Speaker 1: A zone media.
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Speaker 3: Welcome to could happen here. I'm Andre Si Jeffy channel ANDRASM.
Speaker 4: So today.
Speaker 3: I wanted to really draw attention to the strategies of
Speaker 3: resistance that have marked the stories of the African diaspora.
Speaker 3: Of course, the diasporas is widespread on diverse, and you
Speaker 3: could find oscotad hundreds of millions in communities across the globe,
Speaker 3: largely to see impact of the trans Saharan, Transatlantic and
Speaker 3: Indian Ushan slave trees as well as voluntary migration. Many
Speaker 3: millions of stories could be told, but very few of
Speaker 3: those stories have been told so far. My focus is
Speaker 3: really on the African diaspora in the Caribbean today and
Speaker 3: what strategies they used in their struggle and how those
Speaker 3: strategies could potentially be utilized today in our contemporary struggle.
Speaker 3: So for some context, in case you know you just
Speaker 3: arrived on Earth a couple couple of years ago, enslaved
Speaker 3: Africans suffered truly deplorable conditions from the moment of capture,
Speaker 3: through the passage and the season in process, and to
Speaker 3: the last of their days on the field of the plantation.
Speaker 3: Yet in spite of the deplorable conditions enslaved people endured,
Speaker 3: resistance endured. It was both inevitable and constant, as even
Speaker 3: their enslavers recognized. Resistance, of course, began in Africa itself.
Speaker 3: Enslaved people often fled to escape local captors who were
Speaker 3: seeking to profit from the demand for slaves. Entire villages
Speaker 3: would sometimes relocate to fortify their settlements to avoid capture.
Speaker 3: Veellion was common among captives as they weighted to board
Speaker 3: ships during the initial loading and even on the high seas. Tragically,
Speaker 3: perhaps bravely, some choose to resist by taking their own lives,
Speaker 3: either during the journey or during the brutal season in
Speaker 3: process upon their arrival in the Caribbean on the plantation itself.
Speaker 3: Resistance took many forms, tailored to specific circumstances and opportunities,
Speaker 3: but acts of defiance were a constant throughout the history
Speaker 3: of slavery in the Caribbean.
Speaker 4: While not all forms.
Speaker 3: Of resistance were as overt as the famous revolutions and rebellions,
Speaker 3: each act played a role in shaping plantation society, undermining
Speaker 3: the institution of chattel slavery, and ultimately hastening its demise.
Speaker 3: We can classify these acts of resistance into three key categories,
Speaker 3: non cooperation, confrontation, and prefiguration. Non Cooperation involves the deliberate
Speaker 3: refusal to comply with those in power, using both overt
Speaker 3: and COVID methods to protest against oppressive conditions. Confrontation is
Speaker 3: about direct and assertive engagement with oppressive forces, aiming to
Speaker 3: disrupt or undermine them. And prefiguration refuses a deliberate organization
Speaker 3: of future social relations, institutions, and practices in the present,
Speaker 3: envisioning and enacting a better future. It's important to note
Speaker 3: that these categories, of course, often overlap into dynamics struggle
Speaker 3: against slavery, non cooperation, confrontation, prefiguration intertwined, embodying.
Speaker 4: The seeds of revolution throughout history.
Speaker 3: In fact, Wherever people are faced depressure, these forms of
Speaker 3: resistance have emerged.
Speaker 4: The era of slavery in the Caribbean was no exception.
Speaker 4: Acts of non cooperation.
Speaker 3: Were perhaps the most common form of resistance on the plantation.
Speaker 3: Non cooperation to many forms, often subtle yet impactful. Enslaved
Speaker 3: individuals would act carelessly, feign illness or pretend ignorance. These
Speaker 3: tactics slowed productivity and provided plausible explanations for accidents by
Speaker 3: sabotage and tools machinery. They further disrupted the operations of
Speaker 3: the plantation. Arson was another method used to strike back
Speaker 3: against their pressors, causing significant damage to property and resources.
Speaker 4: Secure in extra meat through.
Speaker 3: Covid animal slaughter was a way for the enslaved to
Speaker 3: supplement their meager rations and exit a small measure of
Speaker 3: control over their own survival. And of course, running away
Speaker 3: was another powerful form of non cooperation. Individuals and small
Speaker 3: groups would escape for various reasons, to find psychological relief
Speaker 3: from the relentless oppression, to reunite with loved ones, to
Speaker 3: protest their harsh material conditions, or to carve out an
Speaker 3: alternative way of life within the oppressive system. These escapes
Speaker 3: were not just about physical freedom. They were acts of defiance.
Speaker 3: They challenged the fundations of the plantation system. Modern day
Speaker 3: activists and workers often engage in so forms of non
Speaker 3: cooperation to challenge capitalist structures and state authority. Just as
Speaker 3: in slave people would intentionally slow down or damage tools
Speaker 3: to reduce productivity, modern workers might engage in slow downs,
Speaker 3: work to rule actions, or even deliberate sabotage, which also
Speaker 3: falls into the next category of action. These actions aim
Speaker 3: to disrupt efficiency and profitability of capitalist enterprises, often as
Speaker 3: a form of protest against unfair labor practices or to
Speaker 3: demand better working conditions. Pretended ignorance was, as I mentioned,
Speaker 3: a common tactic among enslave people to avoid the harsh
Speaker 3: demands of plantation labor. We might look at the quiet
Speaker 3: quittin folks who do the bare minimum required for their job,
Speaker 3: refusing to go above and beyond in order to avoid
Speaker 3: burnout and to resist the expectations that seek to exploit them.
Speaker 3: Running away from plantations despite these fair consequences was a
Speaker 3: powerful form of non cooperation that of course sought to
Speaker 3: reclaim autonomy in modern times, though not equal valent strikes
Speaker 3: and walkouts silver similar purpose. Workers leave their positions to
Speaker 3: protest unfair conditions, risk and financial stability to demand systemic change.
Speaker 3: In the Plantation era, acts of confrontation involved direct assaults
Speaker 3: on the system itself. Like I said before, the plant
Speaker 3: has lived in constant fear of revolt, and this fear
Speaker 3: was especially heightened during the Christmas season. What seemed like
Speaker 3: benign dances and festivities often disguised rebel oaths of secrecy.
Speaker 3: Poisoning was another faired form of confrontation, a subtle yet
Speaker 3: deadly alternative to open rebellion. The mere threat of conspiracies
Speaker 3: and plots, whether real or imagined, kept the colonial regime
Speaker 3: perpetually on edge. Colonial legal systems were primarily designed to
Speaker 3: manage colonial property, which included enslaved people. These laws were
Speaker 3: harsh and allowed for severe punishments for any perceived transgressions.
Speaker 3: Enslaved individuals could face proof consequences for unauthorized movement, large gatherings,
Speaker 3: possessions of weapons, or practicing secret rituals. Master The art
Speaker 3: of subterfuge was thus crucial for survival. What does that
Speaker 3: tell us about navigating our current legal context? While planters
Speaker 3: tried to soy scored among the enslaved by facilitating ethnic
Speaker 3: division by separating African born from Korean born, from dividing
Speaker 3: domestic and field laborers as put in skilled and unskilled workers,
Speaker 3: they stay people too about manipulated plantation politics. They carefully
Speaker 3: studied the personalities of their wide overlords, subtly provoking divisions
Speaker 3: between bookkeepers, overseers, and owners. A Nanci the Spider Trickster,
Speaker 3: a popular West African folk tale character, became a hero,
Speaker 3: inspiring strategies of disguised satire, trickery, and deceit. Yet despite
Speaker 3: their cunning, many rebellions were quashed before they could even begin,
Speaker 3: and those that did spark were often brutally suppressed. The
Speaker 3: divisions fostered by the planter class between Creole and African
Speaker 3: and slaved people hindered revolutionary efforts. While all revolts sought
Speaker 3: greater power and freedom, Africans typically desired all out war
Speaker 3: and the establishment of an African lifestyle apart from the colonies.
Speaker 3: In contrast, many Creoles the Caribbean born Africans aimed to
Speaker 3: modify the system to gain the rights of free wage laborers.
Speaker 3: Such conflicts helped foil revolts in barbaeos in sixty, maybe
Speaker 3: three Anti Guns seventeen thirty six, Saint quix In seventeen
Speaker 3: fifty nine, and Jamaican in seventeen seventy six. What does
Speaker 3: that tell us about the risk of unresolved divisions when
Speaker 3: undertaken revolutionary action today. In the past, enslaved people used
Speaker 3: secret meetings and COVID planning to organize revolts, often disguised
Speaker 3: as social gatherings. Today activists can use in encrypto communication
Speaker 3: or parties as staging grounds of political activism. Today, poisoning
Speaker 3: maybe off the table, but its evident that property destruction,
Speaker 3: including our sun, has persisted as a means of protest.
Speaker 3: The efficacy of that method protest is perhaps situationally dependent,
Speaker 3: but it certainly sends a message. Activists of today must
Speaker 3: confront legal systems, just as since slave people in the
Speaker 3: past needed to when descent is shaped against the statuscope.
Speaker 3: There's a time and place for court battles and bail funds,
Speaker 3: but they are not lasting means of resistance. We do
Speaker 3: need to brainstorm more permanent means of liberation from this
Speaker 3: legal system. Finally, just as a NANSI, this FIA trixter
Speaker 3: issued as a symbol of clever resistance among the enslaved.
Speaker 3: We need stories and symbols that can just as potently
Speaker 3: in power. There's a time when Guy Fowk's masks served
Speaker 3: as a powerful symbol of resistance. As a creative species
Speaker 3: are symbolic, species will always need those signals to guide
Speaker 3: and encourage us, to give us safety in numbers, in
Speaker 3: a sense of solidarity, even if such symbols alone are
Speaker 3: not inherently liberatory. Finally, acts of prefiguration may seem less
Speaker 3: viable under their grim conditions. But even if they could
Speaker 3: not build the socio economic autonomy that characterizes robust modern
Speaker 3: prefigurative practices, enslaved people still managed to create networks of
Speaker 3: support and resilient cultures that offered respite in a world
Speaker 3: that sought to strip them of their humanity. Mutual aid
Speaker 3: was truly the name of the game in the face
Speaker 3: of social death. They cultivated ties of real and fictive kinship.
Speaker 3: Since biological families were often torn apart by callous slaveholders,
Speaker 3: with mother child units being the most common familiar arrangement,
Speaker 3: many and slaved Africans extended their concept of family beyond
Speaker 3: biological kin These networks of fictive kinship provided emotional support, protection,
Speaker 3: and a sense of belonging, helping to preserve their humanity
Speaker 3: in the midst of suffering. An example of this resilience
Speaker 3: can be seen in the rotating savings and credit associations
Speaker 3: that developed among enslaved women. Despite their marginal earnings from
Speaker 3: market activities, they pool their resources and rotated lump sums
Speaker 3: of money to each other in acts of mutual aid,
Speaker 3: all without their master's permission. This practice not only provided
Speaker 3: financial support, but also reinforce the bonds.
Speaker 4: Of community and cooperation.
Speaker 3: Similarly, today's marginalized communities create networks of solidarity, mutual aid groups,
Speaker 3: and community centers to support each other in the face
Speaker 3: of systemic injustices such as poverty, discrimination, and violence. Such
Speaker 3: communities also often redefine family to include chosen families provide
Speaker 3: any emotional support and care outside traditional family structures, particularly
Speaker 3: within LGBTQ plus communities and other marginalized groups. Today, grassroots
Speaker 3: organizations and cooperatives continue the tradition of economic cooperation, impowerant
Speaker 3: marginalized groups to economic solidarity, microfinance initiatives, and community based lending.
Speaker 3: It's important that we don't look at these in isolation.
Speaker 3: Confrontation alone is not enough, non cooperation alone is not enough,
Speaker 3: and of course prefiguration alone.
Speaker 4: Is not enough.
Speaker 3: So let's look back at diasphoric history to those who
Speaker 3: did bring those actions together, sometimes successfully maroonage the active
Speaker 3: and slave people escaping plantations to establish independent communities, to
Speaker 3: find the Maroon experience deep within forests and nestled in mountains.
Speaker 3: Across the Caribbean, thousands of Maroons forged their own path
Speaker 3: shape in history through resilience and defiance. As runaways, they
Speaker 3: were inherently non cooperative. As warriors, they directly confronted plantation society,
Speaker 3: and as community builders they aim to prefigure a better
Speaker 3: future for themselves and their descendants. Maroon societies varied widely,
Speaker 3: shaped by local geography, available resources, and their relationship with
Speaker 3: colonial powers. They thrived in rainforests and mountainous terrains, which
Speaker 3: offered natural defenses and facilitated guerrilla warfare tactics Led by
Speaker 3: captains charged with defense, Maroon settlements prioritized vigilance, fortification, and
Speaker 3: constant readiness. They communicated with neighboring communities, practiced evasive maneuvers,
Speaker 3: and engaged in both defensive and offensive strategies. Prior to
Speaker 3: the Haitian Revolution, Francois Macandial and his network of enslaved
Speaker 3: and Maroon allies struck fear into the heart of Saintomique.
Speaker 3: They targeted plantation owners with acts of sabotage and arson,
Speaker 3: challenging colonial authority with daring raids and strategic strikes. Beyond warfare,
Speaker 3: Maroon communities were self sufficient, producing or acquiring what they
Speaker 3: needed through raids, trade, or cultivation. The trader with pirates, merchants,
Speaker 3: and other Maroon settlements across islands, while hunting, fishing, and
Speaker 3: farming for sustenance. Yet their precarious existence often necessitated careful
Speaker 3: population management. Some communities struggled with maintaining numbers, while others
Speaker 3: cautiously accepted new recruits, balancing growth with the risk of
Speaker 3: attracting clonial attention.
Speaker 4: It is unfortunately not all good.
Speaker 3: In the history, though, despite Faerce resistance, some Marone communities
Speaker 3: opted for peace treaties with colonial powers, ensuring their survival
Speaker 3: over generations. However, these treaties often came at a high cost,
Speaker 3: seeding autonomy in exchange relative peace and limited rights under
Speaker 3: colonial rule. The seventeen three to nine Treaty in Jamaica,
Speaker 3: for instance, imposed British control over the Maroons, restricting their
Speaker 3: land rights and obligating them to capture and return their
Speaker 3: fellow escaped slaves. While many Maroon communities ultimately succumbed to
Speaker 3: colonial pressure or were unable to remain hidden, some notably
Speaker 3: in Jamaican Surnam inture to this day, regardless of their fate,
Speaker 3: all Maroon communities defied the clonial order, asserting the independence
Speaker 3: and capability even slaved Africans to conceive and pursue freedom.
Speaker 3: What lessons can we take from their struggle? How can
Speaker 3: we apply their strategy in our resistance today? The struggle
Speaker 3: of the Maroons offers us some useful lessons, in my opinion,
Speaker 3: when they succeeded, it was through strong community ties and solidarity.
Speaker 3: They built networks of support and cooperation that were crucial
Speaker 3: for survival. Today, we need to be fostering unity among
Speaker 3: diverse groups facing systemic oppressure. Building alliances across different communities
Speaker 3: strengthens our collective power and our resilience against common adversaries.
Speaker 3: Another lesson we can glean is that the Maroons adapt
Speaker 3: to their strategies to the local terrain and resources available. Similarly,
Speaker 3: modern resistance movements can benefit from strategic adaptation to current
Speaker 3: socio political landscapes. This includes utilizing technology for communication an
Speaker 3: organization understand the media and digital as well as the
Speaker 3: physical landscape, as well as adapt in tactics to fit
Speaker 3: specific context, because not every tactic is going to make
Speaker 3: sense in every situation, and we can't be going through
Speaker 3: the emotions. Also, as the Maroon communities sort of establish
Speaker 3: self sufficiency as much as possible in their struggle, they
Speaker 3: cannot adequately resist if they were still fully or mostly
Speaker 3: dependent on the beasts they were fighting. They needed to
Speaker 3: be producing their own food, goods and resources. Otherwise any
Speaker 3: all our confrontation would be suicidally premature. We as movements,
Speaker 3: need to prioritize building sustainable practices and self reliant economies
Speaker 3: to reduce our alliance and oppressive systems. We cannot confront
Speaker 3: these systems if we are still dependent on them. We
Speaker 3: will not succeed. If so, the Maroons were also flexible.
Speaker 3: They shifted between defensive and offensive strategies as their circumstances demanded.
Speaker 3: Movements can benefit from maintaining that kind of flexibility in tactics.
Speaker 3: We cannot be all offensive, we cannot be all defensive.
Speaker 3: We must strike a balance. Finally, though this is projection
Speaker 3: on my part, I believe some of the Maroons would
Speaker 3: have had long term vision despite their immediate challenges. I
Speaker 3: believe they maintained a long term vision of freedom and
Speaker 3: autonomy that sustain their resistance over generations. Contemporary movements can
Speaker 3: benefit from a similar long term perspective, recognizing that meaningful
Speaker 3: change often requires sustained effort and commitment across time. That's
Speaker 3: all I have for today, All power to all the people.
Speaker 3: You can follow me on YouTube at androism and on
Speaker 3: patreon dot com slash Same Truth.
Speaker 4: Peace.
Speaker 5: Hi everyone, it's me James and I am joined today
Speaker 5: by Kirsty Zitlau, who is a border water drop volunteer
Speaker 5: I've turn some water rops together, and also an immigration writer.
Speaker 5: And we're going to talk about ice transferring people in
Speaker 5: their detention and generally the sort of post a rival
Speaker 5: process that migrants asylum seeker specifically faced when they come
Speaker 5: to the United States. Welcome to the.
Speaker 6: Show, Thank you, thanks for having me, Thanks for being here.
Speaker 5: So I think to start out with people when I
Speaker 5: speak to them like in my day to day life,
Speaker 5: are very unaware of the situations that migrants face when
Speaker 5: it comes to obtaining legal representation. Right, So maybe we
Speaker 5: could start off by just explaining that this isn't like
Speaker 5: if you're accused of a crime rate in theory it's
Speaker 5: a civil proceeding, but also they'll lock you up, but
Speaker 5: you don't get a public defender assigned to you. Right,
Speaker 5: So can you explain someone Let's say someone comes through
Speaker 5: the hole in the fence in Kumbo, right, they get
Speaker 5: detained at the o EDS, We give them a peanut
Speaker 5: butter and jelly sandwich, and then they get taken out processed.
Speaker 5: What happens after that? So from when they come to three,
Speaker 5: what said in terms of their legal representation? How does
Speaker 5: it work?
Speaker 6: Yes, so I'll address the street release folks as well
Speaker 6: as the people who are then taken to ice the attention. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 6: so I'll start with the street release folks. So they well, first,
Speaker 6: anybody who irregularly enters the United States not at a
Speaker 6: port of entry is subject to detention, not just by
Speaker 6: border patrol, but by ICE. The fortunate situation, I mean, sorry,
Speaker 6: the lining, the silver lining of this, you know, entire
Speaker 6: awful situation is that there's so many people coming that
Speaker 6: there's not enough detention space to detain everybody, and so
Speaker 6: hence the street releases. So the people can then go
Speaker 6: directly to their family. They will go with a notice
Speaker 6: to a peer which starts their immigration court proceedings, which
Speaker 6: was issued by Border Patrol. So immediately they have to
Speaker 6: navigate the immigration court system, starting with the fact that
Speaker 6: the notice to a peer might have a false date
Speaker 6: on it as far as their court date. So that's
Speaker 6: the first it's the first issue.
Speaker 5: What does that mean when you say a false date,
Speaker 5: Like if they share up on that date, the hearing
Speaker 5: won't be happening.
Speaker 6: So there's been a trend over the years to put
Speaker 6: to be decided as a hearing date on their notice
Speaker 6: to appear, which is the first document that says, hey,
Speaker 6: you're now we can put in immigration court proceedings. We'll
Speaker 6: send you a later notice to your address that you
Speaker 6: gave us of when you're actually going to have that hearing,
Speaker 6: or rather the court will. So the immigration lawyer bar
Speaker 6: pushed real hard on this issue and said, no, this
Speaker 6: is BS. You need to put a date in time.
Speaker 6: The reason they weren't is because they didn't want to
Speaker 6: take the time to coordinate with the courts to make
Speaker 6: sure that there's actually a judge on that date and
Speaker 6: time that they assign, so to satisfy the legal requirements
Speaker 6: that we've pushed for, they often will just put a
Speaker 6: fake date and time, So, in other words, they haven't
Speaker 6: done anything to verify whether there's actually a judge sitting
Speaker 6: at some court that day or time to hear their case.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're just making it up.
Speaker 7: So this is exactly so.
Speaker 6: This is of course incredibly confusing and very dangerous because
Speaker 6: they basically need an attorney immediately to explain this concept
Speaker 6: to them, because they first of all won't know how
Speaker 6: to look for when their actual court date is, which
Speaker 6: is a link that I don't think Border Patrol ever
Speaker 6: gives them. And then if they miss their actual court
Speaker 6: date then they will of course be ordered deported and
Speaker 6: the you know, then ICE is after them, and really
Speaker 6: they have no other options at that point. So really
Speaker 6: the need for an attorney arises immediately. And often immigrants
Speaker 6: have been robbed, they've paid all their money to transnational
Speaker 6: immigration to criminal organizations, excuse me, so, and an asylum
Speaker 6: case is costly, so they have a right to an attorney,
Speaker 6: as you said, but only at their own expense. So
Speaker 6: this is a tremendous challenge off the bat, as you
Speaker 6: can imagine.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then just to further sort of go down
Speaker 5: that pathway, the attorney is paid for their own expense,
Speaker 5: but without an attorney they may not be able to
Speaker 5: obtain a work permit.
Speaker 6: Right, So one hundred percent, I mean navigating the process
Speaker 6: on your own is as an immigrant, it just seems
Speaker 6: basically impossible to me. I mean, there's there's so much
Speaker 6: that even US as attorneys struggle with that it is,
Speaker 6: and it's evolving all the time. So even if you
Speaker 6: managed to submit your asylum application by yourself the process
Speaker 6: and then later submitting the work permit form and knowing
Speaker 6: where to send it and how to navigate uscis that's
Speaker 6: I mean, like I said, it's difficult for us. I mean,
Speaker 6: let's just say I got a work permit with somebody
Speaker 6: else's photo on it the other day, so you know,
Speaker 6: so it's a total mess. And to have an immigrant
Speaker 6: and even navigate that process is it just seems impossible.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I've no, I have not applied for asylum,
Speaker 5: but when I renewed my green card that myself and
Speaker 5: English is my first language. I have a PhD. I'm
Speaker 5: used to paperwork, and it was both scary and complicated,
Speaker 5: and exactly your whole future is resting on it. It's
Speaker 5: extremely anxiety.
Speaker 6: By design too. I mean it's it's they haven't updated
Speaker 6: forms to become a resident since I mean, like the
Speaker 6: thirties or something, right, asked about it exactly exactly, and
Speaker 6: it's all just to make it a difficult as possible
Speaker 6: in the wait times and everything else.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So how about the folks who go into ICE detention?
Speaker 8: There?
Speaker 6: So these are typically people, well, I mean that's just
Speaker 6: the thing. These days, there aren't the typical people who
Speaker 6: go into ICE attention. It's kind of it seems to
Speaker 6: me that certainly there's people who are mandatory detention, where
Speaker 6: if they have a prior deportation order or criminal or
Speaker 6: immigration history in this country, they will probably be detained.
Speaker 6: But I've also noticed a lot of racial profiling in
Speaker 6: the detention. I have a few black clients right now
Speaker 6: in detention, and if they were white, I'm absolutely convinced
Speaker 6: they are not even white but Latino, they would have
Speaker 6: been released already. And one of them is a black
Speaker 6: Muslim man from Kenya and he's been called a suspected
Speaker 6: terrorist by ICE for six months or more that he's
Speaker 6: been into detention with zero proof whatsoever, and so they'll
Speaker 6: just hold them for that reason because he's a black
Speaker 6: Muslim man. So these are often people with very meritorious cases,
Speaker 6: like for example, this man was an opposition party leader
Speaker 6: and recruiter back in Kenya. So these people just need
Speaker 6: I mean, whether they win or not win their case
Speaker 6: or not, can hinge on just being able to get representation,
Speaker 6: you know, because he's very intelligent and probably would have
Speaker 6: been able to put together a good case on his behalf.
Speaker 6: But the stats about people winning cases detained without attorneys
Speaker 6: is very very low. So yeah, so then they have
Speaker 6: to work with a family member on the outside obviously
Speaker 6: to get a hold of an attorney. Not a lot
Speaker 6: of attorneys or all attorneys do detained work because it
Speaker 6: is so difficult to start with, I mean, access to
Speaker 6: your client is just so limited, and getting evidence, I mean,
Speaker 6: they have to have a reliable family and support network
Speaker 6: on the outside essentially to help them get evidence from
Speaker 6: their home country. I mean, how else do you do that?
Speaker 6: Detained and so it's a lot of work coordinating as
Speaker 6: an attorney and so forth. So San Diego County saw
Speaker 6: that need and actually started a great program. I'm not
Speaker 6: exactly sure when it's starts arted, but apparently they weren't
Speaker 6: getting enough applicants and maybe it's been around for a
Speaker 6: little bit, but they didn't know about it. And it's
Speaker 6: they set aside like five million dollars to specifically pay
Speaker 6: attorneys to represent people detained an O time ASIE, which
Speaker 6: is of course the big ice attention center in San Diego.
Speaker 6: So that caused there to be more attorneys, you know,
Speaker 6: or more or slightly more represented people at O time ASIE,
Speaker 6: which was great. Yeah, because typically when I go in there,
Speaker 6: you know, this is just anecdotal evidence, you'll see a
Speaker 6: handful of attorneys, maybe a couple, maybe at most like five,
Speaker 6: and then you see all the detainees the immigrants sitting there,
Speaker 6: and there's clearly more than there are attorneys. So you know,
Speaker 6: I read a stat by the ALU that it's like
Speaker 6: something like seventy percent as of twenty twenty one did
Speaker 6: not have attorneys and detention centers.
Speaker 5: Right, so they just won't be represented throughout that process exactly,
Speaker 5: and certainly like God forbid, you're a Muslim, Yeah, if
Speaker 5: you're a black Muslim man, you're like at the intersection
Speaker 5: of things that are going to have us sent.
Speaker 7: Straight to jail exactly.
Speaker 5: Just to briefly explain for people who have when we
Speaker 5: talk about ICE detention, what are we talking about, Like,
Speaker 5: what are the conditions and who is often operating these detention.
Speaker 6: Centers excellent points. So these are for profit detention centers.
Speaker 6: So it is operated by ICE in conjunction with two
Speaker 6: large companies called Corcivic or Geogroup. And if you're not
Speaker 6: familiar with these companies, google them and you will immediately
Speaker 6: be horrified. Yeah, so it's a horrifying state of affairs. Essentially.
Speaker 6: One of the biggest things in one can google this
Speaker 6: right now is the wrongful death suits and payouts. So
Speaker 6: literally the business model is to allow people to die
Speaker 6: detained as a cost of business rather than give them
Speaker 6: proper medical care or take them to the hospital and
Speaker 6: so forth. And they will pay out and they do
Speaker 6: pay out millions to families. And I've seen this in action,
Speaker 6: not that any of my clients died, but just the
Speaker 6: the gravity to which the health situation has to be
Speaker 6: in order to have a prayer of getting them out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's very sad. Like I think one thing
Speaker 5: that I come back to now, like four years issue
Speaker 5: into a Biden administration is that like on one of
Speaker 5: his first decutive orders was he's going to end for
Speaker 5: profit prisons, and he never did shit about the ice detention,
Speaker 5: Like right from the outset there was like, these people
Speaker 5: do not have the same right to the people, and
Speaker 5: we don't care about them as.
Speaker 6: Much, exactly exactly, and at this part well and at
Speaker 6: this point too, it's like, given that he's done a
Speaker 6: one eighty on anything that was pro immigrant or that
Speaker 6: he said he was going to do at the beginning,
Speaker 6: you kind of start to wonder, is he just being
Speaker 6: paid off by the same people, by a geogroup or
Speaker 6: cor civic you know they they contribute millions of dollars
Speaker 6: to whoever is running for president for good reason. So
Speaker 6: it makes you wonder from that aspect as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like it certainly it was in his immigration reform
Speaker 5: built right between increase the amount of ice detention facility beds,
Speaker 5: us cells or whatever, how do you want to put that.
Speaker 5: Hopefully this advert that we're about to pivot to here
Speaker 5: is not for cour Civic Audio Group, but if it is,
Speaker 5: fuck them.
Speaker 6: Amen.
Speaker 5: All right, we are back and we're going to talk
Speaker 5: about this process advice relocating detainees. So this is something
Speaker 5: that you've actually you've done interview about recently, right A
Speaker 5: Pece written about it.
Speaker 6: Yes, Yes, I did two interviews about it, just because
Speaker 6: it's an issue very close to my heart. For several reasons.
Speaker 6: Detained work is very very difficult, and just the fact
Speaker 6: that few attorneys do it. I mean more have now
Speaker 6: in light of the County program. But still it's very
Speaker 6: emotionally draining too. You see, you literally see the decline
Speaker 6: of the person in front of your eyes, both mentally
Speaker 6: and physically, and it's just it takes a lot out
Speaker 6: of you. So these people need and deserve our presentation,
Speaker 6: and like I said, are often detained unjustly and have
Speaker 6: strong cases that they could actually win. So basically these
Speaker 6: people deserve representation and need it the most. I mean,
Speaker 6: they're basically the most marginalized out of any immigrant there is.
Speaker 6: So for ICE to suddenly start transferring mass transferring, I
Speaker 6: might add, represented detainees when they never have in the
Speaker 6: past and they haven't their own memo from twenty twelve
Speaker 6: that says they shouldn't do this except for exigent circumstances,
Speaker 6: you know, like some and they describe it as some
Speaker 6: medical issue or something severe that requires it. It's just
Speaker 6: it's pretty obvious that this is just direct retaliation or
Speaker 6: just designed to get attorneys out of O Tai, because
Speaker 6: there's been more of them in there. And we tend
Speaker 6: to make a stink and we tend to we tend
Speaker 6: to ask, hey, why haven't you given a decision on
Speaker 6: my client's requests to be really east and what's going
Speaker 6: on here? And we tend to send a lot of
Speaker 6: emails advocating for our clients, and we tend to be
Speaker 6: pains in the asses. And before this happened, I noticed
Speaker 6: that ICE was just not responding at all, whereas I
Speaker 6: had some relationship with the ICE agents that are at
Speaker 6: the detention center. Just to back up, every client is
Speaker 6: assigned to a deportation officer, so you technically have somebody
Speaker 6: from ICE to communicate with, and they're supposed to be
Speaker 6: in charge of the person detained, you know, whether they're
Speaker 6: released or whether the treatment like any they're their point
Speaker 6: of contact. And so even under the Trump years, you'd
Speaker 6: be able to Yeah, you might have to follow up,
Speaker 6: but you'd be able to communicate with a couple of
Speaker 6: them or some of them would do you know. And
Speaker 6: so I noticed in the past year or two that
Speaker 6: this is has just been kind of this scorched earth
Speaker 6: approach where they just won't.
Speaker 7: Get back to you or yeah.
Speaker 6: And they're also not responding to requests to have people
Speaker 6: released for just months and months and months despite attorneys asking.
Speaker 6: And so it doesn't surprise me the timing of this
Speaker 6: and that they would do this now that I'm reflecting
Speaker 6: back on this, as well as the county program. There's
Speaker 6: more attorneys at O Tai Mesa now and so I
Speaker 6: mean essentially what happens is if the person is transferred,
Speaker 6: which they've all been transferred to places like I think
Speaker 6: Colorado is probably the best option, but generally like Louisiana, Mississippi,
Speaker 6: things like that. Texas is where my clients are currently.
Speaker 6: So these are places where you can imagine there's a
Speaker 6: not a lot of quality immigration attorneys and b not
Speaker 6: a high chance of winning your case given the nature
Speaker 6: of the judges that are there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sod migrants articulate to me that they would not
Speaker 5: want to be in the fifth circuit exactly. Come here
Speaker 5: in the ninth circuit exactly. They're getting sent right back
Speaker 5: to the fifth circuit there exactly.
Speaker 6: And that's where my clients are now. And one judge
Speaker 6: from Otai decided, who scolded me for suggesting that this
Speaker 6: was even by design. He told me to act more professional.
Speaker 6: He didn't say anything to the DA just attorney about
Speaker 6: what his client was doing. It told me to act
Speaker 6: more professional, changed venue for that client. I was talking
Speaker 6: about the Kenyan client, and so we're now in El Paso,
Speaker 6: and thank god he has a strong case. But even then,
Speaker 6: I wonder, because that's it's I mean, if it's well
Speaker 6: known amongst migrants, you can imagine how badissy.
Speaker 5: If it's someone who knows nothing of the US.
Speaker 6: Yes, I mean, so it's just it's ludicrous that you have,
Speaker 6: you know, people pretending like judges, you know, just like
Speaker 6: this had to happen when you have you know, seventy
Speaker 6: percent of people you know. At least that's slightly dated,
Speaker 6: but still I don't think the percentage is that, even
Speaker 6: if it's fifty percent, why not unrepresented people? So to
Speaker 6: do this, it's just a very obvious, like fuck you.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's just there's no other way to to
Speaker 6: justify it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like when that happens, right, so you have
Speaker 5: this this gentleman from Kenya who's who's been transferred to
Speaker 5: to Texas. That then you then have to travel to
Speaker 5: Texas right for his hearings to talk to meet with him.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so that's the whole that's the whole big battle.
Speaker 6: And I have I have two different clients with two
Speaker 6: different experiences. So so he I will either have to
Speaker 6: appear via WebEx from my home. But then the judge
Speaker 6: now has two people remotely because my client's not an
Speaker 6: El Paso either, he's detained an ants in Texas, which
Speaker 6: is a blip about three hours away from Dallas or something.
Speaker 6: So they and this is also by design, right, they
Speaker 6: put all these attention centers in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 6: because God forbid, the public sees that people seeking asylum
Speaker 6: are in prisons. So anyways, so both of us are
Speaker 6: going to be remote if that's the case. So, I mean,
Speaker 6: I think there needs to be some personal contact and
Speaker 6: maybe if I can have some communication with the DHS council,
Speaker 6: I have to go to El Paso to give my
Speaker 6: clients the best chance of something, you know, otherwise we're
Speaker 6: both faces on this video with a with a fifth
Speaker 6: circuit judge, you know. So the other the flip side
Speaker 6: of the coin was that I have another client who
Speaker 6: was transferred and his trial is literally around the corner.
Speaker 6: It's next week. So yeah, he was transferred four weeks
Speaker 6: before as individual hearings. So I filed something scathing, saying, judge,
Speaker 6: please don't consider changing venue. This is you know, yeah,
Speaker 6: he's been detained long enough. He's a twenty one year
Speaker 6: old by the way.
Speaker 1: I mean, so.
Speaker 6: DHS sheepishly filed something. So Counsel for ICE filed something saying, okay,
Speaker 6: well we're asked, we agree to that. We just asked
Speaker 6: that he could appear via WebEx from ants in Texas. Also, right,
Speaker 6: so now he's going to be a face on a screen.
Speaker 6: But I can be at o tie. But still, I mean,
Speaker 6: these are all significant disadvantages. I mean, judges are evaluating
Speaker 6: immigrants to see whether or not in their mind they're
Speaker 6: quote credible. That means do they think they're lying or not.
Speaker 6: That's very hard to do on a video because you're
Speaker 6: looking for body language. You're looking for subtle things, you know.
Speaker 6: And also it's just like the human aspect of it
Speaker 6: is very important.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: It's easier to deny asylum to somebody on a that
Speaker 6: it is somebody sitting in front of you. You know,
Speaker 6: there's so many there's so many small aspects, and so
Speaker 6: Ice claims like, oh, well, well you just you can
Speaker 6: communicate just fine, you know, you can commune. We'll offer
Speaker 6: you calls and even video calls. And I'm like, okay,
Speaker 6: you don't understand anything about being an attorney and what
Speaker 6: it means to to actually represent clients. At the the
Speaker 6: person's final court hearing, they are asked to swear to
Speaker 6: the contents of not only their asylum application, but also
Speaker 6: all evidence they filed. And so if how on earth
Speaker 6: can you show them and sit with them to show
Speaker 6: them the evidence in person? You know that you can
Speaker 6: only do and personally. So it's just this whole concept
Speaker 6: that you can that you can even adequately lawyer remotely
Speaker 6: or over the phone. It's it's just it's not possible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and especially for people who are less you know,
Speaker 5: like I spent less time on Zoom than we have
Speaker 5: in the past four years.
Speaker 6: Right exactly, And a lot of these people are are
Speaker 6: are traumatized, you know, and are you like, as an attorney,
Speaker 6: you need to build rapport with them, and you do
Speaker 6: that by meeting with them in person, otherwise they might
Speaker 6: not share vital information with you, you know. And and honestly,
Speaker 6: the family of the twenty one year old mainly hired
Speaker 6: me to be with him during his final hearing, and
Speaker 6: so now I can't even do that, you know, just
Speaker 6: to try to calm and you know, these people are petrified.
Speaker 6: They've been through so much and now they have to
Speaker 6: talk about all of it in front of this American
Speaker 6: judge and a robe from a prison. Yeah, and I
Speaker 6: have to be their only ally is not even with them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And like there's understandably in a little country saying
Speaker 5: something on the phone or on a call might be
Speaker 5: a risk, right one hundred percent. You know, it takes
Speaker 5: I'm not saying it's not a risk doing it in
Speaker 5: this country. Like all of these things stack up against them.
Speaker 6: I spend most of my time telling my clients, like, hey,
Speaker 6: what we discuss on the phone is attorney client privilege,
Speaker 6: Like nobody could use this even if they try, and
Speaker 6: it doesn't calm them down, because it's just they think
Speaker 6: they're being recorded, probably from their experiences in their home countries.
Speaker 6: And frankly, I don't even know if we're being recorded.
Speaker 6: I just know that it can't be you are, it
Speaker 6: can't be used, you know. I mean, so, yeah, there's
Speaker 6: so many things that go into representing somebody who's detained,
Speaker 6: and I just knows all of this full well. So
Speaker 6: this is a very deliberate choice, and it's something we
Speaker 6: haven't seen before, like ever. I mean, everybody's pretty shocked
Speaker 6: by this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, when did it begin, sort, I.
Speaker 6: Want to say a couple months ago. But this mass
Speaker 6: transfer they did that sparked us to talk to the
Speaker 6: press and so forth was over Memorial Day weekend. So
Speaker 6: they liked to do that too. I've noticed over holiday
Speaker 6: weekends because last year they were trying to deport a
Speaker 6: couple of my clients even though they had things pending,
Speaker 6: and they try to do it over the weekend and
Speaker 6: so on purpose, right, and so the client's families would
Speaker 6: call and be like, hey, he's being printed, like processed
Speaker 6: for being deported, and so we immediately Yeah, I had
Speaker 6: to do this twice a year ago, so I had
Speaker 6: to send two emails based documenting and ceasing the ICE
Speaker 6: attorney being like hy, they have a pending XYZ case.
Speaker 6: It is unlawful to stop what you're doing immediately. But like,
Speaker 6: had we not been notified over the weekend and sent
Speaker 6: that email, they would have been deported despite having a
Speaker 6: k So this is the type of stuff that regularly happens.
Speaker 6: But it's very ballsy to me to transfer, Like I
Speaker 6: think it was probably like one hundred people or hundreds
Speaker 6: or something, you know, I mean over a Memorial Day weekend,
Speaker 6: you know. And of course, oh, their memo, by the way,
Speaker 6: also says they're supposed to notify the attorneys, you know.
Speaker 6: I mean, I heard from frantic family members who are like,
Speaker 6: why the fuck am I getting a call from ants
Speaker 6: in Texas?
Speaker 9: Oh?
Speaker 6: Oh, and this is rich. You'll appreciate this. It wasn't
Speaker 6: even one transfer. They first went to Eden, Texas, which
Speaker 6: is another lovely place in Texas. And then a week
Speaker 6: later we're moved to this place called blue Bonnet because
Speaker 6: they have to give them pretty names, right, detention facility
Speaker 6: at Antsen. Yeah, and so I had arranged a egal
Speaker 6: call it the first attach a facility and then had
Speaker 6: to like do it all, do this process all over again,
Speaker 6: and they ask you for everything but like your DNA
Speaker 6: in order to prove that you're their attorney, you know,
Speaker 6: to get this legal call. I mean, I spent two
Speaker 6: weeks just trying to figure out where my client was
Speaker 6: and these are two. Imagine this is sucked up like
Speaker 6: all my time since Memorial Day. I mean, there's other clients,
Speaker 6: you know, I've I've been struggling to get to their cases.
Speaker 6: Like thankfully I haven't had too many deadlines, but I
Speaker 6: mean it's it's been brutal.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that secks talking brutal, pointing. We have the brutal
Speaker 5: obligation to transfer to ads for a second time. So
Speaker 5: we're going to do that and then we're going to
Speaker 5: come back. All right, we're back. So we've heard about
Speaker 5: how ice A transferring people across to different different parts
Speaker 5: of the United States. What I wanted to talk about
Speaker 5: now was another recent development, which was Joe Biden's executive order,
Speaker 5: not the very recent one on role in place. People
Speaker 5: have seen that, but it's one quote unquote closing the border.
Speaker 5: Can you explain, we haven't really seen that impact on
Speaker 5: the ground yet, but can you explain, these people are
Speaker 5: supposed to get essentially a document forbidding them from reentering
Speaker 5: for five years.
Speaker 6: Correct, And it's not just any document, Yes, it's the
Speaker 6: worst document. So it is an expedited removal which is
Speaker 6: a fancy term for a deportation order that when issued
Speaker 6: by Border Patrol CBP, carries with it a five year bar,
Speaker 6: and so that means you're not admissible in any way,
Speaker 6: shape or form to the United States, and if you
Speaker 6: try to re enter during that time period or even
Speaker 6: at any time irregularly, you will then be put in
Speaker 6: what's called withholding only proceedings, and that essentially means you
Speaker 6: were no longer eligible for anything, not even asylum, just
Speaker 6: a very very difficult form of asylum, which is called
Speaker 6: withholding or protection of the Convention. It's torture, which is
Speaker 6: also very difficult to win. So that those are the
Speaker 6: two things you're stuck fighting. And then you are also
Speaker 6: mandatory attention, so there's no possibility of you getting out
Speaker 6: unless you're in your case, which is of course very
Speaker 6: very difficult. So can I haven't seen this play out,
Speaker 6: you know, like we're saying, it's it's relatively new, and yeah,
Speaker 6: but I can imagine based on my experience and based
Speaker 6: on what all of us know, that like, people aren't
Speaker 6: gonna have any idea what this is, and they're gonna
Speaker 6: and plus there's desperation and other fact. I mean, they
Speaker 6: just came to the dairy end. They're not gonna let
Speaker 6: a piece of paper stop them, you know. So, I mean,
Speaker 6: so these people are probably going to turn around and
Speaker 6: try again and end up being in this withholding only posture,
Speaker 6: which means they're now really screwed in terms of having
Speaker 6: a way difficult time winning any sort of relief and
Speaker 6: definitely detained, like they will not be released. I've had
Speaker 6: clients on occasion like every blue moon be released, but
Speaker 6: the way I is acting these days, I don't think
Speaker 6: it'll happen. So one of the thoughts I had is
Speaker 6: is this justifying additional detention centers if we're now having
Speaker 6: going to have probably more of those types of people,
Speaker 6: But its just in general, I don't see there being
Speaker 6: a shortage of people they can detain, So I think.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, I think they Yeah. I don't think that
Speaker 5: we have an option in November to vote for a
Speaker 5: person who isn't going to build more prisons.
Speaker 6: For refugees one hundred percent, one hundred percent, which is
Speaker 6: which is why. And I think that's something very you know,
Speaker 6: it can be you can take it and be like, Okay,
Speaker 6: I'm so depressed, you know, blah blah, there's nobody to
Speaker 6: vote for, like you know, because basically Biden has done,
Speaker 6: you know, gravitated so far to the right.
Speaker 5: I called all the stuff that they waved it up
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty sod Trump will do this. Biden has
Speaker 5: story exactly right.
Speaker 6: And so I don't even know that I called him
Speaker 6: Trump Light, but I don't even know if he's Trump
Speaker 6: light anymore. He's like more like Trump medium or almost there,
Speaker 6: you know.
Speaker 5: So less racist speeches.
Speaker 6: Exactly, Trump minus the racist speeches exactly. So it's just,
Speaker 6: I mean, so the way to look at this is
Speaker 6: that like literally we are their only hope. I mean,
Speaker 6: the government here is not only like not only gonna
Speaker 6: not save them from anything. They're in creating all these situations,
Speaker 6: putting them in more peril. So it really behooves us
Speaker 6: to find all the different grassroots organizations, and there's there's
Speaker 6: so many of them that we can help and donate
Speaker 6: involundar teer our time too, because that's literally all these
Speaker 6: people have.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so let's talk about that a bit, because something
Speaker 5: both you and I do as we participate in water drops,
Speaker 5: in in migrant aid of various kinds, welcome stations of
Speaker 5: the thing we've been doing recently. You know, you and
Speaker 5: I were out Now I'm just going to collapse on itself,
Speaker 5: but we were out in a place near the border.
Speaker 5: We were there when we met the two Mauritanian dudes.
Speaker 5: You carried the Chinese exactly. Yeah, Yeah, it was so beautiful, right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: it was such a wonderful Like obviously it's pretty bleak
Speaker 5: that the guys aren't able to use one of his
Speaker 5: legs properly, and yeah, therefore two people who don't share
Speaker 5: a single word with him had to carry him. These
Speaker 5: two Mauritanian men met. I'll just rewind to tell the
Speaker 5: whole story. Yeah, we were driving down the road and
Speaker 5: we kept meeting groups of Mauritanian refugees coming north, and
Speaker 5: we were able to help them by giving them water
Speaker 5: in quick interruption.
Speaker 6: By the way, I looked up Mauritanian and unsurprisingly, they
Speaker 6: have female general mulation, child labor and basically any like
Speaker 6: it's just horrific capital punishments.
Speaker 5: Yeah, gay people, right exactly. So these people, very very nice,
Speaker 5: just wanted mostly a bottle of water, and you know
Speaker 5: how far tw weekend surrounded to border Cotrol, which is
Speaker 5: what they intend to do. And they kept saying that
Speaker 5: there's a guy with a broken leg, and we were like,
Speaker 5: oh shit, like, but that's potentially fatal in this place
Speaker 5: that we're at. They just keep saying, go down the road,
Speaker 5: you'll see him. So we keep going down the road
Speaker 5: and we come around the corner and there's two guys
Speaker 5: sort of eat and then a third guy in the
Speaker 5: middle of them with his hands over both their shoulders, right,
Speaker 5: and they're sort of humping him down the road. And
Speaker 5: it turns out this Chinese man only speaking Mandarin, he
Speaker 5: had like a brace, like an external fixation on his leg,
Speaker 5: like like bolts through his leg and couldn't walk. And
Speaker 5: these dudes have been carrying him for two days and
Speaker 5: they couldn't she speak the same language like they didn't.
Speaker 5: They weren't able to communicate, and it was the most
Speaker 5: humane thing, and it made me just so ashamed that
Speaker 5: like these people, in a time of desperation for themselves,
Speaker 5: have taken the risk to help other people, and then
Speaker 5: here's our government just being like, screw you. If you
Speaker 5: don't belong here, we're going to put you straight in prison.
Speaker 5: Or especially these these are mostly Muslim African men from
Speaker 5: Mauritania right there. They're generally sort of that that will
Speaker 5: be one of the more persecuted demographics. And perhaps you
Speaker 5: can talk about like how you got into participating in
Speaker 5: water drops and how other people could do so, or
Speaker 5: any any form of a direct mutual aid I supposed
Speaker 5: to says like advocacy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean I think I think the
Speaker 6: main thing to take away is that it's easier to
Speaker 6: help or participate then one would think. You know, I
Speaker 6: think you look at this issue of immigration and it's
Speaker 6: so overwhelming right now, and it can be a bit like,
Speaker 6: oh god, you know, what can I possibly do? Or
Speaker 6: you know, and even if i'm you know, what difference
Speaker 6: am I making?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 6: And it's just like I have the same struggles working
Speaker 6: as you know, an immigration attorney, because you're just like God,
Speaker 6: you see just the vast need and you know, you
Speaker 6: focus on the person in front of you, you know,
Speaker 6: And not to sound cheesy, but that's the life you
Speaker 6: can affect and so we're and all of us collectively
Speaker 6: have an impact more than we know, you know. So
Speaker 6: I think that's just the first thing to share. So
Speaker 6: don't don't feel defeated and think that. Remember that if
Speaker 6: you have twenty extra bucks a month to spare, for example,
Speaker 6: like if you donate that to supplies for migrants, then
Speaker 6: that literally allows the work of water dropping to continue.
Speaker 6: And you know, that's the other side of the coin.
Speaker 6: If we can go out all we want, but if
Speaker 6: we don't have money or supplies to drop, then nothing
Speaker 6: gets done, you know. So if you live in any
Speaker 6: part of the country, really you can find a reputable organization,
Speaker 6: you know, or BRC is a collective. I volunteer with
Speaker 6: Borderlands Relief Collective and every cent goes directly to the
Speaker 6: supplies that we drop, and that's a very it's huge
Speaker 6: tangible source of help. All of our supplies are consumed,
Speaker 6: as you know, within a week or so, we think,
Speaker 6: you know. So it's just there's so many different ways
Speaker 6: to to participate. There's organizations that allow you to talk
Speaker 6: to detained immigrants, you know, like Freedom for Immigrants or
Speaker 6: you know, there's different ways you can help. If you
Speaker 6: want to communicate with them. There's also detention Resistance, who
Speaker 6: works with the people mainly in No Taimesa to help
Speaker 6: just provide even a source of support, just someone a
Speaker 6: human being to talk to, who can help them with
Speaker 6: little things like writing letters or putting money in their
Speaker 6: account to be able to contact family members. I say
Speaker 6: little things, but those things are huge because if you
Speaker 6: can imagine being an immigrant in another country and you
Speaker 6: know somebody in that and you're in a prison, but
Speaker 6: somebody in that country or a few people are are
Speaker 6: showing you love. I think at the end of the day,
Speaker 6: whether you're officially deported or when asylum or whatever, those
Speaker 6: are the things that stick with people because I know
Speaker 6: that they're going to remember that probably for the rest
Speaker 6: of their lives.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think it's the least we can do
Speaker 5: to be welcoming with exactly exactly.
Speaker 6: That's why the welcome stations that we do are so
Speaker 6: beautiful too, right, because it's just I mean, what we
Speaker 6: were doing that day when we met those two people
Speaker 6: or the three people rather, and it's just like they
Speaker 6: get they get a help a loving, helpful person as
Speaker 6: their first exposure to the United States, and then you know,
Speaker 6: I said, instead of border patrol, which makes them take
Speaker 6: off their shoelaces and treats them like you know.
Speaker 5: Criminals, exactly exactly, and it's nice. I I've exchanged for
Speaker 5: numbers of those people and they're like, oh, you're the
Speaker 5: first American I met. You'll always be like my first
Speaker 5: American friend. Someone'sta the other day and I thought that
Speaker 5: was really sweet.
Speaker 6: It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. I think
Speaker 6: about that all the time with my clients. You know,
Speaker 6: I'm just like God, I feel so fortunate to meet
Speaker 6: all these people, you know, from different countries. It's just
Speaker 6: and I'm embarrassed to say that I have to usually
Speaker 6: google where the country is, you know.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's awful.
Speaker 6: I don't know what our geography education was, but let's
Speaker 6: just say I didn't get much of it. But you know,
Speaker 6: just where am I going to meet people from Belize,
Speaker 6: from Kenya, from Trinidad, from Chad, you know, and be
Speaker 6: able to really share life with them to a certain
Speaker 6: extent or you know, I know their most vulnerable and
Speaker 6: awful experiences. I know their family, you know, or about
Speaker 6: their families and about them, and it's a really beautiful thing.
Speaker 6: So it's just, you know, unfortunate. So to have to
Speaker 6: interact with them and in a prison is just you know,
Speaker 6: it's just it's just ridiculous, you know. But so that's
Speaker 6: why those welcome tables are I think so just pure
Speaker 6: and precious because at that moment there's no bullshit involved yet,
Speaker 6: there's no US government. It's just humans interacting with humans.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it totally is really nice. It's one of the
Speaker 5: better things that I like to do. And yeah, if
Speaker 5: you if a replace where you can do it, you
Speaker 5: should do it. If you're not, it would be great
Speaker 5: if you get in your money. I am going to
Speaker 5: read as we finish up a plug for the sidewalk
Speaker 5: school Matamoros and they NOSA. I just want to like
Speaker 5: they are in desperate need the money right now. They
Speaker 5: do amazing work with people on both sides of the border.
Speaker 5: I've been on a panel with Felicia for UCLA that
Speaker 5: you can find if you're good at googling things. It's
Speaker 5: on YouTube. It's the Allied Community Arts Brigade. UCLA hosted
Speaker 5: the panel, so if you if you search that and
Speaker 5: border panel, I'm sure you'll find it. And if you
Speaker 5: want to know more about the Sidewalk School. I recommend it,
Speaker 5: and we're joined there by people from Border Kindness and Alotlado,
Speaker 5: which are both excellent organizations working on the border here.
Speaker 5: But the Sidewalk School are working with refugees and assigum
Speaker 5: seekers on both sides of the border in Matamoros and
Speaker 5: by Alsa so in Texas area, and they definately need
Speaker 5: your money. If you would like to support them, you
Speaker 5: can go to gofund dot me slash zero six CDOC
Speaker 5: seventy six and we'll include that in the notes of
Speaker 5: this podcast as well. Kasin, thank you so much for
Speaker 5: your time. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you, James.
Speaker 10: Welcome to take it up and to here a show
Speaker 10: that today is very urgently about things falling apart in
Speaker 10: Kenya and how to put them back together again. I'm
Speaker 10: your host, Miya Long. What you're about to hear is
Speaker 10: an interview about the Kenyan protest that was recorded on Sunday,
Speaker 10: July twenty third. At time of recording, it is now
Speaker 10: Tuesday the twenty fifth, and in that two day span,
Speaker 10: the situation and Kenya has gotten significantly worse. Kenyan police
Speaker 10: are firing live ammo into crowds of protesters. They've killed
Speaker 10: at least five people today. That numbers expected to rise
Speaker 10: as more protesters die in hospitals. The government has deployed
Speaker 10: the army and shut down much of the internet in
Speaker 10: an attempt to stop news from getting out. On Kenyan TV,
Speaker 10: political leaders called the protesters criminals and a threat to
Speaker 10: national security. Meanwhile, protesters made good on their slogan occupied
Speaker 10: Parliament by storming and then partially burning down the parliament building.
Speaker 10: As politicians continue to meet their demands with bullets. What
Speaker 10: we've seen today is terrifying cops shooting live AMMO into churches,
Speaker 10: cops opening fire on people waiting for medical care. Meanwhile,
Speaker 10: to the fury of the protesters, Kenyan troops arrived today
Speaker 10: in Haiti to begin the US backed occupation of the country.
Speaker 10: We spent this interview largely discussing the local Kenyan political leads,
Speaker 10: but this is also an international crisis. Much of the
Speaker 10: impetus for the brutal tax increases on basic goods came
Speaker 10: from an international monetary FUM bailout deal that required Kenya
Speaker 10: to increase its taxes to twenty five percent of the
Speaker 10: country's GDP. Thus Kenyans are being robbed twice, once by
Speaker 10: the Kenyan political masters of the cops shooting them in
Speaker 10: the streets, and again by the IMF and their neolibal
Speaker 10: wealth extraction program. As the struggle continues. Let us now
Speaker 10: turn to our interview into a more optimistic time and
Speaker 10: movement to get a real understanding of what the protests
Speaker 10: are about. Welcome to it could happen here a podcast
Speaker 10: where the here is currently Kenya. Yeah, I'm your host
Speaker 10: Miya Wong, and we're we're going to talk about a
Speaker 10: bunch of protests and a bunch of very very very
Speaker 10: interesting sort of political developments at Kenya that I think
Speaker 10: have gotten very distressingly little coverage in the sort of
Speaker 10: like Anglophone maation media. And with me to talk about
Speaker 10: that is Justine Wanda's a stand up comedian, a political satirist,
Speaker 10: and a writer who's created Fake Book with Justine about
Speaker 10: well basically all the stuff that we're going to be
Speaker 10: talking about today are there are things you will see
Speaker 10: on this show. Justine. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 11: Thank you so much for having me me. How are
Speaker 11: you doing?
Speaker 5: Ah?
Speaker 10: You know this is this This is one of those
Speaker 10: morning recordings so I'm a little bit unhinged, but it's okay.
Speaker 10: We're I'm really excited to talk to you. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: I'm really excited to talk to you.
Speaker 12: And I yeah.
Speaker 10: So I think I think the place to start here
Speaker 10: is can you talk about So these protests are about
Speaker 10: an upcoming finance bill, So let's talk about what actually
Speaker 10: is this bill and what's in it?
Speaker 11: Okay, So for me to be able to talk about
Speaker 11: the finance bill, I have to talk about the finance
Speaker 11: bill that was past last year.
Speaker 10: Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 11: So in twoy twenty three, we had a finance bill
Speaker 11: that was passed. Most of the financial last year had
Speaker 11: something called the housing Levy, which basically requires every single
Speaker 11: Kenyon who's employed to remove a little bit of their
Speaker 11: salary to go directly to pay for an account where
Speaker 11: they'll pull the money to build Kenyon's affordable houses. And
Speaker 11: in Kenya, house is not especially a crisis in rural
Speaker 11: areas because most people have their own personal phones. The
Speaker 11: issue is usually the urban centers where housing is actually
Speaker 11: very expensive and it's it's very poorly infrastructured, like there's
Speaker 11: no water, sometimes there's no electricity in certain parts, like
Speaker 11: people have done a lot of illegal collection connections. So
Speaker 11: last year the bill was kind of rummed through and
Speaker 11: there was so much public participation. Actually in the beginning
Speaker 11: that was like a lot of people got angry about
Speaker 11: the bill forcing people to take money out of their
Speaker 11: pockets to contribute to a fund that didn't seem like
Speaker 11: they had a plan. And a lot of politicians were
Speaker 11: actually on TV and everyone was watching every interview and
Speaker 11: they're like, you don't make any sense, we don't understand. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it's like, what is that money for? We're not sure,
Speaker 11: but we know we're to building houses. How are you
Speaker 11: going to manage the money? Who's going to be in
Speaker 11: charge of the money. How is this? Like every single
Speaker 11: aspect was met by like some form of deflection or
Speaker 11: like a lie, just like a lot of there wasn't
Speaker 11: any accountability in the in what they were telling us.
Speaker 11: And even the person who was in charge was like
Speaker 11: on TV, he was sweating. He looked like he was
Speaker 11: lying though who wrote time. So everyone was like, if
Speaker 11: this is how you're speaking about it when we aren't
Speaker 11: giving out money, what will happen after the fact. But
Speaker 11: the bill sailed through and one of the elements that
Speaker 11: was in that field that wasn't even in the news
Speaker 11: was that avocado farmers in the country will start with
Speaker 11: charging us will be charged a certain amount of money
Speaker 11: on their produce and they have to produce receipts on
Speaker 11: this every single day. What like if yes, if you
Speaker 11: sell like an avocado, one avocado or of avocados, you
Speaker 11: have to do a breakdown of like your sales and
Speaker 11: like provide receipts to the government and then like you're
Speaker 11: charged for it. Oh my god, and yes, and the
Speaker 11: MPs this like earlier this year, were like when the
Speaker 11: bill usually like sometimes it takes a while for the
Speaker 11: closest to come into effect. It takes like maybe a
Speaker 11: couple of months. So the amoungst their farmers were supposed
Speaker 11: to get charged was supposed to go live on sorry
Speaker 11: in February or something. So in February, farmers are getting
Speaker 11: attacked by like the Kenure Revenue Authority. They're being told
Speaker 11: you need to provide these receipts and everything, and everyone
Speaker 11: is like, I don't understand because we weren't informed. And
Speaker 11: then the politicians who did not read the bill but
Speaker 11: first it were like, oh, we didn't read the document.
Speaker 11: It was too big what yes, exactly, So like that
Speaker 11: kind of information was what that was what was on
Speaker 11: the news just before they introduced now the financial twenty
Speaker 11: four So it's like, we know you didn't read the
Speaker 11: one from last year, you passed a bunch of bill,
Speaker 11: is that you didn't understand the impact of it in
Speaker 11: the long term, So why would should you? Why should
Speaker 11: Kenyans trust you with this new one? And then they
Speaker 11: were like, no, we have the best economic interests that
Speaker 11: had And then everyone was like, but the billy passed
Speaker 11: last year to increase revenue didn't work. So if it
Speaker 11: didn't work, what makes you think having a bunch of
Speaker 11: new taxes they're going to work. And they couldn't answer that.
Speaker 11: And now this finance built entertain wants to introduce much
Speaker 11: of your call tax, where if you own a car,
Speaker 11: you will pay like a certain amount like I think
Speaker 11: two percent that's of the voliation of your car, and
Speaker 11: you paid to your insurance company every single year.
Speaker 10: Wait do you insure?
Speaker 7: What?
Speaker 11: What?
Speaker 12: Why?
Speaker 1: Wait?
Speaker 10: Hold on, so why why is the tax? Why is
Speaker 10: this being paid to the insurance company?
Speaker 11: Because that's that's how people asking. It's like, we understand
Speaker 11: because insurance and Kenya is mostly run by private entities
Speaker 11: just know exactly what they're doing, so it's more like
Speaker 11: a way to privates and get money into people's protects
Speaker 11: so we can't see and then and end up being
Speaker 11: stolen and there will be no thoportability. But they say
Speaker 11: it's easier because the insurance company is already handled this
Speaker 11: kind of stuff. So it's on top of your insurance.
Speaker 11: On top of the insurance you pay for your car,
Speaker 11: you pay the motor vehicle tax as part of that.
Speaker 11: And I'm like, that's ridiculous. We don't trust our money
Speaker 11: on any given day. Why would you think we would
Speaker 11: just to suddenly with the branch of money being granted
Speaker 11: by a private from somewhere because they're not going to
Speaker 11: show us their books.
Speaker 10: Yes, it seems like part of this too, is just
Speaker 10: that the sort of tax infrastructure isn't very like the
Speaker 10: tax collection infrastructure isn't very good, because you would think
Speaker 10: that that wouldn't be that hard for the government to
Speaker 10: just collect. Instead, we have like a like an Ottoman
Speaker 10: style tax farming situation.
Speaker 11: So I love it you say that, because like that's
Speaker 11: how that's exactly how it feels like everything is run.
Speaker 11: It's very we're the smartest people in the room. We
Speaker 11: can't make the wrong decision. But you've made the wrong
Speaker 11: decision again and again and again, and now we're like,
Speaker 11: we want to see the approach. We want to understand
Speaker 11: how this is going to work in the face of unemployment,
Speaker 11: in the face of like the country has not been
Speaker 11: in good economic trajectory for a while now, and that
Speaker 11: those economic shocks can be felt. A lot of people
Speaker 11: are closing down their businesses. A lot of people are downsizing,
Speaker 11: which means it's less people employed. Even the beauty industry,
Speaker 11: which is mostly like random inputs, because they're chudgling so
Speaker 11: much input duty, the beauty industry can't even stand on
Speaker 11: its own, so people are not just buying less makeup.
Speaker 11: It's like people who are those stores and any of
Speaker 11: those kinds of basay. This is can't even have the
Speaker 11: like the person who comes to get the job days.
Speaker 11: It becomes a bit of a problem. So everyone is like,
Speaker 11: if you're going to charge us more, you have to
Speaker 11: have an infrastructure that works for us.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah. Another tax that they're adding on the Finance bill
Speaker 11: is the inputs duty fee to like sanitary towels, wheelchair tired,
Speaker 11: like because like Kenya doesn't manufacture a lot of stuff.
Speaker 11: So you find like our like the pad manufacturing industry
Speaker 11: in Kenya, like sanitary towers, only two percent are manufactured here,
Speaker 11: like a big chunk comes from outside and they want
Speaker 11: to increase the input duty on that. So that means
Speaker 11: the pads in the market are going to be even
Speaker 11: more expensive.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and that's something that like that that's not that's
Speaker 10: not a like that's that's that's that's not a luxury good.
Speaker 10: You just need that.
Speaker 11: Yeah, So everyone was like, Okay, I guess though, we'll
Speaker 11: just have to stop having periods. Is like that, that's
Speaker 11: what you're saying, Like we're govern have to magically, Yeah,
Speaker 11: we're gonna have to figure out magically with nature to
Speaker 11: just stop having periods because you guys want to tax
Speaker 11: us in this particular way. And it's it's not just
Speaker 11: like the small things because like the problem with the
Speaker 11: Kenyans space, especially with sensitive issues. So our our third president,
Speaker 11: his name was Mikey Baki, was the first one of
Speaker 11: the first presidents in the world to remove v ty
Speaker 11: on sanitary towers. Like he was seen as like someone
Speaker 11: who's setting an example for so many people. And then
Speaker 11: the fact that this is happening when this country was
Speaker 11: seen as like a chin setter to like not just
Speaker 11: African countries but other countries around the world when it
Speaker 11: comes to like very important goods, it was felt like
Speaker 11: going backwards, and not in a way. It's not like
Speaker 11: we didn't have an example to follow. We actually did
Speaker 11: have a set precedent on like how an economy is
Speaker 11: supposed to work. So everyone who's grown up in these
Speaker 11: particular environments where they felt safe and protected by the
Speaker 11: government and like the government taking they live on very
Speaker 11: important issues was like, you can't say building Kenya, buying
Speaker 11: Kenya is a top priority for you. And even electricity
Speaker 11: costs are expensive, yeah, because even this will adds like
Speaker 11: a fewel levy tax it's going up by seven shillings,
Speaker 11: which is way too expensive. So you pay for your fuel,
Speaker 11: but like most of the charges on the fuel is
Speaker 11: just the levees and taxes and they're adding a little
Speaker 11: bit more year.
Speaker 10: And it seems like from the way that these are
Speaker 10: being structured that you know, I mean, one of the
Speaker 10: things with direct like I guess we call them sales
Speaker 10: taxes here is that the incredibly regressive. The people who
Speaker 10: get affected the most by are the people who you
Speaker 10: don't have that much money versus something like doing you know,
Speaker 10: versus doing like an income tax, and like the people
Speaker 10: who are the highest owners. This is this the burden,
Speaker 10: This falls entirely on people who are poor and can't
Speaker 10: afford it.
Speaker 11: Yes, that's I think it's very scary to think a
Speaker 11: lot of our politicians because they get paid with taxpayer money,
Speaker 11: and what they did when during when they were writing,
Speaker 11: when they were contributing to the budget, they were like,
Speaker 11: we want we want this and this, want to be
Speaker 11: added for this and this thing. But the problem is,
Speaker 11: like when you look deep down what they're looking for,
Speaker 11: they don't want to pay taxes off of their salaries.
Speaker 11: They want to find a way for taxpayers to pay
Speaker 11: for part of the taxes that are being added so
Speaker 11: that they don't have to lose money. Yeah, and every yeah,
Speaker 11: everyone is like, we know your budgeting for corruption. We
Speaker 11: can see you, we can see still, we can see
Speaker 11: you still, and we don't want to be part of that.
Speaker 11: And now to them it was like we're being aggressive
Speaker 11: because we want we want them to be held accountable
Speaker 11: for their very punitive for the punitive measures that they're
Speaker 11: sending to like regular opinions. As you said, a lot
Speaker 11: of sales taps is affect every day before and we
Speaker 11: don't know how else to stop it. And I think
Speaker 11: that's why they protest are so they're catching fire and
Speaker 11: everyone wants to be out in the street.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and we are going to we are going to
Speaker 10: come back and talk about the protests in a second,
Speaker 10: but first I here, here are some products and services
Speaker 10: that are I don't know, probably also be taxed. But
Speaker 10: all right, and we are back. Yeah, So okay, I
Speaker 10: think I think people should should have like a decent
Speaker 10: understanding of the fact that these taxes are these are
Speaker 10: tax to some basic commodities that people need. And that's
Speaker 10: one of the easiest ways to start a protest movement
Speaker 10: is to suddenly make it too expensive to live. So
Speaker 10: let's talk about who. Yeah, how these protests sort of
Speaker 10: started and how they've been being organized.
Speaker 11: My issues that we can't really say how the protests started,
Speaker 11: but there was a lot of anger by Kenyons online
Speaker 11: because Kenyons are chronically online, like especially the younger generation,
Speaker 11: a lot of people have cell phones, a lot of
Speaker 11: people are not tuned into the news really, but the
Speaker 11: information sharing happens whell Like when a clip from the
Speaker 11: news is cut put on tiptop, people see it, this
Speaker 11: is happening, so it will get angry and then they shared.
Speaker 11: So what happened with the the Finance book. People would
Speaker 11: cut very little clips from the news and then someone
Speaker 11: would help put it in context. So that's where my
Speaker 11: channel comes in, where I'm not just using the news clips.
Speaker 11: I provide evidence like I've got through the Finance built,
Speaker 11: and then even consults with people who are in like
Speaker 11: ask lawyers on Twitter, like people who have resources and
Speaker 11: understand the law, or like what that would mean for
Speaker 11: everyday cannons. I would literally reach out and it got
Speaker 11: to a point where I am now in communication with
Speaker 11: the right channels, like you can directly ask how this
Speaker 11: would impact people, like if they tax bread more or
Speaker 11: like refuse to make it easier for suppliers to get
Speaker 11: items for the supply chain, how does this affect everyday people?
Speaker 11: So that helps bridge the graph of information and now
Speaker 11: with more people critically not just looking at their news
Speaker 11: but finding the evidence for themselves. Really have helped us
Speaker 11: get to a point where when you share, we are
Speaker 11: protesting about this issue. This is where we're going, this
Speaker 11: is what's happening. This this will happen in a certain town.
Speaker 11: So like Nairobi had its own occupy parliament reject the
Speaker 11: financial demonstration, it happened in Mombasa, to it happened in
Speaker 11: neary Elderate, all these smaller towns where people will live,
Speaker 11: but they're people from rural areas. They won't really care.
Speaker 11: And I'm like, you don't know that. Yeah. And also
Speaker 11: something that's really magical that's happened. A lot of Kenyons
Speaker 11: were like, Okay, maybe there there are a lot of
Speaker 11: Kenyons who live in rural areas who don't have media
Speaker 11: that doesn't cater to traditional listeners, like people who only
Speaker 11: speak certain languages so vernacular stations. So people started using
Speaker 11: TikTok to do direct translation. It's like this is the script, yes,
Speaker 11: this is the script for the the financial buildings. Are
Speaker 11: the taxes being added. This is the tax on bread,
Speaker 11: This is the tax on your on your vehicle. This
Speaker 11: is the tax that will happen on like period and
Speaker 11: sanitary paths and diapers and everything. So someone does the
Speaker 11: whole break down in their vernacular language and they share
Speaker 11: it on their family Whatspp groups called penans love whatksapp.
Speaker 11: That's why if you're if you want to do anything
Speaker 11: proper gandalate, you can easily bot onwards app before messages
Speaker 11: are crazy. So because like WhatsApp is mostly co opted
Speaker 11: by antis and moms and people who love to share.
Speaker 11: Please go to chat share share this to seven friends.
Speaker 11: People took that mandy to where they send it to
Speaker 11: their moms and then have it shared like seven of
Speaker 11: their friends who don't understand me do what the finance
Speaker 11: bill entails. And that is really changing the landscape of
Speaker 11: like who gets to interpret the bills, who gets to
Speaker 11: understand how it influences them. And it's been very very effective,
Speaker 11: So people who are passive are more and more understanding
Speaker 11: of like why everyone is on the streets.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, it seems like it almost seems like there's
Speaker 10: isn't there's kind of a I don't know, it's like
Speaker 10: a TikTok think tank that's been sort of doing this
Speaker 10: valuation that has been spread through That's that's really cool.
Speaker 11: I'm just saying it's absolutely lovely to see because like
Speaker 11: tribalism has been a tool that's been wielded, especially during elections,
Speaker 11: to make onions look like they don't care about each
Speaker 11: other and they can't go beyond their differences. And this
Speaker 11: time it's like, yeah, we do have language barriers, but
Speaker 11: we're not going to let that affect us negatively. We're
Speaker 11: going to figure out a way through the noise before
Speaker 11: they start co opting those spaces and start saying, oh,
Speaker 11: gen z, kids are lying or millennials are just started
Speaker 11: getting money, so why would they care about taxes? And
Speaker 11: so everyone is making sure that those spaces are not corrupted. Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it seems like a really sort of incredible popular
Speaker 10: education thing that's been empowering this. Yeah, so I want to,
Speaker 10: I guess talk about I mean, one of the things
Speaker 10: that I think maybe kind of breached the I don't know,
Speaker 10: calling it like the Great Firewall is exactly right, but
Speaker 10: it's like, I think one of I think one of
Speaker 10: the parts of this that has gotten a little bit
Speaker 10: of play in the sort of beautia over here has
Speaker 10: been the police response, which has been terrible. Yeah, about
Speaker 10: what the cops have been.
Speaker 11: Doing, Okay, in Kenya protests Historically, protests have always been
Speaker 11: extremely violent, Like during the Moi era, people used to
Speaker 11: get beaten unlocked. MOI was al second president. He was
Speaker 11: in office for twenty four years, so he was a
Speaker 11: power holder a least those words, there's a power holder.
Speaker 11: He didn't want to go anywhere. He wanted to stay
Speaker 11: in power as long as he could and to counter
Speaker 11: anyone who would go against him. People were tortured, people
Speaker 11: were disappeared, people were children like dropped in forest. Many
Speaker 11: families couldn't find their members, especially if they went out
Speaker 11: of protest or do anything. That's why Wankarematas story, who's
Speaker 11: like one of the biggest environment total champions the world
Speaker 11: has ever seen. Her story was so unique because in
Speaker 11: the face of the most brutal dictators and every thing,
Speaker 11: she showed up and like she didn't just disagree, but
Speaker 11: she brought back and she did she use the same
Speaker 11: tactics that people are using now. She informed the very
Speaker 11: ignored part of the population to get the information across
Speaker 11: that if they start taking away your land and putting
Speaker 11: down your tree and you won't be able to pumb,
Speaker 11: you won't have anything. This is this whole place is
Speaker 11: going to be at their set in a couple of years.
Speaker 11: So everyone was funnying because like land is a very
Speaker 11: sensitive issue yea, And that's why the movement worked so
Speaker 11: well because she was not speaking, she was not just
Speaker 11: peaking against authoritude that she was going to like the
Speaker 11: people who who were going to be affected the most.
Speaker 11: And during those protests she was beaten up. Her hair
Speaker 11: was like young top her hair. It was very Yeah,
Speaker 11: it was very graphic and very painful. Like you watch
Speaker 11: these videos and they're like, who does something like this?
Speaker 11: And now it's very replicated. Sorry, it was replicated again
Speaker 11: like throughout his presidency, but throughout the years, a lot
Speaker 11: of civil rights movements and all the community based organizations
Speaker 11: like came together and they will still protest about staff,
Speaker 11: but the issue it had moved on from like large
Speaker 11: protests to even smaller protests, being like they would send
Speaker 11: the police to bitter people who are speaking up about
Speaker 11: any issue. And usually because like you're in smaller communities,
Speaker 11: there's no way to track. So if someone lies in
Speaker 11: Quibera and it's a slam area and it's mostly disenfranchised,
Speaker 11: the community organizations there, no they turn and find justice
Speaker 11: for the family. But because our police are mostly helped,
Speaker 11: you can't hold them to account because they work for
Speaker 11: the state, it's very hard to get any form of justice.
Speaker 11: But this time was it last year when people are
Speaker 11: protesting about the cost of living. I think it was
Speaker 11: just shortly before the finance built twenty twenty three past
Speaker 11: people were protesting. People were out and they were angry
Speaker 11: about everything, and people were beaten up. Someone lost their
Speaker 11: two year old child because the child was beaten by
Speaker 11: the police. Yeah. Yeah, Like there's a woman who lost
Speaker 11: her son. Because usually when you're at protests, sometimes the
Speaker 11: people who are passing by, but because you're there and
Speaker 11: the police are there, they end up eating. Even if
Speaker 11: you're not past year, you're not back to the process.
Speaker 11: So that there's a woman who ended up losing her
Speaker 11: son last year to the protest, and her adopted son too.
Speaker 11: And then this this year, like a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 11: she died in a flood in my daddy, So and
Speaker 11: then yess are like seeing their terrible nature of like
Speaker 11: how state violence kIPS continuing. So this time when the
Speaker 11: protests are being organized, everyone who is like make sure
Speaker 11: you're peaceful, don't carry in stones because like throws stones
Speaker 11: like Perry stones. You couldn't even pick up teas and
Speaker 11: like throw it back and everything, and this time everyone
Speaker 11: is like, just make sure you're very peaceful, only use
Speaker 11: your voice, protect each other. Like a lot of the
Speaker 11: announcements around the protests like make sure it's paceful so
Speaker 11: that they don't have an excuse to say that you
Speaker 11: are out on the streets doing something illegal. You don't
Speaker 11: attack shops, you don't try and force yourself into anyone's premises.
Speaker 11: And what happened that was very beautiful this year is
Speaker 11: like the establishments, like the one I'm in right now
Speaker 11: was helped protect citizens who were protesting, so kids would
Speaker 11: be out of this then start getting teaters and like
Speaker 11: they would open the door, people would come in and
Speaker 11: they would close the door until the away. Yeah, so
Speaker 11: you find establishments are working to not just protect people,
Speaker 11: but also to be to be part of showing like
Speaker 11: this is our premises. It's not being looted, it's not
Speaker 11: being destroyed, because destruction of property apparently is a bigger
Speaker 11: problem than you losing your life. So most people felt
Speaker 11: they were safe at the protest, and they also felt
Speaker 11: like they were seen by other protesters. So it was
Speaker 11: largely peaceful, very well coordinated. There's information on how to
Speaker 11: get medical help or in case we're arrested, how to
Speaker 11: get as bigal assistance. So every single element was like
Speaker 11: we're not just going to ban out of like going
Speaker 11: into the streets, but making sure everyone returns home safely.
Speaker 11: A lot of the protests in the past war they
Speaker 11: got a little violent because maybe some of the protesters
Speaker 11: went road and obviously their politicians love to use bad
Speaker 11: actors where they implant a bunch of people who go
Speaker 11: and destroy business premises, and then it looks like the
Speaker 11: protesters didn't come there to actually protest, they were there
Speaker 11: for their own selfish reasons. So this time what happened
Speaker 11: is like a lot of the protesters were given the
Speaker 11: right information on how to stay peaceful. It's like these
Speaker 11: are the streets to use, these are the meeting points,
Speaker 11: These are the contract people for in case you get injured,
Speaker 11: is this medic in case you get arrested, these are
Speaker 11: the lawyers in case your friend disappears. Make sure they
Speaker 11: have a live location on so we can track them
Speaker 11: and everything. So it was widely successful because that kind
Speaker 11: of peaceful and well coordinated navigated towards spaces that were
Speaker 11: if not before, like the safety of everyone was a
Speaker 11: priority and because our leaders can't really find who started
Speaker 11: the protests because it's mostly like a group who led
Speaker 11: the movement, they've started abducting who they feel like our
Speaker 11: community leaders.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, so I guess that that's something I wanted
Speaker 10: to ask about, was like, has the police response actually
Speaker 10: been any less bad this time that has been with
Speaker 10: other So.
Speaker 11: This time on Thursday, they shot, Yeah, they shot into
Speaker 11: a crowd and one of them ended up shooting at
Speaker 11: twenty four year old and he bled out he died.
Speaker 11: His name is Rex Marsill. And then another kid was
Speaker 11: also shot. His name is Evans Kiragu was also shot,
Speaker 11: and I think they were trying to get him help
Speaker 11: and everything, but he died yesterday, I believe. And there's
Speaker 11: still other rochesters who are yet to be found. And
Speaker 11: then yesterday morning there's a very popular Twitter personality who
Speaker 11: was disappeared, like they kind of appracted him. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 11: But then Kenyon's held a space online for over six
Speaker 11: hours and they're like they were dragging government officials and
Speaker 11: like if you people don't return this particular person, we will,
Speaker 11: And it was very particularly funny because Kenyon's, you would
Speaker 11: think this younger generation people don't have concentration issues. No
Speaker 11: one is going to listen to us. But like everyone
Speaker 11: was like online and they were paying attention to like
Speaker 11: every single speaker just to keep the space longer, holding
Speaker 11: space for the person who had been taken. And he
Speaker 11: was found his lawyers, the lawyer, sorry, the lawyers in
Speaker 11: church found him and they went and like they went
Speaker 11: and got him and he went back safe, but obviously
Speaker 11: you could see he was visibly shaken. His creaturent name
Speaker 11: is crazy and aerobian. Yeah, and then now today they
Speaker 11: took one of the doctors was organizing for a blad
Speaker 11: drive in like in a certain up market area. They
Speaker 11: just picked him out, and like, no one has been
Speaker 11: able to find him until now. So people are still
Speaker 11: advocating to like getting back and a lot of big
Speaker 11: personalities are making phone calls. Lawyers are showing up that
Speaker 11: like if you see this particular car, if you if
Speaker 11: you sit in your location, timely informants share the information.
Speaker 11: So everyone who's online is trying to get the right
Speaker 11: information to make sure that that doctor is brought back.
Speaker 11: And yeah, ironically that doctor is actually unemployed because the
Speaker 11: the government is refusing to hire new medical personnel because
Speaker 11: like it's too expensive when we see them, like driving
Speaker 11: around in new cars has like very expensive shoes, and
Speaker 11: everyone is like, your shoes could literally pay like three
Speaker 11: doctors high high the right thing. Yeah, but I can
Speaker 11: ends up pushing to make sure everyone is safe and
Speaker 11: everyone who's lost, especially big Twitter influencers and big media
Speaker 11: personalities and influencers are coming together to me, they use
Speaker 11: their platforms to help find anyone who's not who's been
Speaker 11: disappeared or been abducted. Yeah, h.
Speaker 10: Where do you think the difference of going from here?
Speaker 10: I know, actually, well, actually I think I think I've
Speaker 10: lost track of what reading of the bill they're at
Speaker 10: right now was.
Speaker 11: I thought it was the third reading or it's a
Speaker 11: it's at the committee stage. So at the committee stage
Speaker 11: they go through the every single close and they try
Speaker 11: to justify why they should keep it or whether they're
Speaker 11: going to disband it. But everyone is just like, we
Speaker 11: don't want any of this because some of the bills,
Speaker 11: there's a there's a part of the bill that I
Speaker 11: didn't mention where the Kenya Revenue Authority is supposed to
Speaker 11: go through Kenyon's personal data to see you're dodging taxes
Speaker 11: and I'm like that, it's ridiculous because a lot of
Speaker 11: people in kinda are supported by a family member. So
Speaker 11: you find, you find if I have money, I'll send
Speaker 11: it to my kids, and then my kids made my
Speaker 11: body to their friends who's probably in trouble. So if
Speaker 11: it looks like I have money coming in, it's probably
Speaker 11: maybe because of like a family contribution, a personal contribution.
Speaker 11: So they want to charge more taxis on that, and
Speaker 11: it actually makes no sense. So it looks like they're
Speaker 11: chasm how much money you look like you have. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 11: it looks like they're checking how much money look like
Speaker 11: you have, and then they want to taxing on that
Speaker 11: or like say you're evading taxes, And it's scaring a
Speaker 11: lot of people because once that happens, it feels like
Speaker 11: there's no safety in anything you have.
Speaker 10: So I guess so from from there, So is the
Speaker 10: strategy right now based around sort of trying to get
Speaker 10: these trying to get the committees to just like to
Speaker 10: have this bill sort of die there or.
Speaker 11: A lot of us are trying to make sure the
Speaker 11: bill doesn't go any further than it is, and everyone
Speaker 11: is tracking their empasse. So what happened even before the
Speaker 11: protest people started sharing their MPs numbers. Every single person
Speaker 11: would find like a member of Parliament's numbers, and we're like,
Speaker 11: if you if this is your relative, please give it
Speaker 11: to us. If it is your side, cheek or whatever
Speaker 11: whatever where you relate to this person. Because it's government officials,
Speaker 11: their numbers should be public anyway, citizens should be able
Speaker 11: to reach them. And because they wanted to hide behind
Speaker 11: their big, big cause and big houses, we were like, okay,
Speaker 11: we're going to find you where you're asked, and we're
Speaker 11: going to text you and we're going to tell you
Speaker 11: to vote no. And most of the impulse were very dismissing.
Speaker 11: They were like, uh, the party that i'm that's backing
Speaker 11: me is the one that got me into office. It's like, no,
Speaker 11: people voted for you, you should represent their views. So
Speaker 11: a lot of canyons held their lives where's like, I
Speaker 11: don't care what your boss is telling you or what
Speaker 11: party this is, you have to vote with us. So
Speaker 11: a lot of MPs who are shamed online some of
Speaker 11: them had to but like they changed their votes. Incredible, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 11: I dontieve we should do this more often. So that's
Speaker 11: really that really gave hope to a lot of canons
Speaker 11: who are feeling like maybe their work isn't amounting too much.
Speaker 11: But we lost. We lost that one battle. A lot
Speaker 11: of us ended up using the battle to the second
Speaker 11: reading because many of the MP's were So there's this
Speaker 11: fund called the CDF IDIF fund. It's the constituency the
Speaker 11: Constituency Development Fund that MPs kind of use it like
Speaker 11: their personal bank account. So members of Parliament, Yeah, members
Speaker 11: of PARLIAMENTI get the CDIF fund and then they'll use
Speaker 11: it to go and like so it's supposed to sally
Speaker 11: take care of like bursaries or any county emergencies directly
Speaker 11: affecting constituts. But what IMPY is doing is that like
Speaker 11: they wild it as a parsenal bank account. So it's
Speaker 11: like you have to like do a lot of us
Speaker 11: kissing and a lot of performative nonsense for you to
Speaker 11: even get some of the money, and a lot of
Speaker 11: people don't actually end up getting the money. So what
Speaker 11: the budget makers did They decided to talk up the
Speaker 11: CDF fund so that more emplies have more money, and
Speaker 11: usually they just potet that money. So they're like, Okay,
Speaker 11: I feel like my budgeted corruption has hit the account,
Speaker 11: I don't need to do the right thing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so that's just literally a bribe exactly.
Speaker 11: It's like the best way is like and they're like, no,
Speaker 11: I'll have more money to take care of the constituency.
Speaker 11: It's like, no, you steal this money anyway, you guys
Speaker 11: have any You're not going to do a conscience today
Speaker 11: just because money. So most of all are trying to
Speaker 11: get the parts of the budget we've seen there, then
Speaker 11: let's put into efforts that go there directly to education
Speaker 11: and healthcare, even if even if it's directly to the
Speaker 11: school instead of the individual. Yeah, so that that will
Speaker 11: help cut down on that kind of corruption that a
Speaker 11: lot of mpies run with. And I think that's scaring
Speaker 11: some of them. And we're hoping we're hoping to get
Speaker 11: more people to be to push their members of Parliament
Speaker 11: or any nominated representatives to recognize that all these items
Speaker 11: that they're voting for it's not just going to affect us,
Speaker 11: but will affect them and the money that they're hoping
Speaker 11: to steal. So if you're going to steal progress, we're
Speaker 11: going to don't get any of the money here.
Speaker 10: Incredible, Yeah, is there is there anything else you want
Speaker 10: to add before you wrap up.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I'll say usually when a lot of stories and
Speaker 11: like the African continent are covered, it's usually like Africans
Speaker 11: vote for bad leaders, and well that is true. Most
Speaker 11: of the times, people don't feel like they have an option.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and like you know, if you you listeners statistically
Speaker 10: are probably either an American or a brain, so like you.
Speaker 7: You you know exactly what that's like.
Speaker 9: You're like someone who just you have Trump and he's
Speaker 9: like a contra now right now. So yeah, because the
Speaker 9: little so TikTok, something happened I think yesterday or something
Speaker 9: where people were like, how dependans vote for this person?
Speaker 11: You are such a very dark criminal past, and and
Speaker 11: everyone was like, have you guys seen yourselves? You can
Speaker 11: there there are no highs. Everyone makes very foolish mistakes
Speaker 11: and all of us look like we don't know what
Speaker 11: to do to make sure people like that don't ascend
Speaker 11: into power, because like group things sometimes gets us to
Speaker 11: like very dangerous places. It happens everywhere. No one is
Speaker 11: any less affected if someone who you hope to lose
Speaker 11: games power, like you're all in deep trouble, Like no
Speaker 11: one is on a higher pedestal than the other all
Speaker 11: of you can actually lose a lot. And one of
Speaker 11: the things that we are trying to remind each other's
Speaker 11: we're trying not to get to this space. So what
Speaker 11: canons are trying to propose like a direct manifesto where
Speaker 11: any person who's running has to have like a close
Speaker 11: in their manifesto that is going to even be turned
Speaker 11: into like a policy and law where if you steal
Speaker 11: any money or we co found doing anything corrupt, you
Speaker 11: have to like remove yourself from office immediately, like there's
Speaker 11: no bargaining to do whatsoever, Like you have to live
Speaker 11: office immediately, and then we're going to seize all your
Speaker 11: property anything. Yeah, it's like if we're going to get
Speaker 11: into power, make sure the salary you're getting is then now,
Speaker 11: if you have any ambitions, let them die now, like
Speaker 11: do everything before you get into earth. And I think
Speaker 11: that's so encouraging to see because everyone is not just
Speaker 11: looking at them now and like all these bad taxes
Speaker 11: and the bad leadership that we have, but also looking
Speaker 11: to the future of like how do we make sure
Speaker 11: we don't get here again. So that's really encouraging to
Speaker 11: see everyone is making sure that they hold people to
Speaker 11: account across the board, like if your protesters, make sure
Speaker 11: you're safe, make sure you know this information. But also
Speaker 11: for the future, this is what we want. So it's
Speaker 11: not just like we're moving bad taxes, but if we're
Speaker 11: going to pay taxes, are they going to be used?
Speaker 11: And how how are we going to make sure that
Speaker 11: the future of the and cheap is being protected by
Speaker 11: collective interest and not just like individual worship, which has
Speaker 11: been a very very big problem in Kenyan culture because
Speaker 11: like over here musicians are barely celebrities, but a politician
Speaker 11: would work in here and like people would like lose
Speaker 11: arms and legs to just see hi. So we're trying
Speaker 11: to make sure we fix that too. Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, So I guess the people listening to just want
Speaker 10: to try to help support the protests. Are there are
Speaker 10: there stuff that other things they can do in places
Speaker 10: they can go to find more information.
Speaker 8: And.
Speaker 11: Because a lot of it is group organized, I have
Speaker 11: to find the the information. I could send it to you. Yes,
Speaker 11: I don't know if from the top of my head,
Speaker 11: because I think and like most people would like do
Speaker 11: individual A lot of we have a lot of mobile
Speaker 11: money transferred, which are usually direct to the person so
Speaker 11: that it doesn't work with various channels and then people
Speaker 11: end up misappropriating or stealing. So if community lens, so
Speaker 11: I'll have to find the information and then sharing.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and okay, if if people want to find you
Speaker 10: on the internet, where can they do that?
Speaker 11: So on Instagram and TikTok, it's pay work. We just
Speaker 11: tin like at people with Justin, like the full handle
Speaker 11: on Twitter, it's at official f w w J. So
Speaker 11: it's official f w w J, which is just people
Speaker 11: with just In official people for.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we'll get we'll get that in the description too.
Speaker 11: Yeah. Yeah, I do have my personal account, but I
Speaker 11: don't know if I want to give that. Yeah, I
Speaker 11: just know I can still give it. It's at Justin
Speaker 11: wonder j U S D I n E W A
Speaker 11: n D Yeah cool.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Jessine, thank you so much. Thank you so much
Speaker 10: for coming on the show talking about this has been great.
Speaker 11: Thank you so much for having me in letting me
Speaker 11: like just run my mouth work up.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and good good, good luck to you all. Hope
Speaker 10: you fucking hope you stop them and bring them all down.
Speaker 11: I really hope we do. If we don't, it's gonna
Speaker 11: be so sad. Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 10: Yeah, of course, And yeah, let's spinak it off here
Speaker 10: and you too can go make your politicians lives miserable.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here a podcast where
Speaker 2: Robert Evans is lying down on a cout because he
Speaker 2: just feels exhausted from sleeping a leftn full hours. Garrison,
Speaker 2: you were much younger than me, and don't seem to
Speaker 2: feel exhausted because you just woke up after staying up
Speaker 2: all night, did you?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 7: No, not as exhausted.
Speaker 2: I hate you.
Speaker 13: Do you know?
Speaker 7: Do you know what is exhausting Robert?
Speaker 2: Elections?
Speaker 7: The twenty twenty four presidential election.
Speaker 2: The twenty twenty four presidential election. Yeah, I hate it.
Speaker 2: I hate it, Garrison, I hate it. But also I
Speaker 2: have made a commitment. I have made a commitment to
Speaker 2: making a prediction about the election this year and sticking
Speaker 2: to it, even though it's going to make everybody angry.
Speaker 2: And I have a good reason for doing so. It's
Speaker 2: because I want to try one of the rarest drugs
Speaker 2: that exists in the world today, that Nate Silver. Shit. See,
Speaker 2: everyone's been wondering since like twenty twenty what's up with
Speaker 2: that guy. Did he like lose his mind? Was he
Speaker 2: always kind of like out there and we just didn't
Speaker 2: notice because he he got lucky a couple of elections
Speaker 2: in a row. And the answer to that is no,
Speaker 2: Nate was a pretty reasonable guy. He comes out of
Speaker 2: like not politics. He only got into politics in two
Speaker 2: thousand and six because they banned online gambling and he
Speaker 2: got angry about it. And then he accurately predicted the
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight and twenty twelve elections.
Speaker 7: Which wasn't hard to be fu Which wasn't hard.
Speaker 2: No, it was not. I mean, he got all the
Speaker 2: states right, but it was just a matter because people
Speaker 2: have pointed out he didn't seem to be nearly as
Speaker 2: accurate in twenty sixteen or twenty twenty. There's a degree
Speaker 2: of fairness to that. But like twight and twenty twelve
Speaker 2: were our last non smartphone elections where there wasn't this
Speaker 2: like big, you know, demon of social media kind of
Speaker 2: hiding behind everything and making everything a lot weirder. And
Speaker 2: I think part of you know, I think what ultimately
Speaker 2: caused Nate's madness though, is that in twenty sixteen he
Speaker 2: did pretty well. He like laid out he was a
Speaker 2: twenty nine percent chance of Trump winning, and when he
Speaker 2: explained what that chance was, how Trump might sweep the
Speaker 2: Blue Firewall states and whatnot, it's basically what wound up happening,
Speaker 2: and as like a reward for being more or less correct.
Speaker 2: While the election was going on, all of the Democrats
Speaker 2: hated him because the news sources they liked said that
Speaker 2: Trump had only a two percent chance of winning, and
Speaker 2: then when the election was over, it became like mainstream
Speaker 2: kind of reality to just say, yeah, Nate fucked that
Speaker 2: one up. He finally screwed up, and I think that
Speaker 2: that mix of things is what's driven him insane. So
Speaker 2: I've decided to predict that there's a twenty nine percent
Speaker 2: chance that the election is basically the same as twenty
Speaker 2: twenty and now, unlike Nate, I don't have any kind
Speaker 2: of math to back that up. It's just a gut feeling.
Speaker 2: But I'm calling that now because I want people to
Speaker 2: get really angry at me now, and then ideally, when
Speaker 2: I'm right, they'll get even angrier at me, and then
Speaker 2: I can go insany it on social media and just
Speaker 2: gradly become completely unhinged and see what it's like to
Speaker 2: be Nate Silver, the Ultimate high Garrison.
Speaker 7: See, I thought you were going to say you thought
Speaker 7: there was a twenty nine percent chance that Nate Silver
Speaker 7: would just completely completely lose it and do some like like.
Speaker 2: You do a major terrorism.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeahs that's what I thought.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He drives a double decker bus into the end of
Speaker 2: the Lincoln Memorial. God, that's my that's my hope.
Speaker 7: He storms the five thirty eight headquarters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's gonna take it back once and for all.
Speaker 7: Okay, so today we're gonna be talking about election polling. Uh,
Speaker 7: the debate is very very soon here in Atlanta, Georgia,
Speaker 7: And as a little bit of a preparatory measure, we
Speaker 7: want to go over some of the actual poll numbers
Speaker 7: for the twenty twenty four presidential election. I like to
Speaker 7: start with this Iowa poe from Seltzer and Co. Now,
Speaker 7: Iowa's a weird one, right. Iowa has has gone read
Speaker 7: pretty consistently the past two years, although twenty twenty was
Speaker 7: closer than twenty sixteen. In twenty twenty, Trump won the
Speaker 7: state by fifty three point one percent to Biden's forty
Speaker 7: four point nine percent. But the numbers right now are
Speaker 7: much much worse for Biden. Not good, No, it's it's
Speaker 7: it's pretty bad. Tr Trump is leading Biden in the
Speaker 7: general election in Iowa by eighteen percentage points, and third
Speaker 7: party candidates, including Kennedy and the Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver,
Speaker 7: are receiving a combined fifteen percent support. It's pretty bad.
Speaker 7: It hasn't been this bad in a while.
Speaker 11: Now.
Speaker 7: People like to use this specific Iowa poll as kind
Speaker 7: of a barometer for the Midwest in general, and that's,
Speaker 7: you know, not completely accurate all the time, but it
Speaker 7: is something that people do consistently to as a general
Speaker 7: barometer for Trump's possible success in the Midwest. Now we
Speaker 7: have minnesotatae.
Speaker 2: Because one of the most probably the most viable path
Speaker 2: to Biden winning involves holding that quote unquote blue firewall,
Speaker 2: which doesn't include Iowa obviously. It does include Michigan and Wisconsin,
Speaker 2: both of which are generally within the margin of error
Speaker 2: in most polls but looking very sketchy for Biden compared
Speaker 2: to how he would like them to be at this point.
Speaker 7: Wisconsin's not looking great. Minnesota. According to a survey a
Speaker 7: USA poll from just a few days ago, Biden is
Speaker 7: up six points.
Speaker 2: Yes, Yes, Michigan is I think the one I was
Speaker 2: saying is a little closer. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So that's kind of the situation with this poll. And
Speaker 7: I'm not going to get into any of the more
Speaker 7: specific numbers because the numbers in this Iowa poll are
Speaker 7: going to be actually pretty reminiscent of more of the
Speaker 7: general election numbers, which we're going to get into, especially
Speaker 7: when we're going to start factoring in things like the
Speaker 7: conviction and Trump's popularity among independence which could very well
Speaker 7: be a major deciding factor in this election. So I'm
Speaker 7: going to quote from Forbes here quote. Trump leads Biden
Speaker 7: by one point fifty to twenty nine percent in a
Speaker 7: CBS poll released Sunday that comes after a streak of
Speaker 7: surveys found Trump's lead has slipped since his felony conviction
Speaker 7: Manhattan last month, including a Fox News survey released Wednesday,
Speaker 7: the nineteenth that shows Biden up by two points, a
Speaker 7: three point swing since the network's May survey. This was
Speaker 7: among a streak of five poles since mid June that
Speaker 7: show Biden beating or tied with Trump unquote. So Biden
Speaker 7: has made some considerable progress in the polls in the
Speaker 7: past month. Biden and Trump are now tied in the
Speaker 7: Morning Consults weekly survey, as Biden has now been leading
Speaker 7: Trump by a point in for two weeks in a row.
Speaker 7: A month prior, Trump was way way ahead of Biden,
Speaker 7: and the two are also tied in the Economist You
Speaker 7: Go of survey released last Thursday, as well as a
Speaker 7: PBST Marrist poll from Tuesday the eighteenth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a couple of things. I mean, like,
Speaker 2: it's easy to say that's probably due to the conviction,
Speaker 2: because that's the biggest thing that's happened since then. But
Speaker 2: I also think there's a decent chance that some of
Speaker 2: that is just the result of the fact that Trump
Speaker 2: is now definitely the nominee, which was a little more
Speaker 2: up in the air previously, so now people are kind
Speaker 2: of forced to consider what that really means. But it
Speaker 2: does seem in general like there's been motion and like
Speaker 2: things have been moving in Biden's favor since the conviction.
Speaker 2: So I don't think it's wrong to say that probably
Speaker 2: overall the evidence suggests helps Biden at this point.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and the Fox News survey is really interesting because
Speaker 7: they have this They have it on a graph here
Speaker 7: and you can see Biden steadily moving upwards on the
Speaker 7: graph very consistently, and Trump has largely flatlined. If not,
Speaker 7: is actually kind of moving a little bit down. Robert F.
Speaker 7: Kennedy Junior is also moving quite down. Yeah, not completely
Speaker 7: surprising considering the whole brain brainworms thing.
Speaker 2: He's going to be the most interesting thing, the most
Speaker 2: interesting thing because whether or not Trump wins could mean
Speaker 2: whether or not we are able to continue doing what
Speaker 2: we do. But OURFK is kind of the most interesting
Speaker 2: thing for me in terms of like, are is it
Speaker 2: going to Is there going to be any kind of
Speaker 2: evidence that there's actually real hunger for a third party
Speaker 2: which everyone keeps talking about. Is this constant topic of
Speaker 2: discussion in US politics, but it never happens, and and
Speaker 2: people were getting very RFK is obviously a bad guy
Speaker 2: to pin your hopes on a viable third party on,
Speaker 2: but I am interested to see if it if it,
Speaker 2: because there's a decent evidence that the primary chunk because
Speaker 2: when you factor in RFK, Biden's lead doesn't go down right,
Speaker 2: because RFK is really popular among a lot of the
Speaker 2: independence that Trump is already strong with. And so the
Speaker 2: big question is, like, is he going to drain votes
Speaker 2: from Trump or just kind of fizzle out. And I
Speaker 2: think right now the smart money is kind of on
Speaker 2: fizzling out. But it's it's a little hard to say.
Speaker 7: Do you know what we can say for sure though, Robert.
Speaker 2: That Robert F. Kennedy Junior is the primary sponsor of
Speaker 2: this podcast.
Speaker 7: God, I hope, so, I hope, I really hope we
Speaker 7: start getting some RFK ads on here.
Speaker 2: Look, folks, if you if you're not sure whether or
Speaker 2: not you want to vote for RFK, we get it.
Speaker 2: You know, obviously it's a this is a big choice.
Speaker 2: But our recommendation is head down to the Gulf of
Speaker 2: Galveston and shove your head in that in that Texas
Speaker 2: coast water, get a couple of Amibas rattling around on
Speaker 2: that brainy ores, and then see how you feel about
Speaker 2: our FK Junior. You know, all right, we are back.
Speaker 7: Let's talk a little bit about independence, because this voting
Speaker 7: block will basically be the deciding factor in this whole election.
Speaker 7: So that PBS Marrist poll that found Trump and Biden
Speaker 7: tied also found that Trump has lost six points with
Speaker 7: independent compared to their poll taken just before his conviction
Speaker 7: last May. And Biden has gained eight points with independence
Speaker 7: and now leads Trump by two points in that category.
Speaker 7: And similarly, the Fox poll also shows Biden leading by
Speaker 7: nine points among independents.
Speaker 2: And that's a massive shift. That's enough of a shift
Speaker 2: that I wonder how much polling methodology maybe to explain
Speaker 2: for it, Like were they just pulling these people? Were
Speaker 2: they pulling them badly before? Or are they pulling them
Speaker 2: badly now? Because that's that's quite a lot of movement.
Speaker 7: We'll talk a little bit about pulling methodology here at
Speaker 7: the end, because it might. Yeah, it is, certainly the
Speaker 7: polling methodology produces a large degree of the numbers. A
Speaker 7: lot of these polls have a margin of error of
Speaker 7: about three point five percent. But this this finding is
Speaker 7: consistent across almost every single poll being done right now.
Speaker 7: A political uh ipsos poll from mid June found that
Speaker 7: thirty two percent of independence say they are now less
Speaker 7: likely to support Trump after his conviction, with twenty one
Speaker 7: percent saying it would be an important factor in their vote.
Speaker 2: Yep, And I did. This is the kind when we
Speaker 2: were taught would talk in the group chat before the conviction.
Speaker 2: I would. I made a note a couple of times
Speaker 2: of the fact that there's a sizeable number of Americans
Speaker 2: who are not what you'd call high information voters but
Speaker 2: just feel really gross about voting for a felon. And
Speaker 2: I think these are the kind of people who are
Speaker 2: independence a lot of the times. They're not people who
Speaker 2: think much about politics. They're people who.
Speaker 7: Makes part m typically yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and they can kind of make a swing,
Speaker 2: gut decision on either of these guys in a moment,
Speaker 2: and if you tell well, he's a felon, that matters
Speaker 2: to some people. There's like the this frustrates a lot
Speaker 2: of like high information political analysts, the fact that so
Speaker 2: many Americans just kind of like make almost random decisions
Speaker 2: like flip of a coid calls about what to do, but.
Speaker 7: Which is also what makes pulling very hard. Is right,
Speaker 7: but all all polls also into hey, that this will
Speaker 7: probably be a much closer election than twenty twenties, and
Speaker 7: in an election this close, small shifts among independents could
Speaker 7: very well determine the outcome. Now, I'm going to quote
Speaker 7: from that Political Episos report on their own poll quote
Speaker 7: quote A plurality of respondents in our poll, thirty eight
Speaker 7: percent reported that Trump's conviction would have no impact on
Speaker 7: their likelihood support Trump for president. Thirty three percent of
Speaker 7: respondent said that the conviction made them less likely to
Speaker 7: support Trump, while only seventeen percent said it made them
Speaker 7: more likely. These results were worse for Trunk. Among respondents
Speaker 7: who said they were political independents, thirty two percent said
Speaker 7: that the conviction made them less likely to support and
Speaker 7: only twelve said that it made them more likely to
Speaker 7: support Trump unquote. And that same poll also found that
Speaker 7: nine percent of Republicans say they're now less likely to
Speaker 7: support Trump.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is massive, and that that actually makes me
Speaker 2: want to bring up one of the guys the analysts
Speaker 2: I've been reading, because this is actually the extent that
Speaker 2: there's any real basis behind my twenty nine percent chance
Speaker 2: things work out basically, like twenty twenty one, it's this
Speaker 2: this fucking dude Helmet Norpoth Norpoth is he's one of
Speaker 2: these guys who's built a model, Like you get these
Speaker 2: every now and then, like because they're great content for
Speaker 2: TV news. Dudes like, oh, this guy's got a model
Speaker 2: prediction the election. His model predicted the last forty elections properly,
Speaker 2: even though they like ran them through after we knew
Speaker 2: how the elections were going to go, and I don't
Speaker 2: know how fair that is. Helmet actually did accurately predict
Speaker 2: a couple of like the last He's had his model
Speaker 2: going the primary model for like the last seven elections,
Speaker 2: and it predicted five of them correctly. Now, one it
Speaker 2: got right was twenty sixteen, although it predicted how Trump
Speaker 2: was going to win wrong, it got that he was
Speaker 2: going to win right. I don't know how much credence
Speaker 2: you want to give that. And he fucked up in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, although you know the fact that there was
Speaker 2: a pandemic, then I'll give him a little bit of grace.
Speaker 2: The other one he fucked up was twenty was two thousand,
Speaker 2: but he called it.
Speaker 10: He called it for Gore.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, I'll read from his website describing like
Speaker 2: how this works, because it's relevant to what you're talking
Speaker 2: about in terms of independent voters, and it's also relevant
Speaker 2: to what I think is another major factor and who's
Speaker 2: going to ultimately win, which is likely voters versus like correct.
Speaker 2: If I feel like it, I'll vote because Biden's lead
Speaker 2: jumps substantially when you consider likely voters correct whereas Trump
Speaker 2: does very well with like maybe voters, and I kind
Speaker 2: of don't feel like this is going to be a
Speaker 2: high turnout election. Rights, that's what I am seeing.
Speaker 7: We have some data on this that I'll talk about later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And Helmet's model works that way. So quote,
Speaker 2: the primary model gives President Joe Biden a seventy five
Speaker 2: percent chance to defeat Donald Trump in November. This forecast
Speaker 2: takes account of the performance of the two candidates in
Speaker 2: the early primaries. Biden won the Democratic contest in those
Speaker 2: states by far larger margins than Trump did and Republican ones.
Speaker 2: What also benefits Biden and the general election is an
Speaker 2: electoral cycle that fits the sitting president in a nutshell.
Speaker 2: A White House incumbent facing no significant challenge in primaries
Speaker 2: almost always wins reelection for the electoral college. The most
Speaker 2: likely outcome of the twenty twenty four election predicted by
Speaker 2: the model is that Biden will get three fifteen and
Speaker 2: Trump two two three And basically, so part of why
Speaker 2: I think this guy's probably a hack, but it's kind
Speaker 2: of interesting is he's looking at how they performed relative
Speaker 2: to each other in their primaries, and you could there's
Speaker 2: a degree to which you can say, like, well, primaries
Speaker 2: are absolutely not general elections. But what it does show
Speaker 2: is relative how much Trump's support has faded from Republicans.
Speaker 2: And Trump actually did considerably less well in the primaries
Speaker 2: than he did in twenty twenty. Right totally, there was
Speaker 2: a degree of actual like hunger to vote for Kerry
Speaker 2: Lake Humaya, I think, is the Arizona Right candidate who
Speaker 2: was running against him, and he showed weakness in a
Speaker 2: number of primary states that was not there in twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: which suggests, along with the polling you showed, you know
Speaker 2: that like nine percent of Republicans are less likely to
Speaker 2: vote from after they can an amount of weakness in
Speaker 2: his base that could be pretty meaningful when we get
Speaker 2: to the election. And I don't think it's been taken
Speaker 2: into account enough by, for example, folks on the left
Speaker 2: looking at how much everybody hates Joe Biden, which is
Speaker 2: also a very real factor. But I think that people
Speaker 2: are kind of denying the degree to which a lot
Speaker 2: of folks who should be his based don't like Trump anymore.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and this is one of the weird things. Post
Speaker 7: to conviction. There were some pundits who are trying to
Speaker 7: make an argument that somehow the conviction would actually make
Speaker 7: Trump a more popular choice, which maybe works if you're
Speaker 7: like a contrarian, but it doesn't really make much sense.
Speaker 7: And if you look at like the approval ratings for
Speaker 7: the conviction and the verdict, they fall pretty pretty well
Speaker 7: on party lines. It's really going to come down to independence.
Speaker 7: Like everyone who's going to vote for Trump, who like
Speaker 7: really really really want to vote for Trump, are still
Speaker 7: going to vote for Trump, right, Like that's how it goes.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not, and they will buy the I'm voting for
Speaker 2: the felon hats that Facebook keeps trying to sell.
Speaker 7: Made absolutely right, Like, those are not the people that
Speaker 7: are in question, But there is a large number of
Speaker 7: other people who do not own a mega hat who
Speaker 7: are actually, you know, questionable in who they're going to
Speaker 7: vote for. On this note, I'd like to like to
Speaker 7: quote again from Forbes quote. Polls consistently show the conviction
Speaker 7: is a low priority for most voters in deciding who
Speaker 7: to actually cast their ballot for. The political Ipsos poll
Speaker 7: found that fifty three percent said it's not important said
Speaker 7: it's not important to their voting decision. Well sixty one
Speaker 7: percent in a Reuter's pull released last week, said it
Speaker 7: won't impact their vote unquote. Now, one of the clearer
Speaker 7: shifts that we have seen post verdict is a sizable
Speaker 7: increase in Biden voters who list stopping Trump as one
Speaker 7: of their main reasons to do so. This we have
Speaker 7: numbers from March to now, is that the main reason
Speaker 7: for supporting Biden. In March, we had forty seven percent
Speaker 7: saying it's to oppose Trump. Now it's fifty four percent
Speaker 7: saying it's to oppose Trump. Which I think that number
Speaker 7: will only increase the closer we get to the election,
Speaker 7: because people don't want Trump to be present, and again
Speaker 7: even though they don't like Biden like. The other thing
Speaker 7: with these numbers is that the percent of people who
Speaker 7: say I like Biden as reason for supporting him has
Speaker 7: decreased since March. Yes, yes, by four percent.
Speaker 2: Of course, because he's not likable and he's he shouldn't
Speaker 2: be president still, but Trump is even like and people
Speaker 2: understand like I that is the number one thing when
Speaker 2: I go out of like my the bubble of my
Speaker 2: friends and whatnot and talk to family members or just
Speaker 2: like have conversations with ret like uber drivers or whatnot
Speaker 2: about politics. I have not heard a single person state
Speaker 2: a reason for vote. They want to vote for Biden
Speaker 2: that is more important than I don't want Trump to
Speaker 2: be president. That is everyone that I encounter basically like I'm,
Speaker 2: I'm obviously you have other people, but it is weird
Speaker 2: to the extent to which that's what this election is
Speaker 2: going to come down on. And I kind of think
Speaker 2: it's evidence that like of a of a failure and
Speaker 2: strategy in Trump's part, because I think he probably could
Speaker 2: do better if he were to focus on allaying those
Speaker 2: fears that he wants to become a dictator as opposed
Speaker 2: to harping on like one of the things that's interesting
Speaker 2: to me. He's campaigning very heavily in Wisconsin right now.
Speaker 2: He's already made like two visits just to southeast Wisconsin
Speaker 2: in the last two months. Because Wisconsin is up for
Speaker 2: grabs right Every poll I've seen basically is within margin
Speaker 2: of air. It's either guy's game, and it's a critical state.
Speaker 2: And Trump is hammering Biden on crime in Wisconsin. Right
Speaker 2: look at how your dims have done, look at how
Speaker 2: much more violent this city's become. And about one percent
Speaker 2: of registered voters in Wisconsin consider crime a major concern
Speaker 2: in a presidential election. And part of that's because like
Speaker 2: violent crime has dropped and like massively in Wisconsin and
Speaker 2: nationwide over the last year. And I do wonder the
Speaker 2: extent to which because Americans' views on crime are not
Speaker 2: based on how bad crime actually is. But I also
Speaker 2: wonder if people are start are like the degree to
Speaker 2: which that's a vote in concern for people is fading
Speaker 2: because it has dropped so much. And I'll be curious
Speaker 2: to see if kind of Trump's strategy of hammering the
Speaker 2: Democrats because they're bad on crime is going to prove
Speaker 2: to be a serious misstep.
Speaker 7: Well, even Fox News has had to do recent segments
Speaker 7: talking about how there actually has been a drop in crime,
Speaker 7: even though Americans feel like it hasn't, which is quite
Speaker 7: funny little tidbit. We're all looking for the guy who
Speaker 7: did this moment. Now, I do want to get through
Speaker 7: a few more conviction numbers. I'm going to quote from
Speaker 7: politicals report on their own poll regarding the importance of
Speaker 7: the conviction in people's vote. Quote, twenty two percent of
Speaker 7: respondents said the conviction is important to how they will
Speaker 7: vote and that it will make them less likely to
Speaker 7: support Trump. Only six percent of respondents took the other
Speaker 7: side of the question, saying they are more likely to
Speaker 7: support A nearly identical negative effect showed up among independents,
Speaker 7: with twenty one percent saying they are less likely to
Speaker 7: support and five percent saying they are more likely unquote now.
Speaker 7: Of those who say the conviction is important to how
Speaker 7: they will vote, seven percent of Republicans say they are
Speaker 7: less likely to support Trump. So that's an interesting number,
Speaker 7: and only thirteen percent say they are more likely and like,
Speaker 7: come on, those people were always going to vote for
Speaker 7: Trump anyway. Forty percent of Democrats, of course, say that
Speaker 7: they are less likely now. Twenty eight percent of Republicans
Speaker 7: say that the conviction makes them more likely to support Trump,
Speaker 7: but it won't affect their vote, and among those who
Speaker 7: said the conviction isn't important to how they will vote,
Speaker 7: forty percent said that it has basically no impact on
Speaker 7: their support of Trump. Most those people are independents now.
Speaker 7: Political also asked respondents if they thought the prosecution was
Speaker 7: brought to help Joe Biden, and most around fifty one
Speaker 7: percent disagree with the claim, but forty three percent agreed
Speaker 7: and said that the case had probably been brought to
Speaker 7: help Biden, and these results are roughly similar among independents.
Speaker 7: So still most people don't think so, and there's people
Speaker 7: who have, you know, suspicions. Not not super surprising.
Speaker 13: Now.
Speaker 7: Political notes that these thre might be movable, though these
Speaker 7: are not necessarily locked down opinions as quote, roughly a
Speaker 7: third of all responders and independence said that they still
Speaker 7: do not understand the details of the case. Well unquote,
Speaker 7: so glorious, those are not really set in stone. And
Speaker 7: Political also notes that there's a number of upcoming events
Speaker 7: and variables that could change of the public's opinion before November,
Speaker 7: you know, including all of the ongoing efforts by political
Speaker 7: operatives to influence people of the public perception of both
Speaker 7: the conviction and just you know, the election in general.
Speaker 2: The debates obviously too.
Speaker 7: The debates as well as Trump's sentencing in Manhattan on
Speaker 7: July eleventh, which could possibly you know, entail a period
Speaker 7: of incarceration. Probably not, but if it did, that would
Speaker 7: that would certainly impact impact these numbers. And also Manhattan
Speaker 7: Dish attorney Alvin Bragg's testimony before Congress on July twelfth.
Speaker 7: This this, this could impact the numbers you know regarding
Speaker 7: you know, how many people think this case is legit
Speaker 7: versus how much peace think is just purely like a
Speaker 7: political move. But still about half of adults do approve
Speaker 7: of Trump's conviction. The AP did a poll with the
Speaker 7: NORC a week after Trump's conviction, but before Hunter Biden
Speaker 7: was convicted on that federal gun case, and uslts seems
Speaker 7: more likely to support Trump's conviction than they are to disapprove,
Speaker 7: with at least forty eight percent saying they approve and
Speaker 7: just twenty nine somewhat or strongly disapproving and twenty one
Speaker 7: you know, not approving or disapproving, to quote from the AP,
Speaker 7: Republicans are less united on the verdict than Democrats. Roughly
Speaker 7: six and ten Republicans disapprove, while fifteen percent approve the
Speaker 7: other to and ten neither approve nor disapprove. Overall, opinions
Speaker 7: on Trump have barely budged. About six and ten US
Speaker 7: adults have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, just in line
Speaker 7: from our findings in a poll conducted last February, four
Speaker 7: in ten have a favorable view of Trump. When also
Speaker 7: largely unchanged since February. The numbers are equally poor for Biden.
Speaker 7: For and ten US adults have a favorable view of
Speaker 7: the Democratic president, while six and ten have a negative
Speaker 7: one unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is very much unique in races that I
Speaker 2: can recall a race to the bottom, like who can alienate?
Speaker 2: Who will alienate less of the base?
Speaker 7: Right, Like, yeah, no, we Polls consistently are showing that
Speaker 7: there will be historically that there is historically low voter enthusiasm.
Speaker 7: Both candidates have very low favorability ratings, and an NBC
Speaker 7: poll found that sixty four percent of voters say that
Speaker 7: they are very interested in this year's election, which is
Speaker 7: a twenty year low, so, you know, not great numbers.
Speaker 7: And a new CBS poll found that among young Americans
Speaker 7: who did vote in twenty twenty, only three quarters to
Speaker 7: say that they'll definitely do so again. Now this this
Speaker 7: poll also does show that Trump's support among young voters
Speaker 7: has been almost unchanged since twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's done about two percent better, which is fairly
Speaker 2: minimal considering how much Biden's lead is among that group.
Speaker 7: But overall, young voters do believe generally progressive values pretty consistently,
Speaker 7: including support for a ceasefire.
Speaker 2: And that's i mean, part of the reason why we
Speaker 2: may not see which could be catastrophic for Biden, because
Speaker 2: twenty twenty a lot of his win came in the
Speaker 2: fact that he did deliver so much of that, like
Speaker 2: so many young voters came out, turnout was so high,
Speaker 2: and they overwhelmingly supported Biden. There is also, i mean
Speaker 2: kind of a reason why that might not wind up mattering,
Speaker 2: which is where Biden I mentioned earlier. Biden does really
Speaker 2: well among likely voters, much better than he does among
Speaker 2: the general electorate. And this is part of a shift
Speaker 2: among white voters with degrees that has been We get
Speaker 2: a lot of talk and this has been significant, especially
Speaker 2: like Latino voters shifting towards the GOP has been a
Speaker 2: really important story too, but this one does not get
Speaker 2: talked about as much. In the four years since Biden
Speaker 2: took office, white men with degrees have shifted twenty four
Speaker 2: points towards Biden, and he has gained nineteen points with
Speaker 2: among white women with degrees, which is like a huge
Speaker 2: amount of his support. And also that's one of the
Speaker 2: groups that's likeliest to vote. Like the strength that Biden
Speaker 2: has gained among kind of middle of the road leaning
Speaker 2: conservative suburban voters is potentially going to be a cider
Speaker 2: in this election.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and according to The New York Times and Sienna,
Speaker 7: the polls do seem slightly skewed in Trump's favor actually
Speaker 7: this year, mostly by disenfranchised voters who may not participate
Speaker 7: in the upcoming election. And analysis they did found that
Speaker 7: Biden had led the last three of their polls among
Speaker 7: twenty twenty voters, but trailed among registered voters overall, which
Speaker 7: is basically exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 2: You know, Garrison, speaking of likely voters, are I don't know,
Speaker 2: that doesn't really lead. And here's the fucking ads. Look,
Speaker 2: you don't get you don't get a good one. Every
Speaker 2: time we do this, folks, there's too many.
Speaker 7: Are likely to listen to these ads.
Speaker 13: They're fine, So.
Speaker 10: We are back.
Speaker 7: Is polling actually useful? This actually useful anymore? The answer
Speaker 7: is kind of. But you know, people have gotten really
Speaker 7: really anti polling in recent years. You know, it's a
Speaker 7: twenty sixteen elections certainly contributed to that. Although yeah, if
Speaker 7: you look at the actual twenty sixteen polls, it's kind
Speaker 7: of it's kind of interesting. In twenty sixteen, Clinton generally
Speaker 7: pulled much higher than Trump for the duration of the race,
Speaker 7: though in late July the two were neck and neck,
Speaker 7: with the gap closing once again in late September and
Speaker 7: the week of the election, Trump was on average trailing
Speaker 7: by less than three point five percent behind, which is
Speaker 7: often in the margin of error for these polls, and
Speaker 7: pollsters usually consider something under three percent being a toss up.
Speaker 7: Now this is three point five percent, so still is
Speaker 7: it was trending towards Clinton, and there's there is reasons
Speaker 7: why in terms of their polling methodology that was flawed,
Speaker 7: But the polls were actually a bit closer than I
Speaker 7: think what public perception seems to remember of the twenty
Speaker 7: sixteen polls.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this is a part of why the public
Speaker 2: memory of twenty sixteen and to an extent, twenty twenty
Speaker 2: and to an extent every election is shown so bad
Speaker 2: is you can't emphasize this enough. People are dogshit and
Speaker 2: understanding what poles say, right. They are really bad at
Speaker 2: understanding uncertainty. One of the things that I hate to
Speaker 2: keep going back to the Nate silver Well, but I
Speaker 2: think he's a fascinating case study. And one of the
Speaker 2: things he pointed out after twenty sixteen. The minute you
Speaker 2: have a forecast where there's less certainty, people don't like that.
Speaker 2: The minute you have a forecast that doesn't have a
Speaker 2: Democrat winning, they don't like that very much. And it's
Speaker 2: to point out, like his he kind of started to
Speaker 2: become a heel as soon as he started showing that
Speaker 2: like Trump had a real shot at winning, and as
Speaker 2: his as his forecast continue to show kind of weakness
Speaker 2: among the Democrats, it got people angrier and angrier. And
Speaker 2: that's most of what makes people determine whether or not
Speaker 2: something is a credible source on the election. And that's
Speaker 2: kind of why a lot of this is like a
Speaker 2: doomed effort, is because people consider, you know, an expert
Speaker 2: credible if they are saying something they want to hear,
Speaker 2: because most of what people want in terms of election
Speaker 2: polling is to feel reassured that things are going to
Speaker 2: be okay, right, and that's that's your kind of It's
Speaker 2: always like a confirmation bias game. And it's also one
Speaker 2: of those things where, like the instant you do well,
Speaker 2: if you are legitimately a rigorous, you know, expert, and
Speaker 2: you predict things correctly, you're going to suddenly be this
Speaker 2: focus of so much media attention and have so much
Speaker 2: money and job offers thrown your way that it will
Speaker 2: inherently drive you mad, which is part of why again,
Speaker 2: I am predicting a twenty nine percent chance that things
Speaker 2: are basically the way they wear in twenty twenty, so
Speaker 2: I can get all that sweet, sweet CNN money, you know,
Speaker 2: if I wind up being right. I am curious, Scaris
Speaker 2: and kind of in that line because as our as
Speaker 2: our official poll expert, you kind of came into this,
Speaker 2: I don't think with a strong set of biases about
Speaker 2: what would happen when you actually started drilling down into
Speaker 2: the numbers, did that change it all your impression of
Speaker 2: what was going on this election?
Speaker 7: I think I thought that the numbers for Biden would
Speaker 7: be slightly worse. I think that's kind of the general feeling,
Speaker 7: and that has been you know, what the numbers have
Speaker 7: kind of looked like in my cursory glances the past
Speaker 7: few months. But looking more into kind of polling science,
Speaker 7: what these pollsters are are saying the gap is usually
Speaker 7: within this three percent, that it feels like it's going
Speaker 7: to be a very close election. It'll be much closer
Speaker 7: than it was in twenty twenty. Poles thought that twenty
Speaker 7: twenty would be a much much more obvious win for Biden.
Speaker 7: It was, it was, it was a closer election than
Speaker 7: what people thought. But this I think will be even
Speaker 7: even closer. So it's it's gonna be it's gonna be
Speaker 7: a tricky one. We're going to be kind of on
Speaker 7: the edge of our seat come.
Speaker 2: From election night, which is what no one wants to hear, right, No,
Speaker 2: especially since you have this, You have a lot of
Speaker 2: people who want to hear Biden is doomed because they have,
Speaker 2: for generally good reasons, come to despise Biden over the
Speaker 2: last totally four years, and they just want to know
Speaker 2: that like the things they're angry about matter, And the
Speaker 2: thing that I all I can say to those people
Speaker 2: is like, I don't know that anything matters. And I
Speaker 2: do think there's a really good chance. I think this
Speaker 2: is basically a coin flip.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think you know, polling is is going
Speaker 7: to look very different this year because Trump is not
Speaker 7: the incumbent. I think there's a lot of other factors
Speaker 7: that are contributing to the polls, and pollsters have adjusted
Speaker 7: a lot since twenty sixteen, to make sure that more
Speaker 7: Trump support is accounted for both in twenty twenty and
Speaker 7: in twenty sixteen. The error did not come from overestimating
Speaker 7: the support of Clinton and Biden. It came from underestimating
Speaker 7: Trump's support. And this has been fixed fixed for via
Speaker 7: a number a number of methods. You know, there's certain
Speaker 7: theories people have had, like the quote unquote shy Trump
Speaker 7: voter theory, which is kind of largely disputed, of saying
Speaker 7: that you know.
Speaker 2: People certainly by this fucking point.
Speaker 7: Yes, no, saying that people who like support Trump are
Speaker 7: too scared to tell pollsters that they support Trump, quite
Speaker 7: quite silly. It's essentially it's essentially blaming, blaming, like pull
Speaker 7: errors on people just lying to polsters because they're too nervous. So,
Speaker 7: I don't know, there's a lot of other stuff we have.
Speaker 7: We have adjusted for white, non college educated voters, you know,
Speaker 7: because people who have a college degree are more likely
Speaker 7: to respond to polls. So all this does get adjusted for,
Speaker 7: especially since twenty sixteen, because that was the main cause
Speaker 7: of the polls kind of being fucked up that year.
Speaker 7: So what exactly happened in twenty twenty, Then if these
Speaker 7: things like the not in college vote and the shy
Speaker 7: Trump voter theory were sort of adjusted for well, a
Speaker 7: few things happened. The pandemic one, you know, made certain
Speaker 7: pulling things. Ure's a little bit unique. The election also
Speaker 7: featured the highest number of voter turnout in decades, something
Speaker 7: that we're probably not expected to see in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 7: In twenty twenty, the national polls were too favorable to
Speaker 7: Biden by three point nine points, state polls by four
Speaker 7: point three. I'm going to read a report from the
Speaker 7: American Association for Public Opinion Research analyzing twenty twenty election
Speaker 7: poll errors.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 7: If the voter's most supportive of Trump were least likely
Speaker 7: to participate in polls, then the polling error may be
Speaker 7: explained as follows. Self identified Republicans who choose to respond
Speaker 7: to polls are more likely to support Democrats, and those
Speaker 7: who choose not to respond to polls are more likely
Speaker 7: to support Republicans. Even if the correct percentage of self
Speaker 7: identified Republicans were polled, differences in the Republicans who did
Speaker 7: and did not respond could produce the observed polling error unquote.
Speaker 7: If this was indeed the issue, it was probably made
Speaker 7: worse by Trump in twenty twenty by being very disparaging
Speaker 7: to polls, making his base probably less likely to honestly
Speaker 7: engage with polling metrics, and both in twenty sixteen and
Speaker 7: twenty twenty there was large large post mortems among the
Speaker 7: polling community trying to figure out how to improve, and
Speaker 7: twenty twenty two's polls were more accurate than any election
Speaker 7: since nineteen ninety eight, with almost no bias towards either party.
Speaker 7: So that is a good side in terms of the
Speaker 7: accuracy of polls.
Speaker 2: This not being nonsense, Yeah.
Speaker 7: Correct, So a poster named Nathaniel Rackitch said, quote, polls
Speaker 7: true utility isn't telling us who will win, but rather
Speaker 7: in roughly how close a race is and therefore how
Speaker 7: confident we should be in the outcome. Historically, candidate's leading
Speaker 7: polls by at least twenty points have won in ninety
Speaker 7: nine percent of the time, but candidate's leading polls may
Speaker 7: less than three points have won just fifty five percent
Speaker 7: of the time. Unquote, And that kind of lines up
Speaker 7: with our current situation, right, Biden was even though the
Speaker 7: polls were slightly skewed towards Biden in twenty twenty, he
Speaker 7: was so far ahead that most of the polls in
Speaker 7: terms of saying who would win, we're still correct because
Speaker 7: Biden was just so far ahead this time. That will
Speaker 7: not be the case. That's not that's not what the
Speaker 7: polls are going to say. The polls are going to
Speaker 7: show this being a much closer race, and that I
Speaker 7: think that is what it's going to be come come November.
Speaker 7: So yeah, that's kind of that's kind of the low
Speaker 7: down of the current the current polling situation. I'll be
Speaker 7: curious to see, you know, what the numbers are post
Speaker 7: debate and especially after the sentencing in July.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll see. And I should note that Nate Silver
Speaker 2: just released his official forecast today and it's it's almost
Speaker 2: the opposite of that. We're German Man, who gave Biden
Speaker 2: a seventy five percent chance of winning, Nate gives Trump
Speaker 2: a sixty five percent chance of winning. So we are
Speaker 2: going to see which of the election pundits who make
Speaker 2: their entire living off of gambling on elections winds up
Speaker 2: getting to be fetted on all of the talk shows
Speaker 2: in like January of twenty twenty five. That'll be That's
Speaker 2: why I'll toss up honestly, thereal'll toss up a helmet
Speaker 2: versus Nate Baby, who's gonna win? I kind of think
Speaker 2: they both might be common. Oh yeah, that wasn't the
Speaker 2: opening of the podcast, or unless it was. I guess
Speaker 2: it was because we were recording Welcome to It could
Speaker 2: happen here, Harrison. I had to open an episode about
Speaker 2: a terrible, terrible piece of voice acting history with some
Speaker 2: horrible voice acting of my own. It was the only
Speaker 2: right way.
Speaker 7: It's true, it's true, but there has been some really
Speaker 7: bad voice acting going around lately. Yes, oh boy, So
Speaker 7: do you know what we're gonna talk about today, Robert.
Speaker 7: We're gonna talk about the South Park of X.
Speaker 2: And I know what you're all wondering, what the fuck
Speaker 2: is X? Did you guys? Is that a placeholder? Did
Speaker 2: you like type in a placeholder because you forgot the
Speaker 2: name of what this is? The South Park of or whatever? No, no, no,
Speaker 2: we're talking about Twitter.
Speaker 7: We are talking about the first animated sit slash calm
Speaker 7: on X Slash Twitter, titled The New Norm Show. Not
Speaker 7: to be confused with the twenty twenty two low budget
Speaker 7: movie The New Norm. This is a new animated project
Speaker 7: from the Great Minds over at Dave Rubin Incorporated. Yeah,
Speaker 7: was so bad but also so insightful that I did
Speaker 7: a whole bunch of drugs and wrote about two thousand
Speaker 7: words about this project and uncovered some kind of shocking
Speaker 7: things that we will slowly get into. I first just
Speaker 7: want to go over the mini pilot itself, because right
Speaker 7: now the only thing that's out is like this three
Speaker 7: minute or so little mini pilot, And we'll get into
Speaker 7: why this is the only thing that's out right now,
Speaker 7: but I'm first just want to do kind of like
Speaker 7: a short play by play, and it will be short
Speaker 7: because it again, it's only three minutes. Yeah, of what
Speaker 7: happens in this new perspective animated sitcom that they want
Speaker 7: to air on Twitter dot com now known as x Yes. So,
Speaker 7: I think the first thing you need to know about it,
Speaker 7: you know, besides you know, the Dave rubenness of it all,
Speaker 7: it looks like early two thousands flash animation, like really
Speaker 7: bad early two thousands flash animation. It's not good.
Speaker 2: It's not good. None of the characters can like really
Speaker 2: express things, and the perspective is always a little bit off. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it looks like something like a moderately competent person could
Speaker 2: have animated in this course of an afternoon if the
Speaker 2: people paying them did not actually want anything that looked
Speaker 2: very good.
Speaker 7: Well, and I think that is kind of what happened.
Speaker 7: They posted one video showing the animating process, and it
Speaker 7: does look like this one person did it in like
Speaker 7: a day. So anyway, it starts with an older man
Speaker 7: sitting in a living room chair scratching at an ankle monitor.
Speaker 7: He reaches for a beer, only to find that it's
Speaker 7: been wokefied with rainbow packaging. The man reacts in horror,
Speaker 7: and his more liberal daughter remarks progress, it's the new norm,
Speaker 7: and then a pandering a country music theme song plays,
Speaker 7: which we will we will play for you later just
Speaker 7: because it's so bad.
Speaker 2: We're going to have to. I want to start just
Speaker 2: because this is the first shot of the episode and
Speaker 2: it was the first thing in the episode that made
Speaker 2: me very angry. And it's how small his feet are, like,
Speaker 2: especially if you're going to have.
Speaker 7: The fact rob Lyfield feet.
Speaker 2: He's got the rob Lyfield feet. And it's this is
Speaker 2: particularly a problem because the ankle monitor doesn't look like
Speaker 2: it's going to be a one off joke, because he
Speaker 2: doesn't just have an ankle monitor he has like an
Speaker 2: evil Amazon alexa that looks a little bit like it's
Speaker 2: been it's gotten some howl nine thousand DNA in it. Yes,
Speaker 2: that every time he says something that's not woke enough,
Speaker 2: it it yells at him, right.
Speaker 7: It is offensive? Offensive?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the fantasy progressive government that is in charge
Speaker 2: in his in this cartoon world has forced him to
Speaker 2: wear an ankle monitor because he's not woke enough. And
Speaker 2: so I'm guessing that's going to be a recurrent bit.
Speaker 2: And if has this sension ankle monitor is a recurrent bit,
Speaker 2: his feet shouldn't look like the ankle monitor should always
Speaker 2: be falling off of them. No, it's so loose. It's
Speaker 2: so really bad animation, right, Like, I'm not even saying
Speaker 2: that's a good bit, But if that's your bit, you
Speaker 2: have to actually design the characters to sell the bit,
Speaker 2: as opposed to me constantly thinking how is that fucking
Speaker 2: ankle monitor staying on his goddamn ankle anyway, whatever.
Speaker 7: The character was not designed with the ankle monitor in mind.
Speaker 7: That was a later edition, so definitely. After the theme song,
Speaker 7: the man addresses the audience, he says, I'm the old
Speaker 7: norm I want normal beer.
Speaker 2: God damn it.
Speaker 7: And I just want to point out this is like
Speaker 7: the only character that gets an introduction. We don't really
Speaker 7: learned almost anyone else's names, except for one other character,
Speaker 7: which he's just great, great for like a pilot. Anyway,
Speaker 7: So he steps towards his front door and the ankle
Speaker 7: monitor starts beeping. He blames his liberal daughter for being
Speaker 7: put on house arrest for quote unquote threatening the school board,
Speaker 7: which he says he did because the school was quote
Speaker 7: brainwashing kids into thinking girls aren't girls and men aren't men.
Speaker 7: His daughter says, sometimes they're neither or both, or dressed
Speaker 7: like dogs. Anyway, his wife comes home.
Speaker 2: Oh god, yeah, there's a real furry obsession in this
Speaker 2: EPI this show. I guess we'll talk about that later too, because.
Speaker 7: This was birth years ago. This is not like a
Speaker 7: modern current take on WOKESM. But his wife comes home
Speaker 7: and with her is someone wearing a COVID mask sporting
Speaker 7: a pink mohawk. And here I'm going to play our
Speaker 7: first clip.
Speaker 12: What's that worrying?
Speaker 14: Actually that is one of my pronouns. Also, they them
Speaker 14: and me?
Speaker 15: Your non binary?
Speaker 12: How do you know that word?
Speaker 5: I learned it in school.
Speaker 12: That's why I'm locked up.
Speaker 1: Norm.
Speaker 15: The judge agreed to conditional parole.
Speaker 12: What condition?
Speaker 4: Where is my room?
Speaker 12: That's saying here?
Speaker 15: Chaz is part of a new government program.
Speaker 14: To re educate homophobic, transphobic, racist Charlie.
Speaker 12: Finally someone normal.
Speaker 10: I don't understand your word?
Speaker 12: Did that?
Speaker 2: Just black whisper?
Speaker 12: You're his friend and boss.
Speaker 7: So something that isn't fully conveyed just through the sound
Speaker 7: is that when the daughter finds out that this new
Speaker 7: person is non binary, she gets like big, big, like
Speaker 7: lovey eyes.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And the black boss character, he is played by failed
Speaker 7: politician Larry Elder, and he's my.
Speaker 2: God, that's Larry Elder. Yes, Oh that's funny. That's so funny.
Speaker 2: He's just there to show that black people like Norm, right, yes, exactly,
Speaker 2: that the progressives actually are racist for not liking Norm
Speaker 2: because the only black person they're going to put in
Speaker 2: this show thinks that he's rad. It's just a normal
Speaker 2: thing that you do if you're a right wing hack
Speaker 2: making a low budget cartoon. He is wearing, by the way,
Speaker 2: a Washington Redskins hat and shirt, and his.
Speaker 7: Shirt discontinued four years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and his first his opening line in the show
Speaker 2: is him coming in and saying, I come over here
Speaker 2: to escape woke.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One thing I do think is interesting is that
Speaker 2: both this character, because Larry Elder makes a note that
Speaker 2: like his son is about to transition and is at
Speaker 2: least non binary, they don't really know what any of
Speaker 2: this means. So a little bit of the script is
Speaker 2: unclear as to what these kids actually how they identify.
Speaker 2: And obviously Norm's daughter is I don't know if she's
Speaker 2: non binary or just like into a like generally queer,
Speaker 2: but like that is the impression you're left with. And again,
Speaker 2: if you actually were someone who was kind of conservative,
Speaker 2: conservative sympathetic, like Mike Judge making like a cartoon, you
Speaker 2: can actually get some mileage out of the accepting the
Speaker 2: idea that like, Okay, you've got these curmudgeonly older people
Speaker 2: and you've got their kids who are like way more
Speaker 2: open about this kind of stuff, and there's there's there's
Speaker 2: room for plots as King of the Hill did pretty
Speaker 2: well that kind of lampoon the culture in general, but
Speaker 2: it requires a little more self awareness. Like again, if
Speaker 2: there was a little bit you might wonder, like, what
Speaker 2: are we saying if we're the people making this right
Speaker 2: wing piece of propaganda that all of the young people
Speaker 2: feel very differently about gender than their parents.
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, that's why Norm keeps saying, I'm the old Norm.
Speaker 7: I want to bear. And the show was called The
Speaker 7: New Norm, not to be confused with the nineteen ninety
Speaker 7: nine ABC sympcom storing Norm MacDonald called it the Norm Shows.
Speaker 7: It's literally right, it's literally in the name. It's about
Speaker 7: you know how these people cannot cannot accept that times
Speaker 7: change and they slowly get outdated social beliefs. Anyway, every
Speaker 7: single time that Norm addresses the non binary character, referring
Speaker 7: to them as pronoun or that his little AI Amazon
Speaker 7: assistant just bleeps out offensive. Offensive.
Speaker 15: Jazz is here to re educate Norm.
Speaker 12: In non bonary studies.
Speaker 4: I'm allergic to dogs.
Speaker 2: It's okay.
Speaker 15: Billy is an emotional support dog and non binary.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, then good dog.
Speaker 7: Just amazing voice acting in that cliff and with a
Speaker 7: helpful laugh track, so you know what is a joke
Speaker 7: and when you're supposed to laugh, which is so embarrassing
Speaker 7: for an animated sycom to put on a laugh track,
Speaker 7: like oh my god, oh my god.
Speaker 2: It smacks of desperation because nobody really liked nobody misses
Speaker 2: laugh tracks.
Speaker 7: Laugh tracks are like if you have a live studio audience,
Speaker 7: you know, a laugh track kind of like makes sense.
Speaker 7: This is this is an animated sitcom. It's like if
Speaker 7: there's a laugh track on like Rick and Morty or
Speaker 7: like the Simpsons, like what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Anyway, The two men sit down to watch sports, and
Speaker 7: Larry Elder laments that a non binary person is present
Speaker 7: in the room and starts complaining about his child.
Speaker 16: I come here to get away from woke trouble at home.
Speaker 16: Ah my boy or whatever it calls themselves now is
Speaker 16: thinking about transitioning that try Regina transitioning to what.
Speaker 7: Another humble whatever it calls them theself now amazing pronoun
Speaker 7: usage another fumble now. Norm tosses the gay beer to Chaz,
Speaker 7: the non binary character.
Speaker 2: Of Jazz, Uh Chaz.
Speaker 7: Chaz fumbles the catch and says, and that's not.
Speaker 2: Even that's not a gay zoomer name. Chazz is like
Speaker 2: something like, that's that's gen x Chazz totally yeah, well.
Speaker 7: Again because this is all made by gen x people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Yes.
Speaker 7: Chaz fumbles the catch and says that they can't drink
Speaker 7: because they're not twenty one, and Larry Elder replies, y'all
Speaker 7: influence my boy and to cut off his junk, but
Speaker 7: draw the line at beer, and then Chaz hides behind
Speaker 7: the couch to call upper level government operatives who are
Speaker 7: advising them on this re education assignment.
Speaker 12: I got it.
Speaker 2: Before we get into this, I want to start with
Speaker 2: what doesn't make sense about that bit, which is that
Speaker 2: if Chaz was straight edge, right, and they were kind
Speaker 2: of chickin, if they actually knew anything about like the
Speaker 2: real sort of culturals kind of divides that are coming
Speaker 2: in around gen Z and gen Alfa, they could have
Speaker 2: made a point that like, yeah, this generation of kids
Speaker 2: doesn't get drunk and do drugs the way like millennials did,
Speaker 2: and that's an actual like cultural cleavage point. But Chaz
Speaker 2: is not straight edge. Chas is just saying I cannot
Speaker 2: legally drink beer.
Speaker 7: Which right, no gay person has ever.
Speaker 2: Seen, which no game.
Speaker 7: But it like the fact that unless unless they're straight edge, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Larry Elder then comes in and says like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is a characteristic but it wasn't like a characteristic of
Speaker 2: you queer gen z kids. But the queer gen Z
Speaker 2: kid did not express that as like a characteristic of
Speaker 2: his identity. He was just stating this is illegal.
Speaker 7: Because it's illegal. Yeah, very yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, anyway, when.
Speaker 7: Chaz is conference calling with this this upper level government
Speaker 7: we have, we have this general in like a in
Speaker 7: like a kink dog mask who barks, and there's a
Speaker 7: trans woman admiral who says, find a way to break him,
Speaker 7: maybe we can fix the country. I believe the admiral
Speaker 7: is a really transphobic character of US Assistant Secretary for
Speaker 7: Health Rachel Levine. And yeah, it's not even a good character.
Speaker 2: It's just it's just it doesn't look like at all
Speaker 2: there is.
Speaker 7: There's also another another character which Robert identified as a
Speaker 7: possible hate crime and and tasked me with locating who
Speaker 7: this person is. And I leave with about one hundred
Speaker 7: percent certainty that this is a character of Sam Brinton,
Speaker 7: who was appointed the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel
Speaker 7: and Waste Disposition in the.
Speaker 2: Office Nuclear Energy. Are you kidding me?
Speaker 7: Apartment of Energy?
Speaker 12: Now?
Speaker 2: Ah, these people are so fucking conservative social media brain,
Speaker 2: what are you fucking come on?
Speaker 7: Brinton may be well known to some of our listeners
Speaker 7: as being let go in late twenty twenty two after
Speaker 7: being linked to a series of airport luggage thefts. One
Speaker 7: of the funniest things that's ever happened. This person could
Speaker 7: not stop stealing luggage from airports so much that they
Speaker 7: got fired from the Department of Energy.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 7: This this goes back to like twenty eighteen years. God,
Speaker 7: there's funny years of airport It's so funny. But again,
Speaker 7: if this was a good comedy thing, they would have
Speaker 7: some kind of bit like maybe maybe they would be
Speaker 7: holding like a like a like a you know, like
Speaker 7: a collection of luggage. But no, they're just they're they're
Speaker 7: just they're just standing behind the Progress Pride flight Like
Speaker 7: that's it. Like it's not funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because again, because the actual funny thing about this
Speaker 2: would be to have like your government character be someone
Speaker 2: at the Department of Energy who got taxed with this
Speaker 2: through some sort of incoherent DEI narrative and also a
Speaker 2: character trait as they are always stealing luggage, and like
Speaker 2: you could actually be bits around that over time. But
Speaker 2: they just they threw all these people in knowing that
Speaker 2: like the two hundred people who are as right wing
Speaker 2: online as them would get who all these were as
Speaker 2: opposed to doing the thing that you would do if
Speaker 2: you were actually making a show for mainstream consumption, which
Speaker 2: is like make fun of people that the audience will recognize.
Speaker 2: Throw with Joe Biden in there right, like obviously you're
Speaker 2: doing this in twenty twenty four, Like where is anyone
Speaker 2: that someone who's not completely lost their mind to this
Speaker 2: stuff will recognize?
Speaker 7: And this is this is the climax of the pilot.
Speaker 7: It's it's so, it's so bad. After Chaz has this
Speaker 7: little phone call, the fake camera zooms back to show
Speaker 7: a fake animated studio audience, and the bad country theme
Speaker 7: song plays once again, and and now now I will
Speaker 7: play it for you, because this section is both so
Speaker 7: pandering but also oddly genuine.
Speaker 8: Towards the end, newly same as you know, everythanks changing
Speaker 8: and I don't know this will not Marri And thank
Speaker 8: God for relungbows and.
Speaker 10: The ship those maids, it says the fall free speech.
Speaker 7: When the song goes, thank god for Elon Musk and
Speaker 7: his ship, post memes he is the home for free speech,
Speaker 7: and unvoiced animated Elon Musk pops through the door for
Speaker 7: no reason.
Speaker 2: And he's someone. Someone on Twitter took a screen grab
Speaker 2: off the Elon Musk and said they gave him that
Speaker 2: in Smith look and he does look like one of
Speaker 2: the fish people from Insmuth. That's not a flattering caricature.
Speaker 2: I think it's meant to be.
Speaker 7: It is because like it's it's I don't know. This
Speaker 7: is a really interesting moment because this is where it
Speaker 7: gets like kind of like genuine. Jess Hawkin wrote, the
Speaker 7: part that blows my mind about this video is the
Speaker 7: Elon Musk cameo where the bitterness and resentment of the
Speaker 7: video melts away into still believing in Santa Claus and
Speaker 7: it gets it gets just so weirdly genuine with this,
Speaker 7: with this like the kind of heartfelt, saccharine Elon Musk
Speaker 7: ending Well.
Speaker 2: Speaking of genuine, Garrison, the main thing that's genuine is
Speaker 2: our love of these sponsors.
Speaker 7: Okay, we are packed so there. After watching this pilot,
Speaker 7: there's there's a lot of questions to be asked. Why
Speaker 7: is there a fake animated studio audience? You know, pretty bad?
Speaker 7: My friend Ellie Erman pointed out, like why is the
Speaker 7: protagonist so unpleasant even in their perfect fantasy world? And
Speaker 7: also why is the word sitcom hyphenated in the title
Speaker 7: something that you don't do? Just a lot of a
Speaker 7: lot of baffling things. So there was there was a
Speaker 7: mix of reactions to this. You know, some of the
Speaker 7: blue checks on Twitter were kind of lapping this stuff up.
Speaker 7: One person with the username Amazing Gaming Productions wrote, I
Speaker 7: know some people are critiquing it, but my fee once
Speaker 7: and I laughed at a couple points. It's a good start.
Speaker 7: I hope you continue to work on it. We need
Speaker 7: all of the indie material we can create. And included
Speaker 7: in this tweet is a picture of a very poorly
Speaker 7: drawn avatar saying, Hi, my name is Indye David. I'm
Speaker 7: here to fight Goliath. Mainstream Oh my God is a
Speaker 7: gamer Gate two themed gaming company who wants to create
Speaker 7: anti woke games. They've done in nothing. They just post
Speaker 7: really bad artwork. And I cannot overstate how bad.
Speaker 2: Why his neck so wide and so long?
Speaker 7: For how bad the TV show's animation is this? This
Speaker 7: reply was just so bad I had to point it out.
Speaker 7: Just incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Now, Dave Rubin, the possible alleged potential most likely creator
Speaker 7: of the show, does air his work on Blaze TV,
Speaker 7: you know by by uh by Glenn Beck, and even
Speaker 7: even other Glenn Beck employees could not could not help
Speaker 7: but point out how terrible this is.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 7: Logan Hall, writer for Glenn Beck's The Blaze, wrote, quote,
Speaker 7: TV shows on leftism the cringiest, most unwatchable, nauseating trash
Speaker 7: ever created TV shows on conservatism, somehow even worse and
Speaker 7: one of the most brain poisoned. Conservative cartoonists George Axopolos
Speaker 7: basically like a discount Stone Toss wrote, quote, South Park
Speaker 7: had ed this has as much edge as uncooked sour dough.
Speaker 7: Between this and the Daily Wires limp cartoon, they may
Speaker 7: as well be flushing money down the toilet. He then
Speaker 7: went on to say, give me a small team, a
Speaker 7: million dollars and total creative control, and we will make
Speaker 7: a cartoon pilot that will melt faces. So again he
Speaker 7: just wants to to get his own his own TV show,
Speaker 7: but a whole bunch of these, you know, kind of
Speaker 7: right wing cultural critics were we're not we're not infused
Speaker 7: with this, with this outing because it's because it's really bad.
Speaker 7: So I want to get into kind of who is
Speaker 7: behind this now the full I hesitate to say creative team,
Speaker 7: but the people by the same team. Yeah, the team
Speaker 7: behind the New Norm Show. Not to be confused with
Speaker 7: the Fox two season documentary show The New Norm have
Speaker 7: been have been largely kept secret, possibly out of fears
Speaker 7: of humiliation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how you know it's a good show.
Speaker 7: But we at least do know some of the voice cast, right,
Speaker 7: Larry Elder plays the token black conservative who only exists
Speaker 7: to affirm that the main character isn't actually racist. Now,
Speaker 7: I doubt Larry Elder has much involvement beyond lending his
Speaker 7: voice and the other two confirmed voice Again, I hesitate
Speaker 7: to use the word talent or even actor, but the
Speaker 7: other two voice contributors are Dave Rubin and JP Sears.
Speaker 7: Now I believe these two could be much more critical
Speaker 7: to what makes up the comedy of The New Norm Show.
Speaker 7: Not to be confused with the Oatly Oat Milk series
Speaker 7: of online puppet shorts titled The New Norm anal show. Now,
Speaker 7: I assume most people listening to this are familiar with
Speaker 7: Dave Rubin. Like many of these right wing influencers, he's
Speaker 7: a failed comedian turned political podcaster who's been positioning himself
Speaker 7: further and further to the right over the course of
Speaker 7: the last decade. Now, JP Sears was a quote unquote
Speaker 7: holistic life coach who turned kind of into like a
Speaker 7: YouTube skeptic type satirical comedian, and while trying to parody
Speaker 7: new age WU and conspiracy theories, JP was peddling his
Speaker 7: own pseudoscience and adopting more and more conspiratorial beliefs. Over time,
Speaker 7: JP and his comedy began moving further and further to
Speaker 7: the right. But the COVID nineteen lockdown was kind of
Speaker 7: the breaking point where he went all in on anti vaxx,
Speaker 7: COVID nineteen and January sixth conspiracy theories. But I think
Speaker 7: there has to be at least one other contributor, you know,
Speaker 7: behind like the art and design of the show, and
Speaker 7: I can't I can't figure out who that is. I
Speaker 7: scrolled through all of the tweets to try to find
Speaker 7: out if this account had another name. I can't find
Speaker 7: out who exactly this other person is. There is there
Speaker 7: is one mystery, one mystery component. But one interesting thing
Speaker 7: I did uncover is that the New Norm show, not
Speaker 7: to be confused with the twenty twelve TV show The
Speaker 7: New Normal, has been in production in some form for
Speaker 7: over four years. They've been working on this for over
Speaker 7: four years. There's one frame from a video titled Character
Speaker 7: Sketch Evolutions posted on September nineteenth of last year, and
Speaker 7: this show's project files stretching all the way back to
Speaker 7: January of twenty twenty. They've been working on this since
Speaker 7: January twenty twenty. Early sketches of the daughter feature and
Speaker 7: Antifa and transgender tattoo on her left arm. Also she
Speaker 7: has a kefia and posters that read Vegans for Palestine,
Speaker 7: all all in twenty twenty artwork.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yehow that's kind of fascinating because the daughter character
Speaker 7: in the published pilot is just wearing like a hoodie
Speaker 7: and like a beanie's. There's none of.
Speaker 2: These got like some bracelets that have like a there's
Speaker 2: at least one off her bracelets has a rainbow on it,
Speaker 2: which I think is the only queer signaling or like
Speaker 2: kind of it really signaling of any kind that we get.
Speaker 2: And she has an Apple Watch because lol gen z.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the otherwise her design is completely boring, like
Speaker 2: there's nothing going on.
Speaker 7: And I found this other, this other thing that is
Speaker 7: maybe a little bit you know, behind the scenes, look
Speaker 7: at what this may have been. So last March this
Speaker 7: account posted a little comic strip saying I'll look at
Speaker 7: how it began as a comic strip. So possibly this
Speaker 7: may have originated as not being an animated series but
Speaker 7: instead an online webcomic, which might explain a few things.
Speaker 7: And also that I assume the mystery contributor that we
Speaker 7: don't know probably was working on the webcomic and then
Speaker 7: kind of rope gain more and more people the sated series.
Speaker 7: But I am going to read out this webcomic just
Speaker 7: because it is fascinatingly bad.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, Oh my god.
Speaker 7: Norm says, for twenty years our address was seven Columbus Ave.
Speaker 7: Now it's callin Kaepernick Drive.
Speaker 2: That's his daughter saying.
Speaker 7: That, and everyone thinks I feel so. The mom says fancy,
Speaker 7: the daughter says woke, and Norm says sick. And then
Speaker 7: a whole bunch of news crews show up at Norm's
Speaker 7: front door. They say, what's it like to live in
Speaker 7: the most woke address in town? And Norman says, I
Speaker 7: refuse to call it callin Kaepernick Drive. It's Columbus Av.
Speaker 7: The news media says any last words before the angry
Speaker 7: mob shows up. Should we call a fire department for you?
Speaker 7: And Norman says, I thought you snowflakes defunded them too.
Speaker 7: It's not even no, no one was talking about defunding
Speaker 7: the fire department. Not true anyway.
Speaker 2: It's it's like it's just not even a joke, right,
Speaker 2: like the the there's not like a release of tension
Speaker 2: or anything with like the the end bit being like
Speaker 2: him saying, why would we call the fire department he
Speaker 2: defunded that? It's not It's like, it's not a joke.
Speaker 7: No, Like the last series of panels are even more disconnected. Yeah,
Speaker 7: they are back inside the doors closed norm says Chloe,
Speaker 7: which I guess is his daughter's name. Never said in
Speaker 7: the pilot, Chloe, why must your generation change everything? And
Speaker 7: then the doorbell rings delivery. The mom answers the door
Speaker 7: and says, sorry, wrong address. This is now Colin Kaeprinick Drive.
Speaker 7: Ben Affleck Boulevard is two streets down where James Woods
Speaker 7: Parkway used to be.
Speaker 2: My god, that's what is that? Even that is that? Even?
Speaker 2: Do you really like?
Speaker 13: Is it?
Speaker 7: They were okay James would get fallen. They replaced it
Speaker 7: with ben Affleck Boulevard.
Speaker 2: If you could if you were someone who was like
Speaker 2: kind of conservative but not completely brain poisoned, you could
Speaker 2: actually get some good bits out of Like they changed
Speaker 2: the name of this street from Columbus Avenue to Colin
Speaker 2: kaepern to drive Now. The smart way to play off
Speaker 2: of that would be to make it very clear that
Speaker 2: the town has a bunch of existing issues with inequality
Speaker 2: and racism that they have not dealt with in lieu
Speaker 2: of changing the name of a single street and pretending
Speaker 2: things are better. And you can actually, like there's things
Speaker 2: you could do with that were you actually making comedy.
Speaker 2: But like the fact that they the fact that the
Speaker 2: escalation is rather than sort of like examining this world
Speaker 2: and like why shit like this gets done just to
Speaker 2: kind of like make these like performative gestures. Instead, it's like,
Speaker 2: and next they're going to replace James Woods with ben Affleck?
Speaker 2: Which therey good do the gen Z kids do the
Speaker 2: progressives like ben Affleck? Does anyone feel all that strongly
Speaker 2: about ben Affleck?
Speaker 7: No, we had to start naving street after ben Affleck. Also,
Speaker 7: why would there be a James Woods Parkway anyway? Whatever?
Speaker 2: Yeah, who's naming a street after name a thing? James
Speaker 2: Woods has been in like.
Speaker 7: Oh my god. So the marketing of this pilot is
Speaker 7: even is almost as baffling as the pilot itself. Right,
Speaker 7: there's a few slogans they like to use, first of all,
Speaker 7: the South Park of X, which is already just brilliant,
Speaker 7: it's hard, legalize humor, very very funny, and make America
Speaker 7: funny again. They will often just tweet these phrases out
Speaker 7: with no context, and sure, why not. The home page
Speaker 7: on their website reads quote The New Norm. Not to
Speaker 7: be confused with the ongoing podcast series. The New Norm
Speaker 7: is an animated sitcom for our woke world, an edgy
Speaker 7: yet family friendly comedy that shines a funny light on
Speaker 7: today's most divisive issues and gives Americans a safe space
Speaker 7: to come together and laugh. Just fantastic stuff.
Speaker 2: Great, great, I love again. I made a comment about this,
Speaker 2: but I love that they're calling this the South Park
Speaker 2: of X because like the South Park, guys would never
Speaker 2: put a cartoon or anything else on X because they
Speaker 2: actually make things that are commercially successful and so real
Speaker 2: companies will buy their shows, whereas if you're putting something
Speaker 2: on X, it means that there's no money in what
Speaker 2: you're doing. It means that you your show is going
Speaker 2: to be monetized alongside those ads for games that don't
Speaker 2: exist that just show like boy like little action cartoon
Speaker 2: characters leaping into the legs of like very horny drawings
Speaker 2: of Gorgan's and shit and actual straight up pornography because
Speaker 2: there is no money on.
Speaker 7: X Family friendly so funny. Now, there are a few
Speaker 7: reviews that they post on the new norm website. Bill
Speaker 7: Mahers has brilliant, Dave Rubins has beautiful, Larry Elders has relevant,
Speaker 7: timely and funny men and Kevin.
Speaker 2: He's literally in.
Speaker 7: He's one of the voices, so is Steve Ruben and
Speaker 7: Kevin Sorbo says All in the Family for our time. Wow, Robert, Well,
Speaker 7: what is All in the Family? Because I am a zooming.
Speaker 2: I need you explain a couple of things. All in
Speaker 2: the Family was a groundbreaking sitcom show from like fifteen
Speaker 2: or twenty years before you were born.
Speaker 7: Even longer than that, I mean it was like it
Speaker 7: was like the seventies.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, oh shit, it was like thirty or forty
Speaker 2: years before you were born.
Speaker 7: Yes, it's way way before my time. It's before your time.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it is, and uh, Kevin Sorbo. Do you
Speaker 2: know who Kevin Sorbo was?
Speaker 7: Even Robert I grew up watching Christian movies. I am
Speaker 7: intimately familiar with Kevin Sorboh.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, but I know why he actually got famous.
Speaker 2: He was, yes, in a show that again predates your existence.
Speaker 7: But it's now just your bad Christian actor. Now, these
Speaker 7: reviews are funny, not only because two of these people
Speaker 7: giving reviews on the site are literally in the pilot,
Speaker 7: but also let's look at the Bill Maher quote brilliant.
Speaker 7: Do you think Bill Maher has seen this pilot?
Speaker 11: No?
Speaker 13: I don't.
Speaker 7: He hasn't.
Speaker 12: No.
Speaker 7: Do you know why? Of course, because underneath the text
Speaker 7: that says in quotes brilliant, it says brilliant Bill Maher,
Speaker 7: HBO Real Time Host, And then in much smaller text,
Speaker 7: it says, speaking of the show creator's previous work featured
Speaker 7: on HBO, he's just talking about Dave Rubin being interviewed
Speaker 7: on his show. At some point Bill Maher said brilliant
Speaker 7: to Dave Rubin, And now they're using this as a
Speaker 7: quote endorsing this show.
Speaker 12: Man.
Speaker 2: I kind of I feel like, so fifteen years or
Speaker 2: so ago, back when he was still alive. Roger Ebert
Speaker 2: shared one of my articles that I wrote for Cracked,
Speaker 2: and I kind of want to take his feedback on
Speaker 2: that and claim that, like like dress it up his
Speaker 2: feedback for our podcast. Yeah, Roger Hebert loves this show
Speaker 2: that was made ten years after he died. Well he doesn't,
Speaker 2: but he said something nice about something else I did
Speaker 2: a long time ago, so I think he would support.
Speaker 7: Show creator's previous work. It's amazing. And I we will
Speaker 7: return to the Kevin Sorbo quote about All in the
Speaker 7: Family for our time. Yes again, Like this isn't even
Speaker 7: just a parody of like All in the Family. They're
Speaker 7: they're taking certain they're they're taking certain elements, but but
Speaker 7: not like actually satirizing them. They're just kind of doing
Speaker 7: them again. And do you know what we're gonna do again, Robert,
Speaker 7: good ads, We're gonna, we are, we gonna, We're gonna
Speaker 7: go to add.
Speaker 2: We're going We're going to transition, which the people who
Speaker 2: make this show would really hate.
Speaker 7: Okay, we are back. I have a few images from
Speaker 7: the from the marketing of this that you're gonna love.
Speaker 12: Robert.
Speaker 7: Back in September, the New Norm shows. Twitter posted this
Speaker 7: picture It's a very bad cardoon Mike god, Ben Shapiro,
Speaker 7: Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2: What are these?
Speaker 7: It has one like and textra says who is your
Speaker 7: fav street A small they made bit Shapiro and Joe Rogan. Oh,
Speaker 7: and there is another another image of Norm the titular
Speaker 7: character saying thank you Chaya Wrycheck and Elon Musk for
Speaker 7: the freedom to say amen. Now that the word amen
Speaker 7: was undemonetized. So most of their marketing kind of look
Speaker 7: kind of looks like this. It's just it's talking about
Speaker 7: other more popular right wing content creators or just praising
Speaker 7: Elon Musk. That is most of the marketing for the show.
Speaker 7: It seems their primary marketing strategy seems to be sucking
Speaker 7: up to Elon Musk to attract attention from him and
Speaker 7: his fan base. Now, I haven't seen anyone else talking
Speaker 7: about this yet, but the New Norm Show, not to
Speaker 7: be confused with the New Norm McDonald Show, actually released
Speaker 7: their first video project last March. It was titled Elon
Speaker 7: Musk xaoc ai Animation unquote what, with show creator Dave
Speaker 7: Rubin saying the future of animation is AI The video
Speaker 7: starts with an AI image of Elon Musk in a
Speaker 7: black suit, with voiceover of Norm A dressing Musk saying, Hey, Elon,
Speaker 7: check this out. We cut to a congressional deposition where
Speaker 7: AOC is questioning Elon Musk, who is wearing a spacesuit
Speaker 7: about him, replying, quote unquote true to a meme posted
Speaker 7: by Norm saying that AOC is hot but not smart.
Speaker 2: Mister Musk, call me Elon.
Speaker 7: There's a slow motion love heart sequence of Elon and
Speaker 7: AOC staring at each other, and Elon says, I have
Speaker 7: a hands on approach to the world's population crisis.
Speaker 15: You'll never get your hands up on me. I'm boycotting you.
Speaker 12: Then go yourself.
Speaker 2: God, he looks like a cherub in that spacesuit.
Speaker 11: What is so?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Here, here's here's Ai Norm and AI Elon Musk sitting
Speaker 7: in this courtroom.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 7: Norm says that it's because of Elon's reply quote that
Speaker 7: millions of people saw my post. So in this in
Speaker 7: this like little to no effort AI short, they straight
Speaker 7: up lay out their intentions behind all of this, clamoring
Speaker 7: for Musk's attention and approval.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 7: Their goal is that if Elon Musk can see their stuff,
Speaker 7: maybe he'll spread it and it will be popular. That's
Speaker 7: the intention.
Speaker 2: A nine year old boy, Oh yeah.
Speaker 5: He does.
Speaker 7: He does look like like cherub Elon Musk. Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 7: But so this is this is their entire strategy, right,
Speaker 7: It's to make content that they hope Elon Musk will
Speaker 7: see and then boost so that people will give them money.
Speaker 7: That's that's the entirety of the bit. In the replies
Speaker 7: to this AI short film, everyone who like expressed that
Speaker 7: they liked it, saying like so funny or just like
Speaker 7: a laugh emoji. The norm account replied to every single
Speaker 7: one of these tweets with a thumbs up emoji. That's it,
Speaker 7: I got, that's that's it, like sometimes with a flaming
Speaker 7: thumbs up, sometimes with a regular thumb up emoji, but
Speaker 7: replying to every single tweet they just did a thumbs up.
Speaker 7: It's so it's so lazy, like like.
Speaker 2: Content goes out. That's some intern who's getting paid by
Speaker 2: there in like or if they're getting paid or whatever,
Speaker 2: however they're getting evaluated. They want to be able to
Speaker 2: claim that they were doing lots of work. So yeah,
Speaker 2: they're just going through and thumbs uping every post. That's
Speaker 2: my wild So.
Speaker 7: This is all kind of reminiscent of The Daily Wire's
Speaker 7: own animated comedy, mister Burcham right now, mister Burchram, we
Speaker 7: talked about in our in our in our Daily Wire
Speaker 7: episodes earlier this year, but it was it was pitched
Speaker 7: to Fox, like over a decade ago. They even made
Speaker 7: a ten minute animatic. Fox passed, and so did every
Speaker 7: other network and streaming service also declined to pick up
Speaker 7: the project until until it came across Jeremy Boring's desk
Speaker 7: a few years ago.
Speaker 2: And Jeremy Bowring said, Adam Carolla, that's who the kids
Speaker 2: love these days.
Speaker 7: So yeah, they green lit the show and it is
Speaker 7: now airing on The Daily Wire Plus. But most of
Speaker 7: the jokes are super outdated because again this was pitched
Speaker 7: ten years ago, over ten years ago, so there's a
Speaker 7: wholench of just like vegan jokes, Like it's jokes that
Speaker 7: maybe would have been transgressive in twenty eleven.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 7: Of course, there's like there's like a few updated jokes
Speaker 7: thrown in there, but like not many. So in terms
Speaker 7: of the New Norm show, not to be confused with
Speaker 7: the many other projects with the same title, only the
Speaker 7: three minute pilot episode is out right now right. They
Speaker 7: are soliciting more money and that's the main drive of
Speaker 7: putting out this pilot is that they are spreading around
Speaker 7: this donation link like crazy. They've explicitly said when does
Speaker 7: the first episode drop? Soon but sooner if y'all give
Speaker 7: here with the donation link.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Two other tweets read quote support this show to animate
Speaker 7: the first season, and support this show and help fight
Speaker 7: the woke mind virus with laughter unquote. I don't think
Speaker 7: this will actually ever get made because no one's gonna
Speaker 7: support this because it's garbage.
Speaker 2: This is like that reddap Family an FT cartoon exactly,
Speaker 2: which I'm still hard well.
Speaker 7: That they're doing is trying to get you know, like
Speaker 7: unfortunate souls to donate money to this, and uh, I
Speaker 7: don't think the right wing billionaires are going to be
Speaker 7: funding this the same way they fund other Daily Wire projects.
Speaker 7: So this seems kind of dead in the water. This
Speaker 7: seems like it, you know, not much thought was put
Speaker 7: into it. It's lazy. It's also completely stealing a Simpson's
Speaker 7: joke from nineteen ninety nine. This is the big thing
Speaker 7: I discovered. So I've been trying to watch more nineties
Speaker 7: Simpson lately, Good for You, Good for You, Solid Move,
Speaker 7: And as I was watching the three minute pilot, something
Speaker 7: started to feel a little bit familiar. And then I
Speaker 7: read the Kevin Sorbo review All in the Family for
Speaker 7: Our Time, and I realized something. This whole show is
Speaker 7: just stealing a cutaway gag from a nineteen ninety nine
Speaker 7: Simpsons episode about a fake sitcom called All in the
Speaker 7: Family nineteen ninety nine, in which a new, more woke
Speaker 7: and inclusive a version of the original show is airing
Speaker 7: on TV. And here's a collection of images Robert in
Speaker 7: my Google document that shows early concept art of Norm
Speaker 7: looking exactly like the main character of.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Down with the Cigar.
Speaker 7: It literally, the picture of him in the chair looks traced.
Speaker 7: It is the exact same. There is a diverse cast.
Speaker 2: And standing next to him exactly the woman's study major
Speaker 2: in her birkenstocks exactly. It got a Rabbi in there
Speaker 2: as opposed to the which is some nineties diversity. Colm.
Speaker 2: But like, and I remember that bit too, which is
Speaker 2: like a it's actually a because there were conservatives writing
Speaker 2: on the Simpsons in the nineties, one of the John Schwartzwelder,
Speaker 2: was like a famous libertarian, like he's a but he's
Speaker 2: also like funny, and so they made a good bit
Speaker 2: about like pec like the rash of like overtly politically
Speaker 2: correct shows right like it's it's it's a it's a
Speaker 2: fun little aside joke that Schwartzwelder was enough of a
Speaker 2: comedian to know is good for about six seconds exactly.
Speaker 7: And I will play those six seconds right now and
Speaker 7: at nine thirty All in the Family nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 14: Who geez did he got me living with an African American,
Speaker 14: a semi American, and a woman American there.
Speaker 7: And I'm glad I loved you so all, I love everybody.
Speaker 2: I wish i'd shaved my money from the first show.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 17: See, there's there's, there's there's a couple of different jokes there. Yeah,
Speaker 17: there's multiple jokes in that three seconds or so. It's
Speaker 17: such a good layered joke on the part of the Simpsons.
Speaker 17: It has the parody of Archie from All in the
Speaker 17: Family kind of being like offensive in an old fashioned way,
Speaker 17: you know, bemoaning that he has to be around all
Speaker 17: these people, but also saying that he loves everyone in
Speaker 17: the way that these kind of shows like to play
Speaker 17: both sides by showing the main character is still good
Speaker 17: nature despite his faults, and then he flips again saying
Speaker 17: he's he's only come back to do the show because
Speaker 17: he needs money. The bit doesn't overstate it's welcome, it
Speaker 17: lasts only like ten seconds, and yet is infinitely more
Speaker 17: funny than the entirety of this three minute pilot, And
Speaker 17: Dave Rubin actually thought he could just rip off a
Speaker 17: shore to obscure Simpson's joke and stretch it into an
Speaker 17: entire show and no one would notice. So I was
Speaker 17: really happy to find that this was just stealing an
Speaker 17: old Simpson's joke really poorly too.
Speaker 7: And because I've been watching more older Simpsons, I've also
Speaker 7: realized that a lot of the jokes and ladyballers are
Speaker 7: also just completely stolen from Simpsons, but ripped of the
Speaker 7: context that makes them funny. So all of these like
Speaker 7: right wing like cranks we're trying to produce this comedy stuff,
Speaker 7: they're all just kind of going back to old Simpson's
Speaker 7: jokes that people, hopefully you have like forgotten and are
Speaker 7: injecting them without the actual humorous context into all these
Speaker 7: anti woke projects. And it doesn't work. It simply doesn't.
Speaker 7: For one, it's plagiarizing, and the second and and like
Speaker 7: secondly it's it's just bad. But yes, I will I
Speaker 7: will post some of these comparison pictures on h on
Speaker 7: my Twitter at Hungry bow Tie if you want to
Speaker 7: see the uh, the shocking, shocking hard works.
Speaker 2: That was a fine investigation, Garrison, because you're definitely right,
Speaker 2: like this is this is a carbon copy of of
Speaker 2: a cutaway gag about all in the family. That's so
Speaker 2: fucking funny.
Speaker 7: Even the background house is the same look. They have,
Speaker 7: the staircase the same the door, like it's everything is
Speaker 7: in the exact same position.
Speaker 2: It's wild.
Speaker 7: I know they said this.
Speaker 2: They sent this to an animator, like they sent that
Speaker 2: screen grab to the animated That's so funny. God, this
Speaker 2: The Simpsons was such a good show and its golden
Speaker 2: years that people are still trying to competently rip it off,
Speaker 2: and again they compare themselves to like the South Park
Speaker 2: of X. South Park even did a much better job
Speaker 2: of ripping off The Simpsons and making that be the
Speaker 2: focus of an episode that like everyone rips off the
Speaker 2: Simpsons because of how the long they've been going on,
Speaker 2: Like yeah, anyway, whatever.
Speaker 7: They were smart enough to remove the cigar in the
Speaker 7: final pilot, but all because because that would be just
Speaker 7: so obvious. But all the concept ared that they've posted
Speaker 7: on Twitter, like half a year ago has has him
Speaker 7: with a cigar wearing a white button up shirt and it.
Speaker 2: Looks it is it is.
Speaker 7: It is almost traced. It is like, yeah, his his
Speaker 7: his arm.
Speaker 2: They threw on the vests distract.
Speaker 7: It's it's phenomenal. So yeah, amazing stuff from Dave Rubin.
Speaker 7: He I guess shouldn't have quit interning at the at
Speaker 7: A at John Stewart back in the two thousands. Maybe
Speaker 7: maybe he could have had a better life, but instead,
Speaker 7: instead we get this, so great job, Dave Rubin. I
Speaker 7: wish you only the best in your future creative works.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is what's going to get him that plush
Speaker 2: writing gig on the Rick and Morty season. I don't
Speaker 2: know whatever the next one is. I'm sure he's on
Speaker 2: the cusp.
Speaker 7: Oh he's close to breaking through. I can feel it.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, all right, right, well I'm glad. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: go watch some classic Simpsons again.
Speaker 10: Thank you.
Speaker 2: For reminding me. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more
Speaker 2: episodes every week from now until the heat death of
Speaker 2: the Universe.
Speaker 10: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 17: cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
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Speaker 6: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 6: monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.