Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Hello everyone, this is Dan el Kurt for it could
Speaker 3: happen here. Today's episode will be focused on Arab Israelian normalization,
Speaker 3: Arab Israeli peace deals, and Arab Israeli relations more generally.
Speaker 3: The reason that this is an important topic to discuss
Speaker 3: is because a few weeks ago, the Washington Post published
Speaker 3: this PowerPoint presentation originating in the Trump administration titled The
Speaker 3: Great Trust From a demolished Iranian proxy to a prosperous
Speaker 3: Abrahamic ally. And this presentation is about God, the US
Speaker 3: and Israeli vision for what Gaza's quote unquote reconstruction will
Speaker 3: look like. And the word great itself is an acronym
Speaker 3: that stands for Gaza reconstitution, economic acceleration, and transformation. Now,
Speaker 3: this presentation has so much in it that horrifies any
Speaker 3: normal human being, but essentially it outlines this vision for
Speaker 3: how Gaza is going to be reconstructed, and throughout the
Speaker 3: entire document, it's very clear that whatever remains of Gaza's
Speaker 3: population will not have any political rights. There is some
Speaker 3: gesturing at some point about handing over some governance to
Speaker 3: quote vetted Palestinians, but there's also a repeated discussion within
Speaker 3: this presentation, within this document of how they want to
Speaker 3: incentivize a significant segment of Gaza's population to leave Gaza
Speaker 3: altogether and not return, and they want to financially incentivize
Speaker 3: them to do that. I think the entire presentation is
Speaker 3: worth looking at. I'll put it in the show notes
Speaker 3: because it really outlines what they think Gaza is going
Speaker 3: to look like and what they plan for the Pileestinians.
Speaker 3: More generally, the reason why Arab is really a normalization
Speaker 3: is important to discuss given this presentation. Given what's happening
Speaker 3: in Gaza after ceasefire is present very much in this document.
Speaker 3: It's very clear from the presentation that the US and
Speaker 3: Israel envision a particular role for Arab governments in this
Speaker 3: reconstruction and in this new Middle East that they hope
Speaker 3: to achieve a Middle East where Gaza is this economic zone,
Speaker 3: connecting it to Saudi Arabia, connecting it to other parts
Speaker 3: of the Middle East, opening up investment opportunities for different
Speaker 3: Middle Eastern governments and companies in the Global North as well.
Speaker 3: And it really is just an astounding vision to behold.
Speaker 3: Referring to Gaza as a demolished Iranian proxy that they
Speaker 3: want to turn into an Abrahamic ally is also interesting
Speaker 3: here because we've seen this kind of language in the
Speaker 3: last couple years, especially during the first Trump administration with
Speaker 3: the Abraham Accords. Now the Abraham Accords, as this episode
Speaker 3: will outline in detail, were agreements signed between Israel and
Speaker 3: the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and eventually Morocco and
Speaker 3: a part of Sudan. And these agreements were billed as
Speaker 3: this new era of peace between Arabs and Israel under
Speaker 3: this kind of religious language and religious framing of Abraham
Speaker 3: as the father of both Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims.
Speaker 3: So to discuss this entire framework, what it means, what
Speaker 3: it office gates today, I'm joined by Ben Schumann Stohler
Speaker 3: and Matan Kammoner, who have created a new podcast series
Speaker 3: called Bad Cousins. This is published by Colomdia in partnership
Speaker 3: with the Diasporust and they recently had an event in
Speaker 3: Berlin debuting their first episode, which full disclosure I'm on.
Speaker 3: But essentially they tackle this question of why are the
Speaker 3: ab Tim Accords named after Abraham? What was that intended
Speaker 3: to denote? And why is Arab Israelian normalization such a
Speaker 3: big piece of the puzzle in understanding both Israeli Pasdidian
Speaker 3: conflict right now as well as the vision for the
Speaker 3: Israeli Pastidian conflict from the American and Israeli perspective. So
Speaker 3: please enjoy this interview with Ben and Mattan. I wanted
Speaker 3: to give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves to
Speaker 3: the audience, So the time would you.
Speaker 4: Like to start?
Speaker 5: Sure?
Speaker 6: I'm an anthropologist. I work at Queen Mary University in London.
Speaker 6: My main research is on migration from Thailand to Israel
Speaker 6: for agricultural work. But this project is something of a
Speaker 6: side project that's blossomed together with Ben, who have been
Speaker 6: good friends with for I think.
Speaker 5: Over a decade.
Speaker 3: Now, all right, Yeah, I remember that first book on
Speaker 3: the time migrants, but you have also published extensively on
Speaker 3: the Arab is really Normalization questions, So yeah, we'll get
Speaker 3: into it.
Speaker 7: Ben Yeah, I'm Benjamin Sohler. I'm a founder and owner
Speaker 7: of Colo Media here in Berlin, Germany. We're an audio publisher.
Speaker 7: We have audiobooks and shows and documentaries in English and German.
Speaker 7: And yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having us.
Speaker 8: Awesome.
Speaker 3: All right, So the listeners I'm sure are going to
Speaker 3: be a little bit aware, but let's kind of just
Speaker 3: define terms at the top of this. When we say
Speaker 3: Arab is really normalization? Well, what do we mean by that?
Speaker 5: So it's a long, long process, it's not new.
Speaker 6: One of the interesting things that I found out when
Speaker 6: researching this, the article that this podcast came out of,
Speaker 6: is that more than one hundred years ago, Heine White
Speaker 6: Span who was head of the Zionist organization, and King
Speaker 6: Faisal were in very very close communication about an agreement
Speaker 6: that it seems a lot like a progenitor of the
Speaker 6: Arab courts.
Speaker 5: Today, we had a very sort of.
Speaker 6: Strong pro Western orientation on both sides, pro imperialists. If
Speaker 6: you like use that language. We had a disdain for
Speaker 6: the Palestinians as people who were not supposedly an important
Speaker 6: factor in the politics of the area, and we had
Speaker 6: framing of Arabs and Jews use as relatives as kin,
Speaker 6: which is one that we trace back in the show
Speaker 6: to the sort of Abrahamic concept that has really come
Speaker 6: to the foe with the naming of the Abraham courts.
Speaker 6: Of course, there's a long long history since then, with
Speaker 6: the big landmarks being the Egyptian is rarely normalization in
Speaker 6: the late nineteen seventies seventy nine, I think, and of
Speaker 6: course Jordanian is really normalization in nineteen ninety four, which
Speaker 6: came very very tightly knit with the Osloochords and the
Speaker 6: initiation of so called peace talks between the Palestines and
Speaker 6: the Israelis. So the Palestinans war, of course, do play
Speaker 6: a central role here, whether as present or as a
Speaker 6: present absentees as Israelis like to call them sometimes today.
Speaker 6: Of course, we fast forward to the twenty twenties. The
Speaker 6: abraham Acords were assigned between Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco
Speaker 6: and one of the warring factions in Sudan. Back in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty, and of course there's a kind of live
Speaker 6: project led by the under Trump as well as Biden
Speaker 6: to extend normalization between Israel and not only Arab countries,
Speaker 6: but other.
Speaker 5: So called Islamic countries like Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, yes, which has.
Speaker 8: Had diplomatic relations since nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 5: But we'll get into that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, But those other ones, of course that are
Speaker 6: on the table. I think Indonesia has been spoken about.
Speaker 6: Pakistan is always some harring in the background, the big
Speaker 6: fishes in Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 5: And we can talk about that.
Speaker 3: As well, right, Yeah, And when we say normalization, usually
Speaker 3: people are referring to the formal normalization of diplomatic ties,
Speaker 3: because a lot of these countries, a lot of the
Speaker 3: Arab countries had a position reiterated in the Arab Peace
Speaker 3: Initiative of two thousand.
Speaker 8: And two that they would not have normal.
Speaker 3: Ties with the State of Israel until a resolution of
Speaker 3: the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and the Abraham Accords was a
Speaker 3: step away from that kind of breaking of that precedent.
Speaker 3: But if we think about kind of under the table normalization,
Speaker 3: of course, there are so many ways in which these
Speaker 3: Arab country trees have had under the table normalization to
Speaker 3: varying degrees with the state of Israel. Ben, maybe you
Speaker 3: could tell us about what the Abraham Accords were, how
Speaker 3: are they build and what did they include.
Speaker 7: You have to make sure my the precision of my
Speaker 7: language is on point. But there's two agreements, right, There's
Speaker 7: two things that were actually signed. So one is the framework, right,
Speaker 7: which which which discusses like Abraham Accords as this unit,
Speaker 7: the decoration of principles, the Declaration of Principles, And the
Speaker 7: other one is a peace treaty, right, the peace treaty
Speaker 7: between Israel and the UE and in other countries.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 7: So essentially that's what it is. It's these two signings.
Speaker 7: But I think when you when you talk about how
Speaker 7: it was presented, it's supposed to mean it's supposed to
Speaker 7: be like a vehicle conduit for travel, for security, for economics,
Speaker 7: for deals, for cultural interchange, for a new way to
Speaker 7: be seen. It's like a massive pr exercise jumping and
Speaker 7: with the specifics.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, I mean what we're kind of honing in
Speaker 6: on here is the sort of sort of cultural or
Speaker 6: ideological aspects. If you want to be more stern about it,
Speaker 6: and I think, you know, that's that's the real interest
Speaker 6: of the show is in how this sort of mythical
Speaker 6: framework that I refer to already, and specifically the figure
Speaker 6: of Abraham is really really central to this kind of
Speaker 6: ideological framing of their course. Like Foer is written extensively
Speaker 6: about how toleration and tolerance have become sort of ideological tools,
Speaker 6: and Abraham is kind of a figurehead for that. He
Speaker 6: does listen in to two different ways that I think
Speaker 6: are interesting for listeners to sort of follow on. The
Speaker 6: first is as the progenitor or the kind of a figure.
Speaker 5: Out of Monotheism.
Speaker 6: So Jews, Christians, and Muslims all all have a stake
Speaker 6: in Abraham, and of course this concept of the Abrahamic
Speaker 6: religions that's very central here. But another one, and we
Speaker 6: already mentioned this as well, is this the sort of
Speaker 6: language of kinship of Jews and Arabs as being related
Speaker 6: to one another, as.
Speaker 5: Being specifically cousins or so is called bad cousins.
Speaker 6: Because we're kind of exploring the various modalities or the
Speaker 6: various kind of shades of meaning and mood that this
Speaker 6: this idea of cousins can have it can be very positive.
Speaker 5: Of course, you know a lot of people.
Speaker 6: Say, oh Abraham, that's so, he's a wonderful figure of peace,
Speaker 6: of hospitality, et cetera.
Speaker 5: But they are also really dark sides to it.
Speaker 6: The dark size that we really get into are the
Speaker 6: sort of misogyny that's very, very central in the Abraham myth,
Speaker 6: the underpinnings of slavery versus freedom that are that are
Speaker 6: really really present there, and maybe most prominent and most
Speaker 6: important to me, maybe as somebody who also studies migration
Speaker 6: to the area, is xenophobia. So something that you don't
Speaker 6: have written about, you know, the similarities between the UE,
Speaker 6: for example, and Israel that aren't really considered, that aren't
Speaker 6: thought about much. One that's always stood out to me
Speaker 6: is the way that migrant workers are treated.
Speaker 5: In both these countries.
Speaker 6: The Golf States, including including to Ae, are huge obviously
Speaker 6: users of non citizen migrant labor. Israel is not as big,
Speaker 6: So it's not as big as phenomenal in Israel there,
Speaker 6: but it's growing a lot, especially since since since October seventh,
Speaker 6: when pastina workers have been shut out of the Israeli market.
Speaker 6: And so I think Israel is like the Golf states
Speaker 6: in a lot of these ways, and it's also getting
Speaker 6: more getting to be more like them, and Abraham is
Speaker 6: kind of a prism or figuring through which we start
Speaker 6: to explore all these issues.
Speaker 3: So in my mind, when the Abraham Accords were you know,
Speaker 3: whispered about and then we saw them happen, and you know,
Speaker 3: I've been writing about Arab's really normalization since before the
Speaker 3: Abraham Accords in smaller ways. But in my mind, when
Speaker 3: I kind of heard that terminology being used and that
Speaker 3: framing being used, to me, it felt deceptive that they
Speaker 3: were using this term of like the Abraham Accords denoting
Speaker 3: and hearkening back to like the idea of the Abrahamic
Speaker 3: tradition and that we're kin and all of these things
Speaker 3: for listeners who are bad at religion as I am.
Speaker 8: Abraham had two sons, presumed, you know.
Speaker 3: Apparently, and one of those sons is the ancestor of
Speaker 3: Jews and the other one is the ancestor of Arabs,
Speaker 3: if you believe that. So anyway, I'm not gonna blespheme
Speaker 3: on this podcast, but.
Speaker 5: I think the story is important.
Speaker 6: I mean, it is a deception. I totally agree with
Speaker 6: you on that, but it's important to unpack how the
Speaker 6: deception works, right right, right, it's so effective because the
Speaker 6: story is so well known to people in the region.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely, absolutely, But to me, like the deception lay
Speaker 3: in the framing of Arab and Israeli animosity through a
Speaker 3: religious perspective, as if the conflict was a religious one.
Speaker 3: So to me it felt kind of very shallow. But
Speaker 3: then as you start to unpack not only the impacts
Speaker 3: of the Abraham Accords immediately so immediately repression increases in
Speaker 3: these countries that sign the agreement, But then you start
Speaker 3: to unpack, like what are these accords actually serving for
Speaker 3: the Arab countries that are signing Why are they signing
Speaker 3: with Israel.
Speaker 8: Well, they're re engineering.
Speaker 3: They're attempting to re engineer society. A lot of that
Speaker 3: tolerance language has to do with that. It's they don't
Speaker 3: want societies that are politically active. They want them to
Speaker 3: be interested in consumerism, they want them to be maybe
Speaker 3: slightly socially liberal, tolerate the Israelis, tolerate more crimes and
Speaker 3: you know, kumbaya, and never ever have the ability to
Speaker 3: question the political leadership or the political.
Speaker 8: Status quo in any of these countries. Or in the
Speaker 8: region as a whole.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it's all that, but I think it's
Speaker 6: also a global power move.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 6: The golf countries, including Qatar, which has a different politics,
Speaker 6: are all really trying to make a name for themselves
Speaker 6: to become really really huge global players. They're basically all
Speaker 6: trying to transform this gigantic oil wealth that they have
Speaker 6: into soft power, into diplomatic power, into cultural power. You
Speaker 6: know this, This this brings us into the comedy festival
Speaker 6: in Saudi Arabia as well, right, And I think I
Speaker 6: think part of the framework here is we're part of
Speaker 6: this larger global story which is about freedom, piece and
Speaker 6: friendship through religion.
Speaker 5: Now, what's the deception here?
Speaker 6: The deception is this sort of and I think been
Speaker 6: A this is one of one of his favorite points,
Speaker 6: so he can he can expand on this. There's a
Speaker 6: sort of like a switcheroo game in which something else
Speaker 6: is brought into view and the Palestinians are hidden.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: The crux of the conflict, the crux of what is
Speaker 6: basically brought is real to go wild on the entire
Speaker 6: region attacking seven different countries simultaneously, is the Palestinians, and
Speaker 6: it's always has been the Palestinians is always going to
Speaker 6: be the Palestinians there is, and you've written about this
Speaker 6: as well. There is a segment of verb society, especially
Speaker 6: ever believes, especially in the Gulf, who want nothing to
Speaker 6: do with the Palestinians and our andopy would be happy
Speaker 6: to get rid of them.
Speaker 5: But this isn't the case with the vast majority of Arabs.
Speaker 6: It's also not the case with the vast majority of
Speaker 6: global South, I think, and even the vast majority of
Speaker 6: the global North right. We've seen very very clear majorities
Speaker 6: against Israel's genocide in Gaza, even in the United States,
Speaker 6: you know, in.
Speaker 5: Israel's biggest, biggest stally ebroad.
Speaker 6: So there's in order to not have to talk about this,
Speaker 6: it's always good to be able to talk about something else.
Speaker 6: One of the many ways, and I'm not saying this
Speaker 6: is the only one, one of the many ways in
Speaker 6: which the subject has changed is by talking about Abraham.
Speaker 5: So we're doing well.
Speaker 6: I mean, our show has a little bit of a
Speaker 6: it's it's it's kind of a difficult to move to
Speaker 6: make because we were trying to talk about an excuse
Speaker 6: but also impact why that excuse is so powerful.
Speaker 7: You know, there's like a lot of violence in this
Speaker 7: peace framing. And if you look at I think it's
Speaker 7: point eighteen of the peace framework that Trump talks about
Speaker 7: the Trump presented on Gaza. I think it's eighteen. I
Speaker 7: have the quote here, but number it's you know, an
Speaker 7: interfaith dialogue process will be established based on the values
Speaker 7: of tolerance and peaceful coexistence to try and change mindsets.
Speaker 7: I mean, this is like to try and change mindsets
Speaker 7: and narratives of Palestinians and Israelis by emphasizing the benefits
Speaker 7: that can be derived from peace. I mean, it's like
Speaker 7: mafia talk, right, It's like you better do it exactly,
Speaker 7: you better you're going to love this piece so much
Speaker 7: or else kind of thing. I cut up some audio
Speaker 7: from the episodes and from the interview with you, Donna
Speaker 7: at the live event that we had here in Berlin
Speaker 7: a couple weeks ago. This topic is so feels so
Speaker 7: urgent and relevant to so many people that like more
Speaker 7: than fifty people came out in the rain in November
Speaker 7: in Berlin, and one of the things I played was
Speaker 7: was exactly when you called it an obfliscation, Like there's
Speaker 7: this paradox where all these things are under the table
Speaker 7: are coming up and are now explicit, these secret deals
Speaker 7: with gold states, this normalization that you know, you two
Speaker 7: had known about, you know, in your research, but people
Speaker 7: like me wouldn't know about if they're not following, if
Speaker 7: they're not academics, if they're not following this closely. And
Speaker 7: yet the Abramccords brought this all up. Okay, now we're
Speaker 7: now everyone knows right now, we know that like this
Speaker 7: is about Iran, this is about security, this is about
Speaker 7: you know, these material issues, right, But at the same
Speaker 7: time that that that it's playing on this kind of
Speaker 7: clarity and this openness, right, and this moderation, it's also
Speaker 7: creating a whole new obfiscation, a whole new myth. And
Speaker 7: you know, people love love this quote. Like there was
Speaker 7: a lot of like nodding heads in the audience when
Speaker 7: I played what you said, Donald, which was like as if, right,
Speaker 7: like as if this is about religion, it's about land
Speaker 7: and it's about sovereignty, and and that's clear, but these
Speaker 7: aren't called the land and Sovereignty accords.
Speaker 8: I mean, like you said, like you said, it's very violent.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've been describing normalization under these terms as
Speaker 3: well as the Abraham Accords in particular as authoritarian conflict management,
Speaker 3: because it maintains structural violence. It's not attempting to solve
Speaker 3: the underlying, you know, motivations for that violence, which, as
Speaker 3: you said, is Israeli Palestinian conflict, which is the land,
Speaker 3: which is the the war crimes. And I think also
Speaker 3: I want to just emphasize for listeners that the tolerance
Speaker 3: framing in particular, there's like the flip side to it,
Speaker 3: which is you better like this piece or else. And
Speaker 3: we're calling it peace and it's Abrahamic, So like, if
Speaker 3: you don't like it, what does that say about you?
Speaker 3: Are you intolerant? Are you an anti Semite? Are you
Speaker 3: you know, like, it's just how could you be against peace?
Speaker 3: The piece is in the name, but it's a very
Speaker 3: particular type of piece.
Speaker 5: It's a liberal I think.
Speaker 6: I think authoritarian conflict management is a very good way
Speaker 6: of putting it.
Speaker 5: But also it's also very helpful.
Speaker 6: To help to explain why the Abraham myth is so
Speaker 6: useful in that regard. Can we can just go over
Speaker 6: the story real, real, real quick for listeners who aren't
Speaker 6: that familiar, Yes, please, so Abraham, who was known as
Speaker 6: in all the so called Abrahamic religions, as the first
Speaker 6: one to to explicitly reject idolatry. Right, So there are
Speaker 6: there are other righteous men in the Bible before him,
Speaker 6: but he's the first one who becomes what is in
Speaker 6: Islam is known as the friend of God, right, so Khalid.
Speaker 5: And he also.
Speaker 6: In addition to having this very very intimate relationship with God,
Speaker 6: he also has a family.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: And in this family he has he has a wife
Speaker 6: and a maid servant. The wife is named Sarah, and
Speaker 6: and the maid servant is named Hagar. Now we're gonna
Speaker 6: do this quick.
Speaker 5: Don't worry.
Speaker 6: Sarah is barren, she can't have children. And she says
Speaker 6: to she says to Abraham, I have an idea. Why
Speaker 6: don't you have a child with with a maid servant
Speaker 6: with Agar, and it'll be my child. So already, already
Speaker 6: I think we can see authoritarianism. We can see uh,
Speaker 6: we can see authoritarian conflict management already as kind of
Speaker 6: the seed that's that's planted in the story, Hagar has
Speaker 6: a child. That child is named Ishmael, and Ishmael is
Speaker 6: beloved by his father. It's the Old Testament says, so,
Speaker 6: it's very very clear, right. But then Sarah gets jealous.
Speaker 6: She says, well, you know this, this this son is
Speaker 6: going to and his mother are going to be basically
Speaker 6: the pushing me out of my of my status within
Speaker 6: the family.
Speaker 5: YadA YadA, yadah. There's a lot of other stuff.
Speaker 6: That goes on, very very interesting and very fascinating, and
Speaker 6: lots of it very well known, like so called.
Speaker 5: Sacrifice of Isaac.
Speaker 6: She miraculously has the child, right that child's named Isaac.
Speaker 6: Everyone agrees within these scriptural traditions that Isaac is the
Speaker 6: father of the Jews and Ishmael is the father of
Speaker 6: the Arabs. This is central to both Jewish theology and
Speaker 6: Islamic theology, and the Christians in so far as they're
Speaker 6: involved in the story, they're also in on. Now, then
Speaker 6: the question becomes which one of them is the blessed son,
Speaker 6: which one of the which is one of the ones
Speaker 6: is the one who's supposed to inherit the land that
Speaker 6: is the Holy land, wherever that's defined, and that's a
Speaker 6: little bit vague as well. The Jews say it's Isaac
Speaker 6: and the muslim to say it's Ishmael. So we have
Speaker 6: a we have a story what my dissertation advisor, Andrew
Speaker 6: Triia are called a community of disagreement. There are people
Speaker 6: who disagree on something, but they don't disagree on the frame. Right,
Speaker 6: the frame in which all that that the entire story
Speaker 6: is inserted is one in which there's no disagreement. Everybody
Speaker 6: agrees that Abraham had two kids. Everybody agrees that the
Speaker 6: women are basically you know that the women this part
Speaker 6: in the story is predicated on their sons, on whether
Speaker 6: their sons succeed. Is is what makes the women succeed
Speaker 6: or not? And then the question becomes which one is
Speaker 6: the favorite son? Which one is the one that the
Speaker 6: father loves and the big father up above also loves.
Speaker 6: Right Now, this is in itself, I think, at least
Speaker 6: in the way that it's framed in Abrahamical courts, a
Speaker 6: form of what do you call it, authoritarian crisis management? Right,
Speaker 6: that's what it is. Now, that doesn't mean and I
Speaker 6: think that this is also important. This is also one
Speaker 6: of the reasons that we made the podcast that there's
Speaker 6: no other ways of reading the story.
Speaker 5: How else could we read the story?
Speaker 6: For example, we could point out we could note that
Speaker 6: the person who has the most intimate contact with the
Speaker 6: God in this entire story is Hagar.
Speaker 5: She's the first and only person in the Bible to
Speaker 5: give God a name.
Speaker 6: She calls him Ellroy, the God who has seen me.
Speaker 6: She has at least two miracles done to her. In Islam,
Speaker 6: of course, her story, in Ishmael's story becomes the story
Speaker 6: of Mecca. All the traditions of the Hajj are based
Speaker 6: around the story of Hagar and Ishmael. So she's a
Speaker 6: central central figure. And she is a slave woman. She's
Speaker 6: an Egyptian, She's the one who's cast out into the desert.
Speaker 5: She's a migrant. Her name Hagar or Hajar in Arabic
Speaker 5: means migrant or migration.
Speaker 6: Right, there's all these powerful undercurrents in the story, as
Speaker 6: there are in every powerful myth, that mean that they
Speaker 6: can be read differently, and some people are reading it differently.
Speaker 6: So I don't think the story itself is the problem.
Speaker 6: The problem is that the story is used in a
Speaker 6: very particular way, in a way which facilitates again what
Speaker 6: you call it, conflictual.
Speaker 5: Sorry, authority and conflict conflict management.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean it's a it's a mouthful.
Speaker 3: Maybe that helps us to get to what the podcast does,
Speaker 3: Like who do you speak to?
Speaker 8: I know I'm on one of the episodes, but who
Speaker 8: else do you speak to? And like what trends were
Speaker 8: surprising to you? How did your kind of thinking shift
Speaker 8: over time?
Speaker 7: I mean, let me start at least because one thing
Speaker 7: we talked a lot about at the live event, there
Speaker 7: was a panel and there was a discussion with the audience,
Speaker 7: and one thing that's become excessively clear, like we heard
Speaker 7: my time explain the story I'm not from the Middle East, right,
Speaker 7: and also in this Berlin audience, like the relevance of
Speaker 7: the story as a Bible story. I know I've heard
Speaker 7: of the story, but it doesn't have that much impact
Speaker 7: for me, like on my life or on how I
Speaker 7: understand the world. It's a story, It's a Bible story.
Speaker 7: And we felt this from the European audience, right. We
Speaker 7: heard people say something like like, okay, this is a myth,
Speaker 7: but are these the myths that are worth exploring right now?
Speaker 7: You know, maybe with like looking at the at other
Speaker 7: myths of more like material issues, and I think what
Speaker 7: we're trying to do with the show is also explained well.
Speaker 7: But these do affect people's lives in the Middle East,
Speaker 7: like this is something. In fact, episode two, which comes
Speaker 7: in a couple of weeks, we have all these vox
Speaker 7: pop interviews from the Old City of Jerusalem where we
Speaker 7: talk to people on the street and just ask like,
Speaker 7: why do you think Jews and Arabs are cousins? And
Speaker 7: what does that mean? And what does that mean with
Speaker 7: the Abraham Accords? And immediately everybody had different Israelis and
Speaker 7: the Arabs that you talked to Himtan had different understandings
Speaker 7: of the Abraham Acords good and bad. But if you said,
Speaker 7: why is it called the Abraham Accords, every single one
Speaker 7: of them are like, oh, yeah, because we're cousins. So
Speaker 7: start there, right. So so episode one was about the
Speaker 7: kind of geopolitics, but that's why you were on Donna
Speaker 7: episode two explaining this kind of what does that mean?
Speaker 7: Then that if everybody can agree that the Jews in
Speaker 7: the Arabs are cousins, but the Abraham Accords are seen
Speaker 7: with all of these we already started talking about, you know,
Speaker 7: all these obfuscating kind of nasty, hidden, violent undertones, but
Speaker 7: also kind of like sick, you know, we can fly
Speaker 7: there or whatever, like all this tourism and and high
Speaker 7: fiving and entrepreneurship and you know, the biggest satyr of
Speaker 7: whatever UAE history or whatever that was, you know, So
Speaker 7: like so we start there and then and and the
Speaker 7: idea is to really like then turn this whole thing
Speaker 7: around and look at the myths and look at the
Speaker 7: stories and try and understand from all these different sides
Speaker 7: we go into, you know, medieval Islamic stories and texts,
Speaker 7: and the idea of hospitality and the idea of of
Speaker 7: cousinage and what does cousins mean? And I mean my time,
Speaker 7: you can you can go further here, but the idea
Speaker 7: of the show really starts from there, right, And that's
Speaker 7: how we're going to like start at the geopolitics and
Speaker 7: end up hopefully and turning the whole Abraham idea thing
Speaker 7: in such a such a somersault that it lands right
Speaker 7: on its head or right on its butt or something,
Speaker 7: and and not only we kind of dismantle it or
Speaker 7: understand it and take it apart, but then maybe like
Speaker 7: reclaim it in a different way and maybe even use
Speaker 7: it for some kind of positive progressive purposes, even radical ones.
Speaker 7: That I mean Matan and his activism and his research,
Speaker 7: you've you know, you've matan you say, you've already seen
Speaker 7: and kind of he has to make the case to me.
Speaker 7: You know, that's kind of the framing of the podcast, like.
Speaker 5: I'm eternally making the case. But that's okay.
Speaker 6: I think I think it's it's it's it's kind of
Speaker 6: a it's kind of a difficult case to make.
Speaker 5: And and and.
Speaker 6: The fact that people keep challenging me on it, I
Speaker 6: think is very is very productive. Well, one other thing
Speaker 6: that came up in Berlin, and I think it was
Speaker 6: really interesting, is that Ben sort of touched on this
Speaker 6: at the beginning of what he was saying just now,
Speaker 6: the way that framing this as the Abrahamic course, framing
Speaker 6: it as the abraham story tends to make it easier
Speaker 6: for people from Europe or from the United States to
Speaker 6: North America to see themselves as outside of this story.
Speaker 5: Right, So this is Donna, you also.
Speaker 11: Alluded to this.
Speaker 5: There's this idea that this is like an age old conflict,
Speaker 5: you know, between these these.
Speaker 6: These relatives who are always quarreling between themselves and oh,
Speaker 6: it's so difficult.
Speaker 5: To primitive people over there.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, Q like oriental music right in the background,
Speaker 6: and and hence that we rational outsiders, we Westerners, we Christians,
Speaker 6: et cetera, all these sort of vaguely linked identities that
Speaker 6: so called outsiders have. We are sort of neutral and
Speaker 6: rational outsiders who can play a mediating role and bring
Speaker 6: this this, this, this whole ancient mess to an end.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 6: But the funny thing about this is that it's also
Speaker 6: a religious kind of there's also a religious undertone here.
Speaker 6: There is this idea, you know, a lot a lot
Speaker 6: of scholars have written about how so called secularism, so
Speaker 6: called enlightenment, you know, in the West, actually is a secularized.
Speaker 5: Form of Christianity in a lot of ways.
Speaker 6: And this is really actually very very clear in this
Speaker 6: Abrahamic framing, because there is this idea that Christianity is
Speaker 6: superior to these other two religions. Right, this is this
Speaker 6: is this is the actual universal religion. This is the
Speaker 6: one that is able to encompass and sort of transcend
Speaker 6: the other ones. And hence, I think maybe this was
Speaker 6: controversial few years ago, but nowadays, I think it's quite
Speaker 6: clear that the US sees itself as a as a
Speaker 6: as a Christian state, right, even sees itself as a
Speaker 6: crusader state.
Speaker 8: I mean, they stayed pretty clearly with.
Speaker 6: The Secretary of Defense having deis volt tattoos on his chest, right,
Speaker 6: so this is this is no longer they're saying the
Speaker 6: quiet part out loud. This this in this context as well,
Speaker 6: and they think that they can come in, you know,
Speaker 6: and as these sort of outsiders solve things, But they're
Speaker 6: actually deeply implicated in the story themselves for much much
Speaker 6: earlier than the nineteenth century.
Speaker 5: We could but go back to the Crusades if we want.
Speaker 6: Europe has always been involved in the Middle East, right,
Speaker 6: and the Middle East has been involved in Europe. For us,
Speaker 6: these are near foreigners, right, So there's no innocence here, right,
Speaker 6: there's no there's nobody who's outside the story and Abrahamic framework.
Speaker 6: One of the I think sort of pernicious ways in
Speaker 6: which it's acting in this in this current conjuncture, in
Speaker 6: this current day and age, is as this sort of
Speaker 6: framing that neutralizes the Western influence.
Speaker 5: It makes it seem objective and.
Speaker 7: Rational, and also I think allows the Golf States to
Speaker 7: claim that. Right, there's like some interesting stuff in the
Speaker 7: Facult book that I didn't quite put together about the
Speaker 7: you know, sort of elite Amarathi perspectives as liberal and
Speaker 7: anti democratic. But if you're pro business in a certain way,
Speaker 7: then you can claim this kind of you know, like
Speaker 7: Donnatan you Tube have written about moderation a lot, but
Speaker 7: this idea for me of like, if you can claim
Speaker 7: you know, the business forward thinking, then you're also modern.
Speaker 7: Then you're also considered you know, more above, Like you
Speaker 7: have a different elevation and a different sort of legitimacy
Speaker 7: according to this worldview than somebody that would care about
Speaker 7: such things as the Jews in the Arabs. What an ancient,
Speaker 7: old fashioned kind of passe, you know, the Palestinian issue,
Speaker 7: you knowugh kind of thing. But you know what's cool,
Speaker 7: like artificial intelligence and like shipping deals in the Indian
Speaker 7: Ocean that's new. You know, golf, Yeah, that's sick, Like yeah,
Speaker 7: golf and like virtual reality watching people play golf like
Speaker 7: that would be awesome. Yeah, And it's sort of data
Speaker 7: that's sort of invited.
Speaker 5: The bichocolate, I could go on.
Speaker 7: It's I still think the sator, like the biggest ator
Speaker 7: in Memoradi history or whatever is my favorite anecdote. But
Speaker 7: the way that it invite this space so like it's
Speaker 7: almost like a genius, like maybe it was like Jared
Speaker 7: Kushner's great genius was to see this, like, you know,
Speaker 7: ability to let other people claim the same Christian elevation
Speaker 7: right the same like I'm on the shaky ground here now,
Speaker 7: so I'll stop.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't know. If I don't know genius, I
Speaker 5: don't I might dispute, you know what I mean.
Speaker 6: In a way, it's in a way, it's kind of obvious, right,
Speaker 6: like they were they were always going to call these
Speaker 6: Abraham McCords.
Speaker 5: When they did them. In a way, right, Jared Kushner,
Speaker 5: I don't know he was. He's the right guy. He's
Speaker 5: the right guy in the right place at the right time,
Speaker 5: more than anything else.
Speaker 7: But do you understand what I mean that, like this
Speaker 7: invitation into this perpector that you were saying, which is
Speaker 7: kind of like Christian you know, in the in our
Speaker 7: event to Berlin, someone said something like, even without the
Speaker 7: Jewish Muslim context, we have this problem, we have this
Speaker 7: problem in this region, and the abramccords allows the conversation
Speaker 7: to happen on this level of let's talk about chips,
Speaker 7: let's talk about fighter jets, you know, let's talk about drones.
Speaker 5: Yeah, dronesveillance Yeah.
Speaker 6: One of the things that I think is really important
Speaker 6: is it's sort of normalis is this idea that there
Speaker 6: is a place for everybody and the people shouldn't be mixed,
Speaker 6: and there's rarely extreme right, the religious extreme right in Israel.
Speaker 6: There is this notion of the distancing of Ishmael for
Speaker 6: his correction, right, what's the idea here is that the Ishmaelites,
Speaker 6: that is the Arabs, that is the muslim that is,
Speaker 6: the Palestinians, they have their place in the world. It's
Speaker 6: not that that place isn't here, It's somewhere else, in
Speaker 6: a place called Arabia, right, And therefore that's why we
Speaker 6: can be friends with them aratis because their Martis or
Speaker 6: Arabs in the right place in Arabia. The Palestinians, however,
Speaker 6: they are a problems because they are Arabs who don't
Speaker 6: realize what the.
Speaker 5: Right place is.
Speaker 6: They can stay here if they accept total subjugation basically,
Speaker 6: you know Themutrich's plan is sort of a secular.
Speaker 5: Raization decisive plan.
Speaker 6: Yeah, his decisiveness plan or whatever that's called is is
Speaker 6: is a sort of secularization of things that Kahana was saying.
Speaker 5: The so called rabbi may Or Kahana was saying in
Speaker 5: the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 6: The sort of spiritual father that Israeli extreme, right, they
Speaker 6: can stay here if they if they're willing to be
Speaker 6: our slaves, basically, if not, they can go to Arabia.
Speaker 6: And once they're in Arabia they can be they can
Speaker 6: be our best friends. And this is really, I think,
Speaker 6: very very closely connected to the animosity towards migrants.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 5: That brings me back to the figure of or Haja.
Speaker 6: Right, she is a migrant, and because she is a migrant,
Speaker 6: because she's not in the right place, that's why she's denigrated,
Speaker 6: That's why she's exploited, that's why she's cast out into
Speaker 6: the desert. So it's not just about the Palestinians in
Speaker 6: that regard. We can see how this sort of myth
Speaker 6: also plays into the hyper.
Speaker 5: Exploitation of migrants in the Gulf.
Speaker 6: We can see how it plays into the racist treatment
Speaker 6: that the refugees from Sub Saharan Africa are receiving in
Speaker 6: North Africa.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 5: We literally saw.
Speaker 6: People a couple of years ago in Tunia being cast
Speaker 6: out into the desert the way the Hagar and Ishmael was.
Speaker 5: And of course this is all.
Speaker 6: This is all closely related again to Europe, to global
Speaker 6: imperial kind of processes, to capitalism.
Speaker 5: You know what Ben was talking about, hecial hierarchy, special hierarchy.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: So one of the reasons that I think we need
Speaker 6: to keep our eye on this ideology is that in
Speaker 6: some ways it's different from what we're used to, right.
Speaker 6: It's not, for example, white supremacy. Right, We're used to
Speaker 6: think about white supremacy as this sort of globally dominant
Speaker 6: racial ideology. But this is something different. This is not
Speaker 6: about people being better because they're white. It's about people
Speaker 6: being better because they're in their right place. And that's actually,
Speaker 6: I think something that's really coming up very very strong
Speaker 6: on the global far right, on the far right globally,
Speaker 6: this idea that you know, oh you'll see like in
Speaker 6: New York, for example. It's not that we have anything
Speaker 6: against black people or Arabs or Asians or anything else.
Speaker 6: They just need to stay in their own countries as
Speaker 6: so long as everybody stays in their own countries, that's fine.
Speaker 5: And you know, with climate change, with.
Speaker 6: All these catastrophica ecological changes that are happening in the world,
Speaker 6: people are going to be moving and we already we
Speaker 6: already see people in masses moving from place to place,
Speaker 6: but that's going to be larger and larger movements as
Speaker 6: in the coming decades. And you know, the basic test
Speaker 6: of humanity is going to be the test of hospitality,
Speaker 6: whether people are allowed to into new places that they
Speaker 6: have to go to in order to survive. And this
Speaker 6: sort of ideology I think is already sort of primed.
Speaker 6: It's primed to deny that and to say no, you've
Speaker 6: got to just stay in your own space, right, So
Speaker 6: against that, Abraham I would like to place Huggar. I
Speaker 6: think she's She's the answer.
Speaker 8: So, I mean, that's fascinating.
Speaker 3: I've never really kind of thought about I've never really
Speaker 3: thought too hard about this story because as a Muslim
Speaker 3: and Arab child, it upset me. But I do want
Speaker 3: to say, like there is as as you mentioned, like
Speaker 3: there is a general trending towards ethno nationalism all over
Speaker 3: the world, but the Gulf States cannot manage ethno nationalism.
Speaker 3: Saudi Arabia is kind of a little bit of a
Speaker 3: different story. But the ones that signed, they are minorities
Speaker 3: in their countries. On top of that, to their own
Speaker 3: citizens to IMMORTI citizens to buy any citizens.
Speaker 8: They are illegitimate. They are only legitimate.
Speaker 3: By virtue of providing economic opportunities. You know, those cracks
Speaker 3: have already been showing up.
Speaker 13: So the way in.
Speaker 3: Which these countries can build legitimacy for themselves offset possible
Speaker 3: public pressure, offset any kind of accountability for their regional role.
Speaker 3: People forget that the United Arab Emirates is deeply implicated
Speaker 3: in the genocide in Sudan. That connect with what is
Speaker 3: I think inherently white supremacist and things like this, But
Speaker 3: of course they're not white, is what ya seen of
Speaker 3: hash Salda Hassyrian theorist calls the ideology of modernism. He
Speaker 3: was writing about the promise and the discourse of the
Speaker 3: Asaid regime when Bashada Usaid came to power. But when
Speaker 3: I read it, I was like, this sounds a lot
Speaker 3: like the ideology of these Gulf states.
Speaker 8: And so he says it has three traits.
Speaker 3: It entirely neglects issues of values such as freedom, equality,
Speaker 3: human dignity, mutual respect among people, in favor of morally
Speaker 3: amorphous categories such as secularism, enlightenment, and modernism itself. It
Speaker 3: neglects fundamental social issues related to poverty, unemployment, marginalization, life conditions,
Speaker 3: gender relations, et cetera. And the advocates of this modernism
Speaker 3: are politically conservative, I mean, just to.
Speaker 5: A t Yeah, that's the Abraham Accords and a unchill.
Speaker 8: Right there, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I you know, I wrote about this in
Speaker 3: the context of the Abraham Accords in a paper I
Speaker 3: published in twenty twenty three, but Yasin Hashsala had like
Speaker 3: kind of nailed it back in twenty eleven that this
Speaker 3: was the trend.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think Syrians saw a lot of things earlier than
Speaker 6: the rest of us.
Speaker 8: Yeah, definitely, And so this is their vision for the world.
Speaker 8: And I think this is the vision of a lot.
Speaker 3: Of essentially the right in the world, even in America.
Speaker 8: Likely they don't care about democracy. They want this.
Speaker 3: They want you to be prosperous and in your place,
Speaker 3: and yeah, everybody stays separate.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's a sort of like callousness around all of it,
Speaker 6: which I think is it's actually a draw for some people,
Speaker 6: because you know, cynicism is a big thing in the world,
Speaker 6: and people are I think one of the reasons that
Speaker 6: people attracted to Trump, for example, is because it's clear
Speaker 6: that he's a completely cynical actor, you know, who's only
Speaker 6: out for his own sake, and people are sort of,
Speaker 6: you know, for better or worse, sick of the.
Speaker 5: Of liberal hypocrisy, so they gravitate towards that. And it's funny.
Speaker 6: I mean, you would think that wouldn't go hand in
Speaker 6: hand with religion or these mythical stories, but.
Speaker 5: It actually does.
Speaker 6: You know, speaking of prosperity, for example, there's in Evangelicalism
Speaker 6: there's a very strong str of what's called like the
Speaker 6: prosperity gospel, this idea and this has you know, very
Speaker 6: very old roots in Calvinism as well. If you make
Speaker 6: it in the world, if you're rich, if you make
Speaker 6: if you make a lot of money, that means that
Speaker 6: God loves you. That's like a proof, right, And so
Speaker 6: there again we shouldn't think about religion too narrowly. Religion
Speaker 6: is really infused in all these sorts of social ideologies,
Speaker 6: among which are this, and I think this is very
Speaker 6: very prominent in the abraham A story.
Speaker 5: In the Abrahamics story.
Speaker 6: Is that well, you know, if they have oil, if
Speaker 6: they have riches, if they've managed to sort of manipulate
Speaker 6: the global economy to their own advantage. Then more power
Speaker 6: to them. Right, And that's attractive. That's that's something that
Speaker 6: you want to that's a train that you want to
Speaker 6: get on. Maybe they'll give you a plane too, Right.
Speaker 6: That was the Kataris. That wasn't ue, So we shouldn't
Speaker 6: get them mixed up. But I think it's kind of
Speaker 6: the same story.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, I completely agree.
Speaker 3: So, I mean I started this discussion by talking about
Speaker 3: the plants for reconstruction in Gaza mm hm. And you've
Speaker 3: already mentioned that, like the big whale for the Trump
Speaker 3: administration is Saudi Arabia. They want Saudi Arabia to normalize
Speaker 3: with Israel. What are some things we should watch for
Speaker 3: in the near future? What do you where do you
Speaker 3: think this arab is really a normalization is going to go.
Speaker 6: I'm always hesitant to to make predictions. I think it's
Speaker 6: a it's it's an extremely volatile moment. This ceasefiring guys
Speaker 6: that we God knows if it's going to hold or
Speaker 6: if there are just going to go back in and.
Speaker 5: Start genociding again.
Speaker 6: I think we're also seeing these really really rapid movements
Speaker 6: throughout the region with I mean, we keep.
Speaker 5: We've kept we've kept alluding to Cutter, but Cutter and Turkey.
Speaker 6: Are really playing a really much bigger role now than
Speaker 6: the than they were until recently. And that's with American blessing.
Speaker 6: So that's also going to change. I think the sort
Speaker 6: of calculus that that that Saudi makes. But broadly speaking,
Speaker 6: I think one thing that we really need to keep
Speaker 6: an eye on is this iMac Corridor, this idea of that.
Speaker 6: Basically Biden administration was starting up, but but Trump is
Speaker 6: really sort of put into into hyperdrive, which is this
Speaker 6: idea of connecting India, the Gulf, Israel, and Europe through
Speaker 6: a sort of alternative to China's Belton Road initiative. It
Speaker 6: revolves around oil and gas, but it also revolves around
Speaker 6: data centers and AI so sort of geopolitically and and
Speaker 6: and geoeconomically. I think that's that's that's the big plan
Speaker 6: that the Americans have hatched for for the region, and
Speaker 6: that basically means turning Gaza into some sort of concentration
Speaker 6: camp slash as Easy especially economic zone. Right there are
Speaker 6: really really really frightening plans to ethnically clans about half
Speaker 6: of the Guns in population, and to uh and to
Speaker 6: sort of turn the rest of them into into well
Speaker 6: basically slaves, you know, basically uh, unfree workers in these
Speaker 6: in in this so called the especially economic zone that
Speaker 6: the that they're that they're trying to to set up. Now,
Speaker 6: whether any of this is going to actually happen, I
Speaker 6: think it's anybody's it's anybody's guess at this point. But
Speaker 6: it's it's it's very clear. And I just saw a
Speaker 6: physiata speaking about this at the Historical Materialism conference in London.
Speaker 6: It's very clear that it's their plan, right, that's the
Speaker 6: planet's out there. It's it's I don't know if it's
Speaker 6: even been leaked or just publicly released, that this is
Speaker 6: what the the Americans, Israeli's Saudis and immioralties are are
Speaker 6: planning for the region. It's a it's a really kind
Speaker 6: of nightmarish vision that they're not even they're they're broadcasting
Speaker 6: out loud. They're not they're not even pretending to disown
Speaker 6: it or anything. So so you know, we should take
Speaker 6: them at their word, and we should be very very
Speaker 6: clear that this is something totally unacceptable. And I mean,
Speaker 6: as you started out saying, and I think we've always
Speaker 6: agreed on this. The question for the region is the
Speaker 6: Palestinian question. If the Palestinians don't have sovereignty, if they
Speaker 6: don't have freedom, if they don't have equality, if they
Speaker 6: don't have the right of return, then things are not
Speaker 6: going to are not going to calm down in the region.
Speaker 6: It's just going to be more and more, more and
Speaker 6: more violence, more and more of this help for everybody.
Speaker 5: And you know, these have been hellish years for all
Speaker 5: of us. I'm not, of course making any sort of comparison.
Speaker 5: I think it's clear that the things that have been.
Speaker 6: Happening in Gaza are beyond any sort of any sort
Speaker 6: of description in terms of how hard the genocide has been.
Speaker 6: But you know, as in ISRAELI who's currently not living
Speaker 6: in Israel and I would like to return at some point.
Speaker 6: I really hope that everybody in the region can come
Speaker 6: to this very very clear conclusion. You know, whether you
Speaker 6: phrase it in religious terms or not. And I don't
Speaker 6: think there's a problem with framing it in religious terms.
Speaker 6: There are ways of framing it in religious terms when
Speaker 6: we can talk a little bit about that more. If
Speaker 6: you want, just the fact that that that the indigenous
Speaker 6: people of Palestine. The Palestinians need to need to have
Speaker 6: the rights to respected and fulfilled. And that's the only
Speaker 6: the only way that we can that we can bring peace.
Speaker 6: That we can bring you know, these these really beautiful
Speaker 6: biblical prophecies about the wolf and the and the sheep
Speaker 6: lying down and the cutting down of swords into the
Speaker 6: plowshires to make those reality. So some people might call
Speaker 6: that messianic, but I think there's also good, good forms
Speaker 6: of missionism.
Speaker 8: Then, do you have any thing to add pop that?
Speaker 7: My hope the past year two years has been that
Speaker 7: if the Abraham Accords elevated you know, countries like the
Speaker 7: AE two a certain like volume, like gave them a
Speaker 7: certain audience that maybe they didn't have before internationally, that
Speaker 7: then uh, what Israel has done could be criticized more
Speaker 7: obviously and that they would actually have some leverage. So
Speaker 7: my hope still is that as like normal partners, they
Speaker 7: can normal threaten and normal criticize and normal check the
Speaker 7: power of their you know, quote whatever partners Israel. And
Speaker 7: so I'm keeping an eye on hopefully that that that
Speaker 7: will start happening. More of what we do see is
Speaker 7: that like trade continues to go up, and that doesn't
Speaker 7: seem to have an impact. And I find that very disappointing.
Speaker 7: And also at the same time, I see the polling,
Speaker 7: and Donna, you know more about this than I do,
Speaker 7: but the polling shows increasing criticism of normalization with Israel. So,
Speaker 7: you know, the idealist to me thinks that like civil
Speaker 7: society will win out eventually, that this is just untenable,
Speaker 7: and that what October seventh showed was that and the
Speaker 7: and the wars since then, that without dealing with the
Speaker 7: central cause in the region, which is the Palacinian cause,
Speaker 7: like there will be no possible safe you know, entrepreneurial
Speaker 7: dream land of a rich future, that that their claiming
Speaker 7: is going to happen. So that's my old but and
Speaker 7: I keep an eye out for that. I hope that
Speaker 7: they use China and Russia as good countermeasures and counter
Speaker 7: threats to the American agenda, and I keep my eye
Speaker 7: out for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, uh, I think really that's the That's
Speaker 3: the open question moving forward is like will the political
Speaker 3: elites went out, will they be able to sidestep the
Speaker 3: Palestinian question, sidestep their own publics, who, as you mentioned,
Speaker 3: are extremely critical of normalization, extremely supportive of the Palestinian cause.
Speaker 3: I think the Americans think that they can. I keep
Speaker 3: mentioning this on this podcast, but I was on a
Speaker 3: panel with Stanley McCrystal, General and commander of the Joint
Speaker 3: what is it, the Joint Armed Forces or whatever in
Speaker 3: I Rock in Afghanistan, and he was like, Oh, you know,
Speaker 3: the Arabs really want to move past the Palestinians, like
Speaker 3: it's a thing of the past. If October seventh hadn't happened,
Speaker 3: like you know, we would have just moved past the Palestinians.
Speaker 8: And I was like, what the hell you're talking about.
Speaker 3: That's you only say that because you think that you
Speaker 3: can continue to crush air publics. Yeah, like you are
Speaker 3: predicating your entire strategy on authoritarianism. And it's it's not
Speaker 3: a Middle East problem. It's a civil society all over
Speaker 3: the world has to fight back against authoritarianism or this
Speaker 3: is our reality.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is I think this is the moment now,
Speaker 6: and this is one of the ways in which the
Speaker 6: rest of the world is becoming more likely our world
Speaker 6: in some ways. As we mentioned, we have large majorities
Speaker 6: almost everywhere in the world. I think maybe every country
Speaker 6: in the world except for Israel. We have a majority
Speaker 6: of people who are now supporting past ten more than
Speaker 6: support Israel, who are against the genocide, who say, you know,
Speaker 6: who answer the polls in a way that that makes
Speaker 6: it clear that they're that they're against what's going on, right,
Speaker 6: and they're against their government supporting it. But most governments
Speaker 6: in the world, most governments in the world, including ones
Speaker 6: that aren't considered very pro pro us are are are
Speaker 6: basically letting this happen.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: That means that there's no effective democracy anywhere in the
Speaker 6: world really, except maybe in a few places where you
Speaker 6: can say, okay, I don't know, Spain, some countries.
Speaker 5: Are Island, Yeah, yeah, where even even.
Speaker 6: Those countries, I don't think they're they're doing it as
Speaker 6: much as as as their populations we would like them
Speaker 6: to do.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: So, again, this idea that the that the that the
Speaker 6: West is somehow essentially different from these other countries, it's
Speaker 6: also kind of a lot and it's also something it's
Speaker 6: it's also it's also bogus, and we need to we
Speaker 6: need we need to call bullshit on that as well. Yea,
Speaker 6: many people have already have already made various arguments, and
Speaker 6: there's various ways of making this argument that the Palestinian question,
Speaker 6: the question of gods, or the question of the genocide
Speaker 6: is kind of the global question of our time. I
Speaker 6: don't think just because there's a ceasefire that that's going
Speaker 6: to go away in any way. Every everything that caused
Speaker 6: the explosion in the first place is still there, right,
Speaker 6: And I think we're going to keep seeing mobilizations around
Speaker 6: this issue.
Speaker 5: I'm sure we are.
Speaker 6: The crucial question for me is how we connect this
Speaker 6: to other issues, How we connect this to the question
Speaker 6: of democracy. Can we connect this to the question of
Speaker 6: rights for migrants, How we connect this to the questions
Speaker 6: of of of climate change, right.
Speaker 5: And and and various people are already doing that.
Speaker 6: So I'm I'm not saying this is something that people
Speaker 6: aren't working on, but this is this is this is
Speaker 6: kind of the challenge for our for our time, and
Speaker 6: this podcast, this project is is you know, just just
Speaker 6: you know, one small part of that mosaic, which is
Speaker 6: looking into the ideology that framed them the Chords after
Speaker 6: Abraham and again thinking about how we can not just
Speaker 6: debunk that ideology and say, oh, this is it's not
Speaker 6: about this, it's about that but also about how we
Speaker 6: can read those stories in a different way and sort
Speaker 6: of yeah, exactly, to subvert it intimate and to read
Speaker 6: those stories in a way that that that makes progressive sense.
Speaker 3: Now, that's I'm really looking forward to listening to the
Speaker 3: other episodes, not just my own.
Speaker 6: So, yeah, you sound a little more convinced now than
Speaker 6: you did after we interviewed in.
Speaker 5: You I'm being really nice.
Speaker 6: No, I'm just you're being hospitable like Abraham exactly.
Speaker 5: It's in my blood.
Speaker 7: When we played it live, someone came up to me
Speaker 7: afterwards and was like, you know, I agree with Dona, right,
Speaker 7: And I was like, no, I think we all agree.
Speaker 7: Like that's kind of the point. I think we all
Speaker 7: agree on the basics here. The other part is just
Speaker 7: sitting in the cringe, as Madan says, oh.
Speaker 14: Nice, yeah, basting basting in the cringe, yeah, basing in
Speaker 14: the cringe here, and trying to find our way out
Speaker 14: of like a bad mushroom trip hallucination where you can
Speaker 14: do things pretend that the Palestinians don't exist.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you know, that's that's We're trying to be the
Speaker 7: orange juice that's supposed to get you out of the
Speaker 7: you know of a bad munchers.
Speaker 3: How do they hangover whatever? Yeah, the trip? Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 3: don't I don't do drugs. I don't understand anyway. Thank
Speaker 3: you all so much. This has been a very interesting episode.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I'll link in the show notes for for
Speaker 3: listeners all of the things we mentioned.
Speaker 5: But yeah, more soon.
Speaker 6: Yeah, episode episode one is already out by the time
Speaker 6: your listeners hear this, I think episode two might already
Speaker 6: be out as well. Okay, in episode two, we kind
Speaker 6: of go into the into the into the backstory. Episode
Speaker 6: one was was with you and we talked about about
Speaker 6: the chords themselves. Episode two we start digging into those
Speaker 6: into those warm holes of the Abraham story. Interesting and
Speaker 6: we when we talked to people in Jerusalem again Ben
Speaker 6: mentioned this, both Palestinians and Israelis. We went and we
Speaker 6: went out and asked them what they thought about Abraham
Speaker 6: Accords and why they thought it was named after Abraham.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm really excited to listen to that.
Speaker 8: Thank you all right, thanks guys, thanks for having us on.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Take care.
Speaker 4: The last week, two major news networks, CNN and CNBC,
Speaker 4: partnered with the so called prediction market Calshi, an online
Speaker 4: political betting platform to use Calshi's real time betting data
Speaker 4: in TV news segments, online news content, and, as Calshi
Speaker 4: announced on X the Everything app quote, to integrate prediction
Speaker 4: markets into CNN's global newsroom, with Calshi threatening, quote, a
Speaker 4: new era of media is here. This is it could
Speaker 4: happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Regular CNN viewers may have
Speaker 4: noticed this integration has already been happening for some time.
Speaker 4: This past election cycle, news anchors used betting odds in
Speaker 4: place of an addition to polling data to weigh the
Speaker 4: likelihood of candidates winning elections. CNN's chief data analyst, Harry
Speaker 4: Enton Nate Silver Protege, who used to work for five
Speaker 4: point thirty eight trailblazed the use of political gambling data
Speaker 4: in news stories earlier this year. How she praised Entin
Speaker 4: by name in their announcement of the CNN partnership.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 4: Enton is an expert at translating what data and polling
Speaker 4: are saying on any given issue, and through this integration,
Speaker 4: he can tap into real time prediction markets data to
Speaker 4: better inform and fact check his reporting.
Speaker 7: Unquote.
Speaker 4: Here's an example of this reporting in a CNN segment
Speaker 4: from October twenty twenty five.
Speaker 15: If you go back six months ago, you go back
Speaker 15: to April K Baldwin. What were we looking at, Well,
Speaker 15: we were looking at the Democrats with a very clear
Speaker 15: shot of taking control of the US House of Representatives.
Speaker 15: According to the Calshi Prediction Market odds, we saw him
Speaker 15: in an eighty three percent chance. But those odds have
Speaker 15: gone par vomiting down. Now we're talking about just a
Speaker 15: sixty three percent chance, while the gopiece chances up like
Speaker 15: a rocket up like gold, up from seventeen percent to
Speaker 15: now a thirty seven percent chance. So we'll look like
Speaker 15: a pretty clear Demo likely Democratic win in the House
Speaker 15: come next year has become much closer to toss up
Speaker 15: at this point, although still slightly leading Democratic.
Speaker 4: Harry Enton never clarifies how these quote unquote odds are
Speaker 4: formed or what they really are. To a viewer who
Speaker 4: just tuned in or maybe isn't paying that much attention,
Speaker 4: it would be very unclear that these numbers are actually
Speaker 4: from a gambling website. They're just big percentages displayed on
Speaker 4: screen the way you would see polling data or legitimate
Speaker 4: information used in a newsroom. This short section using the
Speaker 4: Calshi prediction market odds was then followed by three minutes
Speaker 4: of analysis using selective mid term voting data from twenty
Speaker 4: seventeen to twenty to support the movement in these gambling odds.
Speaker 4: The gambling ods themselves were a load bearing piece of
Speaker 4: information in this piece. Calshi's main competitor, another so called
Speaker 4: prediction market called poly Market, partnered with x the Everything
Speaker 4: app and Yahoo Finance earlier this year to integrate their
Speaker 4: prediction data into online news content. Time Magazine and Sports
Speaker 4: Illustrated have also both launched deals with the prediction market
Speaker 4: platform Galactic. So what exactly are these prediction markets and
Speaker 4: how do they function? On poly Market and Calshi, users
Speaker 4: can bet yes or no on the outcome of a
Speaker 4: question relating to world events, which is called a market.
Speaker 4: As more money is wagered on either side, the odds
Speaker 4: of the outcome change. Currently, top questions include various predictions
Speaker 4: for Time Person of the Year, will the US strike
Speaker 4: Venezuela before the end of the year, the release of
Speaker 4: the Epstein files, and who will be the next president.
Speaker 4: Kalshi has Trump's chances at six percent. Here's Polymarket CEO
Speaker 4: Shane Copelan explaining on sixty minutes, you.
Speaker 9: Make money if you're right, you lose money if you're wrong,
Speaker 9: and as a result, it creates this information that's really
Speaker 9: isful for people.
Speaker 4: These companies would like you to believe that the ratio
Speaker 4: of people betting yes or no on a certain outcome
Speaker 4: of world events is somehow useful or reliable information for
Speaker 4: the general public to forecast the future, whether that's through
Speaker 4: betting on the likelihood of an upcoming recession, the winner
Speaker 4: of a sports game, which days of the week Israel
Speaker 4: will bonb Gaza, or what movie will win Best Picture.
Speaker 4: Almost fifty million dollars is currently being wagered over a
Speaker 4: potential Russia Ukraine ceasefire in twenty twenty five. Production markets
Speaker 4: currently have three billion dollars in weekly trading volume. I
Speaker 4: do need to note these companies argue that hedging outcomes
Speaker 4: of world events legally is not gambling, because that would
Speaker 4: be illegal. Payments through unauthorized gambling sites are illegal under
Speaker 4: the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of two thousand and six,
Speaker 4: which suppressed the early prediction markets of the two thousands.
Speaker 4: But CALSHI is regulated as a platform for trading financial
Speaker 4: derivatives rather than securities trading or straight up legalized gambling,
Speaker 4: and this determines what entity they have to register with
Speaker 4: and what regulations they're subject to. CALSHI launched in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty one with a federal license from the Commodity Futures
Speaker 4: Trading Commission, and after a year's long battle, in October
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four, a federal appeals court ruled in favor
Speaker 4: of CALSHI, allowing online prediction market betting on US elections,
Speaker 4: rejecting claims by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that the
Speaker 4: practice was illegal gambling and their concerns that prediction market
Speaker 4: betting could undermine election integrity. Former CFDC chairman Rostam Benham
Speaker 4: misstatement in May of twenty twenty four, reading quote contracts
Speaker 4: involving political events ultimately commoditize and degrade the integrity of
Speaker 4: the uniquely American experience of participating in the democratic electoral process.
Speaker 4: Allowing these contracts would push the CFTC, a financial market regulator,
Speaker 4: into a position far beyond its congressional mandate and expertise.
Speaker 4: A week before his dad took office in January twenty
Speaker 4: twenty five, Donald Trump Junior became a strategic advisor at
Speaker 4: Calshie Hoolymarket launched in twenty twenty without registering with the
Speaker 4: Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and was fined one point four
Speaker 4: million dollars by the CFTC in twenty twenty two for
Speaker 4: operating as an unregulated exchange and was held forth prohibited
Speaker 4: from allowing bets from US based users, though the poly
Speaker 4: Market CEO sees it a little different.
Speaker 16: It was at one point four million dollars fine and
Speaker 16: also was a settlement and you could not have customers
Speaker 16: in the United States.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we had to go in geoblock trading in the
Speaker 9: US and move certain operations offshore. And it wasn't hey
Speaker 9: you're banned from trading the US. It's like until you're licensed.
Speaker 16: I mean it was breaking the law.
Speaker 9: I mean people say breaking the law. It's like which
Speaker 9: law you know? So if anything it's incompatible.
Speaker 16: It's incompatible with the law.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 5: With the regulatory matrix that existed.
Speaker 4: The past two years, Polymarket has found to be facilitating
Speaker 4: illegal gambling and subsequently banned in the countries of Switzerland, France,
Speaker 4: the UK, Poland, Singapore, Belgium, Romania and Australia. Most of
Speaker 4: these bands just required geoblocking users, which can be easily
Speaker 4: circumvented through the use of a VPN, and since the
Speaker 4: financial transactions on poly market are all done through crypt currency,
Speaker 4: it's not clear that polymarket is taking any steps to
Speaker 4: enforce these bans beyond geo blocking. In the midst of
Speaker 4: facing regulatory hurdles and bands from across the globe, Polymarket
Speaker 4: still exploded in popularity last year, attracting investment from Peter
Speaker 4: Thiel's venture capital firm and hundreds of thousands of new users,
Speaker 4: primarily driven by betting on the US presidential election, speculation
Speaker 4: on whether Biden would drop out of the race and
Speaker 4: who Trump would pick as vice president, all despite the
Speaker 4: platform technically being banned in the United States after the
Speaker 4: first presidential debate in July twenty twenty four, around the
Speaker 4: attempted assassination of Trump and the RNC, Polymarket gained sixty
Speaker 4: thousand new accounts. The year prior, polymarket averaged two thousand,
Speaker 4: three hundred new accounts per month. August twenty twenty four
Speaker 4: saw seventy thousand new accounts, September ninety thousand, October three
Speaker 4: hundred thousand. The month after Trump's second inauguration four hundred thousand. Currently,
Speaker 4: polymarket has over sixty thousand daily active traders and hundreds
Speaker 4: of thousands of monthly traders since October twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: To give another example of their recent growth, in April
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three, Polymarket's monthly volume was about three million dollars.
Speaker 4: A year later, it was thirty nine million. In November
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four, it was two point five billion. Last month,
Speaker 4: it was three point seven billion. In summer twenty twenty five,
Speaker 4: cash Ptel's, FBI and the CFTC under Trump dropped investigations
Speaker 4: into whether polymarket was illegally allowing US users to place
Speaker 4: betts using VPNs. Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump Junior's venture capital
Speaker 4: firm invested in the platform, and Trump Junior himself joined
Speaker 4: Polymarket's advisory board. Curiously, a few days after Trump Junior
Speaker 4: joined Polymarket, the Commodity Futures Training Commission announced it was
Speaker 4: going to allow poly market to operate in the United
Speaker 4: States after acquiring another company that held a US license.
Speaker 4: This past October, Trump's own truth Social announced it was
Speaker 4: partnering with Crypto dot Com to launch truth predict Quote,
Speaker 4: a revolutionary prediction market backed by President Trump for enhanced
Speaker 4: decision making unquote. When Barry Weiss's Sixty Minutes did a
Speaker 4: puff piece on Polymarket with its CEO last week, Anderson
Speaker 4: Cooper inquired about the risk of insider trading markets, CEO
Speaker 4: Shane Kaplan seem to think that a little bit of
Speaker 4: insider trading might be good.
Speaker 16: Actually, good predictive markets do rely on someone having some
Speaker 16: inside information.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think that people going and having an edge
Speaker 9: to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need
Speaker 9: to curate them, and you need to be really clear
Speaker 9: and strengen on where the line is drawn and like
Speaker 9: sort of ethics, and we spend a lot of time
Speaker 9: on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this
Speaker 9: will happen and there's a lot of benefits from it
Speaker 9: and people will adapt.
Speaker 4: The CEO did not elaborate on what poly markets practice
Speaker 4: of curating insider trading looks like and where their quote
Speaker 4: unquote stringent line is drawn, because in reality it doesn't
Speaker 4: seem this line exists. They essentially encourage insider trading through
Speaker 4: these vague statements and lack of clear enforcement. From the
Speaker 4: point of view of these platforms, insider trading makes their
Speaker 4: prediction markets more accurate, so it's a net positive, and
Speaker 4: if it fucks over some users on the other side
Speaker 4: of a bet, that's just the cost of business. Last week,
Speaker 4: an alleged insider trader won over a million dollars for
Speaker 4: bets on Google's twenty twenty five year in search rankings
Speaker 4: listing twenty two out of twenty three in the correct order.
Speaker 4: This user has made a series of early bets related
Speaker 4: to Google the past year, like the exact release date
Speaker 4: of Google's Gemini three point zero, which they won one
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty thousand dollars on. But because this polymarket
Speaker 4: user isn't trading stock, there's no clear regulatory mechanism to
Speaker 4: stop this behavior, and polymarket can't reverse these trades because
Speaker 4: they run through the blockchain, not that they would even
Speaker 4: necessarily want to. Professional gambler, political data analyst and poly
Speaker 4: market advisor Nate Silver was also asked about insider trading
Speaker 4: on the China Talk podcast two months ago.
Speaker 17: Are you worried about insider trading with this uh, with
Speaker 17: all this political betting, I mean there's an aspect of like, look,
Speaker 17: these are all crypto Uh, you know you get on
Speaker 17: these markets with crypto and like, like there were markets
Speaker 17: like which way is Suzanne Collins going to vote? And
Speaker 17: you know the sort of the like you know, like
Speaker 17: the tail outcomes for like a legislative assistant in her office?
Speaker 17: Are you know you can make ten times your salary?
Speaker 17: And like a minute, right, what's your what's your think
Speaker 17: think on this?
Speaker 13: For sure?
Speaker 18: I mean, look, I think there are a couple of
Speaker 18: qualifications though, Like, first of all, I think people on
Speaker 18: the inside often aren't as well as a formed as
Speaker 18: they think, and or there are some downsides having an
Speaker 18: inside view and not an outside of you. You might
Speaker 18: drink the kool aid, so to speak, right, you might
Speaker 18: be in a bubble.
Speaker 17: Yeah, look, I mean I mean there are ones where
Speaker 17: it's like you can literally I mean there's been a
Speaker 17: lots of group chats people talking about like very very
Speaker 17: sketchy trades and one way bets that are being made
Speaker 17: in the stock market of like what's.
Speaker 2: Going to happen with a trade deal?
Speaker 17: I mean you can literally be the person who decides
Speaker 17: right and be vetting on the side if weird.
Speaker 18: If there are incentives to make money in a world
Speaker 18: of eight million people, many of them are very competitive,
Speaker 18: and all of whom and on all of them, most
Speaker 18: of them acts to the Internet.
Speaker 13: Right, people are going to find a way a way
Speaker 13: to do it.
Speaker 4: Right, Let's pause here for a sec. What do you
Speaker 4: think Nick goes on to list as a comparison to
Speaker 4: political insider trading as like an unfortunate but somewhat inevitable
Speaker 4: consequence of our evolving system of finance.
Speaker 18: Like in the crypto space, we've seen an increasing number
Speaker 18: of like crypto kidnappings. Right, Well, I mean, that's one
Speaker 18: of the consequences if people are worth vast amounts of
Speaker 18: wealth that isn't very secure it it's just gonna gonna
Speaker 18: happen until you up security or a better or whatever else.
Speaker 18: And so like, you know, I don't think there's necessarily
Speaker 18: anymore or less insider creating on like polymarket than there
Speaker 18: might be for in sports betting sites. We've seen a
Speaker 18: lot of sports betting scandals or for regular equities. You know,
Speaker 18: I believe the literature says that like members of Congress
Speaker 18: achieve abnormal returns from their stock portfolios.
Speaker 13: I have to do I'm sure there's some debate about that.
Speaker 13: I have to like to double check that, right.
Speaker 4: It's fine, Bros. It's just like cryptocurrency kidnapping. It's fine.
Speaker 5: Actually.
Speaker 4: So Nay goes on to say that prediction market insider
Speaker 4: trading isn't that different from congressmen doing insider trading on
Speaker 4: the stock market, or like rigged sports betting, but he
Speaker 4: really neglects to emphasize that those things are also bad
Speaker 4: and should be aggressively clamped down on. That shouldn't be allowed,
Speaker 4: and prediction markets intentionally skirch regulation. They currently have far
Speaker 4: less legal protections for users against unfair practices, and with
Speaker 4: crypto they can be pretty anonymized, enabling bad actors. And
Speaker 4: now news companies are legitimizing turning everyone's phone into a
Speaker 4: corrupt casino for world events, whether that's Israel starving Palestine
Speaker 4: or how many tweets Elon Musk is going to publish
Speaker 4: this week. The day before CALSH announced their partnership agreement
Speaker 4: with CNN and NCNBC, CBS aired a sixty minutes puff
Speaker 4: piece on polymarket, anchored by Anderson Cooper.
Speaker 16: When we met with Copeland last month, more than three
Speaker 16: point six million dollars had been wagered on whether or
Speaker 16: not Venezuela's president Nicholas Muduro would be out of power
Speaker 16: by the end of the year. Polymarket users didn't think,
Speaker 16: so they gave it only a twenty three percent chance.
Speaker 16: And if you buy no on that and you're buying
Speaker 16: it at seventy eight cents and at the end of
Speaker 16: the year he's still.
Speaker 5: In power, yeah, you get a dollar.
Speaker 16: So you've made a profit of.
Speaker 5: Twenty two cents for share.
Speaker 16: I wudn't see why this would be I mean, I
Speaker 16: don't want to use a term addictive, but it would
Speaker 16: be compelling. I mean, maybe it is a tick fier, well,
Speaker 16: certainly compelling.
Speaker 5: This is how I see it.
Speaker 9: If you are into geopolitics, this creates an incentive for
Speaker 9: you to dig in to what's going on in Venezuela
Speaker 9: and try and get an edge.
Speaker 4: Anderson Cooper, who both works for the newly Calshi partnered
Speaker 4: CNN as well as CBS's Sixty Minutes, is so hesitant
Speaker 4: to call this clearly addictive practice addictive, quote unquote compelling.
Speaker 4: Here's how Polymarket CEO Shane Copelan explained the platform earlier
Speaker 4: in this piece.
Speaker 9: It's a site where you can basically bet on current events,
Speaker 9: some sort of question about the future like an election,
Speaker 9: and as a result, when a ton of people are betting,
Speaker 9: you get the betting odds, which basically tell you how
Speaker 9: likely each outcome is and how.
Speaker 16: Accurate it is.
Speaker 9: It's the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now,
Speaker 9: until someone else creates some sort of super crystal ball.
Speaker 4: Anderson Cooper responds with narration that the CEO quote may
Speaker 4: be prone to hyperbole, but he's definitely onto something unquote.
Speaker 4: In explaining how poly market users attempt to seek truth
Speaker 4: and gain an edge, Copeland told the story of how
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty four, an anonymous French user made over
Speaker 4: eighty million dollars on poly market by betting on Trump
Speaker 4: winning the presidential election, and to bolster his bets, he
Speaker 4: contracted you goov to conduct private polls in swing states.
Speaker 9: People thought he'd just liked Trump, and he had actually
Speaker 9: commissioned a ton of private polls. He did something called
Speaker 9: neighbor polling, which is you ask people who they think
Speaker 9: their neighbors.
Speaker 5: Are likely to vote for.
Speaker 9: Four scenarios for an election where there's a stigma to
Speaker 9: saying you're going to vote for somebody, and people feel
Speaker 9: some sort of social awkwardness and What he noticed was
Speaker 9: there was huge discrepancy in the neighbor polling versus the
Speaker 9: normal pole, and the neighbor polling favored Trump enormously.
Speaker 5: He thought Trump was undervalued.
Speaker 9: If this guy was not able to make eighty million,
Speaker 9: but rather able to make eighty thousand dollars, he would
Speaker 9: have never gone through the hassle. But when you get
Speaker 9: markets that are big enough, you create this incentive for
Speaker 9: people to go above and beyond to try and find truth.
Speaker 4: What the CEO is arguing here is that the sheer
Speaker 4: scale of money being wagered creates incentive to quote unquote
Speaker 4: find truth. In media discussions of prediction markets, there's this
Speaker 4: specter of objectivity around the gambled odds, which obviously the
Speaker 4: CEO of Polymarket has a personal incentive to encourage. But
Speaker 4: Anderson Cooper here doesn't challenge this notion of capital t
Speaker 4: truth even though Donald Trump was way ahead in prediction
Speaker 4: market odds back during the twenty twenty election, which had
Speaker 4: his chances of winning that election far higher than what
Speaker 4: pure polling models showed. Well, she claims that prediction markets
Speaker 4: can help journalists quote unquote fact check, but doesn't explain
Speaker 4: how fact can be determined from speculative gambling markets. Where
Speaker 4: is the fact in gambling, Well, we will find out
Speaker 4: after these ads. To quote from poly market advisor Nate
Speaker 4: Silver's blog The Silver Bulletin quote, It's basically good when
Speaker 4: people are more exposed to probabilities and they become more normalized.
Speaker 4: But of course I also analyze poles and build probabilistic
Speaker 4: models myself in that capacity, I strongly disagree with the
Speaker 4: notion that prediction markets can serve as a good substitute
Speaker 4: for poles. These sorts of claims are sometimes advanced by
Speaker 4: the prediction market companies themselves, including Polymarket. To be fair,
Speaker 4: one minor pet peeve is that both reporters and readers
Speaker 4: often confuse probabilities for poll results unquote, As Nate goes
Speaker 4: on to explain, if Trump is up fifty five to
Speaker 4: forty five over Kamala Harris on a prediction market, that's
Speaker 4: not saying that Trump is expected to win by ten points.
Speaker 4: It means that ten percent more users on the website
Speaker 4: favor Trump winning, which is pretty close to a toss up.
Speaker 4: This confusion is a huge problem which is bolstered in
Speaker 4: both how prediction market companies market their platform but also
Speaker 4: how journalists use gambling data in news stories. If you
Speaker 4: see a social media post, an advertisement, or a random
Speaker 4: news segment showing percentages tied to pictures of two politicians
Speaker 4: in a race without context, those betting numbers could be
Speaker 4: interpreted in a number of ways and influence someone's percent
Speaker 4: exception of an election, and maybe even their choice on
Speaker 4: who to vote for or even whether to vote at all.
Speaker 4: In an October speech, Zora Mumdani reference to Calshi billboards
Speaker 4: predicting a Cuomo victory in the Democratic primary.
Speaker 19: When I walked the length of Manhattan just a few
Speaker 19: days before the election, hundreds of New Yorkers marched alongside me.
Speaker 13: And when we strolled.
Speaker 19: Into Times Square under a billboard with betting odds that
Speaker 19: showed Cuomo's chances of winning at nearly eighty percent, we
Speaker 19: knew that the so called experts were set to get
Speaker 19: it wrong yet again. Andrew Cuomo was supposed to be inevitable.
Speaker 19: When you see the Calshi odds that have our chances
Speaker 19: of victory in the nineties, know this. You are reading
Speaker 19: the same things that Andrew Cuomo read when he went
Speaker 19: to sleep each night in June, believing that his victory
Speaker 19: was promised. We cannot allow complacency to infiltrate this movement.
Speaker 4: Cal She excitedly shared the latter half of that clip,
Speaker 4: proclaiming breaking zoron Mamdani references his Calci odds on stage,
Speaker 4: Calshi is mainstream unquote despite this clip demonstrating how prediction
Speaker 4: markets often suffer from inaccurate bias. Last week, Discount Steve Kornaki,
Speaker 4: former five point thirty eight analyst and now CNN's data expert,
Speaker 4: Harry Enton shared this segment about the Tennessee District seven
Speaker 4: special election on x the Everything app with the caption
Speaker 4: odds are Dems will come within ten points of a win,
Speaker 4: if not outright win.
Speaker 20: I would say, if you had to look at the
Speaker 20: congressional map any district that Donald Trump won by twenty
Speaker 20: two points, you would say, you know, you've got like
Speaker 20: nearly a one one hundred percent chance of winning if
Speaker 20: you're running for Congress there.
Speaker 13: But what are the prediction markets saying right now?
Speaker 15: You know, what are we talking about in terms of
Speaker 15: the prediction market? Us, Look, the Democrat has a fifteen
Speaker 15: percent chance of winning in that race, Okay, a fifteen
Speaker 15: percent chance, which ain't nothing in a district that Donald
Speaker 15: Trump won by twenty two points. But here I think
Speaker 15: is the key nugget on this side of the of
Speaker 15: the ledger, and that is a GOP win by under
Speaker 15: ten points. There's a sixty eight percent chance of that.
Speaker 15: So there is a more than two thirds chance that
Speaker 15: the Republican candidate, Yes, they win, but they win by
Speaker 15: a significantly lower margin than Donald Trump. We're talking about
Speaker 15: double digits, smaller. We're talking about a huge, huge shift.
Speaker 13: To the left.
Speaker 15: We're talking about when you add these two together, we're
Speaker 15: talking about a more than eighty percent chance that there
Speaker 15: is a clear double digit shift to the left, and
Speaker 15: a fifteen percent chance the Democrat actually wins in a
Speaker 15: district that Donald Trump won by twenty two points. That
Speaker 15: just shows you how bad the environment is for Republicans
Speaker 15: right now, that the Democrat has any sort of a chance,
Speaker 15: and this.
Speaker 4: They talk to you about this, he's just authoritatively rattling
Speaker 4: off complete speculation on a Democrat victory. As big screens
Speaker 4: display percentages in huge text with source Calci in tiny
Speaker 4: text the bottom of the screen. Ordinary polling showed that
Speaker 4: this was a close race that leaned red by two
Speaker 4: to eight points, and the Republican did end up winning
Speaker 4: by nine points. To quote the broken clock Nate silver quote.
Speaker 4: Without having polls to look at, the prediction markets would
Speaker 4: probably kind of suck at making election forecasts. Translating poles
Speaker 4: into probabilities is considerably more complicated when there are many
Speaker 4: correlated races at once, such as in the battle for
Speaker 4: the electoral College or control of Congress. Prediction markets had
Speaker 4: a strong twenty twenty four in this regard. They leaned
Speaker 4: toward Trump when our model had it at fifty to fifty.
Speaker 4: I don't think this was because of any special modeling
Speaker 4: insight per se, but because they incorporated some sort of
Speaker 4: prior intuition that Trump would overperform his polls. Again, so
Speaker 4: give the markets credit for that. These sorts of soft
Speaker 4: quote unquote intangible intuitions can be valuable, though you'd need
Speaker 4: a lot of data to determine whether they add or
Speaker 4: subtract value in the long run unquote, As Nate himself acknowledges,
Speaker 4: someone like Andrew Cuomo had much higher betting odds throughout
Speaker 4: the entire New York mayoral race than a purely statistical
Speaker 4: model would show. A contention. I have with Nate. One
Speaker 4: of many is though I call prediction market numbers gambling odds.
Speaker 4: They are not actual probabilities. These odds aren't based on objective,
Speaker 4: mathematical principles like flipping a coin, the three door problem,
Speaker 4: or even something like blackjack. These odds are created whole
Speaker 4: cloth through guessing, sometimes educated or data informed guessing, but
Speaker 4: still primarily through people's intuition, which is susceptible to group impulses.
Speaker 4: Many random world events lack a reliable basis of continuous
Speaker 4: controlled data that's needed to form a probability, like that
Speaker 4: which is applied to legalized sports betting. This is quite
Speaker 4: evident in the betting odds around the Last People Conclave,
Speaker 4: which had very little relevant data to use for informed predictions.
Speaker 4: There was no existing probability to support the election of
Speaker 4: an American pope, a first time occurrence. With prediction markets,
Speaker 4: people can still do research to make an informed bet,
Speaker 4: but it's not really the case that X candidate is
Speaker 4: mathematically expected to win an election. Eighty out of one
Speaker 4: hundred instances a hive mind of users have formed that
Speaker 4: statistical division through the power of money, eighty percent of
Speaker 4: users are betting that a certain result is likely to occur.
Speaker 4: So the problem isn't just that, like Nate says, people
Speaker 4: are confusing probabilities for polls. It's that they're confusing prediction
Speaker 4: market betting odds for mathematical probabilities. It's this difference that
Speaker 4: allows betting on sports outcomes via Calshian poly market, even
Speaker 4: in states that ban typical sports betting, because you're not
Speaker 4: actually betting on fixed odds, you're betting against other investors.
Speaker 4: And now news companies are not just manufacturing consent and
Speaker 4: normalizing political gambling, but are actively encouraging the use of
Speaker 4: these platforms and endorsing the predictive capacity of these gambling markets.
Speaker 4: Anderson Cooper calls it the quote unquote wisdom of crowds.
Speaker 4: But we already have methods for learning group consensus, which
Speaker 4: may have problems, but frankly far fewer problems than gambling
Speaker 4: on world events. Beyond the moral qualms of betting money
Speaker 4: on human suffering, prediction markets are susceptible to not just
Speaker 4: personal bias, but group bias based on the current ratio
Speaker 4: of odds. This in group consensus can be influenced by
Speaker 4: short lived trending topics, and these platforms cater to a
Speaker 4: hyper online point of view. Prediction market users provide a
Speaker 4: very non representational sample variety pulling from a very specific
Speaker 4: type of guy who regularly uses these platforms. To quote
Speaker 4: from Calsh's CNN Partnership announcement quote, cal she has become
Speaker 4: the definitive source for staying informed about the future and
Speaker 4: is used by reporters, politicians, pundits, Wall Street and Main
Speaker 4: Street get recently called the New York City mayoral election
Speaker 4: eight minutes after polls closed, hours before the media. It's
Speaker 4: because of this accuracy that calci's data will serve as
Speaker 4: a powerful compliment to CNN's reporting. Journalists can more easily
Speaker 4: surface credible information to their audiences about the real time
Speaker 4: probabilities of future cultural and political events unquote. In practice,
Speaker 4: this reporting mixes gambling data and actually reputable or credible
Speaker 4: pulls in a confusing way, like this recent CNN segment
Speaker 4: which cites CALCI odds on whether Trump will send tariff
Speaker 4: stimulus checks as well as CBS you gov polling data
Speaker 4: on if tarif's lower prices back to back in the
Speaker 4: same segment, do they.
Speaker 15: Think that the tariffs that these rebate checks are actually coming?
Speaker 13: And at this point.
Speaker 15: No, No, I mean chance Trump tariff, the tariff stimulus
Speaker 15: checks are sent to Americans by August of twenty twenty six.
Speaker 15: It's a twenty five percent chance. That's one in four.
Speaker 15: So that's not nothing. But the American people right now
Speaker 15: are craving, craving some relief, and at this point it
Speaker 15: doesn't look like it is coming. Although I will note
Speaker 15: John Berman, this twenty five percent, it is greater than
Speaker 15: this six percent who say that tars decrease prices, or
Speaker 15: that five percent back in March, which are just you
Speaker 15: never see one, two, three, four, five percent. So look,
Speaker 15: twenty five percent ain't nothing, but at this point it's low.
Speaker 20: Yeah, it's interesting the prediction markets think they only one
Speaker 20: in four chance that will actually happen.
Speaker 4: There is this really what the future of political forecasting
Speaker 4: is going to be? Maybe, maybe not, but there are
Speaker 4: four horsemen of this political gambling apocalypse. Nate Silver via
Speaker 4: his gamification of election predictions based on his time as
Speaker 4: a professional gambler. Sports betting, especially since the Supreme Court
Speaker 4: struck down a federal law banning sports betting outside of
Speaker 4: Nevada in twenty eighteen, resulting in almost forty states subsequently
Speaker 4: legalizing some form of sports betting, which has facilitated because
Speaker 4: of gambling to grow dramatically across the country in the
Speaker 4: past ten years through the spread of online sports betting apps.
Speaker 4: The third horseman is Trump for the Trump administration through
Speaker 4: their removal of regulatory hurdles facing prediction markets. And finally
Speaker 4: that CNN guy Harry Enton, a Nate Silver protege who
Speaker 4: trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories
Speaker 4: the past year. These four horsemen, Nate Silver, sports betting, Trump,
Speaker 4: and Harry Enton have created the cultural and political conditions
Speaker 4: for political gambling to spread. Like wildfire, which, hey, is
Speaker 4: also something you can bet on. During the LA Fires
Speaker 4: prediction market, users could bet on how many acres would burn.
Speaker 4: So what is the endgame of this, this gambling apocalypse
Speaker 4: that seems to be inching its way closer and closer
Speaker 4: To answer that, Here's a clip from Calshi co founder
Speaker 4: and CEO Derek Manser.
Speaker 12: Long term vision is to financialize everything and create a
Speaker 12: tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. We are
Speaker 12: living in a word where like we have an abundance
Speaker 12: of information, but there's a lot of noise, and like
Speaker 12: we don't really understand what's real from what's not. Our
Speaker 12: prediction markets are an antidote to that. They do a
Speaker 12: very very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth
Speaker 12: to people. And you're seeing the sort of massive shift
Speaker 12: where like people are using them whenever they think about
Speaker 12: questions about the future, you know, whenever they're debating about anything.
Speaker 12: And I think that trajectory is going to keep going.
Speaker 12: That's a new consumer habit that I don't think is
Speaker 12: going to be undone.
Speaker 4: This is the demon child of crypto and sports betting,
Speaker 4: this financialization of everything to form a tradable asset out
Speaker 4: of any difference in opinion, creating new addictive consumer habits.
Speaker 4: These companies want to apply the logic of smartphone sports
Speaker 4: betting to everything, where everyone gets to be their own
Speaker 4: little Nate Silver while carrying around their own digital casino
Speaker 4: in their pocket, getting addicted to gambling on speculation of
Speaker 4: world suffering. And CNN is complicit in this. CNN and
Speaker 4: others have decided to partner with platforms that enable the
Speaker 4: people who decide when to drop bombs around the world
Speaker 4: to win millions of dollars by betting money on the
Speaker 4: choices they themselves are making at the expense of the
Speaker 4: rest of the world, and these companies think this is
Speaker 4: a good thing because the betting odds can serve as
Speaker 4: a potential heads up that something is likely to happen.
Speaker 4: Simple consumer protections for users, which currently are non existent,
Speaker 4: are just not enough. Congress needs to be far more
Speaker 4: involved in regulating online betting, and in the case of
Speaker 4: political events, it should just be completely banned. It is
Speaker 4: detrimental to a healthy society. It incentivizes corruption, cruelty, and
Speaker 4: erodes public trust. Gambling doesn't need to go away entirely,
Speaker 4: but it should return to being time and location locked.
Speaker 4: Go to Las Vegas like a fucking adult. Currently, there
Speaker 4: is no existing mechanism for individual states to regulate prediction markets.
Speaker 4: Only the federal government can, and Trump's federal government certainly
Speaker 4: seems like it's not going to considering the President's Sun
Speaker 4: works for both of the main platforms, Klshi and poly market,
Speaker 4: and while news companies are legitimizing this, these platforms are
Speaker 4: now working as their own news aggregators, specifically Polymarket's social
Speaker 4: media account, which is acting as a news aggregation account.
Speaker 4: Because that drives traffic back to their website, where people
Speaker 4: can bet on the news stories that poly market is sharing,
Speaker 4: even if those news stories are speculative or completely made up.
Speaker 4: On December fifth, Polymarket posted quote just in suspected J.
Speaker 4: Six pipe Bomber's legal council projected to argue he was
Speaker 4: included in Trump's pardon of those involved in January sixth unquote.
Speaker 4: This claim subsequently spread all around the Internet, parroted by
Speaker 4: people of a variety of political orientations. But if you
Speaker 4: read closely, the original post says suspected J six Pipe
Speaker 4: Bomber's legal council projected to argue he was included in
Speaker 4: Trump's pardon, polymarket is just spreading gambling information as if
Speaker 4: it is news content. Quote unquote. Projected just means that
Speaker 4: polymarket users are betting on this, But these projected posts
Speaker 4: are mixed in with other posts just aggregating the day's news.
Speaker 4: So unless you are paying super close attention, which rarely
Speaker 4: people on the Internet are, this becomes a trojan horse
Speaker 4: of disinformation. When news companies use the term projected on
Speaker 4: election night, usually that indicates with pretty clear mathematical certainty
Speaker 4: that an event is going to happen. When Polymarket uses
Speaker 4: projected in news tweets, It only indicates that Internet gamblers
Speaker 4: are swinging around money in an effort to create truth
Speaker 4: with once legitimate news companies not just complicit but active
Speaker 4: participants in this process. That doesn't for us today at
Speaker 4: it could happen here. See you on the other side.
Speaker 11: Hello, and welcome to Achnapan Here. I'm Andrew's age also
Speaker 11: known as Andreism, and I'm joined once again by That's.
Speaker 13: A q mea Wong girl who was really really the
Speaker 13: first time was like I Am not going to miss
Speaker 13: my cue this time, and then this time I was like, oh,
Speaker 13: I'm waiting for the queue, and then it was like shit,
Speaker 13: that's the cue. And it took my brain like several
Speaker 13: seconds to be like, oh no, it would be very
Speaker 13: funny if the editors just edited out the pause so
Speaker 13: everyone has no idea what I'm talking about.
Speaker 11: That's that would be hilarious actually, But there was unaware
Speaker 11: that was like a ten second pause before me I
Speaker 11: came in.
Speaker 13: No really truly, this is mia on like three hours
Speaker 13: of sleep brain. I was like, oh, yeah, right, the
Speaker 13: cue is going to come. But then it things going
Speaker 13: great for BeO Loong, the other person who's on the show.
Speaker 13: You know who I am statistically if you're listening to
Speaker 13: the show who, of course?
Speaker 11: I mean speaking of seconds. By the way, in those
Speaker 11: ten seconds that you were waiting for your queue that
Speaker 11: had already passed, hundreds of people were born, you know,
Speaker 11: every second where someone is being born. Like other animals,
Speaker 11: humans have this tendency to multiply. But should they That
Speaker 11: is the question of the day. This is the last
Speaker 11: episode I was on. We spoke about the worries surrounding populasia.
Speaker 11: You know, whether we have too many people or too
Speaker 11: few people. But the question of making people or not
Speaker 11: making them has been the subject of a few ideological classes.
Speaker 11: There's a whole movement of thinkers who argue that bringing
Speaker 11: new life into the world is a big mistake. These
Speaker 11: are the anti natilists. And on the other side you
Speaker 11: have those who say that having children is good and essential.
Speaker 11: That's the pro natalist camp. So in this episode will
Speaker 11: be getting into that tug of war philosophically and weighing
Speaker 11: the issues with both. Because I'm not going to make
Speaker 11: it a secret, I'm not a fan of either of them.
Speaker 11: I don't know how do you feel.
Speaker 13: About Yeah, this is the one good Stalin quote. They're
Speaker 13: both worse, So we have to pick among those twos.
Speaker 13: Let's start with the anti natilists.
Speaker 11: I don't what's the kind of gut reaction or impression
Speaker 11: you get from those those folks.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 13: I think there's a combination of stuff that's largely harmless
Speaker 13: and sometimes is funny. Like you get protested people pulling
Speaker 13: up signs that are like I didn't ask to be
Speaker 13: born or didn't consent to be born. It's like, sure,
Speaker 13: but then then there's also people just doing masshootings about it.
Speaker 13: So it's great, it's it's a good time. It's a
Speaker 13: very normal time for politics.
Speaker 11: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean when I think of them,
Speaker 11: I tend to think cringe and Reddit. But they actually
Speaker 11: have a philosophy outside of Reddit forums. So, according to
Speaker 11: the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, anti natilism is the view
Speaker 11: that it is either always or usually morally impermissible to Brookery. Now,
Speaker 11: most of us grew up with the idea that life
Speaker 11: is inherently valuable, right, but anti natilists disagree. They see
Speaker 11: life as a bruden rather than a gift. Very edgy,
Speaker 11: very read it but you know, it's something that has
Speaker 11: been around since before the Internet. While not himself an
Speaker 11: anti natalist, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who lived in
Speaker 11: the nineteenth century, is taught by some anti natalists as
Speaker 11: a contributor to their philosophical foundations. In his descriptions of
Speaker 11: life as constant, striving, frustration and pain. In the twentieth century,
Speaker 11: the Romanian writer Emil Choran argued that non existence is
Speaker 11: the ultimate form of peace. His philosophical pessimism regarded individual
Speaker 11: life and human history as a whole as a record
Speaker 11: of error, illusion and futility, and most famously, South African
Speaker 11: philosopher David Bennetta laid out one of the main anti
Speaker 11: natilists are in his book Better Never to Have been
Speaker 11: the harm of coming into existence. It's a bang a siteo.
Speaker 11: Though now you can find theoretical contributions to anti natilists
Speaker 11: thought in Buddhism's idea that life is suffering or incidant
Speaker 11: interpretations of it rather or incident gnostic traditions that sow
Speaker 11: the material world itself as a kind of cosmic mistake. Now,
Speaker 11: there are a lot of reasons that anti natilists put
Speaker 11: forward for their stance. There are philanthropic and misanthropic arguments
Speaker 11: of antinautilism. You know, the philanthropic ones focus on harm
Speaker 11: to the individual who is brought into existence, while the
Speaker 11: misanthropic arguments tend to focus on the harm that new
Speaker 11: people cause to the will. So there's the consent argument
Speaker 11: that Mia would have mentioned. You know, basically a child
Speaker 11: that cannot consent to be inborn, so by creating them,
Speaker 11: you're forcing them into life. They didn't ask for a
Speaker 11: life that will inevitably include suffering. Another argument is in
Speaker 11: that sort of negative utilityanism camp. It's the idea that
Speaker 11: our moral priority should be reducing suffering, not increase in happiness.
Speaker 11: In fact, they don't see the potential or actuality of
Speaker 11: pleasure as an offset to suffering at all. You know,
Speaker 11: under their view, even a single unit of suffering is unacceptable,
Speaker 11: and since every new life will include suffering, not creating
Speaker 11: life is the surest way to reduce it. If Benetta
Speaker 11: had the famous asymmetry argument, which is that the presence
Speaker 11: of pain is bad, the presence of pleasure is good,
Speaker 11: but the absence of pain is always good. Even if
Speaker 11: no one appreciates that good and the absence of pleasure
Speaker 11: isn't bad unless there's someone missing out. So put simply,
Speaker 11: according to the argument, by not having a child, you
Speaker 11: avoid guaranteed suffering without depriving any person of joy because
Speaker 11: that person doesn't exist. So that equation is probably one
Speaker 11: of the main pillars i'd say of the ant i
Speaker 11: need lists as a movement. You know, you might be
Speaker 11: thinking to yourself, Oh, but I'm glad to be alive. No,
Speaker 11: you're not. According according to Bennetta and the anti natalists,
Speaker 11: you're deluded to think.
Speaker 21: So.
Speaker 11: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it the deluded gladness argument. Basically,
Speaker 11: your positive view of your own life is unreliable. Better
Speaker 11: argues that we have cognitive biases like optimism and selective
Speaker 11: memory and so on, which distort how viciously we assess
Speaker 11: our own suffering. So many good life reports, even if
Speaker 11: you think you have a good life or a decent life,
Speaker 11: you're deceiving yourself, according to him, Do you think people
Speaker 11: are deceiving themselves when they say that they enjoy their lives?
Speaker 13: You know, this entire line of argument is just making
Speaker 13: me be like, you need to do less philosophy and
Speaker 13: like go outside and live. Like it's just.
Speaker 11: Like, yeah, I mean I get the whole thing about
Speaker 11: you know, all mental bias towards optimism and that kind
Speaker 11: of thing, but that doesn't invalidate the joy of people
Speaker 11: appreciating their life.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's like this. This sounds like the exact script
Speaker 13: you get in your head when you're really depressed. It's like, okay,
Speaker 13: like have you considered getting your depression managed and getting
Speaker 13: help for it instead of like doing philosophy about it.
Speaker 11: I feel like you would be an antenatilist.
Speaker 13: Oh you're yeah.
Speaker 11: Another thing murders well.
Speaker 13: And it's also frustrating because it's like the most compelling
Speaker 13: version of this argument is about like this world right
Speaker 13: now is absolutely dog shit and I can't justify bringing
Speaker 13: someone into it. But that's like too grounded. It's all
Speaker 13: these people are like, no, no, no, no, Actually, here's like
Speaker 13: this philosophy that proves that that life bad.
Speaker 11: And it's like, uh, I mean there are antonielists arguments
Speaker 11: that do get into that more grounded Oh yeah, definitely, yeah,
Speaker 11: thing you know that they have one argument about multiplying suffering, right,
Speaker 11: because every child you bring into the bull is in
Speaker 11: just one pouson. You know, they have the potential to
Speaker 11: have truer themselves and grandchildren and so on, multiplying the
Speaker 11: chances of pain, disease, loss suffering down the generations.
Speaker 13: It's like, this is like long termism. Shit, it's just
Speaker 13: like instead of like actually analyzing the world, we're going
Speaker 13: to build unbelievably complicated and completely meaningless, like abstract models
Speaker 13: of it and try to base our things off of that.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean it's it's destally ridiculous. Now I understand.
Speaker 11: You know, our truck record isn't the best. You know,
Speaker 11: they have their plagues and slavery and genocide, environmental the strut,
Speaker 11: and some of them say, well that's the best thing.
Speaker 11: The best thing we could do is to voluntarily go extinct,
Speaker 11: you know, to step off the stage of the earth.
Speaker 11: And that connects with the general misanthropy, and I think
Speaker 11: the misanthropic argument that humans are some kind of blight
Speaker 11: on the world. Yeah, and they're antilists who take it
Speaker 11: a step further as well, And they're not just antilists
Speaker 11: for humans, they're universal antiists. So they believe that not
Speaker 11: just human births are problematic, but existence itself. Sentient beings
Speaker 11: across the board, human or animal are better off never
Speaker 11: being brought into life at all.
Speaker 13: Really, truly, at this point, brother, this is a you problem.
Speaker 13: You just don't like existing, Like we can work on that.
Speaker 13: But this is not a philosophical thake, like you're just depressed, Like,
Speaker 13: come on, what are we doing here?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 11: I mean, antonism is making some very heavy claims and
Speaker 11: they're obviously going to be coming to arguments because people
Speaker 11: are going to roll over with the kind of as
Speaker 11: solutions that it makes. The most intuitive anser I would
Speaker 11: give is that yes, life involves suffering, but it also
Speaker 11: includes pleasure and joy and creativity and achievements, and for
Speaker 11: most people, those positives outweigh the negatives. And if you're
Speaker 11: a radical, you recognize that some of the negatives of
Speaker 11: life are not inevitable. The famines, the wars, the suffering,
Speaker 11: the poverty, it's not inevitable. It's a product of economic
Speaker 11: and political systems that we have the power to change.
Speaker 11: And yes, there will always be suffering. They may always
Speaker 11: be some diseases, there will always be death, right, but
Speaker 11: that doesn't mean that existence is worse than non existence.
Speaker 11: I'm glad to exist me, I feel like you're probably
Speaker 11: glad to exist. I'm glad you.
Speaker 13: Exist, yeah, most of the time. Like this is a
Speaker 13: distinct improvement for positions I have been in. But like, yeah,
Speaker 13: it's nice. Yes, you know, like even even in the
Speaker 13: middle of like the hell world, it's nice.
Speaker 11: Yeah, And yeah, the biases may skew our perspective, but
Speaker 11: the fact that we overwhelmingly choose life itself is a
Speaker 11: reason too not throw it out, you know, whis people
Speaker 11: are given the choice do you want to live right now?
Speaker 11: And I mostly people want to say they're going to live,
Speaker 11: you know. Yeah, and yes, we don't consent to be inborn,
Speaker 11: but there are other things that we don't consent to
Speaker 11: that we still benefit from. You know, in funds, don't
Speaker 11: consent to be vaccinated, but it's it's something that benefits them,
Speaker 11: you know. We educate in funds, we restrain them from danger.
Speaker 11: We don't ask their permission necessarily to do these things,
Speaker 11: but it's just for their well being, for their benefit.
Speaker 11: And I don't think while consent is an important factor
Speaker 11: in the way that we engage as others, I don't
Speaker 11: think consent is the only factor for a framework of
Speaker 11: determining what is moral and immoral. You know, you can't
Speaker 11: use consent to determine whether it's moral or not to exist.
Speaker 11: I don't feel like those two pieces mashed together very well.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Well, and also I think like there are so many
Speaker 13: other things that we didn't consent to, you know, like
Speaker 13: this is another thing that's talking. It is like we
Speaker 13: never consented to die. On a less metaphysical level, I
Speaker 13: don't know, like I didn't consent to like to live
Speaker 13: under this state, yeah, where you know they're like doing
Speaker 13: helicopter raids on apartment buildings and like dragging naked children
Speaker 13: screaming away from their parents in the middle of the night,
Speaker 13: Like you know that, And that's a thing that you
Speaker 13: can actually actively do something about that you didn't consent to.
Speaker 13: That is actively harming you and everyone else around you
Speaker 13: versus like being born and making that the thing that
Speaker 13: you're doing is like okay, like we didn't get to
Speaker 13: live in or capitalism. We didn't we didn't get sent
Speaker 13: to colonialism, Like we didn't geet to any of the shit,
Speaker 13: and that's something you could, you know, make not happen
Speaker 13: versus you being born, which there is nothing you can
Speaker 13: do to change the fact that you were born. And
Speaker 13: it's like, oh, well, focus the next generation. Yeah, you
Speaker 13: want you want to focus on like reducing the amount
Speaker 13: of suffering the next generation will create in the world.
Speaker 13: Have you considered like climate change?
Speaker 11: Yeah? Yeah, I also think that on a broader level, right,
Speaker 11: I think it's good to be questioned some of the
Speaker 11: intuitions that we may have, you know, even if they're
Speaker 11: our deepest moral intuitions. I think it's good to maybe
Speaker 11: consider them or to be thoughtful about them. But also,
Speaker 11: as the incent Encyclopedia of Philosophy argues, if a theory
Speaker 11: implies that the creation of all human life is a
Speaker 11: moral mistake, that conclusion itself might be reason to doubt
Speaker 11: the theory. This is something called the repugnant conclusion objection.
Speaker 11: I mean, because it's it's repugnant. It's intuitively repugnant to
Speaker 11: most people to hear that existence is a mistake. Nobody
Speaker 11: should be alive.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I was like, well, no, absolutely not.
Speaker 11: Get your shit worked out exactly.
Speaker 13: Betray to logic here, not great.
Speaker 11: Like you were saying, Yeah, there'll be a lot of
Speaker 11: things in the world that suck right now that cause suffering,
Speaker 11: and there's a lot of present joy is alongside that
Speaker 11: present suffering. But there's also the value to be had
Speaker 11: in that potential joy. You know, the potential possibilities have value.
Speaker 11: If potential suffering has value, potential joys should also have value.
Speaker 11: The potential of creating a batter world, each new child
Speaker 11: bringing the potential for greater love, for incredible arts and crafts,
Speaker 11: for scientific breakthrough, is for reshaping the world in a
Speaker 11: positive direction. You know, the potential for the unique goods
Speaker 11: that each individual life can bring, I believe justifies the
Speaker 11: risk of suffering because the world without those future goods
Speaker 11: would be worse than a world with them. And yes,
Speaker 11: humanity can cause harm. Where we are also capable of
Speaker 11: extraordinary good we can change, we can reduce suffering over time,
Speaker 11: new generations are going to be part of that solution,
Speaker 11: I will say, though two anti nationalists credit. One of
Speaker 11: the points of the Internet and Psychlopedia of Philosophy points
Speaker 11: out is that the debate of what anti natialism is theoretical.
Speaker 11: You know, this is stuffy philosophers sitting around exchanging notes
Speaker 11: and writing books. Right, Most of its advocates are not
Speaker 11: actually putting forward policies that are restricting people's ability to
Speaker 11: create life. But the same cannot be said for the
Speaker 11: other side of the coin, the pro natalists. Yep. So,
Speaker 11: in broad terms, pronatalism or just natalism is the belief
Speaker 11: that reproduction is a societal good or even the society
Speaker 11: needs more children. This movement is getting louder and louder
Speaker 11: these days. It's shaping policy debates in the US, in Europe,
Speaker 11: in Asia and beyond, because, as I mentioned in the
Speaker 11: previous episode, fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. Countries like
Speaker 11: South Korea, Italy, Japan, and the US are seeing fewer
Speaker 11: booths than needed to sustain their current populations. So you're
Speaker 11: going to be seeing pronatalism in various forms, shown up
Speaker 11: in politics and even in tech circles, especially in those
Speaker 11: ways texicles. Now, pronatalism is a broad umbrella. You know,
Speaker 11: you can have the mild position of supporting families with policies,
Speaker 11: and most people are not opposed to that, but you
Speaker 11: also have the strong pronatalist stands which is actually urging
Speaker 11: or incentivizing or mandating both for cultural, economic, or ideological reasons.
Speaker 11: Pronatalism was motivated by a few different reasons. You know,
Speaker 11: there's the economic anxiety of a shrink in population meaning
Speaker 11: fewer workers, more retirees, and strained pension systems. There's a
Speaker 11: nationalistic argument of worries about cultural continuity which tend to
Speaker 11: tita into the reactionary directions, and the pronatalism today is
Speaker 11: very much political as a result. In the US, Republicans
Speaker 11: have been leaning into it, framing the low booth rates
Speaker 11: as a national crisis. And in Europe you have countries
Speaker 11: like Hungary under Victor Auburn which have made pronatalism a
Speaker 11: signature policy. It's very in effectiveness. The religious motivations of
Speaker 11: pronatalism are also pretty interesting. You know, you have the
Speaker 11: being fruitful and multiply directive in the Bible, which some
Speaker 11: take as far as the quiver full movement, which is
Speaker 11: the whole thing about having children by like the dozen
Speaker 11: no more.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Then you have the tech elite circles pronatalism because it
Speaker 11: connected with the ideas of human progress. One of the
Speaker 11: prontalists who most famously practices what he preaches mostly for
Speaker 11: worse is he on Musk. Yep, right, he's He's a
Speaker 11: big Nazi about it. For one, because of us, we'll
Speaker 11: worry about white facility rates but he also thinks that
Speaker 11: globoth rates as a whole or a bigger threat than
Speaker 11: climate change. So I mean it seems like he's single
Speaker 11: handedly trying to fix that with his seed is spreading. Yeah,
Speaker 11: is his assembly line of children with the accompanying product
Speaker 11: barcodes for names, And I just feel bad for them, honestly,
Speaker 11: to have that as a father.
Speaker 13: No, it sucks. Yeah, it's not great.
Speaker 7: It's not good.
Speaker 11: And so he and his billionairem bodies of the belief
Speaker 11: that civilization will collapse if we don't make more babies.
Speaker 11: Silicon Valley circles a fund in pronatalist think tanks and
Speaker 11: embryo optimization projects. A lot of policies are also coming
Speaker 11: out of the pronates list camp. Unlike the anti natalists historically,
Speaker 11: countries like the Soviet Union hand their off medals like
Speaker 11: Mother Heroine for women with large families, and the Russia
Speaker 11: of today has revived similar awards recently, alongside like I
Speaker 11: mentioned in the previous episode, banning anti natalist propaganda. Now
Speaker 11: some countries are offering tax incentives for booths and even
Speaker 11: proposing baby bonuses of thousands of dollars paid for each booth.
Speaker 11: Thousands of dollars per birth is kind of a spit
Speaker 11: in the face because that's not even going to last
Speaker 11: the first couple months of a child being born. Let's
Speaker 11: be real, children are extremely expensive.
Speaker 13: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 11: Proniceists also tend to push things like expanded family benefits,
Speaker 11: child allowances or holes and subsidies for pearents. These, I
Speaker 11: would say, are the more liberal minded or progressive minded
Speaker 11: pronac lists as much as you can be a progressive
Speaker 11: and a pronac list, because they actually considering the ways
Speaker 11: that they can make actually bearing children and raising children
Speaker 11: a bit easier for the people who have to do it.
Speaker 11: That sort of support also includes things like expanding IVF access,
Speaker 11: subsidized and fertility treatments, you know, improving embryo screening, that
Speaker 11: sort of thing. Places like Scandinavia also have generous leave policies,
Speaker 11: which are often cited as a model of soft pronatalism
Speaker 11: because it makes it easier for people to balance work
Speaker 11: and child. Are it. But you don't tend to hear
Speaker 11: these policies coming out of the much louder pronatalist conservative camp. Right,
Speaker 11: What do you get from them and from their pronatalism
Speaker 11: tends to be restrictions and women restrictions and abortion and
Speaker 11: body autonomy policies that conflict with the goals of reproductive
Speaker 11: justice and gender equality, sometimes putting women's health at risk.
Speaker 11: And also conservatives push lots of narrative with their pronatalism,
Speaker 11: large families, sense of valories. They frame childbearing as a
Speaker 11: civic duty. You know, they appeal to legacy and culture
Speaker 11: and identity when you get into that white supremacist camp,
Speaker 11: and you also get the whole eugenics of it, you know,
Speaker 11: the tech elite, praiselest wing. They're pushing for things like
Speaker 11: gene editing, embryo selection, and the sort of stuff that
Speaker 11: Musk is talking about with his racial replacement anxieties. In
Speaker 11: any case, the effectiveness of even the few positive policies
Speaker 11: has been pretty mixed. Countries have tried pumping billions into subsidies,
Speaker 11: and often fertility rates have barely budged deep structural issues
Speaker 11: like the cost of living, cultural norms around gender, career paths,
Speaker 11: health concerns. All these often ugwe the incentives of a
Speaker 11: couple of thousand dollars or extended opportunity leaves. You know,
Speaker 11: if people don't want to have babies, they're not gonna
Speaker 11: have babies. If they're not confident in their ability to
Speaker 11: have children raising environment that they feel is best for them,
Speaker 11: they're not going to have children. You know, people, more
Speaker 11: than ever have that choice. And unfortunately, a lot of
Speaker 11: the pronatalist policies don't care about making child bearing easier,
Speaker 11: you know, easing the path to make that choice. They
Speaker 11: just want to pressure people to have children. Yep, you know,
Speaker 11: the loose straight back to massogyny, a reaction against women's freedom,
Speaker 11: pushing them back into the kitchen, pushing them back into
Speaker 11: that subservient position in society. So, after looking at both sides, right,
Speaker 11: you have the anti natalists and the pronatalists. Don't create
Speaker 11: life to avoid suffering, or you must create life to
Speaker 11: preserve society. I guess you could call me a centrist.
Speaker 11: The anti natalists repulse me, and the pronatalists equally repulse me.
Speaker 11: You know, I'm wary of anyone claiming that you must
Speaker 11: have children or you must not have children. I'm weary
Speaker 11: of a world where these kinds of choices are coerced
Speaker 11: by others. You know, as an anarchist, I'm a firm
Speaker 11: believer in autronomy, in personal freedom and the ability to
Speaker 11: decide one's own life. That's what matters to me. You know,
Speaker 11: I don't intend to have children myself. I do like
Speaker 11: children a lot. I was once a child myself, and
Speaker 11: I look forward to being an uncle, a godfather and
Speaker 11: all that. But that's my choice. You know, Let your
Speaker 11: choice be your choice and my choice be my choice.
Speaker 11: Make choices freely, resist the pressure from either camp, and
Speaker 11: keep the agency intact. That's all I have to say
Speaker 11: on it.
Speaker 13: Honestly, Yeah, I mean honestly, that covers my stuff.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say so.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean with that if speaking rapid Yeah, all
Speaker 11: power to all the people. This has been It could
Speaker 11: happen here, Peace.
Speaker 22: Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here. I
Speaker 22: am your occasional host, Molly Conger, and today I have
Speaker 22: exactly the kind of story you probably expect when you
Speaker 22: hear my voice on this feed. A white nationalist has
Speaker 22: gone and done something we all wish that he was
Speaker 22: not doing. If you listen to my show Weird Little Guys,
Speaker 22: you already know a little bit about this particular guy.
Speaker 22: On that show, I talk about white nationalists, neo Nazis,
Speaker 22: right wing extremists, aspiring terrorists, things of that nature. My
Speaker 22: domain is mostly guys you've never heard of because they
Speaker 22: failed to live up to their goal of becoming the
Speaker 22: next Hitler or whatever. It's funnier than it sounds, I swear,
Speaker 22: But unfortunately for all of us, sometimes one of those
Speaker 22: guys breaches containment. The guy we're talking about today wants
Speaker 22: to be more than just one of the weird little
Speaker 22: guys trying to make a name for himself on the
Speaker 22: fringes of the white nationalist movement. He wants to be
Speaker 22: a congressman. He's trying to make himself everybody's problem, and
Speaker 22: that makes him part of what is happening here. Back
Speaker 22: in August, Representative Nancy Mace announced that she wouldn't seek
Speaker 22: re election in South Carolina's first congressional district and she
Speaker 22: would instead focus on making a run for governor. And
Speaker 22: that announcement opened the floodgates. All but one of the
Speaker 22: ten Republicans vying for the nomination to replace her filed
Speaker 22: their paperwork after the announcement. I don't pay a ton
Speaker 22: of attention to this sort of thing. It's not really
Speaker 22: my wheelhouse. But last month a man named Tyler Dikes
Speaker 22: joined the race, filing paperwork as a congressional candidate in
Speaker 22: Mace's district. Now, like I said, it's a crowded field.
Speaker 22: There are ten people in this primary, and it's Nancy
Speaker 22: Mace's district, So being a little bit of a conspiracy
Speaker 22: theorist with an extremely right wing policy platform doesn't really
Speaker 22: set you apart. They all kind of blend together most years.
Speaker 22: I probably couldn't tell you a whole lot about every
Speaker 22: primary candidate in my own district, let alone won two
Speaker 22: states away. So on the surface, he's just another carbon
Speaker 22: copy America first zelot trying to fit this particular mold.
Speaker 22: He's created an image for his campaign that's not unlike
Speaker 22: Nancy Mace's, and I guess that makes sense, right. These
Speaker 22: people voted for her, so maybe that's what works here.
Speaker 22: Tyler Diykes's campaign website is pretty similar to Nancy Mace's.
Speaker 22: They both emphasize their personal connection to military service. Nancy
Speaker 22: Mace graduated from the Citadel Military College and Tyler Diykes
Speaker 22: features photos of himself and his Marine Corps dress blues.
Speaker 22: They both describe themselves as entrepreneurs and business owners, and
Speaker 22: they both hate immigrants so much that their lust for
Speaker 22: mass deportation isn't even confined only to the pages devoted
Speaker 22: to their position on the issue. It's in their candidate biographies,
Speaker 22: and they frame themselves as fighters. There's a lot of
Speaker 22: fight based language, fighting for America, fighting for Christ, and
Speaker 22: they both really position their devotion to God as something
Speaker 22: they have to fight for and fight against the christ
Speaker 22: hating whardes on the left to keep like this is
Speaker 22: something someone's trying to take from them. Their platforms are
Speaker 22: pretty similar to America First, South Carolina first, law and order,
Speaker 22: tough on crime, deport millions of people. Nancy Mace is
Speaker 22: running for governor on eliminating the state income tax and
Speaker 22: if he gets to Congress, Tyler Diyke says he wants
Speaker 22: to slash taxes two but of the five main policy
Speaker 22: ideas on his congressional campaign website, the one that's about
Speaker 22: taxes the tax that he will cut as a congressman.
Speaker 22: He wrote that he will end property taxes. Now, regardless
Speaker 22: of how you feel about property taxes, those are imposed
Speaker 22: by your state and local government. The federal government doesn't
Speaker 22: tax your property. So I guess he's got that Republican
Speaker 22: tax cut spirit. But he's a little confused, but overall
Speaker 22: just another far right America First candidate trying to elbow
Speaker 22: his way into this attention economy. It's distasteful, it's bigoted,
Speaker 22: it's chrysto fascist, enophobic, poorly articulated, economically unsound, but it's
Speaker 22: not unique or interesting. These guys are a dime a dozen,
Speaker 22: and they'll mostly be gone by the time the primaries end.
Speaker 22: But there is one really weird thing about Tyler's campaign messaging.
Speaker 22: He keeps bringing up that he's not a Nazi. He
Speaker 22: wants you to know that no one's asking him this.
Speaker 22: He's bringing it up preemptively. I am not a Nazi.
Speaker 22: Letters that he mailed to the homes of hundreds of
Speaker 22: voters in his district are starting to raise questions he
Speaker 22: thinks are already answered in those letters.
Speaker 11: And here's the thing.
Speaker 5: They still call me a Nazi to this lick.
Speaker 21: They still random me is all these evil, horrific things.
Speaker 21: But let me tell you this what makes me a Nazi.
Speaker 21: I love Christ, I love God. I love my country.
Speaker 21: I love my state, my family, and my community and
Speaker 21: the entirety of the Low Country area. And that's why
Speaker 21: I live here.
Speaker 14: Because I love you so much.
Speaker 21: So does that make me a Nazi? Does love in
Speaker 21: your family? Does loving God? Does love in your country?
Speaker 21: Does that make you a Nazi? That makes you a nazi? Sophet?
Speaker 22: Oh, wow, he's just another tragic victim of cancel culture.
Speaker 22: He's being attacked by the woke mobs who hate good
Speaker 22: Christian men and that's why they're calling him nazi.
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 22: Is there another reason that this keeps coming up? Or
Speaker 22: is it just because he loves his family so much?
Speaker 13: So it's quite interesting.
Speaker 5: You know, my experience is anily six.
Speaker 23: For example, my brand is the neo Nazi domestic terrorists
Speaker 23: because hwave.
Speaker 22: Oh, it's not just because he loves his family. It's
Speaker 22: because he's a peaceful, patriotic supporter of Donald Trump who
Speaker 22: visited the Capitol Building and the communists who run the
Speaker 22: mainstream media are unfairly showing a photograph of him where
Speaker 22: he was simply waving hello to a friend. And that's
Speaker 22: why they're calling him nazi because he loves America too
Speaker 22: much and he waved Helloa to a friend while on
Speaker 22: a sightseeing trip to the Capitol Building. It probably won't
Speaker 22: surprise you to know that that is not the whole story.
Speaker 22: He's getting closer. It's definitely a little bit more about
Speaker 22: what specifically he was doing with his right arm at
Speaker 22: the top of the east stairs of the Capitol Building
Speaker 22: a little after two pm on January sixth, twenty twenty one.
Speaker 22: It's more about that than it is about his love
Speaker 22: of his family. He's getting warmer.
Speaker 6: See.
Speaker 22: The reason he keeps bringing up that he doesn't want
Speaker 22: to be called a Nazi is because there are Nazi allegations.
Speaker 22: But these allegations aren't just lies from the evil left
Speaker 22: wing media. It's something he's been asked about by the
Speaker 22: FBI and by the DOJ, and the Marine Corps and
Speaker 22: police in multiple jurisdictions across several states. A lot of
Speaker 22: people are asking him about the Nazi thing, So it
Speaker 22: makes sense that he'd want to get out ahead of
Speaker 22: it and assure the voters that there's a good explanation
Speaker 22: when he brings up that innocent wave that's being taken
Speaker 22: out of context to smear him as a Nazi. He's
Speaker 22: talking about a photograph, a particular photograph and one of
Speaker 22: many that federal prosecutors included in their sentencing memorandum. After
Speaker 22: Tyler Dykes accepted a plea agreement in federal court. He
Speaker 22: pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting an officer during
Speaker 22: the breach of the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one.
Speaker 22: In exchange for his cooperation, the government dropped the other
Speaker 22: eight counts on the indictment. So in that sentencing memorandum,
Speaker 22: there's a picture. It's a still frame that was taken
Speaker 22: from a video, but obviously you can't put a video
Speaker 22: on paper, so it's just a still frame, and it
Speaker 22: shows a mass of people making their way up the
Speaker 22: east steps of the Capitol Building on the afternoon of
Speaker 22: January sixth. Whoever's taking the video was standing at the
Speaker 22: bottom of the stairs, so you're just seeing the backs
Speaker 22: of the people in this crowd who are walking up
Speaker 22: the stairs, except for the figure in the center. In
Speaker 22: the center of the picture, at the top of the stairs,
Speaker 22: a very tall man in a black jacket and a
Speaker 22: gray mask has turned around so he's facing the plaza below,
Speaker 22: and he's sort of squared up facing down the stairs,
Speaker 22: and his right arm is completely extended at about a
Speaker 22: forty five degree angle elbow straight wrists, straight, fingers together.
Speaker 22: The government's caption reads still from video showing Dikes performing
Speaker 22: what appears to be the see Kyle's salute after he
Speaker 22: arrives on the landing in front of the East Rotunda doors.
Speaker 22: He maintains that he was waving to a friend. For
Speaker 22: what it's worth, I've seen a lot of these waves,
Speaker 22: and I know what it looks like to me, and
Speaker 22: regardless of what it looks like to you in this photograph,
Speaker 22: I have a video of him doing the exact same
Speaker 22: wave at a Nazi rally, so it's not just a picture.
Speaker 22: He only served three of the fifty seven months he
Speaker 22: was sentenced to spend in prison before he was released
Speaker 22: in January of twenty twenty five as a result of
Speaker 22: Trump's blanket pardons for the nearly sixteen hundred January sixth defendants.
Speaker 22: But that's not the issue here. He's not ashamed of
Speaker 22: being a January sixth defendant. That's a badge of honor.
Speaker 22: That's not a problem. If he can spin this Nazi
Speaker 22: thing into a story that reinforces this narrative of brave
Speaker 22: January sixth patriots who are being persecuted by communists and
Speaker 22: liberals and the woke mob, it stops being a problem
Speaker 22: for the people whose attention and votes and donations he wants.
Speaker 22: His story is pretty simple. All the people calling him
Speaker 22: a Nazi are lying. They're taking a single photograph out
Speaker 22: of context. It's not a Nazi salute, it's a wave.
Speaker 22: And all of this, all of this Nazi talk, it's
Speaker 22: all just about this one single incident, this one picture,
Speaker 22: this one wave, and the government, the government is preventing
Speaker 22: him from proving that.
Speaker 23: To you, and then the honorable judge that I had
Speaker 23: denied me being able to get that evidence and being
Speaker 23: able to show that people, and so a lot of
Speaker 23: these people, unfortunately, because of a lot of the news
Speaker 23: media and because of the outforts of the Biden administration,
Speaker 23: they see me as an enemy and as a terrorist.
Speaker 22: That's Tyler Dyke's in mid October of this year telling
Speaker 22: a local TV news crew in Hiltonhead that the media
Speaker 22: is complicit in spreading these lies the government told about
Speaker 22: him in court. When he was interviewed last month by
Speaker 22: a conspiracy theorist and right wing podcaster named Anne Vandersteele,
Speaker 22: she was on his side, She was earnest, and she
Speaker 22: won to get to the bottom of this. He told
Speaker 22: her that the government's entire case was lie after lie,
Speaker 22: and there's proof that he never did any of those
Speaker 22: things on January sixth. And she's excited to hear this,
Speaker 22: and she wants to see these videos because she would
Speaker 22: love to see proof that the government is persecuting our
Speaker 22: brave January sixth patriots. But there's one little problem.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, that's a very funny thing.
Speaker 10: The honorable judge in my case actually put out a
Speaker 10: gaggle order banning me from being able to have any
Speaker 10: of the discovery evidence for me to be able to
Speaker 10: defend myself from the force that is in the dockets.
Speaker 22: Oh, it's in the dockets. It's in the dockets. Phenomenal.
Speaker 22: I can look at the dockets. We can look at
Speaker 22: that together. That's easy. And I do see here that
Speaker 22: there is a protective order filed in this case. Shortly
Speaker 22: after he was first arrested, the judge entered an order
Speaker 22: prohibiting the public dissemination of certain discovery materials. If you
Speaker 22: look at enough J six cases, this kind of protective
Speaker 22: order was almost universal. The government didn't want to publicly
Speaker 22: release stuff like the names of confidential informants, security footage
Speaker 22: from inside certain secure government areas, personal information about witnesses,
Speaker 22: just a laundry list of kinds of evidence that was
Speaker 22: likely to be produced in these cases that would be sensitive.
Speaker 22: So they're not saying they can't turn it over to
Speaker 22: the defense in discovery. They're just saying this stays between us, right,
Speaker 22: This doesn't get released to the public. This was normal
Speaker 22: and it was routine, and it was agreed to by
Speaker 22: everyone involved. The defense council agreed to this. So okay,
Speaker 22: off to a good start. I do see a protective
Speaker 22: order on the docket. But if you skip down a
Speaker 22: year down to the bottom of the docket, to the
Speaker 22: end of the case. After the guilty plea, the government
Speaker 22: filed their exhibit list for the sentencing hearing, and in
Speaker 22: that document, the federal prosecutor wrote, the government does not
Speaker 22: object to any photo or video evidence being released.
Speaker 8: To the public.
Speaker 22: So of the exhibits they planned to show in court
Speaker 22: at sentencing, they said, it's okay if everyone sees these,
Speaker 22: the media can have these. And so the judge in
Speaker 22: turn asked defense counsel how they felt about that, and
Speaker 22: the defense replied, defendant Tyler Bradley Dyke's by and through
Speaker 22: his attorneys, does not object to the video and photo
Speaker 22: evidence identified and the government's noticed ECF number forty four
Speaker 22: being made publicly available. Defendant does subject to any public
Speaker 22: disclosure of his military records identified in Exhibit nineteen, and
Speaker 22: so the judge signed an order the exhibits that the
Speaker 22: government identified for the sentencing hearing, which the file names
Speaker 22: are in that document. It includes the video of the wave,
Speaker 22: the video of him grabbing the policeman's shield, the things
Speaker 22: he's saying he can't get yet. Based on the file names,
Speaker 22: those videos can absolutely be requested from the court. These
Speaker 22: aren't under seal. There's not a gag order. He can
Speaker 22: request these, and I think he should do that. There
Speaker 22: are a lot of videos on that exhibit list, and
Speaker 22: I'm sure people would like to decide for themselves if
Speaker 22: he's describing them faithfully. The only exhibit on that list
Speaker 22: for the defense objected to making publicly available, the only
Speaker 22: one that remains sealed and isn't available for public access,
Speaker 22: are his military records. Those military records are specifically the
Speaker 22: ones related to the other than honorable discharge he received
Speaker 22: from the Marines. See those campaign flyers, the ones he
Speaker 22: was mailing to people's houses. They're all signed at the
Speaker 22: bottom Tyler Dykes, US Marine Corps veteran business owner, pardoned
Speaker 22: J six's patriot On November tenth, the Marine Corps birthday.
Speaker 22: He posted a photo of himself in his dress blues
Speaker 22: on the campaign's Instagram account. Being a Marine Corps veteran
Speaker 22: is as big a part of his campaign identity as
Speaker 22: talking about how he's not a Nazi. These are kind
Speaker 22: of the top two things. He's a Marine, and he
Speaker 22: really wants you to know that Nazi stuff isn't true.
Speaker 22: And he was a Marine. That's true. He definitely was
Speaker 22: in the Marine Corps. But those military records that he
Speaker 22: doesn't want released would really undermine his narrative about being
Speaker 22: a proud, honorable veteran who definitely isn't a Nazi, because
Speaker 22: they would show that he received an other than honorable
Speaker 22: discharge for participating in prohibited extremist activity on November eighth,
Speaker 22: twenty twenty. And that's in the file. I know that
Speaker 22: specifically is in that sealed file because in other documents
Speaker 22: that refer to it, that's all it says. I don't
Speaker 22: know what else is in that record. All I know
Speaker 22: for sure is that the stated reason for his other
Speaker 22: than honorable discharge is something that happened on November eighth,
Speaker 22: twenty twenty. Now, luckily for us, I know that on
Speaker 22: November eighth, twenty twenty, a security camera in Sumter County,
Speaker 22: South Carolina recorded footage of two men. One of the
Speaker 22: men looked exactly like Tyler Diykes. Even his father had
Speaker 22: to agree it kind of did. And the men were
Speaker 22: putting up flyers with swastikas on them outside local businesses.
Speaker 22: I don't know if his military discharge records include anything else.
Speaker 22: Was it really just the flyers, just the one time
Speaker 22: with the swastika flyers and that was it. I don't
Speaker 22: know if the military was a where that he'd been
Speaker 22: attending things like a paramilitary training weekend at a compound
Speaker 22: in Michigan hosted by members of the neo Nazi group
Speaker 22: the Base. I don't know if there's a memo in
Speaker 22: there about the time in January of twenty nineteen that
Speaker 22: an FBI agent from the Joint Terrorism Task Force questioned
Speaker 22: him about his possible connections to domestic extremist groups. I
Speaker 22: don't know if the Marine Corps knew that he was
Speaker 22: one of just a handful of white nationalists who attended
Speaker 22: the Unite the Right to the flop of a Nazi
Speaker 22: rally held in Washington, d C. In twenty eighteen to
Speaker 22: commemorate the deadly rally that had happened a year earlier,
Speaker 22: and along that same line of thought. I don't know
Speaker 22: if the Marine Corps knew back then the Tyler Dykes
Speaker 22: had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville in
Speaker 22: twenty seventeen. I don't know if they saw the videos
Speaker 22: of him marching with a tiki torch or the videos
Speaker 22: of him punching wildly at counter protesters that he'd helped
Speaker 22: trap in that sea of flames. And with the exception
Speaker 22: of the United the Right rally in twenty seventeen, which
Speaker 22: was before he enlisted, all of the rest of that
Speaker 22: conduct occurred while Tyler Dykes was a Marine. He went
Speaker 22: to Nazi rallies, he joined Nazi groups, he put up
Speaker 22: Nazi flyers, he went to Nazi training camps to prepare
Speaker 22: for the race war, and he fought his way into
Speaker 22: the Capitol Building on January sixth. So, okay, yeah, he
Speaker 22: was a United States Marine. He can post that picture
Speaker 22: in his uniform on his campaign website. I don't care
Speaker 22: I'm not personally offended about him being a stain on
Speaker 22: the honor of the US military or whatever, but I
Speaker 22: think a lot of voters would feel like this isn't
Speaker 22: quite honest. By the time Tyler Dykes was arrested in
Speaker 22: twenty twenty three and extradited back to Virginia to face
Speaker 22: charges for menacing those counter protesters with a lit torch,
Speaker 22: he'd already been kicked out of the Marines. He had
Speaker 22: apparently hidden that from his parents, and there was a
Speaker 22: lot they didn't know about their son. The day he
Speaker 22: was arrested in twenty twenty three, he'd been out with
Speaker 22: other members of a group called the Southern Son's Active Club,
Speaker 22: a sort of white supremacist fight club for friendless young men.
Speaker 22: They were trying to hang Nazi banners from a highway overpass,
Speaker 22: but Tyler Dykes was bitten by a dog and had
Speaker 22: to go to the hospital instead. He eventually pleaded guilty
Speaker 22: to that felony charge in Almarle County, Virginia, related to
Speaker 22: the torch march, and he spent a few months in
Speaker 22: the local jail. On the day he was supposed to
Speaker 22: go home, he was picked up by a federal Marshal.
Speaker 22: The DOJ had waited until the last day of his
Speaker 22: sentence here to unseal the charges against him for January sixth,
Speaker 22: and after that he spent a year out on pre
Speaker 22: trial bond in that case. And then he eventually pleaded
Speaker 22: guilty to those charges in the summer of twenty twenty four,
Speaker 22: and he finally reported to federal prison in October of
Speaker 22: twenty twenty four to be there for almost five years,
Speaker 22: but he was released a few months later in January
Speaker 22: of this year after receiving a federal pardon, and now
Speaker 22: he wants to go back to the Capitol Building, not
Speaker 22: as a rioter this time, but as a congressman. The
Speaker 22: campaign is barely a month old. He's using a right
Speaker 22: wing crowdfunding site for campaign donations, so you can see
Speaker 22: that he hasn't cracked two hundred dollars yet. The only
Speaker 22: photo of his launch party is so tightly cropped that
Speaker 22: you can only see the candidate himself standing in an
Speaker 22: empty field in a public park. I don't think there's
Speaker 22: a lot of grassroots excitement for Tyler Diykes in South
Speaker 22: Carolina's first district. But if he does keep making the rounds,
Speaker 22: and if he ever ends up in front of a
Speaker 22: real reporter, I hope they'll ask him why doesn't he
Speaker 22: just produce those exhibits. The videos he's claiming are being
Speaker 22: kept from him under seal aren't. And if he so
Speaker 22: against any exhibits being held back from the court of
Speaker 22: public opinion, he could go ahead and release the one
Speaker 22: he actually has in his own possession, the only one
Speaker 22: that is sealed. He has his own discharge records show
Speaker 22: him to us. I'm dying to know how many of
Speaker 22: those Nazi rallies the Marine Corps knew about before they
Speaker 22: finally kicked him out. If you're interested in hearing more
Speaker 22: about this particular weird little Guy, there are two episodes
Speaker 22: available right now over on the Weird Little Guy's feed.
Speaker 22: Let's say Cool Zone Media show you can listen to
Speaker 22: wherever you get your podcasts. If you're in the Charleston area,
Speaker 22: or more importantly, if your conservative boomer parents are, it
Speaker 22: can't hurt to let folks know that one of your
Speaker 22: local candidates isn't being entirely forthcoming about why people are
Speaker 22: calling him a Nazi and wherever your conservative parents live.
Speaker 22: Maybe this is a useful example of the kind of
Speaker 22: thing you might find when you start at least scratching
Speaker 22: the surface of these America First candidates.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody, this is an emergency episode of it
Speaker 2: could happen here. We're dropping everything else for the most
Speaker 2: important breaking news in the country. Andy Dick has overdosed
Speaker 2: in public in the city of Los Angeles. Thankfully, in
Speaker 2: preparation for this, we've had our entire team deployed to
Speaker 2: the areas around Andy Dick's home. James, do you have
Speaker 2: any updates on the situation.
Speaker 24: No, I'm not sure who Andy Dick is. It's just
Speaker 24: like a public figure in a bout.
Speaker 2: I couldn't planned this out better. Andy Dick is America's
Speaker 2: sweetheart and he's going through some troubled times. But it's okay.
Speaker 2: They narcandem in public. No, it's Andy Dick's fault. This
Speaker 2: is entirely on Andy Dick. Ye on the person who
Speaker 2: had not Kerry Narkan.
Speaker 21: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, one should never feel sorry for Andy Dick. I
Speaker 2: feel bad for the narcan.
Speaker 4: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 4: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 4: and Andy Dick. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined
Speaker 4: by do.
Speaker 25: We've refer to someone the first time we only used
Speaker 25: the last name Garrison.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm joined by being James Shout, Robert Evans, and
Speaker 4: Sophy Lechter. We are covering the week of December fourth,
Speaker 4: December tenth.
Speaker 2: So one of the big stories of the last week
Speaker 2: or so is something that would seem would be unequivocally
Speaker 2: a bad thing in any other political climate, which is
Speaker 2: Netflix buying Warner Brothers and contributing to the shrinking ever
Speaker 2: further of like America's like the number of people who
Speaker 2: actually own all of the media that Americans consume.
Speaker 4: Yeah, monopolization is obviously bad.
Speaker 2: But in this case, I mean it's it's it's bad
Speaker 2: that on that end, it's probably better that Netflix buy
Speaker 2: it than Paramount. Yes, so I guess I'm like, well, okay,
Speaker 2: it's gonna be work creditor.
Speaker 13: Versus alien situation.
Speaker 4: It's a really a weird situation, right, because a lot
Speaker 4: of people are really dooming about you know, Netflix acquiring
Speaker 4: Warner Brothers and what that'll mean for like, you know,
Speaker 4: art and the you know, theatrical model of film distribution,
Speaker 4: and then not realizing that Paramount's counterbid based on Saudi money. Yeah,
Speaker 4: would place Warner Brothers in the control of one of
Speaker 4: the most Trump aligned like media enterprises in the United States,
Speaker 4: right now, Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, So let's let's let's roll back a second and
Speaker 13: look at what is actually going on here. And it's
Speaker 13: actually very important to note this is being recorded on Wednesdays,
Speaker 13: Zeber tenth. This whole situation is changing extremely quickly. There
Speaker 13: could be some another unhinged thing could have happened by
Speaker 13: the time you're listening to this. But the basics here
Speaker 13: is that Paramount which was recently acquired by sky Dance,
Speaker 13: Which is.
Speaker 4: Which direction did that acquisition go?
Speaker 13: I mean, technically speaking was a merger, but it was
Speaker 13: really but it was Skydance taking control of Paramount. Skydance
Speaker 13: had been run by Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison.
Speaker 5: David.
Speaker 13: Yeah. So and this is this is this is this
Speaker 13: is the regime that sort of imposed Barry Weiss on CBS,
Speaker 13: which has become increasingly right wing under her quote unquote leadership.
Speaker 13: We're going to do a full episode about this, I
Speaker 13: think on Monday.
Speaker 4: We're gonna be tuning into the Charlie Kirka Erica kirktown
Speaker 4: Hall on CBS this Saturday.
Speaker 13: Oh God, they can't make me. I will have recorded
Speaker 13: this episode before they did this. I'm going to be
Speaker 13: tuning in because it looks phenomenal, so it's worth putting out.
Speaker 13: So Larry Ellison, who is the father of David Ellison,
Speaker 13: is one of the most terrifying of all of the
Speaker 13: right wing billionaires. Yeah, he's kind of more quiet than
Speaker 13: someone like Andresen or Elon Musk about being a unhinged
Speaker 13: right wing fanatic. But he's one of Trust's biggest supporters.
Speaker 13: He has a whole thing about how everyone's inevitably going
Speaker 13: to be under total cont surveillalists that will make everyone
Speaker 13: behave Well, we'll cover this more later, but the Ellison's
Speaker 13: the father son Ellison duo and paramounts backed by the Saudis,
Speaker 13: Abu Dhabi and Catter.
Speaker 2: They want Bugs Bunny desperately because he keeps My sources
Speaker 2: are saying he keeps pranking Mohammed Ben Salmon.
Speaker 4: By cross dressing. Yeah, and it's really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the entire Saudi military is incapable of stopping bugs Bunny,
Speaker 2: I mean, bet for taking him down.
Speaker 4: Well, I think what's what's an interesting fact in these
Speaker 4: various bids for control of Warner Brothers. The Netflix deal
Speaker 4: does not include CNN. The Paramount deal does.
Speaker 13: Yeah, before we get intoff, should we should say what
Speaker 13: Paramount is doing now, which is Paramounts on Monday began
Speaker 13: to try to just do a hostile takeover by just
Speaker 13: straight up buying out the shares at what they're claiming
Speaker 13: is the higher share price. There's a whole lot of
Speaker 13: complicated stuff yeah about share pricing here that you don't
Speaker 13: really care about.
Speaker 2: And there have been so many dishonest headlines, like one
Speaker 2: being like Paramount lost the bid by just eventy five
Speaker 2: cents and seventy five cents to share. That's like hundreds
Speaker 2: and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 13: Gags, And that's not even it's it's all, it's all ridiculous. Yeah,
Speaker 13: the Wall Street Journal has been getting a lot of
Speaker 13: the information about this. We've gotten to a point on
Speaker 13: Wednesday where investors are going to the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 13: and being like, there's gonna be a bidding war. There's
Speaker 13: gonna be a bidding war. But the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 13: points out, and I think this is an interesting thing
Speaker 13: here that's important to say, these hostile takeover attempts almost
Speaker 13: never work. It's like thirty percent of the time. Yeah,
Speaker 13: and it's like sub thirty percent that these that these
Speaker 13: things kind of work. But the other card that the
Speaker 13: father's son Ellison duo have is claiming that Trump is
Speaker 13: more likely to back Paramount's buyout than the Netflix one
Speaker 13: because Trump can sort of stop this through anti trust yeah,
Speaker 13: or quote unquote anti trust stuff. Per Axios, Jared Kushner's
Speaker 13: consultancy firm is part of Paramount's buyout plan, and per
Speaker 13: Wall Street Journal, David Ellison met with TRUP with Trump
Speaker 13: administration officials in quote recent days, yeah, and has offered
Speaker 13: to you know this this comes back to what Garrison
Speaker 13: was saying about CNN being part about the part of
Speaker 13: this package they have been offering to effectively do to
Speaker 13: CNA what they did to CBS, which is put it
Speaker 13: under the control of the right wing fanatic and turn
Speaker 13: it into a propaganda pure propaganda outlet. This is you know,
Speaker 13: obviously corruption of a sort of mind blowing yeah, yeah,
Speaker 13: and a broad to the fact that like our quote
Speaker 13: unquote free press is literally just for sale. Amazingly, this
Speaker 13: is not this doesn't seem to be working.
Speaker 4: No, I mean, and Trump has spoken positively about Netflix
Speaker 4: and the Netflix CEO the past two days.
Speaker 13: But he's also speaking negatively about both of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, both the Netflix's negatively about Ellison recently. And there's
Speaker 2: a there's a quote from an article I found uh
Speaker 2: in the Wall Street Journal. Trump is so far avoided
Speaker 2: publicly backing a bitterer. None of them are particularly great
Speaker 2: friends of mine, he said at a White House round
Speaker 2: table on Monday. A person close to Trump said the
Speaker 2: President will want Paramount and Netflix to compete for his
Speaker 2: approval of a deal, which does sound very Trump.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and apparently the specific think he's mad at Paramount
Speaker 13: about is for having mergery Taylor Creen on CBSS.
Speaker 4: Yeah funny.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's so really funny.
Speaker 13: There is no amount of sort of ass kissing that
Speaker 13: you can do to actually make Trump consistently be on
Speaker 13: your side. It's really hideous. This is all disgusting.
Speaker 4: Unless unless you give him the FIFO World Peace Prize trophy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he'll die for FIFA now. Yeah, can I just
Speaker 2: say fuck me? He's actually renaming American football to soccer.
Speaker 11: God.
Speaker 4: I love the FIFA trophy because it looks disgusting trophy.
Speaker 2: Yes, I have fifteen minutes on that.
Speaker 4: It's just all all those hands grasping that ball.
Speaker 13: Ohh my god.
Speaker 21: Yeah.
Speaker 25: Really genuinely one of the one of the most impressive
Speaker 25: actors sports sick fantasy since nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 4: But but yeah, it doesn't seem like Trump is as
Speaker 4: keen to back Paramount's bit as what some of the
Speaker 4: Paramount people thought he might be. The Netflix deal might
Speaker 4: just end up actually going through.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, and we'll see about this. This is all
Speaker 13: gonna change probably by the time you're reading this or
Speaker 13: listening to this. That's that's the one that you do.
Speaker 13: But it's so cool that we live in an economy
Speaker 13: where your two options are Netflix destroys Film Forever and
Speaker 13: the Nazis gained control of CNN. It's great, great system. Yeah, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 4: Notes, And what what would really be damaging if if
Speaker 4: Paramount's able to buy Warner Brothers is that then they
Speaker 4: would be in charge of Nathan Fielder's rehearsal, which which
Speaker 4: does which does target the fascistic Paramount regime. Yeah, James,
Speaker 4: what's some what's some small news stories we can uh,
Speaker 4: we can go with here before our first break.
Speaker 25: Yeah, okay, I'm operating on a couple of computers here,
Speaker 25: so this is gonna I'm gonna have to work around
Speaker 25: some constraints.
Speaker 4: Fam good thing you're wearing your five eleven uniform to
Speaker 4: help maintain the discipline necessary.
Speaker 5: Girls.
Speaker 25: And this is not five eleven, my friend, this is
Speaker 25: five dot one dot one. Yeah, you can all get
Speaker 25: this ship outside of Syria and Iraq, and I fucking
Speaker 25: love it.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. I still have my knockoff Timberland shirt which
Speaker 2: just says fixing gand and looks honestly, the label looks
Speaker 2: like an AI slop tried to put the Timberland logo.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 25: My favorite is the one that just says sixteen five
Speaker 25: plus eleven. I love fake five eleven.
Speaker 24: Shit.
Speaker 25: If you have fake five eleven ship, I have a
Speaker 25: collection of it. Send it to me. I will retire
Speaker 25: and make a museum one day. I cannot get enough
Speaker 25: of it. I love that it started as a rock
Speaker 25: climbing brand in New Smite and now it is a
Speaker 25: lifestyle brand in Syria.
Speaker 24: It's perfect.
Speaker 2: I tell you, I missed my Adodus tracksuit that I got.
Speaker 24: A I got some I got some merle boots as well.
Speaker 24: Yeah I love that ship.
Speaker 25: I got a fake Gerban knife graber that that yeah.
Speaker 24: Yeah, bullshit knives. Yeah, one of my.
Speaker 13: Face putting out women's hats very soon.
Speaker 24: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 25: Okay, let's talk about the news. So this is a
Speaker 25: fun one. Schroding does permit, We're going to call it.
Speaker 25: In Pensacola, somebody participating in Food not Bombs was arrested
Speaker 25: Following that, at a press conference, the city announced that
Speaker 25: a person was arrested for being in a park too late, right,
Speaker 25: I guess in Florida, of course, yeah, this is this
Speaker 25: is the most serious crime, yes, and also giving food
Speaker 25: to poor people, which is probably like a felony in Florida.
Speaker 25: So the city then announced issue have been resolved because
Speaker 25: there had been there was a permit issued to Food
Speaker 25: not Bombs for them to.
Speaker 24: Be in the park late and give people food.
Speaker 25: Food not Bombs did not apply for the permit, nor
Speaker 25: do they want the permit, right, there's no kind of
Speaker 25: That's not how Food on Bombs works. Food not Bombs
Speaker 25: is an is an action, not an entity, right like
Speaker 25: it is a protest action. The city is now reviewing
Speaker 25: if the permit is releasable under public records law, so
Speaker 25: someone can find out who attempted to white Knight food
Speaker 25: not bombs.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 25: Some of the suggestions is as a guy who runs
Speaker 25: some kind of we will cooperate with the cops to
Speaker 25: get people off fentanyl charity, which uses some incredible AI
Speaker 25: imagery on its Instagram page.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds good.
Speaker 25: Yeah, so I will keep you updated on this, this
Speaker 25: Florida story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for that.
Speaker 7: James.
Speaker 25: In the Oregon versus Trump case regarding National Guard deployment,
Speaker 25: Judge J. Biby, not normally a guy associated with WOKE,
Speaker 25: a George W. Bush appointee, has penned an extensive opinion
Speaker 25: I think of sixty four pages on the domestic violence
Speaker 25: Clause at the Constitution and how it ought to restrain
Speaker 25: the use of the Guard. So it's like a different
Speaker 25: argument than we've seen previously, right in discussions about the
Speaker 25: National Guards, because.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've read the other judge opinion pieces, but not
Speaker 4: this one.
Speaker 24: Yeah.
Speaker 25: So Biby's been been in it for a while, and ye,
Speaker 25: like he's been someone who has previously not really been
Speaker 25: in a post of what I might see as of
Speaker 25: overreach in terms of state power and violence.
Speaker 24: But yeah, using this.
Speaker 25: This is a different close at a constitution, right, So
Speaker 25: it's now moving along in that discussion. Yesterday as we're
Speaker 25: recording this, so that would be on Tuesday. At the
Speaker 25: ninth the Democrats held they buy cameral shadow quote unquote
Speaker 25: shadow hearing on the detention of US citizens by DHS
Speaker 25: that doesn't really have the power to do much. And
Speaker 25: I have not had time to listen to the entire
Speaker 25: recording because it was only streamed on Facebook. I love
Speaker 25: that we have an opposition in this country.
Speaker 4: God, I love the Democrats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're really I like how together they've got it,
Speaker 2: like after a rough patch, they're really firing out.
Speaker 25: Yeah, like a phoenix from the ashes of an absolute
Speaker 25: ass for being in the election.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like an ass phoenix exactly.
Speaker 25: Yeah, ass phoenix. That's that's my band. Actually, I can't
Speaker 25: believe that you plugged us on there.
Speaker 24: Thank you. Okay.
Speaker 25: Trump's ongoing barrage of hate about Somali people has been
Speaker 25: met with some incredible posting. People who are not on
Speaker 25: x dot com will have miss this, but like genuinely
Speaker 25: some of the funniest response to some of the most
Speaker 25: hateful shit. Like Trump and Miller have both been on
Speaker 25: a and I guess Fox News. Fox News went to
Speaker 25: Minneapolis and heard a call to prayer and had a
Speaker 25: meltdown about it. But this is this campaign, I guess
Speaker 25: by Trump and Miller is very much ongoing. We spoke
Speaker 25: about that last week with a TPS and people an't familiar.
Speaker 25: They can check that out last week. Yeah, Aileen Higgins
Speaker 25: won the Miami mayoral election. Do I want to make
Speaker 25: a pit bull joke?
Speaker 5: The dog you're talking about, mister worldwide?
Speaker 25: Well, we could do. Margat is a major issue. I'm
Speaker 25: just trying to work on that acronym.
Speaker 2: Oh God, because I'm always thinking about mister worldwide James's
Speaker 2: He's never a far from my thoughts.
Speaker 25: No, I often think about Pitbull and how he and
Speaker 25: Hillary Clinton often were exactly the same thing.
Speaker 2: That's right, they have a lot in common. Actually, the
Speaker 2: primary thing is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I don't know, yes, but this is the
Speaker 4: first time a Democrat has won the mayoral office in
Speaker 4: Miami in almost thirty years, which is and it is
Speaker 4: wild significant.
Speaker 13: This is astonishing.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this was like a pretty decent win. This was
Speaker 4: a runoff election, but it's still a pretty pretty substantial win.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And I think there's there's There's a few important
Speaker 13: notes here. One is that even the Miami Cuba demographics
Speaker 13: swung massively towards the Democrats, which is sort of apocalyptic
Speaker 13: news for the Republicans, really really bad. If you're losing
Speaker 13: the Miami Cuban population.
Speaker 2: If you have got Miami Cubans to think critically about politics,
Speaker 2: things are dire. Yeah.
Speaker 13: And and the other thing here too is that the
Speaker 13: Florida Democratic Party, like I would compare them to clowns,
Speaker 13: but like these these motherfuckers make Bobo the Clown look
Speaker 13: like fucking Napoleon. These are the most some of the
Speaker 13: most incompetent people the entire history of politics, and the
Speaker 13: Republicans are losing to them. That's astonished.
Speaker 4: There were a couple of other results like this, Yeah,
Speaker 4: this week, Democrats flipped a Georgia State House seat. The
Speaker 4: seat moved blue by twenty two points.
Speaker 5: Geez yep.
Speaker 13: They flipped Albuquerque City council. There's all of these little results,
Speaker 13: and this has been happening basically since we got the
Speaker 13: first special elections of the Trump administration, where the Republicans
Speaker 13: are losing like ar plus twenty two districts. They're getting
Speaker 13: destroyed in places that it shouldn't be possible for them
Speaker 13: to lose. And this is another major confirmation of the
Speaker 13: media everyone hates them theory. Every day it gets more
Speaker 13: and more validated. Everyone can hate them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, last a small news story that I think is
Speaker 4: worth mentioning because it's a I think pretty important. Actually,
Speaker 4: conservative podcaster Benny Johnson is threatening to sue Milo Iianopolis
Speaker 4: for alleging that he is gay. So we're gonna be
Speaker 4: keeping up with this story pretty close. I know this
Speaker 4: has a lot of ramifications for listeners.
Speaker 26: Yeah, great, cool, we should do ads.
Speaker 2: We're back and we're talking about the January sixth pipe
Speaker 2: bomb guy suspect.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, we know there's a person. We don't
Speaker 2: know that it was a guy. We know someone planted
Speaker 2: those pipe bombs. I'm going to talk about the suspect.
Speaker 4: Ye.
Speaker 2: I want to start just for a little bit by
Speaker 2: again talking about the degree to which I really hope
Speaker 2: this is apocalyptic for the Blaze. Yeah, what they did
Speaker 2: is a case study and what you should never do
Speaker 2: as a publication. It was unethical, it was idiotic, and
Speaker 2: it was deeply dangerous. And if the Capitol police officer
Speaker 2: does not sue them. I don't know what kind of
Speaker 2: advice she's getting other than maybe just sheer terror at
Speaker 2: the number of death threats she's already received. But like ma'am,
Speaker 2: getting all of Glennbeck's money is the only thing that
Speaker 2: will keep you safe right now. Please do it now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So you were out last week when we got
Speaker 4: some the very first reporting on the pipe bomb arrest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, is the only thing I regret about
Speaker 2: my vacation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but very little information was out last week, and
Speaker 4: we have more information now regarding the alleged January sixth
Speaker 4: pipe bomber, or technically January fifth pipe bomber, who is
Speaker 4: now charged with transporting an explosive device with attempt to kill,
Speaker 4: injure or damaged property, and attempted malicious destruction by means
Speaker 4: of fire and explosive materials. According to court records, the
Speaker 4: FBI identified the suspect through cell tower records, license plate readers,
Speaker 4: and purchases of potential bomb making materials, including the pipes,
Speaker 4: the cap ends, the wires, steel, and nine volt batteries.
Speaker 4: It doesn't appear that they gained possession of new information,
Speaker 4: but by changing the agents looking at the information they
Speaker 4: were able to piece piece this together to actually make
Speaker 4: inaction on it, leading to the arrest.
Speaker 2: So it's a classic FBI story of they had all
Speaker 2: the information they needed to have caught this guy very
Speaker 2: long ago and did not yeah.
Speaker 4: Right, or lack the ability to like put the piece
Speaker 4: together in a way that makes them able to do arrest.
Speaker 2: But as is always the case, this was not an
Speaker 2: issue if they didn't have enough access to information. There
Speaker 2: was too much encryptied there, you know, they need more power. No,
Speaker 2: they had everything they needed. They just didn't think right,
Speaker 2: That's what it was. They weren't thinking right, you know.
Speaker 4: Still, very little has come out officially about the alleged
Speaker 4: bomber's potential motivation.
Speaker 2: Who may be innocent, let's be clear, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: There's nothing alluding to his motivation in the charging documents
Speaker 4: besides just an interest, a year's long interest in bombmaking,
Speaker 4: starting in twenty nineteen and continuing into like twenty twenty one. Now,
Speaker 4: NBC has reported based on sources inside the law enforcement
Speaker 4: investigation team, but Embassy's reported that before for the suspect
Speaker 4: acquired an attorney, he confessed to investigators and told the
Speaker 4: FBI that he believed in twenty twenty election conspiracy theories.
Speaker 4: But some new information from the New York Post, which
Speaker 4: I have verified, may have actually cracked this story wide open.
Speaker 4: They have learned that the suspect is a Brony. My
Speaker 4: Little Pony fan draws a lot of actually relatively good
Speaker 4: quality My Little Pony fan art and writes fins my
Speaker 4: Little Pony fan fiction. I could read some here.
Speaker 2: Garrison, what is the quality of their fan fiction? Yeah's
Speaker 2: just just give us like fifteen minutes.
Speaker 4: I'll read a paragraph. Quote Apple Bloom's eyes. It snapped
Speaker 4: open and she sat up in her bed, hinting heavily
Speaker 4: and sweat dripping from her red mane. It was another
Speaker 4: bad dream about that village she had discovered back in
Speaker 4: the ever Free Forest sunny Town. At first, it seemed
Speaker 4: like a normal, peaceful little village, kind of like Ponyville.
Speaker 4: What was strange was that none of the inhabitants had
Speaker 4: qut marks. In fact, they hadn't the slightest clue as
Speaker 4: to what a qutie mark was.
Speaker 2: So could you send me that link?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 4: H I'll actually I'll send this to the entire team chat.
Speaker 13: I'm demanding Hazard pay at the next union negotiations hazard pay.
Speaker 4: Actually like this is very standard but relatively good quality.
Speaker 4: My Little Pony broni activity non sexual entirely Like. I've
Speaker 4: looked at a lot of this guy's art. It's fairly clear, pros,
Speaker 4: fairly high quality. My Little Pony fan are in a
Speaker 4: variety of styles from different eras oft the show not
Speaker 4: like a sexually fetishistic depiction.
Speaker 2: Can't wait to see the headlines from this. Yeah, cool
Speaker 2: Zone host defends Capital bipe bombers pros.
Speaker 13: But no like.
Speaker 4: A high school classmate told Washington Post that he was
Speaker 4: bullied for having My Little Pony backpack in school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 4: He's had this interest for quite a while, kind of
Speaker 4: kind of tapered off a few years before before the bombing,
Speaker 4: But for a while this was like kind of one
Speaker 4: of his main hobbies. On a Tumblr profile, he lists
Speaker 4: his interest as quote hardcore music, video games, mainly horror drawing,
Speaker 4: improving myself philosophically, and anime. Unquote. Well, his grandmother has
Speaker 4: described him as quote almost autistic, like because he doesn't
Speaker 4: understand a lot of stuff.
Speaker 5: Unquote.
Speaker 4: He's only ever worked for the family bail bond business.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean, look, I'll say this, he wasn't bad,
Speaker 2: Like he could have had a future in a private
Speaker 2: security or something like that, like not bad ops as
Speaker 2: it turned out. Yeah, but I don't know.
Speaker 4: A funny slash a dark thing is that in the
Speaker 4: right wace just desperate effort to make everything about trans people.
Speaker 4: They have turned this Brony thing into like a you
Speaker 4: know the trans people also like my little pony and
Speaker 4: like Bronie and like like quotes from like psychologists in
Speaker 4: some of these articles about how how how Bronie is
Speaker 4: like play with like gender boundaries by by being fans
Speaker 4: of like a girl's, like a propery that's usually enjoyed
Speaker 4: by girls. So this was like a slight attempt to
Speaker 4: try to kind of paint this and like in like
Speaker 4: a pseudo translate, but that's not getting much traction because
Speaker 4: like people know what Bronie's are, and like, come on,
Speaker 4: I think this, this whole strategy is is on the
Speaker 4: out in some ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, am I am I incorrect here because I had
Speaker 2: just caught this, but I didn't. Actually this is like
Speaker 2: while I was on vacation, I had heard that he
Speaker 2: expressed a belief that the twenty twenty election was stolen
Speaker 2: from Trump.
Speaker 24: Yeah, that's see.
Speaker 2: Do we know if that's accurate? Okay, Okay, so he
Speaker 2: does seem that's been.
Speaker 4: Reported by the NBC that that he told investigators that
Speaker 4: he believed in like twenty twenty election conspiracy theories. Okay,
Speaker 4: the ones that were spread by Trump.
Speaker 2: So, I mean it seems like, from what we have,
Speaker 2: one of the more predictable ones. And like it's not
Speaker 2: if this is like a weird right wing you know, Bronie.
Speaker 2: This is not the first time right wing Bronie has
Speaker 2: done something violent.
Speaker 4: He doesn't seem super politic in my opinion, like none
Speaker 4: of his owne activity points towards a deep interest in politics.
Speaker 2: No, but if he said he thought the election was stolen,
Speaker 2: then that makes sense as being a contributing fact.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a factor perhaps, but not a huge like online
Speaker 4: presence that revolves around politics. Like a lot of people
Speaker 4: who aren't super into politics maybe thought the election was
Speaker 4: like stolen or like rigged.
Speaker 2: I mean, as we try to point out periodically, the
Speaker 2: vast majority of people who will carry out a shooting
Speaker 2: or other act of mass public violence in the US
Speaker 2: are going to have more in common with other people
Speaker 2: who do that than anyone specifically, just in political terms
Speaker 2: for the most part, because most of them are you know,
Speaker 2: there's their shooter stands there, they're they're that sort of thing,
Speaker 2: like this is their special interest bombings or whatever.
Speaker 4: He does seem to have, Like it's a lot of
Speaker 4: special interests, right. It used to be my little ponies,
Speaker 4: then it became bomb making that just seemed to be
Speaker 4: a special interest of his for like three or four years.
Speaker 4: Was just like the practice of bomb making. This is
Speaker 4: just just something he got like into, And I think
Speaker 4: that's more of a motivating force and like a specific
Speaker 4: partisan political motivation. And I think it's really funny, like
Speaker 4: reflecting on a statement that that that law enforcement leaked
Speaker 4: last week saying that he had like anarchist like leanings,
Speaker 4: which is very very amusing now in light of in
Speaker 4: light of all of that, for a long.
Speaker 25: Time, they have used anarchism to mean like a predilection
Speaker 25: for violence or chaos.
Speaker 2: Doesn't less like the government, right, Like yeah, yeah, part
Speaker 2: of this is just the way people tend to use
Speaker 2: the term anarchism. When I was doing my research for
Speaker 2: like the nuclear Doomstate device episodes, there's a bunch of
Speaker 2: otherwise great pieces that are like and then in the
Speaker 2: in the wake of a global nuclear war, society will
Speaker 2: collapse and all that will be left is anarchy. It's like, guys, like,
Speaker 2: it's not anarchy. That's that's going to be the problem
Speaker 2: that like, like you realize that the cause of a
Speaker 2: nuclear war is like, yeah, all of this, Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: it is not an anarchy as opposed to nuclear war.
Speaker 2: I'm worried about, for example, Yeah, yeah, then yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: worried about like democracy, fucking authoritarianism. I'm worried about all
Speaker 2: of those things. Anarchists would never have built the nuclear
Speaker 2: doom sdat of fights.
Speaker 24: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 25: It's why I used left libertarian sometimes in my academic writing,
Speaker 25: because it was just the term. It's just not comprehensible,
Speaker 25: especially someone coming having been raised on US media.
Speaker 2: And in the wake of a global nuclear war, you'll
Speaker 2: be lucky to get some anarchy because it probably means
Speaker 2: someone's found some food and it's cooking it for you.
Speaker 25: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. Food no bombs on like food off.
Speaker 25: They've rebranded, but that's still going food common.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bomb is actually done with bombs.
Speaker 13: We did it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Food One other update. I'll squeeze in here quick.
Speaker 2: It's short.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas can use
Speaker 4: its newly on congressional map in the upcoming twenty twenty
Speaker 4: six midterms, likely adding five Republican seats.
Speaker 5: The lower court order, which.
Speaker 4: Found the new map was racially jerry mannered intentionally, has
Speaker 4: been stayed indefinitely as the Supreme Court prepares to consider
Speaker 4: whether to overturn the lower court's ruling entirely, a process
Speaker 4: which could take months go well into the midterm cycle.
Speaker 4: So the Supreme Court is authorized the use of that
Speaker 4: new map for this next election.
Speaker 25: Talking of fan fiction and covers of things, here is
Speaker 25: a song that was originally the worst song by the
Speaker 25: Clash and now it's about tariffs.
Speaker 27: Jazz right jazz Bo Sorry, Locking jazz Bomb, Locking jazz Bob.
Speaker 4: I think the cover is of a similar quality as
Speaker 4: the alleged Bombers fan art in my opinion, Dear God,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of good twilight sparkle stuff that he
Speaker 4: was draw in.
Speaker 5: Come sorry, So all right.
Speaker 13: China is technically once again buying American soybeans. Is part
Speaker 13: of the sort of giant trade deal that Chi Jinping
Speaker 13: and Trump negotiated, but come it is not buying soybeans
Speaker 13: at the rate that the White House said it would
Speaker 13: in the fact sheet that was released by the White
Speaker 13: House about the negotiations. This is a huge problem because
Speaker 13: farmers are still not being able to sell enough soybeans
Speaker 13: to not get completely fucked, and the White House is
Speaker 13: now putting out a bunch of statements saying, oh no,
Speaker 13: we actually screwed up the fact sheet. They said that
Speaker 13: they would buy the soybeans not before the end of
Speaker 13: the year, before they at the end of like the
Speaker 13: growing season.
Speaker 24: That's good, that's good.
Speaker 13: Yeah. So and his other solution to this has been
Speaker 13: a twelve billion dollar farmer bail which is funny because
Speaker 13: he did a twelve billion dollar farm bailout in his
Speaker 13: first term when exactly the same thing happened and it
Speaker 13: didn't really do anything.
Speaker 4: Well, at least we're not bailing out let's say Argentina.
Speaker 24: Funny example, Garston, what makes you choose that one?
Speaker 13: Oh god? Yeah.
Speaker 9: So.
Speaker 13: The issue with this farmer's bailout is, and this is
Speaker 13: something that farmers have been saying through all of the
Speaker 13: trade press, any regular press. They can get access to,
Speaker 13: every local media outlet. Every single farmer who anyone has
Speaker 13: interviewed has gone, we don't want to bail out. We
Speaker 13: want to be able to sell our blasted soybeans, and
Speaker 13: they still can't. And this is, you know, a becoming
Speaker 13: a real problem for this administration that even after their
Speaker 13: giant negotiations to get tried out of by soybeans, they
Speaker 13: still can't do it. And farmers are continuing to be
Speaker 13: very very pissed off about this. Where are my beans? Yeah,
Speaker 13: they're sitting in the silos, They're still there. They can't
Speaker 13: sell them.
Speaker 25: How am I going to keep up my soy consumption
Speaker 25: and going to be for us to become a known
Speaker 25: the vegan Ocean era some other kind of boy, I guess.
Speaker 13: Yeah, Well, we'll just have to get it from Brazil.
Speaker 5: Ands that Brazil mentioned.
Speaker 2: Everyone cheer, Hey, they're doing good these days.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, hasn't there been some Bolsonnaro news recently?
Speaker 5: I feel like.
Speaker 2: There has been. Let's roll to ads and then we'll
Speaker 2: talk about it.
Speaker 13: Okay, this has been ur talk.
Speaker 2: We're back, and you know who's not free to listen
Speaker 2: to podcasts? Hear Bolsonnaro. We can hope after trying to
Speaker 2: cut off his ankle monitor. He has been taken into
Speaker 2: custody for attempting or probably trying to escape. Trump had
Speaker 2: made comments about it, expecting to see him soon. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't think. I think he's going to die in prison.
Speaker 2: He's not doing well. I will say one thing we
Speaker 2: got to do. You know, back when he got stabbed,
Speaker 2: I think everyone's opinion on it was like, oh, fuck,
Speaker 2: you've just you know, you've made him a martyr. You
Speaker 2: got to look cool and seem like a bad ass.
Speaker 2: This has done nothing but empower him.
Speaker 24: Yeah, no, it cares.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 2: Actually that stab did a lot of damage, Like that
Speaker 2: ruined his life, low key.
Speaker 27: Ye.
Speaker 2: So thoughts and prayers to that guy wherever he is.
Speaker 2: You know, we just didn't realize the level of game
Speaker 2: that you had, my man.
Speaker 4: No, I mean it's it's it's tough. I mean we
Speaker 4: used to have the two like of the world sickest men,
Speaker 4: Bolsonaro and Stephen Crowder just fighting it out to see
Speaker 4: who would stay sicker for a long But.
Speaker 24: Jordan Peterson that seems like erasia.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's taking the spot because he's still vanished from
Speaker 4: the Daily Wire because of his like.
Speaker 2: Bizarre His daughter says he's basically dead.
Speaker 25: Yeah, he's like patient zero for CWD and humans or something.
Speaker 4: Right, Like the Daily Wire still is acting like Peterson's
Speaker 4: is like still a person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it turns out Cold Turkey quitting Benzos via a
Speaker 2: fucking coma in Russia is a bad call.
Speaker 4: Speaking of Crowder, I did watch the two hours Stephen
Speaker 4: Crowder Nick Fuente's interview this week. Oh god, and it
Speaker 4: was really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll bet I can imagine.
Speaker 5: They were just like jerking each other off for two hours.
Speaker 4: Nick was trying to be nice and like not act
Speaker 4: like Steven's this like like totally irrelevant like boomer, and
Speaker 4: Stephen was trying to make Nick think he was cool,
Speaker 4: and it was so painful to watch.
Speaker 5: The entire time.
Speaker 13: Sat Yeah, it was.
Speaker 4: It was bad. There was nothing else notable from that.
Speaker 4: I guess let's actually move to some notable notable stories
Speaker 4: to close this episode.
Speaker 25: Yeah, so I want to talk about the case of
Speaker 25: Faustino Pablo Pablo. A US District court in El Paso,
Speaker 25: Texas has grown too Mister Pablo Pablo a tentative restraining
Speaker 25: order directing the government to return him to the United
Speaker 25: States by the twelfth of this month, which will be
Speaker 25: the day that you were.
Speaker 24: Hearing this episode. Mister Pablo Pablo enter the USA in twenty.
Speaker 25: Twelve and was found removal by However, that judge granted
Speaker 25: his application for withholding of removal under the Convention against
Speaker 25: Torture because he would likely be tortured if he was
Speaker 25: returned to Guatemala, which is where he's from. In theory,
Speaker 25: he was removable therefore to a place where he would
Speaker 25: not likely be tortured. Right, this is what we've seen
Speaker 25: the US government doing more and more in the last year. Really,
Speaker 25: he spent more than a decade. He moved to California,
Speaker 25: attended his ICE check ins until he was detained at
Speaker 25: an ICE check in on the fifth of November. Mister
Speaker 25: Pablo Pablo's lawyer filed a habeas petition and asked the
Speaker 25: court to enjoin ICE from removing him from the Western
Speaker 25: District of Texas, which is where they took him on
Speaker 25: the seventeenth of November. Right, so he was detained on
Speaker 25: the fifth. People who listened to my immigration series a
Speaker 25: couple of weeks ago will be familiar with this. Right,
Speaker 25: people were detained in La ferried all around California and
Speaker 25: then sent to Texas.
Speaker 24: This is what happened in his case.
Speaker 25: He wouldn't have been sent to the same place for
Speaker 25: people of my serious work, because that's for family detention.
Speaker 25: By the time the court ordered the government not to
Speaker 25: remove him, they had already sent him back to Guatemala,
Speaker 25: just to cover There is one country in the world
Speaker 25: that he has with holding of removal to because he
Speaker 25: will be tortured there most likely, and that is where
Speaker 25: they sent him. The government conceded that they had made
Speaker 25: a mistake and said they quote tentatively scheduled a flight
Speaker 25: for the fourth of December. He did not take that flight.
Speaker 25: As far as we know, he is dolling Gatemalae. He's
Speaker 25: in hiding and the court has ordered that the government
Speaker 25: facilitate his return by the twelfth of this month, so
Speaker 25: we'll probably update you on that in next week's ed.
Speaker 4: I'm going to talk about an expansion of social media monitoring,
Speaker 4: which we've already seen for visa applicants, but now expanding
Speaker 4: out to tourists as well. Customs of Border Protection and
Speaker 4: DHS have posted a sixty day notice for a proposal
Speaker 4: to revise the electronics system for travel Authorization Application, which
Speaker 4: is a waiver that some foreign tourists can use to
Speaker 4: avoid getting a tourist visa. The proposal is to add
Speaker 4: mandatory social media collection for all foreign tourists using the
Speaker 4: ESTA visa waiver. This proposal would require that applicants provide
Speaker 4: the social media information from the past five years, citing
Speaker 4: a January Executive order quote protecting the United States from
Speaker 4: foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats unquote.
Speaker 4: This would match the sort of social media monitoring we've
Speaker 4: seen applied to some visa applicants and immigrants, just now
Speaker 4: extending out to tourists using the ESTA application, and to
Speaker 4: comply with this January Executive order. CBP is also planning
Speaker 4: to add quote several high value data fields to the
Speaker 4: ESTA application when feasible unquote. This would include quote telephone
Speaker 4: numbers used in the last five years, email address is
Speaker 4: used in the last ten year, IP addresses, and metadata
Speaker 4: from electronically submitted photos. Family member names, parents, spouse, siblings, children,
Speaker 4: family telephone numbers used in the last five years, family
Speaker 4: member dates of birth, family member places of birth, family
Speaker 4: member residences, biometric face, fingerprint, DNA and IRIS, business telephone
Speaker 4: numbers used in the last five years and business email
Speaker 4: addresses used in the last ten years unquote.
Speaker 25: Yeah, this is a wild amount of data. I mean
Speaker 25: they can flash some of this like really quickly again
Speaker 25: against like quote unquote watch lists, right, Yeah, but some
Speaker 25: of this A like to gather this data to gather
Speaker 25: biometric data, that's not possible with like you say, you're
Speaker 25: applying on your cell phone or your your home computer, right,
Speaker 25: so this might require an appointment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, for some of the fingerprint stuff. Part of the
Speaker 4: proposal is also requiring selfie be submitted with this application,
Speaker 4: separate from what iver is on the ID that is
Speaker 4: being used, and so they can extract some like facial
Speaker 4: biometrics from that. Yeah, but they can also they can
Speaker 4: also collect that stuff like at the airport reports of entry.
Speaker 4: They have fingerprint scanners now at a lot of these
Speaker 4: like entry kiosks.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 25: Yeah, the selfie isn't just a selfie, it's what's called
Speaker 25: a facial liveness scan, which is what we've spoken about
Speaker 25: before with CBP one right that like notoriously was very
Speaker 25: poor at capturing black faces. Generally, you sort of have
Speaker 25: to like move the phone around your face to check
Speaker 25: that It's like, it's not me holding up a life
Speaker 25: sized copy of Garrison, it's actually Garrison.
Speaker 5: A three D Garrison.
Speaker 25: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, the Garrison mannequin that we all
Speaker 25: got for Christmas last year.
Speaker 4: Can you can excuse that one to me?
Speaker 24: Sorry, it's not legal in New York.
Speaker 25: Yeah, this will make it a lot harder for people
Speaker 25: to apply forest divisas. It's going to create a massive,
Speaker 25: like dragnet of data for people applying forest visas. Yes,
Speaker 25: seeing that kind of is the goal already, right, So,
Speaker 25: like if you live in these countries, you don't always
Speaker 25: qualify for an esther. There are certain things you could
Speaker 25: have done, certain countries you could have been to, certain
Speaker 25: like if you have a criminal record, et cetera, where
Speaker 25: there you wouldn't be able to get an esther. So
Speaker 25: this is kind of already a something of a like
Speaker 25: a pre vetted group and countries who from which systems
Speaker 25: can apply for esters?
Speaker 24: Is that in itself? It's like a tea, right, Not
Speaker 24: everyone in the world can apply for an esther.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's already a semi exclusive waiver with like a
Speaker 4: cost burden as well.
Speaker 25: Yes, yeah, yeah, it creates a massive data data mind
Speaker 25: which I'm guessing might be what they what they're going for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, just the normalization of this sort of
Speaker 4: like social media scetting to identify, you know, undesirable political
Speaker 4: beliefs that Mark Rubio in the Department in the Department
Speaker 4: of State or DHS seems is like a national security threat.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also have kind of my fringe fears that
Speaker 2: this will be used to train but yeah, we'll say, yeah,
Speaker 2: how is this not going to be catastrophic for any
Speaker 2: business that relies on tourism, any state that relies on tourism, Like.
Speaker 24: Like yeah, Florida.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know that's not the top risk, but like
Speaker 2: it just seems again they're they're they're going out of
Speaker 2: their way to fuck over every single demographic in the country,
Speaker 2: which I don't think is going to work out.
Speaker 5: For them in the long term.
Speaker 25: Yeah, it's a uh, this is yeah, this is a
Speaker 25: weird one for me because it's the Yeah, the economic
Speaker 25: cost is so obvious.
Speaker 2: It's a it's a catastrophe, And there's a part of
Speaker 2: me that's like, maybe this is a good thing, just
Speaker 2: because it's part of like, right, we've always known and
Speaker 2: have been trying to say for years every single aspect,
Speaker 2: like they these people are bad for everybody. There's like
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty people in the country who benefit
Speaker 2: from the policies that like the most extreme parts of
Speaker 2: the right wants to push, and everyone else is going
Speaker 2: to be completely fucked over by it, and we might
Speaker 2: as well just take the mask off. And maybe that's
Speaker 2: some of what we're seeing in the collapse of Trump's
Speaker 2: approval is people realizing, like, oh my god, these guys
Speaker 2: really just want to destroy everything good about life like that.
Speaker 2: That is conservatism in a nutshell.
Speaker 5: We hate life and ourselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, well yeah, that's that was the Democratic Party
Speaker 2: in that symptoms garrison.
Speaker 25: But we want what's worse for everybody there that's yes, yeah,
Speaker 25: you got it. Yeah yeah, talking of worse for everybody.
Speaker 25: Do we want to talk about the National Security Strategy
Speaker 25: document that the Trump administration releases.
Speaker 5: Go for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should do a dedicated episode about that, but
Speaker 2: we could talk briefly about it.
Speaker 4: We have fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2: That's not you saw fifteen Yeah.
Speaker 25: I've pulled a lot of quotations from it, and we're
Speaker 25: not gonna be able to discus sort of the mare.
Speaker 25: I think we will have to discuss this probably next
Speaker 25: year when we do the whole episode on it. It
Speaker 25: is one of the more like especially in terms of
Speaker 25: like foreign relations, one of the more like sort. This
Speaker 25: is our ideology, this is our outlook, and these are
Speaker 25: our goals documents that I've seen from this administration. Right,
Speaker 25: they talk about how I'll just quote from it here.
Speaker 25: American strategy since the end of the Cold War have
Speaker 25: fallen short. They have been laundry lists of wishes or
Speaker 25: desired end states, and have not clearly defined what we want,
Speaker 25: instead stated vague platitudes and have often misjudged what we
Speaker 25: should want. They talk about how they are going to
Speaker 25: retain soft power. Soft power people now familiar is a
Speaker 25: theory that Joseph Nye had an international relations It's a
Speaker 25: power to compel or persuade rather than to force. Right,
Speaker 25: the United States has been hemorrhaging soft power like someone
Speaker 25: with their artery cut, like in the last twelve months,
Speaker 25: like seft power is a fraction of what it was
Speaker 25: a year ago. I find it very odd to see
Speaker 25: them even mentioning that, to be honest, when like I mean,
Speaker 25: they have soft power of your victor orban talking of
Speaker 25: orban there's this incredible stuff about Europe. Here quote we
Speaker 25: want to support our allies in preserving the freelom and
Speaker 25: security of Europe while restoring Europe's civilizational self confidence and
Speaker 25: Western identity ha riste.
Speaker 24: Another quote that's good, this is wild.
Speaker 25: The larger issues facing Europe include the activities of the
Speaker 25: European Union, other transnational bodies undermine political liberty and sovereignty,
Speaker 25: migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife,
Speaker 25: censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, creatoring
Speaker 25: birth rates, and the loss of national identities and self confidence.
Speaker 25: Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in
Speaker 25: twenty years or less, and then a missing skipping of
Speaker 25: it here. We want Europe to remain European.
Speaker 4: This just sounds like your average like white nationalists like
Speaker 4: Twitter posts.
Speaker 25: Yeah no, yes, it comes from Twitter, right, this is
Speaker 25: just the Twitter.
Speaker 4: Replies, like very twitter brained like types of politics.
Speaker 13: Yeah yeah, this guy has like a Greek statue avatar exactly.
Speaker 4: I think it's really fun to think of Europe being like,
Speaker 4: I'm Europe. I have a lot of self confidence issues.
Speaker 4: I can't really speak up for myself in in in
Speaker 4: big groups like the European Union, Like come on, what
Speaker 4: do you mean self confidence to grow up?
Speaker 24: Yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 25: They're like, you know, they're they're saying that, like what
Speaker 25: European people don't have enough, like like what European pride?
Speaker 4: People don't respect my Western identity Like okay, yeah.
Speaker 25: Notably, like for instance, the country of France, a country
Speaker 25: which lacks self confidence and pride in this identity.
Speaker 24: This is this has been an issue for a long time.
Speaker 4: It's it's very funny to have this in like a
Speaker 4: this is like a US foreign policy or national security documentary.
Speaker 25: Yeah, this is like these are the guiding principles of
Speaker 25: our foreign policy going forward.
Speaker 4: And they're like jerking off about like Europe remaining European.
Speaker 25: Yeah yeah, it's just like shit talking an entire continent.
Speaker 4: No, America should think Europe is gay and we should
Speaker 4: stay away from it. That's what our national security party
Speaker 4: should be is Europe is gay. We don't want to
Speaker 4: deal with whatever Europe is doing. We're America.
Speaker 24: Yeah, leave us alone.
Speaker 2: Yeah that ended really well for us in the theory.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 25: Well, there's almost like a like a like an early
Speaker 25: twentieth century vibe to this document. They talk about the
Speaker 25: Monroe doctrine, Yeah, they do, and they talk about the
Speaker 25: Trump corrollary to the Monroe doctrine, which they define as quote,
Speaker 25: we will deny non hemispheric competitors the ability to position
Speaker 25: forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control
Speaker 25: strategically vital assets in our hemisphere. Which the people aren't
Speaker 25: familiar with the Monroe doctrine. It's the US sort of
Speaker 25: has a right and obligation to exercise some control over
Speaker 25: the outcome to the entire Western hemisphere, like say Venezuela. Yes,
Speaker 25: that would be one example, Keraton.
Speaker 4: Yeah, see, it's totally different from Iraq because this is
Speaker 4: on our ham So it's good intervention actually mm hmm.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 25: Manifest destiny has given us the right to all of
Speaker 25: the Americas, and so we can we can intervene in
Speaker 25: outcomes there. There's a lot about the nation state in here,
Speaker 25: and like the idea that they quote unquote nation state
Speaker 25: should prioritize its own interests. I wonder what they're talking
Speaker 25: about there, because like we have many nations that are
Speaker 25: exclude different states all around the world, right, like the
Speaker 25: Kurds being one example, Right, like they are they saying
Speaker 25: that nations and states should always align, whilst like their
Speaker 25: special envoyage Syria is saying that he said this week
Speaker 25: the decentralization has never succeeded in the Middle East, which
Speaker 25: is a wild statement to be saying in a place
Speaker 25: where like you can drive in a single day to
Speaker 25: the sites of three different genocides from northeastern Syria, right,
Speaker 25: you can see how the place where the Armenian genocide happened,
Speaker 25: the u CD genocide, and the Anphal Like you can
Speaker 25: do that driving a day if you don't get hung
Speaker 25: up at the border.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, honestly before now if we're counting some
Speaker 2: of what was done against the White Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: a little unclear at the moment, but yeah, sure yeah.
Speaker 25: Like to say that centralization is the only way from
Speaker 25: the Middle East is a wild statement. So I don't
Speaker 25: know how some of this pans out. There's also a
Speaker 25: lot here on border security as national security, right, sure,
Speaker 25: I'm just going to read one. They use the word
Speaker 25: nation a lot. Nationalism was a sub field of by PhD.
Speaker 25: So obviously, like I'm interested in the exact understanding of
Speaker 25: nation they have here because there are several, but throughout history,
Speaker 25: sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration a grated citizenship only rarely
Speaker 25: to foreigners who also had to meet demanding criteria. The
Speaker 25: West experience over the past decades vindicates this enduring wisdom
Speaker 25: in country throughout the world, mass migration as strained domestic resources,
Speaker 25: increased violence out of the crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted
Speaker 25: labor markets, and undermined national security. The era of mass
Speaker 25: migration must end. Border security is the primary element of
Speaker 25: national security.
Speaker 4: Great, this is the only terrain they have left because
Speaker 4: they've abandoned class interests and like exploitation. So the only
Speaker 4: thing they can actually focus this on, and they focus
Speaker 4: focus the economy on, is through nationalist immigration policies. This
Speaker 4: is like the last refuge for the right once they're
Speaker 4: still trying to appeal to some sort of populism but
Speaker 4: don't actually want to address real class conditions.
Speaker 25: Yeah, and for a lot of the right, when they
Speaker 25: talk about nationalism, they are talking about ethno nationalism, right.
Speaker 25: The people, you know, the people are the nation, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 25: the vulk like which is not always the bloods nationalism.
Speaker 25: It's one type of nationalism. It's not all types of nationalism, right, Like.
Speaker 4: That's the cool thing about the United States, And this
Speaker 4: is the one country, one of the only countries where
Speaker 4: this that principle has been like opposed in variy degrees
Speaker 4: since the country is founding.
Speaker 25: Yeah, like it's supposed to be the example maybe along
Speaker 25: with France, right of like subscriptive now where nationalism was
Speaker 25: not an ethnic quality, it was subscribing to a set
Speaker 25: of values and belief philosophical idea. Yeah, that does not
Speaker 25: seem to be the vibe I'm picking up. There's a
Speaker 25: lot more in this document. They spend a decent part
Speaker 25: of its ship talking other document, other previous national security strategies. Yea,
Speaker 25: these are always good for both. But we're going to
Speaker 25: keep it brief and then off they go. But yeah,
Speaker 25: I think it's it's worth us maybe doing the whole
Speaker 25: episode on because I think it's one of the more
Speaker 25: like coherent statements of believery. Not not a lot of
Speaker 25: this stuff is new. We knew that's how they thought
Speaker 25: about immigration. Yeah, you hear them talk about it on
Speaker 25: Fox on News Max. Like any Stephen Miller like public
Speaker 25: statement is you know, it's going to talk about talk
Speaker 25: about how immigration is changing, you know, the economic makeup
Speaker 25: of the country, and like the core identity of the
Speaker 25: country is changing wei to defend Western identity, that sort
Speaker 25: of stuff. Yes, seeing it all written in document together,
Speaker 25: I think is where this has value totally. And I think, yeah,
Speaker 25: seeing that all laid out, seeing that, you know, the
Speaker 25: way these things play into their view of the world.
Speaker 25: And then as I following what's actually happening in the world,
Speaker 25: and like you know clearly that when they're talking, they're
Speaker 25: talking about.
Speaker 24: The United States.
Speaker 25: When they're talking about nations, right, they're not talking about
Speaker 25: the Kurds, They're not talking about your Zds, the Catalans,
Speaker 25: southern nations that don't have states.
Speaker 4: Right. It's just so funny because they lay out all
Speaker 4: these economic things, right, straining domestic resources, violence and crime,
Speaker 4: weakened social cohesion, and destroyed labor markets. Right, they lay
Speaker 4: out all of these things which have direct like like
Speaker 4: economic cause hole drivers. Yeah, and they're like, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 4: it's actually not about these economic factors. It's just about immigration,
Speaker 4: like they're so it's so blatant.
Speaker 25: Yeah, no, other ideology and history escape go to a
Speaker 25: certain group for the economic disaster in the country. That's
Speaker 25: never happened before.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's just one for one. If you go back
Speaker 13: to moish Postone's theory of like structural anti Semitism as
Speaker 13: the driver of the Holocaust, it's literally just this, right,
Speaker 13: except this is an even more blatant version of it.
Speaker 4: Seem like the Nazis, even though did try to do
Speaker 4: some like populist economic policies as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, the Strength through Joy program.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the modern American right doesn't even try to do that.
Speaker 4: It's just the immigration. They're not even doing like a
Speaker 4: weird like like right wing like socialized there.
Speaker 2: There's all this I'll push back. There's a little bit
Speaker 2: of like the talk with oh, we're gonna have a
Speaker 2: give every American thousand dollars that will be invested in that.
Speaker 2: Like there's there they are like.
Speaker 4: They talk about it, they don't do it.
Speaker 5: They don't do it.
Speaker 25: They talk about it. Yes, sometimes, Yeah, he talked about
Speaker 25: a tariff check. Right, Trump was going to give every
Speaker 25: every American check. Yeah yeah, yeah. The first time they
Speaker 25: date during COVID, Right, they threw some money around, but.
Speaker 4: There was that like, yeah, one or two stimulus checks
Speaker 4: we got at the end of COVID. Yeah, the end
Speaker 4: of a first you know, back of the pandemic cycle
Speaker 4: to be more accurate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Robert.
Speaker 4: Was there one other thing you wanted to talk about?
Speaker 24: We have time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is basically related to the Warner Brothers acquisition.
Speaker 2: For whatever reason, Reddit's algorithm will periodically give me little
Speaker 2: hints and bits of the war between Zack Snyder fans
Speaker 2: and the rest of the world.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I know a lot about this. I know
Speaker 4: a lot about this.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm not a big Zack Snyder fan, you know, but
Speaker 2: I don't care. Like I didn't feel strongly anti or
Speaker 2: pro his his DC movies. There are some crazy people
Speaker 2: out there who believe and they are like reading the
Speaker 2: tea leaves. They think the Saudis are going to like
Speaker 2: kill his enemies.
Speaker 5: They're going to restore the Snyder for Strobert.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is I've been following this just as like
Speaker 4: a personal interest for you nuts.
Speaker 5: It's crazy.
Speaker 4: They're fascinating people like they're fascinating you. Unique people to study,
Speaker 4: like the.
Speaker 2: Number of people who literally believe that it like it.
Speaker 2: There should be people executed publicly for for not letting
Speaker 2: Zack Snyder finish his movies. That didn't make money is.
Speaker 4: Out because well because Netflix has parted with Snyder for years,
Speaker 4: when when if Netflix takes over, they're obviously going to
Speaker 4: restore the Snyder Verse. James Gunn is going to be You're.
Speaker 2: Going to restore the Snyder paramount, take over the saudis.
Speaker 13: We can do it too.
Speaker 4: So it's it's really for Snyder bros. Things are looking up.
Speaker 4: So put your money in Snyder coin right now.
Speaker 2: Well, my favorite thing about that is that like as
Speaker 2: soon as they announced the deal, they were like and
Speaker 2: James Gunn is staying. They talked a lot about him
Speaker 2: on the call because like his movies are a big
Speaker 2: part of what makes what are valuable right now? Right,
Speaker 2: Like he's good at making money for the people that
Speaker 2: he works for. And the level of conspiracy theories like
Speaker 2: no they have, it's like it's great have to hide
Speaker 2: Zack Snyder's back because they can't let people know yet,
Speaker 2: but he's already been told.
Speaker 4: He's been doing this for like eight years.
Speaker 2: It's so funny. I had not realized how crazy they were.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love it. It's really fun.
Speaker 2: Anyway. That that's I always enjoy encountering a new cult.
Speaker 2: I think Zach is kind of taking advantage to them
Speaker 2: to get his insight follower account. Yes, it's very funny
Speaker 2: because he's like posting stuff that's like they're reading. Is
Speaker 2: like he's messaging that it's coming back, even when guys
Speaker 2: like Ben Affleckx like it was the worst. I hated
Speaker 2: being Batman. I would never do that again. I don't
Speaker 2: want to be it's I I love it. I just
Speaker 2: love seeing deranged people be it arranged about something that's
Speaker 2: actually harmless for once. Yeah, we could get we could
Speaker 2: get a Snyder verse related shooting. That's not impossible.
Speaker 4: Snyder does encourage it a little bit. But yeah, Snyder
Speaker 4: is not I think the villain of this story.
Speaker 2: And no, he's clearly friends with Gun like they're they're no, no.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and I uh. Specifically, he has dropped his plans,
Speaker 4: which which he had for years, to do some mind
Speaker 4: randed adaptions, which I'm bummed about because I think Snyder's
Speaker 4: heron raand would be great and instead instead he's writing
Speaker 4: this like this like lesbian movie with someone with yeah,
Speaker 4: and so unfortunately we're trading iron rand for like this
Speaker 4: like lesbian cinema slop, which I'm I.
Speaker 2: Am just lesbian I am really about because.
Speaker 4: I think I think Zack Snyder's Iron Rand would be
Speaker 4: a much more fascinating piece of art.
Speaker 2: No, No, I want to see Ben Shapiro get one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty million.
Speaker 13: That's what I've got.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, they bought exclusive TV rights to one of the
Speaker 4: one of the books I for I forget if I forget
Speaker 4: if it was Funtain Head or Atlas Shrugged. But since
Speaker 4: the Daily Wires like finances have collapsed, I do not
Speaker 4: think they're going forward with that right now.
Speaker 2: Oh but but gare the pendragonsight it's coming out though.
Speaker 13: I'm excited, right, we got.
Speaker 2: To watch that together, but you gotta find it.
Speaker 5: We gotta.
Speaker 2: We gotta have the company pay for us to meet
Speaker 2: in the Airbnb in a state and and just just
Speaker 2: watch that, son of a bit.
Speaker 4: If we want to this year to plan some kind
Speaker 4: of a cool zone convergence to to to watch uh,
Speaker 4: to watch the pen Dragon cycle together, I would I
Speaker 4: would hapily travel for that.
Speaker 2: I think we're ethically obligated to do that.
Speaker 13: Okay, final final closing note. Trans housing insecurity continuing to increase.
Speaker 13: But if you have an extra room, put a transperson
Speaker 13: in if you have a couch, put a transgirl on
Speaker 13: your couch. This is going to be bea the message
Speaker 13: going forward. Jesus Christ. People put a trans girl on
Speaker 13: your couch. You can figure out how to live together.
Speaker 13: It will be fine. People are going homeless and dying.
Speaker 13: Please do this.
Speaker 2: Wait, is there like data on like what's what's that?
Speaker 2: Is this just as a result of like the continuing
Speaker 2: like people being forced out.
Speaker 24: Of their jobs?
Speaker 13: Yeah, this is this is this is this is all
Speaker 13: this is. This is me finally talking about something I've
Speaker 13: been tracking for a very very long time, which is
Speaker 13: I mean I say a very long time. But you know,
Speaker 13: even over about the past four or five years, has
Speaker 13: been massive transmigration into places like Portland, into places like Chicago,
Speaker 13: into places like New York.
Speaker 4: They're getting how in New York there's a lot of
Speaker 4: a lot of transh housing in New York. I think this. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's there's some regional aspects of this.
Speaker 24: Don't come to San Diego.
Speaker 2: We yeah, it make it makes sense that the cities
Speaker 2: that are safer having like a big influence and there's
Speaker 2: a lot of people, those are also cities that do
Speaker 2: not have great housings supply that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: nearly balloon.
Speaker 13: And there's been a lot of issues with it, and
Speaker 13: that's something that can be mitigated by just putting people
Speaker 13: on your couch.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, that's as a short terms maybe I
Speaker 4: don't honestly the couch thing freaks me out. As a
Speaker 4: long term solution.
Speaker 13: Well, but I mean that's the thing though, it doesn't
Speaker 13: have to be a long term.
Speaker 4: If people have connections to help other people get jobs.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so they can like just like pay.
Speaker 4: Pay a low amount of rent for like a room
Speaker 4: that's way more solid than like this like forever couch
Speaker 4: surfing thing that sometimes people like refer to as like
Speaker 4: quote unquote transhusing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Okay, but again, but the the the idea here is
Speaker 13: that there and this is something that I have running
Speaker 13: too extensively, is there are a bunch of people who
Speaker 13: basically just need to get out and need like a
Speaker 13: couple of months or a month to get back on
Speaker 13: their feet and don't have the ability to do it
Speaker 13: and are going homeless because of that, and it's killing
Speaker 13: people and it fucking sucks. Yeah, and that is something
Speaker 13: that can be mitigated with sort of cultural shifts towards
Speaker 13: sharing space more, and we're all gonna have to do
Speaker 13: it more because the economy's about to collapse even more so.
Speaker 2: Great fun.
Speaker 13: Yay, put a transcoll on your couch.
Speaker 25: If you would like to email us, you can do
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Speaker 25: you should send it from a proton mail address as well.
Speaker 4: Okay, everybody, Well, happy holidays. I think we have one
Speaker 4: more ed episode before the end of the year. We
Speaker 4: reported the news.
Speaker 5: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
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