the air at Butler,
Speaker 6: the color streaks and the darkened areas line up with
Speaker 6: the Trump Butler photo. Now, the alleged shooter also had
Speaker 6: an undergraduate research fellowship at NASA for the summer of
Speaker 6: twenty to fourteen, and the name of this Twitter account
Speaker 6: matches the name of someone at lockeed Martin who published
Speaker 6: a NASA paper at the same time that the shooter
Speaker 6: was at NASA, and the shooter worked for the Jet
Speaker 6: Propulsion Lab, the same labs that those scientists who have
Speaker 6: gone missing also have been working out of. When I
Speaker 6: saw this, I started feeling a little bit scared because
Speaker 6: I thought I was getting too I don't know, I
Speaker 6: was afraid, needing help. But this is But that's not
Speaker 6: all because the Pepe the Pepe Twitter account was also
Speaker 6: connected to a time travel study, because the color streak
Speaker 6: banner photo was traced to a website on how to
Speaker 6: build a time machine, and this photo was used on
Speaker 6: the web page for the time machine study. So what's
Speaker 6: what's really going on here? First of all, this quote
Speaker 6: unquote time Machine website is actually a europe based project
Speaker 6: for quote three D digitalization of cultural heritage, scanning like
Speaker 6: artifacts and uploading them online as like three D models.
Speaker 6: That's their quote unquote time Machine is preserving cultural heritage. Yes,
Speaker 6: an archive, and actually this color streak image has actually
Speaker 6: been floating around the Internet for a long time. I
Speaker 6: found versions of it since at least twenty eighteen. There
Speaker 6: are hundreds of people named Cole Allen in the US
Speaker 6: on data broker sites. Right now, the first archive of
Speaker 6: this pepe Twitter account whose profile picture only mat Trump's
Speaker 6: because it's a tuxedo, one of the most common outfits
Speaker 6: from men at events like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, it is the same outfit that Trump was
Speaker 1: wearing at the dinner. It's also the same outfit Trump
Speaker 1: is worn at every dinner, because it's what you wear
Speaker 1: at dinners if you're the president at TEXIEDA.
Speaker 6: But the first archive of this post is from after
Speaker 6: the shooting, so we don't know what this account looked
Speaker 6: like prior to the shooting. Now, this account could have
Speaker 6: tweeted tons of random names and then deleted all the
Speaker 6: other posts to pull a stunt like this or people
Speaker 6: at Twitter, like you know, x everything up. The people
Speaker 6: who work there could have backdated the account and the
Speaker 6: post to boost engagement on the platform. Now, those aren't
Speaker 6: any more likely than just a simple coincidence, But there
Speaker 6: are other explanations other than gesturing vaguely towards a pre
Speaker 6: planned psyop spreading images of this. A Twitter account isn't
Speaker 6: necessarily putting forward a specific conspiracy theory. He just gets
Speaker 6: used as a data point other unconnected data points to
Speaker 6: sew public mistrust and undermine reality inferring meaning from odd coincidences.
Speaker 2: Right this is?
Speaker 6: This is seeing patterns that aren't there and literally in
Speaker 6: the case of seeing the Butler photo in a splash
Speaker 6: of colors, and again like why would quote unquote they
Speaker 6: drop hints beforehand?
Speaker 2: Right is?
Speaker 6: This is this predictive programming. But predictive programming isn't really
Speaker 6: necessary to get the public to accept an event like
Speaker 6: an attempted assassination. In fact, that would only sew suspicion.
Speaker 6: Dropping these little hints just so suspicion for an event
Speaker 6: like this, It doesn't actually make it more acceptable. Right
Speaker 6: The whole idea of predictive programming is sowing seeds to
Speaker 6: get the public to accept an otherwise unacceptable thing, and
Speaker 6: that's not necessary for a presidential assassination. Yeah, Now there
Speaker 6: are some other things that propped up in this conspiratorial
Speaker 6: uh shenanigans. In the wake of the shooting, a Fox
Speaker 6: News reporter was calling in to report herk's varience at
Speaker 6: the dinner and suddenly cut out when she started talking
Speaker 6: about something that Carolyn Levitt's husband said to her.
Speaker 5: He kind of leaned over and said, you know, I
Speaker 5: watched your on TV.
Speaker 4: DoD a great job. You need to be very safe.
Speaker 4: And he was just very serious when he said that
Speaker 4: to me, and he kind of looked around the room
Speaker 4: and he said, you know, there are.
Speaker 8: Some sounds like we lost Ayisha's phone there.
Speaker 6: Well, well, well what so her audio actually cuts out
Speaker 6: at different points during this televised call. The anchor said
Speaker 6: that she was having sell service issues, and later on
Speaker 6: x this reporter posted that she was about to say
Speaker 6: that Carolyn Levitt's husband was quote telling me to be
Speaker 6: careful with my own safety because the world is crazy unquote.
Speaker 6: But it does make for a funny moment, a funny
Speaker 6: of television.
Speaker 2: That's a good moment.
Speaker 1: That's an incredible time for your call to cut out,
Speaker 1: Like just awesome stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: There's other other viral posts spreading video of the military
Speaker 6: storming past the red carpet or people in military fatigue
Speaker 6: storming past the red carpet after the shooting, with one
Speaker 6: person writing quote, law enforcement doesn't act like this. Neither
Speaker 6: does the military. This is a staged event with a
Speaker 6: shitty script and pre positioned cameras. Unquote. The cameras are
Speaker 6: there because they're they're to film the red carpet, the physition.
Speaker 2: Yes, because this is an organization where all the press gathered.
Speaker 6: This is a press event. That's why there's pre positioned cameras.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's how you do you know the White
Speaker 1: House correspondence dinner.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh so you're going to see some types of
Speaker 2: cops you have never previously seen when someone tries to
Speaker 2: assassinate the president. Oh yeah, there are a whole lot
Speaker 2: of people whose job it is to stop that happening,
Speaker 2: Lots of them on necessarily uniformed offices who you see
Speaker 2: every day in the Secret Service. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Other people also thought it was odd that Trump has
Speaker 6: skipped every correspondent to dinner across his two terms. Except
Speaker 6: for this one, and then all of a sudden there's
Speaker 6: a shooter in the lobby. How did the shooter know
Speaker 6: that Trump would go to this one? Because the shooter
Speaker 6: planned planned this since early April. How would the shooter
Speaker 6: know this? Well, it's actually quite simple, because Trump announced
Speaker 6: he was attending this dinner in early March, and according
Speaker 6: to Core documents, Cole Allen started searching for information about
Speaker 6: this dinner in early April. A month later, before then
Speaker 6: booking two nights at the Washington Hilton, Trump already announced
Speaker 6: that he was going to be attending the dinner. The
Speaker 6: oddest aspect of the conspiracism post this event is that
Speaker 6: Trump needed to stage this not for any national security
Speaker 6: reasons or to seize more power, but to construct the
Speaker 6: White House ballroom, which has been the main thing that
Speaker 6: people on the right have been talking about after the shooting.
Speaker 6: The people on the right have not been using this
Speaker 6: shooting to go after liberal terrorists, but have been talking
Speaker 6: NonStop about how this security breach demonstrates the need to
Speaker 6: construct Trump's massive ballroom, and that's the main thing they're
Speaker 6: talking about. It's so funny the idea that they would
Speaker 6: stage that the deep state it's going to stage a
Speaker 6: false flag just to push for the ballroom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is to me, frankly very funny. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We don't get an enabling Act in our new fascists.
Speaker 1: We just get a fucking ballroom. Yeah yeah, right, Like okay,
Speaker 1: I mean I guess I prefer this, Yeah.
Speaker 6: The reichstick fire to construct a nice dance floor.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, just yeah, I mean a lot of this
Speaker 2: was like centered on the safety and security exemption which
Speaker 2: was provided in the injunction against the building of the
Speaker 2: new ballroom.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: The issue here is that the Trump administration already filed
Speaker 2: on the third of April a claim that the entire
Speaker 2: building was a contiguous hole. They couldn't do the security
Speaker 2: part without doing the fantasy dance floor part, right, Like, yes,
Speaker 2: Trump has also truced about this. Previous to this event,
Speaker 2: this wouldn't have really added anything. Yeah, they did try
Speaker 2: and get the National Trust for Historical Preservation to withdraw
Speaker 2: their court case, which they didn't against. Subsequently to this,
Speaker 2: the events of the White House correspond.
Speaker 6: So yeah, that's most of what I have on the
Speaker 6: conspiracy stuff. There's certainly more, but that's.
Speaker 2: Oh dose more.
Speaker 6: Yeah, We're going to leave it there's always going to
Speaker 6: be more right, Like, that's that's the way how it is.
Speaker 6: We don't have good data on like the widespread belief
Speaker 6: of this theory. There was there was a poll that
Speaker 6: circulated that said like something like forty seven percent of
Speaker 6: Democrats thought the attempted assassination was staged. But this poll,
Speaker 6: which is from the Manhattan Institute, so take that with
Speaker 6: a grain of fascism. This poll is actually pulling the
Speaker 6: Butler shooting, not this recent one, and people did not
Speaker 6: acknowledge that when they were spreading this poll around. So
Speaker 6: we don't know how many people actually believe that this
Speaker 6: shooting was staged, but you can certainly see a lot
Speaker 6: of people asserting as such on the internet.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Shall we move on to a couple of other topics
Speaker 2: we need to cover.
Speaker 6: Yes, this will be a super super sized episode, but
Speaker 6: it is what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's go talking to people talking about thinks of
Speaker 2: the internet. I think some people got this one get
Speaker 2: a little carried away. As three zero decision of a
Speaker 2: panel of Second Circuit Court judges has rejected ICE's mandatory
Speaker 2: detention of people seeking to deport with a few exceptions.
Speaker 2: The opinion was written by Judge Bianco, who is a
Speaker 2: Trump appointee, stated that quote petitioner entered the United States
Speaker 2: and lawfully in two thousand and four or two thousand
Speaker 2: and five and has resided here ever since. He's there
Speaker 2: for deemed to be an applicant for admission by section
Speaker 2: one two to five A, that he is not quote
Speaker 2: seeking admission because he is not requesting law ful entry
Speaker 2: into the United States after inspection authorization. The government's attempt
Speaker 2: to muddy these textually clear waters defies the statute's context, structure, history,
Speaker 2: and purpose, contradicts of Supreme Court dicta in Jennings and
Speaker 2: long standing executive branch practice, and its interpretation of statute
Speaker 2: raisive serious constitutional questions that should be avoided even if
Speaker 2: the statutory language were ambiguous. The statute in question here
Speaker 2: is the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six, and specifically the fact that it has
Speaker 2: a mandatory detainer for people quote unquote seeking admission to
Speaker 2: the USA. Now, this ruling puts the Second Circuit in
Speaker 2: agreement with over three hundred and seventy judges across the nation,
Speaker 2: but notably odds with the Fifth and Eighth circuit.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Judge Bianco, in a a really incredibly New York and
Speaker 2: analogy here for seeking admission wrote, if someone sneaks into
Speaker 2: Yankee Stadium at the start of the game with no
Speaker 2: ticket for admission and no intention of ever paying, and
Speaker 2: he is later found by security in a seat in
Speaker 2: the seventh inning, no one would consider that to be
Speaker 2: seeking admission to the game. So hopefully that's that they
Speaker 2: explained to people that the argument that the government is
Speaker 2: making here is that someone who has been in the
Speaker 2: country for a long period of time is still seeking admission.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: The Trump administrations place itself odds with other administrations. Right,
Speaker 2: this has been lost into nineteen ninety six, as Bianco wrote,
Speaker 2: quote for five presidential administrations have nearly three decades. It
Speaker 2: did consistently release detainees on bond, whom the government now
Speaker 2: argues are covered by Section one two two five B
Speaker 2: two A. Even in President Trump's first term and the
Speaker 2: first few months of his second, the agency adhered to
Speaker 2: the decades old understanding and the relative scopes of sections
Speaker 2: one two two five and one two two six. The
Speaker 2: these circumstances, the fact that no president has ever found
Speaker 2: such power in the statute is strong evidence that it
Speaker 2: does not exist. That pretty much explains itself, right. What
Speaker 2: I have not been able to work out is whether
Speaker 2: this pertains to people who are detained as in who
Speaker 2: are arrested in the second circuit, or people who are
Speaker 2: held in the second circuit or both. My guess would
Speaker 2: be both, because it is the law in the second circuit, right,
Speaker 2: so it applies in the second circuit. Certainly, most attention
Speaker 2: facilities are not in the second circuit. A lot of
Speaker 2: them are in the Fifth, which has come down the
Speaker 2: opposite way on this. This is why the Supreme Court exists, right,
Speaker 2: big disagreement between these several circuit courts here. Moving on
Speaker 2: to talk about the border wall. Before leaving office, Secretary
Speaker 2: no massigned several waivers for border war construction. This was
Speaker 2: not in the week before she left office, but this year.
Speaker 2: One of them waived twenty eight laws in the Big
Speaker 2: Bend area of Texas. The waiver included a hundred and
Speaker 2: empty five miles of the riverfront of the Rio Grande,
Speaker 2: including parts of the State Park, National Park, and federally
Speaker 2: protected river. These some of these areas are very popular
Speaker 2: for outdoor recreation. These waivers are now being challenged in
Speaker 2: court by the Center for Biological Diversity. They're atteditus on.
Speaker 2: You'll see them in a lot of border legal cases.
Speaker 2: The Friends of Roridosa Church and a telling were river
Speaker 2: guide named Billy Miller. It's an interesting coalition, right that
Speaker 2: we don't often see, like a church group has the
Speaker 2: sort of approach to this that it would destroy historical
Speaker 2: and cultural heritage to build the wall there. Obviously, the
Speaker 2: river guy, Billy Miller, Mister Miller has the claim that
Speaker 2: it would be disruptive to have business and to people's
Speaker 2: enjoyment of nature on the river. Currently, what they are
Speaker 2: doing is focusing on Chispa Road. That's it's Neil like Valentine,
Speaker 2: Texas northwestern MafA where are carrying out road improvements that
Speaker 2: they did not notify county officials about, which is obvious
Speaker 2: the course of disruption. I've actually ridden my bike out
Speaker 2: there a fair bit, did some work making a film
Speaker 2: out there a few years ago. It's a really beautiful
Speaker 2: part of the country. I'm sure a lot of people
Speaker 2: will be familiar with Marfa, which is nearby. Oh, it's
Speaker 2: a great city, great Muffa's great. I love that area Texas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I watched it all burned down one beautiful, beautiful
Speaker 1: afternoon when the horrible fire started. Yeah, it was wild, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I bet geez.
Speaker 2: Luckily, Marfa has recovered a great place to visit. You
Speaker 2: can go and see the Prata Store, which people now
Speaker 2: think is AI generated, which is great. Our reality is cool.
Speaker 1: You can go see the Jud Foundations or the Chinnati Foundation,
Speaker 1: the Donald jud Museum. You know, a lot of other
Speaker 1: good stuff out in Marfa. Pretty good geez sandwich restaurant.
Speaker 2: Pretty fancy glamping set up there as well. Ye. So
Speaker 2: I checked out the CBP smart All Interactive map, which
Speaker 2: sometimes like they don't always have to give notice when
Speaker 2: they're changing their plans, or sometimes find out via the
Speaker 2: smart Wall interactive map. And right now it shows vehicle
Speaker 2: barriers and patrol road planned inside the National Park. Right
Speaker 2: so this will cause damage far far beyond the riverfront.
Speaker 2: Evidently to build barriers at the riverfront, they have to
Speaker 2: build roads to get to riverfront, which will also spread
Speaker 2: this damage over an area that like, especially in Texas.
Speaker 2: Texas is not a state which is abundant with public
Speaker 2: land now. It is not like those states further west
Speaker 2: in that regard. And I know this is an area
Speaker 2: which is very special to a great deal of people.
Speaker 2: I'm really interested in rating more about this, so like
Speaker 2: especially people in the outdoor industry or folks in that region,
Speaker 2: I'd love to hear from you. You can do cal
Speaker 2: Zone tips at proton dot me if you want to
Speaker 2: talk about that. Do you want to do that?
Speaker 6: We reported, We reported the news.
Speaker 2: All of it. Yeah again. Call Zone Tips at proton
Speaker 2: dot me for story tips. For your marketing emails, you
Speaker 2: can just go ahead and flush those we reported the news.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 9: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 9: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 9: Coolzonemedia dot com for check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 9: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 9: now find sources where it could Happen here listed directly
Speaker 9: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.