It Could Happen Here Weekly 189

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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 it could happen here. A podcast that is in many cases about organizing. I AnGR host MEA Wong and with me is one of the most experienced organizers I know, Margaret Kiljoy.

Oh no, hi, I'm a little out of practice, but I have done it a lot.

You know, Margaret says this and also has been doing shit for like one bazillion years. This is and I will say this, the sign of you that you are running into a good organizer is when you talk to them about their organizing and they immediately start downplaying it. That's when you know you haven't captured a good organizer. If they started immediately going, I'm the best fucking organizer in the world. Run like hell, this is an asshole who sucks. Somebody's like, ah, like I did this a

I remember once I went to a thing wait that was put on and there was this, uh they were kind of turfy people who are coming through and we didn't totally know that right away, and their their pitch about why they were such a good experienced organizers, as one of them was like, and this person has been organizing for more than three years, and it was just like, Okay, every person you are giving this talk to has done this for at least three times as.

Long as that.

And don't get me wrong, if you're listening and you've been organizing for three years, you've learned a lot.

I'm not trying to tell you you're a bad organizer.

You might be a better organizer and someone's been doing it longer, but don't use that as your selling point.

Oh anyway, that's very funny. Yeah, So okay, this episode, we are asking you a very very important question. Okay, you want to change something about the world. I don't know what that thing is that is up that is for you to determine the question that you need to be asking is are you organizing because you want to feel cool? Or are you organizing because you want whatever

I really like this way of phrasing it, that it's a technology, Like it's a way of applying ideas to get something to happen, even if a lot of it is instead there is an art to it, but like, yeah, no, there's there's stuff you can like learn and apply and it's Yeah, technology is a good way of framing it.

Yeah, And it's one of these things where you know you can kind of if you don't know how to do this, and you have people you can kind of sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit functional, and the moment it runs into a stress point, it will collapse completely. And this is a thing that like, you know, I have talked to I have done a lot of these. I have talked to a lot of people who've done this. I have like I have been in a rooms of people knew how to run meetings.

Yeah, it's like a when you sit around with your friends and like, oh, someone should do this. No one's actually named someone. Yeah you know, I mean somewhere, there's a non binary person.

Somewhere, but shout outs to someone.

Yeah yeah, if you're listening to someone, congratulations you're a master level troll.

But like my friend, don't ask their name was don't ask.

It's great anyway, whatever, but but someone needs to get something done. And if you leave a thing being like ah, someone should do this, you didn't organize. You have to say, yeah, this is what the following people are doing.

Yep.

Also shout out also to everyone who has been in meetians with me and are like Mark, I'm insufferable in meetings. I try really hard, but anyway, whatever.

Oh god, okay, okay. So this largely is going to be like how to run a meeting? What a one. We're going to start at like zero zero zero, which is you need a place to meet, and that place to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying to go to the meeting. This is a thing that people screw up a lot. It is not that hard to find the place as accessible for everyone to go. You can do this. There are lots of places you can have meetings, depending on how sensitive the meeting is,

Yeah.

I don't think bars is a great idea, but.

I don't think it's accessible to people who are under twenty one, and I don't think it's accessible to people who have problems being around drinking.

That said they happen there.

And I'm not trying to say you're bad for having had meetings there, but I just want to say that.

Yeah, Bars is one that like people go to a lot and like, yeah, there's definitely issues with it, right, But I don't know, like you can have them people's houses. Yeah, sometimes you can like go into like a mesa or whatever. You can go have a meeting there. You can get people to just like go out somewhere and do it. You know, I don't know, like you you are capable of thinking of lots of places where you could have meetings,

Yeah, there's you have to have a certain amount of flexibility in the way that you do things. Because every system, it's the problem with law as a concept, right, is every system can you can find loopholes. And anyone who's been in a lot of meetings has seen people learn how to abuse the process in order to get their position to win by making everyone else too tired to continue, or to use up all of the space in the room,

Something that I tend to believe in for meetings.

Is capable of explaining the process in such a way that even when a lot of people come who are not familiar with the process, they will leave familiar with the process.

Yeah. Yeah, Like to that sort of end, if you need a like, okay, we need a written procedure thing, the thing I would recommend is called Rusty's Rules of Order, which is an unbelievably paired down version of Roberts Rules of Order that was like specifically developed to be used in like union circles in activist circles, and it's like the total PDF of it is twenty five pages. That makes it sound way longer than it actually is. Like several of those pages are like a glossary, and like

I was supposed to make a joke about at the top of all this. I'm sorry everyone. Everyone has been waiting for me to make this joke. I'm certain, but Mia, which one of us is going to keep stacked during this meeting so that we know who can.

Talk products and services support this podcast? Are gonna keep stack and we're gonna go to the right the funt. Now we are.

Back, and I really just want to say, as timekeeper, I'm a little bit upset about how much time that those ads used during the meeting and if we can.

Not fucking damn Okay, we will explain what a stack is and sorry it is in a second. However, COMMA, So things you need to do at the very short of a meeting. You need to take like two minutes to do this, but you need to explain how the meeting fucking works, and you need to assign everyone rolls. And you can't assume that everyone who is going to be in this meeting understands how the rules work, like

And for anyone just say, you know what we're saying right now, we'll explain stack more. That is the order in which people talk. It is a way of like keeping track of the line of who's gonna talk when.

Yeah, I'm realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit. But you need to make sure that everyone understands how the meeting is supposed to work. And you know, usually that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something and then okay, you explain it to them and that's

Mm hmm.

We'll get more into that in a second. Sometimes people create the agenda of beforehand. Sometimes you start you set the agenda at the beginning of the meeting. But like you do want an agenda so people know what you're doing.

And it should be similar that everyone can see a whiteboard or like I guess in a zoom meeting notes or a dock that everyone has open.

Yeah, yeah, you want to make sure everyone has it. Okay, and this this is the point where we need to talk about roles. So part of the technology for this right and the stack is a big piece of technology to keep track of who's talking. But a big part of what the technology of this is is a bunch of roles that you assign people and that ideally everyone rotates through so you learn how to do all of them, and so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power

I think that the important thing to think about a facilitator is that most people come from a background of assumed authoritarian politics. Yeah, assumed politics where someone is in charge. Even our democracies are built around this idea that you

Of a whatever.

You could use the word leader in a lot of ways, and some of them are positive and not authoritarian, and so in that context they are leading people through the meeting, but they are absolutely not only not the decision maker, they are less the decision maker than everyone else. Choosing to be a facilitator of a meeting is choosing to go in and say, I'm not actually even going to push for my side unless you are in a like tight knit enough group where everyone knows each other and

And yeah?

It is to keep people on track, and every meeting is going to have different I really like a strong facilitator. I really like someone who's going to shut me up. I really like someone who's like, yeah, that's not what we're talking about right now. And it's hard because your feelings get hurt, like especially, for example, someone says a joke and then someone else is a joke, and then you're the third person and you say the joke too, and the facilitator like, yeah, that's enough of that. We

We are back. I think this is also you know, as we've talked about sort of in some way in a lot of ways, like how important the role the facilitator is. This is a role you need to rotate because that is a role. It's like those are skills that everyone needs. Like if everyone knows did you just do the I did?

I did I don't know whether people still do it metal hands versus twinkle fingers.

Sorry, okay, this is completely unfortunately podcasting is an audio medium. So all of you just missed me losing my mind because Margaret, Margaret did one of my hand signs for agreement. It's like, shit, God damn it.

Okay, we're talking about meetings that just came naturally.

Well, we'll get the hand signes later, but like you know, you actually do you all of these things should be road hitting, and you should be teaching everyone to be able to do all of the facilitation roles because a okay,

To somewhere there's someone whose name is the whole lost kid and anyway whatever, anyway, okay.

Okay, yeah. But the other thing about it, right is the more everyone knows about these skills, the more effective of a participant, and the more effective you can be making decisions in the meeting like that, the more everyone understands how the process works and knows how to do it and knows how to because like being in a meeting and being in community with other people and making decisions together is a skill and we don't have it.

Yeah.

And the more you're rotating through all the roles and the more you understand how everything works, the more you understand, you know, how to do the facilitation stuff of like getting everyone to figure out what the thing that they want is and how to express that and how to like how to work together. The more you understand that as like a person who's not facilitating, the more you can understand like how to actually do democracy. Yeah, and it rules.

And it's also the fact that like if you are indispensable to your group, you've actually failed your group. Yeah, especially when you're talking about stuff like activism, that has a certain risk. If you are the only medic in your affinity group, that is a problem because if you get arrested, now there's no medic. If you're the only facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator. Happens when you're sick or in jail, and you all have a very intense meeting that you have to do, and you need

That's the thing both for meetings in the way it was explained to me, and this is a more kind of I don't know what term beat us for, but it was taught to me as your job is to organize yourself out of a job. Yeah, totally. Okay, So we're going to move on to the second roll, which

Yep.

That is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to making sure a meeting runs at all. Most groups tend to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack, where you know, this is part of we were talking about earlier, like step forward and step back, But when you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people who speak less in front. And this works sort of

Yeah, although I do think that there's a little bit of a like some people don't want to specifically be called on in that way. Yeah, and so that's kind of a like learning to read the room skill definitely about when you want to encourage people to step up versus other people are like no, I don't have anything particular to say, and I don't want to get you know, singled out. I think that in smaller meetings sometimes the facilitator can keep stack. Larger meetings, that's a terrible plan.

But yeah, it's large meetings you need to you can't.

Yeah, I've been both to be doing it, Yeah, because you need someone keeping track of who's raising their hands when and things like that. Sometimes you're actually even writing the stack on a whiteboard so people can see.

Yeah, yeah, you've like a piece of paper. Yeah.

I have been in meetings that sort of self facilitate fairly effectively in smaller groups, where a thing that people can do is if they have a thing they want to say, they hold up one finger and they keep that finger up, and if someone else is something that they want to say, they put up two fingers, and then if someone else is something they want to say, they put up three fingers. And so you can have this method by which people track their own stack. But

Yeah, And I think part of this also it's important to remember, is like this is like one oh one, oh yeah sorry, as an advanced skill kind of And I'm introducing some things that are probably more advanced than one on one, like like like they're like, okay, figuring out why someone is uncomfortable talking on a like this person wants to talk, doesn't feel comfortable to and if you ask them, they will say something. And this person doesn't feel comfortable talking because they don't want to talk.

I'm actually derailing again. I'm so sorry. This is an example. If there was a facilitator in this call, they would be making me shut up.

That is what's happening.

Yeah no, but but but this is actually like this this this is this is the one time I've ever wished there was like videos you could see the hand gestures because like the thing about this, right is, once you are good at meetings and like if you have people who do this and you talk about what the handjesters are beforehand, that's also important. You can't even if if you're very good at meetings and you're still listening

I though, like speed run the concepts of some of them, because I think they are useful to understand. Yeah, yeah, because it's hard to imagine when you amagine meetings. I think about this a lot because I write meetings into fiction, which is a very hard thing to do and make them entertaining, because they're also hard to be entertained and

Yeah, yeah, and that's likely and that's a that's possure. While I was talking about like like that's that's dependent on who's in the room and what the room is and like.

But I think that a a I agree without needing to say anything is essential.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Other ones to just know of is that there are things like people will say like please move this along.

It's a way of saying, hey.

Facilitator, please shut this person up usually, or can we talk about something else. There's ones that are direct response, which is saying I would like to jump stack because this person has just insulted the honor of my family or whatever, and it's like it's up to the facilitator to decide whether to do these. Another one is point of process, which is saying like, hey, I actually don't want to talk about the thing we're talking about. I

Yeah. You know, as much as I've been talking about being boring, like, I've had things that were technically organizing meetings that were like some of the most transformational experiences in my life totally because me and a bunch of people who you know, a bunch of people really close to me, like came together and we figured out how to do something, and there is a beauty there that is and this is personal to why it's hard to talk about these things, right because like the technical process

Yeah.

No, it's it's the other side of the coin of the first time you watch the police run away from you. It is a way of coming together with other people to accomplish something and make something powerful. Is meetings, and it is also it's interesting because we talk about how men will often take up too much space in meetings.

But no, it's good. Well, and I think there's a new important thing here too, because like we're talking about the politics of like meetings themselves, right of like the the you know, the actual political angle of what it means to have a democracy, where what democracy means you

Yeah.

Yeah, but this is also a thing where like the way you structure a meeting is political. It doesn't seem like it, right, but you can have a meeting where, you know, it's like the fucking plentipotentiary meeting of like the executive committee of I don't know, the People's Congress, the Chinese companies, party or whatever. Those are not the

Yes.

Yeah, that's the way you can do a meeting, right, And that's political and it fucking sucks. And we're trying to teach you how to do a meeting where, you know, we do democracy, where everyone comes together and we like do a thing. Yeah, and we will get to more roles next week. This was originally planned to be one episode. It is not one episode. It is now two episodes. But the upside is that we solved a bunch of the fundamental logistical problems about how to build a free society.

Oh shit, the vibes checker is okay, okay, okay, please continue.

Okay, let's do timekeeper. Timekeeper extremely important person. You want someone with like a watch or something, and the timekeeper's job is to give people reminders of like how much time things are taking. So you know a thing you can do is like, okay, so we know we have this much time allocated for something, right, so we have twenty minutes to talk about this, okay, So like ten minutes and you go, we have ten minutes left, we have five minutes left, we have like fifteen minutes left. Yeah,

MIA's guidelines of order. Is that what you're calling this?

Oh god, no, we'll take it. We'll take you.

What more?

Digression digression, which is that the anarchy symbol, the A with the circle around it is from a per dawned phrase that's the circle is actually an o because the original thing was anarchy. The original saying is anarchy is the mother of order. Yeah, and that's that's where that comes from. So I was gonna make it like me a's MEA's like procedure disorder whatever joke, but it's like no, no, no, this is actually like anarchy is order. Baby.

I believe in an organized society. I just believe in an organically organized society. That is from the to use the Zapatista phrase from the bottom and the left.

Yep, okay, So that that's timekeeper the note taker. Sometimes you need to decide whether you want notes of your meeting. Yeah, it depends on how crime you are. Yeah. I hear this all the time from people making jokes about the scene for the Wire that I've never seen the wire, but everone's making jokes as the scene for the Wire where guy goes, are you taking notes of the criminal continency? So okay, are are you going to have a note taker?

Things yeah, although okay, So there's two weird funny things about this one. Sometimes people who tend not to want to talk much in a meeting but also maybe have an attention span where they would prefer to be doing something at all times prefer to be notea yeah. But famously, the International Workingman's Association or whatever, the the First International was an organization of a lot of different stripes of leftists.

Yeah. On the other hand, if you're like not worried.

About that, you can just have a person who's like, I just really want to be the one who takes notes. It really depends on everything's going to be contextual. I just wanted to tell that story about Marx.

No, like this is this is the story of how Marx became Marx by taking a note taking job and then becoming the person who could wh would write the

That's what the Robert not of the rules of order, but of the behind the bassards was saying about, Oh, the Cambodia man, the horrible de man and killed everyone. Oh Paul Pott was that he he was the quiet guy at the back.

Yep, same kind of guy can be extremely dangerous. The guy who says everything all the time can be dangerous. Quiet person also can be very dangerous and just never trust anyone. That's the answer. Wait now, oh, hold on, hopefully we're not producing pullpot in these meetings. Okay. So the last like official role that I want to talk about, and there's a lot, there's like a million other roles that people use. I want to talk about the vibes checker.

Yeah?

And is just something we need to do about it? And some of this is like okay, everyone is clearly really tired, let's go get lunch. And that's like a pretty easy sort of vibe checker thing. But then also like I don't know, this is partially a facilitation job.

Mean, but it's it's in the name how are the vibes And vibe is a fuzzy word, and you know it's the word that people are going to interpret in different ways.

Yeah, and like I as a very sort of materialist, godless atheist, I it's like, okay, this is how people are feeling.

Right.

People also take this in sort of more new agy directions. People take it in like but like you know, like the important thing about this is right you can feel in a meeting when it's really tense or when things like just weird, everything feels off. Everyone is like kissed off or tired or like just grossed out or like

It is good to have someone who's ready to step up and say, yeah, this is this is what's going on.

Can I make a pitch for another role. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't have a name for this role.

The very first activist meeting I went to when the world was young, during the ultra globalization movement. I went into a meeting for New York City indie media and I had no idea what was happening. But it was a public, open meeting and I was a young activist anarchist or whatever. And I went to this thing and someone sat next to me, knew that I was new, and sat next to me and explain what the fuck was happening.

That's a good role.

And I don't know if I would have become an activist if that person hadn't done that, because I went in and it was the middle of a contentious meeting about people talking about some stuff that was pretty important, and I had no idea what was happening, and someone explained it to me. I think it is very important to have someone know who is new and help them

Yeah, the range inside of the meeting structure of like how formal and informal it is changes a lot. And that yeah, that like changes you know, that changes the roles, That changes how all of this stuff works totally. And that's one of the most important things about this is like being flexible, because the point of a meeting is

Then.

Yeah, we just kept talking, So.

Okay, can I make one more pitch about the thing that's important at a meeting?

Yeah?

Yeah. Food.

I think that it's not always going to be appropriate in every specific situation, and there's a lot of things around dietary restrictions and all of these things, but making the meeting feel like a place that is worth going to and a thing that like I think food is basically like hosting and good hospitality and these sort of again invisibilized feminine labor things goes a really long way

Yeah, I've been theorizing this for a while that like we need because like obviously a lot of this technology has been worked out already, but also we have so much further to go in order to like be able to make decisions together in a free society, and like, I think we need to just have an initiative of

Stuff and yeah, it's just a standing thing where if you want to come and like and then okay, just to keep talking about some of the stuff childcare, childcare, you think when you mentioned at the beginning being like making sure that the space is accessible to everyone. And there's a lot of stuff that gets forgotten about. In particular, I would say that single parents are often forgotten about, and I think that having or parents in general, or

I used to do this. Oh that's cool. Yeah, that's like one of the things that I did for some meetings, and like, yeah, there are like meetings that happened. They're like tens meetings that happened because like people stayed and played with everyone's kids. It was a good time.

And yeah, there's also this idea where sometimes meetings people can come in and out of the society that I want to live in has neighborhood assemblies that then move up to larger structures and make decisions right. And in those there's also this thing where it's like you don't always have to go to meetings. Yeah, there's a thing that about democracy that people don't quite always get, which is that sometimes the most beautiful thing we can do for each other is give our agency freely to other

Sorry, no, no, both this is important, right, you know. And also, like doing the childcare was part of that, because like, yeah, it meant like, you know, I was kind of I was like trusting my people in the group to like do the meeting without me while I was just sort of like taking care of like just taking care of kids. And that was a really beautiful thing and it worked really well. It fucking ripped.

Yeah, and you can build multi generational movements, which are the only movements that accomplish That's not true.

Sudden movements also accomplish things.

But when I look at some of the real high water marks from the bottom and the left organizing around the world, you're talking about people who are drawn from hundreds of years of radical legacies, or at least a couple of generations.

Yeah, speaking of generations, I don't know, I don't have a good pivot into this. But okay, so we've been talking a lot of about a lot of the technology that's been used for meetings. I want to talk about a couple of other kinds of meetings that you can have. When I originally was writing this, I was like, Oh, I could fit this whole, this whole section of how

Yeah.

Yeah, and you know, the answer to this turns out as a technology that was developed. Actually don't know the history of the spokest council. I mean it's been around for like a long time. I don't either, like at least like thirty forty years in anarchist circles, but it has really made it out of them. And so spokes council is a meeting of groups, and so it's it's it's a meeting of spokespeople.

Right.

So your group sends like one or two people to a thing. You send like a couple of people and all of the other groups send some people and you come talk about a thing. Yeah, And this is really useful for a number of reasons. One, it's a way for different kinds of groups to interface with each other in ways that they usually don't. So this can be anything from like an affinity group to like an NGO to like a union. Ye, it can scale between different

Yeah?

And yeah, Mark, I assume you've been in like a million of these.

You know.

I have been in a lot of spokes Council meetings. I've been in a fewer of them, and I think you're right, there's been a bit of a drop off.

Yeah, it's funny.

When we were talking earlier, I was like, oh, I haven't done this in a while. I actually do go to meetings every week, but I like, but I used to go to meetings specifically for direct action protests, and that is a thing that I used to have more direct experience with. Yeah, and so I don't want to be like all people stop doing it because I don't

I know you didn't ask for history lesson and I'll speed run it. No, no, no, no, this is good though.

You know, the folks in Chiapas and the Zapatisas have developed a lot of different ideas about how to have bottom up democracy, and they've been moving through different ones. They actually moved to a more decentralized model than they were doing about two years ago, in twenty twenty three. But they went around the world and built organizations by saying everyone, send your people, We're getting together, the People's Global Alliance like all of these like you know, Global South,

They don't.

That is the concept behind a democracy, right, And so theoretically you can send a delegate, and there's two ways of doing it. There's a decision making larger body and there's a coordinating larger body. And if you want to maintain every group's autonomy, it is a coordinating body. You get together and at the spokes council you say, the ten people I represent who will remain nameless, are all willing to get arrested tomorrow, and we're all willing to

Of I'm actually not trying to tell anyone what to do about it.

But so I think that that's part of why the spokes Council has a little bit demas and I actually think that we just need to adapt the spokes Council to the modern context. And I'm sure people do still do them.

So this is where we're getting this is this is what I'm calling them via technology, which is there have been spokes councils recently that are not like that are not this, that are using the idea of the spokes Council but are kind of a different thing. Okay, because there's another thing that you can do with this organizational form, right of everyone sends their delegates together or whatever, like everyone sends their like spokespeople and everyone meets each other.

Yeah.

I've seen this a lot recently in sort of trans organizing, where like all the trans different groups of the city will be like, fuck it, we're showing up to a thing. Yeah, this is a different thing that we will be talking hopefully to some people who run this soon. This was originally supposedly part of this episode before I realized that it was impossible to fit this into this episode, which

Right, it is closer to a general assembly maybe, but maybe that's a pedantic difference or semantic difference.

Yeah, it kind of is, but it's well, so okay. The way I've been conceiving of it is like, if you're specifically getting people together who are there as organizations, it's a spokes council. Yeah, totally. If they're there as themselves, it's a general assembly. Oh that makes sense, even even if they are sort of like representing a thing. But like yeah, like like the scopes and who shows up to them were very different, I think. Oh, and there's

A fish bull is a spokes council where everyone can come and only the spoke can speak. Hm, so you can look in on the fish Oh that's what that's called. Interesting Okay, Yeah, anyway, which is a way to do it. It maintains transparency. It's a way to have a still open meeting, but only but if only one person from the group has empowered to speak, then it's not a nightmare of trying to have six thousand people in a room talk.

The basic beating technology all these things can be used for a whole bunch of different things in a whole bunch of different ways that like we haven't thought of yet.

You could arrange trash pick up in a neighborhood. You can make the government obsolete with meetings and spokes councils and general assemblies and federations and all of these levels of bottom up organizing. And there are places in the world where people have done this.

Yeah. And you know, if we want to close on sort of like this is the political angle of this, right, Like a free society is one that is structured like this, where a bunch of where things happen by people coming together to do them. Yeah. Right, And you can take the sort of like I don't know, I guess you'd call it the workerri'st angle of like I don't know, we need to run a waste treatment plant, yeah right.

Almost every I would say, every real revolution and revolution utionary movement in history is doing a version of this. You can even look at the Soviet concept. The Soviet was the decision making body, it was the assembly and all power to the Soviets with this slogan that literally was inverted by the Bolsheviks, where the entire idea was

And they're like, this is how we do things.

And then those Appatistas, who are good people, were like, you're right, that's how we do things, you know, and they like built up this model. And you have a similar thing happening with the area called Rojeva in north east Syria, where like basically people were like, actually, the indigenous Kurdish model of doing things is much more this egalitarian method and democratic method.

And then okay.

And the other thing is you can do it in the workers's model, but there's also people who've messed around with it and done things like you know what, maybe the school isn't run by the teachers. Maybe the school is run by the teachers, the parents and the students, you know. And maybe the food distribution center is a combination of the workers of the food distribution center and the people who make use of it. So maybe the trash pickup is both the workers and the people who

I will tell you that. Yeah, but this is like, you know, I have had to learn to shut the fuck up in meetings. Yeah, me to, but doing it has made meetings better. It's great. You can learn to shut the fuck up. Someone else says the thing and you don't have to say yeah. But then also, I do want to put this out right, the things that we're describing here, Right, it's okay, like how do you do to beat or you need food, you need child care, you need structure that make sure one person isn't running

Right?

And it's like, okay, anarchists, how do you run USAID?

Right?

Because like, yeah, like the destructure of USAID is going to kill an unbelievable number of people because people are getting HIV vaccines right right. And the way you run that is the way that you run a meeting.

Right.

The workers who produce ye to act, who are the people who actually figure out how to make an HIV vaccine, distribute it, distribute information about it. Those people form fucking form fucking councils, and they form fucking meeting groups. They and they work in collaboration with the people who need them, and that is how you build a society, right. It's like David Gabor's thing was was like the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something we

Yeah, It's like people ask, how would you make a distributed insulin in anarchist society or an anti capitalist society or a bottom up society, And you're like, well, we know how to make and distribute insulin, and we just need to change some of the social technologies that are doing it. And I think we could probably do it better because it's currently not working great, you know. And my other like go to quote I love the graver quote is the Derudi quote anarchist general in Spanish of war.

The part of that always stuck with me is like, I think the exact quote that I got was we are not in the least afraid of ruins.

Yeah.

Ever, the ones who built this world and we'll do it again. Yeah and yeah. So I don't know.

I don't know these these episodes are gonna be called. But if they're called, the answer as meetings comma, Sorry, I think.

Okay, I don't know who is good end to be the provisional title right now is the most important organizing skill? You don't know, because unfortunately we do need people to click on this and they won't. If it's a meaning things as.

Well, then that's the monster at the end of the book, is that, Uh, it's meetings all the way down.

Yeah, Margaret, thanks for thanks for talking with me about the actual fundamental building blocks and tools of democratic life.

Yeah.

Thanks, thanks for having me and thanks for talking about this stuff. Yeah, and this has been It can happen here. You can go out in your community and you can do these things. You can force pos councils, you can form assemblies, you can go work with the people around you to do things, and you can use structures to do it, and you can change the world. The secret is to really begin.

Hell yeah, ah, welcome back to It could happen here. A podcast that is normally about the terrors, but today today we're talking about I mean, technically still the terrors, but we're talking about a more fun part of the terrors. We're talking about the liver King. Thank God, Thank God.

Gods and kings, two things we famously appreciate on this podcast.

With me today is James Stout and Meil Wong. What do y'all know about the liver King? I thought you were gonna give us cool titles.

Just if we could just go back and you could each give us some kind of some kind of nobility and of food stuff.

Yeah, sure, James, you are the tea leaf salad that made you really say that one time.

King's true.

I think that Tea leave settle room me Atina.

Yeah, it's good to him.

It made me subject.

And I you know, you and I haven'ty and a lot.

Of meals together. We need to do more of that, right, we need to do more of that. You're the You're the I have not eaten many meals with me yet, but hopefully will Queen. Incredible, incredible, incredible. Now, the Liver King is the King of liver, as you're all, I'm certain well aware, and I did.

We did a bastards.

This was a live episode I did a couple of years ago with doctor cave Hoda. And in case you're not aware, the Liver King is a guy who like three two or three years ago started to get really famous very suddenly and obtained millions of followers I think up to like six at one point on Instagram.

By getting super jacked.

He was this huge, shredded guy, or he's not he's not actually very tall, but he was shredded and he would He was always perpetually shirtless, usually wearing very little and talking about his different primal rules how mainly you need to eat nothing but liver and testicles, often raw, and that's all you need to do in order to get huge. That and then you can just lift hundreds and hundreds of pounds and you'll get swollen and gigantic. Totally natty because we're just we're supposed to eat like

Right now.

One of the first people to call him out before this came out was Joe Rogan who saw the And you know, I'll give Joe Rogan credit for one thing.

He knows when someone's on steroids. Yeah, So Joe.

Rogan had called him out initially, being like, there's no way this guy's natural, right, Like, he's taking fucking steroids. It's very obvious now, to be fair, everyone knew that because it's very like, I don't.

Know shit about steroids. And I looked at that guy, like his belly button pushes out.

Yes, isn't like Robert's not talking about an AUTI no, No, I'm talking about it's.

A Gulf bowl. So it's protrusion, like the Organs are trying to escape. This man is so clearly eighty percent steroids volume. That is the highest volume of steroids to body mass that has ever existent.

Yeah, it's nuts stuff. So he lost a shitload of his followers and he's still got like three million on Instagram, but his videos, he's lucky to get a couple of thousand like likes and share these days on an Instagram video. And you know, before that all came out, he was doing much more he had to do Ama Kolpa. He claims he's all natty now and he has just over the last couple of years, just continually degraded.

Right now.

This guy's business, which he made millions doing, or one of his businesses was selling different supplements. He's very expensive supplements. And he's built kind of a little cult at his compound in Texas around you know, listening to fucking dance music from the mid aunts a lot of like Mike Posnor remixes and weird shit rands about being a caveman

Mass or whatever. And anyway, he's he's continually.

Degenerated to the point where those of us who call ourselves liver king watchers have all kind of been saying for a while now, Oh, he's not just on gear anymore, like he's doing he's he he's doing other drugs and they have had they are really having a negative effect on his mental health. Yeah, he doesn't seem well, He does not seem well, so I'm gonna put a video play video on. This is a video that started at all. He started a couple of weeks ago, increasingly threatening Joe Rogan.

It's like.

He's shirtless.

He's wearing shorts and as one user noted in the comments, his pants are vibrating as he talks and he is carrying in each hand. He has a gold plated AR fifteen shirt barreled rifle with a fucking.

Blast for yes, in my entire life. I have never seen a man look less intimidating well, holding a gun, wearing a wolf pelt. Two guns, Man, two guns, the second gun. Two guns. Yeah, holy ship, you blunder buds.

Those are two gold plated AR fifteen SBRs.

With a gold eotech on talking in case he hadn't spent enough money.

Yeah, yeah, and I think a gold wood on the other.

So anyway, I'm gonna listen to this man, Joe Rogan, I'm calling you out.

My name is Leberty Man to man, I'm picking a fight with you. Yeah, I have still training. If you just to your black belt, you should just man tell me. But I'm picking a fight with you. Fund rule. Whatever you want me to wait, I'll wait. I'll wait one night, this morning, I'll wait. I'm you whenever you're ready, whenever you're ready to go at my brains.

And then he get starts dancing, So I'm on a vibration blate. By the way, that's a healthy man. That's a guy who's doing well. Right, we can all agree.

It's a literally buzzy.

I saw a video one time where someone was reacting to a Drake video and his response was those are the least intimidating goons I've ever seen in my entire life. And that is the entire vibe of watching him trying to like brain a place. It's something else, it's it's it is special. Uh, it is special.

And if you couldn't quite make out the audio over whatever, the fuck that music was what he says, and that is Joe Rogan. I'm calling you out. My name's Liver King, man the man. I'm picking a fight with you. I have no training in jiu jitsu. You're a black belt. You should just dismantle me. But I'm picking a fight with you.

Your rules. I'll come to you whenever you're ready.

Holding the AARs does give that a slightly slightly more terroristic threatn vibe?

Right, why are the ars?

Because he goes on to say at another post, you never come across something like this willing to die, hoping that you'll choke me out, because that's a dream come true, which makes it sound.

Like a sex thing. Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes it sound like a sex thing.

Yeah.

He closed out Pride months so.

This video comes out and then Liver King starts making a series of videos in Austin, Right, he drives to Austin. He's making videos on the way. He makes videos when he gets there, and he keeps saying he wants to fight Joe Rogan. Now he's just saying he wants to fight him.

Right, He's not.

Saying I'm going to kill you. He's not saying like I'm going to assault you. He's like he's asking for a consensual fight. But he's also posing with weapons, and he has now traveled to Austin and he's clearly unwell.

We'll probably call the cops, which probably do something about this. So they give.

A call to the police and they're like, hey, we consider this to be like numerous threats, right, he's traveled to Austin, Like this seems like a guy who might actually act seriously on his threats.

We're concerned about this.

So the police wind up talking to Joe Rogan himself, and Rogan says, yeah, I was, you know, my security team told me about this. I consider these to be threats, like, and I'm willing to file a police report.

Right.

He tells the police that Brian Johnson has a drug issue, which is, again it's weird to be like, yeah, Joe Rogan so far not wrong about an AFIS, And he's like, he's unstable, he probably needs help, which again probably accurate. Right, I don't think I don't think there's much to argue with here. So the police side these crossed the line into terroristic threats and they file charges. The Liver King is arrested. He's not in jail long. He's released within

Thank you for all the prayers.

By the way, people praying for me, you should also pray for yourself.

Pray for your family.

Lock that down, fifth bump pound, lock it down.

You should do all that.

I am going to the Capitol. I'm already in the Capital, but We're going to like capital capital, the location, and I've been given the gift of a restraining order just recently.

And so if.

Anybody knows, if someone else whose first name rhymes with blow, whose last name is Rogan, I'm not.

Allowed to say it for a copyright, I might sue you about it. I'm not allowed to laugh. I'll see you have put you in Joe on that one too.

Okay, So first off, he starts this, he admits in another video he falls a little earlier, that he hasn't slept in days, and he hasn't been eating, and he is slurring his words.

At the start of this. He is not well.

I don't think he's sober but it could just be sleep deprivation and the fact that something else is awry and he's like going to the capitol. He says, he wants to go to the capital to like start a legal precedent. He says, Liver King v. Joe Rogan is going to be like one of the great legal battles of our centurion terms of setting press, what kind of

Good born in prime.

Oh wow, from the Vibration play that the greatest home state in the world.

Often Texas.

Texas is the state.

Just to be clear, bags under my eyes haven't slept a whole lot and it's been an amazing gift.

Uh what do you what do you see there people with medical training.

Yeah, the human I shouldn't do that. That is like, yeah, then I'm supposed to look like that.

That's one of the bad side, like twenty times bigger than the other people. It's bad.

Like it's if I cared about this man, I would get him to a hospital immediately.

Yeah, And to be clear, I don't.

I kind of wonder the liver a filtering organ, right, it takes the bad stuff out.

I feel like if that's all you eat, you're going to concentrate the bad You're going to poisoning. She almost certainly did do someone like slip him a bear liver or something polar bear liver, Like what's going on here? Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, he went up the food chain until he ate that wolf's liver and then put it on his head.

Yeah.

It's very unclear to me. Is he actually eating that much liver? Like there's videos where he does, but like on a daily basis. He's also taking gear, so maybe he has a normal diet in order to like, you know, outside of it and this is just for show. There's been a lot of feorizing about that and we just don't know. But either way, I think it's safe to say this is a sick man, right, this is not a well person.

Yea.

His Instagram comments are not helping. Just give this man a gun immediately. Keep trying to fight Joe Rogan. But I believe you can do it right now.

If someone is putting out a casting call for deranged man and like profit in the desert, he looks exactly like that.

Absolutely the incredible added before we went completely looks amazing.

He looks incredible.

Yeah, he's got like two fun his haism can like.

He looks like if you know the.

Mural of John Brown, John Brown is like joke, That's what he looks like.

He does.

Different vibes.

Speaking of different vibes, let's change off the vibes and play some hands.

And we're back.

So, friends, I got to play you this next video, which is after he gets out of jail, he goes to the Capitol, And this is him going through security at the Capitol as.

Best I can tell, and he is.

He's wearing like fucking waiting length pants, like pants that cut off just below your knee, so like they're high water smoke pants. He's wearing like a sleeveless green hoodie. And he has the hood up over his head, and then he's wearing a plate carrier and he's trying to It's just it's just really funny. It's just two ladies and like security informs. They're letting him try to go through. And I think this proves that he's If he was wearing ceramic plates, I don't think it would set off

Five eleven TAC Tech.

Yeah, yeah, it looks like yeah, Carr, So I think you just got AAR five hundred plates in there.

Of course, I mean they're probably just white plates. They may it may not even be a five.

They may may not even be dying. He tells them it's his exoskeleton, so he has to keep it on. I don't think he gets in wearing this. Oh man, I love I love the liver cake.

I was really not expecting him to turn into a lobster. But apparently that's where we're at.

Now, that's where we're at Yeah, you're right, given his radness.

So there's one more video from his time in Austin before we'll get back to the Liver King compound and see the liver Queen a little little oh no that that person is.

Going through like the mental health equipment of the Q course right now, watching their one source of income.

Yeah, I don't know.

I have to hope if you're the liver queen, you have pretty good like insurance for the liver King.

Yeah, you hope.

So I don't know how long they've been living monarch together, whether she was with him before he went completely fucking bongers, or.

I don't know how much time there was before that happened, to be honest. Was it an arranged marriage like previous monarchies.

Yeah, she's actually from the Lung family, but they had to marry her off to forge alliance. I'm gonna have to demand that we watch is Lk's back vulnerable if he only stands to strike, because I need to see that.

There's a lot of Liver King fighting videos, and okay, none of them are are all that impressive.

So one way, he fights like a horse sized duck or one hundred duck sized horses.

There's a video where he goes hunting with his kid and he's talking about how it's like a prival experience. But all that happens is he pays a guy to take him into the woods. It's like forty feet away from a deer, and then they just shoot the deer outside where his Native American guy is like, okay, you can shoot it now.

It's really funny. It's pretty good. Okay what.

He's just cram walking like a gorilla down like the hull of his hotel.

It's beautiful stuff. It's good.

Somebody.

Now he's doing fake martial ice booths and it comes out of the duor straight.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's just turned his girl and crab walk that he does is like fist pump. He has like a little chant that he makes people say, lock it down. He pays to me wearing an ankle monitor. Yeah, he is wearing an ankle monitor. Yes, that's my favorite part of the video. He does have to wear an ankle monitor.

Now someone's coming.

To it's not an ancestral ankle monitor.

That is not a normal crowd walk. I don't know how to describe what that is. It genuinely defies description. It is the weird, weird forms a bush. I've ever seen the cube of undertake imagine if Rita was drunk. So we're gonna go back.

To ads real quick, and then when we come back, we're going to finally see the Liver Queen and him back in his compound talking to his fellow friends about how how things are really good, how he wanted to get arrested for threatening Joe Rogan, how it's blessing to have a restraining order against him and to not be able to be in possession of his guns anymore. And we're back, and I'm gonna play that video for you guys once again. So he is standing in the yard

There's zero race, there's zero I really understand. I really get it, really and I'm not asking for it. I don't need it. But it's it's hard.

It's the hardest parts over, the hardest parts over, that's great, that's really good.

The hardest parts over getting arrested. His wife really doesn't want to take his hand.

He has a.

Caffea draped around his shoulders, a tactical caffa.

He's where a tactical cafea. He loves his tactical kafea. Okay, it's good stuff.

Yeah, he's he's just doing he's just doing really really healthy.

Yeah.

He seems to have like added mag pouches for this one, which he suggests that he removed them his trip to the capital.

He to remove the mag pouches to go to the capitol.

So he already throwed it through And so I bet I could wear it if I take the mag pouches off.

Yeahinating fish, it's incredible fish.

It looks like he's taken so many steroids and he is literally inflated and they are trying to get out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in this last video that we're going to play, he's sitting on a throne. He's got a throat, he talks about how he thinks the throne is silly now and how he wouldn't have liked past liver King, and how people talk about how he's lost it and he thinks that's a compliment because I think he's making a point about ego death here, but it's not very coherent. So here's the liver King talking about how it's good to lose your mind.

Walking through the foyer and I saw these old thrones and I just kind of laughed, and I was like, oh god, you know, kind of a little bit embarrassed. And I thought, oh, you know what, I don't think I made a video today. I said I was going to, so I better, I better deliver on it. But it was Sunday, Family Day, God's Day, Capital g Day, and we did that then, Man, it was that was good. And so I'm walking by this one, this throne, old throne, and I thought.

Buffalo is real.

That's that's legit. That's gonna stay. But I thought, oh my god, you know the predecessor me, I would have hated me too. I read some comments today or yesterday, and I saw he's losing it a lot. And this is says it on my desk, lose yourself.

That is like when you actually lose yourself though, and you lose the ego, you can't really tell people, you know, because then it's like, hey, yeah, I actually shed my ego and now I'm better.

You know, that's the ego talking.

So if other people are seeing it, whoa thank you, thank you, or I can also go back to the egomaniac.

So here's the thing, folks, the new DSM that's coming out, I think they're going to increase the age at which you could be diagnosed as a schizophrenic for the male up to like forty or something like that.

And boy, howdy, no, real, truly like real Ross putin vibes from this one. He's got like a hood on.

He really is obsessed with because he's his hair. He's got less and less of it every day.

That'll happen if you put the testosterone, would you're taking nothing but pure test yes?

Yeah?

Yeah, when you pour a testosterone on your Syrian the morning.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's that's my update for everyone on the liver King. He's doing well. I'll be shocked if he's alive at a year.

What a fantastic man.

He's got kids, but he also makes the meat raw testicle, so I don't know if they're going to be worse off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that he's probably one of those rare station intervene moments.

Yeah, something should have something should be done here.

Yeah, yeah it is. It doesn't seem like a healthy guy. I know, if you should eat just organ meats.

No, Apparently, like eating a diet that is entirely consists of raw organs, random pharmaceuticals and gear makes you like talk exactly the same as like a nineteen year old art student. Yeah, like another enough kennemine to like traquilize a horse. These are apparently equivalent states of being.

This is what I've learned from this. Yeah.

Yeah, I think kenymine is one possible explanation because some of his some of his behavior is definitely like ketamine goaded.

Yeah.

But I also think there's a good chance that this is just like he's been abusing drugs for such a long period of time that he's just suffering permanent brain damage now at this point, right like he's he's not able to like he's not very cogent anymore. And I don't know, I feel like the people who are still around him are largely taking advantage of him for money, Like he was good at making money at one point, they're still cash flooding in and that's that's kind of

I mean so many, Robert, more than you can ever imagine.

But okay, on on a scale of like point oh one to one, Godafi, how or is golden rs?

I mean they're golden ars. Like they're fine, like they are, like they're definitely like dictator great ars.

I'll give them that.

Like if if you if you saw that and like some fucking junta leader, you know, carrying it around and screaming about executing his enemies, you'd be like, yeah, that fits that said, I do think if you are going

Yeah's just why I'm wearing the duppiest wolf. You guys have to just find the fucking wolf. Like the indignity of it being killed is not it's final indignity, as it turns out.

Yeah, no, that's that's as bad as it can go for a wolf.

Yeah, pretty much. You go from the top of the food chain to this guy's bolding hu crania. Yeah, I know, have a fucking vegetable everyone, That's what I have for you.

Yeah, I have have vegetables. Eat more vegetables. We haven't talked about how he squawks.

He doesn't squat with the body, squats with the ragh.

Yeah.

Now we forgot to mention that that is very funny.

Yeah, God, everyone go on this. It's a terrible fucking time to be I've gone into Instagram.

It's funny. Yeah, it's really funny.

Have some fun, enjoy the liver Kings Instagram while he's still alive for another like four to six months.

I'm not taking any pleasure in this. I don't want him to die.

I'm just looking at a man and being like, well, that's not gonna last much longer.

Yeah.

It is like watching a car without breaks. Yeah, traveling down hill.

Let's speed. Yeah, all right, everyone, have a good night.

Trim.

This is it could Happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garson Davis. Today I am joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and later a special report by Robert Evans. This episode, we are covering the week of June twenty fifth to July second. It is the end of Pride month. It was Canada Day.

That's correct. I hate the Trump administration because I can't do my death the Canada jokes anymore.

It sucks terrible Canada. Welcome to the Resistance. I'm gonna start with a brief news round up because there's been so many news stories this past week that we cannot do big sections on all of them. We already have three main stories, but there's some mini stories that I didn't want to get forgotten. I'm gonna start by talking about the Supreme Court, which has now limited the ability

Yeah, there is some sort of like weird hack shit you can do where like there's been some stuff the judges have been trying to do and to be like everyone in the country is a plaintive or whatever the fuck. Yeah, and I don't know how long that's gonna hold up, and and like the fuck thing about this is again it's just like what this means is shroup administration can kind of do whatever the fuck they want and it's just legal until this free court like looks at it, and that's completely unhinged.

Yeah, Agreediously, illegal orders can now be enforced for a period of months to years, as the court cases eventually will churn their way up to the Supreme Court.

Yeah, and this is a particularly egregious one too, because the birthday citizenship is so obviously it's just literally in the constitution. It's literally the Constitution just says, if you're born here, you're a citizen.

Yeah, well it says that section of the Amendment that is under question is subject to the authority thereof which is what is being litigated here. There is a section there that I guess is perceived by some people to be debateable. It doesn't seem very debatable to me, right, No, it's completely insane. It's like unhinged shit. Like it's like, it's like stuff you wouldn't have seen even from like

Unfortunately, well I guess the absolute most unhinged baby, but like you wouldn't have seen even like, I don't know, the normal person on Fox News kind of unhinged arguing this even like fifteen years ago.

And now this was like on the blogs that have, you know, the GeoCities era web design.

Yeah. Yeah.

Trying to restrict and quantify citizenship is going to be probably the main theme of this episode, as we will get to in the future, and if even temporarily, trying to strip the citizenship of already thousands, one hundred thousands of people who are who live in this country is incredibly worrying considering the massive amount of increased funding that ICE is about to receive. Speaking of ICE, second little

Yeah, well, they dynamically breached, Yeah, at home with a little child in right, like you see in the video.

Two young kids. I think, like a six year old and a two year old.

Yeah, you see them presumably the mother of the two mother, Yeah, with the child in her arms leaving.

They sent a fucking drone in there. They're acting the house full of like active combatants. You have like dozens dozens of people in military fatigues raiding this home.

Yeah, except that they didn't do it in such a fashion as you would if you if you were actually worried, right, Like they didn't. There wasn't a flashbang, right that they breached, stood around for a while, sent a drone in. They didn't dynamically breach in a dynamic way right like they would if they were expecting a real threat.

No, they just wanted to blow up this person's fucking house because they were pissed off that they that that they caused a car accident. Yes, these are These are the tiniest fucking baby secret police I have ever seen in my entire goddamn life. Fucking Christ.

It runs me of that one like picture of like a police raid in the nineties that conservatives used to use in terms of like like the government's taking over of this, of this of this, like you know, retro nineties swat cop like pointing a gun at like a family. It's like hiding in like a closet. And the Elian

Yeah, it's pretty worth noting.

I believe Huntington part that mayor has directed their police to enforce the California law which requires law enforcement offices to identify themselves.

Right.

It's been very common to the ICE agents refuse to identify themselves and wear masks, right, And I believe this was passed by their count and then their mayor, whose name is Arturo Flores, released statement calling the ICE abductions mass abductions and directing his police to intervene if what

This absolutely because people don't like ice. There's new ice approval ratings that came out by Quinnipiac on a June twenty fourth, twenty five net approval of ice negative seventeen percent, Democrats negative eighty Independence negative thirty two. This is this centrist position, independence negative thirty two percent.

Oh yeah, you've got like bushadmin staff as saying abolish eyes. It's a win for me.

Oh yeah, GOP is up sixty but that's it. This is like the centrist position now. And also sixty percent is nearly just half the GOP. Like, people don't like ice. The majority of people in this country don't like ice negative seventeen percent. Yeah, candidates that need to run on abolishing ice. This is like one of the most important issues facing the country right now, and they are wildly unpopular, including for independence. For this is this set abolishing ice should be the centrist position.

Yeah, well but this but this is this is sort of the problem, right, which is that the Democrats did this, like, well, a least some of them, at least AOC did so some of that. A Democratic wave ran on that in twenty eighteen, and then the Democrats were just like each shit we're never going to do that again. And like AOC never fucking mentioned it again. Like they all came into power and we're like, Okay, we got to deal

Yeah, but people should bring it back. I think that the data here is in support. Yeah, and like ICE is younger than I am. ICE is younger than all of us, Like yeah, ICE is a is a fucking fake agency.

Yeah, and DHS is younger than most of us.

Yeah.

I like the ICE as an agency should be like disappear and we should like try to be forgiven for it over the course of hundreds of years.

Like yeah, Yeah, people want to learn more about the history of DHS. I did a series about title forty two where I talk about it a whole lot.

Speaking of agencies that shouldn't exist. The BBC cut the feed of the glass Frey Music Festival during Kneecap's performance to block pro Palestinian messaging, but they failed to stop Bob Villain from leading a death to the idf chant.

Bob Dylan.

Villain what.

Bob Dylan based on Villain.

They are a punk rap group and they were leading death to the IDF chance broadcast live on the stage. Both of these music groups, Kneecap and Bob Villain, are now an investigation by the British police from their political comments at this music festival, and the US State Department has revoked Bob Villain's work visa ahead of an upcoming US tour as punishment for criticizing the military of a foreign country. The Party of Free Speed each strikes once again.

Yeah, I do want to say that, like as as a consumer of Glastonbrie music festival content, right, I guess as a British process Yeah, and at the target like age demographic, I guess what this has overshadowed is the massive amount of support for the Palestinian cause that you saw. Like, go watch a glaston Bree video and you will not not see Palestinian flagged in the crowd most of them. You will hear the artists acknowledging that there is a genocide in Palestine.

Right.

I don't know if anyone at the BBC is familiar with Bob Villain, Like, I'm sure they've played their music, but whoever made the choice to stream them and not stream Kneecap clearly had not done like a fucking like a Wikipedia level research, because you know what you're getting into with these guys, Like both the people in the band are called Bobby Villain, right, No, that's sirs, staging that they use in order to have a little bit

Ah. Incredible.

Yeah, they've been very aspoken about a large number of things that the.

British police have been going completely unhinged with this too. The Parliament's currently I don't know what the result. I think they may have voted to do it already. They've been trying to vote to make it illegal for like Palestinian action to exist after they did it after they did a pretty big action at a Britis Din action year. Yeah, after Parson Action did a pretty big like action at

And they've been going after Kneecap for years. There's multiple investigations into Kneecap. Now you should check out Neecaps new movie. It's pretty good for our first main story. I guess I'll throw to James to discuss denaturalization.

Yeah so yeah, a less exciting than Glassery music festival. So the naturalization if you're not familiar, rate the movement of US citizenship from people who became US citizeners at some point in their life. The DOJ has issued instructions to its Civil Division employees to pursue denaturalization proceedings against naturalized US citizens quote in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.

It goes on to lists some categories.

These include some of the things you might expect, including being in access to terrorism and organized crime, people who engaged in war crimes, people who committed violent crimes or failed to disclose felonies on their application for naturalization. But they also include fraud both against private individuals and against Medicaid, Medicare, and the pay Check Protection Plan maybe program, the PPP COVID era government bailout right. The last one, however, is

Any cases that area found to be sufficient sufficiently important.

Just people aren't familiar rates. Civil and criminal law are distinct. Right, civil law has a lower burden of proof and crucially, the accused person is not entitled to legal representation. In addition, this could have trickle down effects. Right, children of naturalized citizens are also citizens, so their citizenship derives from their parent citizenship. So it's possible that children who are not even accused of doing anything wrong could be the natural

Yep.

So in the odious person example in this case is someone called Elliott Duke. They have been denaturalized. Duke was a UK citizen served in the United States military. While serving in Germany, they received and distributed child sex abuse material, according to the DOJ. They were later contacted by the FBI about this and prosecuted. The DOJ stated that their case was identified as part of Operation Prison Lookout, which aims to identify sex offenders who have naturalized. I haven't

Right, and oh boy, are they trying to bring it back.

Yeah, yep, twenty thousand cases a year in the McCarthy era. For references, stats I could find suggest about twenty five million naturalized citizens in the United States both Obama. Obama had something called Operation Janus identified people who were eligible for denaturalization, and Trump one also at higher rates of denaturalization, but nothing on this McCarthy eras scale. Right, people will be familiar with the naturalization also before that, that happened.

To Emma Goldman for example.

Yeah.

One other story from this week that's kind of related is it was announced that whol to check the citizenship status of all Americans. This is the first time we've had a centralized tool like this, or we've attempted to the US has for a while has resisted creating like a dossier of like official citizens because this is like a kind of problematic thing to have. There's a lot of issues with this concept. Actually verifying that this list is accurate is very tricky. You have to add people

Yeah, massive information security risk.

It's really problematic and tied in with these other denaturalization programs. It's a really worrying sign of where things are going to be going.

Yeah, talking of worrying signs, this is a worrying sign that we have to pivot to advertisements.

All right, we are back, James. You do have one piece of good news in the immigration front, Well, I do you, Garson. I've gotta hate you some bad news first, buddy. That's the way this show works.

That's how we do it here. Cool Zone Media.

It can happen here.

Special Immigrant Defenders Law Center i llegal nonprofit says one of their clients, Julie Calderon, was abducted by armed men in Los Angeles and taken to Santy Cedro. People are not familiar. Santit Caedro is the border that you might call San Diego border, right, the town that actually has the physical excess of Tijuana. Santi Suedro. The city of San Diego also has some land down there. She was told at Santi Sudro that she was to sign voluntary

Them as a source. And this is deeply, deeply worrying.

I don't know why it's not getting more coverage other than most people on the migration and border beat perhaps don't speak Spanish or have actually just turned up on this beat a few weeks ago and have have no notion of like who the actors and these groups are, and they tend to go off government press releases. This is like shit that we haven't seen in the United States since I know, the Fugitive Slave Act.

Like it's appalling. Yeah, this is like the most just actual, straight up nineteen thirty is Nazi shit that we've seen from them.

Like, yes, it's hideous, Yeah, it's happening here in San Diego, but it's also of course like as Californian as we are entering this time with the most cowardly and like pathetic governor that we've had in a long time, like Arnolds Tortenego is a Republican, But I bad you'd have handled this better than Nuisance, who is just a slime ball.

Yeah, but the fact that Newsom isn't like like, if this was happening in fucking Illinois, Pritscrew would have swat teams like these, these these people would be like dead right now, but like this is this is completely fucking unhinged.

Yeah, no, this is the fuck. Yeah, James, I was, I was muster good news after the break.

You're right, Garrison and I do have some lucky you.

Finally, a judge has ordered that Trump's sweeping asylum ban exceeds his authority as president and granted broad class protection. So we're going to see, like literally this happened maybe thirty minutes before before we started recording. I'm going to read over the court documents I've linked them in the

So yeah, I don't know what we'll see.

Yeah, all right, now I'm going to throw two Robert Evans for a special report on the Diddy trial.

Hey, everybody, Robert here. I guess I'm a resident p Didy expert because I did the Bastards episodes on him. Just felt like it was appropriate to give y'all a brief update. So on the day that we record this, which is Wednesday, the second of July, Sean Diddy Combs was found guilty on two of the five charges in

Now, if you can't like why did this happen? Right?

Why didn't he get convicted on these higher charges he was absolutely guilty of? And it's because the prosecutors focked up, Right, there were a number of different felony charges they could have gone after him for that were less difficult to prove than racketeering and sex trafficking and did he had good lawyers?

Right?

And there's a lot of weirdness about, like, well, they didn't go after him for the guns and drugs that he had both at his properties, or for a number of the other things that they could have done after him. You know, this is because prosecutors have to make choices as to like what to charge someone with, and they tried for some of the harder stuff that was always

Anything over it. You know, ten years are over.

I would say, that's still at least you know, we can say it's not all the things he should have been convicted on, but that's not You can't know. No one's going to spit it ten years in prison, especially at his age. He's in his mid fifties right now. But four or five years, you know, I wouldn't quite say that's a slap on the wrist, but it's not nearly what is deserved here right now. You do with federal sentences like this, tend to serve a lot more of this. This is not a hope and he'll be

Right.

The legal system moves pretty slow. And his team asked for bail. There's evidence that he had people like setting up getting extra security up around his primary home and they were kind of expecting him to be able to go home today. That's not going to happen. The judge has denied his bail. This is after one of his accusers basically said, hey, I think this guy is really dangerous.

Now we'll pass over to me to discuss our second main story this episode, the formerly named One Big Beautiful Bill.

Oh God. So actually reading through this, I refuse to call this anything over in the genocide budget because this budget what is designed to do is a genocide and that's not an exaggeration.

Well, there's multiple types of killing included in this bill, not just genocide. Yeah, the medicare cuts, I think that's true. Aren't aren't technically genocide, but they but they could lead to mass death, So we should be we should be inclusive. We should be inclusive of all the types of death. I think we'll get into the medicaid shit later. We need to start with the mass deportation. We want to do an ethnic cleansing. We want you to just simply wipe out entire people as you'll live in the US

Yeah no, by yeah, by bye bye, We I mean the Republican Party who fucking wrote this bill?

Okay, just checking.

So, okay, what is actually in this So there's a very good writeup of this from the American Immigration Council and a lot of the stuff is from there. Okay. So across homeland security and government affairs, the judiciary, and the military. The version of the budget that just passed the Senate allocates one hundred and seventy billion dollars to their fucking unhinged deportation ship. This would be the third

They basically want to create a whole new prison system just for immigrants.

Yes, yeah, and again and again, and I cannot emphasize this enough. The United States has one of the largest prison systems on Earth, and they want to the the largest. I think it's I think it's technically smaller than the Chinese. Actually, let let let me actually pull the numbers up. Yeah, I think it's technically for America per capita. Yeah, it's

Which Trump's also been calling for in executive orders.

Yeah, there is forty eight billion dollars for building the wall and like border inflict physical border enforcement infrastructure. There's an additional five billion dollars for checkpoints and like border patrol, like facilities, not posts, and shit. There's also about fifteen billion dollars for states to do deportation.

Shit.

There's so much unhinged anti immigrant shit in this bill that like, again, I can't, we don't have time to get into it.

Yere.

This is going to be a full episode on fucking Tuesday.

This is why you have people like Steven Miller trying to rally the whole party in support of this bill, which massively raises the deficit, something that Elon's been complaining about quite famously.

Yeah, five trillion dollar hole in the budget. It doesn't matter.

Now there's all these Republican congressmen who constantly complain about the federal debt, who are totally fine increasing the federal debt massively, people compromising their fiscal conservatism yep, in support of a bill that furthers the United States as a white supremacist penal colony. And at the end of there's the congressmen vote against it, then that will be used

Yeah, and I want to point this out, like they're not gonna stop at immigrants. I need to make this incredibly clear.

Once you have this infrastructure, you have to use it.

Yeah.

Okay, Look like the people on the on like the furthest left of the US have talked about for a long time, but this is a country that is built on genocide, right. This is an apparatus that is designed to turn the US specifically into a machine to and again, and I need to point this out. The definition of genocide includes like like removing people from a place, right, Like,

That's what she's talking about.

Specifically talking about how she wants to feed them to alligators, which we'll talk about later.

Yes, the context of the number was feeding them to allegates.

Yeah, yeah, right, So, like Trump has been joking for a long time about how if Stephen Miller got his way, there would be like one hundred and fifteen million people in this cushion and they would all look like Stephen Miller, like that's where they're going. And that's not like, oh, this is blah blah blah. You're like, this is the infrastructure for them to be able to do this. And

It was a fifty to fifty split.

Yeah, in this Senate. Yeah, with like Makowski voting for it, for example.

Yeah, So, like you know, on the one hand, being able to pass this bill is precarious. On the other hand, if they do it. That limits the window for which we have to like make ice nonfunctional a lot because as they ramp up this capacity. It's going to take them a while to ramp up this capacity, right, even if this passes, But like they haven't had the capacity to do the genocide they've been trying to do, right, this will give it to them with this, with this

Yeah, Like this is one of those call everyone you can in Congress situations, like not always a big call your ramp person.

Yeah, we're going to get to at the end of this, like how we've actually met. We've gotten provisions killed from this bill already. We're going to get to that later. We also need to talk about the Medicaid shit, because Garrison, you were saying, Oh, I don't think this can be considered the genocide, but it's so killing. I actually disagree with that, because, Okay, let's explain what's going on with Medicaid.

Right.

They're also expanding this shit the work requirements to They want these work requirements to apply to people who have children ages thirteen and older. So if you are trying to like raise a child, fuck you eat shit and die. And again also like this is both Medicaid and SNAP, so this is a targeted The estimates by the CBO, this is per PBS, the Correctional Bunchet Office estimates that it will by twenty to thirty four, eighteen point eight

These systems are already so hard to get in on and stay on, like both, like both SNAP and Medicaid, requires substantial revisions and reforms to make them easier to access. To strengthen the infrastructure capacity of these things to get more people on them, they need more funding. This is basically trying to take an already kind of dying system and just take it out of back and shoot it in the head.

Yeah.

Yeah, Well, and they intentionally just want it to be like harder and more frustrating and shitty to use, Like they literally rolled back that part of this bill is rolling back a bunch of reforms that Biden made to make it like slightly easier to get on. Yeah, and this is just going like, yeah, fuck you. This is going to be an absolute fucking catastrophe, not just because of the people that it immediately affects, although it is

Maybe last week, two weeks ago, one recent executive disorder.

Yeah, yeah, we're talked about I think it's on two different months now about how we beat the fucking ban on using Medicaid for trans healthcare. And by we, I mean a combination of trans journalists like Maddie Castigan, Bia Levine, David Forbes, or like resident trans policy analyst Kurvin Green. I did some work on it, not like a huge amount, but like, I don't know, like it a little bit.

It is.

It is devastating enough to like rural healthcare that even Republican senators are talking about not wanting to cut Medicaid.

So it's a very unpopular bill. And when you tell just regular Republicans about the details of the bill, they don't like it. You can hey, they're being like the Republican media machine is being so selective and how they're talking about the bill, because if you discuss the way that it just rips the heart out of Medicaid, that's not what most older Republicans want because they actually also rely on Medicaid. So it's it's a it is a pretty unpopular bill, and the more people learn about the bill,

Yeah, and and the the unhinge thing about this right is that even with limited information most Republicans have about this, it still has like a twenty to thirty percent approval rating it's so unpopular even in the low information environment we're currently in. It it's like a twenty to thirty percent of proof rating. I think if everyone actually understood what was in the bill, I think it's roof rating

So most people, if they're not personally harmed, will know someone who's being personally harmed.

Yeah.

Do you know what is popular, James Uh? I can guess the products and services that support this podcast beautiful.

Ooh you know what else is extremely popular? It is my hit theme song about tariffs. Let's fucking go.

Sarry Ropy jazz rocky jazz Bart Sorry lacking.

Rocking jazz rocking jazz bo.

Mia.

What do we have for tariff talk this week?

So this is an important week for tariffs. Next week will be the really really critical one. So next allegedly, allegedly, we'll see he's skeptical. So so next week, all of the tariffs on every other country in the world from the Liberation Day tarif tariffs are supposed to like come off. We're gonna see what happens.

I've i've i've become, it could happen. Here's biggest tariff denier. I'm I'm the tariff denier conspiracy theorist.

Well, so here's the Okay, So, so the Trump Minstration is claiming that they cut a deal with Vietnam again as a kind of recording on Wednesday. I haven't actually seen anything from like Vietnam confirming this. It's just worry about. It's totally real. Who fucking knows. So the deal that he's saying is that Vietnam is going to levy or you actually going to levey a twenty percent tariff on all goods from Vietnam and a forty percent tariff on

There's there's enough skepticism in the market about the tariffs in general that so far, not not not all, but but most corporations have been eating the tariffs in this short term. Not all like famously, like like like Walmart like has been has been raising some prices, but a bunch of corporations have been eating the eating the costs because they do not think these will these will be largely effective like long term, and I mean this will slowly change, especially as as more of these start like

Yeah.

Well, and I think also again the important thing here is what this is going to do to logistics firms, which have very very low margins, and right now they've been surviving by just running shit through other places. But like, again, if this is if twenty percent is the rate on Vietnam, plus there's now a massive vicent of not to run goods through Vietnam. That's really bad because that like kneecaps the evasion tools people have been using. Yeah, so we'll see what happens.

Yeah, wait for me and come into place.

Yeah yeah, let's talk about Alligator Alcatraz.

So fucking god.

Florida's new immigration detention center has opened this Wednesday. It's built on a remote airport with aircraft hangars outfitted with cages and bunk beds to incarcerate between three to five thousand people. The facility is surrounded by a mote of alligators and pythons. They're calling it to Alligator Alcatraz. It was designed to be the most efficient deportation machine in the country. National Guard members will act as immigration judges

I mean this is going to be Illegals will come in, they'll be processed, There'll be places for them to be housed. You'll have an ability for food, you'll be an ability for them to consult legal rights. If they have that because there is a process.

That's involved with this.

So the Florida Attorney General has called this a quote one stop shop for immigration enforcement. Come in, get your process, and fly out unquote Jesus. So immigrants will be flown here. They will have some degree of due process here, not really real due process, but enough nope to fast track their deportation. Stay basically at this facilit like less than a week, and get deported from it. It has a working airports. They want to start running thousands of people

So always a grift as well, so you.

Can get deportation merchandise, you can get concentration camp merchandise. This is the this is the soul of the of the Republican Party. For our last main story tonight, let's talk about how Trump and the Democrats are trying to stop the domentum. Because ranked choice voting has now been completed. Zoron has defeated Cuomo fifty six to forty four, twelve points which were talied in just the third round of

This is a guy who who would be petrified if he ever had to walk around New York because seeing brown people is very scary when you know this kind of person.

Zoron's been facing this huge wave of egregious like islamophobic attacks, including from the gimies of his own party. On a radio show, Democrat New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand falsely claimed that Mam Donnie had made references in support of quote unquote global Jihad. Outrageous stuff.

Yeah.

On Monday, she apologized for these comments in a private call to Mamdani and expressed that she believes that Zorn is sincere when he says he wants to protect all New Yorkers and combat anti Semitism, but fucking, fucking gross stuff.

Yeah, it's it was so hideous, it's like two thousand and three level.

It's. Yeah, it's really bad.

Wait, you know, it's considerably worse than that.

Like Bush gave the islamis the Fabric of America speech in two thousand and one. Yeah, Like we now have Democrats just knee jerking to fuck them all their terrorists.

Like in their own party, and like many top New York Democrats have still refused to endorse the now like Democratic nominee, including Governor Kathy Hochel, House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, and Sonather Chuck Schumer.

Jeffries posted in support of him today, some of them.

Have expressed like support of him, specifically support against Islama public attacks, but have explicitly refused to endorse him as a nominee, which is like it's vote blue no matter who until you have like a Muslim democratic socialist and it's like we have to discuss, Like, you know, there's some we have some skeptical things about his candidacy and his ability to keep New Yorker safe.

You're like, oh boy, yeah, yeah, you voted for the three people who die. You endorsed the three people who died in office. I guess like since the last election in the House, like now, the attacks have continued. On Monday, Fox News supporter Peter Doucy asked White House pre Secretary Caroline Levitt about deporting Zoran. Let's play the clip, Peter thak.

Caroline, does President Trump want Zoran Mamdani deported?

I haven't heard him say that. I haven't heard him call for that, but certainly he does not want this individual to be a I was just speaking to him about it and his radical policies that will completely crush New York City, which is obviously a city that the President holds near and dear to his heart.

There's this Congressman Annie Ogles. He wants the Attorney General Bondi to explore denaturalization proceedings because he thinks Mom Donnie could have misrepresented or concealed material support for terrorism based on rap lyrics. He wrote in twenty seventeen. Does President Trump think this is a worthwhile use of the Attorney General's time?

Well, I'll let the President speak to that. I have not seen those claims, but surely if they are true, it's something that should be investigated.

It.

It's ridiculous to suggest that you could wrap your material support for terrorism. That they have to prove that you materially supportated group which he is listed to FTO.

Yeah.

Then on Tuesday day later, Trump himself attacked Zoran, threatening to arrest him if he interferes with ICE.

Your beloved New York City may well be led by a commmunists soon, Zorhan Mundami, who in his nomination speech said he will defy ICE and will not allow ICE to arrest criminal aliens in New York City.

Your message to communist Zorhan Mundami.

Well, then we'll have to arrest him. Look, we don't need a communist in this country. But if we have one, I'm going to be watching over them very carefully on behalf of the nation.

Later, Trump suggested that Zoron quote unquote may be here illegally and that the Trump administration would be looking into that, while in the same clip praising the now independent nominee and current mayor Eric Adams.

Independent running mayor Adams, who's a very good person. I helped him out a little bit. He had a problem and he was unfairly hurt.

Over this question.

He made a statement to the effect that this is terrible New York City can have all these immigrants come in, and like he was indicted the following day.

Just clearly admitting to corruption. He had a little problem, and I helped him out.

Yeah, yeah, just a little problem with accepting massive payments from Turkey to fucking corrupt his whole city.

And I want to say here too, like I was watching just like Trump openly targeting Tom Donnie, like all of the Democrats who are attacking him are just on the side of Trump here. And this has been a significant problem the entire administration is that one of Trump's like core basis of support is like sitting democratic fucking legislatures. It's like fucking Chuck Schumer. Yeah, like all of these people.

Yeah, they're working with Trump rhetorically on all.

Of this and sometimes literally with like Schumer voting for the original like budget resolution shit. Like they're just they're just actively collaborating.

On Tuesday, is or unreleased a statement regarding Trump's comments, saying, quote, the President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, and put in a detention camp, and deport it. Not because they have broken any law, but because I will refuse to let ice terrorize our city. Don't just represent an attack on our democracy, but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows. If you

Build a Blasio. If you get arrested doing the human shield, we will forgive you for one of your many crimes.

Yeah.

I w off for rest Bill.

Good for Bill, But no, everyone needs to do this, Like everyone needs to get behind him right now. If he's gonna be the target of this like denaturalization, push for this. Yeah, if he becomes like the symbol of everything that Trump hates, Like Democrats need to fall in line fucking right now. And you can't be attacking this guy for like innate isamophobia. Yeah, it's it's it's outrageous.

Yeah.

He also has made one of the funniest music videos I have ever seen. There's some good stuff it's video about how much he loves his grandmother with Mada Jeoffrey, and it is outstanding.

Now we do have some good news to close this episode on, including the return of the Stinky Musk segment. In Pennsylvania, Tesla turned into train tracks and drove into an un drove into an oncoming train. It's okay, people were able to exit the car before the grass. But great stuff, great stuff in the self driving car department.

Oh good, and Trump.

Truthed on Monday, quote Elon might get more subsidy than any human being in histree by far. And without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more rocket lunches, satellites are electric car production, and our country would save a fortune. Perhaps we should have Doge take a good, hard look

I will say Musk has also been talking about four by a new party if this budget bill.

Passes, so god, I hope so would be the funniest thing. What other good news do we have to end on here? I think the other good news was the the Asylum van getting Star up to the coach. Oh we already did that, good news.

Yeah, we already did that.

Oh that that's it?

Then?

Yeah, mm hmmm, all right. Well, people like ED being an hour long. I've been the longer, the better.

It's one thing they say about ED.

It goes without saying James, we reported the news.

We reported the news.

Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It could happen.

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