Also media.
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, But you can make your own decisions.
Mia. Are you excited today to learn about Gregory hay Bno.
You know, I would describe myself going into this as an amateur but enthusiast Greg Bovino hater. I am very familiar with his work in Chicago. I'm familiar with his work in Minneapolis. I am less familiar with his other work. I'm excited to have a higher tier of hater of one of the worst people we've ever had.
Yeah, really a gem of the American law enforcement system. We're gonna talk mostly today about Greg Bavino's post Korea pivot, which seems mostly to be asking to have his whole career back, but we can talk a little bit about his previous career work. When he was down here, he was in ib he was in El Centro, who was in blythe for a while, but last week Mia he was in Portugal. Oh boy, yeah, do you want to guess why?
You know?
Okay, going through my by by history of Portugal, it's a country that had a left wing military coup that didn't go far enough by which they never quite got rid of all the fascists.
Yeah, a country that notably has a long history of fascism. Yes, which is where he was. Actually he was there in a remigration summit.
Oh no, yeah, Like, oh so.
I'm just going to use the conference's own website here. It is a set fiscal, cultural, economic, social, political, and logistical policies whose objective is to prevent population and replacement through the reversal of migratory flows. There's nothing there about undocumented people. There's nothing there about visas, right, because this isn't about that. This is about race and ethnicity and removing people who do not line up with what you consider to be the national race.
Yeah, this is this is the method cleansing campaign.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously there's like a lot of parallels in the history of all of these countries, but like, yeah, I think if you if you look at the most immediate one. It's oh, this is like the shit the Nazis were talking about doing. Well, they were building the concentration camps with like Jewish people, right, is that they were going to like deport them all to Israel or whatever. Yeah, we'll keep moving them east and at the very least this is an ethnic cleansing plan.
Yeah, that's the explicit goal, right that there is not mention in that definition of undocumented people, even the way that they have bea refers to refer to it as illegal aliens, a term he uses a lot, and think he sometimes uses it in quite elastic fashion. But even in this case, that is not what this conference is about. No, yeah, this is very much a conference about a white Europe.
Yeah.
It was organized by Martin Selner. Selmer is a neo Nazi who famously exchanged emails with Brenton tarrent at a christ Church shooter.
Oh great.
Yeah. Baffino spoke about this at the conference, and he said that they hadn't met in person before, but after talking for a little while, they found they were out on the same sheet of music.
Incredible.
Yeah, you're going to google people men like he googled Martin Selner, And the first thing that comes up is that he emailed Brenton Tarrant unless I guess that's not an issue. Yeah right, judging by the general company he kept, I don't think that's an issue because he's joining like like a Spanish Vox party of their after day there at AfD, the German fire right party. Racist from all over Europe.
We also saw the sort of racist in America who I would describe as like fancy racists, the race science guys.
Right.
Oh, they're kind of like the Bret people.
Yeah, it is it those guys?
Or is it the kind of newer gen like tech fascist people. So there's overlap between them. No, it's like the VDA kind of tendency. Yeah, no, should we should we explain with the vdair Yeah, a little bit, go ahead, may yeah take it.
Yeah.
Well, I was just gonna say, at some point we're gonna have molly On. I am a I am what you would call a I guess technically a professional Nazi identifier or whatever, but I'm like a low level one, and everyone else in this network is a very high level one. So we'll probably have molly On at some point to like actually really go into vdair and like that kind of shit.
But yeah, it's broadly speaking, it's Peter Brimolo's anti immigration website. We're not talking about anti immigration terms and discussions about what visa is we should give right, we're talking about like white nationalism.
Yeah, these are like Nazi Nazis. These are people that, yeah, you know, like I don't think the US has ever really had what in Europe is called like the Courton Senataire, which is supposed to separate out like the mainstream right wing parties from like the Nazis, Like we've never had that. So Vidare has been kind of more in anti immigration circles.
But it's also like those are people that you know, even you're kind of like really really far right, like people on the radio or politicians don't associate with because they are fairly open Nazis.
Yeah, there was some stuff that trace back to Vida in Agenda forty seven. I remember thinking like this ain't good. Yeah, Vida just for people who like have lived a blessed life and don't know refers to Virginia Dare, who is I believe the first white child or the first child, first girl maybe exploitafore. But I think as the first white child born in the United States as settlers, one of the onth of Roanoke people, right, Yeah.
Which is I don't know, likee, maybe you motherfuckers could have made like the Rono people and disappeared, but yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be nice. Unfortunately, Mia, No, Unfortunately they didn't and they didn't, unfortunately assimilate into indigenous cultures the way that the Rono people almost certainly did. Yes, instead, Yeah, half a millennial long campaign of terror and bloodshed.
Yeah, it's interesting to see Bevino. I guess, like aligning with these European anti migration discussion is different. It's not really dealing so much in undocumented people. It's dealing with people under various legal statuses. I'm not saying there aren't undocumented people in Europe. There are, but the discussion there has moved past that in a toxic way, in a way that it's like, we need to remove these people even though they do have like legal documentation that allows
them to be here. If the state says you're cooler, you're not cool, Like that's not my concern. Yeah, but it's still alarming to see the bigotry move past even that, right, like without the pretense of enforcing the law. Yeah, and just simply being about removing people who we don't think we want to live next to because they're not white.
You know.
One of the groups that you talked about there, like the AfD in Germany, like this has been happening for like a long time, but one of their like slogans or is remove kabab. Yeah right, and that's just literally like remove all Turkish people from the country. Yeah, And the AfD wants to do this. There are documents that have leaked from them that are them planning at conferences to Okay, this is how we're going to remove the not white people, just how we're going to remove the
Jewish people. This is not even like the pretense of anything else do with the law. This is just like we are the original Nazis. We want to do ethnic cleansing against not white people. Yeah.
Most of the people at the conference are peddling great replacement shit, right and they yea, they genuinely believe that is something that exists and that they can reverse it. At the conference, Beveno gave an interview. I found it on a website called bras Info ther eiz H. It's a Breton and French language website. It's also published I saw on a couple of other substacks, so I wonder if it was a pool interview that he gave that very people translated it. I should note that I translated
it from French. I don't think Bavino speaks French, so I'm imagining they translated it from English to French. And there is an editor's note that says the editor.
Was an AI.
Oh great, So any of the quotations here, we can't attribute them directly, right, Like, yeah, we can't assume that those are the words he said in English because it's been through three layers of bullshit. So I understand that going in. Nonetheless, I think it's a very interesting insight into how Greg Bavino sees the world. And what's interesting about that is, like Greg Leavina was very popular in
border patrol. He was, by the standards of the patrol, a good border patrol agent, right, He was liked, and I don't think he developed these opinions in a few months since he retired. No, And like a lot of the way he talks is not dissimilar to the way Border patrol agents talk among themselves, right, I think that, Like, what is interesting about this is not like Greg Bavino
is essentially sharing a platform and agreeing with Nazis. It is after twenty five, twenty six years, in more than ninety thirty years in the Border patrol, this is what the Border Patrol formed him into. Yeah, Because the point I want to make here is this shit is not something we can easily reform. This is not something we can train if this country gets through this and in twenty twenty eight, yes we have another election. God, we
can't fucking let this keep happening. Right, The tool that Baveno was deploying in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Charlotte and all these other cities in Los Angeles.
Right, yeah, Memphis, New Orleans Lake, Yeah, like all over the country. Yeah.
Yeah, it is a tool that Democrats built as well as Republicans. And the place he's at, he got to with eight years working under Barack Obama, with four years working under under Joe Biden. Like, we need to understand what we are diverting a fire hose of money towards with the Border patrol, Right, And I guess we can just start with where Greg Bavino started, which was comparing himself to Nazi general Erwin Rommel. Great, yeah, right at the gate. He also compared hisself to Pat and T. Lawrence,
you know, like historically. It makes you wonder. Yeah, I think he probably has some kind of clean Vermarke thing going on in his head where they're just soldiers and he can respect of them for their tactical prowess, you know, like mm hmm, he says, quote, they grasped the overall strategy where others in government or in the political class did not see it or refuse to see it. Strategic expertise combined with field command, especially in chaotic exposed events,
is very rare. I also listened to a couple of podcasts that Beveno did with a former Border Patrol agent who used to work in San Diego sector, and you hit it a lot right to talk about battle, talk about soldiers, but Vino sees himself as like a general on border patrol, as his soldiers fighting in a war. Yeah, that's not what they do. Oh, clearly they see it as that. I understand why, because like they've they've got
around the country generating so much ill will that. Yeah, everywhere they go, people fucking hate them.
Your actual job, and the only thing we saw in Chicago is dragging screaming babies out of their fucking homes and putting them in camps. Yeah, I think this is This is going back to the thing you're talking about earlier about this not being something that's reformable. Is that, Yeah, that task is what Border patrol was built for. That's what it was doing under all of these administrations, just fucking dragging people screaming from their homes in the dark
of the night. And like, the only way you can get people to do that is by creating a crucible that creates Nazis.
You can't have compassion for the people whose families you're tearing apart, right, Like, Yeah, people should read gent Budd's book if they want to know what going through Borderperl Academy is. Like this give a trigger warning that gen was sexually assaulted and and writes about that Border patrol has a very high rate of sexual assault. Right, Border patrol is ninety five percent male. I have seen people in Border Patrol who do have compassion, and then I
have not seen them anymore. Like it drives those people away. They have a high drop out rate, And I think there are people who genuinely believe that what they will do is keep their community safe and rescue people who get stuck crossing the border in the desert, adjudicate them a fair process, deliver them to a fair process, and
they will do the best they can. I don't see those people remain in the patrol for very long, right, Like I interact with obviously, Like the stance to this podcast is that you should remain silent and not talk to cops, But like I interact with more patrol agents more often than most people do. Right, that it's the nature of my job and the place I live and
the places I go. And like I think these days are recruiting, they're doing They're getting a lot of people who are coming into starting like this.
Yeah, but I don't think that's that's always been the case. Like I understand that there are people also in communities along the border, whether it's very little economic opportunity and then this is the only chance they have. But I see those people get spat out.
Like you said, Meir, if you are going to train people to tear families apart, then you have to train them to hate, and I think that is what we see in this right, Like it's really interesting. But Vino tells his own story a little bit, and he tells this his own story on this podcast I listen to as well. He starts with operation don't let Them Ride. Familiar with operation don't let him Ride? No, Okay, So you have to go all the way back to twenty ten. Oh god, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Little tiny baby Mia, Yeah, yeah, thirteen year old Miya.
Oh god, fuck me.
I feel old.
I was in grad school and Greg Bavino, I think he's Bliz the Blithe station at that time. And they do this operation at a bus station in Nevada. It lasts for sixty minutes, it gets called off. The Nevada Senator is pissed off about it. Their goal, they said, was to apprehend traffickers and to rescue people who have been trafficked or smuggled. Right in a community meeting which was convened because the whole Latino community in Las Vegas was like the fuck right. This internal enforcement was not
a common thing at the time. Paul Beeson, who was chief Agent of the UMA sector at the time, said, quote in that short period of time, we did not apprehend anybody we felt was actively engaged in alien smuggling. We did not encounter any human trafficking victims. So to me, didn't sound like a like a wind Yeah wait.
So so like they were just rounding people up at bus stops. Correct, they went to a bus like a bus stepo station. Yeah, yeah, like one of the big bus yeah yeah, and they just rounded people up and.
Yeah, exactly. So his interview with this former border patrol agent, he said that they apprehended more than one alien per minute of the operation.
That was called Operation Don't Let Him Ride. And that operation was set for about three days. It lasted sixty minutes. But the interesting thing is we called more aliens than there were minutes in the operation. It was a very successful operations, very successful. Yes, Sir Harry Reid called Hussein Obama and had that shut down immediately. But we never
got that. We never forgot the vast amount of criminals that we apprehended in twenty ten on those bus checks in Las Vegas, and the pervasive problem even then that we solve a lot of that problem came in under Barack Hussein Obama as well as Bill Ry Clinton.
I want to know the newspapers at the time reported a number that was more than two dozen. Technically, let's say the operation lasted sixty minutes, that is more than two dozen. It would be unusual to report a number of sixty by saying more than two dozen. Right. What is more interesting to me is that this operation was supposed to find people who had been trafficked to people
who were trafficking, and it failed. Greg Baveno seems to have seen it as a success because it just found people, right, people who were undocumented, people who were otherwise in infraction of immigration laws, but who were not involved in trafficking.
Because for him, it seems like the goal was slightly different, and therefore the criteria for success are slightly different, right, And this kind of fits into this narrative of him, so like I can see what he it is, especially in the context of him talking to the Remigration conference. For him, it's a win, but for the goals of
the border patrol at that time, it's not. So he cites this at the beginning of his journeyed where he is right as a guy they went to for massive surges of border patrol agents into cities tearing families apart. And I think if we see it the way he sees it, then we can see why he sees it as a success. But Vino, in his early career had worked a lot in the Alcentro sector, right, and ev actually became chief patrol agent the l Centro sector. He was in Bortac for a while. I've read a Defense
University paper that interviewed him. He was in Honduras with Bortac training border patrol there.
Oh Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean everyone should read Empire of Borders. Everyone should read Border Patrol Nation.
But like the DHS has done this for years, right, funded armed and equipped and trained border patrol units all over the Americas, because that is how America externalizes its border.
Yeah, in a very similar way to the way Europe does it with Frantics. And you know, like it deals like up with Godarthian and the successive governments and Libya and stuff like that. Yes, and the people they're training there, it's like school the Americas share just like actual monsters.
Like yeah, I mean the Sally Haydensburg My Third Time We Drowned is one of the more heartbreaking books. It's available for a human to read. But like, if you want to know about the fucked up stuff Europe's doing in Libya, it's a good book. Yeah, but yes, you're it moves the violence away from the metropolitan, right, it moves it further. I've seen this from my own eyes, right, I've seen what happens in Panama, not necessarily but the actions of any border patrols there, but just by forcing
people to take that route. Like, I've seen how the externalization of our borders kills people. And I have seen how the Biden administration funded deportations of people who are I can't find any criminal record for. And I have seen literally babies taken out of people's hands. Yea, and they were deporting young men at that point. But I look, I've literally watched families torn apart right there, just after crossing the Darrying Gap. And it's heartbreaking.
Yea.
Talking of heartbreaking, we haven't done ad pivot.
Oh boy, hopefully these product services will fix your heartbreak.
Yeah, oh god, Yeah, here's an advert for whiskey. Okay, we are back. So one of the things Bavino did a light in this into you is he sort to kind of distinguish himself from what he calls the status quo bureaucrats. He's not wrong that, like one of the roles of a chief in a sector is to speak to the press. Right. He seems to be very upset that Roddy Scott and Tom Homan didn't speak to the
press when they art to these big operations. He says, quote CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott and borders are Tom Hoeman not only had no experience was full enforcement of migration laws, but refused to speak public ly during operations. Their reluctance triggered the unique situation I mentioned above, and neither sought nor asked to become the public faith of the operation. But for this type of operation there can only be one.
The responsibility fell to me. When you listen to this interviews he did when he was in the patrol, he wasn't as critical of his leadership as he is now. Yeah, probably for very obvious reasons. But like the let down by leadership thing is is a thing. We've seen this on the right so many times, right.
Yeah, that's the classic backstem, this employed by one Adolf Hitler.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, like and in many cases thereafter, And he kind of seeks in this too to differentiate field agents from like what I guess what he called status quote bureaucrats. Right, and he is genuinely very popular among field agents, Like and he did like grow through the border Patrol, right, Like he's not a guy who came from somewhere else, Like he has a thirty year career. He's done like mountain interdiction stuff down in the Hookumber wilderness.
Like he's he's definitely like had his boots on the ground. I think they like that, And I think for him that gives him like like the he feels like he speaks for the border Patrol and that like these people who are like bureaucrats are what is constraining him and his guys from doing what they want to do. And like it's really interesting to see determines how he describes what they want to do.
Right.
He called the withdrawal from Minneapolis a surrender. He called protesters the opposition. In this podcast I listened to, he calls protesters pro fascist, which is very given the company he keeps his fucking ridiculous, Like the.
Other people at that conference can't be happy with that. Yeah, that's the thing right, where are the fascists down?
Yeah, but they're not hiding it. Like it's very interesting to see him like not willing to kind of surrender that term, you know what I mean, like to not quite say it at the same time as like, yeah, yeah, there are other people like conference you are like, no, where the fact, what are you talking about? They're not profascially say haters Like he's still like one step removed
from joining his buddies there. Another thing I found interesting was he says what the patrol is often referred to as quote the Federal Law Enforcement Marine Corps.
What does anyone say that I've not heard them say that? Oh, I what, I've never heard that.
It's a very strange. I'm guessing what he's referring to is like the Marine Corps has these expeditionary units which can deploy very quickly to conflict. Though it's like we sort in I ran right, like yeah, and I'm guessing that's what he means, Like they're the hit squad.
Yeah, they're they're the like, oh my god, we found like four children sleeping in a bedroom. We have to go, we have to go, sender like tactical squad. After them. Yeah, there are there are first line of defense against against tiny babies. Yeah, and against the Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.
Yeah.
When people were in the street in Portland, it was border patrol. They said, yep, it was poor attack.
Yeah. Yeah, right, they do have something of a history of being the federal government's hit squad.
Yeah.
When they want to stamp on Americans, they do send the border patrol. Interestingly, he went on to cite the old miss Riot. Even know the old miss Riot.
It sounds vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure.
Yeah, I mean you can surmise what's going to happen, right, it's a university in the South.
Yeah.
What happens is that James Meredith, a black man, had attempted to register at the school several times. He had been prevented by racists, including the governor, and at one point JFK sent Border patrol agents along with federal I think they were cross sworn as marshalls, maybe to accompany him to register. They ended up surrounded in the lyceum. Twenty eight federal agents were shot.
Jesus. Yeah, this is like they had a fucking fight about it. Like two of the people surrounded the lyceum were killed. You know, I'm not sure I've ever in my entire life seen a government deployment and thought you should have sent the national Guard. But like, yeah, I guess you should have sent the national Guard Jesus. Yeah, but really, I guess love shooting beds to opposed integration.
Yeah, like in this case, they sent the regular ass army to come get him out.
Yeah.
I think this was the era when they felt like national guides in the South were not entirely trustworthy.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you'd have to do a Trump style like we're sending the fucking like California.
National Mississippi or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah, they normally send like one of those QRSD eighty second Airborn or something like that.
Yeah.
Wow, I can't believe I'm in a position where I support the deployment of US troops against America.
I know, I know, it's it's a wild scenario.
I guess it's like because they're trying to do a lynching.
So yeah, like in that case, yeah, maybe stop the lynching. But it's a really interesting choice because he talked He's talking about how border patrolls, you know, like they had this long history of doing this, and again he's not wrong. And I guess maybe the on miss thing plays a part in their mythos because they were fighting against the racists. I can see why they would want to hold on to that. It's interesting to see him doing that at the racist conference.
Yeah, it's like, oh, no, no, no, we are a different kind of racist. We are California. We're racist. We are we are not like the primitive southern racist. We have advanceder level of racism too.
Yeah. Like, and he's very popular amongst them, Like, we're a different kind of racist racists, right, Like the vida tendency. Is that like quote unquote scientific racists.
Yeah. And but by the way, I want to clarify before I get screamed that the thing I just said was like his perspective, not mine. Jesus fuck these people, yeah yeah, all of them.
Yeah yeah, yeah, Please don't clip near out of context. So, like, he then goes on after he's expended this to explain like his history of migration. He says that around in the year two thousand, quote unquote, the floodgates open. His basic thesis is summed up in his statement from twenty to twenty twenty six. Are borders were nothing but speed bumps. Illegals and smugglers need it. Once they cross the border, they're virtually saved from any consequences.
A couple of.
Things there that obviously includes Trump's first term and part of the second term. Amnasia about Trump having a first term seeds to be quite a common issue on the right.
It's really astonishing and the left too. I don't know. I'm either more and more certain certain certain people who will go unmentioned, who were working for Blackwater under the first Trump administration.
Yeah, it's very interesting to see this narrative, but again not an uncommon one. Ye, right, Like he talks about how he wrote a paper called Illegal Aliens Detraction Natural Resources. So he has two master's degrees. One is from the National Defense University, and I'm not sure if that's his
second master's thesis, which it would be. I'd be interested to read it, but I haven't been able to find it, and I'm not sure NDU makes masters stuff public, and I think generally how it works is you have to opt to make it public. Like I'm interested to know, is this kind of eco nativism? Is it like carrying capacity shit?
Like what, Yeah. It kind of the other thing it kind of reminds me is like you get like you get this from like Scandinavian racists where they're like they have this line about the welfare state, where like the welfare stays of fire and you can only have so many people huddled around the fire.
Yeah, And it's like, oh, yeah, well, god, we see this lean like we saw a lot from Mike Lee right when he was attempting another pathetic excuse for selling off our public lands. Like Lee was saying, how like so much of our willness areas is destroyed by migrants, so we have to destroy them and sell them to protect them. The logic of Mike Lee is unknowable. But I'm to read that if anyone, if he has anyone is like a library Ninjia, get in touch. I'd love
to uh, I'd love to find that out. He spends a great deal of time explaining his one hundred million number, and he refers to these people as illegal aliens right that he contrasts this with the number of twenty million. He says that comes from Pew research, and he says that it hasn't changed since the nineteen seventies. That is not a statistic which is played out in Pew's published documents. I'm looking here at a twenty twenty three paper from Pew.
The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States nineteen ninety three point five million, twenty eight point six twenty fifteen to eleven point zero thanks Obama, and up to fourteen million in twenty twenty three. He claims to spend twenty since the nineteen seventies. Obviously he's not giving a source here, but he claims Pugh has said that, and that's not what I've found from Pew. He sort of
arrives at his towndred million dollar number. First, he said he was looking for some stuff from investment bank dere Stearns. And what he was looking at, why, yeah, it's very strange. He then goes on to give the only hard statistics he gives, and if he's talking about Charlotte, North Carolina here, when they were doing Operation Charlotte's Web estimates indicated that thirty percent or more of commuters who are no longer traveling, This means at least thirty percent of them were most
likely illegal immigrants. This is based on traffic delays he's getting the amount of time people spending traffic jet like he's going on Google Maps. This is a massive logical leap. He then says that's about a quarter of Charlotte commuters
thirty percent, not a quarter. And this figure, you guessed, it fits perfectly with the total of one hundred million out of four hundred and twenty million people in the United States, an estimate that one hundred million are illegal immigrants, same as the observation for children absent from Charlotte schools, more than thirty percent of students were missing. These were, of course, illegal children or children of illegal immigrants. The
category of illegal children. Fascinating choice of words. Oh god, I'm guessing he's talking about like undocumented kids or kids whose parents are ind documents his separate categories there. But like, there are many reasons. I don't think we have to explain this to listeners. Why why some people might not have wanted to be out and about or at school when board patrol and dragging people out of cars and smashing their windows.
Yeah, this is an extremely common thing, which is like.
Yeah, yeah, like not wanting to die.
I want to point this out too, Like they shot like American citizens. Not not that it's like worse to shoot an American citizen than a non citizen, but like, but they did that. Everyone everyone knew that they had done that. Yeah, Like they.
Did that in Chicago. Yeah, like, yeah, they did in Chicago. They were going to go do it again in Minneapolis. Like yeah, obviously they shot protesters.
They also just shot random people like who they were like, oh you're non white, fuck you right, Like it's like that kind of shit.
Ye, people who got in most of the instance we've seen that what they have said is a person tried to ram them with their car, and most of the times we have seen video evidence, it certainly doesn't look like that to me.
No.
Yeah, yeah, this idea of thirty percent of students, are there foreign documented people, that's ludicrous. They were in Charlotte, like middle to late November. There's a time when Americans often travel, don't go to school. Right, They have this Thanksgiving thing here and people like to enjoy time with their families. He then goes on to talk about the differences between US and Europe. There's a phrase here that
I want to read again. I want you to understand that this is translated twice uncontrolled immigration to the United States now post is the greatest threat to our culture in our very existence. This goes for you in Europe too, Even when we managed to get past these cumbers in bureaucrats and politicians, the grassroots will take care of it for us. The precise tactics for removing those who need to be removed may take different forms in Europe and
the United States. The grassroots will take care of it for us is between m dashes. I don't know if he means the grassroots will vote them out. Otherwise that seems like a program, right.
Like, yeah, that's that's not that's not good. Yeah, yeah, that just seems like an ethnic Clenson campaign conducted by people.
I want to be like, like, but because that's a really scary concept, right like yeah, but also.
Yeah, it's an AI translation that was then translated by you. I don't know, I don't know how your French is these.
Days, Like French is fine, but like, uh, yeah, I forget who said all translation is an act of violence?
But yeah, like humans doing translation is an act of violence. AI doing translations is like the fucking future terminator. Yeah, the machines have killed everyone.
Like yeah, like a lot of really is lost in translation. In between the M dashes, the French is labas populai sanchatier. So yeah, come at me, French speakers. Let me know if you think there's a better translation for that. He then goes on to try and like not blame Trump, which is interesting, said, I don't believe Trump has abandoned his campaign promise. I believe that his advisors do not bring him back to reality on the ground, And then
at skips little here. If I had to do it again, I would have briefed Trump directly several times, rather than relying on this inner circle who might have interests elsewhere. Trump is the best president I've ever worked for. I believe he will return to that campaign promise soon. Again, it's kind of a fatty thing, right, Like, it wasn't the leader. It wasn't the dear leader. It was some
people who failed to reflect the dear leader's thought. Yeah, it's very interesting to see him speaking so clearly this way, Like there's two ways he could be going with this. He could be angling for his job back, to be clear, right, The reason we don't have Norman Baviino anymore, in my opinion, is that after Ice and then CBP both murdered US citizens and the plain light of day on camera and then took to the television to lie about those US
citizens in the hours after they murdered them. They became too toxic for even the Trump administration to touch.
Yeah, they were staggeringly unpopular. Everyone fucking hated them.
Yeah.
Yeah, you literally lost like the old guys with the NRA hats at the gun range who I sometimes talked to, like.
Yeah, fucking again, I Kiki coming back to, Like they lost fucking Kurt Warner, who like is like a quarterback who has never once talked about politics ever and is like like made like a documentary that was like a bunch about like his like faith journey, right, and they like when when when Kurt Warner is being like, hey, what the fuck? Yeah, you've lost your You're losing the conservative football guys.
Yeah, I mean you shoot a white man on his knees in the street in the back, Yeah, while you're beating them up. Yeah, that's how you lose Americans.
Yeah, that's how you lose barstool Like it's yeah, hideous.
Yeah, he kind of has two choices, right, Like he can and you can go into the consulting world. He can go into the grifting world right and just become like a podcast grifter, Welcome to the club. Or he can go into politics. And I wonder which, like he's kind of left two of those pathways open, right, like he can kind of yeah, podcast grifter or politics.
Well, and you can do both now too. I guess that's true. Yeah, yeah, ce Ce the head of the FBI too much.
It was too much for Dan Bongino. He retired and returned to the.
True I guess, I guess, I guess. I guess it's like our noble like Health and Human Services secretary the latest shit eating Kennedy or whatever, like you can still do that shit.
But yeah, the serial podcast guests, I just want to come back to, like we need to reflect on this now, right, like we're doing primaries for the midterms right now. The Democrats have doubled down on same old shit almost everywhere across the country. We have seen some better candidates, right, but I understand that the pathway to a beautiful life
is not through the Democratic Party. But if they are incapable of seeing that this isn't something that we can reform, if they do what Biden did in twenty twenty, which is like, oh, they just need more money. Yeah, this ratchet will continue to only move in one direction, which is towards a brutalization of more people.
Yeah, just on a very basic level, like, having a massive institutional apparatus that produces Nazis and gives them the authority to do the thing that the Nazis want to do is not a way that any kind of democracy can survive. Yeah, and that's what we've seen.
To paraphrase, we have created an entity which you can exempt from the law in order to enforce it. Yeah, we can't keep up with that. And like, now is a moment I guess that demands bravery and from the Democrats, I've seen cowardice. Yeah, and if they continue to be cowards right now, we're going to go so far down this path there's no coming back. Yeah. And I don't fucking know, but I think that's something we really need to reflect on.
Yeah. We have twenty thousand Bovenos, Yeah, who we've given guns and training and authority to.
Yeah, and who we've allowed to kill people in our streets and not face accountability.
Right.
Yeah, Like I am not a County attorney appreciated generally, but like it makes me bik to see that Hennepin County attorney go after the ice agent who shot someone through their front door and they lied about it. Like if the liberal democracy can't do any of that kind of stuff, then it's worthless. It doesn't mean anything anymore.
Yeah, and it will and it won't be a democracy afterwards. Right, Yeah, diet made its own bed to die on. There's examples of this fucking everywhere, right, but like, yeah, the Biden administration was tragedy is farce of like Ende promoting Pinochet. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing that he did. He promoted Pinochet, right, Yeah, Like if you don't get rid of the people who want to fucking kill you and you instead give them more power, they're going to fucking kill you.
Yeah, And like what Biden tried to They tried pretty hard to retire Bavino because he would talk a lot about the situation at the border and Biden administration, but they didn't.
No, they didn't. And then also like they made more of them.
Yeah, and also they threw as much money, like the money that your kid doesn't get for free meals. It's because Border Patrol has black Hawks. Like yeah, yeah, that was a heartwarming and inspiring episode of It could Happen Here podcast about things falling apart.
Yeah, but okay, we beat the Nazis once, we can do it again.
Yeah, and Minneapolis beat these people. That's the other thing, right, Like they won. Yeah, they came out and they stood together as a community. They didn't focus on trivial bullshit that divides them. They looked out for one another. The Border Patrol thought they were in a battle, and if they were in a battle, then they did lose it. They surrendered, right.
Yeah, And like that's that's also not to say that they aren't still like horrifying shit happening there, right, Like there's still braids going on.
You're absolutely correct, Yeah, and that like people aren't dealing with the many other ills of capitalism in the distance that the state it is today. But like, yeah, they were not able to make those people cower in fear. Yeah, and that has shown the rest of the country how brave we can be together. And I just don't think we should forget that.
Yeah, isis alm Shinrikiu and Christian Signers are at first glance, these movements appear to have almost nothing in common. One is transnational but territorially weakened Tarror Network most active into twenty and twenty tens. One was a fringe Japanese doomsday cult from the nineties, and one remains a powerful political movement embedded in the heart of the US, the world's
premier imperialist power. The ideologies may be irreconcilable, their enemies may be different, and their methods even may vary from gorilla warfare to political lobbying, and yet they have more in common than meets the eye. Welcome toket happen here. I'm Andrew's age or andrewsm on YouTube, and I'm joined
today by Garrison Davis. Hello, Welcome, Welcome. So my goal is to try and understand these movements through the lens of ideological total itself, which was a specific theoretical framework developed by Robert J. Lifton to identify the outcome of a successful thought reform process, characterized by Denis Jewish and Tim Walforth in on the Edge as a quote mode of absolute conviction, which embeds ideas so deeply in people
heads that they grow inoculated against doubt. Ideas cease to be provisional theories about the world and instead become secret convictions dependent on the word of how old authorities for
their validation rather than evidence quote. Lifton saw the potential for the emergence of ideological totalism within everyone, but he noted quo totalistic convictions are most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content and most ambitious or messianic in their claims, whether religious, political, or scientific. The eight criteria that he identified for thought reform were milieu control, which is the control of communication
and information within the environment. Mystical manipulation, which is the orchestrating of spontaneous events to save the group's message. The demand for purity, which divides the world into black and white, good and evil categories. The cult of confession, which pushes members to confess past sins, personal feelings to the group.
The secret science, which elevates the group's dogma to an unquestionable truth, loading the language, which is using jargon or cliches to minimize critical thinking, doctrine over a person which subordinates individual experiences and identity to the group's beliefs, and finally, the dispensing of existence, declaring that only those in the
group have the right to exist. Now, not all of these factors may be at play for each of these specific movements that I would have mentioned, but we still see the outcome of this ideological totalism in each of these movements, to very extent, the systematic erosion of individual
autonomy in favor of an unassailable authority. Whether we're speaking about ISIS or Armstriakio, or Christian Zionism within the evangelical movement, or in any other case, we will see how movements replace individual identity with a collective prograum personae loaded language and thought terminating cliches make dissent literally unthinkable where the enemy other is manufactured, and where power is concentrated so tightly that the leader or the dogma becomes the only
source of truth. So the foundation of ideological totalism is the destruction of nuance. To build a cohesive US and them, they must be clearly defined and definitionally polarized. First comes the categorization, where the complexity of human identity is reduced into a single non negotiable trait, be it religion or nationality or ideology. And then comes to humanization, which is stripping the other of human qualities, transforming them from a
person into a threat, impure, an infidel, and obstacle. And finally, there's enclosure, which creates social or psychological walls that prevent the US from interacting with them. This ensures the only information the group receives is that of the the others perceived malice. In the context of groups like Isis, the US versus Them engine is expressed both ideologically and through physical violence. By committing acts of terror, the group forces
the rest of the world to recognize their boundary. There's no cross contamination to be had with the infidel world, no middle ground. You're either a part of their struggle for a global caliphate or you're an enemy to be eradicated, whether you consider yourself a Muslim or anything else. With armsheriki, the cults us versus Them engine operated through isolation in
communes and the severigin of external ties. Them was defined as the corrupted world or the spiritually dead, and the group sought purity and enlightenment, so they targeted the individuals existing social networks, family friends, mainstream society, labeling them as sources of contamination by cutting off the member from the outside world. The cult en showed that the only reality that existed was the one provided by the leader. Were
the political religious Christian Zionists. The US versus Them engine is built through a historical and eschatological narrative that sees the entire secular world as enemies to the apocalyptic ambitions of Christ's return. They are frequently warned to avoid worldly influences temptations from the devil that might skew them from the righteous path. The other in all these cases is
successfully stripped of their humanity. The destruction of the them becomes a logical necessity for the survival of the US, and the isolation ensures the group's total control over an individual's interpretation of reality.
Interesting how all these various cultish elements build on or use the techniques written about by Karl Schmidt the frind enemy distinction, and how like creating groups like this, you know, you have to choose like a border point, to choose the point that determines what we are and what our enemy is. And then in order to keep your group active or like safety, that border has to be moved has to always be like like pushing it can't actually
stay at the same point. And then you see that movement with all these groups, right, they have this like millenari neist like apocalyptic focus, but they're still like moving towards this like larger enemy population.
Yeah, I mean you see it in like I mentioned, Isis has erected this barrier that separates them even from Muslims who may share some of their other religious convictions but do not share their political ambitions. Yeah, you see what the evangelical movement, which distinguishes themselves from other Christian sects as being heretical or not fully committed to the wood, or have gone astray in some way.
Yeah, I mean you can see that with the evangelical leaders and like the president picking fights with the literal pope of the Catholic Church.
Yeah, I mean, the beef between the Catholics and the Protestants go kinda kind of far back. You suppose at least share this scripture or this overarch in like religious room work, and yet there's still a desire to delineate, to separate, to define an enemy eaten within that cohort.
And a lot of those like current differences they do relate to, like military action in the Middle East and what's happening in Palestine, like specifically, and I found out to be an interesting connection as you're as you're talking about, you know, specifically like Christian Zionists and how the situation in the Middle East is extremely important for their apocalyptic worldview.
And that is like one of the key differences between between like evangelical Christians and you know, the current stuff like that that the Pope is saying, which is uh, you know, very much opposed to what's happening in the Middle East.
Yeah, because they've constructed this very robust asktsological from work, which is the next thing that I wanted to get into. The language that these movements use helps to control their people. They're controlling people not just through physical barriers, but through psychological barriers.
Yeah.
If you can control the vocabulary available to a person, how a person understands the meaning of words, how they understand the meaning of their scriptures, you can control the range of thoughts that they're capable of having.
You know.
That was kind of the point that as cliched. This point is the point that georgioel was making when they had the Ministry of Truth in nineteen eighty four. That you limit even language available, so that even dissent cannot be fully expressed. You don't have to censor anybody because you've already censored their minds.
Yeah, and you see that even their own creation of like phrases and terms across all these groups, like they come up with specific into a phrase, they just get repeated. And that just starts like replacing language if it starts filling in the gap of language and communication thought, terminating cliches.
Exactly exactly thought to any cliches, and also just a broader cognitive enclosure. So in the case of Shinriquo, you had the group using this dense pseudo scientific and pseudo religious jargon that blended spirituality quantum physics biology, and those who are most elevated in that group were able to wield that language and make themselves sound so sophisticated and elevated and on a higher plane of truth and reality. That made it very easy for them to swindle people
within their circle. It created a linguistic barrier of the entry, so that you couldn't participate even in the group's truth without committing to the incomprehensible dogma. Yeah, and if you don't commit to the incomprehensible dogma, then you just you don't get it.
You're going to be an out.
You are not enlightened, you uh, outside of the truth.
Yeah.
And this this is a problem across a lot of a lot of different groups and concluding groups that are not this you know, apocalyptic or or fascist or like religiously based. But they even see versions of this among like the contemporary left, yeah, which creates like, yeah, this like barrier to entry by using certain like phrases like academic language.
Yeah, and and very idiosyncratic definitions of words that have otherwise common definitions yeah.
No.
And and how much politics is like this subcultural purpose of like maintaining a certain like subgroup like a social circle versus actually building like mass politics, and how they doo syncratic small like purity of groups with their special language and these like barriers to entry makes it very hard to do larger political organizing that actually goes towards like a working class movement.
Yeah.
Lifting points out that there is a tendency for ideological totalism in a lot of movements, as we would have mentioned, So it's something we have to be on guard for if we want to avoid falling into these traps, and so we look at the example of a shamikio in this case, but isis also has a kind of a total elimination of nuance through polarized, emotionally charged vocabulary. You know, you have the believer and you have the infidel, which again includes fellow Muslims. You have the pure, and you
have the corrupt. Every dynamic, every binary is zero sum. You know, you're either with the Caliphate or you're an enemy of God to be wiped out. And within the eschatological framework of Christian Zionism, opposing the apocalyptic and formed of geopolitical ambitions is tant amount opposing God's plan. You know, it's like, how dare you the uses thought terminating cliches as you would have mentioned things like it is written, yeah, revelation.
You know, it's God's will, And there's no way to actually challenge their policies or actions in their minds on whether it be humanitarian, legal, or logical grounds, because it's like you speak in Greek, I mean, doing something like that is like arguing with God. It's like attacking their faith.
And so we also see these movements stripping individuals of their agency for the sake of a transaction, the exchange of the self with all its very real vulnerabilities and mortality and earth limitations, for a higher purpose that is eternal and absolute. In the case of Anchinrikio, the destruction of this self was achieved through the redefinition of morality that used a distorted interpretation of Vadaryana Buddhism and placed
the Master's will above all conventional ethics. To follow the Master and achieve spiritual evolution, one had to abandon the ego with its moral compass and its human attachments, and in its place, aumition Q offered the merit of absolute obedience.
By following their leader's commands, even those of mass violence that would expose the wider world to their threat, the practitioner believed that they were performing a ritual act of spiritual cleansing to become an instrument of a higher cosmic order. You see the same thing with the rise of isis the destruction of the self achieved through the total absorption
of the individual into the monolith. The individuals stripped to their specific context, whatever nationality or background they may have had, and being reduced to a singular functional component of the struggle being given up purpose that was compensated with the promise of eternal significance, the promise of martyrdom, of fighting and dying for the caliphate, and with that the individual could bypass the mundane struggles of earthly life to secure
a place in a permanent divine reaction and the political theological sphere of Christian Zionism. The destruction of the self has more to do with relinquishing the selfs agency and become an instrumentalized for the sake of God's plan by Freeman Israel's ascendants in the Middle East as an essential precursor to the Second Coming of Christ, and when everything in their power to lobby for and support it, the movement disregards the genocidal costs for the reward being the
fulfillment of a define apocalyptic timeline. And so in all three cases, the follower is convinced that the destruction of this world as they know it, and the destruction of the self within it is not a tragedy, but actually a kind of liberation. For all three of these movements have been tragedies for the rest of the world. Amishinrikio
deployed chemical weapons in Tokyo subway system. They killed thirteen people and injured over fifty eight hundred others, instill in a long term anxiety for those who live in the city that their shared space could be the site of potential terror and the person sitting next to you could
be the vessel for a hidden lethal ideology. Isis has forcibly displaced millions, killed tens of thousands, and destroyed ancient heritage sites, all in an effort to erase the other, and the Middle East and Africa in particular continue to be scarred by its violence. Christian Zionist ideology has introduced a variable to the political equation that is immune to reason and negotiation, that cannot question its theological justifications. Of course,
Zionism is not entirely dependent on Christian Zionist support. You know, Jewish colonial settlements would have predated British support, American support, and Christian Zionist support. But the political cosign that Christian Zionists provide within the premier superpower does aid in the continued support for the Palestinian genesis. So ideological totalism seeks to eliminate pluralism, to eliminate shared truth and to literally kill.
But we should not view the rise of totalizing ideologies as some freak, isolated phenomenon, because it deprives its strength from the very framework and conditioning embedded in our existing social structures. The mechanisms of miliu control, loading the language, and other techniques used by cultic tendencies exist in subtle forms within our mainstream institutions. We see the seeds of thought or form in the echo chambers of media ecosystems.
We see the loading of language in the polarized rhetoric of politics. We see the demand for purity in the most aggressive forms of cultural and religious tribalism. The extremist can sometimes be the most honest, uninhibited expression, the natural endpoint of our world's authoritarian tendencies and subtle lifelong conditioning at home, in the classroom, at work BOK. In civic life, we are trained in the soft versions of the very
deference that totalize and leaders eventually demand. We are conditioned to respect authority without question, to prioritize the greater good of the institution over individual agency, and to accept official narratives as the only valid reality. So when a leader arrives who promises to replace the complex, messy and certainty of our political and social reality with the clarity of
absolute truth. The most conditioned minds naturally find the offer at a seductive and so this disease caught through social condition must be treated by a fundamental reclamation of the individual's capacity for critical thought and autonomy. We have to move beyond the mere consumption of information to the active
interrogation of it. This means cultivating the ability to recognize the traps of thought reform, the logical fallacies, the loading of the language, to recognize when an ideology is at teens into bypass or reason in fever of or emotions. The primary defense against thought reform is the refusal so that any authority, religious, pilitical, or otherwise becomes secret and beyond question it.
Yeah, I think that point that you made towards the end there, But like this thing just being the most visible consequence of the contradictions of our current social system is like really important. Is because yeah, I mean, we're all sorting through the same the same sorts of causes that that produced groups like this, or produce the people that move into groups like this, And we might sort these out in different ways, but in the way that
they do it. It's not it's not fully alien, it's just it's just a very visible outward manifestation of the same sorts of internal contradictions, and like fascism feeds on these same things. You can see how much fascism like overlaps with a lot of stuff that you're talking about here, yep.
And it seemed kind of like suicidal tendencies thistructure of the self, right, that is, that is dealing with those with those same sorts of like social tensions and internal contradictions that produce like outbursts of antisocial behavior like this or in some cases like genocidal behavior.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's very much resultant. Oh, there's the structure of our old system.
You know, the.
Stresses, the anxiety, is the pains and pressure points, and you know, we are all different as individuals, and I think that some people respond to these conditions in weas that are very much either self destructive, externally destructive, or both.
I think a part of our task in like a
general sense, is providing some alternative to this. Right, you can like look at the way the really like on like a global level, like the left has really receded a lot in the past fifty sixty seventy years, and that that leaves a lot of you know, people who are who are trying to look for this for this sort of purpose, Right, They're trying to understand the contradictions of the world, and there may not be a humanistic option for that, so it gets directed into much more
destructive ways. Sometimes you can see like what happened in Rajava with like democratic confederalism as like, right, they they actually did that, right, They they saw what was needed
and they did it. And it's directly opposing the sort of alternative version which is which is isis which is like super interesting, Right, but I think we have we have the same problem here, and but we don't really have like a strong, strong, like alternative to that, right, like a healthy, a healthy and growing like working class movement which it attempts to actually solve the sort of sort of problems that are in the world that these
sorts of other things like feed on. Right, they grab onto these onto these very very present problems and apply an emotionally soothing a response to it, even if it is self destructive.
Yeah, the work of building an alternative and demonstrating it and showing people live in it, I think is very very important.
Yeah.
I also think that when you consider the fact that the wholemark of totalizing systems is the elimination of the other and the criminalization of dissent our antidotes, our alternative has to embrace. It has to be committed to the adversity of thought and expression. And I also think that it has to be willing to sit with conflict, to sit with tensions. Yeah, two, allow them to in ate with each other without trying to just override it with some false unity.
Those tensions and conflict are like important, and that is how we will develop our thought and develop our movement forward. You have to you have to have those tensions. You have to have that that conflict and disagreement, which will hopefully produce more positive outcomes.
Yeah.
Hopefully it's it's generative conflict and not destructive conflict. Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean, and some conflicts can be generative if we accept that they can't be resolved. I think part of what makes some conflicts destructive is this effort to kind of just paint over them with some kumbaya sense of oh well, just well, you just unify like that's not consequential, or we'll figure it out, or that's just how it is.
And I think we we act to be willing to be uncomfortable with not having the answers, I mean, we never having the answers. In some cases. There are those who I think will have the capacity to engage into de radicalization of ideological totalists. I don't think I'm among them, and I think that there are others that we can
care outreach towards. Yes, I get irritated sometimes when I see people who believe that the focus of our attention right now, as people trying to build an alternative, trying to build a better tomorrow, that our focus should be on trying to deradicalize right wingers.
Yeah.
The vast majority of people are politically unaffiliated, politically uncommitted, apathetic, disengaged, and I think that we can do far more if we were to focus on reaching those people and helping those people see the problems with this system and the solutions that we have on offer than engaging in fruitless debate with right wingers or.
Yeah, And I think that's actually the most effective form of deradicalization, exactly exactly. There is a lot of problems with the sort of like deradicalization framework that emerge in like twenty eighteen to kind of meet the rise of like the alt right. A lot of it doesn't work, a lot of it can be fruitless, but there is like a noble intention behind it, and I think the best way to actually do that is by just providing a healthy alternative that does appeal to most people.
It doesn't.
It doesn't need to be catered towards someone who's on like the right or like the far right, because in a lot of cases those people are suffering from the same sorts of problems that the rest of people are. They've just found of a false solution for it, and so if you're able to provide a better solution, a lot of them will move over. There's really very few that are like through and tried, like ideologically committed, right.
There's some, and they're maybe very vocal on the Internet, but that's that's not actually like most.
Yeah, and also the Internet is at least half thoughts at this point, so yeah, you know, you teach some of those Internet discussions with a green as salt in terms of being representative of any population significantly. But I did have some tips with regard to outreach for those who may have a special interest in it or maybe have a loved one that they really want to help where they see being immersed in an ideologically totalistic environment.
For one, directly, attack in a person's core beliefs are going to trigger something called the backfire effect, which is where contradictory evidence actually strengthens their conviction because their identity is not used to their ideology, so an attack on the idea is perceived as a mortal attack on the self. Debating them is not.
Going to help.
It's better to think of yourself more as a connecting force rather than a correcting force. Your a lifeline, yeah to gently guide them out of their radical mindset rather than trying to instruct them out of it. To be rate them out of it. And when you notice that they're experience and doubt in their ideas, it can be very exciting to try and rush in and show them the way, but you don't want to overwhelm them. Doubt, especially for people immersed in that mindset, might literally collapse
their entire social and cognitive world. So your focus, I think, needs to be unprovided a safe harbor where their doubts can be expressed freely, without judgment or any pressure to immediately betray all that they've ever known. You also need to consider the conditions that led the person into that
situation in the first place. If you know what they were like and what their situation was like prior to indoctrination, whether they had certain relationship issues, financial issues, systemic abuses, traumas, isolation, some kind of yunin for meaning or purpose that can help you contextualize the situation. And while you can always fundamentally disagree with their conclusions, it's good to recognize the
needs that drove them to those conclusions. But in addition to that, you can try to find out what their passions and will or are outside of that doctrine, so they have some kind of psychological landing pad if they were to escape the environment, so that they're not without a sense of self, so they're not floundering for some form of identity. These movements and this tendency for ideological totalism derived from hierarchy will not be overcome in one
fell swoop. It is a continuous daily struggle within the human mind and the social fabric. It's a struggle to remain unconditioned by the temptations of certainty, to hold on to the messy, the diverse, the complex, to create a social foundation of individuals who are capable of saying no and that's it for me, or power to all the people peace. When we think of globalization, we often think of trade and late twentieth century technological interconnection and the
movement of capital. But there was another kind of globalization emerging in the late nineteenth century. That was the globalization of resistance. In the closing decades of the eighteen hundreds, a network of ideas, outlaws, and revolutionaries would emerged to challenge the empires of the time. Welcome to Ikarappan. Here, I'm Andrew's Age Andrewism on YouTube. I'm joined again.
By Garrison Davis.
Hello, welcome again and in this episode, using the research of historian Bendic Anderson in chapter five of the Age of Globalization, I want to look at this period in history where the tools of empire were appropriated by the very people the empire sought to suppress. To link anarchist prisoners in Monturiche to intellectuals in Paris, to agitators in Cuba,
to nationalists into Philippines. Now, the story doesn't actually begin in Monturige prison in Barcelona, Spain, but a narrative begins there. Following the June seventh, eighteen ninety six bomben in Corpus Christi, three hundred people were imprisoned in a wave of Spanish state repression. Among those caught in the crackdown was Fernando Trida del Marmol, a Cuban Creole whose background connected him
to both Metropol and Colony. His imprisonment was a direct consequence of the state's attempt to suppress the burgenin anarchist movement in Catalonia. They will only end up fueling the movement thanks to the efforts of the radical international press. Triedo was a math teacher, which actually helped him out when he got arrested, because a young lieutenant warden recognized his former teacher and managed to sound the alarm of
his incarceration. Thurida also happened to be the cousin of a conservative senator who used his influence to inshure Trida's release. But Trida didn't let these privileges cause him to forget his less privileged fellow prisoners, because he immediately upon release, went to Paris, the city of duality, a city that was both the central capital of colonial power and a premier global hub for political descent. So then in Paris to Reda gained access to La Revue Blanche, a very
popular periodical of the era. He'd been a recognized writer from before his imprisonment, as he popularly advocated for anarchism without adjectives, and he had gotten into a back and forth about workers associations and bureaucracy and propaganda of the deed with a cit In gene Grave, who was another
popular French anarchist of the period. So in Lar Review Blanche Taeder published his personal brutal experience of imprisonment and contextualized it as a broader political indictment by connecting the gruesome suppression of descent in Barcelona to the exact same mechanisms being deployed in the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Thus, he demonstrated that repression into Spanish provinces was not an isolated domestic issue, but a
fundamental characteristic of Spanish clonial policy. And this narrative was taken up and amplified by the efforts of Philip Fignon and Georges Clement Chau. Fili Fignon was an influential art critic and prominent anarchist intellectual who helped frame this struggle against Spanish repression as a significant moral crisis. He also
wrote strongly against French imperialism and Revanist nationalism. And Georges Clement Chau was a radical journalist and politician considered a formidable figure in the defense of political prisoners as he had the capacity to mobilize public opinion around issues of justice state authority. So together these figures helped ensure that the grievances of to Reader and the Spanish prisoners were
integrated into the global conversation now. Historian Benedict Andersson situated these events within the long nineteenth century, which had a lot of high profile political violence, specifically anarchist bombings and targeted assassinations, which prompted a correspondent escalation in state power
through much more stringent legal frameworks and surveillance apparatus. Parallel to the rise of anti terror legislation was the emergence of a new structured infrastructure of descent consistent of labor organizations and radical press, which served as a vital nod in the global network capable of circulating revolutionary ideas and coordinating resistance across borders. In addition to the Montjewish affair, the Dreyfus affair would also be amplified by this network.
The Drefus affair was an incident in French history where in eighteen ninety four, a certain Alfred Dreyfus, who was a Jewish captain in the French Army, was accused of treason, alleged to have passed sensitive military documents to the German intelligence services. The evidence against him was largely based on forged documents and a high degree of anti Semitic prejudice.
Sir Dreyfus was convicted, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, but the radical press began calling this out, especially when evidence surface suggested that the actual spy was another officer, Ferdinand Wilson esther Hazy, But the French military high command had covered it up, suppressing evidence, manipulating corproceedings and intimidating witnesses to ensure that
Dreyfus remained convicted. A pivotal moment in the affair was the publication of non radical Emil Zola's open letter Jacques in the newspaper Le Roux in eighteen ninety eight, as Zola used the power of the press to directly challenge the military high command after the real culprit was acquitted the day after his trial began. This landed Zola in jail for Libel, where he eventually got out on a plead you, but it also earned him the tenuous respect
of some critical left wing intellectuals. Meanwhile, Tereda had already left Paris for Belgium, then London, where he made use of his contacts around the world to create a coalition of quote liberals, freemasons, socialists, anarchists, anti imperialists and anti clericals against the Spanish government and especially against Prime Minister Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the conservative who was the chief architect of the brutal repression of Spanish anarchists, socialists, and
labor activists. Domestically, his aim was to ensure the stability of the Spanish monarchy amidst growing pressures of anarchism, labor unrest, colonial rebellion, and American aggression. On August ninth, eighteen ninety seven, the Italian anarchist Michel Angiolillo assassinated Canovas. Angiolillo was a real monarchy hater. He had traveled to Barcelona under a fake name and was working as a freelance printer when
the Corpus Christie Bouman occurred. The city was put under martial law and his anarchist friends were incarcerated in Montriche. After hearing about how they were being tortured, he fled for Paris, was expelled to Belgium, then moved to London, where to Reader's agitation against the Canova's regime was at
full strength. He continued to work as a printer and engaged in activism in London for some time, where people asked who would avenge those tortured and murdered by the Spanish state, including the recently executed Jose Rizal, who was a Filipino nationalist. So after hearing this, Anguolil was like okay, bet and he makes his way back to continental Europe
with a pistol in his pocket. In France, he meets doctor Ramon Betansis, who was a Puerto Rican physician revolutionary who sought the independence of Puerto Rico and the dismantling of Spanish colonial authority.
In the antelites.
He spent his life country hop in helping the sick and flee in Spanish spies, and although he was an an anarchist, he was connected with a lot of anarchists, particularly French and Italian anarchists, through the heterogenous front against
the Spanish State, against imperialism and monarchical tyranny. The European anarchists and socialists found a natural ally in the anti colonial movement he was part of, as the liberation of Puerto Rico and Cuba would represent a vital blow against the same imperialist structures they were fighting to dismantle in Europe.
Now.
Bitansis claims he redirected the target of Angolillo's planned assassination from the Spanish Queen regent and infant son to the Prime Minister, but Benedet Anderson calls this narrative into question because there doesn't seem to be any corroborating evidence anyway. So Angiolillo gets to Madrid, he learns Canovas' location, he stalks him for a bit, and then he shoots him.
Dead with the pistol he brought from London. In his trial, Angiolillo defends himself with reference to Montjuiche and Cuba and the Philippines, and says, quote Canova's personified in their most repugnant forms, religious ferocity, military cruelty, the implacability of the judiciary, the tyranny of power, and the greed of the possessing classes. I have rid Spain, Europe and the entire world of him.
That is why I am no assassin, but rather an executioner that does coke pretty hard, it does go hard.
When is this?
Is this late eighteen hundreds or early nineteen.
Hundreds, late eighteen hundreds, late teen hundreds, Okay, yeah, So after his rousing speech, he was then himself executed at just twenty six years old. Now beyond being a symptom
of imperial crisis, Canovas's assassination functioned as an accelerant. By removing such as central figure of the political machinery of Spain in the midst of its war against the US, Angiolillos act triggered the volatility that would culminate in the loss of Spain's final colonial possessions in eighteen ninety eight Q were the Philippines and Puerto Rico were in the hands of the United States, and the bullets that killed
Canovas just kept going well into the decades to come. Now, speaking of the Philippines, we can turn out that Pacific node of the movement network, Isabelo delos Race was a moderate liberal of his time, somewhat privileged as a businessman, publisher, and journalist, but he wasn't afraid to advocate strongly against Spanish colonial rule and was arrested in connection to the Philippine Revolution of eighteen ninety six as part of a
broader oppression against rebels, intellectuals, and activists. The revolution had begun prematurely after the Spanish authorities discovered their plot, and so many of the revolutionaries whore imprisoned as a result. Now, while imprisoned, Isabello had to deal with the death of his wife and was unable to attend her funeral or
do anything for their children. Naturally, after an experience like that, he'll be pissed at the colonial injustices that he and his people suffered at the hands of the government and at the hands of the religious orders. He demanded political reform and was met with relocation, first to a Barcelona
municipal jail and then to the infamous Montuish. While in Spain, he met several brave anarchists who had been in prison for various crimes, crimes including advocating for Cuban independence, protesting trials by military courts, and opening secular schools gasp for children, which I mean it was Catholic Spain at that point in time. Yeah, so that was like the worst thing
you could possibly do. There were some anarchists who were in jail for assassinations, but I mean, come on, what's a little assassination between friends.
I mean the assassination and opening a school I think is the same level of danger to the state at this point.
Indeed, and these dangerous criminals demonstrated a level of solidarity that really inspired Isabello. And while in prison he also got access to anarchist literature and was able to take part in discussions with anarchists where he learned about their rejection of state authority, colonial domination, and class hierarchy. Now, in this exile period, I don't think he ever became
an anarchist, and I mean late in his life. Even sued as a senator, but he was profoundly influenced by the anarchists and did come to admire them for decades to come. Eventually, following the assassination of Canovas and the change in government in eighteen ninety eight, Isabello was freed. He then moved to Madrid and started a fortnightly publication, Filipinas and the europa An Anti Periodist Critique, with particular
focus on the growing American Empire. And it's funny because after Spain lost their colonies to the US, all of a sudden, public opinion in Spain started to become sympathetic to the Filipino fight. It was like, oh, now we could start to feel bad feel you know, the Americans
embarrassed us, so now we have some sympathy. He applied, and so Isabelo criticized America's claim to be liberate in the Philippines and Cuba as hypocrisy by pointing to the regular occurrence of lygens and racist institutions within the US, and he also criticized the Filipino elite for their willingness to collaborate with the new colonial rulers. The Philippino Revolution was basically over by nineteen oh one, as a key leader named Emilio Aguinaldo was captured and had to swear
allegiance to the US. By the way, Alcuinaldo would also prove to be a collaborator later in his life, as he worked with the Japanese occupiers of the Philippines during World War Two. So it's a Patsma behavior for that guy anyway. So after the end of the revolution, Isabello decided to finally return to the Philippines to reunite with the six children he had with his first wife, who he hadn't seen in years, and to continue the struggle. Also,
when he was in Spain, he got married. Isabello arrived in Manila with the works of Thomas Aquinas Voltaire, Pedrosph Prudon, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, and Erico Manchester. He might have been the first person to bring the works
of some of these thinkers to the Philippines. And I think we kind of understate that luck of the draw I suppose when we talk about the movement of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, you know, they didn't have the Internet, they didn't have the anarchist library.
It takes a lot of work.
Yeah.
Yeah, they didn't have all these accessible means of learning about these ideas. So if you didn't happen to know somebody who could bring in that kind of literature for you, well, first of all, you wouldn't even know that literature existed unless somebody told you about it. Yeah, the access to information was severely limited. And so fortunately Isobello brought these ideas to Philippines. That he was the first to do
so in his time. But as we'll soon see, the history of the Philippines could have gotten in a slightly different trajectory if he had not brought in that literature, learned about those ideas, started engaging and agitating on that basis based on his experiences. I mean, he ended up in a Spanish prison, of all places, So the Spanish Empire that imprisoned him ended up so in the seeds for rebellion in the former territory later on.
As it happens, a not uncommon turn of events.
Actually, indeed, so Isabella pulls up in Manila and his reputation as an anti imperialist preceded him. He was labeled a dangerous anarchist, and it really didn't help that the US President McKinley had literally been shot to death by an anarchist just a month prior.
This whole period of time is just while every time that that I've done an episode with you about like the late eighteen hundreds to early to early nineteen hundreds, it's always it's always.
Stuff like this.
It's like, yeah, an unbelievable collection of happenings, like like history really has such a momentum during this period, Like it's it's it's unbelievable.
Yeah.
I just I really enjoyed during those connections because I mean, he came to Manila with all these organizational plans. He was going to start a party, he was going to launch a news people but as he pulls up and he realizes he's literally on a list. Yeah, you know, he kind of had to scrap those ideas and pull back a bit.
And like Lenin's doing the same stuff like in Germany and Russia during the same time, like everyone everyone, like everyone understands the mission. Yeah, yeah, everyone knows what has to happen.
And this is like before the standardization of passports. Yeah, this is before the global visa system, and so people are literally just and around. Yeah, I mean, I always marveled the fact that Rakamana Testa was like he was getting active in Egypt. At one point he pulled up in Brazil. You know, everybody has to come to Brazil. Eventually he was everywhere, right, and these ideas were everywhere too, as a result of the movement of people bringing these books,
bringing these ideas get involved in conversation. It also helped, of course, that a lot of anarchists were printmakers still are still. Yeah, many such cases. So Isabelo switched strategies. In his words, he took advantage of the occasion to put into practice the good ideas that he had learned from the anarchists of Barcelona who were imprisoned with him in the infamous Fortress of Montrige. So he started organ
in the working class in Manila. He had the benefit of actually being able to speak the language of the swaths of workers in Manila because he happened to come from the same region of the fastly linguistically diverse Philippines that they did. He was from the ilocost region of the island of Luzon, and he natively spoke the Ilocano language, like many of the workers that had migrated to Milan.
Though he was technically part of the intelligence here, Isabello had a connection to the roots, you know, to the people streets, and so he began by organizing the printers, of course, and helping them with their strikes, and from their the efforts very quickly snowballed far quicker than the elites could have anticipated into a cross industry worker federation called the Union Obrera Democratica, the first of its kind
in the entire country. The federation was flexible and loosely structured, which made it quite suited to under taken various strike actions. But beyond demonstrations and strikes, Isabello also incorporated a little local flavor because the union was also involved in festivals and theater and music events, so it was a combination of worker and non worker based organization. You get a little bit of everybody involved when you do that, rather
than strictly focusing on just one plane of struggle and connection. Eventually, however, the Americans got their act together and met this movement with surveillance, arrest and trials, and though they couldn't legally justify keeping him in jail for very long. They did throw Isabello back into jail for a short period. Now, the Worker Federation would eventually collapse, but the ideas remained, and those ideas fed directly into various labor organizations, socialist parties,
and gorilla movements going forward. As for Isabello, his second wife, the one he married in Spain, died and two years later he married again. Twenty eighteen year old Isabello married and was widowed three times. He actually outlived all of his wives and had a grand total of twenty seven children.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, I have no comments on what kind of father he may have been, but that's just.
I mean, yeah, you can you can kind of assume based on those numbers, but yeah, that is what it is.
And the fact that he was he was in Spain, got married in Spain, had six children back home who had lost their mother. Yeah, I mean, he wasn't in Spain by choice, right, But yeah, you know, he was middle class, so he may have had family back at home taken care of his children, but still as rough.
Yeah, that is rough.
So later on his life, like I mentioned before, he got into electoral politics on the municipal level, and the Senate level. And he also in his life got to work in religious reform, eventually found in the Aglipayan Church, which was the first ever Philipino independent Catholic Christian church.
Yeah, I was I was wondering because, like you you mentioned, he brought over Thomas Aquinas.
Yeah.
Yeah, he was very critical of the religious orders, the Spanish Catholic religious orders. But yeah, he ended up forming an independent Catholic church, so a Catholic church that is not associated with Rome.
You said he didn't identify as an anarchist. Did he identify as like a socialist? Like what kind of was his like self defined politics like around around this point and like when he started running for office on the municipal level.
I didn't see how he defined himself. I think he considered himself to be a patriot, you know, a patriot somebody who is pro labor. I don't know that he assigned himself necessarily the title of socialist or anarchist or liberal or anything like that.
Yeah, he has.
However, been called the father of the Philippine Mabe movie mount and the father of Filipino socialism. But what do we take from all of this? You know, the empire, my globalized trade, my globalized capital mic globalize various forms of suppression, but it inevasively globalizes resistance. The same infrastructure that empires used to extend their reach across their claimed territories is the same infrastructure that radicals can use to fight.
You know, even prison was used as a site of connection, a literal place of oppression, became a place that connected people across multiple countries. I think the lesson that I take away from this kind of narrative I've spun here between the Cuban and Creole Fernando Tider, the Puerto Rican doctor Ramonetansis, the Italian Michelle Angiolillo, and the Filipino Isabelo Delo race is that the globalization was not a one
way imposition. We could potentially adopt the empire's tools to fight back and to network or resistance.
People who are doing resistance but on the other side of the political spectrum do this same thing. Like the formation of isis in prisons because of how we imprisoned all kind of members is a pretty key example of this. Yeah, this is a very common thing. Like it turns out, very very often the master's tools actually are used to dismantle the master's house. That that phrase still has some like I think metaphorical uses, but in the in a
sort of like literalist sense. I occasionally push back on it, because yeah, it does. It does view movement as a one way thing, and it has it has like no dialectical analysis, and I think part of part of our job is like adapting it and moving as empire and capital adapts and moves to the flow of history one.
And with that, as always all power to all the people. Peace, Hello everyone, and welcome.
To it could happened here. My name is Dan al Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics, and today I have with me Andrew Lever. Andrew liber is a non resident scholar in the Carnegab of Elie Program and an assistant professor in Tulane University's Department of Political Science and their Middle East and North Africa Studies Program. His research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics and international relations of the Middle East and North Africa region,
with that particular focus on Saudi Arabia. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me so I wanted to have on today because well the war and iron, but also because I think there's been a lot of reporting and some that's not very well sourced in mainstream media, like the New York Times about the GCC states GCC Golf Cooperation Council, so the Arab Golf States, about their motivations and the actions of the Golf States during this war.
I think that there's been a lot of obfuscation for a variety of reasons. So I wanted to bring you on giving your expertise to kind of clarify fact from fiction on some of that. We're recording May twenty eighth, so maybe people have seen this. Trump also recently threatened to bomb Aman who were acting as mediators initially. So yeah, I wanted to go through all the main GCC actors and get your analysis of their behavior during this war, what they want to happen when it's over.
Sure, I'm happy to do so.
I think one thing that has been a little hard for people to follow maybe has been the tendency for US and English language media outlistens talked about the Gulf States or the g States are they want from this conflict.
But even heading into.
This war, there were already key differences among these countries. There was a diplomatic and increasingly potentially a military rift between Saudi Arabia and the neighboring.
United Arab Emirates.
There have been past disputes between different cult countries as well, and even though initially the Iran War seemed like it would paper over the cracks in these divisions, in many ways, it's also deepened the divides as different countries have interpreted the threats posed by Iron and by Israel and potentially even the United States in different ways. So at present we can maybe think of three broad camps within the GCC.
So there's Study Arabia, the largest by land mass of these countries, and to a lesser extent, Kuwait and also Kutar have taken the approach of trying to just get things back to quote unquote normal or like a new normal, supporting mediation efforts by other countries like Pakistan, and now for Kutar increasingly engaged in direct mediation to try to lock in some kind of agreement that restores flows of energy and other goods in and out of the Strait of Horus, the key body of water that.
Allows things in and out of the Persian Gulf.
You are then in one direction, you have the United Arab Empirates, which has presented itself as kind of much more hawkish in terms of its willingness to potentially use military force against Iran or to join the United States in a military effort to open the Strait of Hormuz.
In the past few days it's been quietly walking back some of those positions, but it has tried to drag our contrast between its more assertive stance towards Irani and actions in the region and Saudi Arabia, and then the other direction has discussed we have a soult minival mind which leaned much further in the other direction during the war, being the only country that criticized openly from the start both the US and Israeli led attacks on Iran and
Iran's reprisals on the other side of the gold Amani foreign Minister Balbusaid went on US television prior to the war to make the case that this was the possible ongoing talks be in the US and Iran could bear fruit that was unsuccessful as an intervention, but also Allmandi diplomats at various points have offered much more critical commentary of the United States, but they have likewise kind of walked that back or at least not emphasized it as
much in recent weeks. But clearly there is a narrative critical of ver role that circulates in some parts of DC, which percolated its way up into the President saying, well, if if Aman is not going to cooperate with certain things, then you will just bomb them until they do, which you know is not the nicest way to ask for the cooperation of other countries and a sensitive geopolitical issue, but.
So it goes right, we're not the most effective these days, let's say. Yeah, So thank you for kind of laying that out. There are so many questions I have. I want to talk about kind of how Saudi Arabia and Arab Immirates you've already mentioned, differ on this issue, but also like how their differences speak to different visions for
the region, especially visa the Israel. But also just like before we get to that, there's been a lot of reporting about how Saudi Arabia is like secretly really gung home about the war and it is encouraging the Trump administration to be more aggressive.
What weight do you put on those reports.
Yeah, I mean those have been around since the start of the conflict. I'll preface this while giving a major caveat, which is that every week that goes by, we learn more about what we didn't know earlier in the war. Like you know, we know now that both the UA and Saudi Arabia have carried out airstrikes on Iran at certain points that they didn't publicize that.
But I'm broadly skeptical of.
Accounts that Saudi Arabia and specifically Crown Prince Mouhammad bin Solman advocated for this war, pushed for the war. Saudi Arabia and Iran have not always had very great relations, but they nominally re established diplomatic ties in twenty twenty.
Three, and generally, I think so do your AB's views.
They want to keep the geopolitical peace and the surrounding neighborhood because otherwise Saudi Arabia can't get the kind of foreign investment or the kind of economic partnerships it needs to generate economic growth and employ its citizen population. A major political concern, and I think even the United Air Memorates prior to this war.
Was not pushing for it actively.
I think these countries also don't want to tell, with the possible exception of them, I don't want to tell President Trump no directly. So my understanding of things is that everything prior to the war was phrased and a kind of conditional. We would recommend you don't do this, but just make sure if you just think this is a good idea that you can militarily defeat around in
a rather quick and decisive fashion. Of course, that bank on the United States is current policymakers having an accurate view of their own capabilities, which seemed to be not a correct assumption. But I think that also during the war, you had a kind of a panic in different directions, like a belief that, well, I guess if the United States has gone to war clearly, then they can solve
this militarily, right. So I think you had some leaders, especially the United Air Memorates, pushing the United States to like finish the job, don't leave the conflict in a state where it's very clear that the United States can
militarily force Iron to do certain things. But you also haven't kind of secured meaningful concessions from Iran, and that I think is I guess one thing that the units of the DCC states now again with the possible exception of Oman, is concerned about where they get left if.
There is any kind of deal.
It's very clear that they do not have to see at the table in terms of these negotiations. And there's certainly a lot of complaints online or in media outputs and the Gulf about that fact, but it doesn't change the reality that these are US around negotiations with maybe some consultation with Israel, you know, maybe some communication with Saudiriba, with the UE.
But not a ton of consultation of them.
And just to be clear, they've paid the brunt of the price here, and Iran has attacked civilian infrastructure and desalination plants and all those things.
Yeah, no, I mean Iran calculated.
I think, well, we could attack Israel, but most of the rockets and missiles be shot down Israel's farther away. It's harder to hit them with a larger payload, whereas you can hit a lot of infrastructure in the Gulf.
It's been very clear that are on targeted not only the US military bases, but also civilian infrastructure in an attempt to put a lot of economic pressure on these countries, especially the UAE, and even countries that had sought to mediate between the conflict there had been more openly critical of any US military adventurism. Like Katar basically have their entire economy frozen right now because they can get very little of the liquid natural gas they produce in or out.
Same thing with Kwait, same thing with Bahrain. One interesting, maybe unintended consequence of this, though, is that some of the Goal States are doing better than others economically from this. Sauburi and the UAE have made up a significant portion of the ground loss from lost oil exports because they can export some oil over land, and Oman is exporting a Battle's montroial as before, but at a much higher price,
so economically or even doing perhaps better. But yeah, these are the countries that have primarily hid the price in direct terms, and then by extension, every country that relies on their energy supplies is also paying the price in terms of higher costs for cooking gas, diesel, fertilizer, and so on.
Right, really, this is an American Israeli war, even if the United States kind of holds the final say, but you know, recently on social media and in a number of repeated statements President Trump himself and his administration, I've talked about the Abraham Accords, a normalization with Israel, tying it into possible outcomes for this war. How do you explain that.
I'm sure your audience is just familiar with the Abraham Accords, but the diplomatic normalization between the Ua, Bahrain and some other countries and Israel back in twenty two twenty.
I think for President Trump this is motive.
Talking about this now is motivated by a sense of, you know, there's a real loss of faith and status by having talked about how he was going to have this decisive victory against Iran and then it being a disaster on every single front. So I think there's now going to be a hunt for like some other kind of quick win that.
He can show.
But I think also the lead up to this war demonstrated that the Abraham Accords as a framework for US policy towards the Middle East was pretty bankrupt in every direction. On the one hand, all of the like carrots that the United States was supposed to offer to encourage countries to normalize ties with Israel and effective.
We've already been given out.
So Saudi Arabia was like, here are your concessions that we were going to use in order to encourage.
You to normalized ties with Israel.
We can just give those two as long as you promised to invest money in the United States. So that's already been allowed to happen. At the same time, the downside for these countries and normalizing ties with Israel is pretty high. There's nothing that Israeli leaders that president can do to guarantee that there won't be another catastrophic and
genocidal war against the Palestinian population. That's something that you know, a Saudi leadership that is dealing with, you know, potentially rising unemployment that other countries dealing with ethnic or sectarian divides within their borders, not something they really want to take on as well. And I think that the war has kind of created divergent perceptions of Israel as well. I think for countries like Saudi Arabia and especially Oman,
there's a view of Israel. Even for a newer generation of leadership like Mohammad Bncelman, who were not particularly opposed to a greater role for Israel in the region, greater ties with Israel are just now concerned about Israel as a chaotic and unreliable partner in the region that will throw the security interests of its allies to the wind,
you know, at the moment's notice. You know, their interpretation of the Abraham Accords is that it did nothing to protect the UA and Bahrain from attached by Iran or from getting dragged into in Israeli led or partly Israeli led war. In the other direction, however, the UA itself kind of views its tides with Israel as more important than ever. Their view is like, well, this is a region of unreliable actors. Israel has a capable military, even
if they don't admit it openly. Israel's the only nuclear armed actor in the region. And Israel did send what's it called the Iron Dome defense technology to the UAE during the conflict. On the one hand, I think where just as we saw during the Biden administration, the Abraham Accords remains this kind of like cargo culture American foreign policy makers, this idea that we'll just say the Abraham Accords and it will magically make countries kind of change
their foreign policy orientation. But I think the Abraham Accords as a UAE Israeli security economic political alliance in the region is stronger than ever and will continue to be the case into the future.
But that Saudi Arabia will not participate in the way that the Trump administration assumes.
Yeah, I think that Saudi Arabias will continue their policy they've had ever since October seventh, or at least since roughly thereafter, of saying like, well, we're not ruling out, we just have some conditions in order to move on that.
And then, you know, I don't think those are unreasonable conditions of making progress towards the Palestinian state, but they are not anything that Nednyahu or even probably any other political coalition that comes to power in Israel is willing to even think about.
So, you know, I don't really see it happening soon.
I suppose the thing is so unpredictable that he could just like lash out and declare that he's going to
do something to Saudi Arabia if they don't normalize. But then it's a real question like, well, how long is he going to sustain that, and like what does he do if Saudi Arabia or Mohammad Bensimon himself like snaps back over this past winter, we saw, for example, as part of that diplomatic riff between the UA and Saudi Arabia, we saw Amaranti backed forces in Yemen make gains, a lot of commentary online of like oh Mahma beIN, so Man is willing to do anything about this, and then
ultimately wind up the Saudi Foreign Ministry condemn the UA's role in Yemen, and Saudi forces bond like an Amoralti shipment coming into Yemen. So there's also the potential here as well, like these are two political systems where power is highly personalized around specific individuals, and so if President Trump decids to go down that route, is the possibility for this to become a very personalized conflict, right, And.
I think it's important for listeners to understand the connection why the Palestinian issue holds such weight for golf leaders. You mentioned, for example, ethnic and sectarian device in particular countries I'm thinking Bahram or you know, rising unemployment and
dissent and discontent in places like Saudi Arabia. It's because, either explicitly or implicitly, the Palestinian issue in some parts of the Gulf is connected to people's anti regime sentiment, which of course the Iranian regime is very good at stoking and exploiting, and so it's not just that they're worried about regional instability outside their borders. It's also, like you said, there are domestic implications for all these regimes.
Yeah, I think if we want to turn back the clock to like the first Trump administration and even right up to October seventh, in places like Saudi Arabia, I think there was a belief that you could just suppress people's solidarity with Palestine or that this was like a dead issue for most Saudi citizens.
But what kind of October seventh.
Showed or changed was that that sentiment had really never gone away as much as it had seemed, and also that there's now an entirely new generation that has seen the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza over the past few years, that is now well aware of everything has been done, and this is not something you can hide from people
or pretend that it will go away. And it's even harder to do so if people aren't seeing kind of rapid economic gains in their own lives, so it becomes yet another thing that, yeah, if you wanted to fault South leaders for kind of weakness and the international stage, if you wanted to fault them for not demonstrating political courage, that could be a.
Cudgel to use against them.
So inside Saudi Arabia, the one consistent thing over the past five six seven years is the complete suppression of.
Talking about the Palestinian issue.
Because political authorities are so worried that if people start talking about one political issue, maybe they start linking into other concerns. At the same time, there has been a shift among kind of regime aligned commentators from you if this we're back in twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, you would hear them say, well, Saudi Arabia is now our country that acts in its own national interests. That means we don't have to listen to the Palestinian leadership, that's their
own concern. Now you hear kind of same tune, like different variation, where it's like, because Saudi Arabia is acting in its own national interest, we can decide that we want to act in solidarity with the Palestinian leadership, not
just do whatever the West tells us to do. But then this leads into I think kind of polarization among some of the Gulf countries because it's the exact opposite dynamic for the UAE, or the UAE goes the route of presenting itself as closer than ever to the United States, very aware that they can use Saudi skepticism towards Israel as something to attack Saudi Arabia in US commentary and
US media markets. And then even if the country seemed to be able to patch these differences up from time to time, it's going to keep driving them apart as well.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but during the first Trump administration, the propaganda around Palestinians emerging from the UAE was extremely vehement.
Let's say, there was so much.
Rhetoric coming out of UAE government officials and associated influencers and things like that that was attempting to kind of change the image of the Palestinian to an Arab audience. And even though you're right that they are clinging more than ever to the Abraham Accords. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that like they can't do that as much anymore. I'm not seeing as much of that kind of rhetoric and kind of anti Palestinian racism that I used to see.
Yeah, and it used to be that you could walk this like I don't want to call it a fine line, but you could play this game. I'm more familiar with this in the Saudi case, but the rhetoric would go. Of course Audi Davia stands with the Saudi issue, but the Polsitatian leadership, they would basically adopt the same tropes we were familiar with the United States, like the pols Dating leadership never missed an opportunity, to miss an opportunity, or they would just a direct translation of that.
Yeah, but yeah, it's much harder, like.
You can't get away with that anymore because the pushback online would be incredibly intense. And likewise, even from the UAE, we see continued coordination with Israel. But it's interesting how the UAE denies doesn't confirm certain things, so bombing Iran during the war, the UA Foreign Ministry kind of there's a wink, wink, nudge nudge, like, well, look at our policies where we said we were to.
Tell you if we were attacked. Jarirown conclusions.
Whereas when it comes to Benjamin Natanya, who like visiting the UAE either like absolutely.
Not, this is false news.
It did not happen.
Yeah, yeah, And I.
Think that points to the extent to which especially Natanya, who has become extremely toxic and hard to separate from that, and that even though I don't think the UA is going to be hosting any like major Palestinian solidarity events anytime soon, at the same time, they're not like, you know, this is not like a warm piece in terms of how they're approaching israelis either. I'm pretty sure the UA even condemned the recent law like basically allowing executions of.
The death penalty here you will specifically.
Define to basically be Palestinians on the West Bank. Also
condemned Israel's actions in Lebanon as well. So it's become harder to mount the kind of media campaigns against Palestinians, I think, partly because they backfire, and then partly in recognition that like this was done for years and years, and then ultimately what distinguishes Saudi Arabia from the UA is not that their citizen publics have different views about the Palestinians, but just that in the UAE you can surveil coerce and bribe your citizen population so much better
than in Saudi Arabia. It's like, yeah, sorry to be kind of crass about it, but like the Jews just doesn't worth the squeeze in terms of the Saudi monarchy relative.
To at least being in this kind.
Of middle path where they're maybe not pushing the United States too much for Palestinian statehood, but are like doing at least the bare minimum to keep I guess the idea of a two state solution alive.
Yeah, and to stay adhering to the Arapeace initiative in some capacity. What's kind of the takeaway do you think for all of these countries in the aftermath of this war, do you foresee a change in their positions visa in the United States in particular.
For years and years analysts of the Gulf imen talking about like these states hedging, and I think in one direction, this war show that like most of that amounted to just trying to get more concessions from the United States. Like you had a couple of European countries show up, you had like Pakistan get involved a little bit, but their strategies for the course of this war still revolved around trying to influence us thinking you frame how they were viewed in the United States. But I do think
it is going to trigger changes down the line. Like we saw Saudi Arabia normalized ties with itr on four years after the United States failed to intervene after Iranian line groups attacked Saudi oil fields.
I think something similar here.
What we're going to see developments three or four years down the line that have been cooking in the background as a result of what has happened in twenty twenty six. I think we're starting to see some of that now. And it's not going to be like, oh, we're going to get a Chinese military base in the Gulf. It's going to be other things, like we're seeing Saudi Arabia try to work with what it used as the other regional middle powers that can trust and work with Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan.
The UAE meanwhile is trying to double or triple down
on its direct security ties with Israel. But I think the way these ghostates are going to react is going to figure out, how can we shape the diplomas here on the region, how can we shape our own security in ways that don't rely on the United States, but aren't like how to put it, I think in Washington, DC, because of the obsession with Chinese influence in the world, there's always this belief of like, oh, like, if not us, then it will be like the Chinese will be involved.
And I think the reality is going to look very different. I don't think China wants to get involved in a security fashion in the Gulf, but there are other countries that have an interest in some degree of peaceful economic development or some degree of like maximalized security, and that's going to be the future of these state security relations.
Well, thank you so much, Andrew. I really appreciate your expertise. I'll link your profile at Carnegie in the show notes as well as given that we talked about kind of the past Indian question in relation to some of these other issues domestically in the Gulf States, I'll also link to some of my own research on this topic. So thank you so much.
Thanks thanks for having me.
Garrison thinks that's good.
That's good. If we were brave, if.
We will new Halloween, Cotima lotch that's not happening.
A would this is it could happen here? Executive disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today and joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans Eh. This episode recovering the week of June third to June tenth. James, some small news items to start.
Yeah, many small things this week. So new details have emerged about the Santa Rosa Island fire. If you remember, the fire was started by mariner. At first, it was reported that the mariner had started the fire by firing the stress flares. Now appears the mariner's engine caught fire, starting the fire. Oh, then he fired stress flares. But there's more.
Okay, how many fires did this guy have involved in his boating?
Well? He ran into the island next door a week before okay, oh boy, and was towed by coastguard to their harbor, where they found that he didn't have a number of items you have.
To have on his boat for safety equipment reasons. Right, So they pounded his boat for six days until a good Samaritan donated those items. He then left the harbor and crashed into the next island. I think that good Samaritan made a mistake. I think we can agree it's not the man now. Yeah, I think doing anything to enable this man to re float on the Seventh Seas not be in the sea. Yeah, this guy listened to too much Jimmy Buffett. Yeah. Unfortunately, like this seems to
be one of those situations. He bought the boat for a single dollar. We generally don't give advice on this podcast, but I will say you couldn't. It's not uncommon, it's out of California for people to buy boats in order to find a cheaper place to live. Yes, of course, things like slip fees, registraction. People don't realizee things. Add that, I have worked on some old diesel engines on these boats, they're not particularly straight I'm not a great doing some
characters begin with, but they're not particularly straightforward. And this results in what I think we have seen here, which is a delta between confidence and ability on the seven season. This isn't a boat that one should be sending alone, much less so they only bought a couple of years ago for a single American dollar. No, I've ported to destroy a large gradatory pine which only exists there and here so yeah, I know, be careful that there would
be pirates moving on now. I's reported it's nineteenth in custody death this year when correctional centers Storgia. Yeah, continuing to set all the worst records. A court has vacated the president's one hundred thousand dollars h one b visa tacks cases brought by California al But it's more than a dozen states that will be impacted by the tax. This is a good one. Gregory Bavino appears to be eyeing a run of the presidency. Sure, this is interesting,
So he launched an experimental website. Yeah why not? Why fuck? Like his website at Bavino twenty twenty eight dot com. The campaign appears to have originated from Jacob Angles. Angles is a right where he's kind of rogersterone prodigy They broke ways. Angles was appears to be charged for his methamphetamin possession earlier this year. Oh wow, it was Engles who was first post this house Bathno. Twenty twenty eight thing in Bovino's replies and Angele's now pissed is listed
on the Fno twenty twenty eight dot com. Oh god.
In this house Bavino thing. He's just he watched too much Game of Thrones, right, That's that's why he's saying that.
I think so because I looked into it.
That's as far as I can tell, it's him trying to do like a nightly like with a new nightly order. I mean, it's it's part of his ess cosplays how I kind of interpreted it because he clearly is obsessed with the fucking shut staffel and they were like a nightly order. And that's I get those vibes from Greg.
Yeah. Like, and if you look at the website right like you gelt like, he's prominently featured whearing it's now in famous greatcoat trench cut whenever you want to call that fucking coat. Yes, I don't know if Baveno, like Brevino, maybe he's just trying to run this as far as it'll go, Right, he just lost his job, so maybe he's looking for like something new to do. Oh sure, Like, I'm not sure how serious Biffrito is with this. You think he's he's definitely trying to continue to I guess
influence the national discussion. I guess well in the internet.
I mean, he's hanging out with the fucking Martin Selmer over in Portugal. He's hang out with at like straight up like christ Church mass shooting affiliated Nazis, you know, like he's going for it.
Everyone should just scroll down to the foundest section of this website.
Okay, hold on before before we do that, this link has now appeared in our group chat. That is the most Nazi ass like this profile picture thing I have seen in a long time. It's like a Wolfenstein yeah, right, but like in the same way that, like they're also clearly aping from like communist aesthetics, like background, the way he's kind of framed, is this like weird? Yeah, this is it kind of West German.
I would almost say it's like generic propaganda now, which is sort of like a mix of like West Germans, Eastern or easterman us SNRT, like the the use of bad the use of the olive branches, the.
Sun rays from his body. Yeah, it's just kind of.
Like generic propaganda. House Bavino Men Fight generated image. Right, So it is.
Based found the way the text is formed, it does appear to be an AA generated.
It's no property framed right. The framing on the left and right is thicker than the framing at the top. There is no framing at the bottom like xametrao.
Shit, oh my god, No, I think we're all missing something, which is that right underneath the big propaganda image, tiny text, the words in very tiny text, almost hidden. Bavino knows what America needs. America's men.
It's not a quotation marks, but no, the slogan of the campaign is men fight back. Yeah cool?
Or the slogan of House Bavino. It's a little unclear.
Yeah right, Maybe maybe it's housed Bavino. Maybe he's struggling to make rent having lost his job at the Boyd Patrol, and this is setting up a pot to pay his rent. But yeah, incredible. Uh wow, the ab Founders section really.
Oh Michael, Okay, I have scroll.
I have scrolled down to the our founder section and there.
Is an incredible specimen.
The a Bold National Strategy part is really upsetting to me. Yeah, because he's calling himself the Commander and capitalizing the v N the sea in a very like here's the ways following the Commander's maximum effectiveness and quelling the foreign hordes that have subsumed our nation's cities, both large and small. The American people witnessed what true leadership powered by a warrior mindset actually looks like. Is the Commander endeavored to
restore order and national sovereignty? That is one sentence, second sentence. America as a whole has already fallen to the grasps of the foreign global, one world hellscape ushered in by Barack Hussein Obama.
However, we believe that.
The Commander can not only usher in the great restoration of America, but also cement the continuity of a strong and sovereign the United States that will last a millennia, a.
Thousand year reich.
In other words, And that also was one sentence. That is two sentences that I just read. Yeah, I need to be clear.
Yeah, I become paying. A couple of Gmail addresses are using here.
Some really small font by the way, curioistically right, Yeah, Harry inconsistently, This looks like they had Ai lay out his website too.
But they have one woman on their founders page and like everyone else here in size like twenty and she's like size eleven.
Yeah.
Like the set will have you know, images of him or of his post where you can see his name, but it refers to him only as the commander. So like there's a post of Greg's where it like, it's the post that he made at the airport where he's like pointing at the flight to Newark when he was on his way to Portugal, being like, should I just handle it myself and you know, go to Jersey to
deal with this? And above that is perhaps I must resolve this personally as a quote the commander challenging the inertia of the open borders bureaucracy and response to Like it's written like Greg Bovino became the over dictator of America and this is a history book sixty years later, Like that's the way his website is written.
Yeah, it's incredibly low effort.
Yeah, quite concerning, and he really has a high opinion of himself. Yeah, I gotta, I gotta say that.
Yeah, I do wonder how much this is just angles just writing this like as a fan.
Yeah, I wonder how much he had to do with this. But this does not seem like he had nothing to do with it. I will say that based on my knowledge of Greg Bavino.
Yeah, he's shared it on his own social media.
Great.
In other news, the months long fight over ICE and CBP funding has come to an end. In a two hundred and fourteen to two hundred and twelve vote on Tuesday, the House has passed a reconciliation bill funding ICE and CBP.
Yeah, this is the so called Secure America Act. Right, it'll get them seventy billion dollars.
So if we look at that combined with the Big Beautiful Bill, it's about two hundred forty billion allocated to them in a single year.
It doesn't mean they have to spend it all this year, right. The Secure America Act gives them a window up to September thirty of twenty twenty nine, with no particular allocations for any given year. To me, that strikes me as a hedge against funding after the midterms. I think that's what that's about. Also notable, the Charason said that they use reconciliation to allow simple majority in the Senate.
We went over the details of a previous version of this bill a few weeks ago. This money is going to go towards hiring and arming new officers, hiring more administrative staff, attorneys, and this is all going to be towards immigration enforcement, as well as the money allocated for acquiring new border technology. The one billion dollars of quote unquote security funding for Trump's ballroom was removed from the bill by the Senate last week. Two other short things
I want to mention. Yesterday a Fedral grand jury indicted two people in relation to stop copp City protests and alleged crimes in twenty twenty two. And Wednesday morning, the FBI rated about seven people in Michigan related to pro Palestine protests at the University of Michigan and protests against University of Michigan officials. As of recording like this just happened a few hours ago and relates to an indictment that was unsealed this morning as well, which charges eight people.
Will cover this more in detail in the future.
Bring to do one more quick segment here, and then when we return, we're going to talk about the programs in Belfast.
Yay.
Some updates related to primary elections in Maine. Grand Plattner has won the Democratic primary with about seventy two percent of the vote. The governor's race is too close to call, with the ranked choice voting yet to be tallied. But I'm keeping my eye on the Sanders and labor back to candidate Troy Jackson, who campaigned with Platner. Jackson is about nine thousand votes behind the pre ranked choice vote
candidate doctor ni av Shaw. After a week of counting, we have more definitive results from the elections in California last week.
Yeah, which a lot of people are saying is an unforgivable cup of democracy that they counted all the votes and it took them a while. But yeah, gares, please continue and we'll talk about the chaos that is being justified by the fact that this took a while to account.
Tom Steyer will not be making it onto the ballot this coming November. With ninety one percent of the votes counted, Steyer has earned one million, nine hundred and twenty eight thousand, three hundred and eighty one votes, or twenty two point five percent. Republican Steve Hilton, former Fox News host, has Edgedtyer out by about two hundred thousand votes, earning twenty five percent of the vote and advancing to the general election, where he will go up against liberal Democrat Javier Besserra
with twenty seven point nine percent of the vote. Katie Porter won just under four hundred thousand votes Karen Bass still leads the LA mayoral primary with ninety five percent of the votes counted. Bass has nearly three hundred thousand votes, winning thirty four point three percent. Progressive Nythia Rahman has moved into second place with twenty nine percent, beating Republican Spencer Pratt with twenty five point five percent. So the
general election we'll see Raman go up against Bass. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt was up in the early vote, but as Ramond started to pull ahead, Trump and others began claiming the election was being stolen from Republicans. Pratt has insinuated that Raman's lead came from LA's homeless population and must grow oute that quote. The level of fraud here is mind blowing.
Yeah, so homeless people can vote.
Like yeah, provided they are US citizens.
Like yes, yes, it's it's all lies, yeah, I mean, And a lot of what's even what's being reported in the Washington Post is straight up lies. Like they just published an article today that includes this line. And again the theme of the article is like, well, you know, obviously this election wasn't stolen, but the fact that it's taken so long is really a problem. You can't actually blame all these people if they if they think it's suspicious.
This is not evidence of a rigged election, but it creates fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root. It didn't help that Ramen tearfully conceded last Tuesday. But it's irresponsible for prett to intimate on social media. So we did not be stolen. She didn't tearfully concede.
It did not happen.
That never happened. That Washington Post lied, like that's just in a post article. That's just a lie by the Washington Post, like an intentional lie, I would.
Are incredible, I guess to just going today's toe, people understand, like you know, like I've written for broadsheet newspapers, several people. This is not one person fucking up, right, This is an institutional fuck up. This was a choice. Yeah, it was a choice to get this wrong. The person whose name is on the byline wrote that, Yes, an editor then edited, a copy editor then edited it, and then somebody laid it out for the website.
Yep.
And you know this if you're listening and your work for the Post, you know this. You know that your editors, your bosses and your colleagues chose to lie and are choosing to continue to lie and spread lies through their publication. You're aware of this if you weren't there still.
Anyway.
And Benny Johnson, Tempoole or Ingram and Sean Hannity are alleged that Democrats stole the election, and Trump has continued to make claims that the election was rigged. Quote here we go with the very late and massive numbers of mail in ballots.
You no shit truthed? Sorry, yeah, man, it's convenient.
Yeah, eternal twenty twenty Trump truth earlier this week quote not possible for Spencer Pratt? Do you have lost the l A runoffs after the big lead he had Third world nation.
On quote do you understand what the word nation means?
No?
I didn't think they They tell these truth.
I don't think he understands how election works, obviously, or he does and he's just saying what he needs to say here. Notably, on Sunday, Trump stormed out of an interview on Meet the Press when asked if he had any evidence of quote unquote cheating in California.
The election was rigged.
It was a dirty election. This is happening again right now in Californa. Now in California, right now, it's looking. Look at what's happening in California.
It's in California.
It's now, they're not there. They're dropping fast because it's a rigged election. Let me tell you, it's four days and they aren't even close to coming up there.
Why they're doing that.
Because they're cheating on the election.
There's what do you have evidence?
I have to do his Look all you have to do is look is he in front of a green screen that depicts a johnde At tractor and plan to know they are in Wisconsin in some kind of barn and it's raining outside in this barn with the John Deere tractor and like haybells. It's an interesting kind of like real world set they have.
Yeah okay, and the focus is very weird.
Like the Yeah.
Trump later called vote counting in California quote unquote crooked, just like how the press is crooked.
Quote you're either crooked or you're stupid.
You know that these elections are rigged, Your network knows that they're rigged.
You were like a third world country.
Your elections are crooked, and you're crooked and least the press is crooked, show is ABC and CBS and CNN. You're one sided crooked network. Let's call it quicks because I've had enough.
Thank you, Darling.
Goods the president.
Let's please I travel all the way to Wisconsin.
God, that's embarrassing.
Yeah, just being mean to him, be rude, yell at him, call him a fucking liar, scream at him. Stop doing this bullshit like I'm sorry, I have no sympathy for that.
Like people booed him, dreamed the national anthem at a Knicks game. You can fucking do this.
Scream at him, call him a piece of shit, like you know, you're not getting anything out of just letting him talk, paull him a liar, shout over him. Yeah, stop particular, Yeah, yeah, fucking cowards.
I'm sorry, and yeah, yeah, you're right.
I think we should definitely pay attention to the fact that Trump did cause the Knicks to lose that game.
Yeah he did. Did he did?
And honestly, it's that's what I like about him because it continues James.
Streak of.
House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about these claims on Monday and said that the vote counting in California quote unquote stinks to high heaven, and that the schemes are so quote unquote diabolical that it's impossible to prove election ragging.
The present keeps.
Saying that there's election fraud in the California marraw is.
What evidence is there to prove them?
You tell me, Manu.
They are counting votes weeks after the election. We have entire nations with huge populations, like India that can count their votes.
In twenty four to four saying it's rigged, like the president.
I'm not saying it's rigged. I'm saying it stinks to high heaven, and everybody knows that. Let's let's let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have what a concept, Let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with us.
But what evidence is there to prove that there is ringing?
I don't Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.
So this is I think very clearly a preview of what's to come in the interim election. Yeah, for sure, and they are kind of laying this out here. It's of course impossible to prove, but we all know that it's wrong.
Yeah.
This is going to be every election for the rest of our life.
Yeah yeah, yeah, but there's going to be anything that happened that does not meet the increasingly fanciful version of reality they have to believe. Right, it's not just elections, it's literally any fact that like is inconvenient. There's any storm that shouldn't have happened based on when they think a storm should happen, right, Yeah, this is just life now.
Yeah, it's necessary to create the version of reality that they're existing in.
Yeah, we're gonna go on break and then discuss the programs.
In Northern Ireland, we are the fat ooh yeah.
On Tuesday July ninth, This is the day before we are recording this, which is important because we don't know how that's going to proceed from here when you're listening to it. But on June ninth, there were widespread attacks on the homes of non white people in Ireland in what I and many others have described as a poke rom mass assailants kicked down doors, forced on white people from their homes, and lit houses and cars on fire.
People were being stopped in the streets. I'm going to read a little bit from a report from Henel Aufman, who was on the scene reporting on what was going on. Quote, as a woman from an ethnic minority background looked down from an upstairs window, some of the men rushed the front door and broke it down, with the attack thick with smoke from fireworks. They attacked the downstairs windows with bricks as they stormed the property. Some claim to be
quote liberating it. Graffiti nearby demanded quote local homes for local people. A woman in the crowd said to her friend, quote there's wee girls inside.
Yeah.
It is an extremely bleak and worrying event. The nominal cause of this program was a video of a stabbing in Belfast that has gone viral on social media, which has been amplified by writing forces both in Ireland, the UK and across the world, probably most famously by Elon Musk. We will touch on that more in a second, but before we say anything about the broader context, I think
it's important to state two things here. One Ireland and also, particularly the factions of Irish politics are going to be getting to here has had racism problems long before any of these events. Famously, you know, if you want to look at the most immediate stuff in the recent past, exactly one year ago today in Northern Ireland there was a smaller race riot. There was a smaller scale version of the thing we're seeing here, with less damage, but still you know, absolutely terrifying effects.
This very much rhymes with the race riots that we saw in the UK a couple of years ago. Yeah, like a similar, similar deal, similar motivation, mobs attacking hotel that point is more focused on hotels that refugees were believed at.
But yeah, like you were saying, we basically the same idea.
Yeah, these are white mobs. It's also I think important to note, on top of just the general sort of racism of virus society, this program is largely taking place in loyalist neighborhoods. You know, these are places with very very long standing far right paramilitaries, with very close ties to the police. A lot of the people in the streets are you know, sort of parts of old loyalist
paramilitary and criminal networks. These are in many cases like believed to be the same networks that you know, we're doing shit during the troubles and have been active in various forms throughout the occupation of Ireland and deportation's. Belfast notes that leaked emails from police after the twenty twenty five riots they are from the riots themselves, and they said, quote, it is important for you to understand our expectations. Unless there is an obvious article to issue, we do not
expect you to expose yourself to significant unnecessary risk. So what that in effect is saying is that this is in effect a standown order. If you don't if you think that anything would be even.
Let the mobs see what they're gonna do.
Yeah, right, And that's just the stuff. This is from the twenty twenty five riots. Presumably similar orders went out during these riots. And that's just the stuff that they sent via email, right, that that has been leaked out. The police, again very notably, did very very little while all of this was happening, while people's houses were being burned down, while people were being dragged out of their homes.
These attacks also come after weeks of far right discourse in the UK about like the killings of two white men by non white men. Yeah, I mean on the BBC, they are having debates about whether there is a quote two tiered police system, which you know, when I initially saw that, I was confused, because, yeah, two tier police system has been the way that you know, like anti anti police violence activists have talked about the way the
police system functions. Where there is a way the police functions for white people, which is that it treats them stiff, cant better, and then there's the way it works for non white people. The far right has flipped this on his head and is now arguing to an extent that he's now sort of national discourse on the fucking BBC is arguing that there is a two tier police system where non white people are a lot off the hook for their crimes and where white people aren't protected by
the law. This is nonsense, but it has been spreading rapidly, pushed by far right actors like Tommy Robinson and of course Elon Musk. Yeah.
Yeah, Musk specifically has been really pushing Yeah, and he was he was a big figure too in what happened in the UK a bit ago.
Yeah, and the twenty twenty five Irish riots too.
That's exactly right.
And he's been NonStop pushing and making posts, making claims to the extent of like we need to the only way things will get better is if we keep protesting. You know, this has to be handled like forcefully, like that sort of shit, like.
He has been.
He has been basically devoting, as far as I can tell, the week that he is about to have and or that he is having his IPO, devoting the majority of his time to in siding up agram.
Yes, seems to be.
Yeah. He retweeted a post from Restore Britain, which is a somehow even further right just yeah, straight up effectively fascist party, even further right than the already horrifying Reform Party, saying quote, do not make peace with evil, destroy it. Yeah. There's another one where he's like, either you fight back or you die. That's what it comes down to. There's been a lot of comparisons between Elon Musk and Radio Rwanda, which is a radio outlet that was broadcasting calls for THEOND.
Just well, and that's that's not accurate really, but you're referring to ATLM right, Radio Television Lib. Yes, that RADIOOND is a different thing. Oh sorry, am I like rady Render is a currently existing corporation, so we need to be extremely clear in our terminology.
Let me be very clear here because I actually had this pulled up for this. OURTLM was the radio station that is often accused of helping to coordinate or some people will just say stood up and cited the genocide. It was owned by a guy named Felician Kabuga, who was an extremely wealthy Rwandan man and who was personally very much involved in like wanting to.
Push for the genocide.
RTLM regularly called Tucci's cockroaches and encouraged people to cut down the tall trees. However, there are also good reasons why this is not quite as direct as it seems. H TLM did not coordinate attacks, they did not plan specific actions, and analysis in the modern day has shown that a lot of the worst massacres, in fact, the majority of the worst massacers, did not have any direct
relation to our TLM. Now, RTLM's propaganda and broadcasts played a role in the genocide and incited and continued to like escalate the violence. But it's not exactly I would argue. It looks like and we Also, we don't have perfect analysis of what's just happened in Northern Ireland, so maybe this will prove to me wrong. It looks like what Musk is doing has more of a direct positive effect. Yeah, but that's also not clear to me at the moment.
Yeah. Yeah, my estimation so far. But again, like this is changing my estimation so far is that I think it is actually closer to it in that I think I think even if Musk isn't there, something like this happens, sure, because I think a lot of this is mobilization through like very local Irish political forces in these sort of unionist networks.
But it's also really difficult to say just because all of those networks have been heavily influenced by Musk's X in the lasts two.
So it's yeah, I don't know how you want to Yeah.
And it's feeding off of like a decade of intensifying anti immigrant sentiment across the UK, including Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Yeah.
And this is also something that people will point out when you're talking Aboutanda and RTLM, which is that like, well as much blame as you want to give RTLM and some of these other media organizations that unquestionably had some role in motivating and fueling what happened.
Mm hmm.
I mean the root of the Rwandan genocide comes from the period of colonialism when the Tutsies were like a favored group of people within the country, which is what started a lot of these like underlying hatreds, right, is the way in which the colonial power played these different groups off of each other.
So anyway, whatever, Yeah, this is always the case.
It's always going to be deeper than some guy has a media outlet.
Right, that doesn't mean the media al it is not involved in what's Yeah, it's the same in Rwanda, right, like we had the intrahamway like right, like they existed and they give it distinct from RTLM. But like the environment that allows those two things to happen. Nothing's monocles. People want to do this in history.
Now, and it's the difficult thing of both. It's very important to point out when something like this rhymes was something that happened in a jitocide they killed a million people. And also the more you learn about stuff like this when people make those comparisons, the more learned people are like, well that's not quite right.
Actually, this is it was a little different then, you know.
Yeah, the Genocybe Memorial Museum in Kigati is the most moving museum.
If it's stud in my life, it's incredible. If you have the giant table in Chuka. We need to do more inmbastards on Rwanda. But yeah, anyway, wonderful country.
Yeah. The one thing I also want to mention sort of different closing here, is that you know, again, like part of the reason this is happening, part of the reason it's been a lot of you know, these of
these unionist networks. Part of the reason it's happening the way that it is is that this is a very very old white supremacist project, going back like you know, like through the British occupation of Ireland, right, and it's a project that's been aligned with like the Randouins were once British in the sense of like like the you know, this this is carrying on the sort of long imperial British tradition is like the world one of the world's
largest and most blooding and ruthless bite supremacist organizations.
Yeah, we talked about this in the meeting we were having beforehand, but like loyalists in Northern Ireland have regularly made a habit of particularly in the seventies and eighties, displaying Rhodesia flags, in the nineties apartheid South Africa flags. It's very common. Flags like you open.
Yeah.
Partly is a direct response to the internationalism of republicanism. They just decided to align with the worst people on the planet.
Yep.
Yeah, there'll be another episode of Up on this Monday that goes into more detail and we'll have more information as it comes out. This is again a rapidly training situation. There might be more.
Time you hear it.
Days of this. It's possible that the police will crack down harder because there's been some pressure put on them by basically every government's involved in this, but we just simply don't know that at this time. And yeah, I see absolutely horrifying day.
Yeah, pretty hard to see through. Immigration in the US now another country where things going great. So a judge has ruled that Trump administration's broad restrictions on asylum and work permit. These were issued after the shooting of two National Guards people in DC are unlawful. Quote from the court order here, more than six months to go. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services in acted a series of policies through the lives of countless immigrants living in
the United States into indeterminate legal limbo. The agency announced that it will be placing an indefinite pause on the adjudication of immigration benefit requests from individuals from thirty nine African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries. Since then, individuals from these countries have been categorically barred from receiving final decisions on, among other things, their asylum work permit, Greek caard and
citizenship application. And USCIS hold on judications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong. Rather, ed arises solely by the hapbitance of their birth. And then I found this interesting in the court documents here in ruling on these motions of court is reminded of a line often repeated in discussions around immigration policy. If people wish to immigrate to the United States, they ought to follow
the law and do things the right way. This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that. They went on to say that the USCAS had used what they called pretextual concerns of national security that mask anti immigrant sentiment that is forbidden from letting influence its decision making legal terms. That means that us cis IS actions are a contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious. There's a fairly like emphatic court response. Right, this will affect a
great deal of people. It has left a great deal of people in limbo.
Right.
Most famously, I guess there were people who were at the natural the stage of their naturalization where they take the oath to become American citizens, right, the very final step. It is obviously a formality. You've passed the background checks, done the interviews, et cetera, et cetera, but it's still a necessary step. Without doing it, you do not become a citizen. And those people had been delayed unable to do that. They will be able to proceed with that.
Other people will be able to proceed with their process with the caveat that, uscas, if we have reported before in the show, is heavily focused on denaturalization, and it might be very hard for them to actually make that progress and get USCIS to move on stuff. Talking of de naturalization, the DOJ has begun proceedings against seventeen people IS people are either accused or convicted of serious crimes. What it seems that in most cases people have been
adjudicated to have committed crimes. In some cases they played guilty to crimes after they naturalized, but that they were doing before they naturalized. And what they are arguing here, the DOJ is arguing is that therefore they lied when they were naturalized because they were asked if they had committed any crimes which they had not been arrested. So by not confessing to those crimes in their interview, they
were therefore or lying. They were lying on the forum yes, on the form or in the interview, or both, and therefore that is why they are trying to de naturalizing. This is a large denaturalization. Seventeen people, there's a lot. A couple of them are so relged to have applied for immigration benefits under multiple different identities. One that I found particularly interesting is a Catholic priest who abused a minor parishioner. It's just interesting because it's interesting to see
them going there. I'll follow these and kind of keep tabs on how these progress, but that they have been ramping up denaturalizations. This we are beginning to see them kind of reaping the work USCS has been doing since the Trump administration fundamentally turned that agency around and pointed it at denaturalization. Meanwhile, a GAO reportant immigration detension in Camp East Montana. I've never seen it written like Montagna with so I'm guessing it's Camp mon like like Joe Montana.
Yeah.
Well like I they write it says Montana, so like, I don't know, it didn't Bliss right, like it's inside Fort Bliss, so like one would expect normally, like a Spanish style pronunciation given the region. Yeah, but maybe they just like a fucking end yet I don't know, like why they're not anyway, it's Camp. Its name is spelled like the state, not the not the Spanish word for mountain. Some of the things detailed in the support are pretty shocking.
A guard lost a loaded gun. Yeah, people with diabetes and HIV did not receive treatment plans and quote on Jesus.
Yeah.
On Febuar twenty twenty twenty six, ICE issued a discrepancy report for a detained nonsense and death by use of force. In January of twenty twenty six, the coroner's autopsy found the death to be a homicide due to asphyxiate. However, the contractor did not provide use of force and death reports to ICE as required. In addition, evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed.
Jesus, Yeah, like one of their cards strangled someone to death, it appears, Yeah, it.
Is the range of way someone could be asphyxiated, right, like A yeah, that's true, but I'm guessing the attempting to restrain this person violently and like as we've seen many other times in American history, murdered them and then evidence of that was destroyed. What is allowing this to happen is that the contract was solicited using a worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award contract vehicle that's generally like a military
contract vehicle. It allows and experienced pool of military contractors to apply for the contract. They probably did it like this to expedite the awarding implementation, right like Eastpontana's a soft sided facility on Fort Blaze. I've talked about it before here. Soft side facility means tense, right, it means
keeping hundreds of people intense. They hired a contractor who had no experience using what's called a lowest price technically acceptable evaluation approach, so they filter out people who can't do the requirements that they have for the contract, and then they look at which of the ones it does meet the requirements has the lowest price.
Right.
This has resulted very clearly in them contracting someone who is completely incapable of managing a facility like this, and even among ice facilities, this one appears to be particularly heinous. And this has resulted in very, very predictable and easily foreseen human tragedies. Right, they are capable of doing better than this. Conditions were very bad bliss for afghan people, right, who came here after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I wrote about that for the nation. You can look it up.
I they interview to someone who was there. But this is even worse. Rather than learning from that, they've just gone deeper. This has resulted in at least one person being killed. It's pretty horrific.
Let's go and break and then we will return for some stories about trans healthcare and war with Iran.
All right, we are back.
I have a sort of hodgepodge collection of stories related to trans healthcare and trans writes to the United States that I'm going to go kind of sequentially, and they some of them tied together. But let's start with the trans military ban. We've been upted on this. A federal appeals court has at least temporarily blocked the Pentagon from expelling transgender members of the military, though trans people may
be barred from enlisting. So this is kind of sort of like a new form of don't ask, don't tell, in a way of you can get in if you're not trans, but once you're in and you are trans, there's no legal grounds to remove you from the military. This was a two to one ruling that found hag Set's anti trans policy was quote driven by the bare desire to harm of politically unpopular group and quote both
arbitrary and based on animus. For those reasons, the policy violates the plaintiff Apelli's constitutional right to equal protection of the law unquote the last, but is very important, like the equal protection clause in cases like this is going to be the main thing that trans people are able
to rely on now. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins and Obama appointe wrote that the Trump admin claimed their anti trans policy is solely about whether the military can disqualify people from service due to a mental health condition like gender dysphoria.
Judge Wilkins wrote, quote, but the record shows that the purpose of the haig Seth policy is to target applicants and service members who express what the administration believes is a quote unquote false gender identity, and the policy goes far beyond disqualifying persons currently or recently suffering from gender dysphoria. Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification unquote. Haig Seth almost immediately announced he is
appealing to the Supreme Court. Oh boy, we will see where this goes.
YEP.
Last month, the DOJ announced a settlement with the Texas Children's Hospital as part of an ongoing national investigation into violations of federal law for providing gender affirming care to miners. The Texas Children's Hospital has entered into agreements with both the DOJ and the Texas Aturney General Ken Paxton that includes a commitment to not perform quote unquote sex rejecting procedures on minors, which the DOJ says includes puberty blockers
and cross sex hormones. This is a new term that they're really really rolling out it's sex rejecting procedures. That you're going to see this a lot more in these next few weeks to months.
Yeah.
The hospital in Texas also agreed to pay over ten million dollars in damages and civil penalties to quote resolve allegations that it submitted false billings to public and private payers to secure insurance coverage for pediatric sex rejecting procedures. The Department alleges this conduct violated the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the False Claims Act, and federal Fraud
and Conspiracy laws un quote. So they're saying that by billing insurance with their public or private for quote unquote sex rejecting procedures trans healthcare, that this was an act of fraud. Now, this is a settlement, and at the end of the settlement they do note that these are just allegations that these have not actually been proven. The liability has not been proven in a court, but these
are the allegations that resulted in the settlement. Now, as a part of the settlement, the Children's Hospital will also open the first ever quote unquote D transition clinic. So D transition Care is the same as transition care. Right, it is the same type of care. Yeah, I know this, This is like what I do. There's not enough D transitioners out in the world to sustain an actual full clinic, which points to the fact that this clinic is not
gonna be used for consenting D transition. This is mainly going to be used as a conversion therapy clinic for kids who want to transition but are now going to be forced to go to a clinic like this because they're not able to get their healthcare through this hospital
or really like in Texas as a minor. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio settled a very similar case last week, paying three hundred and eight thousand dollars fine and agree to dedicate two million dollars in funds for D transition care while promising to not provide gender firming healthcare to minors for twenty years. That is the part of the
settlement in the Cleveland Clinic case. God In mid May, Oklahoma passed a bill prohibiting Medicaid coverage of gender affirming care, including surgery and HRT, as well as offering this care in state owned facilities. The bill does not cut funding. Two doctors at private health care facilities to provide HRT,
as I have seen some claim online. This, like many of the Medicaid restrictions, primarily effects horror trans people on state Medicaid and may make care hard to access in the future, depending on how private hospitals react to this bill, even though it does not necessarily force them to change the way they operate. Lastly, later this summer, New York City will begin testing a pilot program for a direct, low slash, no cost gender affirming care clinic for adults,
opening in a low income neighborhood in Queens. I think this is a good first step in providing access to care, considering the Trump administration's threats to restrict Medicaid and Medicare coverage or remove Medicare Medicaid eligibility from hospitals that provide firming care services. But as we know, trans youth have
borne the brunt of these threats. Now, Bozmandani and the City Health Commissioner have said they are working to expand city provided gender firming care services to cover trans youth. Commissioner Martin told the City Council last Friday, quote, we are committed to this issue and want to make sure that we provide the services and resources for youth, as well as making sure we don't expose ourselves to clawbacks from the federal government which disrupt the rest of the
care we can give. There's much more to come on this, but rest assured we are working on this un quote. Something that is worth understanding here is that this new pilot program, this city run low slash, no cost dropping clinic, is completely separate from the city's H and H Municipal Hospital system, which already operates multiple H and H Pride centers that currently offer youth gender firming care, including HRT.
I called one this morning to confirm that they are still offering services to children people of all ages.
Now.
H and H is funded through city subsidies and patient revenue through Medicare. The new pilot program is attempting to launch an alternative care service that isn't reliant on insurance or federal funding if that comes into question, and they're trying to get this clinic up and running off the ground as soon as possible, and then once the pilot
program is tested expanded. Last week, Mom Donnie announced a fifteen million dollar investment in gender firming care quote unquote as a first step, and said that the phones would be used to quote unquote unlock care for youth who have had their healthcare restricted by private hospitals. So it's
currently unclear how exactly these funds will be used. For a while, advocates in New York City and state were fighting for care in the state budget, which delayed some of the process on this city prom care because they were expecting about eight million dollars of care from the state budget, which eventually fell through. So now the city
process is ramping up on us. Earlier this year, two major hospital systems in New York City stopped providing gender firming care to trans youth ahead of prospective HHS federal rule changes that would prevent hospitals from receiving federal funding if they offer gender firming care services to youth. These rules have yet to go in effect, but two major hospitals essentially complied beforehand. The risks from the federal government
aren't just isolated to restricting federal funding. The trip administration has employed a variety of threats in an attempt to intimidate patients and care providers. Last month, the two hospitals that discontinued care for trans youth received a criminal grand jury subpoena from the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Texas requesting information on pagans under eighteen years
of age. At least one of the hospitals, Mount Sinai, is complying with the subpoena, though telling parents the records would be anonymized.
Whatever that means.
Oh yeah.
A group of trans New Yorkers who have received care at Nyu Langoon and their parents have filed a class action lawsuit to protect their medical records. Though patients at Mount sign I could also sign on to this suit. The suit has extended the deadline for the subpoena till late June, as both the hospital and patients fight this in court. A similar administrative subpoena requesting records for youth
patients was challenged and successfully blocked in Rhode Island. These subpoenas should be fought on the strongest grounds by both the patients, the state, the city, and the hospitals themselves and beyond the all ages care currently offered by the h h HELL system. I think it was also fair to advocate that the direct slow no cost drop and clinic expand to cover all ages once thelot program is up and running this summer.
We'll briefly discuss the detention of an ICE officer and the war on Iran. We do have a good ICE arrest for you this week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the one good out theorist. Right, let's just start there then. So, Henepin County Attorney has file charges against ICE agent Christian Castro. Castro was arrested in Texas. He is arrested by Texas rangers with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators and DHS Security Office of the Inspector General staff at the scene.
According to a statement by the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, Castro was charged with four counts of second degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime for an incident on January fourteen, twenty twenty six, when he discharged his weapon through the front door of a home, knowing there were people who had just run inside. The bullet traveled through the door and struck oneing victim in the leg before making its final impact in the wall of
a child's room. They didn't know in this that the case be removed to federal court, but they say that he would still be ineligible for presidential pardon. It is not usual when announcing any prosecution to consider the impact of a presidential pardon. It is interesting that they did.
The case in question refers to Castro shooting of Julio Soce Elise, in which the DHS claimed that Soca Salise and two others attacked Castro with a broom at a snowshovel and that Castro quote fired the defensive shot to defend his life. DHS very quickly dropped its case put two agents on leave for providing accounts that contradicted by video evidence. Probably Castro was one of them, right. This is interesting a that they were able to obtain the
DHSOIG support. I had forgotten the DHSOIG were still doing stuff like this. To be honest, I didn't think they were. So this will be one that we will follow. That only leaves us with Iran, where this week a United States a patch helicopter was people have been using shot down. I'm not sure if it was shot. It was taken down reportedly by an Iranian drone and reportedly by a
collision with that drone. It's possible that it's happened accidentally, but given other things we've seen right with in Ukraine, for example, it is possible to take down a helicopter with FPV drone, that would be my guess as to what happened here. Its crew were then rescued from the straight of horn moves by another drone, an uncrewed surface vessel. The US only bought these online in March of this year, so this is the first time that we're aware of
that they were using this capacity. Right, So, this is like a boat drone, an uncrewed surface vessel, and it scooped well, I didn't scoop them up. They got on it. It collected them and then it took them to a second location where a helicopter was able to lift them up. As a direct result, and according to a saint combat the direct order of the President, the USN began self defense I'm quoting here right, quote unquote self defense strikes
against Iran. They claim these strikes where a quote unquote warning shot and will not impact negotiations. But as we record this on Wednesday afternoon, they have just announced another series of strikes. This all comes after Israel and Iran exchanged missile Salvos when Iran responded to Israeli bombing and bait route and the who Thies have also claimed a missile attack on Israel and have said that they would begin targeting Israeli shipping. Again, we already teetering around the
edge of this becoming a massive international conflict in a region. Again, that mean it is a massive international conflict, right, but returning to these full scale conflict that we saw until the ceasefire, which has been repeatedly violated, but the nonetheless has reduced the amount of bombing that's happening. Israel also bombed Palestine this week. Among the people killed was an eight year old boy named Judd Soliman in northern Gaza,
which is tragic. Yeah, we'll keep reporting on this, Like I've tried really hard not to make our coverage of especially what's happening on around Twitter review because real people are killing and real people are dying, and like it's it's focusing on the stupid ship that the president said or that you know, net Yahoo said on Twitter, Like it'sn't a true social converted to Twitter or whatever, Like
that's not really what's such steak here? Like, what's such steak is people's lives, and so I want to kind of avoid doing the back and forth social media review. But yeah, that's what I got this week. Cool oh breaking news as we as we go to press here, the Berlin Zoo has announced the name of its newborn pygmy hippopotamus, and.
I thought Hitler was a mistake. I'm gonna be honest with you, guys. I don't think that's an appropriate name for them.
I drop link in the chat so you can appreciate it. It's like a new moodang just dropped moment. They are calling it brochen brochun and you speak German.
Sure, okay, guys, that's that's martius. Yeah, good work, guys. That sounds like a candy children aren't legally allowed to eat in my country.
Another dub for German marketing. It means bread roll. I guess it is a very cute hippopotomist. That's a pretty cute name. It would be a cute name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, I guess if you're German, it's a cute name. Hit us up German language listeners. Does it seem cute to you?
Now?
Don't because you'll just get angry. At us for not understanding your strange language. In my defense, you live outside of America, the only other country in the world, right, Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, I'm just going to ignore the Iran reporting that. Yeah, yeah, we just well we'll.
Not mention that. Email us at fool Zone, tips at proton dot me. Some of you marketing fuckers are still trying remarkable.
I'm pretty sure it's one person who just create new new aliases. But I'm playing whack a mole over there in the block list. Okay, I will read your name this out if you keep doing it.
All right, well, I think that's going to be it for all of us here at It could happen here. That's the it, and it could happen here is this is Us Doing It podcast.
Goodbye, Put a try to skull on your couch.
We reported the news.
We reported the news.
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly an episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,