It Could Happen Here Weekly 209

about what this sort of means for politics. But now I want to do a slightly different kind of episode, which is looking at the challenge just that Montdomney is going to face, attempting to implement his agenda, attempting to stay mayor just taking him very seriously at his word in his attempt to make the cost of living lower and make people's lives better and there are unfortunately, very significant challenges to this agenda, and those challenges are a

mix of structural problems and I don't know the president of the United States, right. We're going to focus on a few of them today, and before we really start this, I think I want to start this to some extent with the conclusion. And the conclusion of this episode is not to say that these things are impossible, right, and to not say they can't be done, but it's to remind people that the way that actual politics works, electing one person does not immediately make everything better.

well funded, well organized, and structural. And also, as we saw with the election of Aunt Donnie in the first place, it can be defeated. So we're going to start with the bond market. Now, many of you may be asking, bio, what what does the bond market have to do with make buses free? And to do that we need to

talk about funding mechanisms. So most plans in the US for sort of social democratic policy for how you implement wellfare day policies, how you policies that make people's lives better, tend to start from the federal governments and the national level, right,

and there are very obvious reasons for this. Unlike the federal government, city governments don't issue their own currency, which means the modern monetary theory, things that you would normally use to fund welfare programs with at a national level don't work. The federal governments, again, has control of its own debt and money supply. City governments don't. That means the city governments, if you want to find money to

do something, you have to find that from somewhere. And as wonderful as it would be if you could simply do that by just okay, we raise taxes, and the taxes go to the policy that we want to implement, that's not how the system actually works. The way the system works if you want to pay for things at a city level is the bond market. David Ibacker has a very good piece about this the Baffler that I

deeply recommend people read. The main thing that's important here for our purposes is that for funding significant portions of anything that you want to do as mayor, you are

legally required to go through the bond markets. And this means that the city is forced to beg for money from Wall Street investment banks and then also pay those same banks exorbitant fees and interest, and a significant amount of money has to go to, as Backer points out, a whole bunch of you know, lawyers and finance people and consultants and all of these you know, sort of mafia of finance schools who are standing in between the normal mechanism of you have money and you pay for things.

And that's assuming again that you even have the money in the first place, which you quite often don't because cities are very very often cash strapped. As Backer points out, using these bond mechan to pay for programs is legally required. Now, Backer is mostly focused on the structural constraints created by servicing debt, which can consume increasing portions of a city's budget. Until you know there's nothing left. This is sort of

what's happened to Detroit to a large extent. And also the bank's direct control over the payment mechanism even when the city government brings in tax money. Right, So, even if you raise taxes and you bring in money, because you have to go through the bond market, it means that a bunch of that money is going to be

funneled into servicing debt and paying interest on debt. But there's also a secondary problem here, which is that in very extreme cases, and I'm not saying we are immediately facing this, but I want to put this on the table as something that if you are attempting to run a social democratic program in a city, you do need to be significantly worried about the bank's direct control over payment Meaganisms means that the banks, you know, the people who buy the bonds that you need to use to

get to fund these things. So let's actually take a step back here and explain what a bond is.

way to get extremely large amounts of money. But this also means that cities that you know, banks and investors can simply not buy your bonds if they don't like what you're trying to do, and at that point very little can be done to oppose them. The most dramatic version of this problem came to the New York City bond crisis in nineteen seventy five, where New York City had to sell a bunch of bonds. It was significantly in debt, and there's a very famous scene in I

think It's I think it's a hyperdormalisation. You know, there's film of like the city government officials who were sitting in this room waiting for the banks, like people, for the banks to show up to buy the bonds, and no one shows up, so suddenly they don't have any money. And then President Ford at the time tells the city to eat shit and die and refuses to buy any of New York City's bonds, refuse to give them any money,

and this leaves the city bankrupt. Right, it gets to a point where they have fired the teachers, there's no one to collect garbage because they literally don't have money to pay anyone because no one will buy their bonds. And eventually this crisis is sort of mitigated. But the problem is that, you know, the task force that was set up to mitigate this right to like, you know,

get there to be people buying New York City bonds. Again, those people were able to come in and New York City had a functional welfare state, right, had a sort of many social democratic welfare state. And in order to reopen the governments and have schools and garbage collection again, in order to get that money, the city was required

to dismantle it. And you know, the financial situation of New York is obviously significantly better than it was then, right, And the odds of having this kind of just full on macro scale crisis is not as high as it was then. But because of the fact that this is the legally mandated way that you have to do these payments, and because unlike the federal government, there are constraints on spending that in some ways function like needing for an

exchange currency. You know, you can't just issue this money. You have to get it from somewhere, and because of someone's usually the banks, it means that you have to constantly negotiate with the banks and with capital in order to keep the city's lights on. And this is a constant threat that they have sort of, you know, hanging over the head of anyone who wants to be governor.

And as Backer points out, you can even just tax your way out of the problem because payment structures for government projects work out of the bond system, so that money just goes to debt payments. And you know, one of the other things that Backer points out. And obviously the situation in Chicago is different than the situation in

New York. But the Chicago teachers Union did elect a mayor who was, you know, their guy, right, The cholot teachers Union spent a significant amount of money and resources and effort getting their guy elected, and once he came into office, he basically ended up doing the same thing in their negotiations with the teachers union that the previous

administrations had done. And the reason that happened, you know, and the reason that you started to see cuts to school services that we're not supposed to happen, but did anyways, was because the bond market stepped in and said this is what's necessary in order to do this, and they have that kind of power. Now, obviously Chicago was in a worse financial situation than New York is. Mom Doominie

is significantly further left than Brandon Johnson is. But these are real constraints, and the such a democratic solution to this has always been to get money from the federal governments. But the federal government won't give money out to the things that is legally required to give money out to you right now, because obviously it is run by one Donald Trump, and obviously Trump in and of himself is

a significant problem to doing this right. There's always a chance that Trump will see something like mean about Mom Donnie on Fox News and decide to send the National Guard to New York or something, and you know, he will probably continue immigration raids. He can, you know, just fuck with people's ability to get Medicaid payments, which is

a really significant issue. There will continue to be lots of creative and terrible things that the federal government can and will due to this administration that will have to be fought and can be defeated, but will have to be organized and fought against. But for our purposes right now, the big issue here is that you can't get money out of the federal government. So okay, where are you getting money out of then? And the answer is the state government. Now do you know what else gets money

out of state governments? Probably not these products and services. I don't know who knows, who knows? We are back, So okay, let's talk about the state government now again. This even with the city the size of New York, there still is always significant negotiations in order to do you thinks in the city that require the aid of

the state level government. And part of the problem here is that the New York State Democratic Party is significantly responsible for the Republican's control of the House, particularly in

the twenty twenty two cycle. There's a whole long story here about how a bunch of a bunch of the Democrats wanted to form this sort of moderate caucus thing, where the sort of independent caucus that would caucus with the Republicans in order to give the Republicans the ability to stop any sort of liberal or left wing thing from happening. In the state governments and handle a whole bunch of seas over to the Republicans because of it.

But just you know, setting all of that aside, the place that you can get money from would be from the governor's office. Unfortunately, that significate problem. So here's Hotel's response to Mamdami's plan to make buses free. Quote, I cannot set forth a plan right now that takes money out of a system that relies on fares of the buses in the subways. But can we find a path to make it more affordable for people who need help? Yes, of course we can. So Hotel does not want to

raise taxes. Any proposal that would involve raising taxes probably has to run through New York City's City Council, and thus through her. I'm going to quote this some spectrum news about Mundammy's propos to expand universal childcare. Culchel said she's also looking at expanding a universal childcare program statewide. But the total price tag is fifteen billion dollars childcare

I already committed to, she said. I'm committed to this as a mom governor, I get it, but also to do it statewide's about fifteen billion dollars the entire amount of my reserves. Cultural says she prefers to phase an expansion first within certain aide groups and geographically underserved communities. So okay, what is happening here in a macro sense is that Cultural is trying to slow roll both of these things. She is outright opposed to making buses free.

She wants to do weird means testing stuff to it that will make it very difficult to do and extremely annoying bureaucratic layer meant to deny people services that you have to do instead of just having them be free. The childcare thing she probably does want to do, but again, because she is not a democratic socialist, because she is a regular Democrat, she wants to do it slowly, banded through a whole bunch of phases and taking a whole bunch of time.

she will sign on to it. But it's a significant hurdle that you.

they did the year before. And this is a structural problem for all of us because we all have interests that are diametrically opposed to corporations making more money every year because their profit comes directly from our exploitation. Right, we have fundamentally opposed interests from the corporations and the capitalists and the billionaires. But in order for there to be capitalist economic growth, those people have to keep making more money every year.

And you know, there are things that you can do to some extent, right but at some point you are going to have to choose between workers and capital. And if you're the mayor of New York City, your job is to make capital more money. And this is a structural constraint that every social democratic government has faced. And it's worth noting that we are not in a world

that is surrounded by social democratic governments. And part of the reason why, again is that they need the economy to keep growing and that they're reliant on finance institutions to make money. And the most grim versions of this tend to happen at a sort of national scale. But if you look at morally in Jamaica in the seventies, where you have a democratic socialist who gets elected and is running Jamaica and then has to implement austerity because

the country runs out of money and the IMF comes in. Right, these things can get really bleak now they don't have to, right Like, sufficiently well organized populations can force the hand of capital to do things that they don't want to do. Significantly well organized populations can you start trying to fundamentally redistribute economic power. But it's difficult, and the difficulty is magnified by the third really massive constraint, and that constraint

is the police. One of the other big structural problems that comes with the running a state is that it relies on armed men to enforce the laws, and those men, especially in the United States, are at best one step removed from straight up neo Nazis. A lot of them straight up are neo Nazis. The cops are the most

consistently right wing group in the entire country. They are a bunch of racist shitheads who exist to perpetuate right supremacy and protect capital, and they're also again fundamental organizational

unit of the state. Right without the violence of the police, laws are just suggestions, and if you're going to run a capitalist government, if you're going to run one in the US, you have to deal with the fact that your power depends on the loyalty of a bunch of Nazis, and these people will riot if you attempt to do oversight of them. They very famously did this in nineteen

ninety two. They had this whole giant riot, right, They had the thing that was supposed to be a protest rally where they all went on strike, and then the cops who were supposed to be policing the protest obviously

didn't do anything because again there are also cops. And in nineteen ninety two, I did this for a really really really minor oversight tempted oversight, right, And obviously they actually didn't win that direct fight, but they were able to cause enough of a political ship storm that they were able to force the last sort of like vaguely social democratic mayor out of power and install like Rudy Giuliani, who is a weird face, melty dipshit right, who's an

incredible tough on crime right winger. And obviously Mamdani has been trying to kind of trying to do his best to negotiate with the police and not to overtly threaten them, but that kind of doesn't matter because they just hate him, like they think that a Muslim socialist is just inherently an illegitimate person, and they think that anyone who is even vaguely liberal is someone who is their enemy and who is their target. And we have seen them take

actions to just directly threaten mayors fairly recently. Right in twenty twenty, they kidnapped Bill de Blasio's daughter at a protest and then sort of like paraded her mugshot around and posted it everywhere and did this whole big show of how they were holding her. To say it was a thinly veiled threat is a dramatic understatement of how incredibly,

incredibly blatant this threat was. Right, they kidnapped the mayor's daughter, Drea, in a protest movement, and that was Bill de Blasio, who was not some kind of like wild anti police radical right, and especially now as sort of fascism is on the march, and with the backing of the US federal government, right, the police form a very significant threat

to Mandami's ability to do anything. Both on a sort of political level, they are going to be constantly you know, putting out giant press releases about how Mamdami's like turn the city into unliverable hellhole and how they can't do

their jobs, ceda, et cetera. And also just in terms of just directly threatening him and trying to influence his policy, they're going to be a real problem, and his ability to prevent them from, for example, smashing in the skulls of pro Palesime protesters, even if he wants to, was going to be very limited because the police have become a kind of semi autonomous fascist force in this country.

They have always been a ticking time bomb on statius democracy, and that clock is closing in on zero in this in this sort of moment of assented fascism. Now again, I want to close this by saying, these are not all the challenges that he's going to face, but Comma, none of this also means that that the things that he wants to do to make people's lives better are impossible. Every single one of these problems are problems that you

can defeat by organizing. Right, you can put enough pressure on capital to prevent them from doing a kind of like capital striker or a bond struck Right, to force them they continue to fund things. Right, with enough public pressure,

you can make a whole lot of things happen. You can make the police, you know, at the very least be acting on a kind of defensive front to where they're not, you know, rioting and try to run city politics, but are kind of forced by mass popular and mobilization and pressure to at the very least not be openly attacking the mayor. You can put massive political pressure on Kathy Cultel to you know, do things that are good, which which is how we got how New York got

congestion pricing in the first place. Right like that, that was a result of a masses like organizational campaign that went extremely well, and hushov like tried to sabotage it because she thought it would be unpopular, and eventually it got implemented and it's really popular now and now she's really in favor of it. So these people can be pushed around, right, They are not invincible, Their victory is

not inevitable. They can be defeated and they can be forced to accept that, Oh wait, hold on, the extremely sensible policies that we want that make our lives better are good, and that requires mobilization. But you know that's not impossible. We know how to organize. We've been doing it for ages, and it was you know, what had happen to make all of this possible in the first place. And so instead of demobilizing now and going, oh, our jobs are done. No no, no, no, no, our job our jobs

have just begun. But you know, the better organized we are and the more we're able to push this and the more we're able to push all of these people, the better our lives will get. And this election to begin with, is a reminder that another world is possible and it can be.

final section of the interview. Now, most coverage of this interview, including my episode last week, focused on like the first two thirds, which ranged from like Nick Fuentes's political background, early beef with Ben Shapiro and his like Nazisque anti Semitic theories of a quote unquote organized world jewelry corrupting America, which he now lightly couches in anti Israel framing to

profit off of the genocide in Palestine. But the last third of the interview changes course to discuss the mechanisms of quote unquote reality distortion which are ruining young men, drugs, alcohol, the Internet, and most importantly, pornography. After receiving a universal response demanding the release of the porn cut, I have sat down with Robert here to finally finally air what no other news platform is brave enough, brave enough to cover?

a performatively confused Tucker Carlson the concept of pornography. And I guess if we're gonna view you know, Fuenttes and the Gropers as like a serious, legitimate threat that's able to sway national political discourse, I think it's also important to cover his weird sexual politics, just as explaining the weird sexual practices of like, you know, the Proud Boys is important for understanding their whole deal as like a

neo fascist streak gang. The kind of closeted gay in cel women issues of the Gropers is actually really important, especially for Nick, and let's discuss that. But thankfully we get to start off with the majority majority of this section, which is which is on pornography let's start one of the first clips.

get into marriages, lasting marriages. And he frames this kind of slightly as the fault of men, but also really as the fault of women. Women aren't able to compete with how much porn there is, the different categories of porn. How can one woman please a man when a man can go on to the Internet and look up, you know, fifty different niche fetishes that not one woman could. Yeah, and that's that's part of his argument at this point.

his rhetoric to make him like appeal to a bigger audience, but did not really push back on to the same extent he does on a Nick's like relationship with women. But the sexual dysfunction aspect, I think is the is the ending argument for Nick here in terms of what actually makes porn bad. He extrapolates on this point in this next section which I'll play Now.

intensity the novelty and the availability of porn. It's hyper stimulation, and so I think that's sabotaging a lot of normal sexual relationships.

you know, manipulating human behavior. Right, This is like the sissy hypno theory that porn can like make somebody trans Yeah, very goofy stuff, specifically for Nick, considering his curious catboy background and his alleged leak viewership of trans porn, which we might we might discuss later. I want to play it, play another clip kind of on this note, a shorter one.

on screen. That's eventually what he starts talking about, right, And but he couches this in saying that, like, people don't realize that this is what this is, you know, different from actual sex, which is really funny because Nick is proudly proclaims that he's never had sex before, so he is in no position to argue this point.

sly interviewer is at this ending porn section. It's not the it's not the are you a Fed? Section, it's not the Daily Wires stuff, it's not the anti Semitism stuff. It's it's specifically the porn section. But to explain this like out of body theory that Nick that Nick has here, unfortunately Nick gets into trying to explain the Blanchardian theory of trend sexuality towards towards Tucker Carlson, of which I will only play a certain segment of because we don't

need to hear that whole thing. But there is a section of this next clip that which we'll get into that as well as take you on kind of a beautiful journey showcasing Tucker's objection to pornography.

And so there's weird things that happen when you're watching that and having such strong emotional and sexual experiences.

in the in the poor thing is simply phenomenal. I mean, especially considering the whole you know, catboys scandal, which I covered on the show like years ago as when I was like a baby, as well as Nick's like alleged trans porn league, which I guess I'll explain to here briefly. This was in twenty twenty two. Nick allegedly was operating a socc puppet Twitter account when he was banned on Twitter.

This this account shared a clip scrolling through Nick Fuentes like analytics, like video analytics, like search of analytics, showing his popularity and when scrolling through these various tabs, A little section of a tab that that didn't did not get into full view, but you get you saw the bottom of it, which looked a lot like a very

specific trans femboy porn video on porn hub. People found the video, and after they found the video, you know this, This this post with these analytics was like taken down and this account was believed to be operated by Nick Fuentez. Now Nick claims that he obviously was not behind this account, that this was some like a groper fan who was trying to set him up for scandal by operating an account that appeared to be Nick's account on Twitter but

actually wasn't. I Robert, I will show you a little bit of this analytics video. We don't need to see the whole thing, but it's like this, okay, so various various tabs. Look look at all these tabs. This various Like.

a little a little peorn tab right Yeah. So this this turned into a little, a little mini thing with people thinking that they secretly stumbled across the Nick's porn porn watching habits, of which it would be no surprise, yeah, that he'd be watching transfendboy porn, especially again considering that he operated a catboy discord channel on his server. But he has staunchly denied this, as you know, as a

based Catholic in cell obviously. So, both Tucker and Nick believe that porn is a big factor affecting the decline of actual sex and marriage among gen z, and it's not just a male problem. Nick argues that it has become a quote unquote so destigmatized for women to participate in porn as well, of which she's mostly referring to only fans. Here's a clip of them discussing only fans.

if women on the platform also get arrested. Man Ah. Again, the insistence that the a primary objection or like a causal a causal aspect of why is this allowed it's for like intelligence gathering services, is simply beautiful. Do you know what else is beautiful?

back and forth. But like, it's not, it's not the way he's framing it, right, because that's that's the most convenient narrative for the right, that like all of the young men are pulling towards the right, and so the problem is that women are more progressive, right, Yeah.

quote unquote tough chad quote. The whole political system is based around women never being accountable for any of their choices unquote. This is namely abortion and no false divorce, which Nick spends a while talking about how that is but a significant contributing factor towards ruining this country. How women can enter marriages and leave for whatever reason they want, taking half of them money, taking half the stuff, etc. Etc.

There's another factor that Nick claims is contributing to this problem. They have a.

And Tucker responds by saying, even if some of these complaints are true, as believers in the natural patriarchy, isn't it men's role to take responsibility lead by example and to fix this behavior in women through marriage.

you know, depraved and liberal. And Nick argues that even if you find like a nice, trad Christian girl, they're gonna be on TikTok, they're gonna be on Instagram, and they're gonna be quote unquote talking to other women and through osmosis, they're gonna get influenced by this liberal culture and say, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the line, people will change and they may not be so Christian and trad twenty years into your marriage because of society.

But Nick still doesn't buy it. Like he is he is, he is an insul at heart. Here's no way that that Tucker's kind of push back gonna it's gonna turn him on this. Like Nick just hates women entirely. This whole motivation is that due to some sort of like fascist homo erotic like aspect maybe, but it's it's probably

even more complicated than that. I mean, part of the fascist fenboy thing is people who actually aren't even gay but just hate women so much that they end up being gay because that's like the only mode of connection they can even or like physical connection. They can even like muster themselves to to like do, which I explained in that episode from you know a few years ago

when I was a baby. But yeah, this is definitely some stuff at play here, and I mean Nick will always just find new things to complain about in regards to this sort of stuff, like the quote unquote epidemic of simps.

that wives respect their husbands. We got only two more at clips left, but I think they are very revealing, all right, as much else needs to be revealed here.

like hero worship. The guy is the hero. The guy is supposed to be the entrepreneur, the conqueror or whatever, and the woman is really supposed to support the man's goals and be in his world.

Sopranos and fucking breaking bad. That's like the only framework in which you could understand this because he's never had a real relationship. The wife is the villain, I agree with ein Rand. Yeah, famously well adjusted in the relationship department. Iin Rand, the wife's role is hero for chef, and Tucker's like, oh my god, no, that that's horrible.

that he decided to do. And yeah, like my initial feeling after watching this whole two hour and eighteen minute stream is like this whole stream or this whole episode felt like Tucker was kind of trying to be some sort of mentor figured to Neck or saw that Nick might be the future in some way, like might be whether whether it's the future of the party or future of like you know, this sort of like commentating class or style, and it kind of wanted to offer a

little bit of a guiding light towards someone who I think Tucker does see, as you know, having some obvious issues and saying some nasty things and wanting to kind of write that course in a way or provide Nick a bit of a fresh start to restate some of his views on the biggest right wing platform online, which is which is Tucker's show. Right now, I guess that's kind of that's kind of all I have on this

women in poor section. I guess the last thing before we close, there is this question right with people in the GOP who are scared about Nick's Nick's influence at least in the commentating classroom among like interns, but specifically scared of it one because of the you know, anti Israel stuff, but also if that's going to hurt them electorally. Right, A lot of people couch this and saying, well, you know,

these views aren't popular with the electorate. Republicans are never going to win elections if this Graper thing takes over, and that leaves us, you know, people who are against against you know, the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in kind of a weird spot because I don't think we can really do anything to encourage like the graperification of the GOP like an accelerationist fashion. But we can kind

of let it happen. We can choose to just let it happen, or we can choose to kind of stop it in like the twenty seventeen Antifa, you know, framework of like trying to prevent this stuffrom spreading because it

will always lead to bad things. And yeah, after doing all this research last week and really continuing into this week too, I mean Trump just gave a statement in support of Talker and saying that he should get the word out about Nick Fuentes, I've continued to be looking at this stuff and can we even stop it though?

At this point? Right, like how much of the Antifa project like even succeeded considering where we are now politically right, But no, there certainly is this like internal debate in terms of letting this stuff happen versus trying to actively oppose this like Graper takeover of the GOP.

But that said, like, I don't think you can. You're going to scold your way out of this.

like watching the stars disappear in the sky. And today I am here to say, do not go gently into that good night fuck him, rage against the dying of the lights and with me to age she gets the diying of the light and talk about some absolute bullshit.

There are a couple of other things that they highlighted, but certainly the things that they did not highlight include, say, you know, scathing coverage of the Trump administration, or coverage of trans youth and trans healthcare bands for teenagers, coverage of like young celebrities of color, and so on. But yeah, anyway, I guess to just go back to the start of

the timeline. Last Monday, we at the News Guild and you know, at the Conde Nast Union, which is the union that represents basically every worker or every journalist and video maker at Conde Nast except for those in the New Yorker. They are in like a separate bargaining unit that we see as like you know, linked sibling units at the linked sibling unions. We do most of our organize together and our contracts are nearly identical. But anyway,

we were yeah, I know, right, union siblings. It's adorable. Yeah, we try to stay close. But anyway, we got word last Monday that about two thirds of the staff of teen Vogue were being laid off, including a friend of mine and I think former guests on your show, actually Lex mcmahamon, who was the politics editor at teen Vogue, as well as a few.

which was obviously a massive loss. I sat in on a lot of the like the winegarden meetings going over the exit packages for those employees, a lot of like really sad and cheerful meetings that day.

And then two days later at the company we got a notification that there was another round of layoffs, this one hitting I believe folks on the video teams and then people on the like copy in fact checking section of the company as well.

You know, like there will be you know, a reduction enforce will figure out, Okay, how are we going to keep doing our jobs now that we have fewer staffers, And then if the company needs to reduce the staff again, that will happen like a few months, maybe a year

in the future. Two rounds of layoffs in the same week had people really really scared and really stressed out, because I mean, for one, there's like just the sense of like, oh God, a lot of my coworkers are gone, how am I going to be able to keep doing my job? We lost at my magazine, bon Apetite. We lost our social media director, the person who was basically

running our social accounts. We'd gotten notification from the company that editors were going to be doing their own posting from then on, which is just not how things have ever worked before, not really a thing that they're like You know, my colleagues are brilliant, and many of them are brilliant like users of social media, but like not really a part of our jobs historically. So we're all pretty confused how we were supposed to, you know, actually

keep running our magazine. Most of our magazines are already running on pretty reduced staffs in the first place. Yeah, so anyway between that and the kind of obvious political connection that one could draw, or at least like that, a lot of our members were afraid of, you know, ten Vogue being this like pretty famously radical or at the very it's like pretty famously progressive publication doing some

like really really hard hitting journalism. There's a really clear line you can draw between like all of the Colbert and Jimmy Kibble, but also like the CBS stuff with Barry Weiss, like this kind of broader right wing shift in media. You can draw, i think a direct line between all of that and like the shuttering or near

shuttering of teen Vogue. So we did a thing that we basically always do when we're facing an issue like this, whether it's a big reduction in force or just some decision from the upper levels of the management that have all of the workers being like, wait, what, what the fuck did you just do? We had a rally in the cafeteria to go over some of the questions that

we all have for management. We created a list of questions that we wanted to ask and then, and I cannot stress how like routine this is for us as

a union. We went from the cafeteria, which is on the thirty fifth floor of the World Trade Center, down to the executive floor, which is directly below it on the thirty fourth floor of the World Trade Center, and we walked over to the executive offices and said, we have some questions for Stan Duncan, who is the head of the people team at CONDE, and asked basically one of the people in charge of either making these decisions of you know, staffing in reduction, and then of enforcing

those decisions as well. We went down to speak with Stan Duncan, asked him some of our questions to other HR employees came out in medicine the hallway. We said we'd like to speak to Stan. We were happy to ask them our questions, but they said they wouldn't be particularly good at answering them or they might not have good answers for us. But Stan, they said, was in

a meeting at the time. It just so happened that either Stan's meeting ended right then, or maybe he heard people talking in the hallway and decided to come check it out, or maybe there wasn't a meeting, but for whatever reason, Stan happened to come out into the hallway at that time, and so we started trying to ask him our questions. Some of those questions included, like, was the closing of teen Vogue inherently political? But also how are we going to be able to do our jobs

going forward? How are we supposed to keep running these magazines if you're going to keep cutting our jobs? And then also how are we supposed to keep doing our jobs if we are constantly living in fear of losing them?

of the NLRA that says we can do that. We also have like contract provisions that say the company will not infringe upon our right to organize and demonstrate in the workplace. So that just wasn't true. And in fact, the union, before everything else happened, already filed a grievance about denying our Section seven rights to organize in the workplace.

and forth along the hallway. He goes back into his office, closes the door. We all go back to our desks for the rest of the day. I finish up my work and I go home and then I get notification from the News Guild at seven that the company has notified them that they are terminating me and three of my colleagues. Jesus Christ, no severance, no ongoing insurance coverage. My insurance expires at the end of the month. No notice, no investigation, effective immediately. So as of last Wednesday, I

am no longer an employee of Conde and Asked. I'd been working there for five years. I helped start the Conde and Ask union. In the time since I joined there, I was one of the most tenured members of my magazine. Actually, people don't generally stick around there for a long time, but at twenty seven years old, I was a long hauler. And yeah, in the time since then, our union has filed a second degreevance. There was the first one over

telling us we couldn't congregate. There's now a second one over the retaliatory firings of me and my three colleagues. The company has since put five other people I believe on an unpaid leave in an attempt to discipline more people who took part in the demonstration. It's kind of hard to see rhyme or reason in the people that they decided to discipline. So I was speaking quite a bit during the demonstration, as was one of the other people who was terminated. One person asked one question that

was a Jake Lahud at Wired. He asked a question towards the beginning, which was, what is your definition of congregate when they told us we can't congregate in the whole way? Which I think is a perfectly valid question. And then one person who was terminated actually as far as I know, didn't speak at all during the demonstration.

He was, however, the vice president of the New Yorker Union, the vice chair of the New York UNI, and you know, an organizer that the company was like very well aware of. And then as for the people who were placed on disciplinary leaves, I mean, I believe some of them actually spoke significantly more than some of the people who were terminated during the demonstration, but were certainly, like historically at the very least, less visible and less vocal union organizers.

So the trend that we're seeing is that the people who spoke up were either people who had been historically very active in the union, or in Jake's case, somebody who was doing really really impressive coverage of the Trump administration and like really really hard hitting journalism against like Doge and like the general efforts of the right right now to you know, I mean, listeners of this podcast know everything that's going on there.

drawing the connection between this and CBS. I'm like, yeah, what did Barry Weis do when she got into CBS? She fired like every non white person who worked there, right, because their avert political plan is resegregation. And you know, in order to do resegregation, you fire all of the people who are non white, you get rid of any trans people, and you get women. Admittedly, at CBS, it's not like they had like a giant like like you know.

times in the past. There was one demonstration where we all marched on stand during contract bargaining actually last year, where we had significantly more people and I will say being much more confrontational. I remember like a large crowd booing him in front of like the entire executive floor, and I would say, and I would say, like two to three times as many people present watching in a

much more like loud and activated and energetic forum. But we've had marches on other executives, We've had marches on editors in chief in the past. And I mean one of the reasons that like when I got the news that I was being terminated, I like basically went into shock. This felt extremely tame compared to past union actions that we've done. Yeah, and also, no one has ever been disciplined for par taking part in any action like this

in the past, like, let alone terminated. Like as far as I know, no one's ever been called into a meeting and said like, you shouldn't have done that, and we're keeping an eye on you. So this is like a massive escalation on the company side in terms of retaliation. And I mean that's also what we've heard kind of

across the board at the News Guild. You know, I've been in close conversations with our president and with other like organizers at the Guild who have said, and this is, you know, our local union that organizes a bunch of different applications in New York City and kind of in the surrounding area. This is one of the most egregious examples of retaliation that just about anybody I've talked who

has seen in our union's history. And there's like pretty I think valid concern that like if a company like Conde Nast is able to get away with this, like other companies within our union are going to like follow suit and like take this as their queue, which is both scary but also has been energizing for a lot of people. We've seen, like a lot of folks really excited to like show up and join our fight and get involved in any way that they can.

of them. As far as I know, I was the only trans woman implied on editorial Conde Nast, and I am certainly the only trans woman in our union, including at them. Actually, all of the transoman employees there, to

my understanding, are not part of the unit. They are in management positions, which, yeah, your representation, but also means that like I was obviously in this very lonely position, but also this very like visible and like clearly very vulnerable position where it's like incredibly easy to single somebody like me out. I would also say, during our contract fight, we had a lot of back and forth between like me and company management about their coverage under the healthcare plan.

Namely they excluded facial feminization surgery, which meant that, like, if you were an employee of Conde Nast and you wanted facial feminization surgery, you were either out of luck or had to find a way to raise about fifty thousand dollars based on a lot of estimates that I've seen.

very thankful for that. But anyway, point being like, the company does not exactly have the best track record when it comes to and like I feel very qualified to say this as like the trans woman in the Conde Nast union, the company does not exactly have the best track record in terms of like how they have treated us and me specifically around trans issues.

course and turn this around, but anyway, it's disappointing. It's disappointing that like that that doesn't really seem to mean anything when the rubber hits the road.

you know. And this is something that I can say, which is like, this is something we saw from Jeff Bezos, right when when Jeff Bezos sort of like took control of the Washington Post and then gradually sort of purged their staff, and like, you know, has this whole thing now about how, oh h, we're supposed to be pro free market and pro individual liberties, which does not include

trans writes. You know, if you look at what happened to the Washington Post's subscriber account, it's like nothing, It's like the paper is dying. It's effectively just like it's not like an actual functional, like profit making thing anymore. Like it's just it's just the sort of propaganda vanity outlet of a billionaire. And that's you know, that's probably what's going to happen to CBS, is that it's going to just get sort of annihilize, stripped down, because these

people don't want a functioning media. They don't give a shit if these things actually work, because what they're trying to do right now is accumulate raw, accumulate just raw power and attempt to do raw sort of narrative and media control in order to stay in power. And it's not working because everyone still hates them, even though they

bought all the newspapers. Everyone is like, these people suck like but this is that we run into with unions off all the time, which is like, yeah, there are a lot of bosses who would rather their own company be non functional, you know, their workers have any voice

in it. And especially now in this political moment in which oh, hey, look the fascists are trying to seize control of the media, that becomes increasingly more and more an option of just fuck it, We'll just like get handouts from like the tech fascists forever, and in exchange of that, will publish whatever propaganda garbage they want to spit out.

money for the company. Yeah, and so one would think, you know, looking at like the trends of the past, that if that was going to inform anything, like the company would actually say, like more politics coverage, like more progressive coverage out of teen Vogue.

But if it wasn't a hack and a fraud, I would have the exact numbers from the coverage of like the increase in both revenue generation and in like readership that teen Vogue underwent once they started doing politic stuff on at the first show administration, And now you're getting rid of that for what are clearly business reasons and are clearly, very very clearly not related to the fact that there is a bunch of a bunch of political pressure from a bunch of fascists to run the government.

I actively avoid the attention of the Trump administration. You meant just like get rid of the parts of the company that are like, yeah, hostile towards it, and I mean kind of too like the good business of progressive coverage. I've covered a lot of beats in my time of bon Epetite, but there was a period where I was covering like the Starbucks Workers United fight pretty closely, a lot of articles about that in my back pocket. Those

generally did really well. Actually, one of the first times I faced like big right wing backlash online was covering the like Dylan mulvaney bud Light protests, which I used as an opportunity to write about the the Corse Light boycotts of like the West Coast queer worker movement and like kind of the birth of the gay labor movement. One of my best trafficked of all time stories I wrote about the like why the watermelon symbol became like such a big kind of like rally and cry and

like Palestine and organizing over the past few years. Again massive traffic winner for the company. But every time, you know, we get into these meetings with management or every time we like hear about the direction that the company is shifting or coverage is shifting, it always seems away from those kind of hot button issues that like there's clearly an appetite for stories about and instead towards well whatever it's towards you know.

negotiates to weybean sales now. But like you know, you can look at.

free press. The US is a capitalist press, and so you know, you can just buy them or apply enough political pressure and they will fall in line.

introduction there. But at the same time, like when I got into the workplace, I kind of realized that media unions are maybe one of the only things that will keep the media at least as currently exists, alive until we can come up with like some other model that is like more sustainable, because I mean, like I look at a company like Conde Nast and you have this like very well compensated very like large cast of managers

and middle managers yep. And then you have this like massive body of people actually producing the magazines, actually making like doing the work of the journalism and the culture reporting and the video making and so on and so on. And you know, one of those groups is constantly subject to layoffs. One of those groups is constantly being made to say work over time and maybe being told not to build for as much over time as they're being

made to work. And one of those groups is being extremely well compensated and has seemingly incredible job security.

work is going to be produced. I mean, I think it's no surprise that, like if you look at a publication like hell Gate or like Defector or like after Math and four or four, and all of these like worker co ops that are popping up kind of across the media ecosystem, like their worker owns and they have this very kind of flat like payment structure where everybody is making around the same amount, like everybody has a say in the way that the workplace functions, and like

these appear at least to me to be some of the most like stable media like organizations that are out there right now. And all that tells me is that like workplace democracy, I mean in like the truest sense of the word, you know, like workplace democracy as it is earned by like worker organizations, union's work or co ops, whatever they might be, is the thing that's going to keep the media afloat. Like that is the model that

is like sustainable in the long run. So I think that's one of the reasons that having like a strong and active Conde Nasty union, though management probably wouldn't agree at least explicitly, is like one of the things that can keep Conde Nast alive for as long as possible. Like you know, again they would probably loath to admit this, but like an organization like the Conde Nasty Union can only exist as long as an organization like Conde Nast exists, their fates are kind of tied to one another.

I have a lot of admiration for him and what he does. I think he's like the same way that you talk about Sophie. I think he's like really great at his job. I like have a good relationship with our editor in chief. I have a lot of respect

for her as well. We have a really really solid system going where we are like able to make this food magazine every month, and able to keep this website online, and able to make content that we're all like, you know, recipes and stories that we're all really really proud of. And then at the same time, we were kind of subject to this like kind of bigger whatever media machine that's like kind of moving around ahead or above us, and also moving around like again with just like so

little transparency. Like yeah, going back to the action on Wednesday the fifth, we have tried to have meetings with Stan, Like the executive that we talked to in the hallway, the executive that we marched on. We have tried to have meetings with him so many times, in so many different ways. We have emailed him questions, not gotten responses.

We have invited him to like town halls, not gotten responses, We invited him to meet with our diversity committee and labor relations got mad at us for se seeing him on the email.

It's frustrating to like kind of exist in this dual system of like, well, we have a magazine that we are operating like very effectively on our own, and yet there's this entire thing above it that is making these decisions about how it ought to function and like what it ought to be doing.

all the time. It's like the reason that I'm excited about being a member of the News Guild. The reason I got involved in organizing in the first place is, like, I think there is a future of media, Like I think there is a way that like, you know, people like you and people like me, like people who write and tell stories and like are interested in like talking to people and getting their stories out there. I think

there are sustainable ways that we can do that. And I think the people who know how to do like the sustainable future of this thing are the people who are making the product in the first place. Yeah, Like we are the ones with vision, Like we are the ones who know how to make something that can continue to exist sustainably, something that can like even under the capitalist like framework, like something that can make money, something

that can be profitable. A lot of the great journalists I know are like actually very interested in and very very good at making work that like generates quite a bit of revenue. And I don't think that's a particularly bad thing. Like they know how to do this in a way that is sustainable, in a way that like keeps readers excited and engaged in like willing to like

pitch in their own ways. The problem is that the people who seem to have that know how the people who make the thing and the people who know how to keep making the thing and the people who are making the decisions like aren't the same people.

like too aggressive eve and was harassing the chief people officer. Again, there's a video I think is extremely exonerating.

have let me finished the rest of my workday. Instead, I should have been escorted out of the building by security. I should have been placed on a leave. There should have been an investigation with like time for me and the union to comment, and then a decision should have came out. And the entire time that should have been happening, I should have been paid and like if that sounds greedy, Okay, the company agreed to it, like they didn't have to

sign the contract, but they did. But this is another like concerning trend that we're seeing right now with like you know, the gutted NLRB and like the kind of yeah, you know, shirking of like responsibilities from companies is like companies are like straight up gas lighting workers not things

that are in the contracts that they agreed to. They are like pointing to the contract and saying that it says things that it doesn't say, or that it doesn't say things that are like right there for you and clearing English stripe before your eyes. Actually, another time that we tried to talk to Stan this year was so we were based out of New York. Predominantly we have remote workers across the country. Although we were told just about everybody at the company to start coming into the

New York offices four days a week. There's a section of our contract that says that under a declared state of emergency, workers can stay home. Well, this summer in New York, listeners may remember, we had a really massive, like terrible heat wave, like temperatures up in the one hundreds every day, like going into the subway stations, and that week, I remember feeling like I was baking during the declared state of emergency, which again the contract says

workers do not have to come into the office. The company said, we don't care, you have to come into the office. Paraphrasing those aren't they are exact words that they're not too far off. And again we said, okay, but the contract says under a declared state of emergency, we don't have to come into the office, And they said you have to come into the office four days a week, no exceptions. And it is maddening.

Like there are people for whom, like at all ages, standing on a subway platform in that kind of heat is a really life threatening and like really dangerous thing to demand people do, yeah, which is like one of the things that we were thinking about when we like fought for that contract language, and like one of the things that we were thinking about when we were like nearly ready, like in fact that we were ready to go on strike and like disrupt the met gala in

May of twenty twenty four. Like that is one of the things that we were thinking about when we drafted that, and one of the things we were really excited that the company agreed to give us when we want our contract, and so for them to immediately just say, oh, just kidding, well, oh well now if we file agreevance, it might take like months directify. Well just kidding, those rights that we

gave you, they don't exist anymore. Sorry. And again it's like clear, easy to understand language that they are somehow willing to just say like the contract doesn't say what it says.

been this is said, this is national security. We don't recognize your contract anymore. So for example, like the the funny version of is they do this at a prison guard union, which is hilarious.

for better and for worse. So we are hoping that like readers and you know, fans and followers will keep the pressure up against Conde Nast to show like employers like them that like, we will not stand for this. We have an Action Network petition up right now that we are going to keep collecting signatures for that we hope to deliver to management soon depending on onence it

comes out. I mean, we'll be collecting signatures regardless. And that is also one of the best ways signing on to that will get you updates for other ways that you can you know, support us from the outside. But otherwise, I mean, we've got a lot of fighting to do, We've got a lot of organizing to do. I certainly don't think my days at Conde Nast are over. I expect that, like however long it takes for the law of shakeout, like I hope to be reinstated, as do

the other like three terminated employees. I also am certain that like we will be able to win justice for ourselves and the other people who were like illegally retaliatorially disciplined following the action. And I also think that this is nowhere near the last action that Conde Nast upper

management should expect. If anything like this is just showing us that if we want our contract to be enforced, if we want the rights that they said that they would give us, we are going to have to keep holding them to account, and we are going to have to keep fighting for them.

I should have prepared our at but I'm sure I can send that to you afterwards.

also editor in chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Today, I wanted to invite Shadin on to discuss the importance of Palestinian knowledge production and Palestinian spaces for writing, researching, analyzing, etc. So yeah, Shdan, thank you so much for coming.

And really the people who established it were looking for

shaping a space that could discuss these matters freely. And the story of the founders is a really interesting one because they were people like Hisham Cherobi, Walidlidi, Brandoshani Fuatzauf, and Konstantine Zrich, who actually was the person who coined the way that we name the nekba in his book Man and Nekba that he wrote in nineteen forty eight, in which he coined this term the catastrophe to think about nineteen forty eight, which would you know be our

ongoing condition. And I think the way to think about these people in there, in the way that they began their journal is to think about them as really confronting a landscape of erasure, denial, and urgency and occupying this kind of steady, incessant pain of the original inception of the Nekba when you know, think about it in nineteen seventy one, it was not that long before a decade and a half, yeah, right, And I think what's important about you know, in the last couple of years, people

have been kind of making demands about Palestinian studies as part of you know, some of the student movements and the staff and faculty movements, and I think it's really important for people to know that this comes from a much longer tradition of the production of knowledge as a real insistence on existence.

the history were first articulated in these pages. And so that kind of knowledge production is just it is a form of resistance to erasure.

fifty to five hundred and thirty seven Palestinian villages. And this plan would come to be recognized through the work of Benny Morris as a Israeli historian who had access to Israeli documents, but it's actually was Walid Realidi who had been evidencing and showing the empirical foundations of Plan Dalit, and it was in the Journal of Palestine Studies that

he publish those findings. In that case, I think that again, for people who are really engaging the movement for free Palestine and free Palestinians, we really have to be approaching the political economy of who gets to speak and whose knowledge production is uplifted as legitimate and worthy. And I think you see a lot of this kind of centering of Israeli voices, and I think we really have to in this moment. It's urgent to center Palestinian knowledge production.

possibly can't. And we've seen in the last two years a concerted effort to erase Palestinians further from the American Academy, but from also like scholarship generally speaking. But before I get into that, I wondered if you could kind of give your impression of what did doing Palestenian studies look like before October seventh? How was it easy? Was it acceptable? I mean, I know the answers, but I'd like you to say.

so I speak from that place. You know, people who study Europe, people who study the United States, kind of confronting the reality that they might not access archives that they are accustomed accessing, and in a similar way, facing the kind of targeting and surveillance, the bipartisan targeting and surveillance of academic knowledge production, and trying to explain to people this is what we've existed under all along.

than anybody else. It means you have to conduct yourself as if you are always being recorded, right. It means that every single word that you say you should be able to stand up for in a court of law, and all of those kinds of restrictions. Actually, you know, you give us lemons. We're going to make lemonade because those restrictions have imposed on us a kind of rigor. That is the least that we can do. It also means, I mean, I think for a lot of us, yourself included, right.

I was just somebody was interviewing me yesterday about, oh, have you faced harassment or censorship or something? And I think, at least in my case, I'm I'm constantly, you know, experiencing these things and just kind of swallowing it, do you know what I mean, just getting along with the business of the every day.

that kind of thing. And I'd come out of my lecture, you know, and you know, I teach big classes, and I'd come out of a big, you know, two hundred and fifty percent lecture, which requires so much focus and energy and being present and you know that adrenaline. And I'd look at my phone and I'd have fifty notifications and it would just be one insult after another. And that's just.

York when it happened. And you know, we've been under surveillance, we've been named, we've been watched as part of what we do, as you said, And in fact, I got my masters at the Center for Contemporary Studies and they wrote a book back in the eighties about the surveillance and I think it's called They Dare to Speak, well, right, right, yeah, these early accounts of the concerted attempt to silence us.

And so what I like to remind people is at this moment, you know, you said, oh, they're trying to erase Palestinian scholarship. I mean, at least they're trying to erase the voices who are putting forward a critical take on Israeli sellar colonialism and genocide. And I think what I like to remind people is that there is way more of us now than there's ever been before.

moment has completely changed for me. I don't know how it is for you, But the effect of the genocide has made it so that the bankruptcy of the institutions we work for, the rapid ways in which they're engaging with obedience and authoritarianism. Yep. Yeah, it's like what we've worked for our whole careers. It's like, well, I don't think this makes sense actually, do you know?

The level to which they delegitimized Arab and Palestinian sources or questions of importance to Palestinians and Arabs normatively speaking, politically speaking, also theoretically speaking, I mean, I mean, I can tell you so many stories, Like every person who's ever wanted to study Palestine, especially as you said, if you are Palestinian, is discouraged from it and is told not to, is told this doesn't fit, is told. You know, I'm in political science. The theories don't account for Palestine.

It's just outside of space and time and theory, and you can't account for it, you can't discuss it. And the harassment, the harassment campaigns all of us have been facing, I mean, it's it takes such a mental and emotional toll, and yet we produce, and yet we get tenure, and yet we teach our classes, and we're excellent in our teaching,

and our students love us and want to learn. But you know, as you said, like it really has exposed the degree to which these universities because they have been well one like we are in America, but also because they have been so divorced from their actual missions. Like how meaningless the space this has now become. But that's like on the harassment and like kind of these kinds

of obstacle side. I also think like people don't recognize like the resources that are needed to teach and study and research Palestine that other people in the academy, other knowledge producers get very easily. And it's there is so little for people who study Palestine, and of course that impacts what kind of academics are able to do this and how many people we even missing from this discussion, right, I agree with you that has been the condition before

October seventh. I think now after October seventh, that after they have attempted to use Palestine as kind of a cudgel to attack the higher education generally, like now people are recognizing it maybe more, but that has always definitely been the case.

Palestine is paradigm, right. You know, if you look at the memdenuine, I think it reveals also kind of what Palestine also stands for, which is the way that both the Democratic and the Republican Party have really no link to the popular realities on the ground, right, and that in effect, you know, part of the Trump base was really responding to this disparity, right, this lack of investment and in the political system. And I think, you know that for me was the I don't have hope in

electoral politics. And you know, I don't want to be cynical or anything, but I think what the memdnni wind shows us is that people are disgruntled and they're sick of the kind of extractive billionaire class doing what they want to do at the expense of the rest of us. And I think the media is really complicit in all

of this, absolutely complicit in the genocide. It's been absolutely complicit since the you know, war on Iraq, since the Second War on Iraq, in rendering news as entertainment, you know, And and it's like you could see the freak out that people had, the media had about mem Denny across the board. It wasn't just the Fox News.

there's all this disgruntlement in the public space. Our students are disgruntled. They want to learn, They've been promised something with this college education, and you know, even the slight bit of social mobility that has existed as a result of higher education is too much for the Trump administration. Yeah, it's too much for this right wing. So Palestine is a class issue, absolutely.

lesson that keeps being delivered time and again. And one of the things that's really struck me, and this has been the case for the last ten years, eleven years, long before Trump, and I think one of the challenges we face today is not to overdetermine the Trump administration as the site of all of the catastrophes that we're in today. And one of the things I've noted for the last fourteen years is I don't have to teach students that history isn't about things always getting better. That's

not a lesson. They need to know. They understand that teleology and the fallacy of advancement is a lie. They understand that because they live it, as you say, you know, they're in debt, especially those of us who teach at public universities. You know, most of our students are indebted. A lot of them have two or three jobs. They're housing insecure, their food insecure. They don't have a clear vision of the future.

around how this issue has been weaponized. So the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, alongside the Middle Ease Studies Association, just put out a report on this exact question about how titles six investigations, so investigations of alleged discrimination specifically about anti semitism and nothing else. First of all, there's been a huge uptick in them and have been

used to target these universities. Vast majority of these cases has to do with faculty extra mural speech, so like these faculty members having an opinion about genocide outside the classroom. I mean, honestly, I always remember I think Edward Side said, like being a Palestinian academy is like being an outlaw. That's like how it feels. That's how it feels.

So yeah, it's a real policing of speech. It's a real kind of weaponization of the charge of anti semitism, And honestly, sort of one of the things I think that really happens too, is that students don't get the tools to actually recognize and understand actually existing anti semitism, right as it is being rehearsed in like these show trials that we saw in Congress, and these in the rhetoric of many of the people affiliated with the administration,

in the kinds of alliances that even the Israeli state right has made with various right wing anti Semitic states. So it's like, I think one of the things that it's kind of like watching a train wreck, just hitting one train after another and just being like, what is this absurdity? You know, I myself was accused of being

anti semi for having a history of anti Semitism. So what surprises me is the way that people are allowing and facilitating this to happen, you know, and the way that they're not able to recognize how high the stakes are what it means to be a Palestinian in this moment.

You know, when you've been sitting watching for two years your people being shredded and you're facing the reality of what the stakes are in this moment, which is the annihilation of Palestine and the annihilation of Palestinians, your threshold for a shock becomes very high. And so I mean, I'm sure it's the same for you. I don't know if like what. It's like a constant trauma response. You know, absolutely, yeah, they're My emotional reactions are shut down, and I'm in

a state of being in the present. Okay, we got through today, Hopefully we'll get through tomorrow. I don't I kind of am prepared for the worst at all times. And you know, it's a condition of vigilance that I think people when they continue to feed this kind of right wing agenda of making people stupid and eroding even the possibility of higher education, it's the kind of condition that will be much more general, you know. Yeah, and

all these ice rates at the same time. You know, it's I just saw I haven't been able to listen to it. But a scholar who powerfully is talking about the Mexico Palestine border and the and the links between ice and the idea and the and the ways to think about these two things together.

to be able to mobilize. And then of course there's this, as I said, this class dimension of wanting to keep people in their place. There are too many black and brown people in the academy. Now we can't have that kind of social mobility. I just want to emphasize for the listeners why it's so important for Palestine to be researched and studied and things like that is self evident. I don't need to explain it. But why is it so important that Palestinians are the ones who do that?

I mean, again, it feels self evident, but I'll say it like, Palestinians have agency, and they are full human beings, and they know best what questions are relevant, and they have a unique perspective on the issue of Palestine as well as other issues. And so not only are you engaging in the rature of Palestinians when you don't amplify that kind of knowledge production, but you are making scholarship poorer.

You are limiting what you know about this issue. Yeah, so what do you think, you know, kind of broadly speaking, students, scholars, sympathizers, what do you think they should do in this moment.

of philos Steine Studies. What I've tried to do in each of the editor's notes is really lift up all of the testimonies that we've received from Palestinians in Gaza, written and social media and all of these, but also lift up the international voices of Palestinians like yourself and many many people who are writing and giving us tools

to understand and analyze. And the reason that's important is because the main problem that we face, I believe, is the way that certain people are more susceptible to being excluded from the category of the human. Once you exclude people from the category of the human, it's much easier to kill them and make them expendable. And I think our work really in centering Palestinian voices rejects that logic, right, rejects the logic of are we human or not? Are

we going to evidence our humanity or not? You know, we tell our stories, and I think that telling of the story changes the angle of vision. If you're looking at what's happening in the Gaza strip from the perspective of people who are living it, you will see different things then if you're looking at it from you know, a drone or you know, a geopolitical lens. So that's one thing.

offer us. So, I think, in a way link to what the earlier conversation about a political economy of value of scholars, right, there's a kind of also here a political economy of concepts. And I believe that we have to really provincialize Europe. We have to provincialize Europe as the means and the ends of all things. It is not generalizable. No, just ask different questions and look at it from a different perspective in terms of what do I think students and scholars and all of us should do.

Is it's going to sound strange, but first and foremost study, read, learn, Those are the critical tools that you gain that will allow you to defend yourself in a world that is intent.

threatening Donald Trump and jd Vance. This is, of course James Donald Vance Junior different jd Vance, a sixty seven year old man from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

with me. Mark replies, ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba. You know, yeah, I'm going to continue the exchange, yeah, because, Jeffrey replies, and I thought I had terrists. Mark replies, you and your boy Donnie can make a remake of the movie Get Hard sent via tin Can and a string.

Ken Starr. And you know, you go back and you look at like you look at like the actual like impiachment of Bill Clinton, right, and you realize that every single one of these people are all friends with Jeffrey Epstein and are just kind of hanging out like yeah on like on the pedophile and.

that his brother just kind of laughed for him. And again, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the man, but I can recognize it because he also said at the same time, he was like this definitely was not him, referring to Donald Trump giving a blowjob to Bill Clinton. He did also say that he believed that the Republicans were removing the names of Republicans from the Epstein files before release. Right, So he's he has been like hedging his bets because again he's in a lot of danger.

Fuentzi way of being critical of Israel. You see seeds of this because like Martin Taylor Green like attended the Nick Fuontes America First conferences like four years ago, Like this is this side of it not a surprising turn for her. Her finally flipping on Trump in terms of the pedophile stuff may be a little bit surprising because

she was the original like QAnon candidate. Yeah, and q Andon's built on this, like trying to justify in some ways Trump's proximity to Epstein by building this grand narrative.

This has frustrated Trump, and you know, Trump's also been frushtyed with other members like Lauren Bobert and other like congress people who were pledging to vote in support of the release of the Epstein files. And this pressure was building a lot last week during this like twenty thousand document release and all this new news coverage and as these as more and more Republicans bean to deflect from

Trump over the release of the Epstein files. Trump himself flipped his rhetoric over this past weekend, still calling the debate over the files a Democrat hoax, but truthing that the files should be released because we quote unquote have nothing to hide, and he called on Republicans to vote in favor of the bill to release the Epstein files, which they did on Tuesday in a four hundred and twenty seven to one vote, with Representative Clay Higgins, the

republic In from Louisiana, the only Congressman to vote no. Hours later, Chuck Schumer unanimously passed the measure through the Senate. Mike Johnson had previously expected the Senate to amend the bill to quote make sure we don't do permanent damage to the political system unquote, and after its passage through the Senate, Johnson seemed quite worried that it went through

the upper chambers in its current form. And I want to play this clip here because it's kind of shocking to hear him, hear him freak out.

this jam. This bill that has passed does allow Attorney General and Bondy to withhold or redact portions of the files that could jeopardize active federal investigations and personally determine if information in the files should remain classified to protect national security. The last weekend, Trump ordered BONDI to launch investigations looking into connection between Epstein and prominent Democratic politicians and donors. Here's clip from a Wednesday, November nineteenth press conference.

is totally legitimate and totally newsworthy. On Monday, November seventeenth, a piece in the prestigious outlet The New York Post opinion section provided earth shattering relevations revelations care that's the word about the attempted Trump assassination, claiming to have discovered evidence that Thomas Crooks, the shooter, had two possible accounts on Devian Art, which, yeah, this really is the biggest story, which the Post New York Post describes as quote one

of the biggest online hubs for furry art and the furry community. A furry is someone who has an interest in hormorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish unquote

every time. Later reporting in The New York Post claimed that one of these accounts had only shared a single post quote a repost of a towering, muscular female bodybuilder and a slight man in his underwear unquote and quote multiple searches for muscular women and female bodybuilders found on Crook's supposed YouTube search history.

This became the big thing among the right. Another trans shooter, the Trump the Trump assassin was trans the whole time, and we didn't even know the FBI covered up the trans connection. Here it's all coming together more more red string on the board. The trans the trans shooter narrative is growing more and more evident by the day. Right, this, this is the way that this was framed across all of these all these commentators, who's the president right now? What is this supposed to work?

FBI for comment. They did not receive a response. State The New York Posts reporting like in these in these opinion pieces, and I think later an article they did did did later include references to quote, violently anti Semitic comments and racist remarks about Hispanic immigrants m that Semmens Crooks also made, including YouTube comments from twenty nineteen quote, this is going to be blatantly racist, but I hope Trump has these people a squad murdered.

still from a conservative perspective. Instead, the story is now to quote libs of TikTok, Charlie Kirk, killer furry fetish, Trump shooter, furry fetish, Idaho firefighter killer furry fetish. What's going on? Right wing podcaster and disgraced BuzzFeed journalist Benny Johnson quote it has now been confirmed that attempted Trump assass and Thomas Crooks used they them pronouns, had a deep interest in furries and was exploring gender identity. Add

it to the list. This list is then a list of both real and many not real quote unquote trans mass shooters. Another account in d C. Draino, who was part of the White House photo op team during the initial fake release of the fake Epstein files, not that the files were fake, but like this fake media presentation around releasing the already released and actually even more redacted versions of already public files. DC Drena was one of these guys who was like pray it around as like

a prop holding up these binders of files. He posted. Quote it is now confirmed the deep state tried to cover up that Thomas Crooks was a transgender extremist to use the then pronouns and then shot President Trump. We need a massive crackdown against violent trans extremism. This sort of stuff is losing steam. This sort of stuff is not spreading around the way that it has been previously.

It's very clear that this is a blatant distraction away from unflattering stories about Trump in terms of the economy and specifically Epstein and all of this. Uh. You know, you might be wondering why maybe no other outlets of picking the stuff up, and that could be due to the dubious nature of the New York Posts sourcing on these claims, but also the fact that devian Art automatically lists a user's pronouns as they them as the default setting.

If pronouns are not specified, this is the setting that everyone you have to actively try to change it. There is no indication Thomas Crooks specifically set pronouns to bay them. He is not a transgender extremist. He, like many gen Z people, is aware of furry art online. This is

very common. This is a very common thing. But the post had a few other things they tried to try to wrap this story around to give it some credibility, including this post from the Devian Art alleged to belong to Thomas Crooks, which is a picture of someone shooting someone else in the head, which your post calls another artwork appear to feature a shooting against a backdrop of the trans flag colors. This is not the trans flag nor the trans flag colors. This is a blue and

purple background. What purple is not in the transflag colors. You can maybe argue this is maybe, but this is not a trans flag. This is not an LGBTQ pride flag. This isn't even the bisexual flag, which does use these same colors. This is just like a sky blue and a magenta purple backdrop, which they are trying to frame

as further evidence of Thomas Krook's transgender ties. But what is kind of interesting is as a part of the social media accounts alleged to be linked to Crooks that have appeared in new reporting from both The New York

Post and Tucker Carlson's own news outlet. But as a part of this reporting on Crook's possible online background included a collection of search results or like search history from April of twenty nineteen to May of twenty twenty, which lines up with stuff that me and Robert have been talking about for a while, in that this guy seemed to have the ideology or non ideology of a school shooter. This is the actual through line across this act of violinces.

Researches include quote crazy chemical reactions, deadliest mass shootings in the world, people attacking pride parades, cars running over protesters, getting away with racism, best places for a mass shooting, Pulse night club, Pulse night club, police body camera, mass shooting, El Paso mass shooting, Trump's civil war, Trump church shooting video, guns versus protesters, Orlando shooting reaction. Why I'm missing handgun? Firing an air fifteen as fast as possible, fertilizer bomb,

How do you use a tourniqueit? How to make napalm, maltov cocktail? How to make maltov cocktail? Mixing ghasoline with styrofoam, mass shooting Canada, Oklahoma bombing sniper in Dallas shooting.

very nihilistic. That's all I have on the explosive reporting from the New York Post.

listening to this podcast, are effectively in a recession. And the reason I can say this is that there's there's pretty good numbers from the Harvard economist Jason Furman, who points out that if you if you look at so okay, so recession is is three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, right, and this is not like a perfect economic indicator, but you know, Jason Furrin points out, ninety two percent of GDP growth in the first half of this year is

in a category that's called information processing equipment and software. And so, okay, what is that? That is all data center it's all data center construction. It is ninety two percent of all our GP growth.

seems like a fucking grift. This seems bad, and them all being like no, no, no, bro, trust me, no, no no, and then it all goes to shit.

bad assets. There were houses there right at the end of the day, all of these banks can go in and they can take your house, and that's really bad obviously, But what is the underlying assets for all of these tranches of all these tranches of debt. The underlying asset that you're supposed to be taking, you know, that's supposed to be the collateral is compute power.

going to get worse. The good news is once we get past you know, if if this is the way the dot com bubble went right, once we get past this crash that's brought on by you know, a mix of greed and insanity and ignorance and lies, then we can finally get to the Internet changing society in only positive ways, which is what happened after the dot com bubble.

You know, we got Facebook, we got Google, we got Twitter, we got Instagram, we got all of these great apps that have made our lives nothing better but better, you know. So I'm looking forward.

And the idea behind why people thought open ai could be a good business is that these inference costs, which is basically how the cost that it takes to keep making the models better, right, that that was going to decline once they hit a certain level that like you're not going to need to it. It's super expensive to get the models to a point where they're good. But once they're good, then they get to be really cheap.

And that's not really true based on the data that we have, and they were lying about it kind of, you know, they were not in a way that was legally actionable. They're not a publicly traded company that were not required to release this to the public. It does seem like they were honest with their investors, like Microsoft, right, they were lying to us, right to regular people, in order to pretend this was a business that had a lot better of a shot of being successful in the

way it needs to be. The problem with AI as a money thing is not that there's no profit in this. It's not that there's no use for any of these tools. There are many uses, and there are many potential businesses. It's that none of them equal trillion dollars, which is what the minimum that they need to be profitable, right, And these data centers are all based on the bet that no, no, actually, this is a multi trillion dollar industry and we need this much compute, right.

And I am praying. The one thing that makes me be like, I hope this goes down quickly is that I am praying that this bubble goes down before they actually start trying to build nuclear like really truly get off the ground building a buch of nuclear reactors, because can you imagine these guys who created a computer that can't win at chess trying to build nuclear reactors.

boom that created a bunch of wealth. It created wealth doing things that were often super bad for society, But it created a shitload of wealth because real infrastructure had been put in place that actually enabled the whole country to get connected it enabled the birth of like the mobile computing revolution and whatnot, because a lot of groundwork had been laid that was really meaningful, even though a number of the businesses involved in it didn't work out.

And that's really not what we're seeing because it's hard to imagine assuming there's not a multi trillion dollar need for AI, assuming everyone isn't going to do everything for the rest of their lives through AI agents and do all of their thinking through chat GPT. Unless that's the

reality we'rein, these are not good investments. And the only thing I can compare it to in terms of what you were saying to me about this being like the worst allocation of capital in history, because I've been reading a lot about like the nuclear arms race, and it was one of those things where you go from we've dropped tens of thousands of bombs over the course of five years to if we were to accidentally launch these ten missiles, it would be more explosive power than has

ever been detonated in the entire history of human war added together up to the present moment. Right, Like that that is the because of and part of this was

enabled by the actual like internet boom. Right the one that brought about Web two point zero in the social media era, right, like, all of that wealth and all of the money that poured into these vcs who'd gotten on board companies like Facebook that had to be created to allow something this irrational, because twenty years ago, if the technology had been there, there wouldn't have been the money to enable this kind of insanity.

And this is one of the things that causes, for example, the Third World debt crisis in the seventies, is all of this capital flows into all of these there will debt things it eventually. This is one of the things that powers first the Japanese giant housing bubble that they did that caused the Asian market collapse in early nineties and then cost two thousand and eight is that there's all of these pools of capital they have to turn

into more capital, and they can't do it. And when they can't do it, you get two thousand and eight, right, And they've been able to sort of hang on for about a decade, a decade and a half ish roughly, because there was so much money coming in from this from this tech sector. But everyone outside of the tech

sector it sucks. It's bad. So this is part of the reason why everything feels unhinged right now, right Like, Okay, there's obviously kind of a problem with trying to track employment data just by seeing news of firings, because companies just do firings because it makes their stocks go up because it makes investors think they're being more efficient, which is nonsense, but it's why it feels like this is

why you feel broke. And everyone is like talking about how the economy is growing, and it's like, well, yeah, this really small sector of tech has accumulated an unfathomable amount of wealth and they are getting very, very rich and everyone else is fucked, you know, And when this bubble colass, when these people take all of the money they got out of Tech and have thrown it into the metaverse and AI. When that blows up, it is going to be cataclysmic, and we're getting closer to it.

The four entities are called Anti for aust aka Hammerbund hammer Gang, the informal Anarchist Federation that's an Italian group. They use the initials f A I. Also they use fr I that is not the same as the FAI that you're familiar with from the Spanish Civil Wars.

The State Department, when it talks about anti for Oz, talked about a series of attacks in February twenty twenty three. What's missing from the analysis of February twenty twenty three is what was happening in February twenty twenty three. It was an event in Hungary which existed to honor Nazis. I don't mean Nazis like people who have a right wing political ideology. I mean like members of the NSDAP in Germany who fought in World War Two at the

time when they were doing the Holocaust. The rally included several groups which were already sanctioned by US allies, including Blood and Honor Combat eighteen. Jesus, I'm not going to go into an in depth history of either of those groups. They're neo Nazi groups, right. That eighteen is Adolf Hitler one eight. These are the people who are, as far as I'm aware, the victims of that February twenty twenty three violence right. Notably, though Antifa oust was sanctioned by

Hungry earlier. This year right Hungary under Auburn fast moving towards an extremely right wing I didn't think what political scientists like to call it an illiberal democracy.

anti fascist, right. There is a distinction between anarchism and anti fascism, which can be seen very acutely in the May nineteen thirty seven events of the Spanish Civil War. But these groups have neither claimed anti fascism, nor, as far as I'm aware, have any of them killed anyone. I believe believe that the antifa ost people being prosecuted. One of them is being prosecuted for attempted murder. In

other cases they have been responsible for explosions or attempted bombings. Normally, to be designated in FDO, they would have to be a threat to either US people or the United States as an entity. Right there doesn't appear to be any evidence that these groups have any ties to anyone in the United States or present any immediate danger to the United States. I don't quite know where they got these particular groups from.

you know, contact us if you have ideas. The other terrorist designation that happened this week, which is breaking as we record on Wednesday, the nineteenth of November, is that Greg Abbott has declared care this Center for American Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations. Jesus yeah, Jesus Christ. Texas doesn't appear to have an FT list as far as I can tell. What this seems to be is a designation under SB seventeen, which parts passed

earlier this year, which relates to property law. It would stop the Muslim Brotherhood or Care as a national five oh one C three renting or buying property in Texas. I'm not sure the Muslim Brotherhood intended to rent or buy property in Texas. Most of SB seventeen deals with with like nationals and entities linked to like China, Russia, and North Korea. It's trying to not have them by large chunks of Texas. But it also does have this this mechanism in it. So just Muslim Brotherhood is the

sunniest limits organization. It has participated in violence, but not for some time. It has its origines in Egypt. It does a lot of like social programming Care most people will be familiar with.

El Paso Islamic Center. That investigation was closed, right, but this is not the first time that they have attempted to u It's just very clearly in Islamophobia out of Texas, right, Like, that is what this is.

schools a homophobic stuff with their like kind of very specific current contemporary targets by you guys sort of running these two together. Yeah, me, it's right.

twenty twenty one map for the upcoming midterm elections. What's really what's really funny here is that before the elections in November, where the California redistricting measure was up for vote, Newsom specifically removed language in that measure that framed the California redistricting as a triggering event, as in, if the Texas one passes, then the California one can go into effect. You've specifically removed this.

other states are trying to do this. But there is a possible future in which Texas is not allowed to racially jerrymander and California is able to go forward with their redistricting because it may not have been specifically violating this like a racial gerrymandering aspect that Judge Jeffrey Brown found was affecting the Texas maps intentionally.

you don't do that by killing migrants. And so Europe's response to this is extremely disappointing, Right, and I wanted to highlight that because I don't see that in the coverage. Yes,

Russia escalating it's meddling in Europe is extremely concerning. But if we accept that Russia is a totalitarian state or going in that direction, then we should also therefore accept that people are going to want to leave that in many other states where they cannot have autonomy, where they cannot live healthy and full lives, and we should welcome them. Talking of people leaving places where they cannot have autonomy and have full and happy lives, let's talk about immigration

in the United States. Very quickly, Border Patrol and Gregory Bovino have moved their internal enforcement I of Sauron to Charlotte, North Carolina. Seems in large part due to to some racists on x dot com demining that they do so I shouldn't say in large part, I guess in some part there has been video already showing Bovino participating in detentions at a home depot car park.

a billboard campaign. Last year, the North Carolina Republican state Legislature over rode a veto to pass HB ten, which required agencies to cooperate with ICE and honor their detainers. A detainer is basically when ICE is like, hey, you've arrested. We want you to hold them for a bit longer so we can come pick them up for ICE reasons. Since then, Meckelberg County Sheriff McFadden has claimed that ICE has failed to collect people on detainers one hundred and

sixty three times, So this will be. They normally have a forty eight hour detainer, right, they more than forty eight extra hours I should come get When they are held on the detainer, it is still the state that is responsible for them. It is a state that is paying for the cost of incarcerating that person. It is the state that is still incarcerating that person. Right. This has led, I guess, to Republicans claiming the McFadden is

ignoring his obligation under HB ten. Mcfahnen says, isn't he is holding them for the duration of detainer, but then releasing them when no one comes to get them.

because they believe that HB ten is being ignored. I think that might be a lot of the reason why we're seeing this now. Then, finally, I want to talk about something local. Southern California, in Temecula, north of San Diego, seventeen year old boy was pulled over at gunpoint by a man who was known to locals as an ice agent. The man does not appear to have been in his

professional capacity at this time. Neighbors were able to de escalate the situation and get Gerardo Rodriguez, the man in question, to stop pointing his gun at the teen. LA Tucker got video of this.

is an interesting development. Right elsewhere, like in Santa Ana, an agent pulled a gun on a community watch member. Fullerton police on the scene did not detain the person. They also refused to assist, right, they just kind of were present. But this is one of the few cases I'm aware of an ICE agent. There was someone else arrested in l A who I believe died. I believe that was a Border Patrol agent that first unfortunately passed

away of an overdose. But this is one of the first instances I've seen of this, right, like a kind of a state federal a direct confrontation where this guy appears to have been pseudo claiming that he was acting under his authority as an ice agent.