Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 3: Welcome to take it happen here show about things falling
Speaker 3: apart and how to put them back together again. I
Speaker 3: am your host, Na Wong for another It's both episode,
Speaker 3: and what I say both, I mean we are talking
Speaker 3: about something that we've been covering kind of some extent
Speaker 3: in a bunch of different cities, which is a bunch
Speaker 3: of hospitals incredibly cowardly decision to not provide trans youth
Speaker 3: with gender firming care that they need out of a
Speaker 3: combination of fear, greed, and malice. And with me to
Speaker 3: talk about one of the places this has been happening
Speaker 3: and how people have been trying to resist it, and
Speaker 3: this in this case is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center,
Speaker 3: And so we're talking to two people who have been
Speaker 3: fighting back against they're just hideous cowardice. One is Selena Binnock,
Speaker 3: who is a therapist at UPMC, and then also Dena Staley,
Speaker 3: who's the executive director and founder of trans Uniting. Both
Speaker 3: of you two, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having us, Thank you, yeah.
Speaker 3: And thank you for doing this genuinely really critical work
Speaker 3: to try to get this hospital to not severely harm
Speaker 3: their translations.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Good lord, you know we'd be fighting this battle right right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, Okay, I guess the place I want to
Speaker 3: start is, can you explain sort of the exact situation
Speaker 3: of what happened after their sort of recent Supreme Court
Speaker 3: ruling and what the hospital decided to do and not do.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So, from our understanding, what's been going on with
Speaker 6: UPMC or the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is they've
Speaker 6: decided to end all gender firming care. This includes puberty
Speaker 6: blockers hormone therapy surgeries for people under nineteen. And this
Speaker 6: is in response to an executive order that was put
Speaker 6: out in the spring by the Trump administration saying that
Speaker 6: providers who continued to prescribe these medically necessary treatments would
Speaker 6: be at risk of felony charges and that providers who
Speaker 6: supported accessing the type of care could also be in
Speaker 6: trouble as far as getting felony charges for aiding and
Speaker 6: a bedding. So that's the way that the hospital system
Speaker 6: is interpreting this executive order. So there has been a
Speaker 6: lot of pushback from multiple providers people throughout UPMC, and
Speaker 6: the biggest issue is that they created a deadline line
Speaker 6: of making these changes starting June thirtieth. This is an
Speaker 6: arbitrary date that they decided within the hospital system. The
Speaker 6: state was not given to them by any kind of
Speaker 6: federal proceeding or legal mandate. And after that time they're
Speaker 6: no longer going to be prescribing these medications. So, starting
Speaker 6: in April, UPMC stopped taking any new clients who are
Speaker 6: under nineteen who were looking for hormone replacement therapy or
Speaker 6: any kind of gender firming care, and starting June thirtieth,
Speaker 6: they are slowly tapering off all clients from their puberty
Speaker 6: blockers or hormone therapy over the course of three to
Speaker 6: six months, depending on what their current medication course is.
Speaker 6: So what is happening and the thing that I think
Speaker 6: a lot of people aren't saying out loud, is that
Speaker 6: they're forcing these teens and young adults to de transition
Speaker 6: or to or reverse their gender transition, which the fear
Speaker 6: is that they will start seeking non medically advised care
Speaker 6: to obtain and get the treatment that they're seeking for.
Speaker 6: So that is kind of our understanding it's been going
Speaker 6: on behind the scenes with EPMC.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I also just want to say, like I've had
Speaker 3: like insurance bullshit, where like I've been taken off of
Speaker 3: my stuff for like a month.
Speaker 7: And a half and it sucks. It is awful.
Speaker 3: It is psychologically painful in ways that are like difficult
Speaker 3: to describe.
Speaker 7: It really sucks.
Speaker 6: Right from a physical standpoint, You're going to get side effects,
Speaker 6: you have issues, we're coming off these vacations. But from
Speaker 6: a mental standpoint, right, it's these people who are not
Speaker 6: your doctors are determining what your care is and it's
Speaker 6: incredibly harmful.
Speaker 4: In both the physical and the mental aspect of it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and again we're just talking about healthcare pertrans you
Speaker 8: at the end of the day, and a lot of them,
Speaker 8: well puberty bloster and just a therapy are that they're
Speaker 8: taken away any persons over eighteen years old.
Speaker 9: They're legally, you.
Speaker 8: Know, able to vote, should be able to make their
Speaker 8: own decisions that they want to with their health care.
Speaker 8: So it's really discussing and disheartening what is happening. And
Speaker 8: here in Pennsylvania, UPMC was the first large health provider,
Speaker 8: which is one of the largest in the state, to
Speaker 8: start this domino effect of stopping care for transit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I mean it creates this hiteous situation where
Speaker 3: just like because of a combination of like some gender
Speaker 3: bureaucrat at the White House was like, I get to
Speaker 3: decide what your gender is now, and I get to
Speaker 3: decide what your healthcare is because of that, and then
Speaker 3: you have this like cascading effect of like some like
Speaker 3: hospital admin was like, well, I don't know, I think
Speaker 3: it would be easier for like me personally if you
Speaker 3: didn't have health care. It just like it's cascading through
Speaker 3: the hospital system. It's horrible.
Speaker 6: It's horrible, And I appreciate that data makes that point
Speaker 6: of we use this phrase gender affirming care to specify
Speaker 6: what's going on, but it's healthcare. It's you know, not
Speaker 6: that different from someone being forced to come off diabetes
Speaker 6: medication or medication for our heart problem. You know, this
Speaker 6: medication that makes people be able to function in their
Speaker 6: life and feel safe and physically, well, that's what's being
Speaker 6: forced out of their lives. So it is healthcare absolutely.
Speaker 8: And one into spaces that are affirming for them, you know,
Speaker 8: as kids. You know, so now that they don't have
Speaker 8: this affirming space have to go into spaces that are
Speaker 8: not affirming, they will further damage they're ment to you know,
Speaker 8: when are going to spaces being this gender and all
Speaker 8: of the other things that have you know, this is
Speaker 8: what we're talking about, just a safe, affirming place where
Speaker 8: you can access safe for farming health here.
Speaker 3: I think it's worth expanding on that a little bit
Speaker 3: in the sense that like a space that's not affirming
Speaker 3: isn't like a neutral space. It's one that's actively hostile
Speaker 3: to you.
Speaker 9: Absolutely that also.
Speaker 7: Just sucks like it's hideous.
Speaker 3: So it's just like they decided to inflict this on
Speaker 3: a bunch of children because they're mildly afraid, right.
Speaker 6: They're afraid, and they're afraid of losing money. And there's
Speaker 6: no way to say that it's a neutral space, right,
Speaker 6: It's you're affirming or hostile, and that's the rest great.
Speaker 6: Kids can't come the doctor and feel safe at this point,
Speaker 6: and it's.
Speaker 3: Like cascading issues too.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: We've been talking about this a lot in like the
Speaker 3: context of someone like the Medicaid cuts, but it's like
Speaker 3: anything that deters people from going to the doctor, prevents
Speaker 3: them from going in for like other stuff that you
Speaker 3: know could be treated pretty easily. But then suddenly if
Speaker 3: it's like okay, well my hospitals now hostile space, people
Speaker 3: just like stop going in all together until something really
Speaker 3: serious happens. I could have been prevented. The hospital wasn't
Speaker 3: paying assholes to them, like.
Speaker 6: You know, I think the fear is what we're going
Speaker 6: to see as the side effects or the consequences of this.
Speaker 6: You know, we've been told by our supervisors or management
Speaker 6: at UPMC that we should expect an influx of suicidal
Speaker 6: teenagers or young adults. Teenagers were struggling with greater symptoms
Speaker 6: of depression or even psychosis, like acute psychotic symptoms are
Speaker 6: a studied side effect of abruptly.
Speaker 4: Coming off your hormone.
Speaker 6: So not only do you now have these teens inting
Speaker 6: all who will be scared to access their care feel
Speaker 6: like they can't use their name, their pronouns, get the
Speaker 6: care that they need, but they're struggling with mental health
Speaker 6: crises that are due to the changes that we're seeing
Speaker 6: due to the withdrawal of their health care.
Speaker 4: So you're seeing this in so.
Speaker 6: Many different aspects hitting them and then the providers in
Speaker 6: this hospital system, and I'm sure we're seeing this all
Speaker 6: over the country. The providers are here to pick up
Speaker 6: what's happening. That's a decision based on administrative opinions. And
Speaker 6: like we said before, fear.
Speaker 7: So that was shure.
Speaker 3: A hospital admin told you that that was what was
Speaker 3: going to happen.
Speaker 6: So basically after this went into place, I work in
Speaker 6: a suicide prevention clinic, so we were told by the
Speaker 6: people that we work with to be ready and stad
Speaker 6: start having meetings and having discussions around how to better
Speaker 6: support these kids, knowing that through research we've found that
Speaker 6: coming off of hormones can cause.
Speaker 4: Increased risk of suicial thought, psychosis, and depression.
Speaker 7: Sure as fuck does that.
Speaker 6: Yes, And so it's like physical side effects, but also
Speaker 6: if you're forced to detransition, you're going to be physically
Speaker 6: unsafe in a space where you're no longer maybe passing
Speaker 6: or you're no longer able to be yourself, so you're
Speaker 6: a greater risk of harassment and bullying, which then in
Speaker 6: turn can cause higher risks of suicidal thoughts.
Speaker 3: It's just like so hideous that there's people like you
Speaker 3: in the hospital system who can just tell them that
Speaker 3: this is going to happen, and they're doing it anyways.
Speaker 6: It's hard because it's coming down so many layers, right,
Speaker 6: So we're hearing it maybe from our direct management, whose
Speaker 6: hearts are in the best place. They didn't make these decisions,
Speaker 6: but where they're being told to follow upper management who
Speaker 6: are making these decisions. And yes, because they work in
Speaker 6: the hospital, they know the implications of it. But the
Speaker 6: fear is outweighing the risks, and that's what we're trying
Speaker 6: to fight against.
Speaker 3: The lightest possible response that I have to this as
Speaker 3: I'm thinking about that Lord Farquott line from Shrek where
Speaker 3: he goes, some of you may die, but that's a
Speaker 3: sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Speaker 10: It's like these house relignments are literally doing that.
Speaker 3: They're like, yeah, no, some of these kids may die,
Speaker 3: but like whatever, that's fine. I don't have to deal
Speaker 3: with like maybe a lawsuit in like three years.
Speaker 8: But they will absolutely still have to deal with lawsuits.
Speaker 7: Yep, yep.
Speaker 8: At the end of the day, these are people's basic
Speaker 8: human rights at the hundred of the times, So there
Speaker 8: will be lawsuits that happened because of that. Again, what
Speaker 8: the president did was not flaw at all, what somever.
Speaker 8: It was just directed to say, hey, this is something
Speaker 8: that we should do. This is not nothing that he
Speaker 8: can actually put into law. So what they're doing is
Speaker 8: off the end of the fans are sufficient to see
Speaker 8: what they can't get away with and what they can't
Speaker 8: get away with. This is all about having an autonomy
Speaker 8: of our healthcare and off all at the end of
Speaker 8: the day. And they're starting with the most vulnerable population
Speaker 8: of people, which are trends youth.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they're just testing, right, This is a test to
Speaker 6: see what else they can get away with.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, this is the test, and they're failing miserably. And
Speaker 8: instead of fighting them back, you want to fight us back.
Speaker 8: Instead of standing up and saying we're not going to
Speaker 8: do this, because it's not going to stop transcape this
Speaker 8: and never stop with transpit at all whatsoever.
Speaker 9: It starts with transit.
Speaker 6: And DTA makes a good point I mean, I know, Mia,
Speaker 6: you aren't based out of Pennsylvania, but in Pennsylvania, gender
Speaker 6: farming care remains legal from a state level, and the
Speaker 6: city of Pittsburgh, which we are located in, has been
Speaker 6: working really hard to protect trans youth. So the executive
Speaker 6: order that was put in place by Trump one is
Speaker 6: not a federal law and two is not at all
Speaker 6: supported by state or citywide laws.
Speaker 4: So from a legal standpoint, you know.
Speaker 6: Which we've learned from consulting with people like Dana who
Speaker 6: have been doing this work much longer than we have.
Speaker 6: We've talked with our local ACLU and other government organizations
Speaker 6: that this would not hold up in court. So you know,
Speaker 6: that's why the fight I think is starting here and
Speaker 6: hoping to get bigger.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of the way this administration does stuff
Speaker 3: is just by like writing it down on paper and
Speaker 3: then hoping that they can just sort of shock and
Speaker 3: awe terror people into complying. But like, if you don't comply,
Speaker 3: they can't make you like it's you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: this is only so this is only you've seen across
Speaker 3: issue areas, right, Like if people don't comply with ice agents,
Speaker 3: it suddenly becomes incredibly hard for them to just like
Speaker 3: carry on massy rotations. If people don't comply with their
Speaker 3: hospital crackdowns, it's actually really hard for them to stop
Speaker 3: kids and getting gender affirming care.
Speaker 7: But if you give up, then yeah, it's really easy.
Speaker 6: Right right, there's giving up before the fight really starts. Yeah,
Speaker 6: at some level of this, this is what they want.
Speaker 6: They're okay with it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 8: The dogs don't really matter, Like, no, it doesn't matter
Speaker 8: which way it goes. Did we really want to fight
Speaker 8: it now? We don't want to, mister slog. Group of
Speaker 8: people's we're not able to fight it. And if they
Speaker 8: fight it and they win, then we'll give it back
Speaker 8: whatever I can add. Armies of lawyers you can see,
Speaker 8: has armies of lawyers that can really go.
Speaker 9: And really attack this from all different angles.
Speaker 8: Bring in community ad kids, bring together all these you
Speaker 8: know the one that's lot project atm you all these
Speaker 8: different folks that come in with them and really hammer
Speaker 8: it to this administration. But they choose to not do
Speaker 8: that and choose to be complicit in the bull crap.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one hundred percent. Okay, So we unfortunately need to
Speaker 3: go to ads. When we come back, we will talk
Speaker 3: about how we're going to fight back. Yeah, it'll be great.
Speaker 3: We are back so remarkably quickly after this stuff all started.
Speaker 3: There's a pretty large protest, like outside of the hospital
Speaker 3: to get them to stop doing this. Can you talk
Speaker 3: about how this all sort of started to come together
Speaker 3: and how these efforts got organized.
Speaker 8: So I started hearing rumbles about this in December and
Speaker 8: in January. You know, once we got it into office
Speaker 8: and things, you know, immediately he's signed DI exxective or
Speaker 8: I think like a little bit after that, and by
Speaker 8: April we started activating and figuring out what we wanted
Speaker 8: to do because UPMC had made that first directive to
Speaker 8: not accept anymore on trans youth at all, whatsoever you
Speaker 8: think young adults, anyone under the age of nineteen.
Speaker 9: So we did our first action in April.
Speaker 8: May start following up getting information out to disseminate their
Speaker 8: right information out to community members, and doing all of
Speaker 8: the behind the scenes work connecting folks to the necessary
Speaker 8: resources that they need, so we could, you know, start
Speaker 8: fighting back at UPMC.
Speaker 11: Loan behold to us.
Speaker 6: DINA and Trans Uniting have been doing a lot of
Speaker 6: work to kind of set the stage for us to
Speaker 6: get involved, which is really awesome. We were made aware
Speaker 6: of what's going on with UPMC well after you know,
Speaker 6: DNA and some of the community members have been so
Speaker 6: I believe.
Speaker 4: It was earlier June, maybe end of May.
Speaker 6: Some of my really amazing coworkers and I decided, you know,
Speaker 6: we can't really just sit back and do nothing. And
Speaker 6: I think at the clinic I work in, there was
Speaker 6: a big feeling of helplessness.
Speaker 4: You know, what can we do?
Speaker 6: How do we fight back on our bosses? You know,
Speaker 6: we were feeling stuck, and we are a suicide prevention clinic.
Speaker 6: We're not specifically a gender clinic, but because we know
Speaker 6: that there's a hard proportion of trains and gay youth
Speaker 6: who are at risk of suicide in the general population,
Speaker 6: we work with a lot of trans youth. So we
Speaker 6: were seeing this impact us directly in the sense of
Speaker 6: the work that we do. So some of my coworkers
Speaker 6: wrote a letter to UPMC explaining the way that we're
Speaker 6: feeling about this, asking them to reverse this decision. The
Speaker 6: letter discussed several local laws and state laws that would
Speaker 6: protect them as well as hit them where they hurt,
Speaker 6: as far as discussing the money that they have and
Speaker 6: the available funds they have to fight this. The letter
Speaker 6: was incredibly assigned by almost four hundred actually think at
Speaker 6: this point over four hundred staff at the hospital system.
Speaker 4: We work it.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 4: It's amazing.
Speaker 6: Yes, and while this letter was being drafted, some of
Speaker 6: my coworks met with consultants through the ACLU and other
Speaker 6: local organizations to one make sure what we were doing
Speaker 6: was okay, that we were not jeopardizing too much of
Speaker 6: our own safety as far as employment goes, but also
Speaker 6: to get their opinions and start to rally organizations. So
Speaker 6: the ACLU is to put us in touch with Dina
Speaker 6: and Transuniting, and Dina jumped on it. In less than
Speaker 6: two weeks, she and her coworkers had created and built
Speaker 6: up a rally for us, which we had outside of
Speaker 6: the UPMC building downtown just a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 6: and we had local lawmakers speak. I spoke along with
Speaker 6: my coworkers who helped write the letter. Dina spoke in, Dina,
Speaker 6: if you want to speak more of that rally, I
Speaker 6: think that'd be awesome.
Speaker 8: Sure, I just want to say this is what aw
Speaker 8: I shouldst like, you know, acomplases in the fight against
Speaker 8: this you know, heinous crime, because this is exactly what
Speaker 8: it is.
Speaker 9: You know, it's been attack on trans labs.
Speaker 8: But we broke a lot of folks together, community members, politicians,
Speaker 8: and workers from the UPMC all together. We had about
Speaker 8: three hundred and some folks that showed up when we
Speaker 8: were on the steps of UPMC's headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh.
Speaker 8: And we also coordinated with some state wif folks that
Speaker 8: are actually doing a couple of actions throughout this month,
Speaker 8: but there were two actions that happened that same day
Speaker 8: as well, and you know, what is happening is not right,
Speaker 8: So we had to make sure that the community is
Speaker 8: being educated and we're activating community members. At the same time,
Speaker 8: you know, also wanted them to know about this fund
Speaker 8: that we were launching to help the kiddos in this
Speaker 8: situation because folks are still going to need to you know,
Speaker 8: be able to access some type of healthcare, so you know,
Speaker 8: making sure that they are aware of their options and
Speaker 8: making sure they're able to have funds to do so,
Speaker 8: because you know, with everything happening, they are probably going
Speaker 8: to get cut off of their health care insurance as well,
Speaker 8: you know, and that is a real scare.
Speaker 9: And that happens then what meana?
Speaker 8: So that was kind of what happened with that situation,
Speaker 8: and it was amazing, you know, everybody was amazing.
Speaker 9: But I just you know, definitely want to shout out to.
Speaker 8: Lena and the whole team because listen, we need more
Speaker 8: accomplices like that, and it's by you know, we are
Speaker 8: a small but mighty community, and we will not be
Speaker 8: able to get the things done that needs to be
Speaker 8: done to protect not just us, but all of us
Speaker 8: if we're not all united.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you, Dan, I mean, we couldn't do it.
Speaker 6: I thought you guys and the power you've got and
Speaker 6: the beautiful voices that you bring to the fight, it's
Speaker 6: truly awesome.
Speaker 3: I think one of the things that we're seeing from this,
Speaker 3: and you know that we've seen from all of the
Speaker 3: anti trans repression is that like, on the one hand, yeah,
Speaker 3: trans people are like one and a half percent of
Speaker 3: the population, and we're disproportionately like the most broke and
Speaker 3: fucked up percentage of that population.
Speaker 10: And also we are significantly better organizers like prison for
Speaker 10: person than all of the people fighting us. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 10: like they have unbelievable amounts of resources, however, Comma, we
Speaker 10: are really good at like this specific.
Speaker 3: Thing of organizing and fighting back.
Speaker 6: And yeah, well sadly, like trans people have had to
Speaker 6: fight for so long learned to do it, and their
Speaker 6: loved ones man, like they were there when we were
Speaker 6: at the rally a couple of weeks ago, I had
Speaker 6: parents of trans kids hugging me, you know, like they
Speaker 6: show up and they fight for their people, and it's
Speaker 6: really empowering.
Speaker 8: We don't have that cholice fun to do that, you know,
Speaker 8: we don't have that cholices about the show. We don't
Speaker 8: have that cholice about to fight because we had to
Speaker 8: all of our lives in order to you know, continue
Speaker 8: to walk in our true you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like I mean, you know, I could talk
Speaker 3: about sort of the structural factors that make that true,
Speaker 3: but there's also just if you're going to be trends,
Speaker 3: at some point you have to choose to accept it,
Speaker 3: and like the fact that it's an identity that like
Speaker 3: you have to make a choice to be like I'm
Speaker 3: gonna fucking do this and like, Okay, I am this
Speaker 3: person that I've always known that I am, etcetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: I think they're also just like it selects for like
Speaker 3: a small extent for people who are willing to just
Speaker 3: like fuck it, let's go. And I don't know, that's
Speaker 3: been the thing I've always like appreciated about the way
Speaker 3: that like these kind of organizing efforts unfold areria. Okay,
Speaker 3: so let's talk about what the reaction has been to
Speaker 3: the protest, to the actions, both from the hospital and
Speaker 3: from the community at large.
Speaker 6: Looking at both of those things, I guess one of
Speaker 6: the coolest reactions we're seeing is a lot of people
Speaker 6: coming out in solidarity who work at the hospital system,
Speaker 6: So the people who originally wrote the letter, who were
Speaker 6: part of this rally. We are trying to organize more
Speaker 6: community meetings, more town halls, contacting people through email, and
Speaker 6: Dina has been very involved in that along with side
Speaker 6: other local organizations. But the word is spreading and we're
Speaker 6: getting in touch with a lot of people in a
Speaker 6: lot of different departments throughout.
Speaker 4: The hospital who are here and want to show up.
Speaker 4: You know, we're seeing.
Speaker 6: Physicians, social workers UPMC is also, of course a massive
Speaker 6: insurance conglomerate, and we're seeing people who work in the
Speaker 6: insurance side of things come out to support this so
Speaker 6: that's been really amazing as far as what things are
Speaker 6: looking like. As administration feedback, we are being told the
Speaker 6: same response repeatedly that UPMC is doing what they have
Speaker 6: to do to quote unquote abide with the law, and
Speaker 6: they're making the decisions that they are making because of
Speaker 6: the quote unquote law, and they will continue to offer
Speaker 6: behavioral health support to trans youth and young adults to
Speaker 6: support them through this crisis. So, you know, we are
Speaker 6: trying to meet together and talk a lot about what
Speaker 6: that means.
Speaker 4: Of course, there is some fear of will that be
Speaker 4: stripped away.
Speaker 6: You know, we actually saw not that long ago, I
Speaker 6: think was only last week that you know, Ohio they
Speaker 6: built into their state budget that Medicaid can no longer
Speaker 6: cover quote unquote transffirming therapy.
Speaker 7: So this isn't.
Speaker 6: Even puberty blockers, it's not hormones, it's talk therapy.
Speaker 4: And what will that mean?
Speaker 6: You know, we hope that we're protected here in Pennsylvania,
Speaker 6: but there's always resks that this can come into place
Speaker 6: at a federal level. So these talking points that they're
Speaker 6: sticking to, it's not too black and white as they're
Speaker 6: presenting it. You know, they're not abiding with any certain law.
Speaker 6: We don't know that therapy is protected, but that's what's
Speaker 6: kind of they're sticking to.
Speaker 4: And that's just what's repeatedly being.
Speaker 6: Stated throughout various press contacts that are being made through
Speaker 6: the hospital.
Speaker 9: They're doing whatever the fuck they want to do.
Speaker 4: Yeah, to put it lightly, yes, yeah, this.
Speaker 8: Is what's happening, and we just have to continue to
Speaker 8: fight because they want to take us back to the
Speaker 8: nineteen fifties and that's not going to happen.
Speaker 9: That's not going to happen.
Speaker 8: And alsoever, it's Saint nineteen fifty, this is twenty twenty five,
Speaker 8: and you can.
Speaker 9: Take away all you want to. We're going to fight
Speaker 9: and we're going to put it back at place.
Speaker 8: A lot of times it is so much harder to
Speaker 8: take things away and try to get them back. But
Speaker 8: you know, unfortunately we're here and a lot of Americans
Speaker 8: didn't think that we would be in this predicament and
Speaker 8: it's not going to get nothing but worse. So hopefully
Speaker 8: it opens up people's eyes and we have to unite
Speaker 8: as a people.
Speaker 9: That's it. That's it.
Speaker 8: That's all around all of these issues. There's so much happening,
Speaker 8: so much being thrown on us at one time. But
Speaker 8: we have to unite as minority people or we will
Speaker 8: be in a place like nineteen fifties, because I mean
Speaker 8: we're abought to be in a great depression.
Speaker 9: By January, we will be in a great depression. Everybody,
Speaker 9: get ready? Hope you got your CAG good?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, And I think there's there's another element of this too,
Speaker 3: which is like you can look at them doing a like, oh,
Speaker 3: we're just following orders thing, but there's no actual orders,
Speaker 3: which makes it even more pathetic than like the original
Speaker 3: words just following orders people, which again, and I want
Speaker 3: to note this, just following orders did not prevent you
Speaker 3: from being tried at Nuremberg, Like that was found to
Speaker 3: not be a defense, so like right, remembering of where
Speaker 3: that went down. His shit. But the second thing too,
Speaker 3: is like in terms of like there being so many
Speaker 3: different things where like everyone needs to sort of pull
Speaker 3: together and fight this the other advantage that we have
Speaker 3: that's different from like thirties Nazi Germany, right, like this
Speaker 3: stuff is all really unpopular, Like everyone hates it, Everyone
Speaker 3: hates Trump is approve of ratings are terrible, the proof
Speaker 3: ratings for everything he's doing across the bord are just
Speaker 3: really bad.
Speaker 7: The thing about the Nazis was that, like Nazi Germany,
Speaker 7: people wanted.
Speaker 9: They were imutified.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like at least to something extent. They were able
Speaker 3: to smash, like, you know, they were able to sort
Speaker 3: of wipe out everyone who was opposing them, but like
Speaker 3: significant portions of the population wanted all of that shit
Speaker 3: to happen. And then it's just not true here, right,
Speaker 3: And you know, our job is to make sure that
Speaker 3: like the fact that nobody wants the shit to happen
Speaker 3: actually turns into it not happening instead of just you know,
Speaker 3: this unhinged autocratic like you're king is like writing decrees
Speaker 3: on a piece of paper and suddenly hospitals are following
Speaker 3: them even though there's just nothing else.
Speaker 8: Nothing, nothing, bugle crap. But again, we just have to
Speaker 8: band together. I think folks still in a sense they're
Speaker 8: in that mind frame of twenty twenty four. It's like
Speaker 8: this is not twenty twenty four at all whatsoever. And
Speaker 8: if you don't get with it, I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 8: but we're going to continue to fight. That's not going
Speaker 8: to stop. We're going to continue to you know, make
Speaker 8: waves and activate educate people about their rights, and you know,
Speaker 8: create spaces or transit to be and be safe as
Speaker 8: much as possible and do it all.
Speaker 9: But as much as we can do, we will do.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think that also raises a question for people
Speaker 3: listening to the show, which is that what can people
Speaker 3: do to put pressure on this hospital or their local
Speaker 3: hospital to do this and how can people sort of
Speaker 3: help the effort to get UPMC to fucking give kids
Speaker 3: their health care?
Speaker 8: Absolutely, So what they can do is they can go
Speaker 8: visit trends upg dot org. They can sign a petition
Speaker 8: that we have up, you can donate to the fund
Speaker 8: that we have gone currently. Locally, what they can do is,
Speaker 8: you know, work with their borough or city councils to
Speaker 8: create legislation to protect trans kids and use young adults
Speaker 8: and on state wild levels as well. But what we
Speaker 8: have to do is we have to put pressure from
Speaker 8: the top and from the bottom, you know, on the
Speaker 8: government to you know, the state governments to make these
Speaker 8: changes because again there are no.
Speaker 9: Laws in place at all whatsoever.
Speaker 8: So now we have to take that and we have
Speaker 8: to make laws in each state protect not just trans
Speaker 8: you think of adults, blood trans individuals and any minority
Speaker 8: groups that are being attacked by this Orange Man's regime.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a lot of railing together and I think
Speaker 6: what we've seen here is amazingly we were all able
Speaker 6: to come together as a community and fight, and I
Speaker 6: think reaching out to your local organizations. I mean, if
Speaker 6: every city had a Dina Stanley, they would be in
Speaker 6: a much better position to fight this fight. But you know,
Speaker 6: working together with the people who know how to organize
Speaker 6: and fight, but also not be afraid to get your
Speaker 6: feet wet in that act of organizing. You know, we
Speaker 6: have been working with Action Network to open up letter
Speaker 6: writing to our community so that you don't have to
Speaker 6: be a UPMC staff to let UPMC know how you're feeling.
Speaker 6: We're trying to host more town halls and community meetings.
Speaker 6: We hit Instagram. We have an account Club Providers for
Speaker 6: Trans Justice, where we're trying to get the work out
Speaker 6: so we can rally more together. I think in big pieces,
Speaker 6: if you're able to contribute financially, Transuniting has their Youth
Speaker 6: Healing Fund. I believe Tina, that's what it's called, where
Speaker 6: people can financially support trans youth who are having trouble
Speaker 6: accessing their care, and especially knowing what we know what's
Speaker 6: going to happen with Medicaid, this is even more important. So,
Speaker 6: I mean, if you want to support us in our
Speaker 6: fight against UPMC.
Speaker 4: I think it's be loud. It's not stop.
Speaker 6: I believe that hospital is just waiting for everybody to
Speaker 6: quiet down. But we're only going to get louder because
Speaker 6: these taper plans just started for the youth, teens and
Speaker 6: young adults. They're still on their medications, and the further
Speaker 6: way that gets, the louder we're going to be because the
Speaker 6: risk is really going to increase as the months go on.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, so don't stop. Be loud all the time. The
Speaker 8: accomplices in this fite because no matter what, and know
Speaker 8: that your next, so you can either join in, you
Speaker 8: can wait for your turn, and by that time maybe
Speaker 8: too late and there won't be no one to be
Speaker 8: able to stand up the light.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I thing I've been saying on the show
Speaker 3: a lot is it's not even just that after they
Speaker 3: come for us, they're going to come for you. It's
Speaker 3: that in order to come for us, they are going
Speaker 3: through you first. Like that's what this whole administration has been.
Speaker 3: They are willing to destroy the entire global economy. They're
Speaker 3: willing to turn the US into a police state. They
Speaker 3: are willing to again just grab people off the street
Speaker 3: in order to destroy very very small groups of people.
Speaker 3: They are willing to a miserate the lives of every
Speaker 3: single person in this country. And the good news is
Speaker 3: that means that because we're all targets, we all have
Speaker 3: the capacity to resist together and to beat them, and
Speaker 3: we're going to.
Speaker 8: It's just that people have to understand that. You know
Speaker 8: that we are targets, and I understand what is actually happening. Right,
Speaker 8: These are tacked on trans folks. It's not about trans individuals.
Speaker 8: It's about autonomy of a women's body. The tacks over immigrants,
Speaker 8: it's not about the immigrants. It's about citizens ships for
Speaker 8: black and brown people that have it, you know what
Speaker 8: I mean. So this is again, it's just about having
Speaker 8: control over folks period. And as soon as people understand
Speaker 8: that and know that, you will, you know, be a
Speaker 8: slave of this country and in a way that you've
Speaker 8: never been, because we all are but a slave of
Speaker 8: this country like you've never been before. You better get
Speaker 8: with it and open your eyes up and stand up
Speaker 8: and fight back, or you will be in a situation
Speaker 8: that you would just be sitting there thinking like I
Speaker 8: should have could.
Speaker 9: Have what you did?
Speaker 6: The stand up now, the fight we're having with UPNC,
Speaker 6: I mean, of course it's important. It's this is my employer,
Speaker 6: this is where I live. But it is just a
Speaker 6: small fight in the broader scheme of the fights we have.
Speaker 6: And you know, this brings up a good point of
Speaker 6: we fight for trans use because of what might come next,
Speaker 6: but it's already coming.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: We have a lot of people of color who are
Speaker 6: already schedule leave the country because they don't know if
Speaker 6: they'll be allowed back in with their passports.
Speaker 9: At US.
Speaker 6: We have you know, women who are no longer able
Speaker 6: to access abortion care or reproductive care in many places
Speaker 6: in this country. I mean, it's not if it's going
Speaker 6: to happen, it's when, and it already is. So the
Speaker 6: more we fight in the louder we can be for
Speaker 6: the people who are hit the most, the more likely
Speaker 6: that this fight will drag on and hit them, so
Speaker 6: less fights can start in the future.
Speaker 4: But it's happening. We're seeing it everywhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's an amazing place to end. Thank
Speaker 3: you to both so much for coming on and for
Speaker 3: fighting this fight.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, thank you for having us.
Speaker 6: I think it's really awesome to get the platform to
Speaker 6: show what we're doing and hope people, hopefully people will
Speaker 6: feel less scared. Right, there's power in numbers, There's power
Speaker 6: and solidarity. The more people we have fighting along us,
Speaker 6: the easier it gets to fight.
Speaker 9: The power is the people, and we are the people.
Speaker 3: I am incredibly looking forward to talking to you, to
Speaker 3: you again, will be fucking win this.
Speaker 9: So I love everybody.
Speaker 3: That's gonna be great.
Speaker 12: Champagne over the microphone.
Speaker 13: Oh this is it could happen here A show about
Speaker 13: things falling apart.
Speaker 7: I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 13: Today we're talking about movies, one of my favorite topics
Speaker 13: that I never get to talk about on the show.
Speaker 13: But I'm able to talk about it this week because
Speaker 13: I've found a way to talk about how movies are
Speaker 13: covering the death of woke and to help me in
Speaker 13: this doomed endeavor, I have recruited artists and designer Bailey
Speaker 13: new poster Welcome.
Speaker 11: Hi, It's lovely to be here.
Speaker 13: Bailey also is behind the new Top Cup City show
Speaker 13: Art which will eventually go public, maybe in a few
Speaker 13: weeks whenever I finally finished that episode, so keep pounding
Speaker 13: me about it. So we're going to talk about two
Speaker 13: films that came out this past July, Superman and Eddington,
Speaker 13: which I think are actually very closely related despite being
Speaker 13: very different from each other. I believe they're kind of
Speaker 13: equal and opposite films. And I realized this after I
Speaker 13: saw Eddington at a theater in Brooklyn and walked outside
Speaker 13: to the posters for Superman and editing being right next
Speaker 13: to each other, which are very different, and then I
Speaker 13: realized this is actually kind of the same movie but
Speaker 13: doing like or they're very related films. Right now, I
Speaker 13: think they really are like the equal and opposite of
Speaker 13: each other. Both are like uber contemporary, They're very online.
Speaker 7: They have a.
Speaker 13: Sort of like gestural politics, and I think they're both
Speaker 13: reactions to a conflicting view of American decline. Both have
Speaker 13: surprised Tucker Carlson appearances, and both have failed cancer relations.
Speaker 13: There's a lot of overlap in some of the plot
Speaker 13: points of this film, and I think what they're actually
Speaker 13: kind of saying about current American culture, current American politics,
Speaker 13: and how it relates to social media. I think we
Speaker 13: should first talk about Superman to get over that, so
Speaker 13: we can I discuss Eddington because I need to discuss
Speaker 13: Eddington in relation to Superman in some ways. So I
Speaker 13: guess people have been enjoying this film. I think a
Speaker 13: big part of why is how the film tackles geopolitics.
Speaker 13: Oddly enough, the geopolitical conflict in the film was most
Speaker 13: likely based on what it was written trying to pull from,
Speaker 13: like Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But because the film took
Speaker 13: a long time to write, by the time they shot
Speaker 13: the film, there was a whole other geopolitical conflict happening,
Speaker 13: which influenced at the very least the visual language of
Speaker 13: the film, which which pulls from Israel and Palestine.
Speaker 14: It's nice to see it like represented, I guess on
Speaker 14: on a blockbuster film, like that's what it feels like.
Speaker 11: It felt like nice to see it.
Speaker 13: You know, it's like an acknowledgment of the atrocities happening. Yes,
Speaker 13: Like essentially a Benjamin net and Yaho stand in is
Speaker 13: basically like the secondary villain of the film. And at
Speaker 13: this point, I guess we'll just have to talk about
Speaker 13: hashtag spoilers. If you haven't seen these and you want to,
Speaker 13: you can. You can go see them. If you're okay
Speaker 13: with hearing us talk about it, and that might make
Speaker 13: you want to see them more, then feel free. I
Speaker 13: don't think spoilers actually ruin a movie, but yeah, like
Speaker 13: Net and Yaho dying in the film gets like a massive,
Speaker 13: a massive crowd reaction at least when I saw it
Speaker 13: opening night, and people definitely feel a degree of like
Speaker 13: catharsists like watching you know, superheroes stop the IDF from
Speaker 13: massacring you know, civilians who are you were like, you know,
Speaker 13: like like Arab civilians, Like it's it's it's at that
Speaker 13: point they transcend like the Russia Ukraine aspect, and it's
Speaker 13: like very very clear what they're visually pulling from.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think the falafel car guy is the one. Yeah,
Speaker 11: that's crazy.
Speaker 13: Les Luthor executes a falafel card owner. And I'll talk
Speaker 13: about more about how the film like riffs on Palestine
Speaker 13: in a bed. There's other aspects I think of how
Speaker 13: Superman is reacting to what James Gunn sees as like
Speaker 13: American decline, because I think Superman as a film is
Speaker 13: kind of a partially vapid take on like the corruption
Speaker 13: of sincere positive futures and like the loss of hope.
Speaker 13: It honestly feels very like Biden twenty twenty. It's like
Speaker 13: a battle for the soul of America type thing. And
Speaker 13: I also see this as like a reaction to the
Speaker 13: victory of toxic masculinity, especially among like the twitch streamer
Speaker 13: class and like manfluencers like Andrew Tait, and instead you
Speaker 13: have Superman as this like Goodie two shoes boy Scout
Speaker 13: the way he like he should be. And this is
Speaker 13: the aspect of the film I think works. The best is,
Speaker 13: honestly is their characterization of Superman. The cast is phenomenal.
Speaker 13: David Kornsweat does a really good job. And I do
Speaker 13: like this version of masculinity. It's it's it's it's still
Speaker 13: funny to see like post online of people being like, Wow,
Speaker 13: I'm actually gonna try, you know, being nice to my
Speaker 13: neighbors now that I saw Superman, Like what the fuck?
Speaker 14: I want to pick up my girlfriend today and be
Speaker 14: happy when I'm around her.
Speaker 13: Yeah, So that feels a little odd, but like, I
Speaker 13: guess it's good that people can feel like Superman when
Speaker 13: they're doing good things, helping an old lady cross the
Speaker 13: street or whatever. I think that aspect of like decline.
Speaker 13: I sympathize with this, this like loss of like positive masculinity,
Speaker 13: and I think a Superman can be as simple for
Speaker 13: that for for new people who are addicted to watching
Speaker 13: like sneak O or whatever. Yeah, I think that's probably good.
Speaker 13: And in some ways, I think this film, honestly, like
Speaker 13: the exact same film would have been received a lot
Speaker 13: worse if Kamala Harris was president. I think that the
Speaker 13: fact that everyone feels so hopeless, like depress, hopeless and
Speaker 13: defeated because of Trump, I think this actually contributes to
Speaker 13: the positive reception the film is take. And myself and
Speaker 13: a few other people kind of even predicted this, like
Speaker 13: back in November, trying to like forecast like the reception
Speaker 13: of Superman and like Fantastic Four, and like all these
Speaker 13: companies were trying to like save the superhero genre from
Speaker 13: like eating itself right now. Yeah, but for me at least,
Speaker 13: there is a more insidious aspect of Superman that I
Speaker 13: do not see being discussed as much beyond you know,
Speaker 13: James Gunn still still obviously upset that he got canceled
Speaker 13: and is making that a core plot point in this
Speaker 13: film is he's actually super bad and he shouldn't have
Speaker 13: been canceled.
Speaker 14: He shouldn't be canceled, and the people canceling him were
Speaker 14: monkeys at typewriters.
Speaker 13: And which way, honestly that that part is true. Yeah,
Speaker 13: people try to cancel James Gun were monkeys and gone typewriters.
Speaker 11: I thought that bit was great.
Speaker 14: I thought that bit was very I was like, that's
Speaker 14: very like one panel gag in a comic, which is,
Speaker 14: you know, wonderful.
Speaker 11: Very The movie felt very great.
Speaker 13: Morrison, Totally, those are the aspects that I really like.
Speaker 11: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 14: Staying on the political subject, I think you could draw
Speaker 14: a very good analogy between this and or Not.
Speaker 11: Just this feels like this year's Barbie, if that makes sense.
Speaker 14: Sure, like the kind of like corporate political not girls
Speaker 14: get it done this time. Obviously, this is like more
Speaker 14: of like anti not even anti toxic masculinity. I think
Speaker 14: it's just pro this form of masculinity, which I think
Speaker 14: is more productive. Yeah, but I also think, yeah, there's
Speaker 14: like neolib stuff going on. And also the fact that
Speaker 14: the movie, because it's a blockbuster can't properly handle anything
Speaker 14: like it kind of has to just leave everything at
Speaker 14: the road.
Speaker 11: Yeah, on the side of the road by the end
Speaker 11: of it. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 13: This is very much similar to Barbie, in which I
Speaker 13: kind of had the same reaction to. It's like they're
Speaker 13: like o K movies, But I find the political posturing
Speaker 13: actually slightly insulting in a certain way based on how
Speaker 13: shallow it is. And I'm gonna I'm going to actually
Speaker 13: get into that more on Superman here, I've seen people
Speaker 13: talking about how like emotional they got during the scenes,
Speaker 13: like very evocative of the palestinding a genocide, like the
Speaker 13: people like, you know, crying and tearing up and feeling
Speaker 13: so seen. And again, on one hand, that's good, but
Speaker 13: that also gives me a bit of an icky feeling.
Speaker 13: And someone else expressed this very well, the co host
Speaker 13: of the Hit Factory podcast at Deep Impact Crier on tweeter.
Speaker 13: She's the host of the podcast Hit Factory. Wich was
Speaker 13: about nineties to cinema. I think her name is Carly,
Speaker 13: and she expressed this kind of soft disgust that was
Speaker 13: growing in me. But both kind of during some of
Speaker 13: these scenes and frankly watching people's reaction to it, She said,
Speaker 13: quote that's the point, isn't it, To immerse you in
Speaker 13: a fantasy where civilian life matters, to distract you from
Speaker 13: the reality where civilian life does not matter, To offer
Speaker 13: you abstractions of already abstracted images of imperial violence so
Speaker 13: that you can experience catharsis, escape and absolution. A movie
Speaker 13: like Superman exists to take the literal spectacle of genocide
Speaker 13: filling our feed for two years, and further mediate, slash,
Speaker 13: abstract the spectacle so it can be transposed onto another
Speaker 13: product of empire and strategic interpassivity to keep us ideologically
Speaker 13: and emotionally confined to its order. Any empathetic impulse engendered
Speaker 13: by forms and aesthetics of imperial violence and memetic rhythms
Speaker 13: of technology it trades in confines us to the limits
Speaker 13: of the language of empire.
Speaker 7: It keeps us.
Speaker 13: Operating on its terms. We need cinema that ruptures familiar
Speaker 13: imperial forms and its rhythms. So movies like Superman and
Speaker 13: the way that they depict atrocities actually like make us
Speaker 13: more indebted to the imperial system, because the imperial system
Speaker 13: can give us a product to make us feel Catharsis
Speaker 13: about the violence that the empire actually does, and that
Speaker 13: Catharsis keeps us going, like that's what allows us to
Speaker 13: not like fucking destroy everything around us, because we get
Speaker 13: enough of that Catharsis that it makes us able to
Speaker 13: keep living. And that's in the end, what products like
Speaker 13: Superman are kind of doing. They're making us feel just
Speaker 13: good enough by expressing the displeasure we have at what
Speaker 13: our government is doing, but still making us like fully
Speaker 13: married to the existence of that empire, like we can't
Speaker 13: live without it because of the comfort it provides us,
Speaker 13: including this cathartic comfort watching fucking Guy Gardner stop the
Speaker 13: Palestindian genocide, which if you told me that sentence like
Speaker 13: five years ago, I would have not believed you. I
Speaker 13: would have not believed that a cinematic depiction of Guy
Speaker 13: Gardner is going to stop the Palestinian genocide, that that
Speaker 13: Hawk girl is gonna is gonna kill Netanyahu. I would
Speaker 13: have not believed you for a single second. And that
Speaker 13: kind of shows the level of absurdity that we're kind
Speaker 13: of dealing with, and that aspect, I think is what
Speaker 13: makes what Superman is doing actually far more insidious than
Speaker 13: any of the controversial politics in something like Eddington.
Speaker 14: I also think that the whole like indended to empire thing.
Speaker 14: I think this is like the case in point example
Speaker 14: of that considering Superman is literally a symbol of American values.
Speaker 13: Or certainly has like become that, and like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 13: had a more positive version of that in some ways
Speaker 13: during his like birth in World War Two as a
Speaker 13: way as like a symbol of like Nazi resistance, but
Speaker 13: now is you know, very much turned into like truth
Speaker 13: justice in the American way, to the point where a
Speaker 13: lot of his you know, like immigrant aspects have been
Speaker 13: have been kind of undercut in the in the past,
Speaker 13: in the past few years.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I saw an article I didn't actually end up
Speaker 14: fully reading because it was on the I forgot what
Speaker 14: it was then the Washington Post or maybe it was
Speaker 14: the New York Times where it was it was like
Speaker 14: blocked or.
Speaker 7: Something, one of the big two. Yeah.
Speaker 14: Yeah, it was an author who I think was an immigrant,
Speaker 14: and it was like talking about how Superman undercuts the
Speaker 14: the immigrant experience and that he is like literally born
Speaker 14: on the planet anyway, so it's not really like an
Speaker 14: it's not necessarily and he doesn't go through any like
Speaker 14: cultural conflict.
Speaker 7: I guess, you know, totally.
Speaker 14: I also wondered about, well, you know, I g I
Speaker 14: guess it doesn't.
Speaker 11: I guess it doesn't.
Speaker 14: I was gonna I was gonna think about the taking
Speaker 14: the immigrant aspect and then talking about one of the
Speaker 14: main parts of the movie, which was his parents are
Speaker 14: like you need to go and make a harem on
Speaker 14: Earth or whatever, is sort of interesting.
Speaker 13: Yes, the aspect that his immigrant background has been very
Speaker 13: corrupted in this film, Like there's like a certainly like
Speaker 13: foreign evilness associating with Superman.
Speaker 14: Now, yeah, you're an immigrant, and like that's good, and
Speaker 14: that's great and very American, but you shouldn't be what
Speaker 14: your parents were, your like foreign parents because they wanted
Speaker 14: a harem of lovers and to like conquer the West
Speaker 14: or whatever. Yeah, which, you know, considering the fact that
Speaker 14: this was written during the Russia Ukraine thing and not
Speaker 14: mainly during the Israel Palestine thing, I don't know if
Speaker 14: that's like because that's in the movie.
Speaker 11: I have to think about it, you know.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I don't think James Gunn was conceptualizing of that
Speaker 13: when he wrote it.
Speaker 14: I think it's an unfortunate product of what happened aesthetically,
Speaker 14: but it's not that big of a deal, but it
Speaker 14: is weird, like it's something to think about.
Speaker 13: That effect did not bother me as much as it
Speaker 13: did like for some other people. For my overall thoughts
Speaker 13: in the film, I think it's basically as good as
Speaker 13: every other James Gun film, which frankly just is not
Speaker 13: my cup of tea. I've never really loved the Guardians films.
Speaker 13: I don't think James Gun's a very compelling filmmaker. I
Speaker 13: thought it was just fine. It definitely felt like episode
Speaker 13: thirteen of a TV show that doesn't exist, which as
Speaker 13: a comic book appreciator I like. As a film appreciator
Speaker 13: I don't like, But certainly the more campy aspects I
Speaker 13: enjoyed a lot. I think now is time to go
Speaker 13: on a quick break, and then we will return to
Speaker 13: discuss the anti woke cinematic masterpiece of the twenty twenties Eddington.
Speaker 11: All right, we're back, So I.
Speaker 13: Would like to now talk about Eddington for the rest
Speaker 13: of the episode. Essentially, But like I said before, Eddington
Speaker 13: is the equal and opposite of Superman. Both are both
Speaker 13: are very contemporary, very online. Both their politics, gesture and
Speaker 13: I think they're they're reactionary, but they're specifically reactionary in
Speaker 13: very different ways. I think they're they're reacting to two
Speaker 13: very different types of decline in America, or like perceived
Speaker 13: decline in America. So Eddington is directed by Ariastor, who
Speaker 13: made Hereditary, Midsummer and Both Afraid. I'll talk more about
Speaker 13: my thoughts on ari Astor at the end in a
Speaker 13: conversation with Jennie Danger. But I think Eddington is not
Speaker 13: anti woke. Actually I was lying. I think Anything is
Speaker 13: a post woke expression of kind of scared nihilism, or
Speaker 13: like like a depiction of the nihilism inherent to American
Speaker 13: politics right now, like everything as a conspiracy theory, there's
Speaker 13: this specter of cancelation around the corner, and like speaking specters,
Speaker 13: I think so so much of both Superman and Eddington
Speaker 13: for me, is like there's this specter of wokeism that's
Speaker 13: haunting America, and both films are trying to deal with
Speaker 13: that specter. I think Superman partially mourns that wokeness, and
Speaker 13: Eddington deals with its more like actual and like haunting
Speaker 13: and like in like a ghostly quality. Some of its
Speaker 13: more like uncanny qualities. Sometimes more than anything, Eddington digs
Speaker 13: into how we have created a profoundly anti social culture,
Speaker 13: which even leftists contribute to and in some cases actually
Speaker 13: conceptualize that as a form of like based process, and
Speaker 13: how we've all become just reflections of our Internet feeds
Speaker 13: and used politics as a justification for personal cruelty, or
Speaker 13: the very least, used politics as an outlet to channel
Speaker 13: anti social behavior in a way that you can self
Speaker 13: perceive as being morally good. And I think the left
Speaker 13: and the right do this obviously, Like the right does
Speaker 13: this with their like pedophile crusader shit. Never mind the
Speaker 13: whole Epstein thing, just just ignore that, ignore all of
Speaker 13: the actual right wing pedophiles.
Speaker 11: But well, it's entirely about aesthetics.
Speaker 14: It's about absolutely yeah, who looks like a pedophile to me?
Speaker 11: And it's the gay person.
Speaker 13: Ascetisize politics rights, which is huge on I think political
Speaker 13: extremism in general, politics start developing more aestheticized forms. You know,
Speaker 13: this is true among anarchists, and I think fascism more
Speaker 13: more purely, I think is actually like politics asceticize to
Speaker 13: the point we're aesthetisizing, you know, like like people and
Speaker 13: like culture and like race, right, Like that is a
Speaker 13: whole a way different version than you know, like crust
Speaker 13: punks or like yeah, like like you know black Bloc.
Speaker 14: Did you see the uh? I don't remember what the
Speaker 14: account was. There was like something of defense tweeted like
Speaker 14: some AI like from one of those like mill military
Speaker 14: fiction like accounts or something. And it was like a
Speaker 14: picture of like a white dude holding like a fucked
Speaker 14: up looking m for because it was AI generated and
Speaker 14: he's got like a bald eagle.
Speaker 7: On his head.
Speaker 13: No, but that sounds great.
Speaker 11: It got tweeted today.
Speaker 14: It's like the fucking lamest thing I've ever seen, and
Speaker 14: like I just don't even know, like not only the
Speaker 14: fact that he's like obviously he's using a photo of
Speaker 14: somebody else, but it's not even a real picture of anybody.
Speaker 11: It's like a fake image of somebody that somebody.
Speaker 14: Else made, like that he got off of like one
Speaker 14: of those like gun larp aesthetic accounts.
Speaker 11: I just found that very interesting.
Speaker 7: I don't know, Bailey, what did you think of Eddington?
Speaker 11: I adored it. I loved it.
Speaker 14: The moment that I knew that I was going to
Speaker 14: enjoy it was probably where it's revealed the energy plant
Speaker 14: is called perfect Gold, Magic carp or whatever, which is
Speaker 14: like so funny, like all those AI guys making all
Speaker 14: their products, like they're calling it Sourn's Eye or whatever.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so good.
Speaker 14: But I adored it. I think I think that Waking
Speaker 14: Phoenix is wonderful in it. He's a great actor. I
Speaker 14: think Ari Astor is like one of the few directors
Speaker 14: that can perfectly slot him into this like just neurotic,
Speaker 14: impotent man role, you.
Speaker 7: Know, very impotent. Ye.
Speaker 9: Yes.
Speaker 14: So the scene that I really like that I think
Speaker 14: about probably the most, or the character I think of
Speaker 14: probably the most, is the homeless guy. Yeah, the homeless
Speaker 14: guy who wanders into the film and is the you know,
Speaker 14: he's this a stranger walks into a strange town like
Speaker 14: opening of the film, and then all of the scenes
Speaker 14: where he's like he kind of bothers everybody, like he's
Speaker 14: you know, like in Gavin Newsom's like anti homeless policies.
Speaker 14: You know, it's a it's a very bipartisan. We have
Speaker 14: a bipartisan anti homeless thing going on, obviously. And he
Speaker 14: is also like even when his character like snaps and
Speaker 14: kills somebody, he like kills the homeless guy first, which
Speaker 14: I found very interesting.
Speaker 13: Yes, I think this is really crucial that when when
Speaker 13: the sheriff starts his murder rampage, the first expression of
Speaker 13: violence that he feels personally justified in doing or feels
Speaker 13: Catharsis isn't doing, isn't isn't like the fake woke mayor.
Speaker 13: It's not Antifa. It's the homeless guy that is the
Speaker 13: first target of acceptable violence in the mind of the sheriff.
Speaker 13: And I think that is a very accurate look at
Speaker 13: American politics, and that's not something I've seen discussed very
Speaker 13: much in relation to the film.
Speaker 14: No, and I in a way, he's still impotent after that,
Speaker 14: He's like he's he's not even enacting.
Speaker 11: I wouldn't even label that as political violence.
Speaker 14: I just labeled that as violence, right, Like earlier in
Speaker 14: the movie, all the like teen woke protesters are like
Speaker 14: sitting out in the street, and the homeless guy's kind
Speaker 14: of just standing and like he's like, hey, man, I
Speaker 14: don't have any money. Like he's not even asking for anything. Yeah,
Speaker 14: he's just kind of standing there and making them all uncomfortable.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 14: He is he is the specter of the other wandering
Speaker 14: into this town and then everybody has to like and
Speaker 14: he's like the you know, the beginning of conflict. You know, yeah,
Speaker 14: they're they're like the easiest group to other is the
Speaker 14: homeless and the mentally unwell.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 13: I think that that part of the film works really well.
Speaker 13: And I guess this film has received a mixed reaction,
Speaker 13: which I talk a little bit about with with Jane,
Speaker 13: which you'll you'll hear in a sec. And I guess
Speaker 13: I'll start by talking about how I believe Eddington works
Speaker 13: as a as a piece of post woke cinema. And
Speaker 13: I was talking about this with someone and they asked
Speaker 13: me what post woke was, and I was a little confused,
Speaker 13: because that's a term that I feel like I understand
Speaker 13: really well, but then I failed to accurately describe it
Speaker 13: to them. And I think it relates to this whole
Speaker 13: cultural moment that we're in now, especially after the twenty
Speaker 13: twenty four election, where we're facing this larger cultural backlash
Speaker 13: against you know, woke TM and how that highlights like
Speaker 13: the limits of diversity representation and complicated language to explain
Speaker 13: topics that might actually be you know, reasonable, but by
Speaker 13: expressing them you sound very unreasonable, and I think what
Speaker 13: post woke is and the reason why Eddington is post
Speaker 13: woke and is not anti woke, Like Eddington's not a
Speaker 13: centrist movie. I think it actually is fairly political, but
Speaker 13: it's post woke in such that it is a continuation
Speaker 13: of radical politics which incorporates critiques of the woke era,
Speaker 13: what critics would describe as an overreach or excessive focus
Speaker 13: on language or singular identity, trading inaccessible education in favor
Speaker 13: of in group signaling to prove personal political purity. I
Speaker 13: think post woke shoes a shallow performative politics adopted to
Speaker 13: provide social capital, and instead may deliberately flaunt humor, camp,
Speaker 13: or irreverence in ways that may have been labeled problematic
Speaker 13: or taboo during the peak of twenty tens online activism,
Speaker 13: but often in a way that signals both curate awareness
Speaker 13: of social issues as well as an exhaustion with or
Speaker 13: a playful rebellion against socially alienating language and ideas. And
Speaker 13: this can include using irony, parity, and camp to engage
Speaker 13: with social issues without the existential gravity or earnestness of
Speaker 13: prior education focused eras there may now be jokes themes
Speaker 13: or performances that skirt or playfully violate previous norms of
Speaker 13: cultural sensitivity, but not out of ignorance, but as a
Speaker 13: conscious reversal or escalation, while actually emphasizing material support over
Speaker 13: linguistic gestures and systematic pressure over individual personal action. So
Speaker 13: that's what I mean by post woke. I had to
Speaker 13: workshop this definition with a friend earlier this morning, But
Speaker 13: I think that works for both, Like what Eddington is doing,
Speaker 13: I think that works for what events like Twins Versus
Speaker 13: Dolls is doing. How's it's not anti woke but and
Speaker 13: it's not purely reactionary against woke it is it is
Speaker 13: actually a continuous and an escalation while adapting to fit
Speaker 13: the current political climate and still like reflecting on some
Speaker 13: of the shortcomings of the quote unquote Wolke era, which
Speaker 13: we see throughout Eddington a lot in the form of like,
Speaker 13: you know, performative politics, especially that like one like Zoomer
Speaker 13: Guy character, Oh yeah, you know, goes on that whole
Speaker 13: rant about like abolishing whiteness to his parents based on
Speaker 13: like googling these concepts like thirty minutes ago, and now
Speaker 13: feels like he has like an academic level understanding of
Speaker 13: whiteness as a concept.
Speaker 14: The intro to him, I guess it's the second it's
Speaker 14: the second time you see him. But he's at the
Speaker 14: he's at the party or whatever.
Speaker 11: Uh, and like he.
Speaker 14: Gives kind of an opinion to this girl that he
Speaker 14: has a crush on. They're talking about like, you know,
Speaker 14: whiteness and like privilege and stuff like that, and he class. Yeah,
Speaker 14: and class is the really like because clearly he I
Speaker 14: think I think he's supposed to kind of be like
Speaker 14: a lower class like character that then yeah, jumps up
Speaker 14: the ranks through political opportunism, right yeah, but yeah, he
Speaker 14: brings up class and is immediately shut down.
Speaker 13: And Google's Angela Davis seconds before, but only but only
Speaker 13: so that he can flirt with a girl more effectively,
Speaker 13: which is very funny.
Speaker 11: Incredible, It's so good.
Speaker 13: Other small bits like that. I really enjoyed that. The
Speaker 13: like fake woke Mayor who's actually just like a tech
Speaker 13: company shill has he him pronouns on his zoom profile.
Speaker 7: Ye, very very funny to me.
Speaker 11: There are so many little things in this movie.
Speaker 13: It's a lot of little stuff. Yeah, and like very
Speaker 13: obviously this was a film that Ariasta wrote well, like
Speaker 13: way too online during twenty twenty, like he was in
Speaker 13: specifically Twitter, right, this is an extremely Twitter movie, which
Speaker 13: is both works for the movie and sometimes works against
Speaker 13: the movie. I have no idea how this film is
Speaker 13: gonna age. Maybe it'll age very well because we'll use
Speaker 13: it as like a cultural artifact to like look back
Speaker 13: on and be like, yeah, that's kind of what twenty
Speaker 13: twenty felt like.
Speaker 14: In a couple of years, we're all going to be
Speaker 14: looking back on it and saying, how dare they made
Speaker 14: fun of our new currency, crypto, our new bitcoins.
Speaker 11: Everybody has bitcoins.
Speaker 13: All of the bitcoin stuff is really good, like I do.
Speaker 14: Also, I like that they gave the I don't remember
Speaker 14: his name, the black police officer, who's like kind of
Speaker 14: another like main through line for the movie. Yeah, but
Speaker 14: he his only other thing is that he's really into crypto.
Speaker 11: He's so funny, so good.
Speaker 13: If anything, I think Eddington is really good at showcasing
Speaker 13: types of guy. There's so many like type of guys
Speaker 13: in this film, and I think that's one of the
Speaker 13: real highlights. And at least for me, Like I'm obviously
Speaker 13: been very politically aware and engaged since you know, twenty
Speaker 13: eighteen or so especially starting in twenty twenty, So like
Speaker 13: knowing this film is set in twenty twenty and knowing
Speaker 13: it kind of gets into what that year was, like,
Speaker 13: I actually was able to get go into the film
Speaker 13: pretty pretty blind, and I was able to start calling
Speaker 13: shots really fast as soon as as soon as I realized,
Speaker 13: like what what Ari was doing. So like the film
Speaker 13: starts off as this like political satire on like the
Speaker 13: absurdity of COVID Lockdown America, and then we get into
Speaker 13: this like crime thriller genre. Then it concludes with this
Speaker 13: action genre. But at the very start of the film,
Speaker 13: when it's just like this kind of kind of quaint
Speaker 13: like like like parody of Lockdown America, I was like, okay,
Speaker 13: so at like forty five minute mark, we're gonna get
Speaker 13: George Floyd. Right at at one hour in there's gonna
Speaker 13: be riots our you know, hour fifteen, there's gonna be
Speaker 13: some like Antifa type situation. And I called so many things.
Speaker 13: They just started happening like exactly what I thought they
Speaker 13: were going to. So I was not really surprised by
Speaker 13: anything in this film necessarily. I saw everything it was
Speaker 13: doing like I saw it coming because I, you know,
Speaker 13: lived that for so much of a twenty twenty, especially
Speaker 13: like the twenty twenty protests in Portland, but also my
Speaker 13: familiarity with it was also I was also able to
Speaker 13: then like diagnose how the film was subtly like diverting
Speaker 13: from reality and just showcasing what twenty twenty felt like
Speaker 13: and like what twenty twenty was in the minds of
Speaker 13: like people who believed in conspiracy theories more so than
Speaker 13: the actual reality of twenty twenty, which I will also
Speaker 13: discuss more with Jennie Danger later. But I think specifically
Speaker 13: like the genre switching and then setting up all of
Speaker 13: these like twenty twenty hallmarks, I think the film does
Speaker 13: really well doing like pretty solid foreshadowing and hitting all
Speaker 13: the points you're going to have to hit if you're
Speaker 13: gonna make a film about twenty twenty.
Speaker 14: Yeah, yeah, we have the wayfarar pedophile closets.
Speaker 13: Totally Q went on cults, child trafficking.
Speaker 14: Yeah, So I watched the movie Network like for four
Speaker 14: days before.
Speaker 11: I watched this.
Speaker 13: I need to see networks. Oh my god, Robert's been
Speaker 13: trying to get me to watch it for years. I
Speaker 13: just have never found the time. I guess I don't
Speaker 13: know ari.
Speaker 14: Astro like explicitly brought up Network and staid like he
Speaker 14: was thinking about it while making this movie, but that he.
Speaker 11: Wanted it to be more.
Speaker 14: The Network is definitely more like it tells you what
Speaker 14: it means, sure kind of thing, and like what it
Speaker 14: thinks is the right way to do things.
Speaker 13: And this film purposely does not get into that too much.
Speaker 13: It lets its own depiction tell you.
Speaker 11: It doesn't.
Speaker 13: It doesn't like stop you and explain whatever, like you know,
Speaker 13: like what its politics are. I think the movie does
Speaker 13: the politics.
Speaker 14: Yes, but I also I thought in comparing it to Network,
Speaker 14: which I will try my hard it's not to spoil
Speaker 14: the Network, but there is definitely a theme in this
Speaker 14: and in the Network of like forces above, this movie
Speaker 14: is about political puppets about like non political actors, right
Speaker 14: walkin Phoenix's character talks about how like he's not for
Speaker 14: the government, he's for the people kind of thing. So
Speaker 14: he's clearly doing like a populist thing. And then by
Speaker 14: the end of the movie he's all the more like
Speaker 14: he's literally a puppet, right Like, he's like just a
Speaker 14: sack of meat that is like it has to watch
Speaker 14: his mom is not even his mom in law.
Speaker 13: His mother in law, mother in law, ex mother in law.
Speaker 14: It's just incredible, one of the most horrifying concepts. But
Speaker 14: this movie is about like, yeah, a bunch of stuff happens,
Speaker 14: like stuff that's like they're trying to kind of throw
Speaker 14: off the balance.
Speaker 13: Yeah, people are trying to make political change while dealing
Speaker 13: with this problem that politics is both very real, it's physical,
Speaker 13: it determines almost everything about our lives, but it's also
Speaker 13: very vague and nebulous and removed. So like, how do
Speaker 13: you exert agency over something that is both real and
Speaker 13: non real? To be a political actor, do you have
Speaker 13: to literally be like an astroturfed paid actor. The people
Speaker 13: that seemingly have the most political agency aren't even acting
Speaker 13: on any personal agency but instead of just furthering the
Speaker 13: interests of other entities.
Speaker 14: Yeah, but the corporation's the big money people whoever's like
Speaker 14: in the background, right the the plane with the giant
Speaker 14: hand holding the globe.
Speaker 11: And the Antifa globe jet.
Speaker 14: Yeah, yeah, the the So Okay, here's a question because
Speaker 14: because when I watched it, I thought that it was
Speaker 14: it's like paid actors, right, Like they're paid like a
Speaker 14: paid Colson group.
Speaker 11: That's what that's what I write it as.
Speaker 13: I think it's left for audience interpretation whether whether or
Speaker 13: not this is like the George Soros funded Antifa, like
Speaker 13: Specop's crew, who are genuine about their beliefs, or if
Speaker 13: they're like a false flag crew who's just going around
Speaker 13: so in chaos to promote like political discord, but not
Speaker 13: for like ideological reasons, like just just through like false
Speaker 13: flag attacks. I think it's intentionally left up to the audience,
Speaker 13: and I think it's it's depicting that because of all
Speaker 13: of like the Antifa conspiracy theories going around in twenty twenty,
Speaker 13: and I view that as like a it's like a
Speaker 13: manifestation of how the right wing viewed this concept of Antifa,
Speaker 13: even though Antifa is actually teenagers wearing black hoodies. Yeah,
Speaker 13: but they treated it as if it was this like
Speaker 13: organized group going around doing push ups.
Speaker 14: On their private chat, smoking big cigars, getting air dropped
Speaker 14: into into small towns to go exactly blow things up.
Speaker 7: Is like exactly, so funny of Antifa are coming in.
Speaker 14: Yeah, And then that leads into what I think is
Speaker 14: the best joke in the movie, the TikTok zoomer guy
Speaker 14: shooting while holding his phone and then like it cuts
Speaker 14: immediately into like a now this uh like TikTok about
Speaker 14: the antifas.
Speaker 11: Like militia time is and then.
Speaker 14: He's like a hype guy and he's got like a
Speaker 14: podcast where he's talking about if Michelle Obama's gonna run
Speaker 14: for president or whatever, like so good, what do you
Speaker 14: what do you think of kind of the the semi
Speaker 14: cliffhanger conclusion of some of the threads.
Speaker 11: I guess, hmmm, because and.
Speaker 14: I'm only thinking about this as a cliffhanger because he's
Speaker 14: talked about it him making a sequel, if that makes sense, Yeah.
Speaker 13: Like a like a loose sequel, Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, with like some of the same characters.
Speaker 9: I guess.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 13: I have felt pretty satisfied with how this wrapped up,
Speaker 13: because I mean, twenty twenty did not have a real ending.
Speaker 13: We are still living in the shadow of twenty twenty.
Speaker 13: There's still is loose threads, like COVID still is a
Speaker 13: thing that exists. We're still living with, like the way
Speaker 13: political violence escalated and never fully went away with, especially
Speaker 13: like January sixth, and how even the concept of pedophilia
Speaker 13: still runs almost all of politics. Like this is what
Speaker 13: politics is about. Is like deciding who is and isn't
Speaker 13: a pedophile. Yeah, like the whole conspiracy theory angle. More
Speaker 13: people are conspiracy theorists now than I think they were
Speaker 13: in twenty twenty, including like liberals, Oh yeah, no, the
Speaker 13: whole like blue and on conspiracy theories, the alt National Park,
Speaker 13: Blue Sky accounts, the Trump assassination was stayed, like all
Speaker 13: of that kind of stuff is like, this has just
Speaker 13: become all of what politics is.
Speaker 11: It's what your mom does.
Speaker 14: It's what like your mom, or like your every one
Speaker 14: of your parents.
Speaker 13: Does, and not just your right wing mom. Now, like
Speaker 13: this is like everybody's mom.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 13: And I think that's the sort of American decline that
Speaker 13: ori Astra is depicting, as opposed to the type that
Speaker 13: James Gut is depicting. I think it's much more accurate,
Speaker 13: I agree, And it's much more holistic.
Speaker 11: Yes, I don't think you could.
Speaker 14: I obviously, I don't think you could kind of really
Speaker 14: hold the schizophrenia that the post twenty twenty post lockdown
Speaker 14: political schizophrenia that we exist and currently I agree, where
Speaker 14: like everything is ungrounded.
Speaker 11: You know, you can't do a superhero story like that.
Speaker 11: I don't think there's like no way to do that.
Speaker 13: No, unless you use my favorite superhero, the question Yes,
Speaker 13: in which you could do that and James Gutt if
Speaker 13: you're listening, I will write to a question film and
Speaker 13: it will be crazy. But like in terms of like
Speaker 13: like filmmaking, I think I think post woke as like
Speaker 13: a filmmaking style, and like what our aster is doing
Speaker 13: here is a reaction to the past, like ten years
Speaker 13: of liberal self aggrandizing movies as content slop right, which
Speaker 13: tries to get points for like diversity casting without having
Speaker 13: any actual like substance of politics or will like gesture
Speaker 13: to things relating to class, even though it's made by
Speaker 13: these big, you know, multi billion dollar corporations. And I
Speaker 13: think I think that whole era produced this sort of
Speaker 13: schizophrenia because everything feels so paradoxical and self contradictory. And
Speaker 13: I think part of the feelings that evokes is what
Speaker 13: Eddington is trying to pull on and depicting those feelings
Speaker 13: as a subject itself, not just as like a background
Speaker 13: thing that we try to either like acknowledge sort of
Speaker 13: or try to like not acknowledge and like ignore. I
Speaker 13: think viewing that that cultural schizophrenia as a subject. If anything,
Speaker 13: that's like the main character of Eddington, and I think
Speaker 13: that's the part that that worked the most for me.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I think structure wise, a lot of people were
Speaker 14: talking about like it feels like too scattered of a movie.
Speaker 14: I think I saw that a lot, and like the
Speaker 14: critiques of it, and I think, like, sure, if we're
Speaker 14: talking about like just you know, does it become a
Speaker 14: little confusing to follow. Maybe, but it's like that's the point,
Speaker 14: like and not to say like that's the point, so
Speaker 14: it watches that away. But like, I don't think you can.
Speaker 14: I don't think you can make a movie accurately.
Speaker 13: You can't make a movie about that era without it
Speaker 13: feeling scattered like that.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's why I really respect ori Astor.
Speaker 14: I think I was talking to my partner yesterday about
Speaker 14: who's the guy that made like.
Speaker 11: Nosferatu and all those movies. Robert Eggers.
Speaker 14: Robert Eggers very good filmmaker, but he's explicitly talked about
Speaker 14: how he doesn't.
Speaker 13: Ever want to do modern films.
Speaker 14: Yeah, a modern film, I guess. I haven't seen The Crouds,
Speaker 14: but I've heard very good things about it.
Speaker 7: Me neither me neither.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I want to see that movie.
Speaker 14: Because I think Cronenberg is another one who's like I
Speaker 14: also want. I watched so great lineup for this movie.
Speaker 14: I watched Corningberg's What's the Video Drome?
Speaker 7: Recently?
Speaker 13: That did I can definitely see Eddington kind of being
Speaker 13: a grandchild of video drone in some ways.
Speaker 14: I would also recommend. I've also I've been reading Mark
Speaker 14: Fisher's Flat Line Constructs.
Speaker 7: This is a very Fisher movie.
Speaker 11: Yeah, very Fisher.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 14: I literally I listened to the stupid Russell Brand audio
Speaker 14: Book of Capitalists.
Speaker 7: No, oh, that sucks.
Speaker 14: I know Russell Brand sucks, but I was at work
Speaker 14: and I just needed something to listen to. So I
Speaker 14: didn't like blow my head off, and it didn't end
Speaker 14: up working out actually because I was working my shitty
Speaker 14: job and listening.
Speaker 13: To capitalist Brandy Russell Brand, Russell Brands Capitalist Realism.
Speaker 11: Oh God, what a bummer.
Speaker 13: Yeah, truly, Mark Fisher is only l Yeah.
Speaker 14: It is unbearable to have to listen to his voice,
Speaker 14: but it's a great book. I would definitely recommend reading
Speaker 14: that if he want to go into Eddington even more
Speaker 14: like Locked In, I guess, but this is a very
Speaker 14: like yeah, like you know, capital can convert anything into
Speaker 14: the image of something else. There was one shot that
Speaker 14: I really I found very evocative, which was the shot
Speaker 14: of like him walking Phoenix's characters having his haircut by
Speaker 14: his whatever stepmom ex stepmom, and she's talking about like
Speaker 14: conspiracy theory while filming it. That's good for TikTok, And
Speaker 14: it's like this is so perfect and so morbid, and.
Speaker 13: Like, yeah, no, there's there's a little bit of like
Speaker 13: Butdriard's book on America here, there's certainly a lot of
Speaker 13: ged Aboard in this, and I think that also was
Speaker 13: part of what relates it to me to Superman is
Speaker 13: how much like Superman is accidentally doing geed aboard regarding
Speaker 13: the genocide and Palestine, and how much I think that
Speaker 13: critique is actually built into Eddington.
Speaker 9: No.
Speaker 14: Absolutely, yeah, I I Superman is such an an interesting
Speaker 14: movie to take on that subject because obviously, in a
Speaker 14: way you're kind of like, well, good for James Gunn
Speaker 14: for doing something daring.
Speaker 11: I guess daring, I say with air quotes.
Speaker 14: But it's also like you have the Israel Palestine stuff
Speaker 14: placed right after a scene where Superman saves a green
Speaker 14: baby from a river of like cosmic sludge.
Speaker 7: Of like CGI squares.
Speaker 14: Yeah, which, by the way, I'm sure I don't know
Speaker 14: if this is the general consensus, but I thought that
Speaker 14: that scene was ugliest sin and I kind of hated it.
Speaker 13: Also, I hated the whole Pocket dimension. Yeah, aspect. I
Speaker 13: don't know why they didn't do a quick like ten
Speaker 13: minute interlude into the phantom zone keep hit that. But no,
Speaker 13: I think that that whole Pocket Dimension like forty minutes
Speaker 13: like derailed and stagnated a lot of the film for
Speaker 13: me and did not look very good.
Speaker 14: He's doing like Lex Luthor's Peter Thiel, Lex Luthor is
Speaker 14: Elon Musk Lex Luthor's, which could work. Yeah, yeah, which
Speaker 14: I think. I think I found it funny at least
Speaker 14: I said, like totally. I watched it and I thought like, oh,
Speaker 14: I know what he's doing. You know that he's Peter Thiel,
Speaker 14: shut down Gawker or.
Speaker 7: Whatever, crying men baby.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 14: Yeah, so it's like I get it, But I also,
Speaker 14: I mean, it's been done before, kind of thing, like
Speaker 14: I don't find it, you know that I don't know,
Speaker 14: but he Hey, his performance is great, But then the
Speaker 14: whole Palestine stuff is also capped off with a scene
Speaker 14: where lesh Luthor gets like bullied by a dog. You know,
Speaker 14: it's sandwiched between two things that are just like I
Speaker 14: don't know if you can do this or if you
Speaker 14: should do this, Like I don't know, No.
Speaker 9: It is.
Speaker 13: I think it's it's part of that sort of cultural
Speaker 13: schizophrenia that I think that Eddington is pulling on. Yeah
Speaker 13: is moments like that in the David Zaslov Winner Brothers, Discovery,
Speaker 13: Superman twenty twenty five.
Speaker 11: And Eddington just is.
Speaker 14: You know, it's a film that is like its entire
Speaker 14: thesis is that is the yeah is, the jumping around
Speaker 14: the just ret like his car is covered in shit
Speaker 14: for the entire movie.
Speaker 11: I love it so funny.
Speaker 14: All the all the slogans are like kind of like
Speaker 14: they're all trying to put in their own little thing,
Speaker 14: you know, Like he's like, can we make it about bitcoin?
Speaker 11: Can we make it about.
Speaker 13: It's like a twenty twenty conservative Facebook feed brought to life.
Speaker 14: Yes, Yes, it's a great movie. I love Eddingson. I
Speaker 14: think that this movie will age very well.
Speaker 13: Well, what would you like to plug Bailey new poster?
Speaker 14: I think you should follow me If you have an
Speaker 14: X you should follow me.
Speaker 11: On at what is it called at New Poster two
Speaker 11: on x.
Speaker 14: If you're on Instagram, you should follow me at postalytical Bling,
Speaker 14: which is a terrible username, but I made.
Speaker 11: It's my writing user name, like ages ago, I think.
Speaker 14: And then on Blue Sky, if you use that, you
Speaker 14: should follow me it what even is michaelue Sky?
Speaker 11: I don't even use I'm gonna be honest, I don't
Speaker 11: use blues guy.
Speaker 13: But if you if we got to fix the vibes
Speaker 13: on there, baby, we we got it, we got we
Speaker 13: got we got to get more like crazy crazy unhinged
Speaker 13: art on Blue Start all.
Speaker 14: Right, Uh, it's it's New Poster Dot, Bluesky dot social
Speaker 14: or whatever.
Speaker 11: So there you go if you need that. There, there's
Speaker 11: the there's the plugs.
Speaker 13: Well, thank you for coming on to talk about Eddington
Speaker 13: and Superman.
Speaker 11: Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been wonderful.
Speaker 14: I love Eddington, I enjoyed Superman, so this is a
Speaker 14: good talk.
Speaker 13: There you go, Lovely Lovely. For the last segment of
Speaker 13: our post Woke Cinema episode, I'm gonna play a conversation
Speaker 13: I had with Atlanta musician Janey Danger, who we talk
Speaker 13: about her thoughts on the film Eddington and the way
Speaker 13: it manifests twenty twenties hyperreality.
Speaker 11: A little background.
Speaker 15: I guess, like I really like ariost I remember talking
Speaker 15: with you about Bo's Afraid a while ago.
Speaker 11: I remember you weren't a huge fan of it.
Speaker 7: Not so hot.
Speaker 13: I'm Bo's Afraid. I'm Afraid. I wanted to like it too,
Speaker 13: because whenever people talk about this like like like off putting,
Speaker 13: long slow cinema about like anxiety, like I want to
Speaker 13: like that, Like Illa Dumpayer is one of the best films. Ever,
Speaker 13: there's other other other films that do is that that
Speaker 13: that also tackle its not just like David Lynch. Yeah,
Speaker 13: and like the rest of ari Astor, I was always
Speaker 13: like lukewarm to kind of positive on Like, I don't
Speaker 13: hate him as a filmmaker. I don't have that as
Speaker 13: part of my personality way some people do. Yeah, I
Speaker 13: think his movies are just fine. I think he does
Speaker 13: dabble in or. I guess he like overlies on a
Speaker 13: degree of shalk value, which you could even see in
Speaker 13: his earlier like student films. Yeah, I think are like
Speaker 13: very juvenile and not interesting. I think Hereditary's fine. So
Speaker 13: aria Aster has always been there but I've never been
Speaker 13: like a a story in Bio.
Speaker 15: I think he's kind of cool to hate now, Like
Speaker 15: I think with he's very cool to hate now people
Speaker 15: really like hating him.
Speaker 13: But Eddington I think has done him a lot of
Speaker 13: favors though among the people who used to hate him.
Speaker 15: I've kind of noticed that it seems like with Hereditary
Speaker 15: in Midsummer, those were generally like very well received by
Speaker 15: like the A twenty four crowd, and it was kind
Speaker 15: of like, I guess the cool opinion would be to
Speaker 15: be like those movies are mid and then like Bo
Speaker 15: Was Afraid as a masterpiece or whatever.
Speaker 11: I like his horror movies.
Speaker 15: I think they're slick, well made films with good stories.
Speaker 15: I love bo Was Afraid though, I think it's incredible,
Speaker 15: but it is not the kind of it's the kind
Speaker 15: of movie that, like, as much as I love it,
Speaker 15: as much as it means to me, as seen as
Speaker 15: I feel by that film, it's not the kind of
Speaker 15: thing that like, if you don't like it, I'm not
Speaker 15: gonna like convince you, you know, like there's probably like
Speaker 15: if you told me you didn't like Maholland Drive, like
Speaker 15: I'd be like, you're fucking stupid and wrong.
Speaker 7: You're dumb if you tell me you don't like was.
Speaker 15: Afraid, It's like fair enough, It's it's sure certainly the
Speaker 15: kind of thing that's not for everyone. I bring it
Speaker 15: up mostly because I think with bo and Eddington, it's
Speaker 15: a very interesting thing he does that is kind of
Speaker 15: I guess I compared to maybe like French new wave directors,
Speaker 15: maybe like something like Selene and Julie go Boding, where
Speaker 15: the like protagonists are living in like a fake insane reality,
Speaker 15: where in other directors, like most other films, like you'd
Speaker 15: have someone who's like going insane and hallucinating and like
Speaker 15: everyone's trying to kill them, et cetera.
Speaker 11: And then maybe there would be like a cut.
Speaker 7: Which is kind of what happens to bow Is Afraid.
Speaker 15: Yeah, but in other movies there would maybe be like
Speaker 15: a cut away for someone else where they see like
Speaker 15: the character like arguing to a shadow like.
Speaker 13: The quote unquote real perspective. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 15: And I think that bo Is Afraid it's like it's no,
Speaker 15: this is real, And I think Eddington does a very
Speaker 15: similar thing where the beliefs of the characters are real,
Speaker 15: and that's why like you know, all the conservatives, Like
Speaker 15: I mean, if you remember twenty twenty, they're like there's
Speaker 15: Antipho super soldiers that are going out and doing terrorism.
Speaker 15: It's like so in this world, in the Eddington universe,
Speaker 15: it's like what if that was real?
Speaker 11: Like what if Fox.
Speaker 15: News was actually in motion here? And I think that's
Speaker 15: very interesting.
Speaker 13: The approach that he does in Eddington, I think is
Speaker 13: a little bit more subtle than the way there's in
Speaker 13: bos Afraid, because you start the film way way more
Speaker 13: as like a as like you know, a political satire
Speaker 13: on the absurdity of like pandemic era America, and then
Speaker 13: the reality starts diverting from what we can agree as
Speaker 13: like as like a shared consensus reality. Yeah, and then
Speaker 13: it it diverts from that the same way reality diverted
Speaker 13: away from that in twenty twenty for people, and we
Speaker 13: created this like yeah, massive like reality fracture.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Like the first time I noticed this in the filmmaking
Speaker 13: was there was like a news clip about like a
Speaker 13: Portland riot in twenty twenty, and it had people like
Speaker 13: exchanging gunfire on rooftops and it was played next to
Speaker 13: actual news clips of like the Third Precinct burning down,
Speaker 13: like it was played off as like a real, legitimate
Speaker 13: news clip. Yeah, and like I was, I lived in
Speaker 13: Portland in twenty twenty. I know that's not real. But
Speaker 13: to many people viewing, they might not catch that. That
Speaker 13: might just be like, that might just go into the background.
Speaker 13: So at that point I realized that actually the way
Speaker 13: that reality is getting diverted in the film is way
Speaker 13: more subtle. And then of course you get like the
Speaker 13: Antifa super soldier private jet later and it's more obvious
Speaker 13: like what he's doing. But even like small things like that,
Speaker 13: I started to really appreciate you, Like, no, you're like
Speaker 13: getting into the mind of people who believe these things,
Speaker 13: and that's what we're that's what's being depicted, Like the
Speaker 13: feelings of twenty twenty are more important than the reality
Speaker 13: of twenty twenty, and that is what he's trying to show.
Speaker 15: That's even kind of like a meta in a sense,
Speaker 15: because it's like if you watch that that scene of
Speaker 15: like the footage of the Portland like shooting and stuff,
Speaker 15: and you as the audience or like questioning if that
Speaker 15: was real, then it's like your consensus reality is also
Speaker 15: diverging from the regular consensus reality. It's like it kind
Speaker 15: of makes you a cipher for the characters, which which
Speaker 15: also leads me to something something else. So something I
Speaker 15: don't see a lot of people talking about. But the
Speaker 15: vagrant character that that starts the film where he comes
Speaker 15: in and he's just like mumbling like messages. And if
Speaker 15: you've ever been around like a you know, like a
Speaker 15: homeless person on a bus or something, they like to mumble.
Speaker 15: And it's I read that as someone who's like just
Speaker 15: essentially doing what everyone else in this movie eventually comes
Speaker 15: to do totally, yes, which is just taking all of
Speaker 15: your like internalized like messages, traumas, like things you've heard,
Speaker 15: things you believe, and just like grumbling it, spitting it out.
Speaker 15: And so anyone who talks to you, you just incessantly
Speaker 15: just like messages, messages, messages.
Speaker 13: Dissimilarity of that character to like the Mom character, who
Speaker 13: does the same thing but is seen in a very
Speaker 13: different way. Yeah, because of a house, she has like
Speaker 13: a home to live in and has like family.
Speaker 15: Yeah, absolutely, And there's no there's no place for a
Speaker 15: person like the vagrant in this world, but there is
Speaker 15: a place for all these other types of insane people.
Speaker 15: And they're all able to find their little little niches
Speaker 15: and such, when maybe in a world before that and
Speaker 15: a world before it was so easy to find such niches,
Speaker 15: maybe like you would I don't know, go to therapy,
Speaker 15: maybe like maybe your.
Speaker 11: Family would would be concerned.
Speaker 15: It is very interesting because people very are are very
Speaker 15: prone now, and it's like that's because they're able to
Speaker 15: like get pulled into these cults. They find their own
Speaker 15: kind of Austin Butler figure who's able to talk to
Speaker 15: them directly and be like, no, come with me, you're okay,
Speaker 15: and just to go back to the point of like
Speaker 15: messages and stuff. I think that the uh, the Joaquin
Speaker 15: Phoenix character. I think he starts out as a very
Speaker 15: like uh like Hank Hill, like very I mean he
Speaker 15: doesn't he doesn't want to wear a mask. He's obviously
Speaker 15: leans a bit conservative, but.
Speaker 13: But he's like trying to kind of be like a
Speaker 13: reasonable guy.
Speaker 15: Right, And I see him as someone who's trying to
Speaker 15: like avoid the messaging from everyone. Like even when people
Speaker 15: tell him about like certain news stories and stuff, he's like,
Speaker 15: I don't know, like he just doesn't know. And yeah,
Speaker 15: in the process of him like avoiding all these messages,
Speaker 15: what does he do. He buys a truck and covers
Speaker 15: it in fucking messages.
Speaker 13: In messages he starts broadcasting his reality to everyone around
Speaker 13: him exactly.
Speaker 15: It's like, I don't know, I think that normally, normally
Speaker 15: I would call it bad writing for like every character
Speaker 15: to be like a cipher. But I think what he
Speaker 15: does in this is is really really interesting. Like I
Speaker 15: think it's a I don't know, I guess, like one
Speaker 15: more thing that I really like, do want to say,
Speaker 15: is like Ari Astor did an interview with Will Minker
Speaker 15: and Hesse of like Chapo, and he said that he
Speaker 15: kind of wanted to make this movie like a Rorshack
Speaker 15: test of sorts, and I think he maybe overly succeeded
Speaker 15: in that definitely. And in fact, if I had one criticism,
Speaker 15: it's that maybe I wish there was like a few
Speaker 15: things like tied together that and I just wish Austin
Speaker 15: Butler and emm A.
Speaker 11: Stone got a little more meat to do things.
Speaker 15: But aside from that, one of the biggest criticisms that
Speaker 15: I'm honestly just going to dismiss outright as people saying
Speaker 15: that this is like a centrist movie totally, or comparing
Speaker 15: this to South Park or something like that. And if
Speaker 15: you view this as a centrist movie, I mean, the
Speaker 15: liberals in this are like kind of annoying and effectual.
Speaker 11: A lot of them don't really believe what they do.
Speaker 11: Some of them do.
Speaker 15: I think the girl character is very sympathetic, but like
Speaker 15: the younger girl. But Joaquin Phoenix, the ostensible, like you know,
Speaker 15: right wing version of this, kills a child, like he
Speaker 15: kills three people, including like a teenager.
Speaker 13: Like the woke characters engage with politics in a that
Speaker 13: but and self serving way to mask their own insecurities
Speaker 13: and shortcomings and for their own personal benefit. The right
Speaker 13: wing characters murder and have rape cults, and.
Speaker 15: Yeah, right, Like I don't I don't see how you
Speaker 15: could look at the actions of the characters in this
Speaker 15: film and just be like, yeah, I guess everyone is stupid.
Speaker 15: I guess everyone is wrong because it's like no, like
Speaker 15: I mean, I guess everyone is a little stupid and
Speaker 15: everyone is kind of wrong about things. But like, that's
Speaker 15: not like what it's getting across. I think that's a
Speaker 15: very shallow read of the film.
Speaker 13: This is what people outside of the Brooklyn theater were
Speaker 13: complaining about when I eavesdropped for like nearly forty five
Speaker 13: minutes after the film, just to hear what people were
Speaker 13: talking about. I love eavesdropping, I love snooping, So I
Speaker 13: was really feasting out there. And Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 13: people upset at how quote unquote little this film had
Speaker 13: to say. It's just it's just depicting these things but
Speaker 13: doesn't have the audacity to actually like say anything about
Speaker 13: them or like take a quote unquote stance, and like, yeah,
Speaker 13: that's so not what the film is trying to do.
Speaker 13: That the film is pointing out, like the social media
Speaker 13: style engagement with politics is it's incredibly self serving thing,
Speaker 13: and it's this performance that we put on for other
Speaker 13: people and sometimes put on even for ourselves. And twenty
Speaker 13: twenty was away because of the conditions of the lockdown,
Speaker 13: the Internet and real life combined in a way more
Speaker 13: like totalistically than they have ever before. And then that
Speaker 13: combination grew pressure and shot outwards into physical reality in
Speaker 13: a very bombastic way, both for the twenty twenty protests
Speaker 13: and eventually something like January sixth, right, both these things, Yeah,
Speaker 13: I think you can you can look at a similar
Speaker 13: like a political pressure like building and manifesting, and it's
Speaker 13: not saying these things are like equal. It's not the
Speaker 13: centrist I'm better than thou for you look at all
Speaker 13: these crazy guys. But it's it's talking about how we
Speaker 13: as a culture associate with politics now, and like how
Speaker 13: as like American culture we associate with politics now, and
Speaker 13: maybe that's kind of troubling and kind of scary. That's
Speaker 13: like the horror of the film is ye, the way
Speaker 13: that we associate with social media politics now is really frightening.
Speaker 13: Which isn't like a revolutionary thing to say, right. This
Speaker 13: isn't like, you know, breaking new ground here, but he
Speaker 13: is expressing something that everyone I think has felt at
Speaker 13: a certain point. Sure, but it's it's it's presented in
Speaker 13: a way that I think is it very much is
Speaker 13: a Rorscha act test for a lot of people.
Speaker 15: I think a lot of people are uncomfortable. I think
Speaker 15: some people just see too much of themselves, and like
Speaker 15: I was speaking specifically to like liberal audiences, I think
Speaker 15: a lot of them are seeing something of themselves and
Speaker 15: they feel like they're being made fun of and they
Speaker 15: don't appreciate that. I'll just say I was I was
Speaker 15: at the Black Lives Matter protests and stuff. I was
Speaker 15: there and I don't feel that way. No, I don't
Speaker 15: think I was being made fun of. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 15: like Like I think that like that's kind of on
Speaker 15: you as a viewer for like expecting a movie to
Speaker 15: like look directly in the camera and be like, I
Speaker 15: believe the same things you believe, you know, because that's
Speaker 15: I mean, that's bad filmmaking, that's bad writing.
Speaker 13: Explains the exact type of communist that I am.
Speaker 11: Right, Yes, I'm the exact kind of leftist you are.
Speaker 15: We are on the same side and we're all laughing
Speaker 15: at the same things together.
Speaker 13: It's like, no, and if if your engagement with like
Speaker 13: social justice and anti police brutality protests is shallow enough
Speaker 13: to feel called out in a film like this, I
Speaker 13: think that is cause more for self reflection and for
Speaker 13: while you participated in those things.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 13: Not a fault of the film where it's not the
Speaker 13: film taking a stance against those things. I think it's
Speaker 13: it's showing there's certain types of people who who participated
Speaker 13: in an extremely performative and like self serving manner, and
Speaker 13: like specifically the way that like the main like like
Speaker 13: like zoomer guy character who in the end becomes a
Speaker 13: right wing grifter. It's like it's I think this manifests
Speaker 13: this like like like perfectly, like I think his his character,
Speaker 13: I think is one of the funniest characters in the film.
Speaker 13: One of one of the best jokes is just him
Speaker 13: like liking a.
Speaker 11: Tweet googling Angela Davos.
Speaker 13: So I think that kind of stuff is more what
Speaker 13: it's talking about. And when you have those types of
Speaker 13: people being some of the most vocal people at these events,
Speaker 13: it contributes to this like kind of psychosis and that
Speaker 13: I think that's what the film is is specifically saying.
Speaker 15: I mean, did we forget that people like Sean King
Speaker 15: were like popular in twenty twenty. Look, if you see
Speaker 15: this and like the portrayal of like these liberal characters
Speaker 15: doesn't apply to you, I don't know why you're mad.
Speaker 15: I don't know why you would like look at that
Speaker 15: and be like, oh, they're making fun of me and everything.
Speaker 15: I believe because if it doesn't apply to you, then
Speaker 15: it doesn't apply to you. And that was how I
Speaker 15: watched the film, Like I didn't feel like any of
Speaker 15: these characters applied to me.
Speaker 11: So I don't really care.
Speaker 15: And I guess a final point is like I haven't
Speaker 15: heard anyone else say this, but like Sheriff Joe at
Speaker 15: the end of the film is I feel like it's
Speaker 15: very unsubtle symbolism to say that he's lobotomized.
Speaker 11: With if Ice stabbed in the in the head with
Speaker 11: a knife.
Speaker 13: That's what's happened to all of us in a way.
Speaker 15: And I mean, it's funny that Ariastra avoided a lot
Speaker 15: of mother related trauma up until the very very end
Speaker 15: of the movie.
Speaker 13: The very last he had to squeezed it in there.
Speaker 15: I know, I know which it was, I know, and
Speaker 15: he's being like raised in the bed and this kind
Speaker 15: of like angelic like ascension kind of thing.
Speaker 11: I don't know.
Speaker 15: I think that it's I think it's a pretty unsubtle
Speaker 15: and funny way of saying that, like there's really for
Speaker 15: some people after going fully there in like being insane,
Speaker 15: after like just plunging yourself into the heart of all
Speaker 15: of this like chaos and unreality, that the only thing
Speaker 15: that is going to save you is a lobotomy, if
Speaker 15: nothing else. I think that's very funny. So yeah, I
Speaker 15: enjoyed it a lot. I've wondered after about a week
Speaker 15: after I saw it, I was kicking it around in
Speaker 15: my head more and I was wondering, like, will this
Speaker 15: grow on me?
Speaker 11: Will this age well?
Speaker 15: And I think it definitely has grown on me the
Speaker 15: more I've thought about it.
Speaker 13: Same it has also grown me more over time. Once
Speaker 13: I got out of the theater, I was storting through
Speaker 13: a lot of different feelings about what I just saw
Speaker 13: and it has definitely grown me over time. Where can
Speaker 13: people find you and your work?
Speaker 15: Yeah, so I'm a musician. You can go to Janie
Speaker 15: Danger dot com and find most of my links and stuff.
Speaker 15: I have a new song and video out. I'm working
Speaker 15: on a new album that should come out later this year.
Speaker 15: And if you're in the Atlanta area, I'm playing a
Speaker 15: show at the end of August at Bogs Social and
Speaker 15: the Mainline Music Festival in September. But if you follow
Speaker 15: me on like Instagram or whatever, you should have all
Speaker 15: your updates there and you can follow me on letterbox
Speaker 15: at Janey Danger.
Speaker 11: So yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 7: Thank you Jane.
Speaker 13: That does it for us at it could happen here.
Speaker 13: Thanks once again to Jane Danger and Bailey new Poster.
Speaker 13: Follow them both online. They do great work. If you
Speaker 13: want some good music, listen to Jane. If you want
Speaker 13: some cool art, look up a Bailey new poster.
Speaker 4: Hope.
Speaker 13: I guess I will hopefully see you on the other
Speaker 13: side of this post Woke Nightmare, Bye Bye, Welcome to
Speaker 13: It could happen here a show about things falling apart,
Speaker 13: and today the thing falling apart is the Internet. And
Speaker 13: today we have a special guest episode with Bridget Todd.
Speaker 16: Hello Bridget, So Garrett, it's kind of funny that we
Speaker 16: are talking just a few days after the Trump administration
Speaker 16: put out there Woke AI executive Order.
Speaker 13: Yes, I have not read this yet. I have to
Speaker 13: for next week's executive Disorder. I'm not looking forward to it.
Speaker 16: I liked that the Cool Zone team kind of sections
Speaker 16: off all the Trump federal nonsense so you don't have
Speaker 16: to be mired in it all the goddamn time.
Speaker 13: I still kind of am. I just schedule it throughout
Speaker 13: my week. I guess there's certain days where I have
Speaker 13: to do it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you gotta pepper it in. You've got to pepper
Speaker 7: it in.
Speaker 16: Well, yeah, not to give you a spoiler for when
Speaker 16: you dive into it yourself, but it's all nonsense. Basically,
Speaker 16: the Trump administration is saying that right now, the biggest
Speaker 16: threat regarding AI is it being too woke and essentially
Speaker 16: telling folks who make AI tech leaders essentially to be
Speaker 16: more like Elon Musk and Grock and make sure that
Speaker 16: your AI models, the only AI models that we will
Speaker 16: accept in this country are the non woke ones, ones
Speaker 16: that don't incorporate DEI would love to know more about
Speaker 16: what he thinks that means, but that's a little preview
Speaker 16: for you.
Speaker 13: Fantastic, you know, seems like the most important issue facing
Speaker 13: our nationent right now.
Speaker 7: Definitely, definitely.
Speaker 16: And so it's funny that we're talking about AI because
Speaker 16: I don't know if you're on TikTok, but there have
Speaker 16: been these kind of shockingly racist AI generated videos all
Speaker 16: over TikTok, to the point where I would say that
Speaker 16: we are witnessing the revival of the Minstrel Show using
Speaker 16: AI on social media. This is not a claim I
Speaker 16: used lightly. That is how extreme some of this content is.
Speaker 13: I'm not on TikTok, but I think I've seen some
Speaker 13: of this content permeate across platforms, certainly on like Instagram
Speaker 13: reels and even even bits of X the everything app
Speaker 13: I love that you call it that that's the full name.
Speaker 16: So for folks who don't know, I want to scround
Speaker 16: the conversation in what a minstrel show is. So the
Speaker 16: minstrel show was a incredibly popular form of American theater
Speaker 16: and entertainment in the nineteenth century, where mostly but not all,
Speaker 16: white performers would wear black face makeup to make themselves
Speaker 16: look like These exaggerated racist versions of black people and
Speaker 16: essentially portray very racist stereotypes of black folks being lazy buffoons.
Speaker 16: And a common trope in these skits was black people
Speaker 16: trying and failing to gain American citizenship because at the time,
Speaker 16: black Americans did not have full citizenship, and so a
Speaker 16: big plotline would be like, Oh, we had to take
Speaker 16: a test for citizenship, but we were too stupid to
Speaker 16: figure it out. Are we spaced the data and overslept
Speaker 16: because we're very lazy. When these shows would depict black women,
Speaker 16: we were often shown as what you might think up
Speaker 16: as like a sapphire caricature, which is rude, loud, malicious, stubborn,
Speaker 16: and overbearing, kind of like the angry black woman trope
Speaker 16: that you probably are familiar with in media today. So
Speaker 16: these skits were incredibly popular entertainment, but they also served
Speaker 16: the purpose of reaffirming political and social ideologies.
Speaker 7: And so, you know, the dominant.
Speaker 16: Way that people consumed media regarding Black people showed us
Speaker 16: as lazy, stupid, angry, loud, and important, not really able
Speaker 16: to conform to the dominant culture of like mainstream, hardworking
Speaker 16: white Americans. That is obviously an incredibly powerful tool to
Speaker 16: uphold and reaffirm the idea that black folks should not
Speaker 16: be given full citizenship, should not be given full rights,
Speaker 16: cannot be you know, integrated into polite white society. And
Speaker 16: it almost kind of became this for their own good
Speaker 16: attitude that provided like a polite justification for things like segregation.
Speaker 7: Well like, oh, well, you know.
Speaker 16: I've seen in minstrel shows that black folks are very
Speaker 16: lazy and stupid, So it's an as for their own
Speaker 16: good that we treat them like shit in society, do
Speaker 16: you feel me?
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a sort of like infantilization exactly.
Speaker 16: And so even though the minstrel show did die out,
Speaker 16: I would argue that we are kind of seeing a
Speaker 16: little bit of a comeback using AI in the digital realm,
Speaker 16: and just like the minstrual shows of yesteryear were used
Speaker 16: to affirm political and social ideologies under the guise of
Speaker 16: just being in a payment or just being jokes or
Speaker 16: just being funny. I really think it's not a coincidence
Speaker 16: that we're also seeing the rise of digital blackface, where
Speaker 16: non black creators are using AI to create these viral
Speaker 16: racist skits that are steeped in black stereotypes, and that
Speaker 16: they're really taking off all over social media today.
Speaker 13: That sounds not fun to hear about, but I'm excited
Speaker 13: for you to explain it to me.
Speaker 16: Yes, So I will say, initially, the first iteration of
Speaker 16: one of these videos that I saw was not really racist.
Speaker 16: It was made by a black creator, I think, trying
Speaker 16: to use AI to create sort of humorous skits. But
Speaker 16: when that first video took off, people on TikTok started
Speaker 16: using AI to create more and more extreme, more and
Speaker 16: more racist iterations of these kinds of videos, which is
Speaker 16: what we're seeing today. So I will play a little
Speaker 16: snippet of an example for you. What's up, bitch, is
Speaker 16: this bigfoot one hand the baddest bitch in the woods?
Speaker 7: Part time cryptic, full time problem. Don't follow me if
Speaker 7: you scared a please.
Speaker 16: So, but this is a TikTok that got over two
Speaker 16: million views, and it basically it uses AI to generate
Speaker 16: this black woman stereotypical version of Bigfoot, and this account
Speaker 16: is so popular that has generated so many copycats, Like
Speaker 16: this is a format that has really hit with TikTok.
Speaker 7: There also is another kind of bucket of these.
Speaker 16: That people call slave talk, where it uses AI to
Speaker 16: sort of reimagine enslaved people on plantations if they had
Speaker 16: social media and we're doing vlogs and so a lot
Speaker 16: of those videos were taken down by TikTok, which is
Speaker 16: I think good, but essentially it would reimagine these AI
Speaker 16: in generated enslaved people basically saying like, oh, well, yeah,
Speaker 16: I do have to work out here in the cotton fields,
Speaker 16: but at least I'm going to get meals. At least
Speaker 16: I have a roof over my head, essentially really affirming
Speaker 16: the idea that, like slavery, wasn't that bad.
Speaker 11: One of the more heinous.
Speaker 16: Examples that I saw of these that was removed from
Speaker 16: TikTok was a TikTok shop sponsored video that showed an
Speaker 16: AI generated enslaved person working in the fields wearing a
Speaker 16: solar powered hat with a sand in it, and basically
Speaker 16: he was like, Oh, this work in the field would
Speaker 16: be so horrible if I did not have this hat.
Speaker 7: And then there's a little.
Speaker 16: Link to the TikTok shop and you can buy the
Speaker 16: actual hat, which is just some really dystopian awful shit.
Speaker 13: No, that is like quite literally, it's like evocative of
Speaker 13: like cyberpunk tropes that people I would assume would not
Speaker 13: want to use it due to fears of insensitivity, but
Speaker 13: it's just on your phone, like as like a real thing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I completely agree, and I love that comparison.
Speaker 16: And I think, like I would imagine if I were
Speaker 16: running a TikTok shop that using.
Speaker 11: The AI generated image of.
Speaker 16: An enslaved person, I would think like, oh, well, this
Speaker 16: is certainly not something that I would use to like
Speaker 16: sell some cheap fan hat.
Speaker 7: But I mean, I think it is exactly what you're
Speaker 7: saying that.
Speaker 16: I think that the extreme quality of these videos, people
Speaker 16: are just like, well, it'll get views and then I'll
Speaker 16: get more eyeballs on my TikTok shop.
Speaker 11: I don't think there's any kind of sure.
Speaker 13: Yeah, no, it's a very gross way of doing like
Speaker 13: outrage farming. For engagement, I guess, like because surely they
Speaker 13: know that these are not going to like go over
Speaker 13: easy like. I think a part of part of this
Speaker 13: is generating some degree of like attention based on it
Speaker 13: being offensive or extremely gross and knowing that people will
Speaker 13: like comment things of that nature exactly.
Speaker 16: And it's funny that you mentioned that, because the AI
Speaker 16: component of this is sort of what makes this novel
Speaker 16: and new. But that kind of thing has been all
Speaker 16: over social media for the longest time. Sure I remember
Speaker 16: how big stuff like skit culture was on TikTok. And
Speaker 16: I don't mean skits like Saturday Night Live or Portlandia.
Speaker 16: I mean skits where they are trying to get you
Speaker 16: to think this is somebody's cell phone footage of something
Speaker 16: that happened, but really it's like, well that those are
Speaker 16: two actors. And there there was a type of these
Speaker 16: skits that would really tick off on TikTok where it
Speaker 16: was purporting to be oh, this is a parent who
Speaker 16: is going off on a trans teacher for trying to
Speaker 16: indoctrinate their kid, and all the comments would be like
Speaker 16: good for them, good for that mom, and then the
Speaker 16: screen flips and it's like, oh, well, the woman you
Speaker 16: were just telling me is the trans teacher, Now she's
Speaker 16: the mom.
Speaker 7: Who was the next video? Yes, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 13: No, I like the ones that are set on airplanes
Speaker 13: where they all use the same airplane set. Yes, and
Speaker 13: they get into like fake fights on airplanes using the
Speaker 13: same like five actors playing different roles.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and then if you look carefully in the background,
Speaker 16: you start thinking, well, airplanes don't have those strip led
Speaker 16: lights that you can buy on Amazon.
Speaker 7: Does not actually the.
Speaker 13: TikTok lights and the hallways like five feet wide.
Speaker 16: Yeah, exactly, And listen, I am not above getting taken
Speaker 16: in by those kinds of skits. And I guess I
Speaker 16: don't love the idea that someone would be dedicating energy
Speaker 16: and brain space to getting upset about a set of
Speaker 16: circumstances that never really happened.
Speaker 13: But it's the Internet. Come on, that's that's like, that's
Speaker 13: half of the Internet.
Speaker 7: Yes, Like, you know, I don't love it.
Speaker 16: But when the stakes so, like when the stakes are
Speaker 16: low and it's just like a random fight on an airplane, fine,
Speaker 16: when the stakes are higher and it's like, this is
Speaker 16: a skit meant to like attack or demonize trans people,
Speaker 16: queer people, black people, that's where I'm like, well, what
Speaker 16: are we really doing here?
Speaker 7: I think whether or not this.
Speaker 16: Kind of content, like when it's AI generated, we're looking
Speaker 16: at things that never actually happened. Even though these these
Speaker 16: circumstances in these situations never really happened, they still very
Speaker 16: much affirm the worldview of the people who are consuming it, right,
Speaker 16: And so if you are consuming a skit in involving
Speaker 16: whether it's human actors or AI generated black people, if
Speaker 16: that skit reaffirms your worldview that these people cannot be trusted,
Speaker 16: these people are bad in some way, it kind of
Speaker 16: doesn't matter if it's real.
Speaker 13: Or not, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 13: That's like the concept of like hyperreality, where you're trying
Speaker 13: to like blend the Internet's exaggerated version of reality with
Speaker 13: our physical, lived existence, and how these things start combining
Speaker 13: into each other to create this idea of reality in
Speaker 13: our heads that's more real than it actually is, to
Speaker 13: the point where we take things on the screen to
Speaker 13: be more accurately reflective of what's going on in the
Speaker 13: world than what we actually experience in our day to
Speaker 13: day lives. And so much of that concept is what
Speaker 13: drives like American like reactionary politics exactly.
Speaker 16: And when you actually go into the comments of these videos,
Speaker 16: which in my opinion are very clearly AI generated.
Speaker 7: People are in the comments.
Speaker 13: Well, I mean that easy for you to say. Someone
Speaker 13: who spends their time like researching what's going on and
Speaker 13: on the internet. I'm not sure if Mema and pop
Speaker 13: are finding these videos to be like, well, this one's
Speaker 13: obviously AI generated.
Speaker 16: No, And that's my point is like I don't even
Speaker 16: think they're thinking about it that way, and I don't
Speaker 16: think they care that it's not real. In the comments
Speaker 16: of these videos, it'll be a video, an AI generated
Speaker 16: video of a black woman behaving in this very stereotypical
Speaker 16: racist way, and the comments will say they're all like that,
Speaker 16: and it kind of misses the point of like, well,
Speaker 16: there's there's no they in this video because it's AI generated.
Speaker 13: This is just a computer puppet. This isn't real.
Speaker 16: Like, yeah, I completely agree, But I think when you
Speaker 16: see something online, whether it's obviously AI generated or not,
Speaker 16: if it reaffirms your worldview, it kind of doesn't matter.
Speaker 7: It's the same reason why when there's like.
Speaker 16: Four legged veterans in AI slop holding a sign that
Speaker 16: says everyone forgot about me, wish me happy birthday.
Speaker 13: Three billion likes on Facebook.
Speaker 16: I mean, what do you think is going on there?
Speaker 16: I find that so fascinating.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 13: I mean, I'm not a psychologist, but I don't know.
Speaker 13: I think it isn't just the simple reaffirming of someone's
Speaker 13: previously held view people are very receptive to. And we
Speaker 13: even see this with like you know, with like fake
Speaker 13: news headlines, right, and people might point out that this
Speaker 13: story isn't isn't actually real. And when people are confronted
Speaker 13: with this idea of that they've been tricked by unreality,
Speaker 13: they'll be like, no, maybe this one isn't real, but
Speaker 13: it could be real. And that's and that's what really
Speaker 13: matters is that this this feels true, not that it
Speaker 13: is true, but the fact that I feel it resonating
Speaker 13: is actually more important than any kind of physical trueness
Speaker 13: out inside, like the flesh world like that. That that
Speaker 13: is honestly that that matters far less than how it
Speaker 13: impacts how I feel and how how it reflects the
Speaker 13: world as I see it.
Speaker 16: So I did an episode of my podcast or oar
Speaker 16: Norgles on the Internet all about the sort of weird
Speaker 16: economy of AI generated disinformation, essentially fan fiction that came
Speaker 16: out of the trial of Sean P.
Speaker 7: Didy co.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 7: That sounds incredibly upsetting.
Speaker 16: It was so upsetting, And the reason I looked into
Speaker 16: it is because I have to be honest and say,
Speaker 16: one of these AI generated videos got me.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 16: It was a video that claimed that the late musician
Speaker 16: Prince was able to testify in Ditty's trial from the
Speaker 16: Beyond the Grave, and that they played a video that
Speaker 16: Prince made warning everybody that didty is this bad guy? Right?
Speaker 16: I am probably the world's biggest Prince fans. Well, I
Speaker 16: was like Prince always like. It got me and it
Speaker 16: totally affirmed what I want to be true.
Speaker 7: But it was all a lie.
Speaker 13: It's compelling, it's trying to like, it's trying to impact
Speaker 13: you emotionally, especially for people who who like Prince, who
Speaker 13: who miss miss Prince. This could be emotionally compelling, and like,
Speaker 13: that's that's what they're like intentionally going after. I think
Speaker 13: that's that's why something like that could work so well.
Speaker 7: It got me.
Speaker 16: And when I looked into kind of how these videos
Speaker 16: are cranked out on YouTube, so basically any celebrity that
Speaker 16: you can imagine. There is an AI generated video on
Speaker 16: YouTube saying that they were some how involved in the
Speaker 16: Didty trial. And what's so interesting is in the comments
Speaker 16: of these videos that are again pretty obviously AI generated
Speaker 16: or not real, and even the description of the YouTube
Speaker 16: account will say this is just for entertainment.
Speaker 7: Nothing here is supposed to be true. People won't read
Speaker 7: that part.
Speaker 16: Basically, if you've ever had a bad feeling about a celebrity,
Speaker 16: which who haven't totally see, there's a video that that
Speaker 16: affirms with that worldview that is like, well, did you
Speaker 16: know they were involved in the ditty frea comps?
Speaker 7: And everybody's like, I knew it.
Speaker 13: That person always gave me the ac can Fine, I
Speaker 13: knew it. I was smart enough to pick it up.
Speaker 13: Not everyone else was smart enough, but I was. And
Speaker 13: that's that's a whole other emotional feeling that it's being
Speaker 13: targeted by these like AI slop creators where they're trying
Speaker 13: to yeah, like affirm people's like like narcissism about their
Speaker 13: ability to judge the moral character of strangers.
Speaker 16: That is so it because the people that celebrities they choose,
Speaker 16: it's people that maybe you would have like, I have
Speaker 16: no real reason for this, but I hate Kevin Hart
Speaker 16: and so in the videos, don't even.
Speaker 7: Ask me why. I don't even have a real reason.
Speaker 7: I just don't like him. Well, he is short.
Speaker 2: He is short.
Speaker 13: There you go love to my short kings.
Speaker 7: One of the reasons I don't like him.
Speaker 16: This is just me speckel, Like, he just does a
Speaker 16: lot of ads and you can't get on social media
Speaker 16: without his cryptocurrency ad, his draft kings ad.
Speaker 7: I just like hate seeing it. Sure in the AI.
Speaker 16: Generated video claiming that he was mixed up in the
Speaker 16: Diddy Trials, every comment is like I knew it. I
Speaker 16: always hated him, And that's affirming. People like feeling like
Speaker 16: they knew something that other people didn't see, and they
Speaker 16: knew it early on.
Speaker 13: Well, And I think what's something that's similar to this
Speaker 13: that's happening right now is there's a massive media campaign
Speaker 13: right now against Pedro Pascal with with AI generated videos
Speaker 13: of him like touching his female co stars. And these
Speaker 13: these videos have been have been digitally altered, and it's
Speaker 13: in service of this this big harassment campaign against someone
Speaker 13: who's like very vocally Protrance writes, there's other possible reasons
Speaker 13: for why he's he's being targeted by these videos. But no, Similarly,
Speaker 13: it's trying to create this like ick around Petro Pascal
Speaker 13: using a altern media and it's gaining a lot of
Speaker 13: traction right now, and it's something people need to be
Speaker 13: like very very cautious of. But yeah, it's trying to
Speaker 13: affirm whatever. Maybe you, for some reason have never liked
Speaker 13: Paedro Pascal. I can't imagine why. But if you find
Speaker 13: a video like this talking about how he's using a
Speaker 13: social anxiety diagnosis to inappropriately touch his co stars, do
Speaker 13: you like I knew it.
Speaker 7: I knew it.
Speaker 13: I never trusted Pedro Pascal, and I don't like it.
Speaker 13: He's pro trans writes, and you're like, there you go.
Speaker 13: They've completely got you. They've been able to like automate
Speaker 13: and monetize internet hate campaigns against people that you don't know.
Speaker 16: Garrett, Literally, right before you and I got on this episode,
Speaker 16: I saw a video on Reddit and it's a scene
Speaker 16: from an episode of Always Sunny where one of the
Speaker 16: guys is like essentially lifting d the female lead up
Speaker 16: by her crotch, and the caption was Pedro Pascal when
Speaker 16: he feels anxiety. Next to me you got a co star,
Speaker 16: And I remember thinking, like, this is such a weird
Speaker 16: fucking video.
Speaker 7: But what order of the Internet have I wandered into?
Speaker 7: But I didn't. I did not know that there are
Speaker 7: horses trying to make me get the ick about Pedro.
Speaker 16: Pascal Coincidentally, he is someone who speaks up for LGBTQ rights,
Speaker 16: you know, progressive causes.
Speaker 13: Of course, yeah, no, it's it's it's a it's a
Speaker 13: it's a huge thing sweeping the internet right now.
Speaker 16: And I think it really goes to show how kind
Speaker 16: of easily we can be manipulated using digital content, whether
Speaker 16: it's AI generated or AI manipulated or not. Like our
Speaker 16: understandings of the sort of general temperature of what's going
Speaker 16: on are so so much more tenuous than we think,
Speaker 16: and so much more easily manipulated than we realize.
Speaker 13: No, absolutely, no one is immune to propaganda. That is
Speaker 13: a great way of putting it.
Speaker 16: I'm happy that you used the word propaganda, because that's
Speaker 16: what I really do think the AI generated essentially menstrual
Speaker 16: show videos are. I think it's not a surprise that
Speaker 16: we are seeing them the same way that back in
Speaker 16: the day menstrel shows were very popular at a time
Speaker 16: when there was an active campaign of attacking black folks
Speaker 16: and saying they weren't smart enough and did not deserve
Speaker 16: full citizenship, did not deserve rights, all of that.
Speaker 7: I think we're basically seeing the same thing today.
Speaker 16: I think the rise of popularity of this kind of
Speaker 16: content is against the backdrop of a very real attack
Speaker 16: on marginalized people from this administration. You know, there was
Speaker 16: just this very medipiece in Republica about how Trump and
Speaker 16: Musk their goage stuff really was an attack on black women, specifically,
Speaker 16: like black women with stable federal jobs totally, and that
Speaker 16: these attacks essentially it was like you were able to
Speaker 16: smear black women career civil servants as you know, they
Speaker 16: were DEI hires, they were undeserving of these jobs, they
Speaker 16: really just deserve to be fired. And you know, really
Speaker 16: black women just became these easy targets for an administration
Speaker 16: hostile to marginal life people. So if we have all
Speaker 16: of that happening against the rise of this form of
Speaker 16: digital media that is using AI to reaffirm these stereotypes
Speaker 16: about black women, that we aren't able to behave ourselves
Speaker 16: in polite society, cannot figure out a way to solve
Speaker 16: conflicts without resorting to violence, are loud and obnoxious. Then
Speaker 16: when you hear about real life human black women getting
Speaker 16: pushed out of their employment or attacked by this administration,
Speaker 16: you might think, well, maybe it's for the best, because
Speaker 16: they're not suited for that work anyway. Because the kind
Speaker 16: of content that I have been consuming on TikTok and
Speaker 16: I think it just reaffirms this world of view that
Speaker 16: real life human black folks are not self actualized human beings.
Speaker 16: We're just a collection of tropes and stereotypes and caricatures.
Speaker 13: I don't know what to say there, but I agree, yes.
Speaker 16: And I do think there's a kind of platform accountability
Speaker 16: question and all this.
Speaker 13: Because oh, most certainly.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 16: Like, the reason why we're seeing the rise of these
Speaker 16: videos is because of the recent introduction of Google's vo
Speaker 16: three creator. It came out about a month ago and
Speaker 16: it's Google's latest AI video generation model, and essentially it's
Speaker 16: designed to create these realistic looking videos from text prompts.
Speaker 16: And the thing that kind of makes it a step
Speaker 16: above is that you can incorporate things like synchronized audio, dialogue,
Speaker 16: sound effect music. It is really taken off with creators
Speaker 16: online who are using this tool to create everything from
Speaker 16: these AI skits to AI influencers to AI muckbangs you
Speaker 16: know where people eat tons and tons of food.
Speaker 11: Oh, this is so upsetting.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 16: And then like another kind of offshoot of this is
Speaker 16: you have people who use VO three to make content
Speaker 16: like this and they get tons of us and then
Speaker 16: they're like, oh, if you want to learn how to
Speaker 16: make this yourself, pay me and I'll teach you how
Speaker 16: to do it too.
Speaker 7: So it's like there's always a weird.
Speaker 13: Like MLM grift in there somewhere that is the content
Speaker 13: creator classic is like a mid tier influencer. We're not
Speaker 13: like that good at what they do, but is able
Speaker 13: to supplement their income by offering courses to people to
Speaker 13: teach them how to make similarly some subpar content. And
Speaker 13: it's interesting that we've reached the full AI automation aspect
Speaker 13: of this, right. This used to be a big thing
Speaker 13: among like YouTubers. I was not aware that this is
Speaker 13: now a thing among like AI TikTok influencers, but that
Speaker 13: makes sense because this is like the easiest thing to automate,
Speaker 13: So of course there's going to be like an influx
Speaker 13: of people trying to make a quick buck on racist
Speaker 13: AI slop.
Speaker 16: It makes me so sad, And I do think I
Speaker 16: mean when I guess I would be curious how Google
Speaker 16: feels about the fact that, like, this is what their
Speaker 16: tool is being used for.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 16: I wonder like if leaders have a sense that this
Speaker 16: is harmful, not just harmful to black women like me
Speaker 16: who are depicted in this kind of content, but harmful
Speaker 16: for the Internet as a whole. It makes the Internet
Speaker 16: experience worse for everybody. And I guess, I guess I
Speaker 16: would imagine that like Google probably doesn't care that this
Speaker 16: is what their their technology is being used for. Like
Speaker 16: if I had a direct line to some darpachi, the
Speaker 16: head of Google, I would show him these clips and say, like,
Speaker 16: is this what you had in mind for VO three
Speaker 16: or is this a misuse of this tool that you
Speaker 16: just put out and unleashed on all of us?
Speaker 13: Yeah, And are you going to dedicate some like millions
Speaker 13: of dollars of research into stopping this from happening? No,
Speaker 13: of course not, Like they're not going to build comprehensive
Speaker 13: tools that prevent platform abuse like this, Like that's not
Speaker 13: going to happen as long as people are using it,
Speaker 13: and then people are hearing about it and it's spreading,
Speaker 13: like that's that's what they want. If if there happens
Speaker 13: to be offensive use cases of it, if anything, that's
Speaker 13: good because that drives engagement.
Speaker 7: It gets people to know about the product.
Speaker 16: And I think that's another one of the reasons why
Speaker 16: Trump's you know, executive orders on AI.
Speaker 13: That we saw early AIY.
Speaker 16: I mean, like, I will be the first person to
Speaker 16: admit that we have very deep problems when it comes
Speaker 16: to AI. Anybody who listens to Better offline knows this,
Speaker 16: Like the is not a secret.
Speaker 7: AI is often biased.
Speaker 16: AI is often wrong because it is trained on us
Speaker 16: humans the bias little bucks that we are right, and
Speaker 16: so that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. I also
Speaker 16: will say, like, some of the solutions of how we
Speaker 16: fix that are complex and not super simple.
Speaker 7: But what Trump's executive order, he.
Speaker 16: Basically is signing an order saying all AI must be objective.
Speaker 7: It must it must.
Speaker 16: Adhere to the objective truth of the United States. And
Speaker 16: it's like, well, who determines that?
Speaker 13: Who who determines the objective truth of the United States?
Speaker 13: The President?
Speaker 16: I mean, if you ask Trump, yes, him and I
Speaker 16: guess that's the thing that pisses me off, is that
Speaker 16: there actually are complex issues and problems when it comes
Speaker 16: to AI, but this executive order just is like, Oh,
Speaker 16: the problem is is that it's woke. The solution is
Speaker 16: me signing an executive order saying no woke in AI,
Speaker 16: and rather than getting any kind of actual solution or
Speaker 16: having the conversation, we just get fucking nonsense.
Speaker 5: You.
Speaker 13: No, it is worrying for multiple levels, including the fact
Speaker 13: that the president thinks he's the orbiter of objective truth
Speaker 13: and it thinks he can legislate that or thinks he
Speaker 13: can executive order that into being by either benefiting or
Speaker 13: punishing tech companies who follow his policies.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean spoiler alert for that executive order. That's
Speaker 7: exactly what he's saying.
Speaker 16: And you used the word propaganda earlier, and that really
Speaker 16: is if there was like a thesis statement of what
Speaker 16: I wanted to say in this episode, is that that
Speaker 16: is exactly what I think is going on here. It
Speaker 16: really does remind me of minstrel shows because even though
Speaker 16: minstrel shows back in the nineteenth century were this popular
Speaker 16: form of entertainment, it also was an entire manufacturing enterprise
Speaker 16: where people made very good money selling racist blackface figurines
Speaker 16: as novelties and all of that. David Pilgrim, the founder
Speaker 16: of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Farris
Speaker 16: State University in Michigan, put it like this. They were
Speaker 16: everyday objects which portrayed black people as ugly different and
Speaker 16: fun to laugh at. They were, in a word, propaganda,
Speaker 16: And I think that's exactly what's going on here.
Speaker 9: Like people like.
Speaker 16: To think about racism as if it's just this thing
Speaker 16: that hangs in the air, as opposed to a system
Speaker 16: that specific people are personally and intentionally perpetuating because they
Speaker 16: are cashing in on it. I don't feel Google letting
Speaker 16: creators use their tools to create content like this is
Speaker 16: any different, Like no, yeah, it's that is exactly what's
Speaker 16: going on in my book.
Speaker 13: That's flatly like that's just like one to one, Like
Speaker 13: you're using tech to create like unreal depictions of racist
Speaker 13: chricatures to please audiences, to reaffirm their own their own biases,
Speaker 13: to reform their own racism, and you're monetizing it and
Speaker 13: you're automating it to create hashtag viral moments like it's
Speaker 13: it's the most explicit and like gross, blatant form of
Speaker 13: this that I've seen. Like I think Robert a few
Speaker 13: years ago reported on people using AI to like make
Speaker 13: like you like true crime videos of like like like
Speaker 13: animating like victims of crimes or like murder victims and
Speaker 13: talking about how they were killed or something, which is
Speaker 13: very gross and very very disgusting. But this sort of
Speaker 13: like organized like like racist video propaganda stuff can lead
Speaker 13: to a lot more like actual, like real world damage.
Speaker 16: I completely agree. I mean those true crime videos, I
Speaker 16: remember that. Imagine if your kid was murdered and then.
Speaker 7: No, it's so gross.
Speaker 16: Twenty years later someone is like, oh, I've made an
Speaker 16: AI depiction of your murdered child telling their story.
Speaker 13: No, yeah, it's it's it's it's evil. But I think
Speaker 13: the damage that can do is is kind of limited.
Speaker 13: The damage that this whole altered reality where racism can
Speaker 13: get affirmed leads to I think a lot more actual,
Speaker 13: like political and personal consequences.
Speaker 16: Completely agree, And I also think just taking a step
Speaker 16: back in the conversation about AI, we're all being told
Speaker 16: how the proliferation of AI is going to be the
Speaker 16: lynchpin of our economy.
Speaker 7: It's so important, it's going to change everything. And then
Speaker 7: you actually.
Speaker 16: Look at some of these use cases that are taking
Speaker 16: off and it's like, well, was this really worth all
Speaker 16: the fucking climate degradation to make this racist AI version
Speaker 16: of a Bigfoot that.
Speaker 7: Looks like a black woman.
Speaker 13: No more rainforest, but at least we get racist Bigfoot.
Speaker 11: So, oh my god.
Speaker 16: It Well, Garrett, I think that's a good place to end.
Speaker 16: Thank you so much for letting me rant at you
Speaker 16: about this. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 7: Where else can people find your work? Bridget Well?
Speaker 16: You can listen to my podcast There Are No Girls
Speaker 16: on the Internet. You can listen to my other podcasts
Speaker 16: with Mozilla Foundation about ethics in AI called IRL, and.
Speaker 7: You can find me on Instagram at Bridge at Marine.
Speaker 13: DC fantastic, Oh the Internet.
Speaker 17: Hi everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a
Speaker 17: very special edition of a Could Happen Here, in which
Speaker 17: we are very lucky to be joined by Inland from
Speaker 17: Live that the World is Dying and what will be
Speaker 17: the first of many crossover episodes where the folks from
Speaker 17: Strange Hit Tangled Woodenness are going to share with us
Speaker 17: some of their preparedness Advice.
Speaker 7: Welcome to the show. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, James, I'm in
Speaker 1: man Marowin and I use say them pronouns. And I'm
Speaker 1: one of the hosts of Love Like the World Is Dying,
Speaker 1: your podcast for What Feels Like the End Times, which
Speaker 1: is a lefty prepper podcast about community and individual preparedness
Speaker 1: for disasters of all kinds. And really excited to be
Speaker 1: on the show with you. Yeah, on a different show,
Speaker 1: because you're on that show with me sometimes, which is great.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I'm bringing together the two like I'm sure there's
Speaker 17: a superhero reference I could make here, but I don't
Speaker 17: really understand that world, so I don't either.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 17: Great, Okay, two people talking about a thing they don't understand.
Speaker 17: That is what pubcasts saw sometimes, but not today.
Speaker 7: What are we going to talk about today?
Speaker 1: Well, what I'm really excited to talk about today is
Speaker 1: preparedness in general, how community preparedness differs from some more
Speaker 1: conventional modalities and being really nice with that phrase.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's one way of saying it.
Speaker 1: How individual preparedness fits into community preparedness, and kind of
Speaker 1: about my own journey into prepper stuff or preparedness, which
Speaker 1: might be a new term for some people.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like to call it preparedness over like prepping as
Speaker 1: a term sort of because like, I don't know, Like,
Speaker 1: if I say I'm into prepping, then people start to
Speaker 1: give me funny looks and think, I want to live
Speaker 1: in a bunker with a thousand cans of beans and
Speaker 1: more guns than I know what to do with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But if I say I'm into preparedness, people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: I know who to call if I need help with
Speaker 1: something or get in a jam, you know. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's kind of exactly that sentiment that I want
Speaker 1: listeners to think of when they think of preparedness is
Speaker 1: what connections and resources we have for when things go wrong,
Speaker 1: and how we are going to respond to disasters of
Speaker 1: all kinds when we're faced with them, because having a
Speaker 1: plan kind of makes things less scary, you know.
Speaker 17: Yeah, Definitely, I feel safe for approaching bad things because
Speaker 17: I've approached bad things with my friends and we have
Speaker 17: gone through them and we've.
Speaker 7: Helped other people get through them.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I also think a lot of people engage in
Speaker 1: preparedness without really realizing this. I feel like i'd ask
Speaker 1: these questions to you on a less rhetorical basis if
Speaker 1: I didn't know them to be true. But for instance, listener,
Speaker 1: do you keep tools and your car in case you
Speaker 1: break down on the side of the road or if
Speaker 1: your car won't start? Do you have a friend that
Speaker 1: will take a look at it for you and help
Speaker 1: you fix it. If so, then congratulations, you're into preparedness
Speaker 1: for a very specific kind of disaster. And now we
Speaker 1: just have to figure out how to apply that to
Speaker 1: other disasters, whether it's your car breaking down, the climate
Speaker 1: breaking down, or the world as we know it breaking down,
Speaker 1: because unfortunately, with the world as it is right now,
Speaker 1: as Margaret has said before, we're all preppers now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's something that makes thinking about disaster
Speaker 1: just less scary. And I think that's ultimately kind of
Speaker 1: one of the best reasons of like why we should
Speaker 1: get into preparedness is because it makes things less scary.
Speaker 17: Yeah, definitely, And I think it gives you if you're
Speaker 17: doing it right, And I think this is something we
Speaker 17: can get into. You realize how much your community can
Speaker 17: get through if you will have each other rather than
Speaker 17: necessarily the alternative that the other modality that you talked
Speaker 17: about is theoretically thinking how much you could get through
Speaker 17: whilst never helping anyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's very different things. Yeah, yeah, totally, And
Speaker 1: I don't know listeners. We're talking about kind of more
Speaker 1: traditional like bunker mentality prepping, which we'll get into yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit later, but that is my euphemism so
Speaker 1: far as more conventional modality.
Speaker 7: Yeah, certainly.
Speaker 17: Can you give some ideas of like why people might
Speaker 17: want to get into preparedness, what they might want to
Speaker 17: be prepared for?
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, so many things. The list is kind of endless,
Speaker 1: which is yeah, which is unfortunate, and I don't want
Speaker 1: to overwhelm overwhelm people, but there's just a lot of things,
Speaker 1: and new things are emerging every day. But the first
Speaker 1: step of preparedness is kind of identify ying what your
Speaker 1: threat model is, or really just asking yourself, you know,
Speaker 1: like what are you personally worried about for yourself or
Speaker 1: for your community and some kind of like larger categories
Speaker 1: that we can lump that stuff into. Is I feel
Speaker 1: like what comes to mind for people immediately probably is
Speaker 1: natural disasters. They're ever more frequent, they're growing in intensity
Speaker 1: and happening in more places. People who never thought they
Speaker 1: would become climate refugees are now becoming climate refugees. I
Speaker 1: still live on a chunk of land, and like we
Speaker 1: got flooded out. We lived in a hundred year floodplain,
Speaker 1: and like, yeah, I know it's not once every hundred years,
Speaker 1: that's not how it works, but like our time.
Speaker 13: Came and we got flooded out. Yeah, there's migration.
Speaker 1: This could be due to climate change, political upheaval, economic reasons,
Speaker 1: family bigotry. Yeah, and obvious tie into this right now
Speaker 1: is everything going on with ice raids where a lot
Speaker 1: of people are being displaced and either trying to return
Speaker 1: to their homes or find new ones. And there's also,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, there's like a lot of people,
Speaker 1: like in more conservative states in the US who for instance,
Speaker 1: are trans or have trans people that are in their
Speaker 1: family or in their close friend group and are deciding
Speaker 1: whether they need to move somewhere else or at least
Speaker 1: come up with an escape plan if things get worse
Speaker 1: where they are. Yeah, And the same is true for like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, maintaining access to abortion. Everything is very
Speaker 1: different in very different places or very close spaces. Even
Speaker 1: in the United States, And so I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people who never thought they'd need to think about
Speaker 1: migration are now thinking about it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 17: A big problem with how migration is reported on in
Speaker 17: America is that like people who migrants have seen as
Speaker 17: like some kind of subcategory of humans, you know, totally. Yeah,
Speaker 17: if you were a person who can get pregnant, and
Speaker 17: you're a person who might consider, in whatever circumstances, accessing abortion,
Speaker 17: then in some states you need to be prepared to
Speaker 17: become a migrant, like a yeah, relatively very short notice. Right,
Speaker 17: It's something that we're all closer to you than we think.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Another big one is kind of like larger economic, social,
Speaker 1: or political collapse, you know, simply meaning that like the
Speaker 1: structures of the world no longer mean what they used
Speaker 1: to mean. This could mean the collapse of capitalism or
Speaker 1: capitalism turning more into like literal corporate feudalism. Another big
Speaker 1: one is, I'm just have this broad category of war.
Speaker 1: This could be an invasion, a civil war, a revolution,
Speaker 1: a rise in right wing militias, another rise in right
Speaker 1: wing militias, whatever. I'm kind of neglecting. Some more fantastastical
Speaker 1: apocalypses that I'm sure we can all imagine, but there
Speaker 1: are those we might wake up as fungus, you know
Speaker 1: who can say. And then lastly, there's the current disaster
Speaker 1: that is late stage capitalism. And this one is the
Speaker 1: one that I spend the most time thinking about because
Speaker 1: it's the one that's ever present in our lives currently
Speaker 1: and kind of informs and maybe creates a lot of
Speaker 1: the other larger threats I just mentioned, Yeah, except becoming fungus.
Speaker 17: Well yet yeah, maybe, Yeah, we're doing a lot with
Speaker 17: the the old whatever. Rfk's in charge of Ministry of Health.
Speaker 17: It's not called that health and Human Services. Yeah, I
Speaker 17: think this is the one that, like, this is a
Speaker 17: disaster that people don't often like see because it's slow.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It kills us slowly rather than quick and it kills
Speaker 1: us quickly.
Speaker 17: Yeah, talking of killing us slowly in it, my obligation
Speaker 17: to pivot to adverts is slowly killing my soul that
Speaker 17: I have to do any Yeah.
Speaker 11: This is new for me.
Speaker 1: We don't have these on a little like the world
Speaker 1: is dying.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I know, I thought i'd take the first time.
Speaker 17: I'm going to leave the second.
Speaker 1: One up to you.
Speaker 17: You can have a swing at it. All right, thank
Speaker 17: you Products and Services for supporting this show.
Speaker 7: We are back.
Speaker 17: I mean, let's break it down for people in like
Speaker 17: a very basic sense. So that's okay, how do we
Speaker 17: start being more prepared? Like I imagine the first step
Speaker 17: would be to immediately go to a federal firearms license.
Speaker 7: Se is that right?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: That is that is the first step. It is to
Speaker 1: fill your bunker with guns. No, that's that's not the
Speaker 1: first time because you can eat them. Yes, and now
Speaker 1: jokes aside. So the first step we just talked about
Speaker 1: it before that break is determine your threat. You know,
Speaker 1: in the case of let's use earthquakes as an example,
Speaker 1: if you live somewhere with earthquakes, then your threat model
Speaker 1: should probably include earthquakes. You might prepare for earthquakes more
Speaker 1: than you might prepare for wildfires too. The second step
Speaker 1: is make a plan, which means, like, when there's an earthquake,
Speaker 1: you're going to do X and Y and meet so
Speaker 1: and so at blank. You can also include not living
Speaker 1: somewhere with earthquakes anymore as part of your make a plan,
Speaker 1: because maybe that's just the one thing you don't want
Speaker 1: to deal with. The next part is acquire the parts
Speaker 1: of the plan, and so like, if your plan includes resources,
Speaker 1: which everyone's plan should include a go bag, an escape route,
Speaker 1: and any kind of equipment that you need. And at
Speaker 1: this point you're mostly ready, I maybe would add to
Speaker 1: collaborate with others, and then this step gets missed a lot.
Speaker 1: But at this point, since you're mostly ready, hopefully you
Speaker 1: can let go of some anxiety and despair. You've done
Speaker 1: the hardest part, which is to get started, and hopefully
Speaker 1: you can. We can feel comfort in that if we
Speaker 1: can't forestall a disaster, that we can at least be
Speaker 1: ready for it, and then act on the plan, do
Speaker 1: the thing, and assess what you can do better next time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those are my basic steps. Yeah, it is makes it
Speaker 1: seem also simple.
Speaker 11: It's so simple.
Speaker 17: Yeah, obviously we will spend a lot of time in
Speaker 17: the next few months breaking down each of those steps
Speaker 17: and explaining them for people.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 17: But yeah, like, I live in a place where wildfires
Speaker 17: are common. In my time living in California, I've been
Speaker 17: evacuated for a couple of fires. I've had an earthquake,
Speaker 17: you know, I've had a fewer than natural disasters. Of course,
Speaker 17: earthquake channels have become fires. It did in San Francisco.
Speaker 17: But yeah, it would not make sense if you live
Speaker 17: where I live to.
Speaker 1: Not have a plan. Yeah for that being naive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like.
Speaker 17: A story like that for you, Like is there a
Speaker 17: thing did you, like, you know, have to evacuate for
Speaker 17: a wildfire and you couldn't find your shoes?
Speaker 7: Like what?
Speaker 1: So one of my funny things was living on this
Speaker 1: land project and like we were we were experiencing a flood.
Speaker 1: We were experiencing what could have very easily been a
Speaker 1: flash flood, and I was trying to just convince people
Speaker 1: to leave, and I had a hard time convincing people
Speaker 1: to leave. Yeah, like there was like water up to
Speaker 1: our chests. And this is my answer now. But my
Speaker 1: answer that I wrote about for this episode is so
Speaker 1: a little bit of preliad. In the first episode of
Speaker 1: Live Like the World Is Dying, Margaret talks with Kitty
Speaker 1: Striker about anarchist prepping, and Margaret talks about the possibilities
Speaker 1: that she's preparing for, which she identifies as kind of
Speaker 1: these four possibilities, living like the world is going to end,
Speaker 1: and that we might not survive. Living like the world
Speaker 1: is going to end, and we can try to survive,
Speaker 1: living like we can prevent the end of the world,
Speaker 1: and then maybe trying to live like the world isn't
Speaker 1: going to end after all. And I got into preparedness
Speaker 1: for a lot of reasons, some of which evolved over time.
Speaker 1: It went from something that felt scary to something that
Speaker 1: feels comforting, and I hope that it can become comforting
Speaker 1: for other people. I hope that's where a lot of
Speaker 1: you can land who are listening, who are either new
Speaker 1: to the concept or think that prepping is only for
Speaker 1: people who expect to need to survive for thirty years
Speaker 1: in a bunker after a nuclear, zombie, bio apokarev or whatever,
Speaker 1: eating canned beans. I'm really harping on this image because
Speaker 1: I think it's what a lot of people think of
Speaker 1: when they think of prepping. You know, beans, bunker, a
Speaker 1: little battie and the fourth maybe lesser known one billionaires
Speaker 1: or the four bees of the apocalypse, as I want
Speaker 1: to think about them. To kind of confront this as
Speaker 1: like a word, this like apocalypse. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: different kinds of apocalypses, and whether we like it or not,
Speaker 1: if it isn't already here. It's coming, and for some
Speaker 1: people it's coming swiftly, for others it's slowly, but it
Speaker 1: is coming, and billionaires are preparing for it. Even if
Speaker 1: they want us to think their tech will save the world.
Speaker 1: They have all the money and resources, and they are
Speaker 1: still worried. And while they'll try to use their money
Speaker 1: in power to kind of escape the consequences becoming a
Speaker 1: billionaire has had on the world. Most people probably don't
Speaker 1: have access to those kinds of resources. But what we
Speaker 1: all do have access to our social and community ties,
Speaker 1: even if it might not seem like that now. And oddly,
Speaker 1: these social ties are things that billionaires often lack, or
Speaker 1: doubt the authenticity of, or just can't comprehend. There's this
Speaker 1: article by Douglas Ruscoff. This tech consultant who gets flown
Speaker 1: out to the desert to talk to rich people about collapse,
Speaker 1: surprised because they don't really ask him about tech stuff.
Speaker 1: They ask him about like maintaining social control over the
Speaker 1: people that work for them when money no longer means anything.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, I don't know, do maybe make like
Speaker 1: more authentic friendships?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 17: Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe don't rely on having people so
Speaker 17: subservient to you. Yeah, but I think this kind of
Speaker 17: air quotes conundrum speaks a lot to people's fears about
Speaker 17: collapse and is what gets people into a bunker mentality.
Speaker 17: You know, everyone's worried about roving bands of armed people
Speaker 17: taking what they've prepared for their own survival, and I
Speaker 17: think that is a fantasy that we don't really see
Speaker 17: happen in real life as often as we might think. Yeah,
Speaker 17: I've reported from plenty of natural and human creative disasters.
Speaker 17: Actually it is the opposite of that. Like, we can
Speaker 17: talk about this another time, but it's one of the
Speaker 17: reasons I can keep doing it. Like, despite being huge mutumatic,
Speaker 17: is it's touchingly incredible how much people will go out
Speaker 17: of their way when they're thoroughly miserable to help other
Speaker 17: people who they see is needing help.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really beautiful thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: To be a little bit of a word nerd real quick.
Speaker 1: I feel like everyone who talks about prepping has talked
Speaker 1: about the etymological origins of the word apocalypse. But it
Speaker 1: is very interesting and I think it's relevant, which is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's from these two Greek words apo, and collectine, which
Speaker 1: means like often to conceal and so like a more
Speaker 1: literal translation of it is a revealing And I think
Speaker 1: that disaster really reveals things. It reveals the ways that
Speaker 1: society has really like bailed. It reveals the consequences of
Speaker 1: what living in a corporate oligarchy looks like. And it
Speaker 1: also reveals like what beautiful and powerful things people have
Speaker 1: built as communities and prepare it for to give like
Speaker 1: a little bit of a positive spin on a grim,
Speaker 1: grim grim word.
Speaker 17: Yeah, No, Like when I think about that, I think
Speaker 17: about like two years ago, I was in the Marshal Islands,
Speaker 17: right where like the apocalypse has come, right, the atomic
Speaker 17: bomb has dropped on the Marshal Islands, the United States.
Speaker 17: We did that, and the sea levels a rising such
Speaker 17: that like children born there today won't die there, right,
Speaker 17: they probably won't even have their own children there, you know,
Speaker 17: twenty thirty forty years left. And I didn't see like
Speaker 17: people fighting each other for the highest point of land. Yeah,
Speaker 17: I saw people taking care of one another, thinking about
Speaker 17: how like not just like their individual you know, they
Speaker 17: could maintain their assets, but how their community could survive,
Speaker 17: how their culture could survive, and how they could keep
Speaker 17: the things, the incredible hospitality that's so special to them,
Speaker 17: which I thought was like very revealing compared to this
Speaker 17: sort of mindset that you see more conventionally in like preppers.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And to finally get to my own kind of
Speaker 1: little journey into preparedness. Yeah, I wasn't a prepper until
Speaker 1: like not that long ago. Really.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I first heard Live Like the World Is Dying,
Speaker 1: it was twenty twenty. COVID was still new. There was
Speaker 1: like extreme civil unrest because there was an uprising going on,
Speaker 1: and the same fascist that's our sitting president now was
Speaker 1: our president then, and he was backed up by people
Speaker 1: like Kyle Rittenhouse who were gunning people down in streets
Speaker 1: for protesting a racist murder. Where I lived in entire
Speaker 1: Mountain Range was also on fire. Yeah, and the idea
Speaker 1: that it was the coolest summer I might ever remember
Speaker 1: was still setting in. And then I heard about Margaret
Speaker 1: doing Live Like the World Is Dying, and I actually
Speaker 1: refused to listen to it because I knew with every
Speaker 1: fiber of my body that things were irrevocably different, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to stick my head in the sand, you know,
Speaker 1: like not because I was scared, but because getting prepared
Speaker 1: is overwhelming, and I didn't have any clue where to begin.
Speaker 1: Like I was a scrappy punk I didn't have like
Speaker 1: thousands of dollars to spend on gear and stockpiling food
Speaker 1: and guns and shit, you know. Yeah, And so it
Speaker 1: felt for a while like preparedness was only for people
Speaker 1: who had a lot of money, and that I'd be
Speaker 1: left behind. But I did eventually listen to the show
Speaker 1: because Margaret's my friend and I trusted she had good
Speaker 1: things to say, and because it was a show about
Speaker 1: beginnings and I needed one. And so as I listened,
Speaker 1: I slowly started to warm up to the idea that
Speaker 1: preparedness wasn't just necessary, but that it was also very
Speaker 1: much within my reach, especially in the framework of community preparedness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know who can tell you a lot about
Speaker 1: community preparedness. Who's said, I think these lovely sponsors or
Speaker 1: advertisements or products that were about to hear about.
Speaker 7: I sure, hope, so we are back.
Speaker 17: That was a fantastic ad transition, first of many. Hopefully
Speaker 17: it wasn't like apparently beginning ads for like some kind
Speaker 17: of gold company that is also sanctioned by God, God,
Speaker 17: that that is just just to be clear, not the
Speaker 17: way to go trans the community preparedness that precious metals route.
Speaker 17: This one we're not advising here. Can you like explain
Speaker 17: the difference between those two modalities, because I think, yeah,
Speaker 17: like I still when Margaret was asking me if I
Speaker 17: wanted to do live like the world is dying, she
Speaker 17: was like, oh, because James is like when we did
Speaker 17: an episode together and go back, She's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 17: James's a big like like at lefty Prepper a community
Speaker 17: prepared And I was like, whoa, that's not me.
Speaker 7: I'm not going to be on.
Speaker 17: The Discovery Channel show, you know, like where the people
Speaker 17: shoot themselves on camera.
Speaker 7: Back then they.
Speaker 17: Didn't too kill themselves and they handle their firearms in
Speaker 17: an unsafe manner and hurt themselves totally. So let's explain, like,
Speaker 17: let's break down the good and the bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's kind of a tension between them, yeah,
Speaker 1: and between like what i'll call community preparedness and like
Speaker 1: bunker syndrome prepping.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the image that prepping brings to mind for a
Speaker 1: lot of people is like a right wing alpha dude
Speaker 1: in a bunker with a dragon horde of preserved food
Speaker 1: and more guns than anyone could ever use. It's like
Speaker 1: an image of one person against the world. And I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like, Okay, your fantasy apocalypse happens. You survive
Speaker 1: the nuclear apocalypse, Armed gangs rove the wastelands, food is
Speaker 1: hoarded and fought over, and you're protecting your bunker. And
Speaker 1: then what, you know, what happens next? How do you
Speaker 1: build back a world alone? What is the world if
Speaker 1: you're alone? Yea, And not only like we've talked about that,
Speaker 1: we mentioned this earlier, but like, I don't I think
Speaker 1: this is not only like a fantasy, but it's not
Speaker 1: what happens I think historically in disasters and the way
Speaker 1: that we can make it through disasters, I think is
Speaker 1: not based on how many resources we have hoarded, but
Speaker 1: based on our abilities to make and maintain community, friendship
Speaker 1: and connections. You know, it's a trope, but the real
Speaker 1: horde in the bunker was the friendship all along, you know.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, but you know, we do need
Speaker 1: to learn how to produce and preserve food and build stuff.
Speaker 1: We just don't have to do it alone. In a disaster.
Speaker 1: Our greatest resource is help from people that we care
Speaker 1: about in potential new friends. And it's sort of the
Speaker 1: overwhelming amount of skills that come with the bunker syndrome
Speaker 1: that I think causes a lot of people to become
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by starting to prepare and the traditional preppery community.
Speaker 1: It's very right wing conservative, and it really makes it
Speaker 1: seem like every single person has to learn every skill
Speaker 1: they could possibly need in order to get for heard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think part of that kind of bunker syndrome
Speaker 1: is also maybe that you have to learn all that
Speaker 1: stuff on your own because you low key think that
Speaker 1: everyone you know is going to turn on you, you know.
Speaker 17: Right, Yeah, because you've been an odious piece of shit
Speaker 17: for your entire life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and again make better friends, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 17: Like I used to think that like preparedness was a
Speaker 17: lot of people who'd never really experienced genuine hardship wondering
Speaker 17: what it might be like probably is, yeah, a lot
Speaker 17: of it is, right because like if you've been just
Speaker 17: like poor or otherwise facing like like trans folks right now,
Speaker 17: right even like anyone really in their LGBTQAA area, Like
Speaker 17: it's scary right now, and you've probably found that the
Speaker 17: things are keeping you going are other people, yeah, and
Speaker 17: not your pile of beans. And like I certainly have
Speaker 17: not experienced what transfers are experiencing, but like I've had
Speaker 17: some difficult times and I've been poor, and like it's
Speaker 17: always been like other people who have come through for me,
Speaker 17: not stuff I had or even skills I have. Really Yeah,
Speaker 17: And I think there's this real divide between like there's
Speaker 17: people who are in fantasy bunker land, and then there's
Speaker 17: people who are like either too afraid to think about
Speaker 17: preparedness or feel too overwhelmed to think about it, or
Speaker 17: think that yeah, they can't possibly do it because it's
Speaker 17: too far gone already. And I think preparedness is for everyone,
Speaker 17: you know, like we say start small, put food away
Speaker 17: every week, start to get your go back together.
Speaker 1: Just start.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so to maybe now to find like what community
Speaker 1: preparedness is is, I think that it's what we get
Speaker 1: when we take a lot of different principles and mash
Speaker 1: them together. You know, there's like it's like part mutual aid,
Speaker 1: it's part individual preparedness. It's principles of autonomy, solidarity, direct action,
Speaker 1: and collective decision making, and it's all synthesized into a
Speaker 1: kind of a beautiful little alchemy.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the most like anarchistic thing you can do,
Speaker 1: which is really fun to me. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: it really means investing in the people around you so
Speaker 1: that you can all invest in collective survival. I know
Speaker 1: we mentioned this earlier, but like there's this thing that
Speaker 1: happens during disasters that gets referred to as disaster communism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: have you heard that one?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 17: It doesn't mean that like Lenin emerges and leads a
Speaker 17: vanguard group to show you where the Pupercachen's at.
Speaker 7: No, no, no.
Speaker 1: No, It means that the logic of capital is kind
Speaker 1: of temporarily suspended, and people just help each other for free,
Speaker 1: not even for barter, for free, and like people like
Speaker 1: go out and just give out stuff they haven't excess,
Speaker 1: even if they purchased it, and even if they're like,
Speaker 1: you don't look like the kind of people I like,
Speaker 1: just give.
Speaker 7: It out, Yeah, one hundred percent.
Speaker 17: Like, yeah, I think, like I can think of a few,
Speaker 17: Like I can remember when those of people were being
Speaker 17: housed outside in the cold and wet at the border.
Speaker 17: House is not the word I would use peralte In
Speaker 17: the desert. I was out there with my friends and
Speaker 17: like we look like dirty crusspunk people, right, Like we're
Speaker 17: not like clean and well put together in that sense, right,
Speaker 17: Like we just scruffed and that's fine, and I like
Speaker 17: being scrubbed.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's nice.
Speaker 17: But like, yeah, it was amazing to see like folks
Speaker 17: who one hundred percent do not have the same politics
Speaker 17: as me, like roll out and whatever, like setups you
Speaker 17: know they had and like be like, yo, this is
Speaker 17: fucked luckily, Like I have some stuff that I was
Speaker 17: going to use for a barbecue next week. Some will
Speaker 17: drag my barbecue out here and cook for people, or
Speaker 17: like yeah, you know people who cook for their church's
Speaker 17: bake sale, being like yeah, I have a giant ass pot,
Speaker 17: Like let me make some beans for you guys. You know,
Speaker 17: Like yeah, I think people would be so surprised, and
Speaker 17: it's great that people have not experienced that, like because
Speaker 17: I think it's quite a traumatic thing to experience, Like
Speaker 17: you'd be so surprised how how much or like I
Speaker 17: remember one time just building shelters with a bunch of people,
Speaker 17: and like everyone was pretty miserable rates of cold and windy,
Speaker 17: and like there were some Kourdish guys and respect guys,
Speaker 17: some Chinese guys, and we're building these shelters together, and
Speaker 17: like all of these people who didn't even share a
Speaker 17: language and we're going through very difficult times. We're just
Speaker 17: like nerding out on knots together rare and just helping
Speaker 17: each other and then not doing that so they could
Speaker 17: sleep inside, doing that so little children wouldn't have to
Speaker 17: sleep in the cold.
Speaker 7: But yeah, it's that. It's the way humans behave.
Speaker 17: In these situations, and capitalism or YouTube might have convinced
Speaker 17: you it's not, but it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think like more traditional preppers really like
Speaker 1: get into it too, Like they'll show up they're like
Speaker 1: I got forty chainsaws or like like it's like every
Speaker 1: like chud Truck's time to shine to like Halloway Repigeon,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, you know, it's like I'm making
Speaker 1: it sound exciting, but what's exciting is when people collaborate
Speaker 1: autonomously and collectively for like more good than their own.
Speaker 1: And then kind of the problem is that like capitalism
Speaker 1: comes back in the initial fallout fades from sight, and yeah,
Speaker 1: just because the disaster kind of fades doesn't mean it's gone,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of people who kind of still
Speaker 1: have to deal with it for potentially ever. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's kind of like the disaster of light stage capitalism
Speaker 1: is similar. We have people who are constantly invisibilized even
Speaker 1: though it's part of their regular lives.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can I maybe break down some of these terms that
Speaker 1: are maybe it can be good for people? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I think they get thrown around a lot, right, totally. So,
Speaker 1: Mutual aid is knowing that any help that we give
Speaker 1: our community helps us by strengthening our strengthening our community.
Speaker 1: Autonomy is deciding what's best for us based on what
Speaker 1: we know about ourselves and our needs. Solidarity is unity
Speaker 1: through action and knowing that. Like it's like the you know,
Speaker 1: I got your back even if you don't got mine.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Direct action is working directly to achieve our goals instead
Speaker 1: of waiting for someone else to do it.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: We see this in disasters like don't wait for FEMA.
Speaker 1: There's like so many people who are just out there
Speaker 1: doing autonomous relief efforts and it's incredible collective decision making,
Speaker 1: finding ways to make decisions together in ways where power
Speaker 1: isn't being like abused or accumulated. And then there's individual preparedness,
Speaker 1: which is kind of the last little thing I want
Speaker 1: to talk about. So individual preparedness is kind of like
Speaker 1: the ways that we prepare individually so that when a
Speaker 1: disaster strikes, we have our basic needs met and you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot to learn. So it's like we it's
Speaker 1: easy to get lost back in that overwhelm mentality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think we can really think about it in
Speaker 1: terms of disaster since we're on that track. Like, if
Speaker 1: there's a disaster d and power goes out, then the
Speaker 1: roads are less traversible. If you have all of your
Speaker 1: needs met through individual preparedness, then you're in a really
Speaker 1: good position to go help others. And if everyone in
Speaker 1: your community already has prepared for their basic needs, then
Speaker 1: your whole community is prepared to take kind of the
Speaker 1: next step towards recovery. And it means that your community
Speaker 1: can now help other communities that were less prepared or
Speaker 1: more impacted by a disaster, even if they thought they
Speaker 1: were prepared. Community preparedness is like what happens when we
Speaker 1: kind of mash all of these ideas together and start
Speaker 1: doing it, not just as an individual, but as a community,
Speaker 1: and this can look small or it can look big,
Speaker 1: you know, And I think a lot of people's biggest
Speaker 1: hurdle is just like kind of making a plan, and like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, your disaster plan might include you and
Speaker 1: the people you live with, It might include you and
Speaker 1: your polycule. It might include you and your whole block,
Speaker 1: and it might include your whole neighborhood. And I think
Speaker 1: there's just this like big, beautiful spectrum and to kind
Speaker 1: of carry an example through, like some interviews that we've
Speaker 1: done on a livef the world is dying. Someone's measure
Speaker 1: of individual preparedness might include having a radio when cell
Speaker 1: networks go down, and anothers might include building communication infrastructure
Speaker 1: that they can distribute. And another maybe smaller groups idea
Speaker 1: might be agreeing on a place to meet up because
Speaker 1: they don't have radios, can't afford them, don't know how
Speaker 1: they work, and they've just said when shit hits the fan,
Speaker 1: we're meeting at the library.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 7: That's still a whole lot better than like dashing around
Speaker 7: town wondering what the people you love.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and it's that easy. You know, we get
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by tech, but there's so many low tech solutions
Speaker 1: to a lot of these problems.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Yeah, that's why we're doing an episode on carry a pigeon. Yeah,
Speaker 17: carrier pigeons, aren't they extinct? That's passenger pigeons, different pigeons,
Speaker 17: passenger visions.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Yeah, So, like, what are some basic ways we can
Speaker 17: we can think about preparedness And we're going to cover
Speaker 17: these in more detail, right, we'll do episodes on each
Speaker 17: of these. But maybe someone's like, well, shit, I would
Speaker 17: like to get on that. What are some things people
Speaker 17: can work on?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think it does start with kind of individual preparedness.
Speaker 1: And when I say individual, I mean, like, you know,
Speaker 1: for ourselves. But that doesn't mean we can't do individual
Speaker 1: preparedness parallel and like with other people. So don't think
Speaker 1: of individual as being alone. It's just we're thinking about
Speaker 1: your specific basic needs. And so here's kind of a
Speaker 1: checklist that we put out in a zine for strangers
Speaker 1: in a Tangled Wilderness called Ready for Anything. There's documentation
Speaker 1: you know, get or renewed documentation like passports, DOCA, other
Speaker 1: status cards whatever. Get a driver's license from your state
Speaker 1: if you are undocumented, if you have other kind of
Speaker 1: permits like concealed carry permits, or medical documentation for you
Speaker 1: and your pets. Get all of those together, and you
Speaker 1: want to think about having both physical and digital backups
Speaker 1: of those things. Yeah, because digital might not work. You
Speaker 1: want to do some kind of basic just supply preparedness,
Speaker 1: which is store three days or three weeks of food,
Speaker 1: store three days or three weeks of water, Store enough
Speaker 1: portable power to keep your phone and other essentials charged
Speaker 1: for three days or three weeks. Build yourself a go bag,
Speaker 1: stockpile prescription medication you need, keep your vehicle in good
Speaker 1: running condition with at least half a tank of gas,
Speaker 1: and get kind of any equipment stone that you might
Speaker 1: want now because it's going to be wildly unavailable when
Speaker 1: a disaster does come.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then on the community side, get to know your neighbors,
Speaker 1: plan with them, help them with documentation and preparedness components.
Speaker 1: Make sure vulnerable neighbors know that you are a potential resource.
Speaker 1: Connect with activist groups locally. Build an affinity group. Maybe
Speaker 1: you and your friends are really into communication infrastructure, and
Speaker 1: when a disaster does strike, you just have that ready
Speaker 1: to go, while you know some other affinity group is
Speaker 1: making sure that everyone's fed Yeah, divide and conquer. I
Speaker 1: don't like that phrase, but it works, right Now, make
Speaker 1: a plan for securely communicating, and make plans for meeting
Speaker 1: up when things go wrong, and even when things kind
Speaker 1: of go wrong with your plan, you know, have a
Speaker 1: backup plan.
Speaker 7: Yeah, primary, alternate, contingency and emergency plan if you want
Speaker 7: to use the cringe military acronym.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then these are some kind of questions that
Speaker 1: I think you can ask your community when you're trying
Speaker 1: to think about building resiliency. What disasters are dangerous do
Speaker 1: you feel like you're likely to face? How can you
Speaker 1: maintain access to food, water, and communication? How will you
Speaker 1: interact with other groups? What skills do you currently have?
Speaker 1: What skills do you wish you had? Can you learn
Speaker 1: those skills? How will you foster care and address specific
Speaker 1: needs of individuals in your community? How will your community
Speaker 1: defend itself? And how can we resist despair and maintain
Speaker 1: access to joy? Which I think that last one really
Speaker 1: gets lost a lot.
Speaker 17: Yeah, yeah, people forget about that one, but it's important
Speaker 17: even in like really dark places, like I've attended civil wars, right, Like,
Speaker 17: maintaining access to joy is important, Like I've sat with
Speaker 17: people in Kurdistan and sung songs and played hambled, which
Speaker 17: is like I think the English word is ood, it's
Speaker 17: an instrument, and wild drones were vombit and so we
Speaker 17: didn't want to go outside at night. Golly, And like,
Speaker 17: let me tell you, it's a lot better if you
Speaker 17: have people to sing songs with and sitting on your own.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm putting a songbook in my go bag now
Speaker 1: that's that's happening.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah, these people had a folder like they came
Speaker 7: equipped with like laminated shit, like they were ready to rock.
Speaker 11: Golly.
Speaker 17: Yeah, that's kind of what I got, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 17: that's a great place for people to start. We're going
Speaker 17: to be covering a lot more of this stuff, so
Speaker 17: like you will hear more about water and food and
Speaker 17: all the other things.
Speaker 7: That we spoke about.
Speaker 17: Will try and do at least one of these episodes
Speaker 17: a month, and mean, where can people find you if
Speaker 17: they have questions, if they want to listen to other episodes.
Speaker 7: Maybe you've Live That the World Is Dying or otherwise
Speaker 7: reach out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you want to hear more about anything that
Speaker 1: I've talked about, then you can listen to Live Like
Speaker 1: the World is Dying. Wherever you get podcasts, where an
Speaker 1: entirely listener supported podcast with zero ad breaks. And you
Speaker 1: can find more of what our publishers, Strangers in a
Speaker 1: Tangled Wilderness does, including books and other podcasts we put
Speaker 1: out at Tangled Wilderness dot org, or you can support
Speaker 1: us on Patreon dot com slash Strangers and a Tangled Wilderness.
Speaker 1: And if you want to ask me personally about things,
Speaker 1: you can find me on Instagram at Shadowtale Artificery, where
Speaker 1: you can see other stuff that I do. That isn't
Speaker 1: this beautiful?
Speaker 7: Thank you?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Thanks?
Speaker 2: Holy balls, it's executive dysfunction. We call this right, right,
Speaker 2: executive disorder, a rectile dysfunction?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 7: What do we do?
Speaker 2: Who are we?
Speaker 5: This is?
Speaker 7: It could happen here.
Speaker 13: Executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 13: White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
Speaker 13: Robert Evans, I'm.
Speaker 2: Sorry, Garrison. I thought we were anarchists, and being an
Speaker 2: anarchist means never knowing what you're doing or why.
Speaker 13: Yeskank of Phim, I'm Garrison Davis, joined by James Stout
Speaker 13: and Robert Evans and Sophie Lichterman.
Speaker 4: I wasn't planning on being in mic but it was very.
Speaker 13: Ap well, it happens very able.
Speaker 17: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't plan for shit, Sophie.
Speaker 1: It's always chaos here.
Speaker 13: This week we are covering the week of July twenty
Speaker 13: third to July thirtieth.
Speaker 7: Robert Evans, how are you doing?
Speaker 11: You know what?
Speaker 2: I'm chillin' like Gillan. I'm not because I am not
Speaker 2: in a security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, a federal prison.
Speaker 2: It's actually not maximum security. So let's let's talk about
Speaker 2: friend of the pod Gilan Maxwell. We all love Gillan,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: You speak for yourself.
Speaker 2: You love her. I lover her. Jeffrey Epstein loved her.
Speaker 11: Oh but I don't love her.
Speaker 2: So Gilan Maxwell is the daughter of a guy named
Speaker 2: Robert Maxwell. We've done it behind the bastards on him.
Speaker 4: It was a fun one.
Speaker 2: Bartley amazing character, basically a guy who in his early
Speaker 2: life was a character from inglorious bastards, like a Jewish
Speaker 2: refugee who signed up to fight the Nazis for the
Speaker 2: Brits and killed his way across Western Europe, murdering dozens
Speaker 2: of ss men and then after the war he became
Speaker 2: a financier and destroyed scientific publishing, and also tried to
Speaker 2: ignite a rivalry with Rupert Murdoch and failed so badly
Speaker 2: at it that he stole a billion dollars from his
Speaker 2: company's own pensions funds and then killed himself when all
Speaker 2: of that was coming out.
Speaker 13: So he really is like the average Quentin Tarantino character.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what I would describe him as if Quintin for
Speaker 2: some reason did a sequel to Inglorious Bastards and it
Speaker 2: was just based on Brad Pitt's character becoming like a
Speaker 2: crooked finance executive in the seventies.
Speaker 7: Coming like the Wolf of Wall Street type guy.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly like that. That's his backstory. Did you use
Speaker 2: to murder Nazis? Yeah, but now I'm like foreclosing a
Speaker 2: children's hospital.
Speaker 13: Anyways, So Gillan.
Speaker 2: Had a rough upbringing because like her older brother had
Speaker 2: a car accident when she was very young, and he
Speaker 2: was in a coma for years. Her mom basically spent
Speaker 2: a whole year just at the hospital with him. She
Speaker 2: was ignored for a period of time, and then her
Speaker 2: parents tried to overcompensate and massively. Anyway, she has the
Speaker 2: kind of upbringing you would kind of expect for a
Speaker 2: socialite who winds up both poor as a young adult
Speaker 2: when her dad dies. Not real person poor, but rich
Speaker 2: person poor. When her dad dies and the family is
Speaker 2: disgraced and all their businesses fail, and she flees to
Speaker 2: New York to try to start a new life, and
Speaker 2: the thing that makes sense to her, based on her
Speaker 2: back ground, being the kind of person that she is,
Speaker 2: is to find a rich man and cling to him.
Speaker 2: And that rich man happens to be Jeffrey Epstein, who
Speaker 2: starts off by kind of renting her a luxury apartment.
Speaker 2: They begin dating. At some point they stop dating. It's
Speaker 2: unclear to me how they would have defined their relationship
Speaker 2: at any point internally. The way they would always say
Speaker 2: it is they dated for a while, and then Jeffrey
Speaker 2: had a thing where he would say, like he never
Speaker 2: he doesn't have exes. He promotes his exes to friends,
Speaker 2: right and Gilan Maxwell was like his best friend and
Speaker 2: his business partner. She helped him run not his actual
Speaker 2: businesses that made money, the finance stuff, but his life
Speaker 2: right like she ordered his houses, she managed his housekeepers,
Speaker 2: and she helped recruit girls and women because they recruited
Speaker 2: both for the stuff that Jeffrey is famous for, right,
Speaker 2: both to give him massages and in the context of Epstein,
Speaker 2: the massage always means sex. And also recruit the girls
Speaker 2: that they flew around on the Lilita Express and you know,
Speaker 2: handed off to different prominent men who wanted to have
Speaker 2: sex with teenagers or very young women.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 2: Gillan was intimately involved in all of this. She was
Speaker 2: convicted in twenty twenty two after Epstein's suicide and sentenced
Speaker 2: to twenty years in prison for all of you know,
Speaker 2: the sex crimes that she had a part in. She
Speaker 2: was transferred to a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida in
Speaker 2: July of twenty twenty two. She was initially held in
Speaker 2: the normal dorm like in general population, right, and the
Speaker 2: prison wing that she was in is was kind of
Speaker 2: colloquially known as the snake pit because it was a
Speaker 2: very nasty place with quite a lot of violence. To
Speaker 2: quote from an article in the Tallahassee Democrat quote, Maxwell
Speaker 2: created a ruckus when she had a falling out with
Speaker 2: several women. After Maxwell reported two other inmates known as
Speaker 2: Los Cubanas for trying to extort her Epstein's partner and
Speaker 2: crime refused to use the shower stalls, where violent attacks
Speaker 2: are more common, and was escorted by a guard to
Speaker 2: and from her prison library job. So she has a
Speaker 2: kind of rough early time in prison because she's in
Speaker 2: general pop. She rolls on these other inmates, and that
Speaker 2: starts the process of her getting special treatment. She has
Speaker 2: since been moved because of her good behavior to an
Speaker 2: honor dorm, where there are thirty or forty quarters for
Speaker 2: the best behaved inmates. She's we don't really know for sure,
Speaker 2: but it's very likely that she has a private room
Speaker 2: with storage. She's teaching yoga classes at the prison. She
Speaker 2: has at some period of time volunteered at the library.
Speaker 2: She also teaches etiquette classes. And I want to make
Speaker 2: it clear I don't have an issue actually with the
Speaker 2: fact that she's teaching yoga or doing etiquette classes. I
Speaker 2: think if we're going to have prisons, prisoners should have
Speaker 2: access to stuff like that. I think that's all perfectly fine.
Speaker 2: I think her getting special treatment for good behavior I
Speaker 2: don't really love. But I also don't think we should
Speaker 2: have prisons that can be described as a snake pit.
Speaker 2: So I'm kind of on the mixed end here. Another
Speaker 2: thing that's kind of come out during her time in
Speaker 2: prison is that she has become a vegan. She was
Speaker 2: not for most of her life, but she did when
Speaker 2: she came to prison. She's complained a lot about the
Speaker 2: quality of the food, which is never spiced and it's
Speaker 2: just kind of like unflavored tofu, and Peta has advocated
Speaker 2: on her behalf, which is pretty consistent for Peta. She's
Speaker 2: also said, and there's significant evidence that this prison regularly
Speaker 2: serves rotten food that is bad for inmate health. It
Speaker 2: is a Florida prison. When Gillan talks about it, she
Speaker 2: has in several interviews the bad conditions in her prison.
Speaker 2: She's not lying or whining. These prisons are not acceptable quality, right,
Speaker 2: Like the Florida Department of Corrections and the Federal Department
Speaker 2: of Corrections are horrible and they're doing a horrible job
Speaker 2: of running these places. The fact that I don't feel
Speaker 2: specifically compassion for Gilan Maxwell doesn't mean I want to
Speaker 2: like minimize the reality of the conditions in these prisons,
Speaker 2: because most of the prisoners there not massive sex child
Speaker 2: sex traffickers, you know, yeah, sure, so anyway, FCI Tallahassee,
Speaker 2: which is where she's at. She's now in the prison's
Speaker 2: honor dorm and is still trying to get out of prison.
Speaker 2: So she's made a couple of claims prior to the
Speaker 2: most recent stuff that is in the news right now
Speaker 2: that we're talking about. One of the things she's tried
Speaker 2: to argue is that the terms of Jeffrey Epstein's when
Speaker 2: he was initially prosecuted back in like two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight, the terms of his plea bargain
Speaker 2: should apply to her basically like she was included in that,
Speaker 2: and so she shouldn't be liable for the things that
Speaker 2: she got sentenced for more recently, I am not familiar
Speaker 2: with the exact legal ease her lawyer is using to
Speaker 2: make that argument, but that is the gist of the
Speaker 2: argument her lawyer is trying to make. It's not going
Speaker 2: to work. What might work is her getting a pardon.
Speaker 2: So that's probably the thing you've seen about Gillan in
Speaker 2: the news most recently is that she is basically asking Congress,
Speaker 2: if you want me to tell testify about Epstein and
Speaker 2: about the client list and everything. I can't talk openly
Speaker 2: if I'm in prison, and there's a degree to which, like, again,
Speaker 2: I don't support this at all, but she's not wrong
Speaker 2: that like, well, yeah, you really couldn't talk total Like
Speaker 2: it really isn't reasonable, unreasonable to say, yeah, someone's probably
Speaker 2: not going to be able to talk openly about all
Speaker 2: of the wealthy, powerful people they saw committing sex crimes
Speaker 2: while they're locked up in prison. Right, Not that Prayinger
Speaker 2: is the right thing to do either. I'm just like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, I bet someone could have you killed. I
Speaker 2: bet there are people that you have dirt on that
Speaker 2: could have you killed in that prison.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, and she's currently appealing her conviction to this room court,
Speaker 7: and she's arguing, yes, that if she were to testifying
Speaker 7: for Congress, she would need immunity for anything that she says.
Speaker 2: Right, So that's what she's asking for now. That said,
Speaker 2: she has already very recently been talking with the Department
Speaker 2: of Justice.
Speaker 13: Yes, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blank.
Speaker 2: Todd Blanche had nine hours of meetings over two days.
Speaker 18: Wow.
Speaker 7: Okay.
Speaker 2: Now there are no public statements about what she said
Speaker 2: during this. We don't know what this was about. We
Speaker 2: do know there was some sort of immunity agreement.
Speaker 13: A limited immunity agreement for those meetings, and what she
Speaker 13: was saying in those meetings, okay.
Speaker 2: And we don't know precisely what it covered, but it
Speaker 2: probably means that basically, you're already in for twenty years.
Speaker 2: If you talk to us about stuff that may implicate
Speaker 2: you in crimes you haven't been charged for yet, you
Speaker 2: get immunity on That is what I would guess, right,
Speaker 2: but we don't actually know precisely, like what was happening here,
Speaker 2: and yeah, there's Barrett Berger, a former federal prosecutor in
Speaker 2: New York, told NBC News that he thinks that the
Speaker 2: interviews Blanche did were probably performative. Quote, it may just
Speaker 2: be a way of being able to say, look, we
Speaker 2: dotted every eye and crossed every t There's value in
Speaker 2: being able to say that we've tried to speak to
Speaker 2: everyone that we possibly could, including the co defendant. Right.
Speaker 2: So that's her argument is basically, yeah, Blanche met with
Speaker 2: Gillan so that they could say they're talking with her
Speaker 2: because she's not going to talk to Congress and they're
Speaker 2: probably not going to offer her immunity.
Speaker 13: And it's hard to imagine that. Like Donald Trump's own
Speaker 13: Department of Justice is going to be investigating Donald Trump's
Speaker 13: connection to Jeffrey Epstein. So whatever comes of these meetings,
Speaker 13: I do not think that through these meetings she's going
Speaker 13: to incriminate Donald Trump and that's going to be handled
Speaker 13: in any serious way. If anything, something like the opposite
Speaker 13: is happening, where she's talking about people who are not
Speaker 13: Donald Trump, Yes, and in doing so trying to gain
Speaker 13: some sort of favor with the President. As Trump has said,
Speaker 13: like last week, that he's quote unquote allowed to pardon her,
Speaker 13: not saying that he will, not saying that he plans to,
Speaker 13: but that he's allowed to. I can play that clip
Speaker 13: here for the audience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 1: Would you consider a.
Speaker 2: Pardon or a commutation for Kelan Maxwell if you love something?
Speaker 7: I haven't thought about that really recommending that someone.
Speaker 5: I'm allowed to do it, but it's something I have.
Speaker 7: Not thought of it.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't rule it out to her and why. And
Speaker 2: in addition to that, he's made a couple of weird
Speaker 2: comments about Gillan over the years. When he's asked about
Speaker 2: Jeffrey Now, he's pretty negative about him. He tends to
Speaker 2: be like, look, we knew for a while, like we
Speaker 2: were never close and you know, we had a falling out.
Speaker 2: He's a bad guy, right, that's what he said. More recently,
Speaker 2: He's never really been negative about Gillan. More recently, the
Speaker 2: thing that I recall him saying is that, like he
Speaker 2: wishes her well when she was sentenced, Yeah, which is
Speaker 2: kind of weird, right, And I don't know if it's
Speaker 2: kind of a result of the fact that she has
Speaker 2: something on him and he's trying to you know, I
Speaker 2: don't know. That seems unlikely. That seems less likely to
Speaker 2: me than like maybe he actually just kind of liked
Speaker 2: Gilan Maxwell. But I don't actually know. And anyway, that's
Speaker 2: the situation. We don't know. Is Trump going to pardon her.
Speaker 2: He hasn't said he's going to. But as Garrison noted,
Speaker 2: it's weird of him to insist that he has the
Speaker 2: right to just kind of randomly, Yeah, why would you
Speaker 2: do that if you weren't thinking about it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you can just say no, Like you can just say.
Speaker 2: No, I'm not gonna like, I'm not going to pardon her.
Speaker 17: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Well, and Trump has continued to make weird comments about
Speaker 13: like Epstein and has elaborated on his falling out with
Speaker 13: Epstein the past week, first stating that they broke up
Speaker 13: their friendship because Epstein was just poaching hotel staff, which
Speaker 13: contradicts Yeah, earlier state was Trump made. And then on
Speaker 13: July twenty ninth, he had this much more elaborate conversation
Speaker 13: on Air Force one about how Epstein was taking employees
Speaker 13: from his spa and specifically like naming known victims of
Speaker 13: sex trafficking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he specifically named Virginia Jeffrey fairly recently too when
Speaker 2: talking about like people.
Speaker 17: It was yeah on the twenty nine Yeah, I think
Speaker 17: a reporter asked if he was one of the people,
Speaker 17: and he said, yes, I believe she was, right, Yeah.
Speaker 13: He says, I think so he stole her as the quote.
Speaker 17: Ye, Yeah, there was a reporter who introduced the name
Speaker 17: into the conversation to sweet clear.
Speaker 2: So, you know, do I think she's going to get pardoned?
Speaker 2: It seems really unlikely to me. And it seems really
Speaker 2: unlikely to me in part because how would that Like,
Speaker 2: I have trouble imagining even that not causing huge problems
Speaker 2: for him. Right, I'm not one of these This is
Speaker 2: guys who's constantly like, ah, Trump's Trump's finally, you know,
Speaker 2: we've got Donnie on.
Speaker 13: The road, finally got But this is this is.
Speaker 2: A big one, right, this is a big one to
Speaker 2: his followers, to just Americans in general. Something like seventy
Speaker 2: percent of the country or more is following this story
Speaker 2: actively and has a strong opinion on it, and there's
Speaker 2: zero electoral gain and pardoning Gillan fucking Maxwell right like
Speaker 2: it's a it's a it. It strikes me as unlikely
Speaker 2: because it seems like a serious damaging risk.
Speaker 13: The only thing they might try to do is if
Speaker 13: they try to paint like her herself as like a
Speaker 13: victim of Epstein.
Speaker 2: Right there.
Speaker 13: There's been like a Newsmax segment trying to argue this,
Speaker 13: so like you can see some sectors of the right
Speaker 13: who are trying to like create room for Trump to
Speaker 13: maneuver here. But I don't know if that will be
Speaker 13: a compelling narrative nationwise.
Speaker 7: He's got to lose some people if he does that.
Speaker 13: It seems unlikely, And I don't know. He seems annoyed
Speaker 13: that this is still a news story. He had this
Speaker 13: little Scotland vacation to finish a trade deal with the EU,
Speaker 13: which we'll talk more about next week, But throughout this
Speaker 13: Scotland vacation, he was quite upset that reporters there were
Speaker 13: still asking him about one Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oldn's normal Jeffreys story.
Speaker 16: Kid with.
Speaker 5: No had nothing to do with it. Only you would
Speaker 5: think that not had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 4: That is that why he cheated at golf?
Speaker 13: You know, that's a good a good call, Sophie. Maybe
Speaker 13: he was off his game because of all of these
Speaker 13: Epstein questions and that's the only reason why he cheated
Speaker 13: at golf this one time and definitely no other times ever,
Speaker 13: truly his most heinous crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that's kind of where we end off.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna say he wouldn't, right. I'll never say
Speaker 2: there's no way Gilan Maxwell gets pardoned because this is
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five and be crazy. It's like, there's there's
Speaker 2: credible evidence that he is considering a pardon for fucking
Speaker 2: p Diddy.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Deadlin reported that yesterday.
Speaker 2: And again, if it is right, it's if he does.
Speaker 2: We know why. It's because p Diddy probably has some
Speaker 2: shit on Trump, right, and p Diddy has the kind
Speaker 2: of resources that he could have like a a dead
Speaker 2: fall system set up right that like if something happens
Speaker 2: to him, the info gets out like he that that
Speaker 2: is not beyond the kind of guy that P. Diddy is,
Speaker 2: Whereas I don't know that Epstein ever really prepared for
Speaker 2: that eventuality.
Speaker 13: No, I don't think so like Mark Epstein, Jeffrey's brother
Speaker 13: was interviewed by the BBC last week and mentioned how
Speaker 13: Jeffrey was talking about like possible information he has regarding
Speaker 13: to the twenty sixteen election. But it does not sound
Speaker 13: like there was any kind of like system for this
Speaker 13: information or that even any other people knew besides Jeffrey.
Speaker 13: I can play that clip here too.
Speaker 7: Did he tell you who he knew things about it? Well?
Speaker 19: In the twenty sixteen election, we were talking about the election,
Speaker 19: and Jeffrey told me that if he said what he
Speaker 19: knew about the candidates, they would have to cancel the election.
Speaker 7: That's a quote, It's.
Speaker 9: Exactly what he told me.
Speaker 19: He said, if I said what I knew about the candidates,
Speaker 19: they'd have to cancel the election.
Speaker 11: He didn't tell any what he knew, but that's what
Speaker 11: he said.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in general election, was like a very compartmentalized guy.
Speaker 2: And I don't know we'll see what happens with all
Speaker 2: of these cases. It's going to be worth following. But
Speaker 2: it doesn't seem to be going away the way that
Speaker 2: a lot of Trump stuff does, because I mean, it's Epstein, right,
Speaker 2: You've gotten too much of your base hooked on this
Speaker 2: story for them to just give it up because it's
Speaker 2: inconvenient now. So I don't know what's gonna happen, but
Speaker 2: we'll keep watching and you keep listening to these ads. Beautiful,
Speaker 2: Oh my god, those ads were so good. I feel
Speaker 2: like that picture of Bill Clinton getting a back massage
Speaker 2: from Nope, I.
Speaker 13: Don't know if we should do that in this episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Anyway, what's next? What do we talk about next?
Speaker 13: Speaking of pardons and Epstein, I'm gonna I'm gonna play
Speaker 13: one other clip from Trump's Scotland vacation where he's trying
Speaker 13: to reiterate his whole Epstein hoax narrative and in doing
Speaker 13: so invokes something thing that relates to our next topic.
Speaker 13: But I'll play this clip here.
Speaker 5: So hoax that's been built up way beyond proportion. I
Speaker 5: can say this. Those files were run by the worst
Speaker 5: come on earth. They were run by Komi. They were
Speaker 5: run by Garland. They were run by Biden and all
Speaker 5: of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen.
Speaker 5: Those files were run for four years by those people.
Speaker 5: If they had anything, I assumed they would have released it.
Speaker 7: The whole thing is a hoax. They ran the files.
Speaker 5: I was running against somebody that ran the files.
Speaker 13: The autopen. That's going to be our first mini mini
Speaker 13: story this episode. So, the autopen is this tool that
Speaker 13: helps with the signing of documents. It automates the process
Speaker 13: by replicating a signature. And this is a machine long
Speaker 13: used in the White House. It's for like hundreds of years.
Speaker 13: Barack Obama the first one to officially use it to
Speaker 13: sign led legislation. But this is a regular tool, right
Speaker 13: And the past few months, Trump has been increasingly obsessed
Speaker 13: with the autopen in trying to attack Biden's administration and
Speaker 13: somehow like take some of the blame away from Biden
Speaker 13: and onto the people who Biden was surrounded by. In June,
Speaker 13: Trump ordered an investigation into Biden's alleged use of the
Speaker 13: autopen and if other figures in Biden's White House were
Speaker 13: using the autopen without Biden's knowledge. Acting as shadow president.
Speaker 13: I'm going to play a clip here from Fox News
Speaker 13: discussing the possible ramifications of the autopen's use.
Speaker 20: Mister Chairman, you mentioned that you're looking at some of
Speaker 20: the pardons that were done under President Biden and the
Speaker 20: use of the AUTOPEN, doctor Fauci being one of them,
Speaker 20: talking about whether they were legitimate or not. Are you
Speaker 20: also looking into Biden's judicial appointments as well.
Speaker 21: Absolutely everything that was signed with the AUTOPEN, especially in
Speaker 21: the last year of the Biden presidency. This is when
Speaker 21: all the books that are being written, all the tell
Speaker 21: all interviews that are being recorded from his former disgruntled
Speaker 21: staffers and staffers who are trying to preserve the reputation
Speaker 21: for future employment. They're all saying that Joe Biden was
Speaker 21: in a deep mental decline. This raises an issue whether
Speaker 21: these pardons, whether these judicial appointments, and whether these executive.
Speaker 9: Orders are legal.
Speaker 21: I believe that if this investigation keeps going in the
Speaker 21: way that it's going, that's going to very serious concerns
Speaker 21: about whether or not Joe Biden even what was going
Speaker 21: on around him, much less whether he authorized the use
Speaker 21: of his signature on all of this stuff. I think
Speaker 21: all of these are in jeopardy of being declared null
Speaker 21: and void in a court of law. And that's a
Speaker 21: big deal for the Trump administration because so much of
Speaker 21: what Trump is up against in court now with these
Speaker 21: liberal biased Biden appointed judges is the fact that they're
Speaker 21: using and citing some of these executive orders as reason
Speaker 21: to to to throw out President Trump's agenda and President
Speaker 21: Trump's executive orders.
Speaker 13: So that gets into this the scope of things that
Speaker 13: we're dealing with here. It's it's it's not just pardons.
Speaker 13: This this started by talking about Biden's pardons this past
Speaker 13: March on a on a truth on Truth social Trump
Speaker 13: claimed that Biden's preemptive partons and members of the January
Speaker 13: sixth Investigation House Committee are quote hereby declared void, vacant,
Speaker 13: and of no further force of effect because of the
Speaker 13: fact that they were done by auto pen unquote, And
Speaker 13: like this just isn't true that there there is no
Speaker 13: constitutional requirement that pardons even be signed. He cannot void
Speaker 13: pardons like this allegedly, right, who knows what they'll try
Speaker 13: to like do by like enforcement. But according to like
Speaker 13: the legal the legal systems currently in place, this this
Speaker 13: like isn't real. But if they do try to legitimately
Speaker 13: go after like judicial appointments and try to create this
Speaker 13: conspiracy see of this like shadow cabinet that was secretly
Speaker 13: running the government. I will be interested to see where
Speaker 13: that goes and the extent to which they think they
Speaker 13: can pull that off, especially as a way to like
Speaker 13: bypass judges who are blocking various Trump policies from being
Speaker 13: put into effect.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've just always been of the opinion that
Speaker 2: we shouldn't even be allowing these people to use pins,
Speaker 2: you know, niform. We already had the perfect way of
Speaker 2: putting law on the books, and we need to go back.
Speaker 2: We need to return.
Speaker 7: Yeah, then to books exists in or is it all
Speaker 7: in the clay tablets? As God in.
Speaker 2: All clay tablets, James, We've got him, robber the whole
Speaker 2: internet clay tablets.
Speaker 17: Yeah, because none of these laws are actually written on clay,
Speaker 17: and therefore, I for one belief that they do not
Speaker 17: apply to me.
Speaker 2: That they're not valid. You know, you've heard of e
Speaker 2: ink screens. We need eat clay.
Speaker 17: That is the only way that a law could be
Speaker 17: passed in these United States. Otherwise I retain my sovereignty as.
Speaker 2: A citizens that's what it's about.
Speaker 13: Trump does pride himself on always using the pen to
Speaker 13: sign things himself, except for like fan mail and like
Speaker 13: thank you cards, and which he gets his staff to
Speaker 13: use the auto pen to sign those toilup orders. But
Speaker 13: for all serious matters he prides himself on only using
Speaker 13: the pen.
Speaker 7: Not just the pen Garrison.
Speaker 17: I believe he has a special Trump edition shoppie has
Speaker 17: a big bucket of them on his desk.
Speaker 7: If a call correctly that he then did, they sell
Speaker 7: them off off to it my mistake.
Speaker 13: Uses his special sharpie to sign all documents, including the
Speaker 13: next two topics, which are some executive orders.
Speaker 9: Shit.
Speaker 13: So there's been a number of executive orders in the
Speaker 13: past few weeks that are forming what's what the White
Speaker 13: House is calling the AI Action Plan, which largely seeks
Speaker 13: to loosen restrictions and regulations on AI and accelerate the
Speaker 13: building of data centers to power AI training so that
Speaker 13: American companies can better compete in the global market. But
Speaker 13: there was another AI executive order signed to last week
Speaker 13: on July twenty third, which is titled preventing Woke AI
Speaker 13: in the Federal Government. Wow, incredible. I'm going to read
Speaker 13: the first two sentences, which are which are long sentences
Speaker 13: of the AI Executive Order on woke AI quote. In
Speaker 13: the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of
Speaker 13: factual information about race or sex, manipulation of racial or
Speaker 13: sexual representation in model outputs, incorporation of concepts like critical
Speaker 13: race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism, and
Speaker 13: discrimination on the basis of race or sex. DEI displaces
Speaker 13: a commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes, and,
Speaker 13: as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.
Speaker 13: For example, one major AI model changed the race or
Speaker 13: sex of historical figures, including the Pope, the Founding Fathers,
Speaker 13: and vikings when prompted for images because it was trained
Speaker 13: to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy. Another
Speaker 13: AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of
Speaker 13: white people, even while complying in the same request for
Speaker 13: people of other races. And yet another case, an AI
Speaker 13: model asserted that a user should not quote unquote misgender
Speaker 13: another person, even if necessary to stop a new killar
Speaker 13: apocaly Official White House Executive Order.
Speaker 17: Documentary The last one is one of the fucking funniest
Speaker 17: things I've ever heard.
Speaker 13: Would you suck off one hundred apes to save one
Speaker 13: human life?
Speaker 2: Well that absolutely not absolutely happens, but I would do
Speaker 2: the reverse.
Speaker 13: This is this is like this is crazy stuff, right,
Speaker 13: This this is stuff that you would see like daily
Speaker 13: wire posters talking about like four years ago.
Speaker 7: This is like debate me bro like blue tick twitter stuff.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 13: Yeah, but even even talking about you know, like how
Speaker 13: like things like unconscious bias and systemic racism cannot be mentioned, right,
Speaker 13: those are things that specifically Ben Shapiro has like led
Speaker 13: their charge on attacking in mainstream in mainstream like political
Speaker 13: disagreement for a while now like arguing that systemic racism
Speaker 13: is not a thing. Yeah, and now you have orders
Speaker 13: specifically targeting systemic racism being used in AI outputs. So
Speaker 13: part of what this executive order actually seeks to do
Speaker 13: is make it so that the government can only use
Speaker 13: large language models that are developed with the principles of
Speaker 13: quote unquote truth seeking and ideological neutrality, requiring that these
Speaker 13: are nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor
Speaker 13: of ideological dogmas such as DEEI. In effect, the order
Speaker 13: seeks to use government contracts as bribes to make companies
Speaker 13: ensure that their AIS are not woke, with the Trump
Speaker 13: administration serving as the judge of what is and isn't
Speaker 13: woke and threatening to pull contracts and force companies to
Speaker 13: pay cancelation fees if their AI language model is deemed
Speaker 13: to be too woke.
Speaker 4: I never want to hear the word woke again.
Speaker 2: I'm so fucking tired.
Speaker 11: That's exhausting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's Jim Crow for the for the computer these
Speaker 1: ways what.
Speaker 13: This is like as a part of this AI action plan,
Speaker 13: Like they're like third or fourth main principle is quote
Speaker 13: unquote upholding free speech in frontier models. Updating federal procurement
Speaker 13: guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier
Speaker 13: large language model developers who ensure that their systems are
Speaker 13: objective and free from top down ideological bias. That's the
Speaker 13: opposite of free speech. Yeah, what do you We will
Speaker 13: like make sure that they only do the specific thing
Speaker 13: that we want, and we're calling that upholding free speech.
Speaker 1: Just say you want Mecca Hitler Rock just just.
Speaker 2: Just say he has Grock has indeed said.
Speaker 4: That I know.
Speaker 13: Oh, so that's the first executive order that I want
Speaker 13: to talk about. The next one is less brain roddy
Speaker 13: and more perrific, actually scary. Like I'm sure the WOKEI
Speaker 13: one will turn out to be bad, but this next
Speaker 13: one is like extremely extremely fascistic, and I don't use
Speaker 13: that word lightly. This order is titled ending Crime and
Speaker 13: Disorder on America's Streets. I'll start by quoting one paragraph quote,
Speaker 13: Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have
Speaker 13: made our cities unsafe. Shifting homeless individuals into long term
Speaker 13: institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of
Speaker 13: civil commitment, will restore public order. The Attorney General shall
Speaker 13: prioritize available funding to support the expansion of drug courts
Speaker 13: and mental health courts for individuals for which such diversion
Speaker 13: serves public safety.
Speaker 17: Yeah, this is bad, This is yeah some yeah again,
Speaker 17: people like to like to use fascism a lot, but yeah,
Speaker 17: this is some Nazi shit like this, this is.
Speaker 7: A thing that the Nazis did.
Speaker 13: Yep, let's get more into what this order outlines. So
Speaker 13: this executive order directs the Attorney General to reverse quote
Speaker 13: unquote judicial precedents prohibiting involuntary institutionalization and to seek the
Speaker 13: quote termination of consent decrees that impede the United States
Speaker 13: policy of encouraging the civil commitment of individuals with mental
Speaker 13: illnesses who pose risks to themselves or the public, or
Speaker 13: or are living on the streets. It starts by, you know,
Speaker 13: if someone's at risk to themselves, and then expands that
Speaker 13: to just include everybody if they're deemed to be at
Speaker 13: risk to the public or just happen to be living outside. Yeah,
Speaker 13: you can now get put in what is essentially Trump's
Speaker 13: new version of a seen asylums.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's really scary.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I think like we shouldn't not mention that a
Speaker 17: lot of this shit it's directly downstream from democratic mass
Speaker 17: in large cities and especially in California, pushing forrint voluntary
Speaker 17: commitment of vunt House.
Speaker 7: No, this is like Gavin Newsom's wet dream. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 7: this is Todd Gloria shit.
Speaker 2: Honestly, this is unfortunately very bipartisan when we are at
Speaker 2: least talk about the political elite, and to a sizable extent,
Speaker 2: when we're talking about the electorate.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is an issue on which the left has
Speaker 2: catastrophically lost just like immigration. Unlike immigration, it is not
Speaker 2: an issue in which we're starting to see the pendulum
Speaker 2: swing back. Because yeah, number one, I mean, I guess
Speaker 2: we have not yet seen the kind of violence deployed
Speaker 2: against the houseless by agents of the state at scale
Speaker 2: in public that we're seeing right now on migrants. Right Like,
Speaker 2: there's not a federal agency going to war on the houseless.
Speaker 2: It's the same kind of violence that's existed previs But
Speaker 2: also like there's a huge amount of propaganda against this,
Speaker 2: Like every city business association you know, is constantly complaint
Speaker 2: because they see this as like, oh, this is why
Speaker 2: people don't want to come into stores anymore. It's the houseless,
Speaker 2: you know, it's not fucking Amazon or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's absolute bullshit.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean some of that might change, though, because
Speaker 13: Trump is seeking to mobilize federal resources to start doing enforcement. Yes,
Speaker 13: the order direction Trump's cabinet to be giving grants to
Speaker 13: state and local governments to help enact civil commitment and
Speaker 13: institutional treatment, with the priority of grants being directed to
Speaker 13: states and municipalities that already have and enforce strong anti
Speaker 13: homeless policies. The order allows for emergency federal law enforcement
Speaker 13: assistance funds to be used for encampment removal, and directs
Speaker 13: the Secretary of Health and Human Services to remove federal
Speaker 13: funding from quote unquote harm reduction or quote unquote safe
Speaker 13: consumption programs, as well as quote ending support for how
Speaker 13: using first policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery,
Speaker 13: and self sufficiency. So not only are they increasing LA
Speaker 13: enforcement capacity to apprehend mentally ill or houses people and
Speaker 13: put them into institutional facilities, but they are cutting all
Speaker 13: federal funds from programs that are deemed to be harm
Speaker 13: reduction or safe consumption, which are programs that have been
Speaker 13: shown to work across the globe, as well as ending
Speaker 13: housing first policies, which is what most homeless advocates actually
Speaker 13: push for as a way to solve homelessness.
Speaker 7: Yeah, because there're evidence based and they work.
Speaker 13: The order also requires that recipients of federal housing and
Speaker 13: homelessness assistants to force participants who suffer from substance abuse, disorder,
Speaker 13: or serious mental illnesses into quote unquote treatment or mental
Speaker 13: health services as a condition of participation unquote, and that
Speaker 13: the recipients of these federal funds are now required to
Speaker 13: collect quote unquote health related information from everyone who has
Speaker 13: provided assistance and is required to share that data with
Speaker 13: law enforcement quote in circumstances permitted by law.
Speaker 4: Don't love that. That's horrible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really just not align we went across. That's
Speaker 1: so scary, yep.
Speaker 13: The weaponization of health data for law enforcement, yes services, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And unfortunately it's exactly the thing that like for
Speaker 2: years advocates for mental health care have been trying to
Speaker 2: get across, like, hey, it's okay to go in to
Speaker 2: seek treatment, like this is stuff, isn't going to be
Speaker 2: weaponized against you.
Speaker 7: And that's not true anymore.
Speaker 2: Like the degree to which, outside of the actual danger
Speaker 2: of law enforcement getting this data and using it, the
Speaker 2: setback to mental health care to people feeling having any
Speaker 2: chance of feeling safe to pursue it is like incomprehensible,
Speaker 2: Like it's it's so bad.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And not only are they seeking to go after users,
Speaker 13: the recipients of federal Housing and Homelessness assistance that operate
Speaker 13: drug injection sites or quote unquote safe conception sites will
Speaker 13: be reviewed by the Attorney General for violation of federal
Speaker 13: law and bring civil or criminal action in appropriate cases,
Speaker 13: literally going after people who try to create environments where
Speaker 13: people who use drugs can do so in a method
Speaker 13: that will not kill them.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people who are handing out clean needles, you know,
Speaker 2: safe injection sites, that sort of thing, any kind of
Speaker 2: harm reduction.
Speaker 13: Which will now be under investigation by the Attorney General.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, which is going to get people killed, as
Speaker 2: going to imprison people who have been doing nothing but
Speaker 2: helping other people. Like, it's just comprehensively a nightmare.
Speaker 17: It's going to lead to more communicable diseases spreading that
Speaker 17: we don't like. Some of these safe injection sites have
Speaker 17: prevented spreading, right, needle exchanges have prevented When we combine
Speaker 17: it with our f case stuff like, this is going
Speaker 17: to be a major public health issue on top of
Speaker 17: everything else.
Speaker 13: So on top of expanding drug courts and mental health courts.
Speaker 13: I will will end with one final quote the order quote.
Speaker 13: They will ensure that homeless individuals arrested for federal crimes
Speaker 13: are evaluated to determine whether they are sexually dangerous persons
Speaker 13: and certified accordingly for civil commitment. And finally, Trump's cabinet
Speaker 13: is directed to quote assess federal resources to determine whether
Speaker 13: they may be directed towards ensuring that detainees with serious
Speaker 13: mental illnesses are not released into the public because of
Speaker 13: the lack of forensic bed capacity at appropriate local, state,
Speaker 13: and federal jails or hospitals unquote. It remains to be
Speaker 13: seen the scale in which this will be implemented. Usually
Speaker 13: these orders have a series of months in which the
Speaker 13: cabinet members will then propose actual implementation policies that then
Speaker 13: can be implemented across the country. But certainly what is
Speaker 13: in the order itself is incredibly worrying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, we probably shouldn't let this guy become president again.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Oh, well, do you know what we should do right now? Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, ads, discoda, ads, sure have fun with that.
Speaker 18: Everyone talking of shouldn't have let that guy become president again.
Speaker 18: One of the reasons that I did become president again
Speaker 18: is because the Democrats were incapable of fielding a candidate
Speaker 18: who could say genocide bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That might have helped.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's a fucking low bar and they failed
Speaker 7: to clear it.
Speaker 2: It might have helped.
Speaker 13: It might have helped. According to new data from New York,
Speaker 13: where two thirds or more of New York Democratic primary
Speaker 13: voters agree with Zora Mondonney's positions on Israel and arresting
Speaker 13: Benjamina Yahoo and the fifty seven percent say that they
Speaker 13: might oppost Democrats who do not endorse Mandanni for mayor. Yeah,
Speaker 13: because so it seems like, yeah, maybe the Democrats should
Speaker 13: have done something about that. It seems like the majority
Speaker 13: of their base wants that.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm not one of those. I always hate it
Speaker 2: when people like try to reduce the loss to one thing,
Speaker 2: because there's a number of but like one like Michigan.
Speaker 2: We can probably blame the loss of Michigan on Pamala's
Speaker 2: failures to call Gaza a genocide or to take any
Speaker 2: kind of a stance separating her from Biden on that matter. Right, Like,
Speaker 2: there's a decent amount of evidence to suggest that maybe
Speaker 2: other states, you know, other things went wrong, but like this,
Speaker 2: that was a significant reason why the Democrats failed.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Look at the way, if we're about to discuss how
Speaker 17: the entirety of Canada while we have been recording this
Speaker 17: is announced that it is joining the UK and France
Speaker 17: and plans to conditionally recognize a Palestinian state. Yeah, and
Speaker 17: the reason that is happening is because Israel's genocide in
Speaker 17: Gaza is continuing. Yeah, July has been the deadliest month
Speaker 17: for the past year and a half. One person who's
Speaker 17: died every twelve minutes. One hundred and ninety nine people
Speaker 17: have died every day, four hundred and one of them
Speaker 17: have been injured. We saw this week nineteen people died
Speaker 17: of starvation. None of these people are dying because of
Speaker 17: a famine that's caused by the weather or some other
Speaker 17: natural cause. Right, this is entirely a choice, and it's
Speaker 17: made by people in the Israeli state, very chiefly by
Speaker 17: Benjamin net Yahoo to quote Netyaho. Israel has been forced
Speaker 17: to allow some aid into the Strip, but only a
Speaker 17: tiny fraction of the required aid has made its way in.
Speaker 17: One in five children in Gaza is suffering from acute maultnutrition.
Speaker 17: That figure has tripled since last month, according to the
Speaker 17: World Health Organization. Not only is there not enough food,
Speaker 17: but there are also not enough medical supplies to treat
Speaker 17: people with acute malnutrition. Right when somebody is acutely malnourished,
Speaker 17: you can't just like hand them a sandwich and fix
Speaker 17: a problem.
Speaker 2: This was a major problem when liberating the concentration camps
Speaker 2: at the end of World War Two, American soldiers would
Speaker 2: see these peall who were just as I mean, can
Speaker 2: you've seen pictures of Auschwitz survivors and stuff and just
Speaker 2: act with immediate human compassion and give them whatever they wanted, right,
Speaker 2: And then people got sick and died because you literally can't.
Speaker 7: You have to.
Speaker 2: There's a very specific way when someone is that far
Speaker 2: gone that you have to slowly renourish them whatever.
Speaker 17: Yeah, refeed them, ensure that they are maintaining adequate hydration levels, right,
Speaker 17: therapeutic formula for babies that are malnourished.
Speaker 2: It's more, it's I think there's this like mystic understanding
Speaker 2: that like, oh, starving people are just hungry, so you
Speaker 2: just feed them, and like past a certain point, No,
Speaker 2: they're not just hungry. Something else is going.
Speaker 17: Their bodies are failing and beginning to die, and that
Speaker 17: requires medical attention because they have a very serious medical condition.
Speaker 17: Those medical supplies are not getting into Gaza. The Integrated
Speaker 17: Food Security Phase Classification, generally referred to as the IPC
Speaker 17: stud an alert for what it calls, quote the worst
Speaker 17: case scenario of famine in Gaza this week. In their alert,
Speaker 17: they said, quote, Over twenty thousand children have been admitted
Speaker 17: for treatment for acute malnutrition between April and mid July,
Speaker 17: with more than three thousand severely malnourished. Hospitals have reported
Speaker 17: a rapid increase in hunger related deaths of children at
Speaker 17: a five years of age, with at least sixteen reported
Speaker 17: deaths since the seventeenth of July. That's not really much
Speaker 17: that I think we can say about this other than
Speaker 17: it's absolutely despicable and disgusting as a result of Israel
Speaker 17: carrying out genocide in the open. The UK, France, and
Speaker 17: Canada have indicated, as I said, they're willingness recognize a
Speaker 17: Palestine new state with some conditions.
Speaker 7: Statehood will not.
Speaker 17: Feed these children, rightly, these people will be dead long
Speaker 17: before the state is recognized in US. Something changes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, The whole recognizing statehood for me is less meaningful
Speaker 2: because I care about states, than it is as a
Speaker 2: symbol of the fact that France, you know, and the
Speaker 2: UK and an increasing number of nations who were not
Speaker 2: like imagining them ten years ago, like taking the sense
Speaker 2: of being as critical of Israel as they are, would
Speaker 2: have been a stretch, right, would have been difficult to
Speaker 2: comprehend and I think what it really does showcase is
Speaker 2: how rapidly international opinion has changed and the very dangerous
Speaker 2: situation Israel has gotten itself into. Where I don't think
Speaker 2: it is a matter of immediate danger because the weapons
Speaker 2: aren't going to stop flowing and no one is going
Speaker 2: to stop them militarily, but they are sabotaging the ground
Speaker 2: underneath themselves, and I do think I mean, maybe this
Speaker 2: is me being unreasonably hopeful here, but yeah, like this
Speaker 2: is I think they're setting up their own downfall here,
Speaker 2: you know, not quick enough to save any of these lives,
Speaker 2: but like this is not a good position for them
Speaker 2: to be in a country that's this dependent upon foreign trade,
Speaker 2: upon foreign weapons, upon foreign support for its survival. Like
Speaker 2: they're sabotaging themselves.
Speaker 17: Yeah, they're becoming a parias state, far too slowly given
Speaker 17: what's happened over the last couple of years, but it's happening.
Speaker 17: I'll just finish, I guess by saying that Israel has
Speaker 17: agreed to make tactical pauses, which is I don't know
Speaker 17: what that really means to allow AID to enter The
Speaker 17: IPC report suggesting media actions to protect life, but it
Speaker 17: concludes a quote, none of this is possible unless there
Speaker 17: is a ceasefire, and there is no sign of that
Speaker 17: immediate future. Let's talk about immigration, shall we something something
Speaker 17: that is also pretty much a downer. I guess the
Speaker 17: State Department is rolled back it's visa interview waiver. This
Speaker 17: was a pandemic era thing right that people didn't have
Speaker 17: to come into the consulate and actually do an interview
Speaker 17: with a physical human for their visa. This will result
Speaker 17: in assive delays at consulates around the world and will
Speaker 17: mean that visas are inaccessible for some people entirely right,
Speaker 17: because getting to a consulate alone is a barrier for them.
Speaker 17: Rate or another expense, and it's a risky expense if
Speaker 17: you think you might be turned down. The government has
Speaker 17: been canceling hearings, according to NBC Miami, of people in
Speaker 17: the Everglades Detention Facility aka Alligator Alcatraz, right, it makes
Speaker 17: are also being denied the right to meet with their attorneys.
Speaker 17: The government asserted that everyone there has a final removal order. However,
Speaker 17: at least one attorney with two clients there the NBC
Speaker 17: Miami spoke to said that this was not the case
Speaker 17: for their clients. They don't have final removal orders, but
Speaker 17: nonetheless they are not able.
Speaker 7: To access their due process rights.
Speaker 17: There is a lawsuit challenging this and many other issues
Speaker 17: at the detention center that will be held on the
Speaker 17: eighteenth of August. Talking of removals, we are beginning to
Speaker 17: see first hand accounts from the Venas Whalen people who
Speaker 17: were detained as Scott two hundred and thirty Venezuelan detainees
Speaker 17: there were traded with Venezuela in a three way trade
Speaker 17: for the US citizen ents detained in Venezuela.
Speaker 1: Right, three way trade, I.
Speaker 17: Mean very clearly the people in Seccot were really under
Speaker 17: US custard, yes, right, so it's just a workaround for
Speaker 17: a direct trade.
Speaker 2: Well, or at least I mean they were under the
Speaker 2: custody of a US contractor, right, Like, that's I think
Speaker 2: the accurate way to describe this. Yeah, yes, I think
Speaker 2: that's probably yeah.
Speaker 17: Yeah, Like the US had control over their comings and goings,
Speaker 17: as it's demonstrated by this prisoner exchange.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 17: These reports indicate that the plane landed and immediately Salvatory
Speaker 17: and police entered and beat the men so severely that
Speaker 17: flight attendants on the plane cried, an ice agent told
Speaker 17: them in Spanish quote, this would teach you to enter
Speaker 17: our country illegally. Many of the menahed to point out
Speaker 17: did not enter the country between ports of entry or
Speaker 17: without inspection. They entered via CBP, the only legal way
Speaker 17: for them to claim asylum at that time. The men
Speaker 17: said they were beaten, kicked, and shot with rubber pellets.
Speaker 17: They were never allowed outside, and guards would mock them
Speaker 17: and refuse to tell them the time when they asked.
Speaker 17: Several of them mentioned a fellow detainee who began cutting himself,
Speaker 17: writing messages on the wall in his own blood.
Speaker 7: Those messages include.
Speaker 17: Stop hitting us, we are fathers, we are brothers, we
Speaker 17: are innocent people. Shortly before their release, they say they
Speaker 17: were treated better, allowed to shower and shave, and given medicine.
Speaker 17: When one of the men returned, his neighbors clapped together
Speaker 17: to raise twenty bucks for his mother to decorate the
Speaker 17: house and make him a meal of chicken, rice and plantains.
Speaker 17: That one was particularly hard for me to read for
Speaker 17: some reason, because that specific meal is one I've eaten
Speaker 17: with the people I live with in Kakas, the people
Speaker 17: I was with and at Bari and gap.
Speaker 7: It just seemed very personal to me.
Speaker 17: They also noted that many of the men were detained,
Speaker 17: paryed and read the Bible. They used food packaging and
Speaker 17: even food to make dice and playing cards to play games.
Speaker 17: The things that I read in this are actually, like,
Speaker 17: really heartbreaking, because I've seen folks from Venezuela go through
Speaker 17: really horrific things. Right, they were in the Daryan Gap
Speaker 17: when I was in a Daryan gap. I've seen him
Speaker 17: in outdoor attention. I've also spent time living in Venezuela
Speaker 17: and throughout that like people, Venezuelan people have shown an
Speaker 17: incredible capacity to continue to smile and have joy and
Speaker 17: have a joke and have a laugh. So like seeing
Speaker 17: these men, though thoroughly beaten down by the Salvadarrian state
Speaker 17: is really hard. I'd encourage you all to read the
Speaker 17: pro public apiece, which I will link in the show notes.
Speaker 17: But yeah, it's yeah, it's as bad as we expected
Speaker 17: it to be. Right Like, I don't think for a
Speaker 17: minute that else Albert or expected them to leave. So
Speaker 17: it treated them like I'm sure it treats everybody else there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right like that, that's what you have to assume,
Speaker 2: and that's why it's important not to limit the discussion
Speaker 2: or the anger to the case of you know, the
Speaker 2: Garcia and you know this couple of people who are
Speaker 2: quote unquote obviously.
Speaker 7: In essence individual people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like nobody should be in Seacot and quite frankly,
Speaker 2: Hunter Biden's right, you know we should we should invade
Speaker 2: El Salvador if that's what it takes to close this
Speaker 2: place down. Yeah, like fuck them, like it's it's I mean,
Speaker 2: or someone should invade us. I don't fucking know whatever
Speaker 2: it takes to stop this shit, but like it's unacceptable.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's inhumane. Like a world where this exists is
Speaker 7: not a world we should want.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 17: I guess maybe I'll end with some good news and
Speaker 17: a little fundraiser.
Speaker 7: I people want to donate. Good news?
Speaker 9: Is it?
Speaker 17: A judge has ordered the release of kilmar Abrego. I
Speaker 17: guess he prefers to just use the first part of
Speaker 17: his last name, right, Spanish last names come from your
Speaker 17: mother and father.
Speaker 7: Some people used both.
Speaker 2: Want Oh I hadn't caught that actually, Thank you, James.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you are welcome.
Speaker 17: Judge Genie ordered that he'd be returned to Mary and
Speaker 17: not be immediately detained by ICE on his release, and
Speaker 17: the seventy two hours notice be given if they try
Speaker 17: to remove him. I have seen reporting that says she
Speaker 17: has ordered that he can't be deported.
Speaker 7: That's not true.
Speaker 17: She ordered that he have his due process rights if
Speaker 17: they attempt to remove him right. I've also seen reporting
Speaker 17: that he is like out and about on the street.
Speaker 17: That is not true. A Tennessee judge did deny the
Speaker 17: government's attempts to detain him while he awaits criminal trial,
Speaker 17: but at the request of his legal team, his release
Speaker 17: has been stayed by thirty days. I believe this is
Speaker 17: to prevent ICE grabbing him and deporting him immediately when
Speaker 17: he's released or thereafter, right until they've got their clarification
Speaker 17: from judges.
Speaker 7: Enis.
Speaker 17: This comes after Trump administration or the DOJ has failed
Speaker 17: to persuade any of for federal judges that he was
Speaker 17: a leader of MS thirteen. His lawyers have also asked
Speaker 17: a judge to stop DHS posting about this and prejudicing
Speaker 17: a potential jury pool. So, at least in this one case,
Speaker 17: and it is moving closer to being back with his family,
Speaker 17: Let's talk about a fundraiser and then we can finish up. Yeah,
Speaker 17: So I want to talk about Hose Jiron and I
Speaker 17: will just read here from the fundraiser page. Jose was
Speaker 17: taken from his family and detained O Ti Meser Detention
Speaker 17: Center over thirteen months ago. Like many friends, parents and
Speaker 17: siblings in prison at OMDC, Josse has received no medical
Speaker 17: care despite having concerning symptoms for colon cancer. Visibly in
Speaker 17: pain during his previous hearing, Jose showed the judge Ajar
Speaker 17: with one point five to two inches of blood that
Speaker 17: he reported had come out of his rectum. No one
Speaker 17: should have to supper these indignities. If you would like
Speaker 17: to support Josse, you can go to give butter dot
Speaker 17: com slash free Horse Jiron. That's fie Jo S E
Speaker 17: G I R O N.
Speaker 7: I think that's all for us. We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Goodbye, we report the news.
Speaker 5: Hey.
Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 2: now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 7: It could happen.
Speaker 13: Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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Speaker 13: or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Speaker 13: sources for it could happen here. Listened directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening,