Al Zone Media.
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, b A walg with me is Robert Evans. Woo woo. So we have spent a lot of time on this show talking about the rise of the far right and what that's looked like electorally, what that's looked like in the streets, and the sort of you know, deleterious effects that it has had on effectively everyone in the US. This is going to be a little bit
of a different episode. We've talked about a lot of the responses to the far right, sort of you know, inter sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations. What we haven't really done is talked about what can be done electorally, and I do think that a significant portion of the far right can be defanged and eventually defeated through a series of things that are not particularly complicated.
But the problem is that defeating the far right means going beyond simply trying to win every single election, which is the current sort of democratic strategy. Right If you want to actually defeat the far right, winning every election is not a viable strategy. We've seen this fail already with Hillary Clinton. We cannot rely on simply winning every election into the future. You have to go beyond mere electoral victory towards using your electoral victory to actually defeat
the base of the far right. When the Republican Party held power for twelve years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan, they did it by destroying the political base the Democratic Party. They shattered America's trade unions and rebuilt the economy to ens unions would no longer be able to provide the ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on. If we are going to defeat the far right, we need to wage the same kind of campaign against them now.
Luckily for us, unlike Ronald Reagan, We do not need to completely rebuild the American economy to knock the legs of the far right out from under them. There is, in fact, a pretty minimal program that we can implement to defeat the far right that is very simple. It has three components. First, a crack down on MLMs that drives them effectively completely underground.
Yeah, by which we mean multi level marketing. For these are period schemes, right, which are a major source of funding for the fire right. I mean this is where Trump comes out of, right, this is why he did that fake university like, this is a big part of his base. Yeah.
Yeah, we're going to get more into that in a seconds. The second, very important one is a regulatory overhaul of how the FDA regulates supplements. Oh boy, which sounds like it yeah, extremely technical and nerdy thing, but supplements are another enormous cash spigot for the far right.
Yeah, this is where Alex Jones and Joe Rogan get their shit. Yeah, yep, yep.
And the third is another kind of wonky change that will be extremely important, which is making sure to allow car companies to make direct sales to customers, thus undercutting the enormous and extremely politically powerful base of right wing American car dealership owners.
Yeah, who donate more money to political causes than any other career field in this country.
Yeah. And you may not believe us yet just from this sort of basic introduction, but these three simple reforms EML and regulation, regulation of dietary supplements, and the direct sales of cars will destroy so much of the financial and political base of the far right that they will at least temporarily and in the sort of mid range term, becomes significantly less of a threat than they are now. So we are going to start with MLMs. Yeah, as Robert has sort of alluded to, MLMs are a very
very important political base for the far rights. I'm probably the most famous and the one that Robert has done an entire show on. So go listen to that if you want to really actually in detailed thing on the history of Amway. Amway and the sort of political family the devices that they've generated are an incredibly important part of the emerging far right. I mean, obviously, most famously Betsy de Vos, who married into the Klan, was our
Secretary of Education under Trump. You know, the sort of prince family is embedded into this and Amway famously used its own internal communications to stump for Republican Party candidates and also uses its base and also directly its own funds to fund the Republican Party and a bunch of Republican congressional candidates. Now, obviously, and this is something that is true of all of these reforms, is that everything we're doing here, they're morally and politically good in their
own right. Right, MLMs are scams, They're extremely exploitative, and their role, I think in the far right is a lot more important than people understand. Even if you just look at the money, you're sort of missing part of what's going on with MLMs. MLMs aren't just a cash spigot. They're part of how the far right builds is ideological base. MLMs teach you to convert all of your personal relations
into potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on a moral level, but it's also insidious on an ideological level. The MLM logic of turning all of your most precious relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world. And this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway works so well. Once you've been trained that literally everything, even your sort of closest friends and your dearest relationships with your family
are just business opportunities. It's extremely easy to convince you of the rest of the Republican Party platform in the same way the experience of being in a union and organizing with your coworkers once reliably turned out the ideological base of the left. MLMs have generated enormous political basis
for the right. And unfortunately, this sort of ideological threat doesn't just go away if people are able to get out of MLMs, or especially if you know they're sort of cast out of the mlems because they've simply are broken brand of money and are in debt. The isolation and alienation that comes from pushing away, you know, every single relation that's close to you, from attempting to sell them soap or whatever, makes people isolated and alienated and
makes them more vulnerable to far right radicalization. And this is why driving these MLMs under isn't just a way to sort of cost Republican Party money, because that's not enough to defeat the Republicans. They can find other sources of money. What you need to do is systematically remove parts of their political base. And when I say your roofports to their political base. What I mean is you have to go after the systems that are creating more members of the or right. Going after MLMs is a
way to do that. Now. The FTC has gone after m lms before. They sort of famously, as you talked about in that episode and an m way, they went after a bunch of MLMs in the eighties. But this sort of caused MLMs to get smarter and has you know, has been pretty effective in in sort of warding the FTC off from really going after MLMs since then.
Yeah, which is by the way, like another you were just talking about how the way MLMs impact like the minds of the people participating in them, like prepares them, you know, for the far right. Yeah, the way in which this this sense of impunity has developed among the people who run and participate in these things due to their capture of the legal system is also a part of like why the far right works the way it does, that sense of impunity.
Yeah, And part of the reason why they have that impunity is is just the way the FDC goes after these companies, right, I mean, there was in the in the mid twenty tens, the FTC went after neutral Light, which is one of the biggest and oldest MLMs. But the way they went after them was they issued them a two hundred million dollar fine, and that's a lot of money, but it didn't drive neutral Light out of business.
And as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, if government regulation just means setting fines, and if the fines still allow the business to make more money than they lost from the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut.
It's not actual regulation. And if you're one of these businesses and the worst that could happen to you is the government takes a cut, you end up with, you know, two thousand and eight right where all these banks know they're going to get bailed out, and they know the worst punishment that's going to happen to them is just the government taking a small cut and they can go back to just making all their money. So in order to actually go after MLMs, we can't simply rely on
the FTC. You know, even if if you were to sort of put in charge a more militant FTC that was were willing to go after stuff, there needs to be actual literary change here, and that is possible but difficult. But if we actually want, if we're actually deeply serious about wielding political power to defeat the far right and to keep them from re emerging and to keep them out of power generationally, then this is the start of what we have to do. So we mentioned Neutralite, which is,
you know, a very very powerful MLM. Neutralite is important because it is actually two kinds of business that are extremely important to the far right. At the same time. It is part MLM, but it is an MLM that also sells dietary supplements. And when we come back from these ads, we will be considering the role of the virtually unregulated dietary supplement markets in the rise of the far right more broadly, and we are back, oh boy, yeah, the supplement market. There is a lot less that has
been written about this, then there should be. So dietary supplements are barely regulated by the FDA. People are getting scammed all over the place enormous numbers. I mean, I've seen numbers that we're suggesting. I mean two hundred million people take some kind of dietary supplement if you include things like sort of vitamin gummyes et cetera, et cetera.
This is an enormous this is an enormous business. I'm going to read from Johnny R. Starr, who wrote an article about supplement regulation in the American Journal of Public Health. If you're going to read this, By the way, this is slightly out of date, because the next year, I don't know if this is part of this. The next year at FDC a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations.
But here is star quote the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which is the big thing that sort of deregulated supplements, prohibit supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury, allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue immediate bands on substances that are imminent hazards, and authorizes
the FDA to implement current good manufacturing practice guidelines. The law also requires pre market notification for new dietary supplements defined supplements that were not marketed in the US before October fifteenth, nineteen forty four, which is when the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act went into effect. Products violating these regulations are deemed dangerous, adulterated, and misbranded, are otherwise unlawful.
And that all sounds well and good until you get to the next sentence, which is quote, However, supplements need not be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on safety are required for new supplement ingredients.
Yeah.
So, like you're not supposed to let people sell dangerous supplements, but we're all also not supposed to check to make sure the supplements are safe or work.
Yeah. Yeah, it as the FDA itself admits that even the little tiny notifications for things like new ingredients that the fa in posts of twenty sixteen, you're supposed to notify the FADA if you put new ingredients. But like, even that just isn't happening. These companies just don't care. They're just not either not even like doing the little tidy legal mandate stuff they're required to.
I should also note a large part of the blame for particularly the supplements, but also I mean MLMs, actually they play a role in it too. It's the state of Utah.
Yeah.
By the way, a political power of the state of Utah is a huge part of why, because supplements are a massive fucking industry in Utah. So are MLMs. So, by the way, our team treatment facilities, the ones where they like kidnap your children and torture them. These are all things that the state of Utah in specific will fight like hell to stop from being fixed in any way, shape or for.
Yeah, and that bill I keep talking about the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act, That is the baby of Utah Senator or In Hatch, who is a terrible right wing force in American politics. And the fact that orin Hatch has been this effective and the fact that Utah serves as such a powerful base here demonstrate something that's important about this political strategy, which is that it has to be a federal level political strategy because there are a
lot of states Republicans effectively have strangleholds. You need to use the federal government to bypass the unbelievable block of sort of political power in these states. I want to read a little bit more from that article by Star about what kind of regulations are required for supplements, because I think it's extremely dire in and of itself. Quote, manufacturers are not required to confirm the identity of all ingredients supply to them.
Sure why they need to do that?
Unbelievable, And they're not required to follow up river how I talked about there's current good manufacturing Practices guidelines. Following those guidelines does not guarantee the absence of all contabinants. Moreover, unlike drugs which are considered unadulterated or misbranded, if they do not achieve compliance with national standards set by US Pharmacopeia and National formulary, dietary supplements may choose to be compliant.
Only six brands of dietary supplements are currently verified by US Pharmacopeia, so they don't have to work. They can choose whether or not they want to be submitted to see if any of this stuff works. Now in theory, also, the marketing of dietary settlements is supposed to be regulated by the FDC, But like is the FDC regulating you know all of these false claims people are making with the dietary slelements. No, of course they're not doing that.
So why do we care about supplement market Robert has kind of has talked about this at the very beginning of the episode. The easiest answer for why we should care about supplement markets is simply the figure of Alex Jones, who you know, we have talked about extensively on this show. It's been behind the masters. If you want to really, really in depth look at who Alex Jones is. The podcast Knowledge Fight is the single best resource I think anyone has ever created.
Yeah, it would be hard to beat.
Yeah, it's it's unbelievably detailed. But Alex Jones has, you know, as an individual figure, has done more or to sort of spread the ideology the far right and turn this country into what it is now then maybe almost any other single person other than someone like Trump. Right, he is probably most well known now as quote the Sandy Hook guy, which he's extremely mad at people calling him, but he's why everyone thinks that not everyone, but a bunch of people think that Sandy Hook was a false flag.
And importantly, here's from NPR quote most of Free Speech Systems, which is Alex Jones, the corporate name for Alex Jones' company. Most of Free Speech System's revenue to this day, about eighty percent comes from dietary supplements, according to court records. Now, these court records come from one of a number of lawsuits against Alex Jones for defaming the families of the victims of the Alex Jones shooting. Are we certain for defaming the victims of Sandy Hook shooting. Sorry, yeah, yeah.
And you know, in the process of discovery, we got a bunch of information about how how Alex Jones's internal media empire actually works. Now, if you followed Alex Jones over the years, you know that he's hawked everything from silver to satellite phones. But it is the dietary supplements that actually sell right As an MPR article said, about eighty percent of his revenue comes from dietary supplements. And this is not a sort of small independent media outlet,
right free speech systems. Again, as Alex Jones' company was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, this is an enormous for right media empire, and supplement sales allow right wing figures like Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads, which removes a lot of potential leverage from activist groups who wage pressure campaigns against you know, dated this against Tucker Carlson for example, where people went after their advertisers and showed them the stuff Tucker Carlson was saying on
Fox before he got kicked off and what do you want to fund this? And you know that was actually a sort of effective strategy. But you know, the any part about this is if you look at the end of Tucker Carlson's show, right, the ads on that show were ads from the MyPillow guy, who is a far right extremist in his own right and a very important election denier, and a bunch of supplement companies. Supplement sales are a durable and renewable grift because there's already an
extensive network of suppliers and distributors. Right wing brands who want to make a bunch of money can just sort of slap their name onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale, and then they can market them to their viewers, and this gives them an extremely profitable and lucrative source of funding. And this is used all over the place right.
Again, it impacts what they say and like how they like the obsession they have with like seed oils and what's destroying your ability, like your testosterone and all of these like different far right conspiracy theories about you know, what kind of stuff you shouldn't be eating, Like all of this stuff is related to the supplement business, right, Like they are trying to drum up and destroy trust and public health and drum up conspiracy theories for their
own profit and so it's not just a matter of like this is how they get money, but this also is why they do some of the things that are so harmful.
Yeah, and as you're saying, this is cyclical, right, the incentive structure for going further and further into these conspiracies and selling more and more of the supplement things, it's a spiral. It it keeps on just increasing in size and increasing in size due to the feedback loop from
the incentive structure that's selling these supplements creates. Now, this is actually not an enormously difficult sort of feel to just completely shut down the next branch we're going to talk about, I think is actually a much harder political fight, But a lot of the market for this can be defeated by just having the FTC actually regulate supplements the way they do drugs because and this is really important,
these supplements are being marketed as a drugs, right. The advertisements that these people are already doing are already illegal. The FTC is not supposed to allow people to sell supplements like this. They shouldn't be able to be manufactured
like this. And this is again as with banning MLMs, this is something that helps the consumer because it'll mean that whatever supplement market exists after sort of a massive regulatory sweep and crackdown will be much safer, it will be much more effective, and it will also destroy the base of far right media. If you can cut the knees out of this sort of far right media ecosystem, you can go an enormous way towards solving the crisis of the far right that has been brought upon this country.
Speaking of crisis.
Yeah, we're gonna let the ads talk about the ads, and then we're gonna come back and close by talking about car manufacturers in the American gentry.
Yeah, you're back. And this is a fun one. This is also like one of my particular favorite things to hit because I don't think a lot of people know how much the Republican Party is just a party of used car dealers YEP.
Probably the most famous piece that talks it's not really fully about car dealerships, but it mentions their sort of political effect and the kind of class that they belong to. Is maybe the best thing The Atlantic has published in the last decade, at least one of the best things they've published, and it's an article on the American gentry by the by the journalist Patrick Wyman. Wyman argues that huge swaths of America are ruled by what he calls
the local gentry. These are millionaires, and notably, these are not billionaires. These are multi multimillionaires whose wealth derives from immediate wealth extraction from the surrounding communities. In places like wyman childhood home of Yakima, Washington, these elites have enormous
local power over the territory. They rule like the landed gentry of old Wyman quote the conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet setting cause of politans, if popular imagination exists, But they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies that govern life for tens of millions
of people. Donald Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance, acting as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct, when he crowed about his quote beautiful boters, lauding the flotilla of his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January sixth crowd that included people who had flown to the event on private jets. He knew what he was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry,
the salts of the earth, multimillionaires. You see them as local leaders in business and politics, the underappreciated backbone of a once great nation. Now Wyman is largely focused on the agricultural gentry, because that's you know, the sort the sort of agrobarons who are very important to this story, but are are kind of are are kind of auxiliary to this and that you know, that's largely because he's talking a lot about the places where he grew up,
which are which are agricultural hubs. But a very critical component of this American gentry, of this local elite class are car dealership owners, and their wealth and influence literally cannot be overstated. The journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in an article in Slate in twenty twenty three. Quote auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top point one percent of American earners. Car dealers,
gas station owners, and building contractors. It turns out, make up the majority of the countries one hundred and forty thousand Americans who earn more than one point five million dollars a year. Crunching numbers from the US Census Bureau, data, scientists and author Stephens Devotowitz found that over twenty percent of car dealerships in the US have an owner in banking more than one point five million a year, which
is absolutely absurd. That is, that is an unbelievable amount of money for people who really, when you think about it, don't do anything, like what is the actual service that a car dealer is do?
I mean the primary thing that they do is rip people off, because there the entire way that car sales work is based on fraud yep, right, Like it's based on getting you to buy things that do not actually work, like service packages and whatnot that you often will not get any benefit from. And it's a lot of it is based around also just outright scams, you know, altering the information buyers have access to so they don't realize
like problems with a used car or whatever. Like it's it's all fraud, right.
Yeah, And as as is becoming ever true of American life, fraudsters, scammers and people who are just their entire existence is dedicated to ripping you off have more and more political power in this country. Here's a salmon from that same article quote. As of twenty twenty one, the top one hundred dealership groups in the US had annual revenues of around one hundred billion dollars, more than any company that
actually makes cars. The National Automotive Dealer Association NADA became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with sixteen thousand dues paying members spanning thirty two thousand, five hundred franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA convention became routine for presidential hall fulls, and even Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended ahead of presidential runs. Bill Clinton and both Bushes came
after they left the White House. And the fact that Democrats are showing up to this is appalling on a moral level. Right, this is an entire organization of fraudsters, and it doesn't even work.
Right.
Car dealers donate six to one for Republican causes, but.
They really want that one. Yeah, it's the same thing with like you've got Schumer going out for the crypto Caucus now where Yeah, well, only a fraction of those guys are going to donate to DIMS, but it's all scam. He doesn't really care as long as some of it goes to him. Yeah yeah.
Now. The thing that's that's dangerous about these people, and I think it's even more dangerous than something like crypto money, is that these are local elites, right, and they are dispersed enormously across the country. This is something that Salmon is very sort of specific about, and something that comes up in Wyman's piece, and somebody comes up if you
do any research about this at all. A huge part of the power is because these people are spread geographically across the country, and because they are the richest people or among the richest people in the sort of small areas that they dominate, they have unbelievable amounts of political power. And because they are again unbelievably wealthy, they can funnel this money directly into local politics on a scale that
cannot be matched by your sort of grassroots organizations. This allows them to buy everything from city council's to seats in Congress, and.
They effectively unionize like and they've got the Portland Business Association right, which is to a significant extent, allied with the police and like dominates local politics. They're the ones who buy the mayor's election, like they're the ones who you know, make deals with the Portland Police Officers union. Like this is this is the way in which a lot of power gets exercise that actually impacts your daily life.
Yeah, and they've also been doing things like like coordinating and doing strategy sharing about defeating unions. But I mean, this is why most of these big associations were formed, was specifically to destroy unions in the early twentieth century. And you know, I mean the Autolobbying Group was formed to do autolobbying because these car dealerships don't have unions. That's another thing that we'll come back to it a
little bit. But yeah, these car dealerships are a durable and extremely powerful force in electoral politics, and they deliver seats and this is the most important thing if you're an electoralist. Right, these people consistently deliver cease to Republicans by flooding an amount of money into local races that people can't compete with. And because of this, they miserate the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and they
can also largely be destroyed in a single stroke. That's maybe oversalling it a little bit, but their power largely rests on an enormous array of state level monopolies that ban the direct sales of cars to consumers or prevent car companies from competing with local retailers. And this is something that the autolobby has been you know, the auto association lobby not has been fighting for for ages. They've gotten it in an enormous number of states.
Yeah, and this, by the way, you know, in terms of abilities to like disrupt things, this is a big part of like how Tesla is different from other auto manufacturers is in most states. There are some states where they're not allowed to do this, but in most states they sell directly to the customer, which is like back before Musk became as political a figure, was actually a major reason why these people didn't like him.
Well, they still don't. This is actually a really interesting thing, is what the thing I want to close on here? Yes, yes, yes, these people still hate Musk and they hate electric cars because electric cars, to a large extent, are both a being directly sold by companies and B it's harder to you actually have to do service on them in a way that makes it more expensive for these these companies to write about this. This is something that Salmon has
written about extensively, so they absolutely despise electric cars. And this is actually a political opportunity for us, right because Elon Musk now is again one of there is I think he's still the richest person in the world technically until sort of all his stocks implode. But this is an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base right because the local government monopolies that these car dealers have are actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the
other parts of the Republican base right. Elon hates them. Actual car manufacturers hate it. No one likes car dealers, like, oh yeah, and this is everything you know. This is also something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at this, and this is one of the few times libertarians are right. They look at this and go, oh yeah, well, these
people have been literally granted market monopolies. There are a lot of places where if there's already a car dealer there, if you're a car company, you can't compete with these things. So these are state sanction monopolies. So there's large portions of the Republican base who oppose these companies, and if you can use this as a wedge issue to split the Republican base, and that's sort of where I want
to close on. As much as I've been talking about these three very specific things, right banning MLMs or at least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns, regulatory crackdowns on supplements, and legislation to allow direct car sales. What we're trying to do here isn't just getting rid of the money that supports the far right. We're trying to destroy their
institutions and we're trying to fracture their base, right. Going after MLMs destroys their ability to sort of produce more produce more Republicans from these MLMs and produce more people in the far right from these MLMs. Going after supplements is a way to destroy the right wing media ecosystem, which has been crucial to the rise of the far right.
And going after cars can help split the emerging Republican coalition by you know, pitting two parts of the Republican base against each other, pitting these car dealers versus Elon and versus the auto manufacturers.
Well, Mia, great episode, This is a nice starter. This is again something we're going to continue to talk about because I really think we can't hit enough on this. Obviously, these three things don't solve every problem with the far right, but this is like, if you get actually like packaged these together into a legislative agenda, it could be the equivalent of like the nuclear option for these people. So yeah, yeah, I think this is a smart thing to be hitting.
We will continue to talk about this in more detail, but you know what, we're done for the day, Go do something else.
I'm Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas who covers political extremism in Texas.
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian who wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis. Both of us grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, and for both of us our home state has been a matter of both wonder and horrified fascination. In this episode of It Could Happen Here, we're going to try to explain Texas culture and politics and why the country and the world
should care. Spoiler alert, what happens in Texas doesn't stay in Texas, the state has always had a disproportionate impact on national politics. The annexation of Texas in eighteen forty five provoked the Mexican American War. From eighteen forty six to eighteen forty eight, the United States I have two thirds of Mexico's territory, and there was an ugly and bitter fight over the status of slavery in all that
new land the United States acquired. That's going to turn out to be one of the major causes of the Civil War, a conflict that resulted in the liberation of four million African Americans from slavery, but also the death of three quarters of a million Americans. Texas also was the epicenter of the Populist Movement, a leftist movement largely based in Texas that actually challenged the power of the
Democratic Party in the South. And if the Populist Party had succeeded everything else happened in America in the twentieth century in terms of Jim Crow, lynching, the Clan, etc. May have had a very different outcome.
Slavery didn't end in Texas until June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five, months after it had ended in the rest of the country. It's a state that today is the second most pot peoalists say in the nation, and it's the eighth largest economy in the world. Two of the most consequential presidents over the last sixty years hailed from the Lone Star State.
There was Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who brought the country not only Medicare and Medicaid, but the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act and the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act, two issues that the right wing continue to fight against to this day. Those laws made African Americans perhaps the
most important constituency in the Democratic Party. Racist backlash to johnson civil rights legislation, urban uprisings in places like the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, and white flight generally led segregationists and their children in the South, who had been loyal Democratic voters to switch allegiance to the Republican Party. Over the next three decades, another Texas president, Republican George W.
Bush.
He aggressively embraced homophobia, tightened the ties between the Republican Party and the most right wing Christians in the country, and made denial of climate change strict.
Gope orthodoxy.
Of course, the Bush family's oil wealth was central to their rise to power, and broadly speaking, the wealth of right wing oil barons in Texas has helped push the Republican Party further and further to the right, in no small part due to a particular belief in a particular strain of Christianity, which we'll get to later in this episode.
Bush's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September eleventh led to the rise of the modern surveillance state and the two longest
wars in American history, both of them disastrous failures. The combination of white backlash to the LBJ era civil rights initiatives, the intense religiosity of the Bush era and the Republican Party in that time period, and the sense of the United States was a declining power unable to impose its will on Afghanistan and Iraq opened the door of the
Donald Trump's ascendancy. In short, two Texas presidents played a major role in making the Democratic Party vastly more diverse, more urban based, and more mainstream liberal, and the Republican Party more white, more right wing, more isolationists, and far more fundamentalists and skeptical science.
Texas has been in the national news frequently in recent years, and often for the worst reasons. It's become famous and infamous for its wide open gun laws and several of the worst mass shootings in American history, including at an army base in Killeen, a Walmart and al Paso, and
an outlet mall in Allen. Draconian abortion laws allow complete strangers to sue women who go out of state and their pregnancy, and new laws are being considered to prevent women from traveling through particular counties on highways who if they are seeking abortion, you know they could be arrested for basically trying to leave the state to seek an abortion.
In the last three year years in the state, a group of teachers in the Southflex School District in the Dallas Fort Worth area were instructed to tell quote both sides of the Holocaust in order to not run a foul of the legislature's ban on critical race theory. A beloved teacher, Nerving, was fire for displaying a rainbow sticker in our classroom as a sign of support for LGBTQ students.
The first ever African American high school principal at Heritage High and yet another Dallas suburb, Colleyville, was forced from his job when he sent an email to his high school community after the murder of George Floyd that acknowledged existence of systemic racism in the United States.
So I think you could maybe pick up on a trend here in Texas that our fundamental rights like free speech are under threat, particularly if you run a foul of the orthodoxy that comes out of the Republican Party. And one target of that orthodoxy has been books. All across this nation, we've seen dust ups over books in schools, books and libraries, and Texas has.
Been one of the.
Main flashpoints of this fight. So the literary organization pen America reports that Texas and Florida lead the nation in book bands at public schools, with more than fifteen hundred books banned in the state of Texas. Most of those books deal with issues like racism or LGBTQ experience, and one deputy constable in Granbury, a suburb near Dallas Fort Worth, even spent two years investigating three librarians on alleged felony
charges of providing so called harmful materials to miners. Simply because they allowed miners to access acclaimed books like The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison. According to an investigation by NBC News, the law enforcement officer Scott London was a member of the extremist Oathkeepers organization. He subpoened names of young readers who checked out supposedly objectable material, and he even secretly recorded his conversations with the librarians who drew
his unwonted attention. The investigative report that came out of this investigation into so called harmful materials was eight hundred and twenty four pages long, and no charges were ever filed. But nonetheless a lot of people's lives were made difficult and a bunch of books have been taken off the shelves.
So, as we mentioned, Texas has been on the cutting edge of right wing politics and America on issues like abortion, the treatment of trans children, and on immigration particular. Texas has modeled the Republican attitude on newcomers and migrants and policies towards them. The state k Governor Greg Abbott essentially tried to establish his own independent border policy, even though the constitution makes that the responsibility of the federal government.
Texas so far has built thirty four miles of a wall Abbot valves will eventually extend along the entirety of texas twelve hundred and fifty four mile international border with Mexico. One estimate says that project, if it were completed, would
take thirty years and cost twenty billion dollars. The State of Texas has placed Buoy's entangled with razor wire in the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass, a border town that's a major crossing point for migrants fleeing the violence and economic hardship in Central America, Venezuela and the rest of Latin America.
One of Governor Abbot's border initiatives, Operation Loan Star, has flooded the border with hundreds of law enforcement agents and has touted thousands of arrests. But it's also eleven billion dollars and it's unclear what it's really done in terms of making the state safer. Texas insists, through statements from people like Greg Abbott, that immigrants are dangerous and that they are flooding our streets with crime, never mind the fact that studies indicate that immigrants are far less likely
to commit crimes. On average, these initiatives have been deadly. In August twenty twenty three, a buoy trapped a twenty year old in Durham and a small child, causing them both to drown. The Texas border patrols El Paso sector has become one of the deadliest areas of the border here, with one hundred and forty nine immigrants dying over a
twelve month period between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three. Recently, on a podcast, Abbot expressed regret that Texas has been unable to shoot immigrants who are attempting to enter Texas by crossing the Rio Grant and has complained that the Biden administration might file murder charges against border regions if such lethal force was used.
And the only thing that we're not doing is we're not shooting people who come across the border.
Because of course the Biden administration with charges with murder.
One of the issues about immigration is a panic amongst the Anglos living in the state that white people will become a shrinking and less politically powerful minority, and this
connects to the issue of abortion. Throughout the history of abortion laws in Texas, there's been a discussion of whether or not white Texans were committing what they said in the early twentieth century was so called Reese suicide, a real panic that black and brown people would eventually out number whites and would seize political control of the state.
And this is tied to the abortion issue because throughout the history of abortion laws in America and in Texas, there's been a concern that white women are having abortions and that really fuel some of the extremism in how Texas has approached this issue. Twenty twenty two, this state legislature passed the law that would allow a third party to sue anyone who helped a woman getting an abortion, although the courts have so far blocked enforcement of that law,
called Senate Bill eight. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton meanwhile has addressed another issue dealing with trans children, and again, trans children, if they're white, would be out of the reproductive demographic race that panics white racist in the state.
He has tried to force doctors and other states to provide medical information on young people receiving gender affirming care outside of Texas and the parents are trans children in Texas have been investigated for child abuse in each case, these extreme laws have been discussed, in some cases imitated in other Red states.
On the one hand, we've got anxieties about immigrants allegedly replacing the white race rhetoric that has been repeated by people as high up as Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who has said that immigrants are trying to take over our country without firing a shot. This is something that people like the Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes, who has met with a high ranking and influential Republican consultant who works for one of the largest political donors in the country, he
believes that sort of rhetoric and pushes it. On the other hand, we've got the issue with LGBTQ issues in general. We've seen books being taken off the shelves as we've previously mentioned. We've seen rights taken away from students with regard to their access to bathrooms. We have seen, as doctor Phillips mentioned, the targeting of parents, and a lot of this comes from this anxiety that students are being groomed into becoming LGBTQ in public schools, in public libraries,
and other settings. The idea being that yes, they're trying to turn your kids gay. That's what they're saying, and so of course they're going to be extremely upset about any shrinking demographic numbers among the white population, or a growing acceptance of queerness or people being transgender, and so
much of that is rooted in religious belief. But all of this it matters in a bigger perspective, and I think we can understand why some of this is so prevalent in Texas through the lens of Texas's importance to national politics.
Texas counts for forty of two hundred and seventy votes needed to win the electoral College. Only California has more electoral College votes, and the Republican Party has been able to rel lie on winning every single presidential election in the state since nineteen eighty. If Texas should ever flip politically, it'd be hard to see how the Republicans could ever win the White House again. And it always seems like Texas is just on the verge of flipping blue.
Right.
There's there's been a lot of talk for a long time about this pending demographic revolution, the idea that eventually, you know, the numbers are just baked in and that Republicans will no longer control the state. So let's look at some of those numbers. So Tejanos or people of Latino Hispanic descent, make up more than forty percent of the state's population, so they're the largest single population group.
Non Whites account for sixty percent of all Texans, and as a group, they vote mostly for Democrats, and they control most of the state's largest cities in terms of political dominance. But because of low voter turnout among people of color, laws that intentionally make registering to vote harder, making voting itself even more difficult, gerrymandering, and the general feebleness of the Democratic Party in the state, the state has remained in control of a very conservative, very white
Republican minority for three decades. In Texas, every major city is blue except for one, and that's Fort Worth, which is in a place called Tarrant County. And I think it is not a coincidence that the largest, flashiest conflicts have often been in Tarrant County when it comes to things like schools, when it comes to things like books. Colleyville, as we previously mentioned, is in Tarrn County. If you've ever heard of the name South Lake, that's a town
in Tarrant County. There are numerous national articles about issues that have emerged from this one single stronghold of Republican power in the state, which if it were to fall, would pretend great changes not just for the politics in the state of Texas, but perhaps even the nation.
It's been remarkable because school board meetings used to be really dull and talking. You used to talk about boundaries for particular campuses, you know which students are going to tend which class. But now over the last few years, very often they've been scenes of screaming, matches, threats, and so on. Texas in many ways has become a laboratory of autocracy, and again it's a model for other states
that have a right wing political leadership. For instance, the Texas Republican Party platform adopted this year called for changes in the way statewide officials like governor would be elected, and essentially, the Republican Party called for creating a local
version of the electoral college. Under these proposed changes, a candidate for governor, lieutenant governor, all the down ballot statewide offices could win the popular vote and still lose the election unless they carry a majority of the two hundred and fifty four counties in the state, most of which
are very white, very conservative, very fundamentalist. If this became law, the proposal would guarantee permanent Republican rule in the state, and as I said, other Republican states are looking at this proposal. It hasn't been proposed as legislation, but that would really end any pretense of democracy because most people in Texas live in cities like the rest of the United States. Another way that Republicans have maintained their grip on the state is by waging a never ending culture
war centered on matters of faith. So if you really want to understand Texas, its culture, and its politics, you can't avoid a discussion of religion. You have to dive into a one particular type of Christianity. We've already referred to. This interpretation of the Bible motivates right wing voters and the vast rural sections of the state and the outer
suburbs and the major cities. It's disproportionately molded the state's laws and attitudes where its African Americans, immigrants, and the people we've talked about women, gay and trans people, and also non Christians like Jews and Muslims.
If you trap the sort of issues that are being discussed by the Republican Party of Texas and you look back, say to the time of George H. W. Bush, and you look to now, it will be very clear to you that the topics have changed. The sort of things that they talk about. It's less about low taxes, it's less about being business friendly, it's less about letting you do what you want in your personal life, and it's much more about imposing a particular religious viewpoint on others
through policy. And the most vocal, perhaps one of the most highly organized and certainly flush with funds, sect of Christianity that is, you know, driving this is this group of Christian fundamentalists that religious scholars broadly describe as dispensationalists. So what's a dispensationalist. It's a fancy word for someone who believes that we are living in the end times.
The end times being this idea that at any moment now all true Christians will be wisked up into the clouds in an event called the Rapture, that an embodiment of Satan called the Antichrist will take over the world and try to destroy Israel. And you know, all of this is, you know, presaging the final judgment, you know, the day when the Lord Jesus comes down and he basically decides who's done well, who's done bad, and that settles it for all eternity.
This particular strain of fundamentalism in Texas culture and politics has a profound impact on global politics. The dispensationalists are certain World War three is going to consume the planet. They believe there's going to be a final battle between good and evil called the Battle of Armageddon. And they believe this, and this is significant. They believe that Jesus Christ will come back specifically to stop World War three
for a particular purpose. He's going to come to prevent the destruction of all remaining Jewish people on the planet. And they believe that millions of Jewish people are going to die, those who survive are going to convert to Christianity, and when Jesus returns, he will establish what's essentially a divine dictatorship that will be a time of perfect peace and harmony, called the Millennium.
Texans have played a major role in popularizing dispensationalism and its doom day theology both in modern times but also historically, one Texas writer named Michael Ennis once called the city of Dallas the Athens of the Apocalypse, and in the late twentieth century, predicting the end of the world was a lucrative business. So there was a theological center here in Dallas that was one of the most influential groups when it came to originating and promoting.
This idea of the end times.
And it also has to do with one gentleman named Cyrus Scofield. But before we talk about Cyrus Schofield, a quick ad break.
What happened was there's this member, a convert to the Congregationalist church who came from Kansas. He had been a politician in Kansas who had to leave office because he was accused of accepting bribes. He later said he was struggling with alcoholism at the time. His name is Cyrus Schofield, and he converts to Christianity and he's invited to head this Congregationalist church that has a tiny congregation in Dallas, Texas. And when he gets here, he brings this dispensationalism he's
learned from other evangelists and he's a modernizer. He has adult education classes correspondents courses on the Bible, and eventually he produces something published in nineteen oh nine called the Schofield Reference Bible that basically is the King James Bible with footnotes that he and his co editors have put together where they say, these strange verses in the Book of Daniel, in the Book of Revelation that refer to beast with seven heads and ten horns, and you know,
these other strange creatures, and this highly symbolic language has a very literal, obvious meaning, and that is the return of Jewish people to the state of Israel, and how that marks the beginning of the end.
So the Schofield Reference Bible extremely popular when it comes out. It was so popular it didn't save effectively the Oxford University Press from going.
Yeah under during the Great Depression. That was very much a possibility that Oxford University Press would go under. And Schofield was lucky in some ways that you could put it that way because the Reference Bible comes out in nineteen oh nine, and four years later, what was at that point the most catastrophic war in human history, World War One, breaks out with a level of death and technology that was unprecedented in its destructiveness. Then the depression happens.
You have the rise of these fascist dictators, and there's a sense that the world as we knew it was collapsing. Capitalism might collapse, you know, you might have communists takeover, you might have fascist takeover. And then of course World War Two, and then finally the thing that really makes Schofield seem like he was onto something in terms of his Biblical interpretation. And this particular interpretation had been around in certain variants for centuries and centuries, but it had
always been a minority view. But what really made it seem like Schofield was onto something was nineteen forty eight when the State of Israel is established, the modern state of Israel. Because he had been saying this would happen, this would be the sign of the end. It becomes the point where a lot of churches ministers are measured by the degree to which they promote Scofieldism, and Protestant churches ministers get fired if they don't begin to talk about the end times.
Schofield kind of won the lottery with timing, and you can imagine a world maybe where the Schofield Bible didn't take off.
Because it hadn't come out at that time that it did now one of Schofield's acolytes separated by several decades. Schofield had been dead for a long time. When you have a student at the Dallas Theological Seminary, name how Lindsay, who had been a tugboat captain, he is attending this particular school, Dallas Theological Seminary had actually been established in the nineteen twenties by allies associates of Cyrus Schofield. It had been a center of the study of Biblical prophecy.
And basically Lindsay's a student, and a lot of his peers said, basically he took his class notes and turned into a book and his real effort. He had been a leader in the campus Crusade for Christ, which was an evangelical group that was trying to fight the counterculture hippies, LSD and so on, and so he had that experience and he brought it into the writing of a best selling book called The Late Great Planet Earth. And The Late Great Planet Earth is written in the language of
the time. He tries to use hippie type of lingo in to catch on with the youth culture and it's his timing, just like Schofields is great. This is a time where there's an obsession with hidden knowledge. You have really popular books selling about the lost continent of Atlantis UFOs, the phenomena supposedly a spontaneous human combustion. Did ancient aliens build the Pyramids? And if you went to a convenience store or a store department store, you might find racks
of paper books with all this hidden knowledge. And people believed that there was something hidden because of Watergate and because of Vietnam, and so this became a phenomenal seller. It was the best selling quote unquote nonfiction book of the nineteen seventies. It later got made into a pseudo documentary that was narrated by the movie star Orson Wells.
Yeah, I mean it was so successful that it was like twenty eight million copies by nineteen ninety had been sold. And if you've got Orson Wells buttery voice narrating it as if it has some real import, certainly, many, many, many people were exposed to the ideas of how Lindsay Man.
Is faced by unprecedented perils threatened to send him crashing.
And the extention.
Now from how Lindsay's incredible best selling book comes the film, which explores the terrifying.
Policies of the revelations.
Here's Our Planet Truly and Mortal Peril.
The Late Great Planet Earth, featuring Orson Wells.
But it didn't stop there. Lindsay's book inspired some other guys who you may have heard of, these two right wing political activists and Christian evangelicals named Tim Lahay and Jerry B.
Jenkins.
And and they're the creators of the Left Behind series. Now, if you don't know the Left Behind series, you may have been living under a rock, or maybe you weren't born yet. And that's not your fault, but it is this publishing empire. At this point, retail giants like Walmart stocked the books. They sold eighty million copies, warehouses full of merch sequels, prequels, graphic novels, audio books, calendars, greeting cards, a shoot them up computer game based on the books.
All of this stuff was centrally talking about the rapture the end times. That's what the Left Behind series was about. And those who are left behind are those who were not raptured. And these films center on the chaos that breaks out right after the rapture, really really popular stuff. Will play a quick clip so you can get a sense of what that's like.
He took them to protect them, what from the darkest time in the history of this world, persecution.
And seven years of darkness.
He took them there.
The left Behind books, they basically depict Jesus not as a source of love and forgiveness, but as this like source of vengeance and bloodshed. One person who spoke to in the preparation of this episode described him as a sort of rambo Jesus, to be compared to mister Rogers Jesus, you could say.
And what's particularly dangerous is sometimes believers in this interpretation of the Bible try to make the end times happen sooner rather than later. Yeah, I can mention two cases, one better known than the other. You had a father's son evangelical team called Gardner Ted Armstrong. His father was named Herbert W. Armstrong. That a radio broadcasting empire. The
problem is called the World Tomorrow. And they had college campuses in California and in Big Sandy, Texas, unaccredited college, unaccredited college absolutely And one person who had listened to the armstrongs on the radio, and there's an Australian named Michael Dennis Rohan on August twenty first, nineteen sixty nine, actually travels to the Aloxa Mosque in Jerusalem because he believes that's a key focal point of where armageddon is going to take place, and he actually starts a fire
in that mosque, and that's a revered one of those holy sites in Islam. And there was a time where
there was a diplomatic crisis caused by this believer in dispensationalism. Then, of course we have what had happened to Waco, where you had a sect very much obsessed with en times and with this spensationalism led by a man named David Koresh nineteen ninety three, he led his followers on this fifty one day standoff with federal and state officials over the illegal weapons that this group, the Branch Davidians held.
Eventually you have an exchange of gunfire between the agents and the Branch Davidians, and then on April nineteenth, the Feds decide to charge in and there's a fire and seventy six people die, including twenty five children.
In the modern day, you know, we've got two hugely influential people who promote End Times theology. Now, one of them is the biggest political donor in the entire state of Texas, more money donated than anyone else. And his name is Tim Dunn, and we'll talk about him in a second, But first I want to talk about someone who is also pretty influential, maybe not as wealthy as Tim Dunn, who I should mention got his money through oil.
But this is a man named John Hagy. He is the pastor of a twenty two thousand member church in Texas called Cornerstone Church, and I think he has a global audience as large as one hundred million people. So back in the day, as a twenty eight year old young man, he took part in the Wallace Youth, which is an organization devoted to supporting the presidential candidacy of white supremacist Alabama Governor George Wallace in nineteen sixty eight. Yeah, let's just hear from Wallace real quick.
In the name of the greatest people that I've ever taught differ. I've brought a line in the dusk and passed the government before the THEATA Turner, and I face segregation. Now, Tom and Sarah Gosan forever.
So since then, in his fifty eight years as a non denominational pastor, hage has proven to be as much of a lightning rod as Wallace. When Hurricane Katrina killed nearly fourteen hundred people in New Orleans in two thousand and five, hage insisted the superstorm represented God's wrath at a planned gay pripride. I can't even believe that that's real. Yeah, so he really said, Oh, you celebrated the gays, and so God killed a bunch.
Of you with a hurricane. He really said that.
He's also called the Catholic Church a false cult and has falsely claimed that Muslims are commanded by the Qur'an to kill Christians in Jews. So he's a you know, really moderate guy when he comes to his word choice in his rhetoric.
Hagey, for instance, believes that Jewish people are still God's chosen, and he often quotes a line from Genesis twelve three, twelfth chapter third verse in which God says to Abraham, I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you, and he interprets that the mean that if the United States ever fails to support the State of Israel in any of its policies, or if it attempts to encourage Israel to trade land for peace, to
set aside land for the Palestinians to establish their own nation, that that leader is violating a divine commandment to quote, not divide my land, and there will be terrible consequences. So I one dispensationalists pastor basically said that the United States has economic problems whenever it fails to support Israel.
Hagey in twenty fourteen said that a small outbreak of the Ebola virus in the United States was God's vengeance against President Barack Obama for supporting the establishment of Palestinian state. And of course, when that is a big attitude amongst a really significant block of voters, that makes the United States really have problems when it tries to mediate in that conflict.
We'll talk a little bit more about John Hagey. Right after this ad break, you might be asking, who cares about this guy John hagy Like, why does his interpretation of the Bible matter at all? Why does what he say have anything to do with my life? And there's a number of reasons why it matters. So, I mean, he could be considered the most important leader of the
Christian Zionist movement for starters. He formed an organization in two thousand and six called Christians United for Israel, which has like a reported ten million members in the United States. Not sure how accurate or real that is, but you know, he has donated through his organizations more than fifty eight million dollars to right wing extremists in Israel's specifically ones that have you know, sponsored settlers to move to the occupied West Bank.
In you know, violation of international law.
And he's, you know, he's pushed Congress to take a hard line on the Palestinian issue of Palestinian statehood. He has the ear of elected officials in Texas state level politicians like Greg Gabbott and Dan Patrick have been seen with him at campaign events, have featured him at campaign events. Hagey has tried to you know, influence a number of issues and has had success. He was sought as someone whose endorsement mattered in the presidential elections of George H. W.
Bush and George W. Bush.
He was an early supporter of Donald Trump, and he influences the other major pastors as well, And so it's hard to say that people like this don't matter, particularly whenever you know they have been invited to speak during big events like the March for Israel in twenty twenty three, which drew tens of thousands of people to Washington, DC.
And who was there, John Hage.
And here's one of the paradoxes of this movement. When Hage was invited to speak at this pro Israel event after the October seventh Hamas attacks in Neurope, Israeli Kibbutz Hage was invited and a lot of Jewish people were horrified because he really does capture one the central paradoxes of dispensationalism, and that is someone can be inflexibly pro Israel in anti Semitic at the same time. And so John Hagen is promoted a very old anti Semitic myth
that rich Jewish people control the world's finances. He talks about the Rothschild family, which has always been an obsession of anti Semites. You know, the secret puppet masters of the world, you know who rob the typical, the average person of money to gain wealth. They cause wars to enrich themselves. He actually described Hitler based on nothing as a half breed Jew, and he said that Hitler was
sent by God himself. So he's Hitler was an emissary of God as a hunter to persecute Jews in Europe in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties, specifically for the purpose of forcing them to leave Europe and settle in Palestine. And you know, he said that this was all part of the Divine plan. Nazism was part of the Divine plan.
Yeah, but don't just take our word for it. You can listen to him say something along these lines right now, How.
Did it happen because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen because God said, my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them.
To come back to the land of Israel.
Today Israel is back in the land, and they are at Hisequel thirty seven and eight. They're physically alive, but they're not spiritually alive. Now, how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive? And say, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he is God.
So yeah, you know, hege has predicted that the Antichrist will be a half breed gay Jew and will rule the planet on behalf of Satan. Those are the kinds of things that he believes and he spreads. And in spite of statements like these, several Israeli governments have welcome to the support of right wing and times past like Hagy. I mean, they don't have any issue with working with
someone like Hagy. And obviously that relationship is cynical because you know, people like Hagy are able to help bring material resources to Israel and further solidify the relationship that Israel has with the state of Texas.
And there's a real interesting synthusis between the far right in Texas and the very right wing government that rules Israel. Now Israel depends on Texas oil. Many of the weapons Israel is using in its warren Gonza are manufactured in Texas, including in the Dallas Fort Worth area where Steve and
I are having this conversation. You have some of the wealthiest American supporters of Israel, like hyper conservatives such as the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Addison, who have spent quite a bit of money flying Texas politicians like Governor Greg Abbott, the agricultural Commissioner, said Miller, members of the state legislature to Israel to promote close business ties and to ensure that weapons manufactured in Texas and that Texas oil flows to that state.
In the background of all of this is the money, the money backing these politicians, and the largest and most powerful political donor in Texas is someone who we have mentioned already, billionaire oil man Tim Dunn. So Tim Dunn,
who is he? What's his deal? He's a pastor, He's based in Midland, which is in West Texas, and over the last decade, Dunn has dumped tens of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of far right politicians and political action committees that promote sendiary messages, including the one group that I previously mentioned was caught meeting with a
self admitted Hitler fan, Nick went Is. Nevertheless, Dunn is named alongside Hagey on the annual list of Israel's top fifty Christian Allies published by the Israel Allies Foundation, of which Done incidentally is the chairman of the It's like the Christian Advisory Board.
So yeah, this really really.
Powerful donor who has his thumb on the scales all across the state. He too is an End Times prophecy believer. And he's not just a believer. He preaches it at his own church in Midland, where he's a pastor.
God is a consuming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The word obey means listen to, So we're talking here about unbelievers. These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.
And you know, it's completely changed the nature of the Republican Party his influence. They were already conservative and already religious to begin with, but the sort of wave of politicians that have been supported by Dunn has taken that to a new level.
And you know, I mean it's resulted in, I think, a real assault on free speech in the state of Texas. We have religious groups like Christians United for Israel in the Texas Eagle Forum lobbing the state legislature and persuading politicians like Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick were sympathetic to their agenda to pass laws that limit the way people
who oppose Israeli policies can protests. So, for instance, twenty seventeen, Texas passed Hospill eighty nine, a law that banned the stay from doing any business with any company or individual contractors who participate in the boycott of Israel that many
activists have participated in. And on March twenty seventh of this year, when you began to have a wave of protests across the nation and in Texas, and there were major protests at the UT Austin campus at the University of Texas at Dallas, which is in a suburb called Richardson, another one at the University of North Texas UT Arlington,
University of Texas at San Antonio. Abbott responded to these protests by issuing an executive order that defined a common slogan chanted by supporters of Palestinian statehood from the River to the Sea Palace Steine will be Free, as anti SeMet and it required public colleges and universities to review their free speech policies and to punish what the state
regards as anti Semitic speech by faculty and students. And it targeted two specific groups, two student groups, the Palestine Solidarity Committee and students for Justice and Palestine to be disciplined for violating these policies the State of Texas saying these words are forbidden.
Indeed, and despite the fact that the University of Texas at Austin had issued a video celebrating their so called free speech Week, I think it was just a matter of months before they arrested one hundred and thirty six pro Palestinian.
Demonstrators at the University of Texas at Austin.
All across the state, we've seen pro Palestinian protests or what you could call anti genocide protests or calls for divestment at these various universities, and arrests have happened at least three different universities.
I mentioned earlier a paradox in dispensationalism, and that is that some of the people who have absolute devotion to promoting the state of Israel are at the same time antisemitic. And another paradox is that Schofield himself, Cyrus Schofield himself said that Jesus wasn't into politics. He said that when Jesus was alive, slavery, inequality of wealth, all of these political pressure were all at their worse and Jesus and his apostles didn't address any of that. They focus on salvation.
That Christianity is not about changing this world, because this world is doomed and the only person who's going to fix anything is Jesus himself. But nevertheless, these dispensationalists at the same time are very happy to be involved in politics that's not involved in social or form. They don't want you to. You know, Schofield was living at a time of progressive movement when they were trying to end child labor, trying to make workplaces safer, and so on.
Today we're dealing with issues of wealth, inequality and so on. The dispensationalists will say, believing that humans can fix those problems with satanic But nevertheless, you should be involved in politics if it involves denying women sovereignty over their bodies, if it involves banning people from gender affirming care and so on, but that politics is okay and so and we see this with this activism and trying to suppress a particular side of the Israel Palestine.
Debate, right, And I think that if that strain of dispensationalism that's Schofield represented, that sort of a political dispensationalism. If it still exists, it is certainly no longer dominant because today, you know, we're seeing this end times theology, this belief in this theory around the end times, it's increasingly overlapping with other sort of distinct trends in Christianity. So on the one hand, there's things like the prosperity Gospel,
which is, you know, best represented by Kenneth Copeland. He's the richest pastor in all of the United States, and his whole thing is, yeah, if you know you give, you get and so you give me your money and you prove that you're you know, holy person, you will be rewarded. In turn, you will be healed, all of
your things will be solved. And then the other thing that it's overlapping with this end times theology belief is what you know, we might just call the Seven Mountains dominionist trend or dominionism broadly speaking, which you may or may not be familiar with, but it really just breaks down to this idea that Christians should be at the top of all of the mountains of society, and these are just you know, basically stand ins for the segments
of society they think are important, so education, media, politics, what have you. This is a really growing idea as a sort of meme in right wing Christianity in these sort of non denominational churches, which are the fastest growing and largest segment of churches I think we're talking about.
And those dominionists are the ones who are taking over these school boards that are adopting the anti trans policies and also banning the books.
That's right, and it is a very active form of Christianity, very politically active, and so through people like Hagey and you know, people like Tim Dunn, we see that embodied in what they do. The sort of advocate can see that John Hagy takes part in in the millions and millions of dollars that Tim Dunn dumps into the state of Texas.
And you could almost characterize the Republican Party in Texas, which is one of the most important state wings of the Republican Party in the United States, as a wholly owned done subsidiary. You know. He really many of the most infamous Texas politicians in this era, such as Ken Paxton,
are generously supported by Dounn. And so I think that if we kind of wrap this up, I think that we could say that the disdain from activism that dispensationalists claim is a ruse that activism is bad if it advances any attempt to create equal opportunity, reduce income inequality. And dispensationalists vote and they with Texas as one of the major bases for dispensationalism, they are a hugely influential budding block. Thirty nine percent of Americans have told polsters
that they believe we're living in the end times. And the simple fact is, if you think the world's going to end, you're not going to invest much time in making the world better, making it a more just place. You're not going to try to clean the water, clean the air. Half of Evangelical Protestants in the United States believe that supporting Israel is absolutely essential to fulfilling Bible prophecy, and that group constitutes a third of all adult Texans.
And they want to love Israel to death because they believe that if they push Israel to annex the West Bank, to take the most aggressive standards Palestinians, that will provoke the of the Antichrist, which will lead to arm again. And they're willing to make that sacrifice. They're willing to fight for the Second Coming to happen down to the
last Jewish person. And this is creating instability for the world and putting the United States in a very difficult place in the world stage, and the chain of events leading to our position currently visa the Middle East can be drawn back to this state.
That's right.
And I think one thing that I really want to emphasize that we haven't dived into as much as we could have, is that this sort of belief system tends
towards dehumanization. So if you believe that your opponents are in league with the devil, or are Satanic, or are doing the bidding of evil, and that you are on the side of good unequivocally and you are doing the Lord's work, it is e easy to treat your opponents as inhuman, less than human, to see them as other than someone who has equal rights and equal standing.
And if you're wondering if it could happen here, it meaning fascism in many ways. It's happened in Texas already, and we have a large population here. As they wait for the end, they're building walls around the lives of more than thirty million people who live in this state.
I'm Stephen MANCHELLI, I'm Michael Phillips. Thank you for listening.
Oh what indicted by the FBI, my several people I don't like it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and today this week, well for the last couple of weeks, the thing that's fallen apart is Tenet Media. This is not related to Christopher Nolan, that we can prove at this exact moment. It is instead a media adventure starring a bunch of assholes that turned out to all be an op by the Russian government, and none of said assholes claim they knew anything, even though they
got paid one hundred thousand dollars a video. Anyway, We're going to talk about all that and more today, but I'm going to bring onto the program now my co hosts, Garrison Davis and James Stout.
Thank you.
I'm not getting one hundred k per episode here, but if I was, I certainly wouldn't tell the government now that it was actually a foreign government that's saying me.
I would keep tweeting about it.
Fun fact about both of you guys, Before we get into this. If you reverse your last names, you sound like Confederate era generals.
Garrison Stout, James Davis like.
Names Davis s Garrison Stout.
Yeah, oh yeah, all right, yeah, yeah, that's sod. That is our secret backstory. We had to actually switch them when we joined cool Zone Media due to a Confederate tie.
Yeah, and the fact that you're one hundred and ninety years old. So Garrison, you want to take us off here?
Yeah.
So Tene Media was this kind of small right wings startup that hired a whole bunch of more well known content creators on the right wing sphere, from like Tim Poole, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern. Yeah, people who are either just like conservative commentators or you know, in someone like Lauren Southern's case has been like an alt right kind of white supremacist media figure for quite a while.
And they put together this little collection of people to make like content for Tenants on YouTube channel as well as licensing some of their regular content. And this company was ostensibly started by another right wing YouTuber named Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan. Chen's been like on Fox News News Max Daily Wire and was employed at the Blaze, where she's no longer employed based on the allocations inside this DOJ indictment. So yeah, it was a
small collection, not super kind of noteworthy. Honestly, in a lot of cases, lots of people weren't super familiar with tenet media. I know they also hired like Taylor Hanson, who was kind of one of the first guys to report on grooming LGBTQ stuff like a few years ago.
That's kind of what was immediately weird about them to everyone who pays attention to this stuff is that their videos did not get a crazy amount of engagement. They were clearly not an established like they came out of nowhere, but they had money, the money to pay for people who weren't cheap. Timpool, if you don't know, Tim is one of the most profitable influencers on the right wing chunks of the Internet. He's a guy who kind of got his start as a citizen journalist during occupy. Really,
he's one of these guys. All he does is he gets on he reads news articles, he reads the headlines of news articles. He talks about how we're all doomed to left wing terrorism or whatever, and then he makes millions of dollars. He's a frustrating individual to say the least, but he doesn't come cheap, and Hansen also doesn't come cheap. Dave Rubin is not an inexpensive person to bring onto your team. So it was kind of clear from the beginning there's a lot of money behind this thing that
seems to have come out of nowhere. Whose money is it?
And that is what the federal government's been trying to figure out. And we have now a better indication on where all of these kind of right wing content firms, or at least this one who's employing some very unforunch of people, where they are getting some of their money from. Because there's a lot of money flying around this space. Lots of these guys are obviously filled by like fossil fuel billionaires.
Right.
You can look at like the early funding for The Daily Wired that has a lot of money, but for this, for this smaller, kind of lesser known company, how are they paying one hundred thousand dollars per episode to these guys?
And it's also the Daily Wire definitely started inorganically by getting a lot of fossil fuel money pumped into it. But one thing you have to hand it to them, is they built a business that is a functional business, right, they are now profitable in their own regard, or at least were. There's some evidence their traffic collapsed recently, but you saw you saw them have a growth curve that looked pretty organic for a media organization, which you didn't see with Tenant.
No no.
And it seems the only way to actually pay these millions and millions of dollars to all these people is if you are actually the government of Russia who is starting covert operations that's their words, not mine, to influence the US election by like both talking about like Ukraine, using these mouthpieces, but also just kind of so general division,
which seems to be kind of the main tactic. And Robert elected to actually go through some of this g's twenty three page indictment and kind of hopefully we can find some of some of the some of the better funnier little tidbits here, because there's a lot of interesting information about kind of the inter workings of some of these media groups and how exactly Timpoole was convinced by a Russian agent.
Yeah, a Russian agent pretending to be three different people.
Pretending to be some mysterious European billionaire.
Yeah. So the document starts with some stuff that I had been unaware, which is that you know, because Russia Today is kind of the first large Russian government affiliated media organization that has been like putting up propaganda in the United States, and the FBI has been watching them
like a hawk. And so they quote here from the editor in chief of RT after the expanded Russian invasion in February twenty twenty two, when he describes Russia Today, which has always argued that it's a legitimate news organization, as an entire empire of covert projects designed to shape public opinion in Western audiences. And one of these covert projects it described as the funding of what we now
know is Tenant Media. Right, it's described in these documents because their indictments as a Tennessee based online creation company, but it's it can only be referring to Tenant Media.
As employees have since admitted that, yes, it is for sure to Tenant Media.
Yes, yes, there's no doubt about this. We're not like reading into the what the FED said here at all.
Yeah.
So they spent over the course of about a year ten million dollars. I think it's actually was more like nine point six, but ten million dollars basically just buying these influencers.
Oh my god.
First off, things we could do with ten million dollars yeah, oh oh, James, we'd be sailing to me and Maar and on a pallet kill rocket launchers.
The things that their military could do with ten billion dollars.
That's sending dude to the front with as off plates. Yeah, it's anyway. Whatever. So the kind of key detail there is how much they were making per one of these dog shit videos, which is about one hundred thousand dollars per YouTube video. That's what Tim was getting. I think Dave Rubin was getting close to just half a million a month to do like a weekly video. So when that is the kind of money we're.
Talking about, and Tim was also being paid one hundred thousand dollars per weekly video as well. He was making one video a week. That was what he decided on his contract. So he's breaking in at least four hundred thousand, if not five hundred thousand dollars a month.
Yeah, and then they had signing and download bonuses on top of that.
Which is like even for them is more than you could get on YouTube for the kind of traffic that they get. That is that is like the top one percent of the top one percent of YouTube creators are making money like that, and certainly no one with the kind of views these tenivities we're getting. So anyway, Garrison, you've got a clip to play.
Yeah, here's here's a here's a clip that's definitely a totally genuine opinion. Not impacted by those one hundred thousand dollars of Tim Poole talking about Ukraine.
Trigger war, most annoying man on earth.
This is psychotic. Ukraine is the enemy of this country. Ukraine is our enemy being funded by the Democrats. I will stress again one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine. They are expanding this war now, don't get me wrong. I know you've got criminal elements of the US government pushing them and guiding them and telling them what to do. Ukraine is now accused a German warrant issued for blowing up the nord Stream pipeline
in triggering this conflict. Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia.
Interesting, I wonder what would compel a man to say that, huh, curious, very curious.
There's no way to know garrison. So, since they publicly launched in November of last year, Tenant Media posted almost two thousand videos. I got about sixteen million views. And sixteen million views is a lot for a YouTube channel,
but not if you've put out two thousand videos. So again, that's what I mean when I say, like, this is not the kind of audience that you would get this kind of money organically for, right, Like this was obviously and I mentioned this because this is obviously suspicious to the creators. You cannot be Timpoole is not a smart man, but you cannot work for YouTube the way that he has and not know that something is fucked up with the money.
Just if you're not a mental arithmetician like myself. That is eight thousand views video. Yeah, I made a video once about how to use hiking polls, which has around that many views.
I have a video that I fucked up when filming another video while I was reviewing products fifteen years ago, before anyone knew who I was that has more than.
Eight years, Like where's all money, Vladimir.
Yeah, yeah, come on, Vladimir, Like I'll there's a lot I'll do for half a million dollars.
Well, And I think part of this as well is not just trying to prop up ten and own news itself. It's making these specific content creators lives more comfortable, because the better that these guys do, that's all that Russia is like interested in, as alleged in this document, right, It's that they just want to make sure that these guys can still talk about Ukraine as certainly as like this like evil and how Russia is like the traditionalist
Christian empire and right wing resistance to globalist domination. But in terms of like just wanting to amplify US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core government of Russia's interests in the ongoing war in Ukraine. As said in the document, all they need to do is just make sure these guys are having a lot of money, so like their comfortable tenant doesn't need to be like a successful media operation where like they're making more money
on YouTube than they're paying their influences. And that's not the point. The point is just to give these guys a lot of money to keep talking the way they're talking.
Yeah.
What was also interesting to me, and this comes from a Wired article. Wired downloaded as many of these videos as they could and then ran them through. This is actually one of the un journalistic uses for these large
language models. They ran them through like one of those machine learning algorithms to just kind of look at how often different subjects are mentioned, because no human being could analyze that many videos with any kind of like speed, right, And one thing they found is that Ukraine, which you would imagine being the focus of a horrific war that is bleeding. Russia's military was mentioned about like a third
as often as transgender people. The vast majority of the content was US culture war stuff right like woke is much more of a focus than anything to do directly with Russian military operations or Russian like government like what you would imagine, right, And the reason for that is that they see it as number one, building a sense of solidarity between American conservatives and Russia, which is largely imaginary.
I'll be talking about this in an episode later, but like Russia is not the country a lot of conservatives in the US think it is. But more to the point, it's just sort of stoking division, right, rather than actually needing to change American minds on Ukraine in much of
a concerted way. Like if you kind of keep them ginned up and angry about everything the quote unquote left is doing, they will be against supporting Ukrainian resistance anyway, right, And that's the bet the Russians made, very very astutely, and it seems to be paying off for them. One of the more interesting facts here is that one of the primary contacts, this is one of the people who has been indicted, who was working with you know, Pool and these other creators, is an employee of Russia today
with the perfect spy name, Constantine Kalashnikov. Just amazing stuff.
How is that literally their day? Yeah? How do they not just change it?
We call it a Kalashnikov because the guy's name was Kalashnikov.
It's just lovely, it's just beautiful.
It's breathtaking because if you put a character with that name in a Bond film, everyone would be like, come on, man, it's not nineteen sixty five anymore. What are we doing here? But that that's just the person's actual name. It beautiful. So they had a couple of fake personas within the company, but this was a person who like directly talked to the employees of people like Pool, the editors and whatnot
without disclosing that he worked at Russia. Today now there's evidence that people who worked for some of these creators in their discords, like editors and whatnot, saw this as deeply suspicious. Probably the most interesting came from when we now know it was Tucker Carlson posted a video during his trip in Moscow like where he was going to a Russian grocery store to be like, look, Russia has
grocery stores. Everything's fine here. His editor in the discord was like, this seems like a little much what are we doing here basically, and the statement made was along the lines of like, you know, this is what the people paying us want us to get out right, which is clear evidence that people were aware of what they were doing to some extent.
At least among like the tenant media producers, there was a growing awareness of what was actually going on. Obviously, all of the on air talent still maintains that they are the victims of an international conspiracy.
In a victim pays, I guess, oh.
My god, and no, I think one of one of the funniest parts is definitely this fake European businessman. I believe he's referred to as Edward Grengorian.
Yes, this was very funny, but.
We'll talk about Edward. Let's let's throw to ads first and then we'll get back to this and we're back, Garrison, Let's talk about Edward.
Yeah.
So in the document they talked about how Kalashnikov, this other RT person, as well as Tenants founders worked together to deceive commentators one and two, who we believe are our Timpool and Dave Rubin. The point was to let leverage their existing audiences and license their videos they were
already making. So together the RT people and the Tenant founders tried to trick Pool and who we believe is Ruben into thinking that the person providing these one hundred thousand dollars per episodes was a European businessman and private investor named Edward Gregorian, which is a wonderful a wonderful fake name. And this was not real person. This was
a completely faked person. At some point, I believe Dave Ruben or Commentator number one requested that the founder provide like a profile or an article.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was commentator too that wanted to know more about the quote. Would like to know more about the company and who he will be working with.
Yeah, so they asked for like this, like one page profile on like who this guy was, And this was provided and he was described as an accomplished finance professional who had various positions in Brussels and France multi National Bank, including the director of private Banking division and wealth management.
The one page on this guy who is supposedly their investor, shows an obvious stock photo of a man on a private jet with his face blurred out face blood. Yeah that's what's that? Looks real? Yeah, not sketchy at all. This is this is an actual guy quote. Founder one transmitted the Edward Gregorian profile to Commentator one, who is either Pool or Ruben.
We believe it's Reuben.
Yeah, I think that one's Ruben because Tim wouldn't have asked for more details, Honor. About May twelfth, twenty twenty three, Founder one reported to Persona one that Commentator one had a problem with the profile we sent over, specifically the reference to social justice. I think it may be because that's usually a term used by liberals, but we're trying to create a conservative network. Founder one suggested that Commentator one and Edward could simply speak together to clarify the profile.
Yes, and I know there was a secure call between a Russian ation pretending to be miss Gregorian to Tempoole, and allegedly this this other call with Commentator one, who we think is Ruben. So there was like conversations between like Rubin and Pool with people like further involved in the actual like espionage parts of this and the actual like you're talking to people affiliated was like Russian spies in order to like sell this lie.
I did find it very funny. Where did you read the section where they sort of did a forensic analysis of the three persona's email accounts.
No, I'm not fun up in doing it yet.
So they had three different personas, so all access from the same IP address and had different were presenting a three different individuals, right with three different email accounts. Obviously, the DOJ has been able to get access to those email accounts, and they found that the people using those email accounts made mistakes in signing them. So one was supposed to come from PERSONA three, but they mistakenly signed
it Edward Gregorian. And another time PERSONA one sent a draft of email to person to two, which percent to two then coll beet and pasted into an email like the object was extremely poor. Yeah, it would seem, and it didn't set anyone off to kind.
Of make that point in terms of like what's happening to these guys right now. What they've been indicted for is violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Like, if you are acting as the agent of a foreign government, you have to register in the United States. You have a freedom of speech, but you don't have freedom to
create propaganda for another government and pretend that you're not right. Yeah, and so you know, obviously one of the things the Feds needed to indict them is evidence that they knew, specifically they were being employed by the Russian government, Right that like the Russians hadn't somehow snuck money to the
people who founded Tenant Media, Right. And so at one point Founder two gets on the Investor Discord channel to submit one of the influencers, I think it's Ruben's invoices to PERSONA one and press for payment of those invoices on September eleventh, twenty twenty three, never forget at a post roximately eight oh seven pm Central time, Founder two wrote in that Discord channel. Today marks two weeks since I submitted the invoice for August. Any idea for the
delay We are signing the large contracts. We need to be certain we will get the funding to pay these people while waiting for a response, they searched for the current time in Moscow. So yes, unbelievable OPSEC like giving the government absolute knowledge of intent.
I mean similarly earlier on in the document quote in their private respondence. While working directly for RT pursue want to founder one's written contract, Founder one and Founder two regularly referred to their sponsor as the Russians, and for example, Honor about May twelfth, twenty twenty one, Founder two message Founder one on Discord, quote, so we're billing the Russians from the corporation, right, Honor about May twenty second, Founder
one message Founder two on Discord. Also the Russians paid, so we're good to build them for the second month. I guess nailed it, Honor about Founder one, message Founder two on Discord. Also, I say we build the Russians for the last month. Once we're done the extrafens.
I wonder if they knew they were working for the Russian government.
There's a lot more that's just like this.
They constantly referred to the source of their income, at least to each other as quote unquote the Russians, and then in like outreach to like talent, which is, you know, a generous word to refer to Timpoole and others, they were a little bit more vague, but they certainly made kind of coy references to it in their producer discord beautiful.
Well, yeah, so, I mean the big question here with all of this is, like, did any of these major right wing media figures who have like they got hired in part because they were already doing the job the Russians wanted them doing, you know, building up this kind of hatred that exists on the right over the idea of funding Ukraine and Ukrainian resistance to the Russian war machine. Like all of that kind of stuff is like why
these people got brought on anyway. Tim Poole has just kind of been one of the most reflexively anti Ukraine voices and conservative media, and Ruben is very effective at getting Americans to hate other Americans, like he's one of the big kind of anti trans culture warriors out there. Did O Hanson Like that's why they wanted these guys like they wanted to encourage them basically to keep it up. And you know, the question then is what did these
guys know and when did they know it? And the bigger question because I have my suspicions, and my suspicions are a lot and immediately, but none of that is in this indictment obviously. And the big question then is is the federal government going to attempt to prove anything like do they want to actually go after these guys? And I don't know. My guess is not because there very rarely are consequences for these people. But I'm curious as to what y'all think.
No, it seems not.
I'm both both Pool and I think three others have made statements saying that they've been contacted by the FBI as a potential victim of a crime vibe and that they will be happy to assist the FBI investigating this matter.
Now, that doesn't mean the FBI isn't necessarily looking into them, because that is all which the FBI would use if they suspected them. But yeah, my guess is that they lawyered up.
Absolutely. It was funny both in there. In Betty Johnson's and Timpole's immediate statements, they call this elk DOJ indictment, which is not true. It was not leaked, it was just unsealed.
Yeah, they just arrested people.
Yeah, I'm very sure there's a press release.
Like Also, one of the final posts from Tenant Media, I was talking about how this woman named Lauren's son was charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party. Quote he or she is talking about DEI? Why would the Chinese government want to push a DEI in America?
Oh? Yeah, remember this?
This is This is I think one of one of their final Twitter posts before their I can't got taken down.
Yeah beautiful.
Their Rumba account is still live and kicking.
Yeah. Oh thank goodness that out.
Also, could we talk about their graphic design just for a moment, because it is dog shit? Yeah, Tenant mediums Tenant Yeah, like, have you I don't know, have you have you been on their rumble account? Garrison?
You know, I can't I can't say I have been on their Rumble account as of as of recent.
The last time I looked at Rumble it was their booth at the rnc OW.
Let me tell you they're back, and genuinely some of the most like deranged. It's just it's extremely busy, it's very nineties like. It's a lot of bright colors.
I mean.
The clearest indication to me that this was absolutely a Russian op is that the company described itself as quote a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.
Definitely Russians. Definitely Russians.
You're like, oh, I wonder who wrote that? Who would ever described themselves?
Tim Poole had never even seen the word head of redox before.
Yeah, it's crazy, It's it's wild.
Yeah, they put multipolar into a theosauric and that's what they came up with.
It's crazy.
It is interesting. One of the things in this indictment that I did find kind of worth talking about is that it specifically notes that folks at Russia today when they were because they were largely deplatformed after the expanded Russian invasion in twenty twenty two early twenty twenty two and the indictment quotes the editor in chief of Russia Today being like, but it's fine because we were able
to rebuild our following on Twitter. So I don't know if you, just in case you had any questions about like what Elon Musk's reforms at Twitter have accomplished, one of them is that we should probably roll to ads again. And then, Garrison, you had a very fun document you wanted to take us.
Through, yes to kind of talk about why they might be doing some of this. There was one other document that was unsealed that kind of sheds a light on Russia's exact focus on influencing US politics.
Well, that's great, speaking of influencing US politics. Our advertisers probably don't. And we're back.
There's another document called Exhibit nine to A, which is originally in Russian and this translated Coffee is provided in this PDF. And this appears to be some kind of instructional manual for why exactly people are going about this, why exactly is Tim Poole and all these others getting paid to talk about what they talk about. And then it also kind of explains like tactics and like how
to actually go about it. So the first bit of this of this document, they just are talking about like the US two party system, which is really funny, and they primarily explain the two party system's differences as being like the way that they affect race, that the US Political Party B or Democratic Party includes people of color and quote unquote supporters of affirmative action and reverse discrimination, i e. Infringement on the rights of the white population
of the United States. And then meanwhile, the Republican Party are victims of discrimination by people of color unquote. So that's how they kind of frame the US two party system is that there's these poor white people being oppressed by wokeism. They end this little introduction on the two party system by saying, quote, a key characteristic of the American media is it skew towards the Democratic Party's influence.
While society is split between supporters of the new globalist socialism and traditional values, the media is democrat by over seventy five percent. Situation for the Republicans is made complicated by the censorship on social media and Democrats oriented new media. So some kind of weird phrasing there because it is
being translated from Russian. But they're talking about how liberalism is inherently biased in media, and that's something that's promoted while being racist and being a Republican is something that is harder to get paid for by big media.
To talk about.
And that's why they have this campaign, which they title gorilla media campaign in the United States. They justify this by saying that there is no pro Russian and or putin mainstream politicians or succinctly large numbers of influencers and voters, and this is one of the things they're trying to do. Another quote is that Americans are quote dissatisfied by the dramatic decline and center of living and large expenditures of offensive policy in the United States, in Europe and Ukraine.
They are afraid of losing the American way of life in the American dream. It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in the United States. Smart The campaign topics used in their Gorilla Media campaign are included here. First ones encroaching universal poverty. Number two is the risk of job loss for white Americans, privileges for people of color, perverts and disabled, constant lies
of the Democratic Party administration. They threat of crime coming from people of color, and immigrants, including new immigrants from Ukraine. Overspending on foreign policy at the expense of interests of white US citizens, constant lies to the voters by the Democrats in power. Last, but not least, America is suffering a defeat despite Liberals' efforts. We are being drawn into
the water. Our guys will die in Ukraine. The target audience of their campaign is listed as Republican voters, Donald Trump supporters, supporters of quote traditional family values, white Americans representing the lower and middle class.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. It's frustrating that it is working. Yeah, to be quite frank, it's exactly what the Russiagate conspiracy theorists have been saying for years. Unfortunately, Yeah, unfortunately, and like a shitload of people on the left have just been mocking them endlessly, in part because they've bought a lot of this propaganda.
And this is certainly different from the way they were going about it in twenty sixteen, right, And this isn't absolutely Yeah, this is the same like Facebook stuff they're doing, although Tenant did did have Facebook accounts. These are like weaponizing these people that have gotten big on YouTube and other platforms for talking, but the same type of things that Russia kind of wants them to talk about, and it's just making sure that they have the ability to
do so. Kind of Lastly, in this information doc they talk about kind of like where you can spread this disinformation. It says here quote on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. We need to create multiple perishable accounts, primarily for the work with comments. Websites should serve as the sources of information for dissemination and for video content YouTube accounts with a
relatively small number of subscribers and commentators unquote. The list of information products can be disseminated includes texts of posts, comments on social media, memes including charactures and collages, and video content including news stories in the Fox News style. They then propose creating a quote unquote project office to run us this style of like media campaign. This consists of three segments monitoring US media and social media accounts
of Republican politicians. A text factor with a minimum of five to four main topic based recommendations, including about ten basic posts on social media and forty to sixty comments, and then managing an editorial office with a daily output of three to four pictures and memes and a video editorial office with a daily output of three to four videos per day.
Quote.
In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information.
At the same time.
You should continuously repeat that this is what's really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you unquote.
So I mean, like, part of what's frustrating about this number one is just like they clearly have watched Alex Jones, and like, I've learned a great deal from how he's done this, which, unfortunately something Alex used to claim about putin that fuck maybe he was right. But the bigger, more frustrating point to me is that like, oh, they didn't need to do any of this at all, Like this was all working just fine without them directly getting
involved this way, I kind of am intro. I think it's probably just a reaction to the fact that they had a lot of their more traditional stuff get deplatformed after February twenty twenty two. Yeah, but like this was all stuff the Right was doing organically in their media without Russian money. They didn't need this.
They certainly are trying to kind of rebuild some of their like directability to influence after like RT got deplatformed. The other part that's interesting to me is because like this indictment focuses on like Tenet Media as being kind of one of these video editorial offices with a daily output of three to four videos a day.
Like that.
That's what this That's what this kind of guide it describes, that's what Tenant is. This evidence Stock also talks about how like they're also just like faking engagement, getting like sixty comments per day on various social media posts on political topics. So that also like points towards like a lot of people like driving like discussions and trying to like increase the actual visibility and engagement is being boosted
by this like non authentic interference. A lot of videos will go viral not just because they had a lot of people watch them initially. It's because they have a lot of engagement in like the comments, and that's what's going to push something to actually show up more people's feets. Like that is how Twitter currently works. There's a degree to which that's how things work on YouTube. So it's also just trying to try to like engineer virality by
faking a certain amount of engagement. Yeah, there's also like that that degree of like interference beyond just actually, you know, paying for Tim Poole to talk about Ukraine and talk about how gay people are evil once a week.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think that's probably all we've got to say about this for right now. This is not the most surprising news in the world. It is good that it's embarrassing to some of these guys. I don't know that. I think it's actually going to hurt their listenership at all. The people who listen to them don't really care.
Yeah, they'll lie out of it.
Yeah, they'll find some way to and to make themselves the victim out of it. They will not have any reflection that there was a whole Russian operation to identify like influencers, to scout for that would serve Russia's purposes. That they will never reflect on why they specifically were
scouted for. No, Yeah, they will never reflect that. The only bit of like, the only bit of hesitation that they had to take this money was that the profile for the think businessman mentioned to Social Justice that was the only thing that they like protested that's the only thing that they actually wanted to look further into was the fact that he listed social justice is something he cares about, and not the fact that he just doesn't exist at all.
This is a completely fake person.
They were able to flag social justice but not flag that he just did not existed. None of this will cause any kind of recollection because these guys don't care. Like the reason why they say what they say is because they can make five hundred thousand dollars a month extra saying it, So imagine how much money they're already making. Like that explains why they're doing what they're doing. Like
they don't care what they say anymore. They make such a ridiculous amount of money that it doesn't matter.
Yeah, and that's what it's always been about. Like they have never believed in anything.
Yeah, they don't need to like reflect on any of this because they're still making tons of money. They're making slightly less than they used to now that Russia's not paying them, but they are still making tons Especially like if this is what they thought like the going price was, like they suggested these amounts, like they this is like the regular price for them, and that kind of points towards how much money is flying around this right wing medio ecosystem.
Yep, great, good to stuff.
Yeah, the last couple of videos were focusing on this ridiculous lie that migrant's taken over an apartment complex in Colorado, Like all this shit that just isn't true that they've been able to make true. I don't know, it's so frustrating.
I find it's so frustrating. Also, how like Pool has been able to run this line of like the media won't tell you this because there are things that legitimately our neoliberal establishment media completely ignores and like that leave the door open for this kind of shit, and as a result, people can fill that space with lies, as we're seeing here.
Yeah.
Well, so the next time you get contacted by a shady man on WhatsApp to pay you five hundred thousand dollars about talking about how gay people are evil, you might want to check to see if he's actually a Russian agent first. You just you might want to do a little a little bit of work. Yeah, they have to tell you. It's like cops. You just ask him that.
They have to tell you, you know what, Just send him my way. That's exciting. New content news for you guys.
I would not get paid by Russia to lie. I might get paid by like Sweden, you know, to like advance Swedish interests.
Maybe there's a number of most countries I would lie for besides that aren't rush. Yeah, would I would lie for like Japan?
Probably No, that could get dark actually never won. Yeah, yeah, I leave that one out. Brother.
Sweden, Sweden's perfect, No, it's just scarce. So I just think you're underestimating the kind of shit Sweden gets up to.
Oh no, they're certainly evil. They're certainly evil.
But in terms of like a very like milk toast country to get paid to increase their foreign interest, then I think Sweden's about as good as you're gonna get. Like, come on, like hungry, come on, come on Switzerland.
You know all the Switzerland you would you would quickly get implicated. But they could pay.
All the financial all the financial price.
Yeah, Robert and I received material benefits from the Burmese PDF. We both had a nice lunch from them, and that has been what we've done all our coverage. It's time for us to come clean now.
We did, although you did get very sick afterwards.
So deceivably sick and you lucked me out of the toilet.
So yeah, that was pretty funny.
Oh what a time anyway, Rip Tenant Media, you were a bake one.
We'll be back tomorrow. Ah, what's not doing great? My democracy? Although better than a couple of months ago. Maybe if we're comparing this debate to the last debate, I think the short answer everyone we'll agree with is better debate.
My god.
I'm Robert Evans with me tonight for you know. A quick reaction to everything that went on in case you don't want to sit through it yourself is Garrison Davis and Sophie Lichdermann.
Yeah, this was like a real debate. We haven't had one of these in a long time.
No, no, maybe never. I can't actually think of a time in my life. It's certainly not in my adult life where we have had one. I don't know, you know what, Maybe I'm not remembering the Romney one well enough, but certainly it's been a long time since we've got This was really was about the issues to a significant extent, not all of the issues I would have picked to talk about, but there was a lot of discussion of issues and policy.
And like actual moderating.
And actual moderating, yes, live.
Fact checks, which I've never seen to this extent at any Yeah, at any presidential debate. Ever, it was almost shocking to see the moderators actually do their job.
That was the highlight of the night for me.
Yeah, And if you didn't catch the debate, it was hosted by Disney's ABC and the moderators were Lindsay Davis and David Muir, and yeah, both of them each did a very decent job, I believe, with live fact checking. When Trump said some of yes, very out of pocket, unhinged comments.
They deferred to him a couple of times when he would demand to be allowed to speak. That I wasn't thrilled with, but yeah, it was kind of it was made up for you know. One of the things going on on the right wing media the last couple of days has been this claim that Haitian immigrants to the United States are eating people's pets. Probably do an episode on this, it's worth covering. Like it's all lies, it's
like evil, racist lies. But Trump brought it up in detail during the debate and got pressed pretty effectively by David who essentially what I'm saying like, well, that's just not true. Like we've talked to the city manager. There's no reports of anyone's pet speed. Yeah, you've just made this up. And Trump said it was true because he saw it on TV.
He said it twice.
But like, you know, I just want to like for like a Reuter's fact check, like this started from a Facebook post and then determined that it was there was no evidence to this claim, and that didn't stop the likes of jd Vance and other horrible individuals spreading it on the internet and Donald Trump announcing it to be true multiple times during the biggest presidential debate of our lifetime.
As they kept saying, it seems every debate is the most historic debate that's ever happened.
Yeah, I'm going to say this one wasn't. Sorry, the last one definitely was because one of the guys who was in it is no longer running for presidents.
That's fair. That one was a little historic.
Yeah, do we want to get into a little bit of the pre show at all?
Or sure we could talk about the pre show first?
Yeah?
Why not? Why don't you start there?
Sophie.
During the pre show, Fox News was talking about how the Trump campaign says that he will only go low on the issues, and he did not. They also had a guy who is on TV way too much Byron Donald, where he said that Kamala, we know Biden is not running the country your VP.
Now basically what.
They they kind of just did the same sad talking points and then CNN did, I mean, this is not that interesting, to be honest, like CNN talked about how important this was, and Chris Wallace specifically said that Trump's biggest strength is he doesn't talk like a Paulian. I don't think that helped him tonight, to be honest, not tonight.
Well, you know, to be honest, here's what I would say that was true of why he won. That played a major role in winning. But he talks like a politician now because politics has reordered itself around trump Ism, particularly on the right. But even Harris and Walls are a little trumpier than certainly any Democratic politician was before the selection.
Right, and the most interesting thing that was said in both of these things to be which will bring us to the start of the debate. CNN was heavily focused on the fact that President Trump is almost a foot taller than Vice President Harris and asking if he will take advantage of that. He wouldn't even meet her across the stage to shake her hand. She walked all the way over to him. I genuinely think he did not want to shake her hand.
No, he didn't, And I thought that was again, this all seems like very petty stuff to talk about, but this is the pettiest man alive, and like this stuff actually does matter. And I think it was a pretty intelligent strategic move. I think it started off the night with him off ballance. She immediately put him off balance and pissed him off, and he didn't really recover. He had some moments. He certainly was not weak everywhere I
think he was. He was lie like his economy. Everything he says about like tariffs is like it's a nonsense policy that would devastate like large chunks of this country. But I think his messaging was pretty effective there. It probably is going to work for a lot of moderates. I thought his messaging on Afghanistan was really effective. I think he probably won that segment of the debate just in terms of what's going to play better.
Those are the two definitely right.
But you know, he didn't lose every clash they had. He never got momentum, and he was never able to build momentum. Even when he had a win, he was never able to tie that into a greater pattern like he was with Biden. He was never able to get any kind of weight behind him. He just kind of was wabbed the whole.
Night, which I think at this scale is the first we've seen from him.
No, it was definitely Kamala going in hard for the handshake at the very very start of the debate was her equivalent of Trump following around Hillary Clinton on that debate stage. Yep, it threw him off balance. He wasn't expecting it. It immediately kind of gave her the upper hand literally wow and controlling where the conversation was going to go. Like Trump refused to look at Kamala through
the entire debate. He only looked straight ahead. Kamala was often addressing Trump directly looking at him and then also turning towards the cameras. Trump was just straight faced the entire time. He never he never looked at her or acknowledged her like visually. It was kind of odd to see, and throughout the debate he just kept getting really angry and almost like childish. Harris maintained her ability to present herself as like the more hopeful candidate and by and large led the debate.
Yeah.
Yeah, he kept having to like follow her. You just came off as like an angry child.
Now.
She did not answer some of the questions about like her policy shifts, but she was able to deflect those questions and Trump to go off topic to talking about like crowd sizes and rumors about eating dogs. Trump wasn't able to actually talk about what his plans for the country were. Harris just kept him like complaining about weird nonsense, going off on tagents, and always going back to talking about immigrants. He just couldn't control the conversation at all.
No, and the crowd size stuff. Like he was very clearly like on the verge of kind of losing it there, which was interesting to see.
CNN claimed during their post show that that moment was when he never recovered after the crowd size stuff.
Yeah, I think that's probably accurate.
Fair, Yeah, that's a fair analysis from CNN.
I would say that he didn't he never recovered from the opening handshake, Like, but that's when it was kind of undeniable, the crowd sized thing like, because he kept trying to get back on the rails, and I think
he gave up. And the clearest example of that was his closing statements, which I know we're kind of jumping around here, but Kamala's closing statements were the kind of closing statements you give if you are trying to become the president, and Trump's you can contrast it to the way he was talking during his big RNC speech, which was certainly much too long, but was clearly intentional for the most part, was a better speech. Yeah, it's like there was some ad libbing there. He did some, but
this was clearly not written down ahead of time. It did not sound like that. It made no sense. Yeah, it was nonsense.
Kamala's ending statement was talking about how this is a fight for two different versions of what this country will look like, you know, very politician e speech. Trump didn't talk about himself at all. He just was complaining that if Kamala Harris has so many great ideas for the country, why hasn't she enacted them? And the answer is because she's not the president. Yes, but he did not talk
about his own version of the country. He was just complaining about how much he didn't like Kamala Harris and that Kamala Harris is promising to do great things even though that she's not like doing them right now as vice president. And that was his messaging, at.
Least in the pre show that I watched, and in a lot of like the punditry I read before this, the thing that kept getting reinforced was that this has to be a debate about the issues. The Americans that are still undecided want to hear what people's plans are for the country. Now. Do I believe that's the case. I'm not necessarily the most optimistic about how seriously Americans
take political policy. But if that is the case, Trump blew his chance to talk about what he wants to do as president because he number one, was extremely defensive. He spent more time denying things that he wasn't going to do. Like it she got him very good on
twenty twenty five. That has proven to be an extremely effective line of attack, and he was really he had to not just deny that he planned to like in State Project T twenty five as present, but like he had to repeatedly claim I've never read it like, I don't know what's in it.
I don't want to read it.
I have nothing to do with Project twenty twenty five.
In a way that sounded almost panicked. Yeah, right, like where he really I'm kind of surprised they didn't give him a better response on that, that they didn't really drill that down, and I wonder if they did. And he just was so flustered and pissed that he didn't do it. But he certainly did not have an effective response to that one. And when he kept repeatedly being asked to give his policy on how he would like fix the Affordable Care Act or replace it, he just punted.
He just kept saying it's terrible.
It's like, okay, yeah, it's terrible, but i can't do anything about it, so I'm not going to repeal it, but like We've got to do better. It was. It was a really weak answer.
Yeah.
One thing I found interesting is that the last debate was full of so many AD breaks and we went full like a one hour, yeah, full hour before before ads, and speaking of ads, oh wow, we have gone a full thirteen minutes, and that means it's time for us to take an ad break.
All right, we are back.
Yeah. Can I get to one thing first because I just came across this. It's about the Haitian immigrants. PBS put up a documentary like literally a day or two ago talking, yeah, one day ago, talking about this, and they interview a factory owner in Springfield, Ohio about what he thinks of Haitian migration, and he's like, I wish a lot more of them would come. They're the only people in town who don't do drugs and come to work on time. I just thought that was a great,
great Springfield, Ohio representation. I hope that guy's happened a good night.
Great quote there, Robert, Yeah, Gerre, what do you want to talk about next?
Now?
In this middle section, it is kind of I want to go over some of what they actually talked about during the debate, a few of kind of the main topics. They started with the economy. Kamla was talking about how there's a shortage of homes, they're the cost of housing is just too high, and she's going to have tax cuts for families and warned about Trump's quote unquote sales tax that would rise costs for households by nearly four thousand dollars a year now. This is in reference to
Trump's tariffs, which he then talked about next. They know they're not sales tax, they're tariffs, and that countries will pay us back for all that we've done in the world's insane, which will bainly mean that our economy will do worse and things will be more expensive for us.
I thought Kama was pretty strong during that section in terms of like her response. She directly mentioned Goldman Sachs, which is something that's come out in the last couple days from Reuters. It's that the Goldman Sacks's biggest boost you as economy from Maharis when talking about US economic growth would likely get the biggest boost in the coming two years from Democrats headed by Kamala Harris winning the
White House in Congress in Novembers election. And she specifically called out to that, And her being actually able to call out to something like that in a debate was something we I haven't seen in a while on a debate, and so that was something that I particularly took note of.
Yeah, actually slight relevant authorities on issues.
Yeah, Yeah, she did a lot of that. She definitely had her moments where she would avoid responses. I noted she consistently refused to answer, are there limitations you think should be in place on when people can get abortions? Right? Yeah, she just kind of did not answer that one. Now, to be frank, I think that's a bullshit question, and I think a redirection was pretty effective. Yeah, But as a general rule, when she answered questions, she cited statistics
and like studies and did a pretty a pretty good job. Now, again, how well is that going to matter? We're still very early in the pundit cycle here. It seems pretty clear that most of the mainstream media, including Fox Like, agrees
Harris won the night. Polymarket predicts a ninety seven percent chance that Harris is judged the winner in the debate snappoles, which I found out from Nate Silver's quick reaction, where he also notes, quote bitcoin prices are down, which also implies a loss for Trump.
That's very funny.
I love that Bitcoin's a good political needle to see where the country's going.
I'll tell you the happiest assuming that we don't usher in a new fascist or you know, a significantly worse state in November. The best thing about it is going to be not needing to pay attention to Nate Silver for another four years.
Yeah, but yeah, you know.
He did make one other point that I found kind of funny, which was his argument that, like well, Trump is a lot taller. The stature gap in terms of physical size was also notable, especially with Harris having a shorter podium. And you'll hear people say that you should watch the debate with the sound off, and by that measure it was much closer than with the sound on.
Who says that name? Has ever said that, who's gonna watch the debate with the sound off?
Stick to Poles man, what the fuck is wrong with you?
These debates used to be audio only. They were a radio broadcasts. That is, that's how the TA started.
That is so unwell of him to say what are you? What are you doing? Why think that over head? And don't put that on the internet.
He is a good one.
Yes, every second Nate Silver isn't writing a blog post or looking at Poles he is he is sitting in a shitty bar in like Fremont Street, Vegas, playing like mid Steaks poker. So he probably does consume a lot of television with the sound off.
But to go back to the economy.
So as Kamla was talking about her plans for like tax credits and tax cuts helping people buy homes, Trump was just talking about and immediately brought up that one of the things that's affecting the economy is that there's there's millions of people pouring in from prisons and a sane asylums, taking jobs from black and Hispanic and union workers.
That these immigrants are taking over towns and buildings violently, And it's just immediately that's that, that's what that's what he goes to because he has really just nothing else.
He also said people can't buy bacon, cereal and eggs cereal cereal.
Of all the foods to choose cereal.
So yeah, tried to talk about like inflation and stuff. It just it just didn't go very well, especially because inflations rose so much during the pandemic when he was president. It just didn't play very well at all. Immediately it was clear that Kamala was kind of the front runner.
The next topic was abortion, which Kamala also did very well, and Trump just really lost it because he couldn't stop talking about how Tim Walls wants to execute babies after birth, and this just this was the main thing he talked about. He was very defensive about his stance on a national
abortion ban. Moderators asked him about his contradictory abortion statements, about how he's voting for an abortion ban in Florida but is claiming to not want one nationally, and Trump just didn't know how to talk about this topic very well and just kept saying that Democrats are evil because they want to do nine month abortions, seven month, eight month abortions, post birth executions, they will execute the baby, which was I believe this was like the first fact
check for the night, and this is what kind of really scared Trump is. He was like, Oh, they're actually gonna call me on this stuff. Moderator said that there's no states where you can kill babies after birth, and Trump just didn't know what to do. Kamala brought up Project to twenty twenty five and their plans for a national abortion ban. Trump made a little funny comment kind of throwing JD Vans under the buss about Trump vetoing a national abortion ban if it was passed by Congress.
Trump said that he actually hadn't talked to Vance about that.
I didn't discuss it with Jamie.
By the way, I've been taken a break from Twitter, but I did catch a good post recently. JD. Vance, before the debate, made a claim that a bunch of people from Springfield who he won't name, have reached out to him talking about Haitians eating their pets, and then ended it by saying like, it's possible this will prove to be untrue. And someone just quote tweeted that and said, every day I see something that makes me understand why Vance's mom traded him for a couple of perk thirties.
Incredible.
Kamala basically said most of her regular talking points and abortion. She would like for the House in the Senate to put abortion protections into law and she would sign that bill and wants to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade, and also talked about how it's absurd to be talking about post birth executions and how this is like consulting.
Yep, she's correct, Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Next thing was the border, very similar to both their RNC and their DNC speeches. Kamala talking about this kind of very conservative border bill that Trump shot down for political gain and then invited us to attend a Trump rally where he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter and how windmills caused cancer, and that people leave early, and he never talks about you, the American people. So this was obviously giant bait for Trump, which he he
took immediately. He just couldn't stop talking about people actually come to my rallies way more than they go to your rallies. They don't leave early. You have to bust in people to your rallies.
And he claims she pays people to attend her rallies as well.
He got so flustered.
Is that this is what he started talking about the eating dogs thing. It's because he got so flustered on this line of argument about his crowd size that he just he just had to immediately talk about how there's immigrants eating dogs. Yeah, because he just didn't know what to do.
I mean, it's actually kind of just a very like on the nose, but perfect representation of how racism works culturally a lot of the time, which is like white man feels aggrieved and threatened and immediately turns to attacking an entire group of people based on their race, like it really was the most direct example of that that you could possibly get, Like, he felt vulnerable and so he attacked a group of people for eating cats. He did a blood libel.
I think a big part of Kamalist strategy here was to paint Trump as like an illegitimate figure in politics, like someone who's not like responsible to like lead the.
Military and it's dangerous. Yeah, she bragged.
About the endorsement of two hundred Republicans, including Dick Cheney hated that moment, like, no, but you know, is not great, but we'll see if it plays politically well.
It might work.
Yeah, it doesn't play well for us, but yes, doesn't mean it doesn't overall play well.
Unfortunately, a lot of her statements seemed like she was trying to court both the NATSEC people and the courts if there's ever like a contested election, Like she wants those people to be on her side. And there was a lot of Commons throughout the debate that was kind of pointing to that and like showing how Trump's just like an unreliable and like dangerous figure to be in
control of national security. Trump went on this interesting tangent about how he was actually good because he fired a whole bunch of those Republicans because they were because they were bad at their jobs.
I thought it was one of his more effective moments.
That was something we've never really seen done before, openly attacking military leaders in that fashion.
Yeah.
I didn't read it as attacking military leaders. I read it as him specifically stating because she was Harris had been talking about the Republicans from the Bush White House who had endorsed her, And I read it as Trump saying I brought in a lot of like rhinos, what he would call rhinos, but I brought in a lot of like old Republican veterans and fired them because they were bad at their job. And I thought that was one where I was like, well, yeah, they were, you know, like,
you're not wrong. You didn't replace them with anyone better, but like they were. In fact, you did hire a bunch of Republican officials who had a long history working in other administrations, who sucked at what they did, you know, like, not wrong. Now it's interesting to have him say I brought in a lot of people, some of them were good and some of them were bad.
Yes, Yeah, I don't.
Think I've ever heard a former president admit that during a debate.
He was like, we don't talk about the good people. And it's like, well, why why don't you do that now during your debate. Yeah, here's your chance.
JD.
Vance great guy, great guy, great, great guy. Trump, So JD.
Van's great guy. Never met him, don't know who he is. Who are you talking about, never talked to him.
One of the more interesting questions the moderator asked was just directly asking Trump, how would you go about your massive deportation program? How would you actually go about deporting eleven million or more undocumented immigrants? And Trump did not have a real answer to this question. Trump said that, you know, there's actually way more of them here than what you would think. South America is sending all their criminals here.
It's really interesting because he said, they say fifteen million, it's really twenty one million. And then he said, and it's a lot more than twenty one million.
Okay, how many is it? Donald?
The moderators challenged him on like rising crime rates, saying that the FBI is actually, you know, showing that crime is going down, and Trump then claimed that the FBI crime rates are fraudular, are fraudulent, which is the first time that you've seen, at least that I've seen him talk about it that way. Like usually on Fox News they will like mention that, but they'll be like, but people feel crime is going up, So that's what really matters. Even if even if the FBI claims it's going down,
people still feel less safe. But he just openly said that those numbers are just like fake, like the FBI is just like lying saying that they aren't counting crimes in like the biggest major cities. Kanma's response to this was saying that that's rich coming from a convicted criminal. So we got that first, like prosecutor girl boss moment.
Okay, hi've rise up.
Trump complained about all of like the legal witch hunts he's been facing and said that, quote, I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me, unquote, which is just a fascinating way to frame that unhinged thing to say.
It is, especially given how many Americans don't think he was shot in the head.
You just know his advisors were like, what the fuck, Like, what are you saying right now?
Ah?
Fuck?
Oh they are drinking tonight.
Oh, they they.
Are drinking tonight.
Yeah.
Yeah, And that's not even like the most unhinged thing he said, because the most unhinged thing he said the entire night came shortly after that, which was, she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison. Based she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison. She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in.
Prison, and the leader says she's a radical liberal.
I believe that a president can perform surgery if that president wants to. Sophie and I support Kamala Harris's policy.
You should have voted for Ben Carson, then.
I did I write him in every year? Okay Jesus Christ, no you don't.
There was a good tweet that remarked that it just sounds like he's talking like he's playing cards against humanity. He's just like change, He's just like changing out different words like transgender aliens, prison, surgery. I believe what he's referencing here is that both Fox News and Trump's campaign team the past few days have been talking about how in twenty twenty, Kamala made a statement basically saying that, yeah, we should like offer gender affirming health care to people
in prison. Like, if you're in prison, we should not like deny health care to you just because you're locked up. That's like what he's talking about. That is specifically what he's referring to. But it just it's sounds just absolutely bad.
Shit.
Let's have another quick ad break. We will come back. I want to talk a little bit about January sixth, foreign policy, Israel, Palestine, and then some of Trump's and Kamala's post debate statements made to the press.
All Right, we are so bad, so bad.
It's so bad, like the Harris campaign kind of kind of She's been slowly kind of like flatlining in some of these polls. I do want to talk about that a little before we get into this, because it has been interesting. She's been losing kind of national popular vote momentum, and that has been narrowing. The swing states have not really narrowed in the same way. Yeah, which is not to say that she is a clear favorite. Everything basically is within the margin of error.
She's barely ahead, but she's still ahead. It has been a really interesting change. It has not been the same.
There's a newsletter I check on occasionally for stuff like this at GERMNTUM. That made what I thought was an interesting point, which was that it's possible that a lot of that has to do with the fact that the national popular vote has been narrowing as a result of the ads the Republicans have been pumping out because there wasn't a real strong consensus about who Harris was and
now that's growing. But in a lot of these swing states, which are red states, people have been living under Republicans and are just a lot less kind of vulnerable to being drawn away by that kind of propaganda because they know what it's like.
No, I mean, especially if you're looking at North Carolina, you're looking at Georgia. Those are two battlegrounds that the Harris campaign is targeting. I can definitely see that being being an aspect. So the mods turned the questions towards January sixth. Trump immediately claimed that nobody on the other side was killed, only Ash the bad that was killed by a bad police officer.
Very ironic, but.
Easily the only Coppall go to bat for the best shoot in twenty twenty one by a mile.
And he then complained that why haven't BLM rioters been prosecuted in Seattle and Minneapolis, which of course they have. They are still they're still arresting people.
Man, I've spent time in courtrooms with people, Like.
Yes, I was shocked he did not call out Portland.
It is interesting that he went for Seattle and not Portland. I guess maybe just says a lot about his media diet that he just maybe got a lot more Chaz stuff than he did Portland stuff.
I don't know.
He certainly did go after a commonal a few times for being pro defund the police back in twenty twenty.
He really, he tried several times. He clearly she never took the bait. Yeah, she never took the bait. And that must have been one that his advisors really pushed him on. Yeah, like they must have said, you'll get her.
It was both that and her previous like fracking policies, which which she has like backtracked on. And ye, you have to if you want to win Pennsylvania. So like, I understand why they're doing it. It sucks because the planet's burning, but right now they're trying to win Pennsylvania. The debate was in Pennsylvania, Like that's why she has backtracked on those policies. I think it's smart to deflect from that at least right now. But yeah, I mean, that's that's not surprising to me.
Now.
I think Kamala did a pretty good statement about January sixth. She said, I was at the Capitol on j sixth. He incited a violent mob. And now she got kind of emotional. She said one hundred and forty officers were injured and some died. Trump was impeached, which is something that just hasn't been talked about very much. Is like, yeah, Trump has been impeached. Why isn't that talked about very much?
Because so many other things have happened, then everyone has forgotten.
Yeah, that he was liter really impeached. Yeah, multiple times. And then she pointed to January sixth as like not the only incident. No, she pointed back to Charlottesville, talked about Trump's statements about Proud Boys and how the Proud Boy militia was told to stand back and stand by, and she kind of closed this this little January sixth monologue by saying, like, we don't have to go back to this. He says that if the election doesn't go to his liking there will be a blood bath.
We don't have to go back.
And she's positioning herself as like as an alternative towards like that type of chaos. Trump got very mad at this, very mad Trump talking about how Fox News debugged the Charlottesville quote.
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure.
I know one other like fact checker I think with Snopes is like, actually, the Charlottesville quote is different in context, and at least a whole bunch of fact checkers that like I know and extremism reporters have kind of gotten on snopesas for this, because it's very clear it's a very disingenuous way of framing what he was trying to say. Yeah, we all know what happened on Charlottesville. We all know what he was talking about.
Yeah, Cataboo is a really good video on it if you want to watch more.
Yeah, yes she does.
And then the moderators talked about how Trump has been falsely claiming for three and a half years that he won the twenty twenty election, but now says that he lost by a whisker, and Trump was startled by this.
He's like, did I actually say that? I said that I said that. No, no, no, no, no, that was sarcastic, and it was.
Like the only time I've ever heard him he sounded genuinely like confused, like maybe there was a little old man. But we were like, oh shit, what have I been saying.
He's like, no, no, no, that was a sarcastic statement. I still think I won the twenty twenty election.
Yeah, and he really And that was one of the more effective moderator moments because you could see the moderator was like, Oh, what a gift I've been given. I just want to make very clear. Let's have him say, Let's have him confirm what he means, like three times, and then we could move on.
Kabla had a good reply talking about how like we can't have a candidate who's confused about how the elections work.
And being like like she is correct, Yeah.
Come on, great respond and then Trump immediately went on to defend Victor Horbon, Yes, the president of Hungary, seg some people call him the strong man because he's a really tough guy.
He loves the strong man thing.
That was my favorite part because he clearly misunderstood, no, strong man is a term for dictation.
Yes, Yeah, he just that was quite a moment for this country.
It was just the fumbling and bumbling.
I love it, you know what. Overall, good time, except for one thing that really sucked, which is several things that really sucked, which is whenever it came to something where a huge number of human lives were involved. Yeah, almost always it got kind of brushed over.
Ukraine.
I will say, I don't think it got a very good set of questions. It was the same shit that they've been asking both sides. Right, The Dims get asked, how are you going to actually conclude this conflict in a favorable way? And the Republicans get asked, are you just going to abandon Ukraine? Right? Like, that's the gist of what both candidates are being pushed on, and the gist of their responses is unchanged from everything we've heard earlier this year.
Right, And despite being asked multiple times, Trump refused to answer if it was in the world's best interest of Ukraine wins the war. He was asked that several times, and he just he just said, I want the war to end, not an answer.
And there wouldn't have been a war if I'd been president.
This wouldn't have happened. Yeah, this wouldn't have happened. That's his claim.
But you know, Harris did not have an answer, because there isn't one, no, no, this is an incredibly difficult war. Right now, I will say, I think like the actual things she should have done, and the thing that Biden should have done, is say, like we are removing all extant limitations on the weapons that we ship Ukraine and how they can use them. You know, at this point they have now invaded Russian territory and occupied hundreds of
miles of it. Like, you know, that was something I was interested in that she should have hit on and did not, which Trump brought up the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons in a matter of like, we can't
push him too much. Who knows what they'll do, right That was clearly what he wanted people to take from him bringing up the fact that Russia has a nuclear arsenal, and Harris didn't bring up like, yeah, you know, they invaded Russia a couple of weeks back, no nukes, Like this kind of threat is clearly something that the Putin regime wants the international community to have. But when push
comes to shove, he's not suicidal. And the idea that like Putin is going to start nuking people if Ukraine is able to fire missiles at Russian fuel depots or whatever, I just don't think is supported by how he's actually performed so far. But at any rate, at least Ukraine got a decent amount of time. It was one of the things that they talked about more in this debate.
Gaza got one very quick question. You could tell the moderators wanted to move the fuck past it as fast as possible, and both Trump and Harris wanted to get past it, Harris more so than Trump.
Harris stayed about the same statement she made at the DNC YEP she first mentioned October seventh, talked about how far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.
The war must dan. We need a cease fire deal, the hostages out. We need to chart a course for a two state solution and rebuild Gaza. We will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, especially in relation to Iran. That was most of her statement, which is nothing new from her now. Trump first tried to skip the question and just immediately talking about Russia. He then said that Kamala hates Israel and she also hates the Arab people.
The whole area will be bombed.
Under her presidency, saying that if he gets elected as president elect, he will solve the war. And then he just talked about like how oil pipelines are important.
It was so weird interesting to me that he tried to skip this when this is one of the things she's weakest on the things. But I think it may just be that, like Americans overwhelmingly at this point do not think Israel is categorically in the wrong. They think that Israel is often in the wrong in this war and been killing a lot of innocent people. And so it may just be that he knows that, Like this isn't really a great issue for me either, Let's move
back to something. But it was it was interesting to me that he didn't have any kind of concerted attack, like saying she hates Israel and Arabs is such a strange tactic to take here, and I don't see how he thought it could help him.
Who are you trying to appeal to.
Right, How is this supposed to get you a vote? What vote does this get you that you don't have?
There's just no way. That was like what was in his campaign prep. Yeah, that was not advice, There's no way.
Yeah, Kamla did have a good line here to think points towards her like recording that sec people. She said, it's well known that Trump is a weak on foreign policy and national security. He's pro dictator. Yeah, yeah, Trump just doesn't have any way to answer that, because yeah, he does want to be a dictatory. He just he just offended the president of Hungary like a few minutes ago.
Yeah, like called him as strong man and said that that means he's tough.
Well.
He also she had a good line about how like he's not going to be tough with these people, They're just going to like say something nice to him and then he'll immediately want to be their friends. Like, yeah, that was a decent little jab. She got a few of those in more than a few. I want to talk about since we're kind of running along just a little bit. At the endier after the debate ended, I caught this. I don't think you guys did, but Trump went down to what's called the no spin zone, which
is just a thing Fox did. I I think it started on the Handity Show.
I caught the.
Fox immediate after the debate response, do you want me to get into that, it's just one quick thing?
Sure?
Yeah, So immediate response from Fox was Vice President Harris was clearly well prepared, but she was never held to the fire and felt like ABC was helping her out. He went down a few cat and cat and dog holes instead of rabbit holes and not rabbit holes. That a direct thing to the eating pets thing. Make no but snake about it. Trump had a bad night.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Then just talked about how she was calm and prepared and whatnot. But then you know, Hannity came on and did his Hannity thing and then I'm.
No spin zone.
That must have been why Trump was heading down to the no spin zone. So what happened? You've got this. It's the floor of where they did the debate, so everyone is everywhere, tons of media and Trump. There's like this huge scrum around him and I'm watching on ABC and the ABC anchors just start screaming at him from like Donald Donald, mister President, trying to get him to answer their questions and like everyone is doing this, and he eventually like gives a statement where he says, well,
this was my favorite debate. This was like the best debate I've ever had. I clearly won. Someone was like, so are you going to do a second debate? Harris says, she wants another debate, and he's like, well, she just wants another debate because she lost, So I don't know if I'm going to do another debate. I found that very funny. I found it kind of shameful how the ABC guys just kept howling at him to give them some attention in the middle of this very crowded room.
There was no way he could hear you. He's an old man. Guys have some self fucking respect. You're supposed to be journalists, and you had a colleague down there who was actually asking him questions. But anyway, yeah, so yeah, I mean, there wasn't a ton there other than him kind of desperately trying. And one of them did make the good point that, like he is claiming, I obviously won the debate, as he heads down to the spin zone spin his loss, which is like, yeah, it's not
a position of strength. No, I don't know that you would have been doing this if this had been a clean win, but it certainly wasn't and yeah, like I think tonight went pretty badly for him.
Yeah, yeah, CNN was like foaming at the mouth happy or sad a CNN was thrill, They're foaming at the mouth for Kamala Harris that nobody else has done what she's been able to do. And then something else happened that made CNN and MSNBC thrilled and ruined one Trump
advisor's day. I'm sure Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president right after the debate, And if only we could have seen that Trump advisor whispered in his ear that he did not, in fact, despite that AI fake endorsement, get endorsed by childless cat lady Taylor Swift.
That's so interesting to me that she couched her endorsement in I am doing this because of the AI that Trump kept retweeting.
Yeah, retruthing, sorry, retruthing.
Retruthing, Yes, you're right, I apologize. I didn't mean to. I'm not going to make that joke anyway, Garrison, what were you going to say?
Just that that's all just retruth thing.
It's interesting to me that she she did specifically like couch it and like is it's because of what he did with this AI video like that, I felt like I had a need to come out and say who I'm voting for.
Yeah.
Also, she has a cute cat. I hadn't seen her cat before.
It's also that.
But because I pay attention to Taylor Swift News, she was getting hammered a little bit in the last week because one of her good friends, Brittany Mahomes, who's the wife of Patrick Mahomes, who is Taylor Shift's boyfriends Travis Kelsey's teammate Jesus Christ You're welcome, has liked several of Trump's posts and uh truth truths. No, I don't know where.
It was to be.
I think it was actually think I don't I actually don't think.
It was his posts.
I think it was your post about him pro Trump post on Instagram very important to this election. Yes, and then and then they were seen together at the US Open and and the Girl Bosses were very unhappy with Taylor about this, and so so I think that also played into the timing. Robert, just so you know know, you're Taylor Swift. Facts by Sophie Lickterman.
Sorry Sophie, well you were talking about washed up musician Taylor Swift Live.
You are going to get ones are going to get on our ass.
They will get our show canceled.
Robert Evans, we are not in that era. I was getting in that.
I was getting crucial debate take from America's most influential celebrity, Gilbert artist, Scott Adams.
What do you think?
No, the debate is a tie so far with lots of folks is flying a tie? Is a win for Harris?
Well, that's true. I think that is true.
There you go, Scott, good work.
Scott comes out saying that Harris won the debate.
There you go. That's great.
Finally, I do I do think it's funny that Trump claimed that he didn't know about his previous comments questioning if Kamala Harris was black.
That was a very.
Talk about that moment. Oh, were you accused her of putting out too?
What was that to talk?
He was also like saying, well, the Central Park five pled guilty, So actually I think it was okay. I wanted them executed a wild, a wild.
Unforced error there.
Man.
That whole little racism section was just crazy.
Look, I will take one quick victory lap because I said after the last debate, which was a disaster in every possible way for Biden. Trump's not his soul self either. He is definitely an older man. Yeah, he was in twenty sixteen and even twenty twenty, and like, yeah, this was that.
Well, hopefully this was the only presidential debate that we'll have to talk about with Kamala v.
Trump. What an exciting time.
I'm excited for that, for that Vance Walls debate, if that ever happens.
So am I.
Oh interesting that Like our reaction after this debate was like, Okay, she shouldn't do any other debates and he's going to want to do more debates. Yeah, And it was the exact opposite in their in their reactions.
Yeah, I was interested by that, which.
Like on MSNBC Tim Walls was like she should do one every day. I mean, she did good, she did well, But like my reaction was like, Okay, you did the job.
You did the job.
I do think like I have like, oh boys, I think this might be Hubris coming in here and a bad idea, but she could be right. I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah, Like one of the problems is that if the election doesn't turn around as much or if something else happens that pushes momentum back towards Trump, she might need a third debate and you kind of have to You kind of can't know, like you are rolling the dice on this one way or the other.
Yeah, well that was the best debate I've ever watched. Yeah, just in terms of it actually being a debate. Yeah, there was not a half dead man on screen, or yeah maybe there was that, there just wasn't two half dead men on screen, so you just.
Get a good look at like, Okay, yeah, these are these are pretty decent pictures of the kinds of president that these people want to be.
And like it literally comes down to he was not willing to shake her hand, and she walked across the stage to shake his hand, and that's basically what the debate was.
Yeah.
Anyway, anyways, this has been it could happen here. We're gonna post our source links from this episode in the episode description, so look out for that.
Yeah, that's right, and you know, until next time. I don't really have any advice.
Bye, Hi everyone, it's me James. This is a pick up. It's Thursday Morning. I recorded with Joseph on Wednesday night, someone destroyed or removed one of our coolers. Since then, I've received photos this morning of a place where we put it and it's gone. You can probably joy your own conclusions to how I feel about that probably tell from how I'm talking to it. I'm pretty pissed off. Also, our friend Rafael, Rafael from Los Angeles de la Desierto
is without a vehicle at the moment. His truck broke. This is a person who gives every ounce of his being to rescuing migrants. He is there with them in their hardest times. When they pass away, he's there to recover their remains with dignity, to connect their families with the passing moments of their loved ones. He's there to rescue people. He rescued a woman and child on Monday. His truck's broken, and if you're able to give, I'm
going to include a link in the show notes. I talk to Borderlands Relief Collective and we all agree that the most important thing right now is to get money to Raphael so he can continue doing that life saving search and rescue work as we hit record temperatures here and before it gets freezing cold in the winters. So if you can, please, please just a few bucks, like
we'll buy them an old track. I'll fix it. I just don't want more people to die out there, and I think having a truck for Rafael would meaningfully make it safer for people. So if you're able to give, please give. Otherwise, please enjoy this podcast. And yeah, I understand if you can't. It's a hard time for everyone. But yeah, either way, hope if you can enjoy this podcast. Bye,
Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcast today. It's me James and I'm joined by Joseph Hauser, who's a volunteer from Bordlands Relief Collective who was out with me on Sunday. We're recording this on Wednesday night and we were dropping water at the border. We wanted to describe for you a little bit of our what we saw at there. It was very hot, things were in a bad way. I think it's fair to say like despite all of
our best efforts, things were really difficult there. There's only so much we can do when it's one hundred and five degrees and there are dozens of people and we're trying to get water to all of them. So welcome to the show.
Yeah, thank you, James, thanks for having me on.
No, I appreciate you being gay. So I think if we begin by like describing preps for people, and we first started messaging by going out on Sunday, like Saturday afternoon, right, I think.
Yeah, Yeah, it was yeah, early Saturday afternoon. I had just finished getting my haircut, I'd gone and grabbed an early lunch, and I saw a message from you and one of our group chats that some of the local grocery stores were selling those big orange five gallon water jugs for like thirteen dollars, Like apparently they're trying to
like get rid of their stock or something. So yeah, you and me a couple of other people were scrambling around the county trying to buy up as many of them as we could.
Yeah, like I think I was a normally one hundred bucks for reference. They're like an insulated water vessel with a spout on the bottom. And given that we knew it was going to be a record temperature and it was already really hot on Saturday, we wanted to try and get folks water that was as cold as possible. So yeah, we went all around, bought all the all the ones from that chain of grocery stores that we could, and that sort of corralled them, and then we put
ice in them. Right, this is the next day on Sunday, and then you and I met up and we went out. Do you want to just give people a sense of the people we met right from all over the world, the different places we met them, and then then the sort of condition that we found them in.
Yeah.
So the first group of people we met, we ran into four Mauritanian men. Yeah, they seemed to be in pretty good spirits. They were all traveling together. Gave them some food, gatorade, water, kind of our typical stuff that.
We hand out.
Yeah, and I don't know, maybe three minutes down the road from there. I don't know where the man was from, but is Asian man that did not look to be in great shape.
His clothes was torn up, his face was really dirty.
From what we could understand, he was saying he had been mugged, his cell phone had been stolen from him.
Yeah, and he just looked in a bad ways.
So we, yeah, you know, gave him water, gave him again some gatorade, and when we tried to give him some food, he was just like I can't like, I'm so like, he's just so dehydrated.
He he couldn't stomach anything other than liquid.
Yeah, it was like we see people all the time who were in a bad state, but it's pretty rare for people to be like I can't eat, I'm too dehydrated. I can't face food right now. Because he'd been walking for at least seven eight hours, I'm guessing, if not days, Yeah, depends how he came man, because we were just driving along and he came out of the verge like with his hands in the air, like looking just so afraid, like they'll stay with me for a while, like absolute like fear.
But he had yeah, like he just looked stricken.
Yeah, yeah, like just really it's just so sad to see someone like reduced to that. I'm glad we were able to help him and get him the stuff that he needed. And then from there we moved on to I'm trying to think where we went next. We went up to the top, right, we grave up to the top of them out too.
Yeah, we went up to an area where Borderlands Relief Collective has set up what we call a welcome station. It's up on top of one of the smaller peaks in the area. It gives us a good view, like you can see all the way down to the actual border and stuff and kind of take note of like, okay, like we've got a group coming up here.
There's some people crossing over there.
And then we've primarily done that in the winter time, just to greet people with some like some hot teas, some water food, just basically things to say like hey, like you know you're here, yeah, and at least give them a friendly face, because who knows what they've you know, what everyone's been through just to get to that point.
But yeah, so we dropped one of our water jugs there and then went a little bit further down the road to a gate that I think Border Patrol maintains that gate maybe cal Fire yeah as well, they keep that locked pretty much always. But we know people take that road up obviously, So we left one of the smaller water jugs we were able to pick up. I think that one was like a two or three gallon that we left there.
Right, Yeah, because people people walk up for the border. I always like that spot. It's weird because sometimes you see people in your they've got a long walk and it's hot and I'm up here and there down there and that that sucks. Yeah, sometimes it's a really if it was anywhere else, it would be a beautiful view.
There's a valley below with little oak grove and like sometimes you'll see like a red tailed hawk or something and it'll be like level with your eye line because you're at the top there and it's but unfortunately, yeah, it's at the border, so people have to suffer miserably there.
Yeah, it's absolutely gorgeous like natural landscape, but it is like just so unbelievably deadly and unforgiving.
Yeah, Like you and I have both hiked lick alongside hiking up and down the roads. We've hiked on the trails and migrants often take. And I've hiked a lot, You've hiked a lot. It's incredibly difficult going. It's difficult for us as like fit people with technical apparel and good shoes, like we often see people in flip flops or like crappy sneakers if.
They have footwear at all at that point.
Yeah, I remember a number of the people we ran into didn't have shoes like later in the day. Yeah, and I've definitely given away shoes before and then we have some of my drug. But I'm a giant person. Everyone it's like penguin flip of feet, so I wasn't able to help everyone. And so yeah, we went from there, we dropped another We hiked to water in a little bit because the road was too narrow to turn the
truck around, and we dropped that in another gate. And then I think at that point things were pretty normal, and that was like a normal water drop day, or a driving water drop day, I should say, not a hiking one. Do you want to describe what we saw at the next place you went to, because I think that was when both of us realized that like things were going to be worse in normal and people needed as much help as we could possibly get in.
Yeah. So basically, once we finished up in that.
Area, we went from where we were, we went a little bit further south. I don't know, I was like maybe a ten minute drive, you think.
Once we got back to the main road, yeah, we ran into a group of three men.
Believe they were more Aitanian again, a different group of men. Yeah, when we came across them, they were kind of walking almost like just middle of the lane on the road. Yeah, yeah, which was kind of like keyed us in that, like, oh, like we should stop and check on these guys.
They overall seemed to be doing pretty well, Like.
They were obviously very tired exhausted from their journey, but they were telling us that, you know, like oh we've got another two, We've got two more they fell behind. So we gave these guys you know again the normal like food, gatorade, water, checked in with them to see if they had like any wounds or anything we could treat, and they seemed pretty good. So we hung out in that area for I don't know, it was maybe five ten minutes max. Before we saw the people that they
had mentioned were further down the road. So another two guys came up. We again gave them what supplies they seemed like they needed. The The fifth guy in that group seemed to be in the worst shape of all of them. Yeah, he was upright and you know, like moving under his own power, but like you just kind of see that little wobble in his step.
So we kind of took some extra time with him.
I believe we got him like a little ice pack to put on the back of his neck, just to try and bring his body temperature down, and then kind of just got that. All five of them regrouped together under a tree some shade, and then from there we went I don't know, maybe we got maybe three hundred feet down the road and we came across a group of five I believe they were all Spanish speakers.
I didn't catch where they were from.
Yeah, I think once it from Colombia. I can't remember where the whole group were from, though.
But that was so far.
Everyone we had run into was by a parent's middle aged men I shouldn't say middle age, like young adult. Yeah, yeah, like thirty thirty five maybe, like you know, somewhere in that range.
Yeah.
Yeah, they could be anywhere from like twenties to thirties. Yeah. Like I think some of that is because it was such a difficult day that like some folks who have children or older people maybe decided not to make the journey that day. Yeah, they had that choice. But this, yeah, this group was yeah, this.
Group of five we I want to say it was three men in that age range.
Uh.
There was a woman with them, and then a kid that, if I had to guess, probably fifteen at the oldest.
Like I seemed to remember, like clocking that he had braces on, like he just he seemed young.
Yeah, he seemed like a child. Yeah, it wasn't like a young man.
And so you know, we got off to the side of the road again, we're giving them food, water, all that again, like this is all off.
The main road for that area.
And like as we're interacting with these groups, you know, like several border patrol cars are just zooming passed like yeah, just crazy.
But nobody.
Nobody's stopping the check in and nobody's you know, like you know, stopping them from big finger quotes here, invading right.
Getting getting on a bus as like people are going so mad about us. We oh before they got mad about Haitian people.
But yeah, so we we worked with that group. Nobody really seemed to be in dire straits there. So we're working towards a trailhead which we could actually see from where we were working with this group of five and there's like a little bridge there and we just kind of see some heads popping up.
Yeah, and we're like, oh, I think you have my binoculars.
We were like checking to see.
Yeah, and we're like oh, like we like we need to get over there.
So we get back in the truck after we get them kind of you know, as settled as we can, and we get over to this trailhead, which.
Is like, really I think where the day because.
Like you said, like it was kind of a normal day up until we got to this trailhead and then things kind of seemed to take a turn.
Yeah, talking of taking a turn, why don't we take a turn to advertisements and then come back.
That's why they pay you the big bucks.
That I see.
You see that no one saw that comes. All right, we are back. I hope that you haven't bought anything. You could give money to board Lands Relief Collective of Google lip.
Oh, yeah, that would be really nice. I would appreciate that.
Yeah, why would I do that?
Don't go to Chumber because you know, Yeah, so we got over there and like that location, just to give people like paint a picture. There's the road which we were traveling on, and then parallel to that, parallel to it ninety degrees as a dirt road which we pulled into the road that we were traveling on was going over a creek which is dry at this time of year.
So there's a bridge and it was under that bridge that people were hiding from the sun, and so that's why we couldn't see them until we were very close. And yeah, describe what we saw there, because that was when I was like, oh shit, that was when we started to run out of enough bottles for people to drink out of. So we had to like just stop opening like cans of energy drink and beer and stuff or whatever we had just to use them as bottles.
Yeah, So we we pull off the road and underneath that bridge. I mean I didn't do like a head count necessarily or anything, but there was a group of like fifteen twenty at least. Yeah, you know, again like mostly men in that like twenty to thirty age range, but there were moms with kids and there just there were so many people. We at that point we had
you know, some water bottles, some gatorades. We had that one five gallon jug with the ice water in it left that we were going to take up to the top of this pass, and we just like by the time we got done getting every one water, we ran out of water in the jug. I think we had just about cleared out all the food we had.
We had no more Gator aids.
We were scrounging around in the back of your truck trying to just find vessels essentially to give people what liquid we could, you.
Know, like get at shake out of the ice.
Yeah, it was not good.
And so then that was when there was one young man I believe he said he was from Jordan. He was trying to get our attention and telling us, you know, like I've got two like I've got family up there too, two family And he keeps pointing up up the mountain toward the pass, saying he's got two family members up there. And then another man I didn't catch where he was from, but he was telling us there were two family members
of first man. And then there was another three men traveling up there and they were trying to indicate to us that one of them had heart problems.
Yeah, it was how they how they put it.
So we kept telling like, hey, like you know, we're we're going to go help them, but the gate to access that the road that goes up that pass was locked. So first we had to figure out like who we could contact to get through the gate. And then that poor guy that you know said his family members were up on that mountain like he desperately, desperately wanted us to drive him up there with us, but we had to keep telling him, like we just we.
Can't, Like it is so illegal for us to put you in a vehicle. Yeah, thank you anywhere.
Yeah, Like at least the interpretation of the Lower's border patrols easy is that we would be like trafficking them at that point. And like maybe one could defend it in court if the person was like bleeding out or you know something, but pretty much that is something that we can't do.
Yeah, we've been out on a water drop together and just handing out food and water to people on foot next to the truck, and border patrol has like an agent has threatened to write us up for trafficking.
Yeah, yeah, in this particular student, which like I I don't really care. This agent can go fuck himself. Like we were. This girl was probably four years old. I would say, I don't know exactly, I didn't ask, wasn't the most important thing at the time. She was with her mother. They were both from Guinea and a Nigerian woman. Like I speak French, so I was speaking to the Guineaian family and like I remember you were trying to feed the little girl right she had.
Yeah, another another volunteer and I were trying to feed her some trail mix I had, and she she wouldn't touch any of it but the but the dried banana chips that were in there. So yeah, like actually, ever since then, anytime I make trail mix for drops, I always make sure that I've got dry banana trips and they're just you know, in case there's another kid that that's all they'll eat.
Yeah, And I remember like she wasn't very responsive. I've been talking to her mom, and her mother's feet were in a very bad way, like immersion foot. And after a while we were like, this little girl is like not very talkative at all, like maybe to a degree that we should be concerned. And I think we both were all kind of quickly realized she was very cold, like potentially hypothermic. I remember having there. I tried to record some of this for the podcast, but it's all fun,
it's all. I had to wrap her up in a miler blanket such that like I was sitting behind her so that she would get like warm from me, right and sit my jacket so she would get warm from me. And obviously the whole fucking podcast bit is my love blanket noise, Which is a shame because at that point a border patrol agent arrived started swearing at us, accusing us of trafficking, just like as if this little girl
wasn't having the worst day of her life anyway. Yeah, just like someone who's paid by my taxes and your taxes turns up to scream at the only people who are helping her that day, and her right like it scared them. And eventually one of our friends was able to de escalate that situation and those people got taken and hopefully protested, and I hope that they are living a happy life in the US, yeah for sure, But.
Yeah, that was a bad day.
So yeah, we as you said, right, we can't take this guy with us back up the hill, and we're now trying to get so it's about ten kilometers to the top, and it's ten kilometers and I have no idea how it's a lot of climbing, Like it's it's ten kilometers all uphill, and so like it's not really possible for us to hike up that road and get to these people who need help in a timely manner, right in a manner that, so we need to drive.
I think in the end we ended up calling nine one one, Yeah, I think that was what we also called a friend who personally contacted Yeah.
Then yeah, somebody got Calfi out for us.
They opened the gate kind of let us take the lead up that dirt road. Yeah.
I thought that was really cool of them, Like it would have been easy for them to be like, yeah, we're here to save you and like credit where it's to you. They were like, your truck is going to go fast enough, fire rangine, you guys should go first.
Yeah.
So we get a portion of the way up and we run into the group of three men that we were told were there and were At this point, I think is when we realized like, oh shit, like the only water we have on our that we have at all is our personal water. So yeah, I actually I have water bottle right here next to me. I I like was literally pouring what I had left into their.
Water bottle for them.
Yeah.
Luckily this is like an insulated thing, so it's cold for them. But you know, we're trying to figure out like shit, like when we get to when we find these two women, the family members, the guy kept talking about like yeah, what.
Are like, what are we going to do?
Then?
Like I think we ended up giving when we came across them further up the mountain at that point, like we basically just had my backup now Gene. Yeah left, So we were like, hey, we want you to to take this, Like, we just gave them the full now Gene and tried our best to explain to them that we were going to go to the top make sure that there wasn't anybody else up there, and then we were going to come back down to check on them.
So we do that.
We go up to the top where you and some other volunteers have built like a little shade structure to try and just give people some relief.
Yeah.
I didn't built that one. I built the that previous one that got torn down. Okay, bye. Some type of cop lovely yeah great, really nice, really help. It wasn't actually a cop, to be fat I'm pretty sure it was. It was some other federal agency BLM or BP or someone.
But so when we got up to the top, we didn't see anybody else. We couldn't find anybody up there. We were doing our best to try and use our language skills to.
Yeah, we were just shouting in various languages to see if anyone needed help.
Then the CalFire guys met back up with us up there, you know, figured out like hey, like you know, we we're not seeing anybody else. So you and I decided that basically all we could do at that point was go back down the mountain and go further south to a little town that's like pretty much right on the border.
I think, yeah, it's literally a border crossing.
Yeah, because we ended up, we drove down, checked in on the women, the two women that were traveling down. They seemed to be doing about as okay as they could at the time.
Again, it's like I.
Don't know, one hundred and five, Yeah, completely exposed up there.
Yeah, there's no tree, c co a, you're not getting any shape.
I don't I.
Don't remember it being particularly windy at all, so it's just.
Like hot still still.
Yeah, But we get down the mountain kind of give everyone, like the big group that's there under the tree at the bridge at the bottom heads up of what we're doing. We go into this little town and like again like tiny little place, like it's basically from what I saw just parking lots and then like a gas station and a border crossing.
Yeah, that's it.
We went into this gas station and bought I think like sixteen gallons worth of water.
Yeah, they had to go round the back to get the rest of the water. Like we took all the gallons jugs they had.
They had one of those little like displays of like I don't know, I think it was like little keebler like cheese cracker sandwiches.
Like we just bought the whole splay.
Yeah, just to try and give people some some more food. And then from there, like we just high tailed it back to the bridge, like distributed out some more water, checked in with them again, just like explained like we're going back up. And as we were going back up the mountain, we started seeing these like little rain drops hit in our windshield. Yeah, like oh that that can't
be good, you know, so we continue up. When we when we found the two women, they were both just kind of lying in some shade just on the road.
Yeah.
It was not a good scene.
Yeah, and so we got out.
We mixed I think it was we got one gallon of cold water and then we took another of the gallon jugs and just mixed up like a full thing with some gatorade powder we found in your truck. Yeah, and just kind of sat down with them, and then we got help well with some translation over the phone, trying to like talk to these women figure out like what exactly was going on, because one of them kept like kind of pointing to her chest.
Yeah, and she was doing the like thump thump thump, yeah, which is concerning.
Yeah.
You know, like through through.
The help we got translating over the phone, just basically explained like we like we just absolutely cannot transport to like we we want nothing more in this world than to be able to take you down the mountain, but we just can't.
Yeah.
Like I would very happily put those ladies in my truck and driven them down, Like that would have considerably improved my day.
Yeah.
I did do that, because it is fucking heartbreaking trying to tell someone they have to keep walking when they're maybe halfway down and they're like just lying there, exhausted, ready to Yeah I don't know what, just give up, but yeah, it fucking sucks. It sucks. We now know that several people died that day and the day before
and the day after. I guess I don't know exactly how many because the medical examiner hasn't confirmed, and I'm not going to say their names or really much about the location beyond that because I want to respect the privacy of their remains and their family, and so until we hear from them, I won't. But like it's I found out some people had died in the vicinity of where we were, and I don't know exactly where it's
people died. I don't know who they were, but like it's a really fucking hard thing to say with Like I think those people we helped were probably okay. I think between the fact that as we'll get onto a giant thunderstorm soaks soaks them to the degree that we had to give them like ponchos, and then but just having to deal with like I would happily I have driven up and down that road all day, but people in my truck wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest.
We're not not able to and somebody journey ended in tragedy, and like it's I don't know, Like we we try our best rather a lot, and it's not we do more than enough, Like I'm not saying that, like I say, it's own any way on us, but like we would love to do more if they would let us, and like shit like that, like not began to put people in the vehicle. It's just it's just hard to live with, you know, when you're sitting and bed at night or whatever, Yeah, having your dinner Like it sucks.
But yeah, because like there's I said, I feel like there's this picture like when you talk about San Diego or just kind of southern California in general, it's oh, like it's sunny beaches.
It's nice days, like it's mild weather year round.
But as we've said multiple times at this point, like it gets fucking hot. It gets It was one hundred and five degrees on that mountain. A thunderstorm rolled in, and in a matter of I don't know, twenty thirty minutes, our conversation went from like, oh, like I hope they are you know, are not coming down with a heat illness or you know, gonna get heat stroke, to like, oh shit, like are they gonna go hyperthermic? Like what what do we have to get them warm? We're trying
to cool them down. Now, we're trying to warm them up. Like, what kind of cruel joke is this?
Yeah, like it does seem like this the most perverse thing to be. Like then worried about fucking lightning on the other side of the valley, you know, like it was insane just from like we then we carried on up the mountain, dropped some water, and then returned down to check on these women again. And when we were at the top of the mountain, we could look down
on the thunderstorm. Yeah, see it beneath us. And then yeah, we drove into it, and like, just what an apocalyptic scenario to be in, you know, like it's jumping with rain, triple digit temperatures and or you have the only thing you're allowed to do is walk, like it was difficult. And then like, I guess the last thing the last person we ran into as we came down the mountain was the guy who'd been pleading with us to go
help them. Yeah, God, and like had decided Border Patrol had collected everyone to take them to process them right for their asylum claim. And that we've heard on this podcast before about what it's like when that happened. It's not nice. It's not a pleasant stay. It's now considerably worse. I imagine people are being moved to Texas. They stayed for weeks. I met a young man a few months ago now who was in detention for three or four weeks before I presume being deported back. I can't find
any record of him being released, which fucking sucks. So like this guy had chosen not to go back, and instead he'd chosen to hike back up the mountain without any food, without any water, to try and rescue these women, which it's an incredibly selfless thing to do, but he was in a bad way, right, yeah.
Because so we passed the two women on the way down, kind of gave them little snacks here, like just try to encourage them as much as we could. And then when we ran into this man, he you know, kind of had that I don't know what other word to use, but kind of like crazed look in his eyes, like he wasn't sure, like yeah I do I just go back down, like I can't leave them, like I need to keep going, like I feel like I can't. And so we tried to get him settled as much as we could.
We got him some water.
I think you dug out some like gummy worms or something from one of your bags.
Yeah, it had a bag of hot It wasn't It's like an open bag of horrabo that he was happy to receive.
Yeah, and uh, you know, we just did our best to try and convince him to just kind of sit there rest a little bit and you know, like assure.
Him that they're coming. They're walking down now.
And it was honestly kind of beautiful the one woman, because the two women had kind of split up a little bit while they were walking downhill. So the one comes around the bend and like when they saw each other, like he just kind of.
Like you could see like just everything about.
Him just kind of elevated and he, you know, pepinist stuff, was like, oh my god, I'm so happy to see you.
And yeah, he got up because he'd just been kind of slouched there almost like just looking exhausted.
Yeah, so like seeing them kind of reunite was really nice, and they had a quick conversation and seemed like they kind of decided she was going to keep going down, and you know, he just seemed like energized by that and decided to keep going up to find the other woman to make sure she made it down as well.
Yeah, which was like not an easy choice. I'm sure of him, Like no, yeah, Like at that point again, we were out of food. We we mixed him up some gatorade, and I think we took the sugar backets from MRI and like mixed them in there and some salt, just like yeah, try and give him, like I guess
something some fluid he could hold on too. So who doesn't get hyper and our tree make right, which is definitely something when you see the amount of salt on people, like the white crusting on them, like they're only drinking water and they're not replacing electrolytes, like it becomes a concern. Yeah, that I guess was us for the day, right, Like we we drove home, and like we don't get to really find out how anyone did and we don't get to follow up, right, Like it's kind of not how
that works. But yeah, that's just one day. Like I spoke to Raphael from and Helistad he was out on Monday, said it was just as bad, right doing a search and rescue on Monday for a mother and child and that they were able to rescue them, and like I felt like it was a value to highlight what we saw in one day because it's it's every day. I mean, it's cooled off now Onnesday, it's we that's hot, which is good, but it's every day at the moment.
Well, and I.
Guess for like context, cooled off means it's like load of mid nineties.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's still like it's still not safe to make that hike without water. People are often mugged right when they cross the border or sometimes before. Sometimes they get their bags stolen. That often involves them getting their water bottles stolen that they've taken with them, right makes that journey a lot more dangerous. They also get their phone stolen, so even if they need help,
they can't call nine one one. Border Patrol sometimes has like rescue beacons that you can press them and it calls Border Patrol. On the route that we run for the back half of the day, there are none of those I saw, Like I know, I came back and then you know, I sort of tried to process my day and get on with my life when you do, and and I saw the presidential debate last night, and it just makes me so fucking angry. I mean, we
shouldn't expect anymore from these people. They're politicians. They don't give a shit about you, they don't give a shit about me, and they certainly don't care about these poor, desperate people. And like, I understand that people want to vote for Kamala because maybe she's less bad than Trump, but like, I have a real fucking hard time thinking about the parents of the young man who died at the border. Yeah, having to deal with Okay, well, she's
less bad than Trump. Cool, it doesn't bring their baby boy back, you know, Like and just seeing both of them, Like, the whole framing of the immigration discussion was how do we reduce numbers and make it harder. They didn't entertain for a moment that someone might come here because they've got nowhere else to go and they need to be safe, or because they want to work hard and have a better future for their family. There are a million reasons
to come here, right. I came here to fucking do a PhD in Spanish history, and no one made me race my bike, No no one made me walk across the desert. You know. It's the reasons were a lot more valid than mine were. And like I know I guess, I guess we should take a commercial break.
Okay, we're back.
I guess I want to finish up. You told me a story about why you started volunteering, which I thought was really meaningful and I'd like people to hear it. Would you mind sharing that with everyone?
Oh?
Yeah, no problem.
So my grandmother on my father's side came to the US from Panama to go to college. My grandma on my mother's side. My understanding is they originally came to the US because somewhere down the line they were German. One of them was a duke fell in love with you know, like a servant girl or something, you know that old story. Yeah, got ostracized from the family and fled to you know, the United States, and so like even though looking at me like, I'm a why does white can be freckles?
And all?
Right?
Like my family it's immigrants like you go back, yeah, like you know, as we all are. And god, this was twenty nineteen. I didn't know what I was doing. I felt stuck in my job. I just kind of wanted to get away from my family for you know, lack of a better phrase, And I thought, hell why not the like why not the Peace Corps. Go do something good on the government's dime. And you know, see the world, it's you know, it's big, it's sexy, it's foreign.
And so I went.
I got placed in Swatini, which is a country in southern Africa, and I was in the youth development sector there.
So I got placed.
I was working at a high school there, and I was having a conversation one day with the religion teacher who just couldn't he could not understand the idea of like why we don't teach religion in high schools in the US. Like he's like, you know, how can you learn to understand somebody else's point of view if you're
not allowed to learn about it. And so like talked about like how we value the concept of separation of church and state, and it just kind of got on the topic of different viewpoints between our two cultures like that, and this man looked at me and said, I feel so blessed that there is a country in this world, like the United States, where there's no poverty, nobody goes hungry, everybody has a job, and there are people like you willing to leave such a beautiful place to come here
and help us, which you know, naturally, I was like, oh, like that's, you know, really nice of you to say.
But you know, like in the United States, like we have people that.
Go hungry, we you know, deal with poverty, homelessness, et cetera, et cetera. And I'll never forget this guy looked me dead in the eyes and just said like, oh, then why are you here?
Why aren't you at home helping them?
And it just kind of shattered me in this you know, like yeah, no, like you're right, Like I totally and completely joined the Peace Corps for like the super selfish reasons and so, like I said, I was there twenty nineteen, so I was there.
I don't know if you were.
The listeners heard about this thing called COVID and the pandemic that happened, But I was part of the global evacuation order that went out for Peace Corps. Came back to the US, moved around a little bit, and last year I was listening to your podcast at work. You interviewed a couple of people that do work with Borderland's Relief Collective and just kind of thought to myself, we like, shit, I live near there, Like I can carry stuff in a backpack, Like I know how to hike, you know,
why not me? Why not go see how I can help out? And you know, it's been a year and some change at this point that I've been with the group, and you know, like it's not like I've got some big fancy degree in like international relations or anything like that.
I'm just a I'm some guy.
I'm a graphic I'm a graphic designer that can carry stuff at a backpack. Yeah, but you know that makes all the difference sometimes.
Yeah, it's just being willing.
To go out there and you know, like put that compassion to you.
Know, to work.
Yeah.
I think it's like we're just two dudes with the truck and like a good credit card to buy water. It doesn't take a brilliant so like command, I speak a couple of other languages, but often like maybe I'll make the image for the show of my Google Translate app for that day. Yeah, Like we we're just using the tools that most of us have, right, Like, and
it doesn't have to be at the border. Obviously people listening on the border, but like things will be so much worse there if local folks didn't just take it upon themselves. To do the things that the state refuses to do. And like that applies to the unhoused population too, write like I know my friends were also carrying water for them this weekend because it was hot trying to get and the city shut down the Homelessness Resource Center because the temperatures were too high for the stuff, which
is fucking just something else. But I don't think we should expect anymore from the state. That's not what it's for. It's not to keep us safe. It's to keep capital safe, it's to keep wealth safe. It's to keep a certain class of people faith. And it camouflages itself and all these institutions which say they're there to look after us, but like when it comes down to it, like when those ladies are lying on the dirt, it's just two toots in a truck kind of scrounge around for gatorade. Right,
And like I want people listening. I know I harp on this a lot, but like, the only way that we fixed is it's not someone else, it's not posting. I would love it if you could donate, right, I mean, I'll include a link in the show. That'd be great, But I would love it so much more if you could do something wherever you are, Like, just don't think that anyone doing this is special. Like, of course the things that I think they're special, people enjoy spending time
with them. But like, you could do it too. There's nothing that's inherently stopping you from doing it. And it doesn't matter who wins the election, right, it really doesn't matter. Every year that Joe Biden has been president, more people have died than the year before. And he was the guy who was supposed to be kind. He didn't even run on a harsh border policy. Harris is running on a half border policy. It's only going to get worse.
She's even renegged on building more wall, like they are beginning to construct wall around her cumber in the places where we looked after people last winter. So that will push people to value of the moon where it is impassable ter rain. Yeah, more people will die in the cold, and more people will die in the heat, and I
guess we'll probably be out there too. You're trying to help them, But I just want everyone listening, Like, I know we've covered the election a lot, it doesn't I don't want to tell you it doesn't matter I'm sure it matters, like it matters for my friends in Kurdistan who Trump fucking abandoned left to die after they gave
thousands of their children to fight. Isis right? But even if Harris wins, like, donations went down so much in the Biden era compared to the Trump era, and people died in the desert, people died in Tijuana, right, because that's what this system does. But people stop caring when a lot of big commercial networks start reporting on it. And I would like you will still to care whoever wins the election. And I'd like you will still to care before the election. And the way you can show
that you care is showing up for your community. Whatever it is, right, Harmelo isn't going to fucking solve homelessness either. So yeah, you got anything to leave people with if anything you want to you want to say, want to plug just.
You know, order lands, relief, collective order kindness.
Raphael's group, the Anhelez de Desierto.
I think, yeah, you know, just if you can.
Come out, like if you're in the area, if you can come out, you can help great, Like the more people that carry supplies, the more we can leave. If you're not in the area or you know, like hiking and carrying heavy things is not what you're into. Donating always super appreciated. I know, specifically Order Lands Relief Collective. Every single cent that is donated to us goes to supplies that we leave for migrants. And even if it's only a few dollars, I mean, like we're talking bottled water.
I mean the sixteen gallons of water that we bought I think ended up running somewhere in ballpark like fifty bucks. Like yeah, you know, like it's it's water or gatorade. Sometimes it's you know, off brand gatorade. So like a few dollars can go a long way, and that long way could mean saving someone's life.
Yeah, totally. So you know, whatever you can give I would be appreciated. I know our friend Rafael from Lochandelesto is his vehicle broke this weekend. He does search and rescue. I gave you got a few bucks and you want to pass him his way. It's Los and Hell's like the town del Desierto do or go put that on the link to but we'll put both those in the show notes. Please do whatever you can and yeah, hopefully next time I talk to you about border stuff, it'll
be better than you. Thank you, Jons, Yeah, thanks mat.
Hey.
We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast Us, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.