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. What are we recording?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah?
What the episode started?
Now?
I was, I was, I was going to say something, something to do with Texas. But to be honest, you know, why, why why do we do this? Why do we let ourselves, you know, get famous for for for saying a particular bit and then just keep repeating it over and over again. Are we so creatively bankrupt that there's there's nothing else we can do but repeat our greatest hits in order to recapture some of the some of the the excitement
that we felt as younger men. Anyway, my co hosts on this episode, James Stout and me A Wong, welcome, there could happen here.
Hi, Robert, I'm glad you're doing so well.
We're all doing great, James. You've just been having a searing emotional experience at the border. Yeah, and everyone else is busy living in the United States, which is its own seering emotional experience.
Man.
Today, today we're going to be talking about the both the most and least American state, Texas. Huzzah, Yeah, love you. Yeah. Who here has spent a lot of time in Texas. Garrison, You lived in the Dallas area, right.
A lot that I've made my visits to Texas over the years with you, even in the murder house.
You and I have quaffed many a shiner bock together, James Many. Okay, I guess we'll move into the fucking episode. So there was a there was an email sent out by Texasdemocrats dot org recently with the title Texas moves from solid red to battleground. Sure, you know, like clockwork. A lot of Democrats got very excited, and I made a couple of people made posts being like, hey, this is the same thing that happens every single election. They are never right. Texas is never a battleground and it
always costs an insane amount of money. It is a con by DC political consultants to get your money and pump it into something that will fill up their coffers and not achieve anything of value for the state of Texas or for the Democrats nationwide. And this makes people very angry for two reasons. One, they tend to interpret it as saying abandon Texas and the people there, which is not the statement I was making or anyone else
was making. And number two, everyone and it kind of obsessively starts pointing out like, look, look at how over the last thirty years, you know, the things have narrowed in Texas, and the proportion of like Democratic votes is you know raised, This is a this is winnable. We
can do it. We can do it. We're gonna talk today about why the anyone who talks to you about flipping Texas as a political goal that you should give money to is conning you, and not only conning you, but making it actually more difficult for Democrats to win, both in Texas and nationwide. That's that's that's the premise of the episode.
Everybody, Here's here's how Bernie can still win. Though at the very end, we will give you.
Yeah, We're gonna let you know he's got a shot. Look, look if he if he is capable of putting another three rounds of six point five into a dinner plate sized target at one hundred and fifty yards. Now that that was anyway, he'd have to shoot a lot of people to make.
He's got a deploy bought a joy into an.
Absolutely not.
Person. So I want to talk about this because I find it, like I think people tend to interpret this. I've certainly gotten accused of like, oh, you're just kind of being like a nihilist. Uh, this is you're being you know, just an anti electoralist. You're not being practical. There was a there was one particular guy who's like a local Democratic candidate who responded seven times to my tweet being like with variations, and his obsession was like, if we win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to
win national elections, which is true. If theoretically the Democrats flipped Texas, the GOP would have no chance at winning a federal election ever.
Again, Yeah, and so simultaneous to this, right, if the Republican there are more Republicans in California than there are any other state in the Union, and if the Republicans won California, they would they would win every election forever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, happen, not going to happen. I mean, it's it's one of those things. I am not saying Texas will never be a blue state. You know, that is something that is possible, even likely, given enough time. What I am saying, the argument that I'm making here, and I'll provide you with evidence, is that number one, focusing on these elections from the top down. And when you're saying we want to flip Texas, that's a top
down approach, right. You are not focusing on we want to fill up and win a bunch of different local elections. We want to flip, you know, the state houses. We want to flip a bunch of mayoralties and stuff. You are saying what matters is how Texas votes in the national election. And if you were to get if you were to kind of eke out a bear like in Georgia, right where you get a narrow victory in the federal election,
that would be great for the Democratic Party. One of my issues with it is that kind of focusing obsessively on flipping Texas isn't focusing on the stuff that actually will help Texans, like Texans currently being targeted by the state government, because flipping the state in a federal election, but not taking the governor's seat, not taking the lieutenant governor's seat, not like actually taking the state House, doesn't
improve life for people in Texas. I think the kind of the degree to which the federal government, Biden's administration, has been unable to push back very effectively against kind of a lot of the shit that DeSantis has been doing in Florida. You know, they have started to make some attempts, is evidence of this, and kind of more to the point, even if you don't agree with that, fundamentally, these strategies that the Democratic Party has embraced in Texas
do not work. The Texas Democratic Party is incompetent. They are bad at their job. They are worse. People bring up Georgia a lot when I talk about flipping Texas, and folks are like, well, we flipped Georgia, And it's like, yeah, because the state elected officials and candidates in George number one, the state party did a much better job of kind of harvesting is a weird way to phrase it, but of incubating talent to run for election in a number
of local offices. Then the Texas Democratic Party has ever done, and that was a big part of what allowed them to be competitive and eventually to flip the state. There's a lot of like kind of dollar sign information on how bad the state party in Texas is at this shit, and I guess I should go ahead and provide some of that now. So in the twenty twenty two election, the midterms famously an unusually good showing for the Democratic
Party nationwide for a midterm election everywhere but Texas. O'Rourke ran against Greg Abbott. He lost by eleven percent. This is kind of to contrast the election that got everyone excited when he was running against Cruse. I think they were like three percent apart. And again, the only reason there was this kind of mistaken belief and excitement among dims that O'Rourke, because he was so close to Cruz,
had a real shot of winning Texas. No, he got kind of close to beating Cruz because Ted, even Republicans hate Ted Cruz. No one has ever liked that man. His own wife can barely stand to be in a room with him. His political allies would turn the other cheek if fucking somebody anyway, we shouldn't talk about political assassinations on this podcast. It wouldn't anger anybody though, right.
Lindsay Graham has said that, like Lindsay Graham's like, what maybe the only good joke a Republican elected officials ever told is that if you were to shoot Ted Cruz on the floor of Congress and the trial was held in Congress, like nobody would vote to convict the murderer. Anyway. So Beto lost quite badly to Greg Abbott, and beyond that, basically every statewide candidate that the Democrats ran lost in
that election. It was a bad election for the Democratic Party and people who pay attention to Texas politics and actually, like, aren't just trying to like grift your donation money? Know this. Joe Montfort, a Democratic consultant in North Texas, said, quote, it's been one election after another where we ramp everybody up and set these expectations that we're going to finish
in first and then we finish in second. I don't see any indication that we can win at state wide levels or won't continue to bleed house seats to the other party.
I love to need to finish in second.
There is if there's like a podium on election libertarians. Yeah, the text Democratic Party to take the l to like Gildstein.
Yeah, there were some kind of site. There were some wins by Democrats in Texas. They managed to hold on to two out of three seats congressional seats in the battleground regions in South Texas, but they still lost one. They did they you would still lose one and you know, the GOP had to spend a lot of money to
do that. But like one of the one of the points is that so they they held onto two of those seats, and they won a contestant seat in the suburbs of Dallas, and you know, like but basically in all of these areas, these were like super narrow winds, like these the big successes, and they were narrow wins in areas that Joe Biden had carried by double digits two years ago. And Joe Biden is a historically like that is part of some of the some of it will show you how bad the Texas Democratic Party is.
Joe Biden is not a popular president. And the fact that he carried a lot of these areas by more than the candidates who narrowly won in twenty twenty two could is not a great sign for the way things are trending.
Yeah, It's probably also worth pointing out that like those Southern Texas seats, like in the Rio Grande Valley, right, Like, yeah, those people are normally Democrats, Yeah, but you have guys like hen is it Quella Quala Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah's opposed to abortion rights yeah yeah, and extremely hawkish on the border, and like, yeah, what do we gain by
having like yeah, blue team good? Like not really if this person is going to take away your bodily autonomy and brutalize people for coming to this country for one day.
About a life.
Yeah, it's it's like a lot of the some of these wins are kind of like marginal at best, given the compromises or just given the kind of Democrats who can win it. It's like a Joe Manchin kind of situation.
Yeah, exactly.
And more to the point, like it's not not only is this like evidence kind of that the Democrats' strategy isn't isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something and it failed. They tried something and it was so expensive that it stopped them from trying things in other areas where the money could have gone better. For example of how fucking wasteful, particularly the bed O Wort campaign was, right, he loses by eleven points to Greg Abbot. He raised
seventy seven million dollars to lose by that much. A few years earlier, Lupe Valdez ran against Greg Abbot. She spent raised like two million dollars and lost by thirteen points. So seventy five million dollars may have bought Beto two percent. Uh you know, like if you assume that national trends had nothing to do with that gap closing, buy a tiny amount, like what.
With seventy five million dollars, I could take control of a moderate at least is Texas city?
Like yeah that is like, yeah, I could buy had my chunk of Texas specific like you could purchase a large chunk of fort Worth with that much money. No, yeah, that's how I'll go here at cools the own media.
Yeah, yeah, to own fort Worth. Finally my dream completed. I'll be able to be I'm gonna buy those horse statues at Los Kalitas, finally be happy.
Let's get blucifer as well. It's probably a good time to pivot to ads that help us pay for a piece of fool.
Sure, yeah, you know, who isn't a waste of money these fucking ads. So overall we just talked about you know, Beto raised seventy seven million. The gubernatorial race cost in total something like one hundred and forty million dollars, which is a huge amount of money for something that fails that badly and doesn't there's no evidence that Beto's campaign
like he was. He's obviously good at fundraising, right, And there was kind of this belief among a lot of dims, an errant belief that this meant that he would be good for down ballot races. Right, He's going to bring the entire because of how much attention he gets, He's going to raise the entire Democratic Party up. The poor showing of the Democratic Party in Texas in twenty twenty
two suggests that that's not the case. And the money, like there are there are fights that could have been won and probably weren't because the money wasn't being invested in those fights. It was going to battle. And I'm going to quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here. This year the party ran Rochelle Garza, a civil rights lawyer with little political experience against Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent.
But Garza struggled to raise money or gain traction in auric shadow and lost by ten percentage points against Paxton, who's been indicted on felony security fraud charges and is being investigated by the FBI for abuse of office accusations. And it's what, Maybe she couldn't have won no matter
what you did. But one of the rules of politics in this country is that the money you spend at a big race, like a gubernatorial race, like a like a like a Senate or a congressional campaign at the federal level, like a presidential campaign, goes less far per dollar than the money you spend in smaller local elections. Right, ten million bucks going into that election might have done something, you know, as opposed to seventy five million going into
Bedo O'Rourke and accomplishing very little. This has been not just a problem in Texas in previous elections, throughout the Trump area and a little before in particular, this was a problem the DIMS had kind of from the middle of the Obama years until the last couple of like, really the last midterm at twenty eighteen is when it started to turn around nationally, and the dims have I've learned a lot in other regions about like not spending
stupid amounts of money on hopeless contests, but not like comprehensively. So for example, in twenty twenty two, the second most expensive house race was the fourteenth congressional district of Georgia, where Marcus Flowers raised sixteen million dollars and lost by thirty two points, not a great return on the investment. And it was like the reason why he raised so much money is because he was running against Marjorie Taylor Green, and nationally, dims outside of Georgia wanted to put in
money because they hate her. And it's a trend that relies a lot on social media on kind of the way in which like hardcore dims, the dims that do a lot of the small dollar donations think about politics where it's like Marjorie Taylor Green bad donate money to opponent, Well, her opponent had no chance of winning in that district, Like no amount of money would have flipped that, and you just wasted sixteen million dollars that could have helped
somewhere else. Maybe that's an insane thing, and it's not as bad as it used if you want to look at like the like the kind of the dumbest it ever was. In twenty twenty, so Lindsay Graham's seat was up in South Carolina and Jamie Harrison ran against Lindsay Grant and dims again because Lindsay Graham evil, you know, raised one hundred and thirty million dollars and he lost
fight ten points. Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell, who is another like you can always get a shitload of money to fight Mitch McConnell ninety four million dollars lost by twenty points, either of the like one hundred and thirty million, ninety four million, that's two state legislators you could have flipped, or at least made progress on flipping, right, Like that amount of money could potentially do that or at least help set up, you know, get a couple
of people elected who have a chance at kind of broadening a base of support and becoming you know, leaders in states that are currently like dominated by red legislators. Like there's a chance at least here and that.
Like specifically the state legislature. Thing is this has been a problem with the Democrats for fucking ages, which is that they just like it is only genuinely in the last two years the Democrats are started giving a ship about state legislatures, like and this is this is one of the things from the Obama era, Like one of the reasons everything sucks so much is that the Democrats managed to lose like, oh god, I forget it was like they I think I think the total they lost
like a thousand seats. It was like yeah, and and and you know, on the we were seeing the product of this, right like this like like Wisconsin was sort of just a hell hole for the last decade. Uh and you know, I mean like and these are like Minnesota to like the like, there are lots of these states that like that thought, not Minnesota, wor am I talking about Michigan?
Yeah, Michigan.
Yeah, Like there's a lot of these states, and you know, like and both of these places were winnable, right like like they're like the Democrats are winning there now, right, but they just like fucking left, like you know, they they they fucking left Lint to get poisoned by lead because they just not like the only the only things that the problem is there's there's no money for consultants in in sort of like downbout like state, and like local races just just jack shit, right, And the Democrat
the Democrat party like is not run by sort of like it's it's not a party in like an actual real sense. It is a it is a collection of consultants. And those consultants only care about senates, about Senate races. Sometimes they care about house races, and they care specifically they spend all of their fucking money and presidential races.
And you know, it's like again, and the Republicans don't do that because they have a bunch of like people they you know, because they have a bunch of like part of their base, right is these like small and mid scale capitalists in you know, in cities, in rural areas who have like immediate concerns about like you know, there's like there there are specific workers who they want like lives to be worse. And so because of that, the Republican machine is like seize the entire fucking country.
And the Democrats have been sitting around like spending like a trillion dollars on Wendy Davis losing by twenty points.
Yeah, yeah, And it's like you get these you get these like cases where you know, you're looking at thirty million being spent, you know, failing to unseat Marjorie Taylor Green or somebody thirty three million something like that. But what you don't like at the same time as like that's happening, is all of these massive amounts of money are being devoted to these like to the races that
get attention because there's famous names involved. You have, like in twenty twenty I think it was you have or no, it is twenty twenty two. You have the election between Ted Budd, a Republican against the Democrat Sherry Beasley in North Carolina where the Democratic Party decided not to prioritize this election because it wasn't winnable, and then Bud won up wound up winning by just four points. That's a
seat you could flip with money. That's that's not that's not an unreasonable thing, as opposed to again, the races where it went to and people are losing by like thirty something fucking percent. And if you want to know who a serious candidate is who is not just trying to do the sexy thing or not just trying to like again flip the state so that we can win the federal election, but actually wants to help their state. And this is again there's very nice things about Beto O'Rourke.
I was in Texas during the ice storm. He did good work during the ice storm, like actual community defense kind of stuff that I do have some respect for. He is not and has never been a serious politician. And I will tell you why he went from winning an election to losing a state election against Ted Cruz, to losing a presidential race to losing the governor seat. That is so fucking scattershot. That is not building a base of power, That is not building from the ground up,
and like encouraging the growth of other personalities. You're just darting from whatever the sexiest and most like pr driven race is. That's not serious. I want to talk about what Number one one, the Democratic Party, the ship that like, as we've said, they're getting better. The National Party got a lot better at this particularly in twenty twenty two. It was less stupid than the previous couple of elections had been.
Really difficult, to be more dumb than that, but you know it is British British labor et cetera, et cetera. Y labor actually is the big one. Oh my fuck.
I want to talk what has what has worked, and what I think could work again. And to do that, I'm going to talk about a guy named Howard Dean, who here knows who Howard Dean was. Garrison simply, yeah, a little bit.
Have you?
Have you all heard the video of him screaming that got like his career is before? Okay, well, James, would you load that up for us so we could play that in a second to the Deanswward, Jamie, pull it up. Howard Howard Dean ran for president and was He was the first national political candidate to use the internet effectively to raise money in the in the history of US politics. He's kind of pre Obama, worked out a lot of the strategies that Obama's people wound up using to very
successfully raise money for him. He was really good at it. He was a reasonably intelligent candidate, and then he gave the speech that we're about to play for you, and it completely created his ended him as a as a candidate.
You know, I always say, the thing about Dean. Dean is stunningly unlucky that he ran in the time that he did, because the clip you're about to hear is one thousand times less weird than anything DeSantis has ever done. Like he he ran in it. I mean there was there was dan Quail, right, but like he ran in an era where like the seriousness and like non weirdness of politicians was so much higher.
I mean it's in the chat, so you can this is a good shit.
Straight to that beautiful scream.
We're going to South Carolina in Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York. We're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, d C.
To take back the White House.
That's it. That ended his career as a candidate. And it's a little silly, but that doesn't that doesn't that wouldn't be a twelve second news cycle today. But after kind of failing out as a presidential candidate, he became chairman of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and he was a pretty good one. His kind of primary strategic vision was what he called the fifty state strategy, which is, don't focus just on swing states, never write a state
off at unwinnable. Instead, spread the money that the DNC has around two campaign throughout the country everywhere, particularly to fund local dncs so that they can start building a stable of candidates that can attract voters and eventually win local elections. It's not like an easy, it's not a sexy strategy because a lot of it is focused on like the slow kind of grueling fight to build up a base of support and unfriendly terrain. But it worked
like really well. Actually in twenty or so states, those that had voted solidly Republican in private previous recent presidential races, Democratic candidates like won elections that had previously like in the like gone against them like it had. Like there were about like twenty states where it the kind of slide to red was arrested and pushed back to blue.
These are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. When you do the yeah, there we go. So basically, Dean's strategy led to a net gain of thirty nine state House seats and a two
percent increase of all seats in the states analyzed. They lost two, you know, state Senate seats net, but it worked great in the House and like gained an attorney generalship, gained three House seats, gained a Senate seat, and in fifteen of the twenty seats the Democratic nominees on increase in vote share between two thousand and four and two thousand and eight, which was the years that so again,
not super sexy. These aren't like we flipped Texas suddenly, but it's like, oh, we started to see real gains and like a lot of pretty red states.
Now.
It didn't work everywhere. It was not particularly successful in a large chunk of the South, like it did not arrest the slide into the red everywhere. But in a lot of the Midwest, particularly the states that were like the Hillary Clinton so called firewall that went for Trump in twenty twenty, it was extremely effective. And of course it got mixed immediately after Obama won election. And this is a big part of why in twenty ten the
DIMS lost disastrously. But like the basic idea of we should be putting money into local democratic parties in order to like number one, have like a big part of winning any conflict, whether it's a war or a political election, is having the resources available reserves to take advantage of
opportunities that present themselves in the moment. So you have a solidly read state house seat or judge ship or something like that, or governorship or mayor mayoralty, and a candidate has a health scare or has a scandal, you know, they get caught fucking a thirteen year old or something, and suddenly this seat that was solidly read is in play. And if you have no one who can get votes, who can get voters excited, who can run for that, well,
then your probably not gonna win it. It's just going to like go to whoever the RNC you know, picks to pick up the seat next. But if you've got someone waiting in the wings, they have a chance at winning it. And a good example of this is what just happened in Jacksonville, Florida. Right you have DeSantis make go like lunge to the fucking most fascist end of the right and pass this abortion bill that's something like
seventy five percent of the state doesn't like. And the Dims had a decent candidate there that was able to run against the Republican mayor of Jacksonville and win. And in that election, the dim spent two million and the Republicans spent nine million. You were not talking about the kind of resources expended that you're seeing in some of
these dumb races we're talking about. So anyway, like this is most of what I wanted to get into is just like you can win and you can improve things in Texas and you can build a base from which to actually change things electorally in that state. But you can't do it by just like focusing on whoever is at the top. Like it has to be smarter. It's not just about shoveling money into a pit.
Yeah, And like I think there's there's a couple of things I want to add. One was that like, oh god, okay, like so Tim Kane, Yeah, tim Kaine got put in after they ran out Dean and Jesus like Tim Kane might be is a is like a once in a generation terrible politician, like one of the worst, you know, but like like you would see ship like.
He is the Winston Churchill of making me bored.
Like yeah, like he like like you would see I mean, and this still happens, right, but like there are there are seats that are winnable that the Dems like just literally won't even bother finding people to run for because they're just fucking too lazy and they don't give a shit. And you know this this happens if this happens in a fucking lot of races, and you know, and part part of the other thing that that happens in this sort of period that like you know, is the reason
why the top down is okay. So this is like if if we're gonna actually do this sort of like complicated electoralism, like this is why Bernie Sanders lost two elections in a row. Is that you can't actually like like actual sort of like substantive political change like doesn't happen from the top down. It's it's like it happens on bottom up organizing. And you know, the the democratic waves in like the last two years, we're basically like
them eating actual social movements. It's you know, like they it's it's them basically, like they're there. There's a sort of rejuvenated anti abortion movement that they just sort of consume. Right, They've been doing a very very good job of sort of like eating like whatever sort of queer rights like movements exist alive, and they had kind of stopped doing that for a while because they chose to just like destroy Occupy Whether rather than like try to co opt it.
And you know, I mean there were reasons for that, right, but like part of part of the thing like if if you if if you're a Democrat and you want to actually like win Texas, you need to have like actual you to have actual sort of social movements that you know, the Democrats can eventually take over and destroy.
But in the time between they destroy them, destroying them and them, and you know, like like in the brief time while they both exist and are controled by Democratic Party, that's how you actually sort of like build the kinds of the build the kinds of coalitions to build the kinds of organization that win these races. And the Democratic Party has just no interest in doing that like almost anywhere basically outside of Minnesota, where I don't know.
Those.
The Minnesota Dems are fucking built different. I don't, I don't, I don't know.
I don't.
I don't have another explanation for that, but like, yeah, it's I don't know, it's it's.
It's like one of the things that you have the opportunity to do at the local level is and this is you know, this is a big factor in like,
uh politics in Georgia. You've got people who are motivated because of a specific political issue that Dems are strong on, like abortion, and you can you can get people registered, you can get people out organizing, you can get people donating money, and more most important that you can get people votevoting and voting in numbers that they haven't before and make if you're able to kind of harness that sort of thing. But being able to harness that again,
part of it is this is not sexy. This is not something we can say this is going to flip a state in twenty twenty four. But putting in the money and the resources to have people who are being supported to go out and make attempts and to build like a reputation and a base of support and networks in the state, Like that's the non sexy thing that
the number one the Republicans are really good at. If you're asking yourself, looking at all these horrible anti trans bills, anti gay bills, anti abortion bills, how do they do
this well? Because church is organized at the local level to build up the kind of support and the kind of human infrastructure that allowed them to take advantage of the kind of broader social trends that drove some of those states more deeply read and that kind of like made may did it possible for them to do things that ten years before people had said, like there's no way to make this happen. That can work on the left side of things, but you have to have the groundwork in They started.
With like school boards, Yeah, they started. They started with going for school boards, going after books. Then you get up basic people riled up that you can go after healthcare for minors and you can go after health care for adults. It was a very easy path and it started by like going to the most accessible places to have public comment on issues, which was complaining about books inside of school.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And another thing I'd say about the church thing is like the thing that you used to do that for the Democrats was unions, but then they destroyed them all. And but you know, but like you can actually you can actually see what this looks like like in the
places where something like this. This is why the state level Midwest Dems are so much further to the left than the Dems everywhere else, because like the people in Minnesota, the people in Wisconsin are likely the only reason they're even so remotely in power is because and you know, you're seeing this, like it's at like in Chicago too, with Brandon Johnson. Is that like those those people are like functionally dependent on like that they're on their teachers
unions to exist as like a political coalision. Yeah, and so you know, like like union organizing is a is a like we're just like fucking just giving money to a strike fund is even even if the thing that you want to do is win elections, that is a more effective way of winning of winning elections than fucking giving money to Beto Auroric like a seventh time.
Yeah, and again when we the thing I want to get across here is the right thing to do is not say and no one is suggesting this here, fuck Texas, it can never be fixed. The right thing is saying if you're focused on one famous guy running in Texas or this like top level thing of flipping Texas, you don't actually care all that much about the problems being faced by people in Texas because that's not really going
to fix them. Right, Beto's not going to win. And even if Texas flips for an election action, that doesn't mean the state legislature flips. It doesn't mean the governor flips. It doesn't mean that things get better for people doing these kind of bottom up approaches. Number one will eventually flip the fucking state. Right, there is a demographic trend happening. Part of how you flip the state, By the way, if you're actually responsible, is like proving that you can
make people's lives better. If you want to flip the state, that's maybe more ethical than just being like, what if we dump one hundred and seventy million dollars to try to make this guy who goes viral on YouTube or Twitter sometimes look better? Right, maybe one of those is more ethical than the other. Anyway, I don't want to rant about electoralism anymore, but as a transplant in Texan, I get frustrated by this. So I felt like we had to say something.
Yeah, I also get frustrated by Better claiming to be punk, which is the least punk thing in the fucking whether that's a no repisode.
No, we have one. We have one elected who's gotten anywhere close to being punk, and it was Bernie Sanders when he when he got into that cold book depository that November morning with the man liquor carcano rifle. Extremely punk anyway, cutting the feed here.
Ah, oh yeah, it could happen here a podcast where I just made my colleagues I can see them through the zoom, deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with with.
With a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace. I'm Robert Evans. Joining me today is Mia Wong and Garrison Davis me. I take it from here.
Oh boy, So it's been a you know, this is okay, So this, I guess is now like last week's Twitter thing. But okay, so also not this is this is? This is not a Twitter thing? No, well it kind of is.
It kind of is, but like let's not let's not friend this as a Twitter thing?
Yeah, okay, okay, so what this is? We we are okay, we have been experiencing in the last you know, like half decade actually belonging from that cause like this seven eight years now, like the the sort of incredible rise in casual American anti semitism and the level of anti semitism that you could just do in in sort of
public discourse and it's quote unquote fine. And one of the sort of biggest indicators of this is the like the the extent to which it's now socially acceptable to just do the most like absolutely like unhinged like antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. And specifically the thing that specifically was like, okay, need to do this episode was last week Elon Musk like compared George Soros to Magneto and then said, quote you assume they are good intentions.
They are not. He wants to erode the fabric, the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity. And this is just like the mainstreamline of the Republican Party now like they just all do this. You can just sort of, I mean, and this is honestly like as bad, like you know, this is like the stuff that Elon Musk is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere near as bad as it goes, Like it's pretty common to just sho these people like talking about the Satan sorrows
agenda and shit. Now like it's it has gotten unbelievably, unfathomably out of control. And so today I wanted to take a look at, okay, who George Soros actually is, like the real human being and not the sort of like caricature projection that has been created of him on the right. And I wanted to also sort of look
at why the right hates him so much. And you know, Soros is kind an interesting figure because he falls like right in the middle of like our two shows about people, because he's not he's not really like a cool person. He does cool stuff, but though he does stuff that's cool sometimes, but he's not also like a bastard properly.
So though he's done some bastardy stuff too, he has.
We are going to talk about that.
He said, he's a Yeah, I mean.
Most of what this episode is about, he's.
I would say he's like twenty percent more complicated than the average billionaire on a on.
A morel yeah, I think I think like twenty or thirty percent.
Yeah, there's there's somewhere in that neighborhood.
Yeah, you know, and I think there's three George Soros's. Two of them are real and one of them is fake. There is you know. So George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist, right, and you know, so that means that he has a sort of billionaire side and a philanthropist's side, and they are very often working across purposes. Sometimes they're not working.
Sometimes there he aligns them together, sometimes he doesn't. And so the way I've sort of structured this is like the first episode we're gonna be talking about the sort of billionaire side and how he did that, and the second episode is going to be more about the philanthropist's side and how both of these basically have been kind of accidentally structured in such a way that the right was like, oh my god, this is the perfect guy
to do atise medic conspiracy theories about. And then there's also the third George Soros is like the one who's just literally the devil who the Republicans have made up and yeah, so George Soros was born to a Jewish family in Hungary in nineteen thirty, which is not a good time to be born into a Jewish family in Hungary.
No, really, there's not a good time to be born to a Jewish and family in Hungary until like I'm gonna get I'm gonna say, sometime in the fifties.
Yeah, you know, I will say that it gets way like it. It is way worse when he is born than it was in like even like the eighteen nineties, which is like not a great time, but it's gotten significantly worse. He is fourteen when the Nazis invade Hungary nineteen forty four, and this is the point at which we get to our first Soros conspiracy, which is that there's this, there's this.
It's a little more complicated than that. It's not really the Nazis. Well, it's a little more complex than yea, when the extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community begins, really in nineteen forty four, yeah, yeah.
And so there's a thing that happens. I don't know. He and his dad have a kind of complicated like set of things they survive, and there's a part of the story that gets picked up by the right that gets If you've ever heard Alex Jones talk about Sorows, like the second or third thing he will say is that like Soros Nazi collaborator, was like a willing collaborator with the.
Nazis, which is not true.
And also like he's fourteen, like you know, but like I don't really call even like fourteen year olds and the Hitler youth willing collaborators because they're children. Yeah, you have to have a lion at some point, even with Nazis where if their kids, they're not really morally responsible
either way. Yeah, and like you know, so the specific thing that he does is there's these notices that are sent up by the government that's like telling Jewish people to like go like to a place and if you go to the place, you're gonna get routed up and killed.
And basically, so the thing that actually happened is that so George Ros's dad is told to do this and he gives it to George Rosen is like go tell these people that they've been called for this and that if they go, they're like they're gonna get taken away. And this has been transformed by you know this that is,
this is a nightmarish thing these people are spiving. This has been transformed by a bunch of the worst people ever lived into Nazi collaboration, which is also you know, the part of the story that never gets told, even even when people sort of like do the like dive
into like oh this is fake. Is that the thing that like Soros's family spends the rest of the war doing is basically getting like counterfeit papers to Jewish families that like says that they're Christian, and you know they like they they legitimately save a bunch of families from dying in the Holocaust, and yeh.
Know, the shit that Jones pulls on them is like part of this because of like the job this guy who's like saving young George Soros has involves like basically like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced out of their homes. He's like they were profiting off of the holl No, they were like doing whatever job kept them under the radar while they attempted to help. Like it was the Holocaust. It was messy. Yeah, but like it's almost like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage of
slave labors. Well, no, it's actually what Schindler was doing. It was not that, Yeah, like he was you the trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people. It's quite different from just enslaving people.
Yeah. I think the thing that's really disturbing about this though, right is like, Okay, like this is like Alex Jones is Alex Jones, Right, He's just gonna say the worst shit you've ever heard. But like this is like a thing that mainstream right wingers just say now, yeah, and it's just unbelievably horrible and it sucks and it's just
like not true. But fortunately for George Soros, his family makes it through the Holocaust, well his immediate family does, and they like get out and they end up in the US. And this is where, Okay, this is something that I think is very important to the story that isn't told very much. So Soros is like a finance whiz, right, he is very, very very good at finance. And we're gonna be talking a bit about like how like the things that he figured out to let him do this,
because it's interesting. But he's also not from the sort of like American or the British financial elite, Like if I don't there's like a certain kind of person, right who like goes into finance and you know, it's like like like wasp frat Brose or like in bred British aristocrats, right, and door Soros is like a hung is a Hungarian immigrant, right. He is not sort of from these people. He is like and and you know this is this is gonna be a really big deal when he like goes up
against the British financial elite later on. But you know, he he he threw sort of like he's able to turn like a job doing door to door salesman into like a way into a firm, and he's able to sort of work his way up to a point where like he has suddenly like has his own hedge fund and he is really really good at this. He's he's one of the sort of early people who does hedge funds.
There's a great book called The Influence of Soros, Politics, Power, and the Struggle for an Open Society by Emily Tempkin, who did a lot of really great work like interviewed Soros, interviewed an enormous number of the people who were around him. And I want to read a passage of this about like how he figured out how to sort of beat
the market. He's talking about this guy named Carl Popper, who's like a philosopher of science who also wrote this book called The Open Society that we'll talk about next episode.
More.
Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the role of misconceptions in financial markets, Soros said decades later. People believe that markets don't lie and shouldn't be and should be trusted. But that isn't true. Sorrow's knew markets react to humans,
and humans are fallible. Instead of looking at the money being made, or as Sebastian Mallaby put it, in more Money than God, his book on the history of hedge funds, the Psychology that drove investors appetites, Soros looked at how one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the other forward until the trust were so completely overvalued that
a crash was inevitable. And this is really like if you even today, right, you know, if you're able to understand that, you know, like the way a lot of hedgephoon people tend to think about the market is as like the market, you know, especially in this period, is this is this sort of dogmatic, neo lible thing of like the market is like a perfect codvance of price signals, and so I was just like no, it's made out
of people. And those people like get greedy. They have emotional stuff they like they get into these like fomo like fear of missing out stuff. You know, they like intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees the assets like expensive, so everyone like you know, rushes to buy it, and like this is something like like even now right, this is this is like a very smart way to understand finance.
She's figured this out in like the seventies. And if you, if you, if you're able to do this kind of stuff and like use this to understand how the market works in the seventies, you are going to look like a god among men. And he starts a hedgephone in nineteen seventy three, but by nineteen eighty one he has a fun that is worth three hundred and eighty one million dollars in like nineteen eighty one money. I don't know what that is in modern money, but I assume
it's a lot. I'm a hack of a fraud. I should have actually figured this out.
Yeah, that's like a billion dollars.
Yeah, And like he personally is like has like for himself like one hundred million dollars right, and he you know, at this point, he starts to become sort of very famous in finance circles because you know, I mean he's just like absolutely destroying the market. Now, okay, this is where things get. You know, up until this point, he's kind of like he's been doing a lot of sort of finance stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly just been him like ripping off other finance people, which
I'm entirely okay with, like that's just very funny. But he starts to get into currency speculation, and in nineteen eighty five he has one of his big breaks, which is he predicts the plaza cords. Now, okay, the Plaza cord is something we've talked about on the show before, but I need to talk about it a bit more because unfortunately it's we have to talk about the Asian financial collaps this episode. And this is a like one of the key moments of the Asian financial collabs, even
though it was like a decade earlier. So in nineteen eighty five, Ronald Reagan is trying to like revive the US as a domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying, and you know the reason part of the like a big part of the reason is dying is that they're getting absolutely destroyed by sort of German and like West German and Japanese manufacturers. And part of what's happening here is that particularly Japan's currencies are worth way currency is
worth way less than the dollar. This is called having a weak currency, and having a weak currency is really good for if you have like an export based manufacturing economy.
And so Reagan basically like walks into a meeting with like the Germans, Japanese government, the British, like few other people and just basically just like not quite in so many words, but basically just says like you are all American military protectorates, and because you're all American military protecs, like I can I can force you to increase the value of your currency like or else capital O, capital e. And they do. They comply, and this is this, this
becomes this is a thing called the Plaza Cords. And this this, you know, weakens the value of the dollar
versus a bunch of other currencies. And this like literally single handedly like restores the profitability of American manufacturing like through the nineties, which is really wild, but the the other the important thing for this story is that I I don't know how he did this, but like George Soros predicts that this is gonna happen, and she makes an unbelievable amount of money basically like no, no, like basically do in currency speculation because he knows what, like
currencies are going to increase in value, which you know, he knows that, like uh, for example, he knows that, like the Japanese yen is going to increase in value. So he makes an enormous amount of money doing this stuff, and he gets very famous for like he'll like make it much of money, and then it'll lose it again and and then he'll make it again. And this all
culminates in okay, so they're they're okay. He starts taking a truly enormous bets, like against national currencies, and there's one of these that's just funny, and there's one of these that's really bad. So we're gonna do the funny one first, which is so in nineteen ninety two Soros And this is the other part that they ever got talked about. It's like it's not just Soros doing this stuff.
He has like allies because like as big as Soros for NBA is right, he can't him and his ally is gonna take a fifteen billion dollars short position on the pound. And even he doesn't have like nobody like this is like fifteen billion of nineteen nineties money, right, Like you need a bunch of firms working together in
order to do this. But he basically takes this massive bet the pound is gonna go down, and because of the way that these these bets work, like the actual value of the pounds like collapses and the British Central Bank like like doesn't have enough thing. The reason we're able to do is they figure out that the Birtis Central Bank doesn't have enough money to stop them, like they don't have enough money to like maintain like they don't have enough reserves to like maintain the value of
the pound. And so he gets like completely blamed for this, even though again there's like other people involved in this, right, Like the front page of the Daily Mail is literally his face in the title I made a billion crashing the pound baste, which is I okay, so like an anti British level, this is very funny. It's no, there's a bunch of arguments about like what does this mean
for like the world economy and for national sovereignty. Soros thinks that like currency speculation is necessary evil and he he.
Has this sort of seem to think that when you're making that much money, yeah right.
You know it's now okay, this this like specific thing which is like a a a bank a banker comes in and is able to manipulate the value of a currency.
This is like this is like absolutely like this is the fodder for like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of the anti Semitic right. Like it's this sort of like rootless cosmopolitan banker like attacks the good and righteous like noble people of Britain thing, And this is how it gets framed in the press, who are like the press is I mean it's the British press, right, Like the British are not known for, you know, not being anti Semitic,
and so they just like go wild with this. But you know, like this particular thing he's doing against the British.
Part of what's happening here, right is there's this sort of there's this kind of like national populist equation thing going on here where there's this assumption that like the Bank of Britain, like the bank, like the British Central Bank is like an entity that is identifiable with like an ordinary person in Britain, and like no, like the the Retis Central Brank is run by just unbelievably and bred aristocrats, right.
And you know, I think they're pretty believably in bread.
That's fair.
Yeah, we're just talking about like like zero point five six of a Habsburg unit. You know, I have the Habsburg is the international unit for measuring how inbred someone is. If you're if you're unaware.
I yeah, yeah, that seems that seems like a reasonable amount of inbread for these specific people. But you know, like but this is what I was talking about, Like at the very beginning, I was talking about sort of like sorrow's not being from this sort of like normal
class of finance people. And the thing is, like the normal class of finance people are fucking terrible at their jobs, right, like these amber British aristocrats and like the fucking American like cocaine frat boys, like like just like doing lines of cocane off each other's as cracks. Like these people
all suck at their jobs. And George Soros is like smart and is good at his job, and so she just like absolutely goes through these people like a fucking flaming chainsaw, and she just like, you know, and the maneuvers that he's doing here, she just like absolutely humiliates all of the people at the at the at the
British Central Bank. He's humiliating, like and not just those guys too, it's humiliating the Tories, it's humiliating like all of the people who are seriously important in the real economy, in the sort of real British economy. And he can do this right because like his opponents are you know, people who are like they're they're they're promoting they're like they're they're they're okay, they take in like their people from college, right, and they're promoting the base off how
good they are at golf. And so when she just sort of like cut like walks in and just makes it like makes like billions of dollars just like destroying these people, he makes just a permanent enemy of a very very powerful like faction of the British ruling class, and the British ruling class, like I don't know, they they It is hard to fight people who will beat
the British ruling class and an anti semitism off. And this is this is one of the things that sort of you know, if you're looking at like why Sorrow specifically is the guy who all of these sort of right wing conspiracies wind up being about, Like part of it is because he pisses off these specific people.
Yeah, these guys who's like dads were all friends with the King of England, who was like a close personal buddy with Hitler. Like there it's a bunch of like it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game. And so like the fact that it's a Jewish dude who does it means that they're going to be even
more racist than they already were. And the fact that there's plenty of international anti semitism and that George Soros after this starts funding liberal and you know, vaguely progressive causes, Like yeah, it's not this is not a it's not surprising that this is the way things went.
Yeah, and you know, and again, like I can't under emphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically the reaction to the British media class. Who I mean, we know now that those people are psychos, Like we have seen them see a transperson at a boat race and like like ten years ago and like like draw a giant things circling them in a boat and making it a front page news story. Those people in the nineties.
Were like, sure, they are biological biologically better at navigation, that is that has actually been been proven.
Yeah, but then they're like justice, they're they're they're just a sort of feral and like terrifying lead bigoted then as they are now. And this means that like like just if you're a regular British person and you are like walking down the street and there's a newspaper sand you are seeing like like they truly unbelievably terrifying anti Semitic shit, like just literally everywhere. And this this will have no consequence, which is whatsoever? Yeah, it's all good,
nothing bad ever happens. And speaking of no consequences, do you know what we can promise about about training services? Twenty three minutes.
In you know, look, you're welcome, Daniel.
Okay, we're back. We have to talk about Okay, so the doing it to the British economy was mostly just really funny because the British economy is going to be fine. And it's the funny part about shed H doing it of the British economy is that this actually unfortunately helps the British economy because it forces the British to like abandon some truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they were doing. But then he does it to Thailand and that is a lot less justifiable. So it in this
is five years later, is nineteen ninety seven. Sous brings in some economists, Arminio Fraga, like Roddy Joe's David Kowitz, he brings He's bringing in people who are sort of experts in like developing market economics, and that's never no one has ever brought in a developing market economist for like a good reason. And what they what they realize is that they start doing analysis of Southeast Asia, like the Southeast Asian markets, and they realize very quickly that
Thailand is fucked. They they figure out that Thailand has Thailand has his currency pegged to the dollar and this, but you know, they don't have the reserves support this, and the tie like actual Tai currency isn't strong enough to maintain like stay being pegged to the dollars. It's not a strong enough currency, and so they do a two billion dollars short of of like Thailand's currency. And I mean, I'm gonna read from the Influence of Sorrows again about like the process of this. It was a
debate we had. Jones told me we'd gone to work in Asia, and here you are taking large scale short positions in countries with institutional fragility. Going for the juggular in the United Kingdom was one thing doing the same, and Thailand was another. The Bank of England would surely recover. Thailand was a developing economy and it was unclear what impact outside investors could have. Soros has justified speculation with the idea that it could serve as a kind of
warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the bot needs to devalue. Change your policy now before a currency collapses, devastating for your people. The trouble is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead, it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves to buy tai bot. When it finally ran out in early summer nineteen ninety seven, the value of the bot plunged thirty two percent against the dollars, and millions of people lost
Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund seven hundred and fifty million dollars.
Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes, I made a lot of money selling Heroin to those middle schoolers, but really, when you think about it, it was a warning to those schools that it was too easy for me to bribe the janitor to sell Heroin to kids.
There.
You know, I was actually performing a public service.
So true, Robert, it is just like that, you know, to be fair, you know, I'm not going to every money. I'm not going to finish that thought.
That's probably for the best. Yeah, we need we need one person to remain uncanceled here to keep the lights on.
Oh god, doesn't have to be me.
Oh no, yeah, no, legally it does.
It's really bad. Yeah, no more joking, but yeah, we can't. We can't suffer any other jokes.
Yes, somebody's got to upload this episode.
All right here here, here, here's the next joke. Soros actually doesn't make money off of the speculation. If off of a speculating in Southeast Asia because he loses basically the same amount of money taking like a long position in Indonesia.
Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took a long position on doing cocaine in my bathroom with the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids. You know, we're a lot alike him and me, we're a lot of like, well.
Okay, to be fair, to be fair, and this is okay, this is the thing I I The reason I wanted to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay, like to this day, if you look under sort of if you if you every once in a while, someone someone, there'll be a tweet that's like, like, what did George Sorrows do? And immediately there will be a bunch of people talking about how he like deliberately destroyed all of the economies in Southeast Asia. Yeah, and that's not really what happened.
And that would be for one thing, too much to put on one guy fucking around with a cup.
Yeah. Yeah, And I wanted to actually kind of walk through this a little bit in depth, just because Okay, there's a really really easy way to think about the economy that is bad. It leads you into anti Semitic traps, which is like, hey, here is like one banker who wanted to make money, and because he wanted to make money, he like destroyed all these economies. And like, on the one hand, yeah, like like sorrow is vetting against like the tai currency is bad, right, like this is this
is not a thing you should have been doing. On the other hand, you know, Okay, so that's like the sort of level one thing. But the thing about you know, this is the sort of this is the sort of
like great Man anti anti Semitism theory of collapse. And this is the theory that a lot of the sort of regional leaders take, you know, because and this and this is sort of a crucial thing, right, this position very conveniently allows them to just like not think about capitalism in general or like their role in this in
this crisis, which is not insignificance. And so in order to figure out what what actually happened here, we need to look at so so Sorow sort of like tip like tip some don dominos, right, but the dominoes were already there and they were going like regardless even if Soros had never existed, right, like they were going to fall and they were going to fall because ironically of the Plaza coords. So you know when we talked about the plaza courts earlier. The US forces Japan to increase
the value of its currency relative for the dollar. Okay, so this is great for the American economy. This nukes the Japanese economy, I mean the Japanese economy, you know. And we'll talk about this in a bit too. It was already kind of doing bad when the US does this and its manufactured economy just like implodes it. It gots the Japanese economy. It has. The Japanese economy has never recovered from this. It probably will never recover really
into what it was. And you know, the effect this has is that now the governments of Japan has to figure out how to grow their economy without having any like way to make money that grows your economy. But and now they have a stronger currency. And so their solution is, okay, what what did they all all the central bank people look around each other and they go,
what is a strong currency good for housing speculation? And so they they start like they start they start slashing interest race and they start basically building an entire economy, uh based on the assumption that housing prices will always go up, and so you should just take out loans so you could buy houses because the value of the housing will because housing prices will always go up, so you can you can have all of these assets based
on mortgages. This is this may may or may not be sounding familiar to everyone who lid you thousand.
And eight.
And so you know, in in like in like nineteen eighty two, the entire Japanese economy implodes sort of again because they they literally built the two thousand and eight machine. And so this this forces the US to do something called the reverse Plaza cords where they take the original Plaza records and they reverse it and they increase the value of the American dollar. American manufactory dies like it's
never recovered, it's never coming back. And this for a this kind of the stabilizes the Japanese economy a little bit, but it means that the US now no longer has a functional economy. And so we do our solution to this is we need two thousand and eight, right, we build an entire economy also on the Japanese model of currency speculat of you know, of like housing price speculation, craculation of like or like the rising prices of like stocks. Right,
we we build an economy completely made a bullshit. But you know, okay, but what does this have to do with the Asian market collaps? Okay? The problem is that like all of the countries in East Asia and like Southeast Asia also do this. They also do the thing where they're like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna ba We're okay, so our manufacturing economies are declining, right, so we're gonna we're gonna base our entire economy on housing prices going up. And you know that's and it's
not George Soros. That's the thing that actually destroys like the sort of that that's something that like that like
actually destroy all of these economies. And you know, and I wanted to sort of run through this, and you know, this is like a lot of like sort of econ shit, right, But the reason I wanted to run through this is that I think I think he gets at the sort of truly the truly horrifying thing about how our economy works that is really difficult to face, and is I think it's at least a part of why people really really want there to just be one guy who is
running anything everything, whether that's the CIA, whether that's Soros, whether that's like the New World Order. Yeah, right, because if there's if there's like a guy who's doing this, right, you can stop him. But the great horror of this world is that there is no deep state, right, there is no Satanis cabal, There's no one pulling the strings at all. The only thing that is there is just sort of the cold, lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital.
And that logic is moving all of us, right all you know, the people who are doing that can conspiracies insofar as they exist, are being moved by this. All of the rulers are being moved by capital. All of us, the subjects, are being moved by capital. But that like sucks, right, Like the fact that all of these economies are destroyed not by like the individual actions of people, but by the fact that, like returns are less good in Thailand
than they are in China. And this is just sort of the inectable logic of the entire economic system we have. This is, you know, this is absolutely terrifying and faced with this sort of reality, right, like people who want to protect capitalism because you know, they have a bunch of assets in it, right, retreat into this sort of like they you know, they they they use Soros as a smoke screen for like why everything is suddenly going wrong.
But sort of simultaneous to this, right, this is also a real problem for George Soros because he's like, you know, when he's not sort of in his role as like capital he's like not a piece of shit. He's like a person who wants the world to be better. And this, you know, this causes a sort of there was a contradiction in his ideology, right, which is that he wants the world to be a better place, and simultaneously he's also a capitalist, and these two things are sort of
warring with each other. Even as early as even as early sort of the nineties, he's giving speeches about how like his open society that he wants. It's a sort of like this liberal democratic society of like laws and norms and human rights. The greatest danger twitter ceased to be communism, it's now capitalism. But he can't do anything
about it because he is also a capitalist. And next episode we are going to watch Soros like through his philanthropic endeavors, attempt to solve the problems that his economic system has caused, and fail catastrophically and become the sort of boogeyman and the the anti Sivdic spector of every conspiracy theory the world.
Yeah, so check out that next time. And you know, if you're hanging out around Clark Middle School and you have forty dollars, I can hook you up with some some of that sweet black tar, so you know, give me a ring. My phone numbers posted in the show notes of every episode.
It's it could happen here the podcast where I attempt to wrangle jokes that are enough okay that we keep podcasting. Yeah, with me here to wrangle Robert Evans and also Karrison Davis. Welcome, Welcome by Eck.
My two uses in this series are to make corrections on Hungarian history of the Holocaust and talk about selling Heroin to children. So proud to be here.
I'm very excited. You're gonna hear me complain. You're gonna get to listen to me very briefly complain about Plato, a thing I did not think I was gonna do when I started.
This like the like the philosophy guy.
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, all right, okay, so all right, why why are we eventually going to talk about Plato? So George Soros is probably best known for a foundation that he eventually funds called Open Society that was visually the Soros Foundation. Then he was like, why am I naming this after myself? And it changed to Open Society. I'm going to read, so the Open Society is a very sort.
Of again, I gotta say, exactly twenty percent more self awareness than you get from the average billionaire. Like Bill Gates is like, well call it the Gatespell Foundation. Sourus is like, well call it the Soros you know wait, wait you know, no, you know what?
Well, And to be fair, like Soros has Sorros has a real ideology and it it can't work, but if it did, the world wouldn't be that bad, Unlike unlike what would happen if you let Bill Gates run rampant over the earth, which is the world we live in right now. So I'm going to read a little bit from the influence Soros again about like what the Open Society is. I have lived through Nazi persecution and Soviet occupations.
Soros later said, Popper's book is Carl Popper Open Society and His Enemies struck me with the force of revelation. It showed that fascism and communism have a lot in common, that they both stand in opposition to a different principle of social organization, the principle of open society. So okay, I I read this, and I was like, okay, so let's go, let's go. Let's go read Carl Poppers's book, which is called The Open Society Enemies. And so I assumed, right, that's interesting me.
I was also doing poppers last night.
You had to suppear your experience with your poppers. I'm assuming I had a bad fucking time. I read this like last week.
She got mears from a gas station too, Yeah.
No, instead I got it from the internet for free, which questionable results. So okay, so I read this book, right, So this is Karl Popper is like normally a philosopher. Well, he's like a scientist, right, He's most famous for philosophy of science stuff. But he also wrote this book, and this is his critique of totalitarianism. So okay, I'm expecting, right, it's going to be half of it's gonna be about the Nazis and half of it's going to be about
the communist right. No, the first half of this book is about Plato and the second half of this book is about Borks. But he spends like two hundred ages yelling at Plato. And to be fair, everything he says about Plato and about why Plato is totalitarian is completely true. But like his conclusion about what totalitarianism is is that totalitarianism is descendant. It's like the product of this thing he calls historicism, which is when like you have one
thing that's the agent of history. And so he sees like like I don't know, like a great man or like the guy like whatever hegel's geist, or like one great nation or like a great class as like those are all examples of historicism. And if you think about history like this, you will this is how totalitarianism is born. And I am incredibly skeptical of that, of the view of the way you look think about history being the origin of totalitarianism. I I don't know. It's it's a
very very weird book. In a lot of ways. Poper is trying to do this thing that like a lot of kind of liberal philosophers of that period is doing, which is that she's trying to reconcile sort of like individual freedom but then also sort of economic calitarianism. And you know, okay, so if you were actually serious about doing both of these things right, like the two things you care about on earth are protecting individual freedom and
achieving economic calitarianism, you have two options. You either become an anarchist and you sacrifice neither of your values, or you become a neoliberal and you sacrifice both. And Popper unfortunately takes a second route.
And I feel like a lot of a lot of the conflict between kind of like reconciling you know, the Great Man theory of history with some of these other like it comes out of an unwillingness to look at systems of power, because the extent to which like individual weirdos and their obsessions influence history is largely due to or is largely like related to the degree of power that like different systems allow to be invested into like
individual weirdos. Like it's it's less a matter of like you've got these sort of you know, in that kind of fascist idea, you've got these sort of individuals who embody the spirit of a people. And more, if your system allows huge amounts of power to be invested in individual people with their weird hang ups, than those weird hang ups of this one guy may wind up defining history. I don't know, this is this this is an unrelated ram.
Well, no, I think it is related because this this is sort of the core flaw of this ideology, which is that these people conclude okay, so like they don't okay the thing that they have to do, like pop rass to do right, because he like acknowledges that a lot of the Marxist critique is really powerful and that like it is in fact not very good that you have an entire class of people to like survive off
of extracting like labor from another class of people. But you know, if you accept that, right, you can't actually like defend capitalism on the merits of it being an economic system. You have to like do this like circle
run around dance of like defending ideas. And this all gets like gets to this point where the problem that you're talking about happens, which is that like, well, okay, capitalism is also a system where one really weird guy, and he's like, terrible ideas can have an enormous impact
on how society operates. Like this is this is this is this is the thing we're all suffering from from like Elon Musk, right, or like what what's that guy's name, like Robert Moses, right, Like yeah, like the you know, like capitalism is absolutely a system that generates just one guy who can just fuck everyone's.
And that's a perfect example of it, because like the fact that Moses has these weird personal hang ups around public transportation and this love of being driven around influences how tens of millions of people live to this day, and influences like the global climate crisis. And so it's not like this great man didn't like grab the lathe of heaven. It was more like, no, our we we are society kind of like the system we set up allowed an enormous amount of power for this specific thing.
How our cities are set up to be invested in an unelected weirdo because he was the only one interested enough to focus on it, and that led to this very bad situation.
Yeah, and like I think I think Popper's think of that. I was like, well, okay, you do you do you deal with this by like just having elections for everyone, And it's like, well, okay, like so sometimes you have election. We never vote for crazy assholes, thank god. Sometimes sometimes sometimes you get Donald Trump, right, like, you know, the these these are these are these are things that are
going to haunt both Popper. Popper doesn't live long enough to see like the absolute worst this can possibly go. But George Soros unfortunately has lived to see exactly how value this this con possibly go.
But let's call him, let's let's call him by his nickname from from now on. Uh uh g Sizzle? Is that good that we're not doing that. We're not doing that. Thank you, Thank you, Garrison. This is this is this is why you're This is why you're here. You have power of attorney over what nicknames we call the subjects of the episodes.
I will I will keep it and reserve this power.
See, this is we're We've built a system to try and uh and stop you know, individuals with with weird hang ups from from influencing history so much. It's that simple, folks, you know, devolve powers. Yeah, works great for un precedency.
Unfortunately, we're you have to talk about Ugoslavia this episode.
So it doesn't always work. But all right, so back back back in, back in sort of the heady days of of the seventies and eighties George, where like, okay, he has a dual thing where he at once has his kind of crisis a conscience thing where he's like, I want to actually do something with my life that's not just you know how, I want to have an impact on the world that is positive and not like I made so much money that like gods look at it and vomit and so and so. Okay, So his
solicial is he sets up a tax dodge. And he's actually very explicit about those interviews that his first foundation to do charity work was set up as a tax dodge. But but this is where Soros is very interesting, right because he has, you know, for for like a billionaire, right, he has some positions that are started only very good. So he is anti apartheid and that is like not a thing you can guarantee from people in that era,
like oh boy. He also and this is only I guess gets him in trouble like to this day, is he is pro Palestine. And this is part of why like Netanyahu absolutely hates him. He's he's not like like okay, he's he's.
Not like a radical pro Palaestine by the standards of net and Yahoo a radical.
Yeah yeah, yeah. It was like his you know, his sort of like like his sort of like liberal humanism, like hey, we should not like shoot children with guns.
Thing is Broadley anti shooting children throwing rocks?
Yeah, and like like that that that makes you a like like like enemy number one of the Israeli Still well yeah, no, I okay put them like.
The enemy number one is those kids, but yeah.
Or four. They haven't rapped him yet. So oh god, speaking of things that the Israeli government didn't do. So he gets his start.
I thought you were going to do an ad.
I don't worry. I have a better one. It's kind of good. So in that today, his first experience, like doing charity work is he decides that he's going to go up against like apartheid in South Africa, and yeah, this is good. So he he what he starts doing.
He starts giving scholarships to black students to go to the University of Cape Town, and then he learns a very very important lesson about neoliberalism that he's about he's going to like promptly forget after this, which is that, okay, So what actually happened what he thinks is going to happen, right, is what he's trying to do, is he's trying to make, you know, he's trying to make sure there's more money
for black kids to go to go to university. What actually happens is that the state uses his money to pay for the existing scholarships and stops paying for any more scholarships. And so there's two things going on here, right, One is the obvious. This is the this is the apartheid racism, right like they don't want more like they
don't want more non white kids going to school. But then two also this is also sort of a classic nearliberal failure, which is like if you were, if you were, when you replace the state with like billionaire philanthropists, the state simply instead of like you know, having more of the of like the resources of the services provided, the state just stops doing it and spends more money on cops.
And so he sours very quickly realizes that like he figures this out, it is like I fuck this, Like no, I'm not going to help you, like I'm not going
to help the apartek government do racism. And so this makes him kind of weary of this stuff because he has sort of he has sort of seen how you see what happens when you when you very explicitly try to work within a system that is unbelievably fucked up, which is that the apartheid government uses your money to as a way to like funnel more of their own money into their own pockets. And do you know who else use the system of apartheid to funnel more money into their own pockets?
Oh okay, I see, I now see what you were doing. I think the last I think the previous attempt to not break was actually better.
I was kind of like, you know, you.
Know, I mean criticism correct that our podcasts are entirely sponsored via a time machine. We used to go back to apartheid South Africa. Uh get their advertising dollars. So please keep the krue grands flowing and purchase these products and services. I learned that krue grands was the South African currency from the movie Lethal Weapon two. We're back and I'm sitting uncomfortable in the knowledge that I am the only person on this zoom call who has watched
lethal Weapon? Two? Have either of you seen any of the Lethal's weapon? No, unbelievable. You're missing maybe the best Mel Gibson performance outside of that time he got pulled over in Malibu and gave a racist rant to those California State Highway Patrol officers.
H okaygre thinking of people who are about to give racist rants. Okay. So the other thing about Soros, and the thing that is sort of blisteringly ironic about how the sort of course of Andy Soro's attacks go, is that Soros is like a vehement, like pretty hardline anti communist and this is what he spends most of his time, like in the eighties doing, is is you know, like give giving money to anti communist groups and communist countries.
So he funds Solidarity in Poland, which is this like I very mixed record.
Well, we'll get the like he's funding anti communist causes.
Yeah, yeah, he's funny, but you know he's he's funny. He's trying to fund like a very specific kind of like liberal anti communist cause, right, and you know this this goes badly for him in a number of ways.
One is that the moment, like the moment the Berlin wallfalls, everyone just like suddenly forgets about all of the anti communism that he did because you know, and this is something about this, we have a kind of anti communist that he is, right, Like, there's a lot of anti communists who are, like you were, just like desk squad guys, right like, this is your like your guy trained by
Shan Kai Shek who's like shooting peasants in like El Salvador. Right, there's also like another kind of anti communists in this era who are sort of liberal anti communists who like are anti communists but like also anti Pinochet. For example, like Soros give somebody to the people, you know, when when Pinochet has this big referendum of his like should
I stay in power? He gives money to the people who are like no, and those are people who, ah, their intentions are better than the just like absolutely horrifying right wingers. But you know, it doesn't it doesn't go
great for him. So Soros his initial plan, right is he's gonna, you know, okay, when he's trying to like start funding ant communist groups, He's gonna use his things like he was gonna go into Hungary and he was gonna like give Hungarian students scholarships, and the Hungarian students were like, don't do this, Like if you if you just show up and give us money, the state is immediately going to be able to go like, hey, you
were like outside funded opposition people doing like regime change stuff, and it's going to like immediately discredit us. And so this is the point where he sets up the SOUS Foundation, which becomes opens There's a whole thing with this. This stuff changes names like many times the Open Society Foundation stuff. Yeah, yeah, and you know, and so you know what we were like, we just talk about what they actually do because in sort of like.
That, I can tell you one thing that they do because I used to work with when I was teaching classes at Belling cat my my partner, my partner, John Carlo, he would go and teach because he's he was born and for at least a period of time raised in Venezuela.
He would teach classes in Latin America to local journalists who wanted to know open source investigative techniques and who didn't have the kind of money to pay what it usually costs to do a belling cat thing, and that program whereby a bunch of journalists in Latin America, particularly Columbia,
got training, was funded by the Open Society Foundation. And so a couple of years ago when there was that massive swellowing of like the police murdering people and protest crowds and stuff in Colombia, the journalists who were like doing open source investigation to track down which police officers were you know, killing folks and how this was going were a lot of the folks that John Carlo had trained.
Like that's the kind of stuff that one of the kind of things that the Open Society Foundation does.
Yeah, they also do a lot of They do a
lot of like giving student scholarships. The other thing they're really big on that doesn't get talked about much is that there were huge on like cultural events basically like paying people money to like put on plays and like theater stuff and music and like writing poems and books, which is like I don't know, like I actually think that's cool, Like like we as a society used to do this, Like we used to like pay people, like the government used to pay people to like write things
and like create art. And then we decided that that was bad, and I've never done it again.
And yeah, I'm anti creating art for the record, That's why I'm really happy about all this.
Ai bait bait ye bait post do not engage. So unfortunately for the Soros Foundation, one of the people they give these these scholarships to is victor Or Broun, which is I.
Victory the Hungarian Yeah, press, yes, we.
Shall, we shall return to that. This is I think maybe the single greatest example of like creating young grave
Digger I've ever seen in my entire life. I I I don't know, like one of the things that that comes up about this and this is this is one of the things that another one of the guys who sorows BACKX, who like betrays him later on, says that Soros is bad at politics, like you just he's like not very good at it, Like he's not you know people like the sort of like thing about him is that he's this sort of like criminal mastermind who can like like bankow revolutions and stuff, and he just like
gets out maneuvered by people constantly in ways that are like kind of depressing. Yeah, but you Okay, So he's spending in the eighties like doing all this, you know, like doing this sort of cultural work. And you know in Hungary, right, there's a sort of interesting thing that happens where like he's wealthy enough that like even the Communist Party is sort of like has to work with him because he has money and they sort of don't.
But you know, the other thing that that's I think important to understand is that he's not like there's a bunch of foundations who do like exactly the same stuff, right, like maybe slightly worse. Like you know, there's like the Ford Foundation, There's like the Rockefellers, right, or the Rockefeller Foundation, like they all they all like at any place where open society is like doing stuff, there's like a worse version of it at the Ford Foundation, and like the
Rockefellers are doing. But you know, somehow, stunningly only one of these groups is singled out for being yelled at all the time. And I will I will leave as an exercise to the reader why specifically picked Soros and not Ford? Huh huh?
I wonder, I wonder what big mystery. I wonder what differences and uh and cultural views might be.
It might be Yeah, so okay, the other real problem that he runs into, which is a cultural problem, is that, okay, this is the problem that all the liberal anti communists run into, which is that, Okay, so the walls come down, right, and the communist governments fall, and it turns out that, uh, the anti communists and and Europe are almost all right wingers and their base are all like right wing nationalists fanatics.
Here's another Stories quote about this. I thought I would blaze the trail, I would lead and others would follow. But now that I look, I find that there was practically nobody behind me. I asked myself what went wrong? And part of what went wrong is like what Soros is doing in these places. So for example, you know, he's involved in funding solidarity, he's involved in some solidarities negotiations with the government. And then the other thing that he does is he's one of the people who helps
like do structural adjustment in Poland. And this goes really badly because so what we were talking about, we just talk a little bit about what solidarity is because he helps destroy it by accident. Solidarity is this giant sort of like social democratic e union that forms in you know, in like the early eighties in Poland, that's like the first sort of independent union in one of these communist countries. And they eventually are able to sort of like knock
off the government. But they come into power, and you know, so they do on sort of Soros's advice and on the advice of a lot of the sort of financial people. They're getting, right, all of the people are telling them to do privatization. So they do it, right, They privatize all of these giant state owned like facilities, they privatize their docks like stuff like that. And this, it turns out,
it just causes massive de industrialization. It destroys Solidarity's base because there's there's suddenly no longer all of these union jobs at all these state owned factories. And so you know, they lose an ex election and the solidarity like vanishes forever into the midst of time. There's like six of those guys left. Yeah, and this and this is a
real sort of source problem. This that like keeps running over and over again, right is you know, he spent all this time being an anti communists, but then the actual anti communists who have bases and who aren't just like destroying their own bases by like doing privatization, which is something he stuff he's also pushing, right are these
right wringers? And this is this is just sort of a fiasco, and you know, it's so like he he does, like he tries to do like a very similar thing to what he'd been doing in in Eastern Europe and China, and this goes like even worse because he winds up like backing, he winds up backing one of the CCP factions who gets purged after Tienemann, and so you know, surus like as the sort of nineties go on, right, like he's sort of slowly starting to realize that, like
the stuff that he's doing is not working very well. And one of the sort of I don't know if consequence is the right word, but okay, one of soros are sort of like principles that makes them different from a lot of other of these billionaires rights. He doesn't do humanitarian aid. His thing is that like he wants to produce a society that doesn't need humanitarian aid, which is sort of noble.
But like.
Then then Yugoslavia falls apart, and he winds up doing a bunch of stuff in Yugoslavia, Like he winds up building like a water purification plant Sarajevo. While aside resiege and the other thing that I didn't know he was like really involved with is like he's basically the reason why the UN war crimes tribunal that like tries Moloshovic and stuff like happens, Like he funds it. It wasn't really like a UN thing he was. He was like, Hey,
we're gonna have this tribunal. And then the German government like arrested one of the war criminals just sort of randomly at like an airport or something. And he's able to convince sort of like Clinton and a bunch of other people to like actually turn and the UN to like turn this into a real court. And this pisses off a lot of people and like bye by a lot of people. I mean, like very specifically pisses Belosovik cough because I somewhat obvious reasons that he tried to
try him for war crimes. Okay, so I think, gar you're too young for this. Robert, do you remember Rock the Vote? God?
Oh yes, I remember Rock the Vote.
Okay. So one of the things Soros does is he does like a he brings like a rock to vote. He's like one of the people who brings the rock devote to like Slovakia great, and you know, and this is the first.
Time that this is how we introduce people to democracy by showing how cringe it can be perfect well.
And the government is immediately immediately this is sort of the first time that like a government is seriously like, well, I mean, okay, this is the first time that you've had like a protest movement that starts and the head of the country goes like, it's George Soros. He's the one doing this, even though like the Ford Foundation again and the Rockefellers and just like a bunch of random
people in Slovakia are also doing this. But this is, this is this is sort of going to become like a pattern in in in these things, because you know, he he's sort of like like I think she's kind of like poking a lot of sort of very powerful, like increasingly powerful sort of regional right wing leaders because he looks at the societies and are like, actually, it sucks to have like just dog shit right wingers who are like racist and hate everyone running a country.
Yeah, that sounds like it would be bad.
Yeah, and this is this is the thing about words, right, Like he every once in a while, right, he sees something really bad going on and goes, I'm gonna throw a bunch of money at it try to fix it. And so one of the things that he does this for is the war on drugs, like in the in sort of the eighties and nineties, Like Saras looks at this and it is like this fucking sucks, Like this
is really bad. And so he starts working in Baltimore, where the government is trying to do like something's like pretty like something like even now is to consider sort of like pretty radical I like harm reduction stuff. So I mean they like it. Like Baltimore in the nineties has needle exchanges. Uh, he's doing like narcan trainings for people.
He's you know, he's doing things like funny instead of like like giving money to like he's doing he's has these programs to like get people out of like prison faster, and he's doing like after school programs for kids and this stuff like this is like genuinely good. Like there's no like I don't know it sucks that like it's it's billionaire money that's like doing it. But like I don't know, like probably there's a lot of people who are alive because I didn't get HIV from needles that
they were able to do exchanges for. Yeah.
Sure, that's all. That's all good stuff.
Yeah, And but you know the interesting thing about Storts, right, he's he's like not like you know, he's doing stuff that's like pretty lefty, right, but he's like not a partisan guy until he sees George Bush and he sees he's he like the day after nine to eleven, he's like, holy shit, this guy is a maniac. And like it's just instantly has like the switch flips of like this man, this man is an enemy to open society, which is true. And he's like he's he like, guess this braid of
like I need to bring this man down. So he starts getting really for the first time, he starts getting really really involved in the two thousand and four election. He's doing like like these like micro targeting ad stuff.
He's like throwing money around everywhere, and you know, I mean he explicitly like the like the way he looks at it, like if he's very explicit about this is like he wants to level the like the playing field between the Republicans, who are funded by just a trillion routing billionaires and the Democrats, who are funded by not that many billionaires. The problem with this is that he has like a very weird view of what's wrong with Bush.
I'm gonna read from the People up the Stars again in imposing its view of freedom on both the American people in a foreign country. Quote the supremacist ideology of the Bush administration, and it is in contradiction with the principles of open society because it claims possession of an ultimate truth, which I don't know, I don't actually think like claiming possession of an ultimate truth is like specifically the thing that like is the reason why the Bush
administration is bad. But simultaneously, I don't know, Like I it's hard for me to be like too mad about a billionaire seeing George Bush and just like going, oh my god.
Yeah it didn't it didn't work, but it yeah, good that he gave it, gave it the old college try.
Yeah.
Well.
Unfortunately, this this has a backlash effect, which the Republicans see him start doing this and they're like, oh shit, this is incredible campaign material for us, and we start seeing like the sort of the less openly anti Semitic like precursors. So like all the stuff we see today, like Bill O'Reilly goes after him.
Oh god, Robert, do you remember denn Dennis Hastard. Oh yeah, Look if my favorite pedophiles who were long standing speakers of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastard is easily in the top three.
She i, this is the thing that's been like collectively wiped from like America's conscience. Is that like the Republican speaker of the House for like twenty years was like one of one of one of history's most prolific pedophiles.
He sure was.
And she she also turns out one of the people who mainstream the anti Soros stuff. She starts citing a fucking Lyndon LaRouche quote unquote report claiming that Soros got
his money from drugs. So Lyndon LaRouche is this like fascist weirdo who cut his teeth and running this like anti communist cult that would like physically fight leftist groups on campuses and would like give information on like student leftist groups and like other leftistcroops or the government like they are they are so feded up that like if you start reading about de LaRouche sites, like they were narking to federal orgs like you've never heard of before,
it's stunningly, stunningly bizarre like conspiracy cult thing. And Dennis Hastert was just straight up like reading their antisemitic conspiracy
theories like on TV. But you know, and I think I think it's something that that one of the things I wanted to emphasize like in this episode, right is like the anti Soro stuff isn't really like I don't know what you call it, like or sort of organic anti Semitism, Like it's not something that like comes from the Republican base, right, This is something that this is a deliberate choice by Republican political strategists who are very deliberately like this this is this is a Jewish billionaire
who's helping the who's helping a Democratic party, Like we can use this to do to try to do like culture warship to win this election. And you know, like we know we can see the results of this, and this isn't even you know, we're gonna get this in a little bit, but like this this isn't even the only time this is gonna happen where like the specific like sorrows, like anti Semitism stuff for dreaming agust is like it's cooked up by like like very specifically cooked
up as a targeted thing by political strategists. I love it.
Which it's it's good.
Anyways, we should we should do ads.
Yeah, speaking of anti Semitism, you know, just just speaking about it. That's what we're doing here. Anyway, here's the mads. Ah, we're back, got another email from the A d L. I'm gonna deal with this. Y'all continue talking about George Soros.
Oh boy, So all right, Well the other thing Soros keeps doing, like you know, so in going after Bush, right, he has now made himself like he's not enemy number one yet, but he's going he's made himself like a pretty high profile enemy of the Republican like.
Through the shoe.
Yeah yeah, yeah, so that guy actually sucks.
Ida Yeah yeah, we're not praising him.
Yeah. He starts this sort of like arc of pissing off a bunch of really really powerful and important people who are anti Semitic great wingers. So remember how I a while back, I said I was talking about there was a guy who double crossed Soros, who was like, this guy's bad at politics. So that guy was like a h that that that that guy. That guy was a Georgian protest leader who Soros like helped like his protest movements overthrow a sort of like kind of pretty
shitty like pro Russian government in Georgia. But like that guy, that guy has like a wild arc that you could do his own fucking movie series on. He's now a victor, a close ally of Victoria Bond. So it's going great, But how do you actually pronounce his name? For some reason, it always just like pings off my brain.
Oh yeah, I mean Victoria Garren. I hear, are the real brain trust to ask about pronunciation? You've brought together, you know, just the goat.
Latest gnunciator just said to me a list of like European cities. That's a free episode idea.
There you go.
Yeah, I'm just gonna say the word Binghamton like forty seven times. It's gonna be great.
Okay, So sorrows back to this GE's called the Rose Revolution, and you know this turns out badly for Soros in every possible way, which is that like one his guy like sucks and turns on him. And then two he really like this like really pisses off Latimer putin a man who is going to hold this grudge like like on his deathbed, he will be holding this grudge. Now, okay. So one of the things that that sort of like happens. So he's backing these sort of like protest movements in
Eastern Europe. I refuse the sort of two thousands. And you know, as the two thousands go on and turn two thousand and eight, thing the world economy goes to shit. A bunch of right wingers started taking power. And one of victor Or Bond's like political consultants, who's this guy who he met through net and Yahoo? Like specifically like this is this is another consultant guy very specifically cooks up the idea for how you know, he's trying to fend off like a right like a sort of another
sort of right wing challenge. He's trying to fend off like the rest of our political establishment. And or Bond's consultant like very specifically is like what if we go after Soros again? And you know, and so he does, and this is this is another one of those things like this is literally the anti Semitism is fucking cooked up in a pr lab in order for these people
to win elections. And I don't know that that that just sort of just sort of like cynical cold bloodedness of it, like of these people, like this politic cool consultant by the way, like is also Jewish, right like, and he just doesn't give a shit. He's like a fuck it. Like well, you know, like I'm like one
of Netanyahu's guys. NETANYAHUO fucking hates this guy too, Like why don't we just use him as a punching bag, And so they do, and you know, this is this is part of a big part of the reason like why Soros turns into this sort of enemy Number one is that in twenty fifteen, they start blaming him for the influx of refugees from Syria and this spreads like
fucking wildfire. Suddenly, like every single right wing leader on earth is like, oh shit, I can blame all of my refugee stuff on this guy, and they start doing it.
And you know, so suddenly, like like air Dowan is blaming him for like the Gtzy part protests and he does at thirteen, like Trump gets on this and you know, this stuff sort of like it's it spreads really quickly, and once it's sort of out of the bottle, right like you know, like people like like there are the people who sort of first start this right are doing this sort of like you know, like incredibly cold, cynical
political calculus. But once once that, once this like incredibly high level that he sent and he sententism gets out of the open, it starts turning into just like Soros a Satan ship and you know, and and part part of what happens here is is that like this is this is one of the things, like the sort of campaigns against Soros is one of the things that he's responsible for, like our current like migrant policy, like why it's so bad, Like why like half our episodes next
week and are going to be about like just horrible shit happening at the border, which is that like Soros in the in the like the late the nineties and two thousands found out that like Clinton was funding his welfare reform by cutting legal immigrants off from food stamps and like SSI benefits, and he's like, wait, this is fucking.
Yeah.
It's just like like he caught one point five million people off of his off of fucking benefits for just no reason, like on believably demonic act. And Soro finds out about this is like wait, what the fuck, what do you mean he's doing this? So he like puts a coalition together that like funds a bunch of immigrant advocacy groups, and he's able to overturn this. But there's a sort of right the right wing reaction to this, right like is partially also part of the right wing
reaction to Soorros two thousand and four. There's this very very effective and like unbelievably brutal sort of right wing backlash about immigration politics. That is, you know, it's one of the things that drives the Obama administration.
Right.
The Obama administration is like worse than the Bush administration
on like deportation shit. It's you know, just utter horror, and all of that stuff continues, and all of these right wing people figure out that if you can just pin like like Trump starts with Trump pins the migrant caravent on Soros, and they figure out, like, this is the this is like the specific combination, right, It's like the the the anti semitism of like the Jewish banker bringing immigrants into your country is just like the sort of one way shop driving your entire country into like
a like fascist right wing frenzy. And it works. And now, you know, like the cycle that we're in now is like anytime something happens, like the right blames info like this. So the the the current right wing panic is that Trot Soros was funding some like pretty moderate like reform DA people because he's a criminal justice reform guy. And the Republicans are now all talking about how this is like a scheme by Soros to like cause crime and
like destroy the entire country. And unfortunately, like this is just like this is this is just this is just reality now all of these like really bleakly cynical political leaders and they're like polsters and pr consultants, where like we could use anti semitism to win elections and they did and now we live in hell.
Yeah.
But on the upside, you know, uh, the you know, have you guys had the new uh the new Mountain Dew zero major melon. It's not tasty, but uh it's in grocery stores. So if you're looking for a diet mountain dew flavor, you know, that makes it all kind of worthwhile.
I no longer even delivering flavor.
That's that's what I had for you. It was that or another heroine.
Why why would they need to deliver flavor when instead they can just continue to mainstream anti semitism to get right wing politicians elected so they can make say.
But you know what I've been I've been studying this can for a while now, and none of the anthropomorphized watermelons look like they could be racial caricatures. So that's a win.
You know, Look, if that is, if that is actually that actually is a racism wind to.
If Mountain Dew had made a melon version in nineteen thirty, it would have been pretty bad. Like we would be sharing pictures of those cans on Twitter today and going, oh my god. They would have to make a statement. They'd have to donate some money to like, I don't know, fun to probably scholarships or something. It'd be a real problem for Mountain Dew, is what I'm saying. But today, nothing problematic about the melons on their can.
Yeah, I'm sure there's nothing problematic about the soda industry.
Aspertaine, the health chemical.
Well, is that is that all we had?
Yah?
Yeah, that's yeah, this is this is endicular app here.
Well, it's now we finally know why George Soros is as bad as Magneto, and why comparing George Soros to Magneto as the one of the richest men in the world who owns probably the most influential communication app is probably not a good thing, you know.
Okay, one more thing I want to get out, like for one second that I forgot I realized I forgot to say earlier, is that like Soros is not like in the scale of billionaire, Soros is not very rich, Like he's like the three hundred and seventieth richest billionaire. Like he's not even in the top one hundred. Right, Elon Musk he has like six billion dollars. Elon Musk has like one hundred and eighty four billion dollars or something.
So like, you know what the the relative levels of influence that these people have.
No, I was talking about Elon Musk, Yeah, right, the one of the chest most influential people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just I just I need everyone to understand exactly how much more fucking riches. It's it's it's like fucking it's like when fucking Henry Ford was like doing anti Semitic conspiracy series. It's like you literally like like you personally literally control like more wealth than like all the people you're ranting about combined. Like shut the fuck up. Oh my god, h anti semitism, folks, it sucks. And also rich people do it even though
they're they are the actual like the actuals. Yeah, in so far as anything even remotely like what they're what they're hypothesizing, could even potentially exist, it's fucking these people. So yeah, they're bad. Uh yeah, it's it could happen here. Uh look, I didn't I didn't think of an intro for this one. I really should have. I apologize to the readers. I was reading about Chinese aloze instead.
Uh.
Yeah, this is a podcast that's I don't know. It's about things. I'm here unlike all those other podcasts about things, and ours is actually about things. And today it's about hot dogs, and in order to talk about hot dogs, were joined by Jamie Loftus, whose new book Raw Dog, The Naked Truth about hot Dogs boldly asked the question what if a book was good? Welcome to the show, JB.
Hello, Hello, So it's so good to be here to talk about things. This is like the thingiest thing available, I think.
Yeah, so I I read this book in Okay, I don't know how you're actually supposed to divide up, Like if you stand up to go to the bathroom in the middle of a sitting, is that still one sitting?
Yeah?
So I read this book in one sitting and it was great.
One sitting with a bathroom break.
I think there was two technically, but yeah, it was a good time. Yeah. And so okay, so this is this is a book that's about hot dogs and also about it's a tale of human human and animal misery
and suffering. And so as I was reading book, my playlist pops up Daniel Connan The Painted Birds song The Butchers Share, and so I'm like reading about this and the song starts going, Let's take a walk around the Old Bizarre, where every little thing has traveled far, every pair of pants and grain of rice contains a horror story and its price.
Wow. Really really theming right at you?
Yeah, I was like wow, Wow, Okay, I guess reality is just sort of telling me what the what what the plot is right now?
Yeah?
I mean that In another another case, I think it's really important that we're talking about this right now.
Is that I.
Believe your book was officially published on May twenty third, Yeah, which is which is the twenty third day in the fifth month, which is obviously of the year twenty twenty three, which is very important in the in the Discordian glendar, and your books about hot dogs, which is a specifically it is the one sacred food in the religion of Discordianism. So we for these.
Reasons, it's really it's really important we talked with this because you us be a very powerful wizard to have to have figured this out.
Yes, yes, I had to reserve this date years in advance. I saw it coming and uh, you know, and and then by the time people caught on it was too late. I had already I had already wizarded my way into the most potent release date. And now I mean, it's we all may be fucked because I didn't.
Someone's gonnassassinate JFK again.
It's gonna be great, and this time his head is going to explode like there's twice as much blood in it as the original. It's gonna be really shocked.
The original.
I love it.
It's like as the original series or movies.
It's gonna be a second there's gonna be a second grassy knoll stack on top of the book depository. It's gonna be amazing.
Has reboot Culture gone too far? You know? It's good, it's a good question.
I was gonna I was trying to do a reboot culture plug cycle back here thing, and I can't do it. I'm a hack and a fraud. But I wanted to. Yeah, So I wanted to talk to you a bit about one of the things you mentioned in the book is that you were trying to get into like like try trying to be able to get tours of these of these meat like packing plants, and just they just like didn't let you. So I wanted to ask a bit about like that process, because that seemed like it was incredibly chaotic.
Yeah, it was really frustrating and humiliating kind of every step of the way. Where I mean, as we were traveling, I had, you know, the map of places that I wanted to go, and then I also had a map of like meat packing plants that we could possibly go to on the way, And so I reached out a little bit in advance and either got I mean got a ton of just no answers, and I would try to call, but generally the excuse I was given was was, well, we don't let people tour anymore since COVID, because there
were a few places. I know that the Vienna Beef factory in Chicago used to do tours of very specific areas of the factory, kind of the least gnarly parts, which is saying nothing, but you know, there were places that you used to let civilians tour, and now it's just unless things have changed in the last you know, year or so, no one can. And on top of that,
in certain states, and this is also shifting. But the AGGAG laws I think make it way less possible and appealing for any meat packing plant to allow other people in, which is true. I mean the AGAG law rabbit hole is so sinister of just like, instead of any meaningful improvement in meat packing plants, they're inventing new laws to combat technology, which is just like terrifying.
Yeah, I mean that was all was that? Was that technically pregreen.
Scare That's a good question, Honestly, I think I think it was.
I think that was mostly like a mid like a mid nineties thing.
Yeah, but they've definitely kicked up. I mean, I think awareness of them in general has kicked up in the last couple of years because like in uh, sort of in step with how horrible conditions were for workers during lockdown after the executive order, I think there was like all of a sudden, a heightened interest in wanting to investigate it, and they were just blocked at every single turn. And there are some I know that some have been overturned or in the in the process of being overturned,
but I don't know. It seems pretty bleak to me.
Yeah, yeah, like you do know, I think i'd help with that, right, Like we found out like one like a look was like a month ago, like pretty recently. Also that there were a bunch of companies, of these meatpacking companies that were just like using child labor. The children were getting horribly named.
Yep. That yeah, that was in didn't make the book, but I could have taken an educated guess, you know, like truly it is like often so comically bad it feels wrong, but it's just like so over the top horrible, and it sounds like describing current meatpacking conditions in the us. Sounds like you're describing meatpacking conditions one hundred years ago, and they were actually slightly better one hundred years ago.
So it is it is very bleak in the unions that still exist, but they are somewhat weakened and making it possible for laws like this to sneak through at active child labor. And uh, there's I know. I put this in the book because it's something I think about
all the time. Where you know, down the line, it was reported that not only was working to meet packing plant one of the least safe jobs in the country during lockdown, but but on top of that, a year later, it was revealed that the top brass at Tyson and Smithfield were directly colluding with the government and essentially drafted the drafted the executive order that was given in April
twenty twenty to keep the meatpacking plants open. There were you know, foreman and sort of middle managers at these companies that would take bets on how many of their employees would get sick. It was just like it was cartoon evil.
It was yeh, I'm like constantly haunted by the taking bets thing like that's you think about that, like once a week and of like, I think I think your line was I think your line was like a continued thing of how okay with you are?
You?
Are you with bringing the guillotine back? And I was like, you know, like this.
And it's the worst when it's like middle managers. I'm like, what is what is your endgame here? Like it's I mean, I know what the endgame is, but it's so bleak to you know, be making you know, just getting by and still betting against your like like vulnerable people that work for you, who you see every day. It's just like, I mean whatever, not surprising, but yeah, I was like, Wow, there's no there's no justice in hot dog Land. There really is.
I'm so curious about how curated what they what information is allowed to be shared, Like I'm curious if I don't know if they know how bad it is even or if they're just like conditioned not to not to think about it.
Yeah, from what I can tell, there are. And I write about one at length in the book because it's one of my favorite YouTube clips of all time. This like Canadian TV show that's like a I think it's just called how It's Made, But.
It's like this is a very popular Canadian television show. It's I watched this as a kid, really, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I love I mean, I love shows like that, and I love specifically when they show you how something gross is made because they're really trying to like keep the mood light in a way that is like so funny with hot Dogs where it's like just these big machines farting out goo and then there's like this bassline
playing that's like boom boom, boom boom. The next step in the hot dog's journey is going to the shit that and you're like, what, it's so good, but it's really I mean, those those clips are ridiculously curated and to the point where it's like I can't even really tell you what's missing, but I you know, you could tell weird pr when you see it, and yeah, like they're sort of showing the easiest I don't know, it
reminds me. I don't know why. I'm like in I'm like Farah Nose pilled today, but like it reminds me of the anecdote about Elizabeth Holmes where she was like taking Joe Biden around Pharah Nose and then there were like people in each room, setting up the next room to look like it was a functioning business, as like they were taking him through the through the rooms and successfully deceived him. That's very much what hot dog production clips feel like to me, which is wild because they're
still disgusting, like you cannot make it look good. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, going back through years of reports, it's it's really difficult, understandably so to speak with people who work at meat packing plants as well, because there's like not a lot of that they stand to gain
from talking to reporters. But there was a good Washington Post report about it in the early two thousands that detailed not just labor abuses within the workforce, but how you know when you're not paying your employees enough and not keeping the equipment updated, and are you know, factory
farming focused on just production production production. The animals are far worse off too, and there were some pretty horrifying descriptions of what would happen to animals when people didn't have the workforce or the or the tools to be able to, you know, slaughter an animal in not the most horrible way possible.
I like thought I had to, like i'd like watch stuff before on factory farming and like, I don't I might have a real fun time sleeping tonight thinking about the fucking like I don't know. I mean, the LA should probably content wording this because this is like the animal stuff and this is genuinely horrible, Like this thing I was like, I was like, I'm talking about like they're like stunning an animal to kill it, but the animal comes back and they're like literally chopping the animal apart
while it's alive. The animals like blinking out that're like Jesus Christ.
It's like it's hot. And then and on the workers end, it's like and don't stop or you're fired, and like and you have no protection. It's just like it's a it's a nightmare in a lot of places. And there it came around in an interesting way with at the Nathan Totalk eating contest last year because they use I don't know if they used Smithfield plants for all of
their food, but they did certainly some of them. And there was a protester who came on stage while Joey Chestnutt was gobbling seventy five guzsies or something like that, and like the protester was like wearing a Darth Vader mask and he had this sign that said like take down the Smithfield death Star. And it was a good, like a pretty solid protest. It made it on TV. But then Joey Chestnut tackled him to the ground and
then just stood up and kept eating hot dogs. It was like, I mean, the protester was so in the right, but also watching Joey really just take someone just in the middle of eating. He was like forty hot dogs deep tackled this guy to the ground and on like the low res feed I was watching, it looked like he killed him, and I was like, what did Joey just do on ESPN? Did he just kill a man? He didn't, but he injured someone and he also had
a broken leg at the time. Joey not the protester, so it was just like then he went back to very very bizarre and then he yeah, and then he finished the contest and he was like, well, I would have beat my own record, but unfortunately I had a pause for five seconds to kill someone. But anyways, Yeah, the especially Smithfield, I think is uniquely bad. That Smithfield Entyson. It's just like her, like horrendous with labor practices.
Yeah, I mean I think that was like I had a thing I was gonna say and then it simply evaporated from my mind. Uh you know what fucking ed breaker to cover up my failures.
I keep having this like false memory. I feel like it's like it's like Mendela effect thing where when everyone says, whenever someone says Joey Chestnut, I keep I keep thinking it's a character.
I think you should leave, But whenever I look at it, very single time, I mean, it does sound.
Like that, and I think you should leave. Has such god tear hot dog jokes that Joey should be on that show, but unfortunately he lacks charisma and so he's He's definitely complicit in a number of things. Very hard to know what Joey's politics are, which I know is intentional, but I'm like, what's going on with him? He's from San Diego, but now he lives in Indiana. I just don't feel like it bodes well, but I can't say for sure.
Yeah, yeah, you know that was another part of this that I was like, I was reading this and especially like given the ship that's been happening the last few weeks reading about to Kyu Kobyashi, the former champion competitive eating guy coming to the US and then like having the very combination American experience of like coming to the US and then slowly realizing, holy shit, this place sucks ass, Like there's just a bunch of racist here and they hate us, and my boss is going to like run
a racist pr campaign against me for money.
Like like mask off like every day all the time, And here's the guy I'm going to be replacing you with, and you will be only abused until this guy can beat you and then goodbye forever. And that's what happened.
It's so I mean, I don't know. I think it's fascinating in a very sick way because it's like he is just hot dog Vince McMahon, like absolutely who this guy is and clearly idolized as Vince McMahon, the guy George Shay like his wife wrote for the WWE and soap operas, and so he he's just like very well versed in a very racist, anti woman high drama. Like it's just like what he it's his favorite and I hate him and he's so uniquely in control of that world.
It feels very Vince mcmonish, where you're like, surely someone else could do this job, but it's just not not allowed.
If he's the Vince McMahon of the hot dog world, are what are you now in the hot talk world? Good question, the study of hot talks.
I'm one of the people who Vince McMahon covers up the murder of I think probably that's eventually me. I'll be involved in a very small, suspicious incident in this man's life. I don't know. I mean, yeah, Unfortunately, I
feel like that's the best shot I have. Uh. It was interesting though, when I released an excerpt of my book that was about Joey Chessman and there they did not run this by me, but they just named the excerpt I'm in Love with Joey Chestnut, and I was like, Okay, I guess I do say that, but I wouldn't lead with it anyways. Uh, the Major League Eating PR team reached out to me, and I thought it was going to be I was just going to get like reamed,
but they it was just a light fact correct. It was very weird, a little menacing, But I guess that they're fine with me calling them evil. They're like, hey, when you said we were evil, your number was a little bit off, just so you know. And thanks.
I guess Russ is good for us.
Yeah, knowledge is power, and I changed my mind. I think they're great now due to this small fact.
Correction ringing ringing endorsements where we're attempting to confirm live there is not, in fact a gun behind Jamie's head right now.
Look, I can't say. I can't say I think the two things. Yeah, with the book being out now, it feels nice in most ways, and then two ways where I'm like stressed out about it, where I'm like, I'm afraid that George sha is going to come for me, and I'm also afraid the entire city of Chicago is going to come.
Oh okay, I want to talk about this because okay, all right, So I'm gonna have to go into witness protection after this. But I agree with you that the Chagosolt hot Dog is not that good. Yeah, like I think on hot Dog is really good. But yeah, there's like it doesn't it just it's it gets to soggy pretty quickly. It like the flavors don't necessarily go together. Like it's only okay, it's it's it's.
Wet and there's too much going on, and it's just like, yeah, it's a catastrophe. I I well, okay, I'm was promising myself I would dial back on Iago hotdogs lander, but it's like not, it's not it's not very good. And I think the main thing, it wouldn't bother me as much if they I'm like those people in Chicago who But if the Chicago hot dog loving community was just like, hey, we have this gross hot dog and we love it,
that's fine, unbridled enthusiasm for something gross, love it. But then they top that up by being like, and if you like Ketchup, you should walk into traffic and get hit by a car. Like so aggressively hate Ketchup in a way that I don't know. I love something disgusting, but hating something innocuous is such a weird thing to do. It's very bizarre.
I also got like just absolute whiplash reading this because one of these places you go to is the incomprehend simply named Fatso's Last Stand, and I was literally there last week by accident, because I know, yeah, so I was like an absolute fool. I was trying to travel at seven am on two hours of sleep because I was writing an episode and I took a bus the wrong way and I ended up there and I was like,
what the fuck have I just walked into? Opened this book and I was like, Oh my god, what is happening to me?
Empty Fatso's Last Stand sounds like a very scary, wominal space.
It was so a cursive like I was like getting off the bus and the bus driver was like, are you sure you want to get off here? And I was like, yeah, well like a like a I don't know episode, it was a thing.
Yeah, and then you find out that Fatso's Last Stand burned down twenty years ago. Did you get anything?
They weren't open?
Oh?
Pretty good?
It was.
It was pretty good there. And then I've since gone back to Chicago because I didn't have time to go everywhere I wanted to, And I since on back and I do genuinely like the Chicago style hot dog at Red Hot Ranch. I'm a big Red Hot Ranch head. I've converted, but a lot of it is, Yeah, it's just bizarre, and the hating the ketchup thing is confusing.
And then I went to Pittsburgh recently and their Ketchup City, USA, and so I was having some interesting conversation and yeah, this is what my life is like now I did everything.
Okay. So there's there's two more various like hot dog questions you need to ask. One is do you have portillo takes?
Ooh not really? I like I like Portillo's and I've been in Illinois and I've been in California too. It's a classic. It's good it didn't it didn't make it into the book because there was like so many hot dogs that didn't make it into the book because they're like, all right, that's just you saying, like there were so many paragraphs in the road, like and then I had this one and I liked it. And then I had this one and I liked it. So my editor was like, all right, we can, we can cut it.
Yeah we can.
I had to cut whole chapters. It's so wild how long this book could have been where I not reigned in but there was well this is Chicago relevant too. I took a two day course called hot Dog University through Vienna Beef from this Guy's a thing.
I'm going to beat that for me.
Sorry, oh yeah, I'm a graduate of hot Dog University. It's a course where you it was on zoom. Unfortunately it used to be in person. This is Guy Mark, PhD, Professor hot Dogs, and you take the course and he teaches you how to open your own hot dog stand and over the course of two days. And it was actually I learned a lot.
How many people were on the zoom.
There are three people. It was me and two guys from Chicago. And I was trying to like be I didn't want to say why I was there, so I was trying to like, oh, my name's Jamie, and I'm interested in opening a California hot dog stand. And Mark was really interested in an idea. And it was a couple months of me kind of like dodging some emails of like I'm not going to do it. I never told them, but I'm not going to do it.
Okay, So all right, I need to I got. I'm now conflicted because I have a great hot dog stand pivot. But also I want to ask you the second hot dog question, which is have you had Japa Dogs?
No, I haven't had Japa dogs yet. I wanted to go because I know that there's like a bunch of there's some Vancouver.
Is that right, Like I know, yeah, yeah, Canadian Canada codd. My my friend in Vancouver keeps insisting I eat it, and I refuse.
I wanted to go to Vancouver and try it because like Northwestern hot dogs, there's like there's a lot going on there in a good way, Like Portland, Seattle, big fan of their hot dogs. Yeah, I didn't get to jack a dog. There are a few places. There was a place in Maine I really wanted to go to, but it was so on the side of the highway and open two hours a day that it was like it would be so logistically hard to be there. But working on it. Yeah, I want to go to jap
a dog someday. I went to U. I got hot dog poutine in Montreal recently, which I guess is common a common poutine make.
It was great.
So now that you've dedicated I'm guessing multiple years of your life.
Two years Yeah, ye, not getting those back.
So I guess it's studying both hot dogs and like the cultural conditions that are created around them.
Do you feel like a better person.
Ooh?
Or have you learned something extremely useful about American culture that will improve your life going forward.
Thank you for two alternatives to the question. I said that knowing more about hot dogs didn't make me a better person. I think, I hope, And I also I think that like I don't know, it's like it feels better to or I don't know, like I enjoy my stuff. That it's like you can get to a really dark and serious place, but they seem so innocuous. It's like whatever, and getting Hansel and Gretel to come into your candy house and then being like, actually, it's sucking a murder city.
Everyone's fucked in here. Like you're gonna have fun for a little while, the food is delicious, but then you're gonna die. Like I just I like, I like subjects like that and getting to I don't know, I've met genuinely when we had the book release show the other night. I've met so many nice people through the hot dog community, my my dog community. It's true. I had this guy I met in a parking lot in Culver City. He was a Wiener mobile driver at the time, and he
like his yance. We talked on stage and he was reflecting on his Wienermobile heyday and he told me this, Oh I'm excited because at the time he was still working for Oscar Meyer and I was like, do people have sex in here? And he was like, I don't know, probably, but now he doesn't work for Oscar Myers. I was like, do people have sex in there? You have no loyalty at this point, and he was like, okay, well I
never did. But there is like, there's like six seats in the waitermobile, and I guess on the back left it's called the meat seat. And that's where the fuck the meat seats. I know. It was really it was really shocking, and he's so sweet that it was really scary to hear it coming out of his mouth. So there is the meat seat. Anyways, I've made a lot of nice I've met a lot of nice people through hot dogs, and I've learned stuff I did not know.
So fun.
Well, you, you too can become a better person by purchasing the book Rock Talk wherever books are sold. One actual serious question, have they ever watched the movie Food Fight?
No?
Wait? When? When?
Is it?
From the twenty twelve computer animated movie starring starring supermarket food mascots that they and they unite to fight the generic brand food products in their grocery store. And there's a lot of really weird na see imagery, really uncomfortable like over sexualization and some of the most some of the most garish animation you've ever seen. It's a pretty wild movie.
It was.
It was a development for like it was like almost like a decade and a half.
Evil Longoria, Hillary Duff, Oh.
Yeah, Christer Lloyd plays Plays plays one of the villas.
It is.
It is one of the worst like acid trips of a movie, just just because of like it is just really bad.
That is, I have zero records predominantly features hot dogs, so I can.
I mean, hot dogs are certainly prominent on this post there. I'm just like shocked at them billing the starkest tuna above the twinkie. It doesn't make sense to me.
Also, there is there is there is a dog character who's just like Indiana Jones, but a dog that is also but also in a romantic relationship with a human woman.
I don't want to know where the Nazi stuff comes in, but I am this is so wild because it's like I thought that sausage party was the worst thing to happen to this very scary genre, and it like, this is like.
The dark side of Sausage Party.
No, oh my hot. Oh, and there's a maybe there's a sequel Food Fight. It's about time.
I've not heard of this.
Oh oh, maybe this is fake. No, maybe this is fake. I hope it's fake.
Yeah.
This is so ugly Holy no, it is.
It is one of the worst movies ever ever made. It's it's it's it's garish, it's upsetting, it is weirdly fascistic, and it's also like primarily based around like brand promotion. Also, a lot of these big food companies like signed these contracts in the late nineties, and of course the film didn't come out until twenty twelve.
Oh my god. There's a whole bunch of really weird, like Food Fight merchandise that was made with all of these brand mascots and it's all extremely questionable.
That does explain the cast, yeah, because it was like, it's a late nineties cast to have Wayne Brady playing Daredevil, band Christopher Lloyd playing mister Clipboard, Chris Catan is in it. Yeah, this movie has been in the me for a long time.
Wow, holy ship.
Anyway, I was just wondering since it is.
It is supermarket food hot dog adjacent, and it does does often draw draw draw parallels to Sausage Party, which is also obviously one of the most famous hot dog films.
One of the most famous films.
I have.
I've been wearing them at the shows I have. They did make Halloween costumes for Sausage Party, and they have the bun that looks so visceral like the like it has like vagina mouse, and then they gave the bun huge boobs and a huge butt. Anyways, she's voiced by Kristin Wig and I have the costume and I've been wearing it.
You have the actual costume, Yeah, I have.
It's it's tonight.
Oh god, you're.
Wearing it for your book stuff?
Yeah.
I love a costume change, especially when it is also a jump scare.
Yeah yeah wow. Yeah, Well that's incredibly upsetting. That's about all the time we have today, though, Jamie. Where can people find the hot Dog book?
Oh?
You can find it all over the place, but I would recommend getting it from bookshop dot org if you're ordering online. It's a really cool website that will automatically purchase from your nearest independent bookstore and send it to you. So yeah, it's a pro labor book, so don't buy it from somewhere shitty, use your head, but yeah, get it.
And there's also I also the audience book if you like many people have been telling me for the past couple of days, or like a book kind of a long podcast in a way, and it's like, sure, it feels great. It feels great to hear.
And where can people find you on the internet and the stuff that you also do that's not the hot time book.
Uh, bravely still on on Twitter at Jamie loftus help and Instagram at Jamie christ Superstar. And then you can listen to me on the Bechdel Cast every week on this very network.
Well, I sure hope you cover food Fight in an upcoming episode.
We just covered Sausage Party, and I think we both have PTSD, So.
You have like a de talks period first.
And then come back with food Fight and by the end be like, you know, Sausage Party.
This is the one you do when the paperback comes out.
Honestly nice, not the worst idea. I I do want to watch this movie now, but I like looking at the poster, I'm like, I don't know if I can watch it alone, but I will watch it.
We can, we can surely plan something.
Let's do it all right.
Thank you, Thank you for coming on and talking about hot dogs and labor and all of all of your hard work. You can find us on cool Zone Media, on most of the Instagrams and twitters and other places.
And happen here pod keep on dog dog doggin yep.
Okay, as they say, as they say, yes, hello, welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Recently, I just wrapped up a whole five episodes about the previous week of action to stop cop City in Atlanta, Georgia. In a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to shorten the running time of those episodes, I had to cut out many of the funny bits, jokes, gaffs, goofs, bloopers, and related tomfoolery.
But as demonstrated by the police's massive mobilization to shut down a canceled comedy event in the woods on March seventh, the Wallani Forest and surrounding area of Atlanta are often home to manifestations of absurdist humor. There's been a lot of not great news recently, well there's kind of always a lot of not great news now that we live in an ever expanding hyperreality oversaturated with information. But I digress.
I think it's just as important to not overlook the comedic, lighthearted side of things as it is to keep up with all of the doom and gloom that we usually.
Platform on our show. So, without further ado, I present to you jokes from the Atlantist side.
Note, I am now invoking Jester's privilege legally, everything we say in this episode is a joke as a as a little heads up. Okay, this episode will probably make more sense if you listened to the four part Week of Action series or the retrospective episode. But also I will do my best to pop in via this narration to help fill in any gaps so that listeners will not be completely lost if you've not listened to those
other episodes. Anyway, we shall start by tuning back into my conversation with Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective as we discuss the March fifth police raid of the South River Music Festival. Welcome to it could happen here cast. I'm Garrison Davis.
In World of Warcraft, you can shield bash.
So.
There's been this effort from police and media to frame these arrests as like these were arrests that happened at a crime scene, like these these arrests were people who were torching equipment, who were involved in all these actions, who were doing domestic terrorism. But all the rest that happened were at a music festival, Like they were in a completely different section of the forest.
At a music festival, at the parking lot, even away from the music festival. And you know, police surveillance may be good, and they may have been able to pick out an individual or two, but for the most part, like you had something like two hundred people partake in this direct action and then disappear into the woods, there's really no way too And of course most of them were wearing block of some form.
There's really no way much of that block, which has now been burnt and it's no longer existing in the physical material realm, so there's no way to like really tell who was there, and other than allegedly having mud on your clothes.
Don't want to talk about what the war and were in the oddity of how the warrants were formatted.
Once you started to listen to them, you noticed this very repetitive nature of them. And so about halfway through we get to a lawyer who straight up calls out the fact that these warrants seem like they were just copy pasted.
Like every single person all the way downline. And one of the such claims the mud mud.
So I don't know, I don't know how many festivals you've attended in your life, but I've been to a few, and they are never clean affairs.
So it rained like one day before the night before the festival started, there was a tornado warning in Atlanta. I forgot about that, and there was rain, which makes I don't know if the prosecutors know this, but when rain mixes with dirt, it creates something called that we that we refer to as mud. My dock martins are still caked in mud. Future me cutting back in here
for a sec. So for the record, I have since cleaned my dock Martins, but the mud was still on there for well over a month until I was forced to wash my shoes after I stepped in much much more mud while in the Tillamook Forest as I was failing to shoot Akeeltech, which yeah, that was that was probably my bad. These charges don't make any sense. There's no evidence these people committed any actual crimes, so they're
just being charged with terrorism. This like nebulous concept. The judge said that the legal basis of these claims will have to be decided on another day. Similarly, they said that in regards to like actual evidence that these people charged did any crimes, she said that she had none of this, none of the She said that she had none of this evidence in front of her, and that evidence is for another day.
So it's absolutely I think bonkers is an appropriate word. One of those one of those kangaroo court moments.
It really my faith in the legal system was really solidified this day. There was also the threat of arrest for the New York Times reporter that happened forgot to mention that, So yeah, I'll leave that commentary by itself.
They should have they should have charged Sean Keenan with domestic terrorism. Sorry for making fun of noted trans ally the New York Times. I promise it won't happen again. Wait wait, no, that's that's a lie. That there's at least two more New York Times jokes.
In this script.
Fuck, I guess let's talk about Monday, Monday, Monday, So, uh, don't.
It is the editor?
No, Daniel, Daniel, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.
He's not going to hear any of this ship. I'm because the way these work as I transcribe them and then I copy and paste sections, so they only move the section over.
So when I when I say, ask Garrison about okay.
So it turns out that was a lie. Daniel did need to hear that. So sorry, danel full full transparency. Most of those bleeps were me making horrible, horrible slurping noises into the microphone, as Daniel can probably attest. So really all of you should be thanking Daniel for suffering through those to bleep them out. Daniel died for your sins, I mean content truly, truly, braver than the troops.
Insert joke. Anyway, back to me from the past. So let's talk about let's talk about Monday. I want to talk about the clergy event that happened in from a city hall, so city council meeting. You work for the Atlantic Community Press Collective. You've you've covered a lot of city council meetings in Atlanta before. This was my first
time covering an Atlanta City Council meeting. Due to your know wisdom in this in this field, I would like for you to to discuss what happened at the city Council meeting and in relation to your to your to your years of experience in covering these these uh these meetings.
So I city council meets every other week on Mondays. I cover several other committees, but uh, you know, the big one is always the city Council meeting. And over over the course of time, there there's like a cast of characters that that you just begin to understand are going to appear either every week or or from time
to time. And you you had the pleasure of actually getting to see a few of these and I was like, there were we were there were a few of us media folks there, and I was actually really happy that like people got to experience this with me because I usually have to do it by myself. So you got to meet three of the characters. You got to meet Brother Hakim, you got to meet Rachel, and you got to be your favorite chef doctor.
So this is just somebody who everyone refers to as chef Doctor. He is dressed up as what you can only describe as a chef doctor some wondering half of a chef's outfit, half of a doctor's outfit. He had a Freemason pin on his shirt, because of course he did. And I just like watched him for a while, because like initially in the city council meeting, they were just like handing out awards to, like the proclamation, the proclamations and awards to like various people, including like former city
council members, like whatever. And then eventually public comments started, and I guess, let's let's talk about chef doctor so well, no, so for the entirety of the city council meeting. During the proclamations, in the back, in the back of the back of city Council, there was this large red like like heart just sitting sitting in the back.
But it looked like Bob the Tomato from the it looked.
That was exactly what I thought.
I like, this heart, Like, why is there this Bob the Tomato ass heart mascot just sitting in the back of city council. No one was inside the costume. It was just like the heart sitting there next to like another massive heart made up of like flowers.
I saw.
I was kind of confused for why that was there. There was like a pediatric surgeon that got like one of the awards, and like, oh, maybe the heart's there because of like because of like heart surgery or something.
I don't know.
No, No, that would make sense. And you have to you have to get out of that mindset for public comment for the most part.
So then chef doctor gets ten minutes of public comment.
So we should explain that mechanism. Everyone who signs up for public comment gets two minutes. You can award your time or give over your time to somebody else. So there were four other people who gave their time over to chef doctor to give him ten minutes, and he used all ten minutes.
And so what was chef doctor trying to get out of the city? Why was he giving public.
Heart So a shout out to chef doctor. Okay, like his Chef doctor wants to create a soul food museum in the West side of Atlanta, and and he's she's shown up a few times to kind of ask city council for money, and as far as I know, that has gone nowhere. But that was what he is ostensibly there for today. However, beyond just the heart, the dancing, we haven't got there yet. However, beyond just the big red heart, and like the paper mache flower heart, he brought a.
Floutist, a floutest. So a floutist is someone who plays the flute. If you are like an uncultured person, who's who's who's listening to this? And he walked up to the microphone and then for five minutes he got a floutist to play a flute cover of amazing Grace.
Yes, but but he had back muse from a laptop that just kind of appeared up nowhere, and so he played into the microphone.
They played this funeral song as as this now heart that's been brought to life, it starts dancing.
Starts dancing. So this person wearing like heart pajama pants changed into this hard question at some point. I didn't see them change into this. I don't know how this happened. I must have missed it.
With City Council Magic.
Next will be.
Chef doctor Kenneth Wilhoyt.
You'll have ten minutes due to yield in time.
Chef, let's go ahead and get started.
My name is.
A chef doctor Kenneth Wilhoyd. I'm the president of the Soul Food Museum and the Soul Food University.
We are celebrating a twentieth anniversary and we are asking for the City Council and an honorable mayor to get behind us and support us with donating a museum space, building and land with parking in the city of Atlanta.
For our tourists that come here to have a place to come and experience our hospitality agriculture Service of Atlanta. I'm gonna sell quick prayer because I'm spirit lid. I do things by spirit. I'm at that age you know it's not about me, it's about the spirit. Now we'll have a song that was selected by the spirit of the ancestors, not by me, but by the spirit of the ancestors. I asked God to say, Hey, God, what songs should we introduce today? This is the one that was.
But this, this guy in the heart costume walks up and he starts like kind of dancing to this float music for five minutes. Talk about the dancing.
I don't think it was so much dancing as a swaying with a little bit of hand motion along with the swang.
But like I.
I wasn't expecting it.
I thought some would like dosed me with hallucinogens.
I did, actually I had. There were some streps of LSD. I put them in your water bottle when you went looking.
This explained so much about what happened on Monday.
No, it would make much more sense if that's what happened. Unfortunately, Atlanta is a cartoon town and that's not what happened. This was real life.
So this, this this float cover of Amazing Grace played for five minutes with along with the dancing Heart, and then we finally got to public comment for the reason for the reason for the reason for why we were there. Not only were we blessed with that stunning rendition of amazing Grace, the floutist himself was was briefly able to address the city Council before President Dave Shipman rudely, very very rudely called time amazing.
It's such a sort that made the world.
So that's.
Okay, and we are back. And just as a note, I forgot to put this in the script, so I'm going to say it now. It turns out that that heart costume that was quote unquote dancing to the music that's actually rentable. You can rent that in Atlanta. So I I have some really good ideas for the next for the next week of action, since we could rent more more bouncy castles and also that hard costume. I think there's a lot of potential, extremely funny things that
that could happen. Anyway, back to my conversation with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective.
There are a couple like things to note about how city council public comment works. City council doesn't tend to pay attention to them Oessensibly the only one who pays attention is City Council President Doug Shipman, because it is his job to call time and to call up the next person. But you know, city councilors will like step in and out of the room, get something to eat during the seventeen hours of public comment for cop city, like one of them held a press conference like it is.
It is weird. How they're like legally allowed to not pay attention like that is that is bizarre.
You would you would you would think that if you allegedly work for the people, like.
You would you have to actually listen to them.
So amongst the city Council. There are two in particular, I'm glad you got to see there. There's Mary Norwood, who represents Buckhead, and then there's Dustin Hillis, who is the the committee chair for the Public Safety Legal Administration Committee. So he's basically in charge of police here.
Throwing molotov cocktails at officers and damaging millions of dollars of.
Equipment, and he gives off that vibe and neither one of them will pay attention.
They were, they were on their phone from almost the entire time I was there. The the the Buckhead woman gave off ontologically evil vibe. Like I I did not know like who she was when I went to the City Council, but once I saw her, I was like, oh, okay, this person is like obviously evil, right, And I asked people about it afterwards, like oh, yes, that is a person that represents Bucket. I'm like, okay, yes, of course, of course, Bucket of course.
Being the like primarily white neighborhood in North Atlanta, that part of it wan to secede from the city, and that's a whole, Yes, that is a whole another issue. But to kind of give context of what Buckhead is redlining.
That's not a question, that's just a observation.
And so sitting directly next to her is Dustin Hillis, who is known for not paying attention.
Ever, except except they did both pay attention after public comment when police gave their testimony on what happened to the night previous, and then these two people were very engaged. We will hear more from Mary Norwood ontologically evil in a in a bit, but first I have to saw Jesus Christ fucking fuck Jesus. My cats are just running a muck all right.
We will hear more from Mary Norwood ontologically evil in a bit, but first I have to I have to some of Councilman Antonio Lewis's response after Police Chief Darren Cherbaum gave his little presentation at City Council. Because I don't think I've ever heard January sixth, the Atlanta Way, and six Flags all get mentioned in the same sentence before they.
Looked like January sixth. I ain't never seen police run from a group of people, and so the only thing I could think about when I saw that video. I saw it on atl scoop, the videos all out there. I've been seeing it all over and when I saw the police officers run, I mean I was a little nervous. When I saw the heat map, I saw one hundred people I saw, I saw it. I mean like that ain't the Atlanta wait, I mean, I ain't never seen.
I'm just thinking about the At the same time, at six Flags, we had some young men that were fighting, some of our teenagers fighting at six Flags.
They didn't run up on the police.
They didn't run up on the police with molotail malor tail cocktails throwing to burn up stuff. What I will say, I thank you so much for last night for working. I want to really commend officers because y'all were under some immense pressure. And to not see a gun fire back because when I see the firecrackers, I'm from Cleveland Avenue. If they throw firecrackers at me, I don't know those firecrackers. I've never seen that. So I appreciate APD for doing that.
Truly, truly a stunning admission, just just perfect. So I had to listen to Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum's testimony a few times for the five episodes that were released earlier this month, so I didn't really feel like fully listening through again to find any funny bits to put in this episode. So I just kind of like skimmed through while multitasking, and weirdly enough, I noticed that the chief said some pretty shocking things that I somehow just
must have missed in my previous viewings. So I will play those for you now, and I will warn you it is. It is pretty disturbing. Like all the subjects we put on air, their statements do not reflect our opinions or the official position held by whatever current company owns this podcast. So yeah, like I said, well warning, these are shocking, but I will let the chief speak for himself.
Take aggressive action against these officers, move to the front gate, more accelerant, inflict vitally harm upon them, launch illegal and criminal attacks to attack members of law enforcement, bring harm to our officers. These attacks are going to continue.
Pretty pretty shocking stuff coming from a police chief to Jesus, But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Because to my surprise, after public COVID was over and all the news cameras left after I left, and you know, everyone left the building, it turns out Darren Sheerbaum gave a second testimony at the very end of the City Council meeting that I just completely missed until now, so I will warn you it is kind of leud in nature. So if you want to skip past lewd police conduct,
just fast forward like a minute or two. But anyway, without further ado, here is the secret recently unearthed second testimony presented by Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum.
Presidentship and members of the Council would like to brief you on events that transpired yesterday. I'm going to let the video play here. Why I walk through each of the situations. What you see here is of our partners at the Decab County Police Department, the Sheriff of Fulton County, as well as the Georgia State Patrol. We're seeing changing out of the clothes that they were wearing. They're going to position themselves when it appears to be an attempt
to keep pursuing the officers. This is the officers see these. We had a rapid response from our partners as well as to change their clothing. Different groups were performing acts within the manner of their training and their discipline at this time. Our officers repositioning themselves inside of our partners. These officers had been stationary to ensure that they are
being restrained. The officers are on city property and are positioning themselves and repositioned themselves to be prepared to go back in. Our officers are showing great restraint. They remained in a position. It's what you see here is a
lieutenant that is discharging. We're very fortunate that that was the outcome, and I want to commend every man and woman on duty yesterday as they stood in the gap to do their job, those officers entered our partners, and what you see here, ladies and gentlemen, is as some of the individuals that had just previously had entered into those officers, they start changing back into the clothes that
they were just wearing moments before. Just last night, officers of this department, as well as the Cab County to the Georgia State Patrol and the Sheriff's Department moved in.
And I want to think of the men and women again of the Atlanta Police Department, the Georgia State Patrol, the Sheriff's Department, as well as the the Cap County Police Department for the professionalism that they demonstrated through the night and to the early hours of this morning while many of us were asleep, they continue to work through the night.
I've never seen that, so I appreciate APD for doing that.
I would have loved for every one of those very hysterical people that we've been sitting listening to for two or three hours to have seen an actual video of what really did happen. And there may be great reasons if the administration chose to do it this way, but our media is gone and all the people that needed to see this are gone.
I'm glad that nobody was hurt and none of our employees were hurt yesterday.
Oh boy, whoa uh well that was That was certainly something I did not did not want to know that much about what the the APD and their partners get up to after hours. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled comedic, James I know A. Sheerbaum was addressed with some questions by Unicorn Riot when he was trying to exit, which he then denied. He hea have a very frustrated face and then denied answering and promptly left the building.
Well in the company of the New York Times journalist Oh with With with.
A friend of the show Sean Keenan. So that was that was a That was most of Monday. Yeah, that is everything that happened on Monday.
So what Monday evening I went home to start working on article. What did you do, Guaryson?
I went to the Perham in the Woods. I got to share my memory of the veggie tails esther story starring the tickle monsters. I got to bond with a few expangelicals about that, so that was fine. Then there was an experimental noise show in the forest.
And then you had a tragic neck injury on Monday night.
So Tuesday, the.
Group that we followed left out of the church and went to Norfolk Southern, which is one of the funders of APF and UH Friend of the Environment in Ohio. When they finished reading the letter, like all they asked was that the letter go to the CEO. Yep, And they denied that and all they had to do was accept it and and move on.
But they while people were inside the security called ns Police. And if you're wondering, you're like, you know, NS Police. That isn't the city in Atlanta, what could that be? That is the Norfolk Southern Police, who are legally allowed to arrest people.
And we we thankfully we avoided going to Norfolk Southern Police Jail, going to Norfolk Southern Court, which certainly would have been a very legitimate court, so.
It would have been almost as legitimate as the real court that that the bail hearings happened at. That same day, after successfully evading Norfolk Southern Jail, Matt and I headed downtown for a march that was accompanied by a cadre of over one hundred officers. Pinning this crowd onto the sidewalk.
Got a blocking the sidewalk like a Doorida State University canine unit. This blocking off the entire sidewalk next to a Fulton County Sheriff's vehicle. I like the cops are just also commanding the corporate media on where they can stand and the whatever like boomer journalist is with whatever like mainstream news. Helle and was very peeed off at this cop for telling you to get on the sidewalk.
The next day, a smaller crowd met up at the same spot and broke off into little subgroups to walk around downtown Atlanta and hand out defend the forest leaflets. So all the little subgroups kind of meet up on on Andrew Jung and Peach Tree, right next to the Hooters and the hard Rock Cafe.
To classic examples of atlanted food. There was an Atlanta swat vehicle parked outside of the Hooters. Fucking the fucking outside a fucking hard rock cast.
So I can't keep picking up this copyrighted music.
But there's a big.
Atlanta Police swat vehicle parts on the block by the Atlanta Police Foundation head quarters. All right, there's actually a pretty decent number of people gathered here for the flywering event today. They're at the Peachtree and Young International Boulevard intersection, right across from the Hooters and the Hard Rock Cafe. There's a swat vehicle parks right behind us. There is about, I don't know, twenty to thirty officers stationed a little
bit to our north. You know, normal police responds to people handing out flyers, just fifty officers and a swat team. Lieutenant Neil Welch approaches the crowd and gives them a dispersal order. They cross the street walk like a block north past some of the cops that are guarding the Wells Fargo building. At this point, people chatted the cops to quit your jobs. Quit your job, and one of the cops guarding the wells Fargo, says, that's actually good idea.
You can always quit your job.
That's actually sounded.
Already tried.
And he's like, I tried to and they wouldn't let me. But like, I don't like laughing, but that one got me. That one got me.
The cop responded like, not in like a glib tone like he was, it was actually actually like yeah, that's actually yeah, that's actually a good idea.
Extremely funny moment.
While this is happening, Uh, there's another group who comes in to the side of Petree Center Mall and enters the mall to find Mayor Andre Dickens.
Andre Dickens is like the head of some kind of like board or something.
Yeah. There there are a couple of boards in Atlanta that stipulate the mayor is like the head of the board, and this is one of them. And it meets in Peatree Center Mall as one does. So the mayor is having a meeting in the mall office spaces, you know, sort of above the mall, and so so three Indigenous An activists along with Kamal Franklin arrive and they find the mayor. They enter the board meeting and they begin
to read this letter from the Muscogie Nation aloud. Mayor Dickens, in true mayor fashion, bolts away from this, running through an exit door which is then like blocked by a guard which I think that has its own like set of legal issues, essentially just ignoring them over his shoulder. He calls out, I've got a copy of the letter and hides just completely trying to escape what is not a good look for him.
This this is what we call a ted Wheeler moments. So as this happens, I think like like Apex Swat is deployed.
They so Apex and Swat had had been elsewhere and they were called back to their vehicles like right before this, and then the activist exit and almost like in this very comical moment, after they get out in a way, squads of these special units start rushing into the building, of course, finding no one.
Charlie Chapman asked, shit, truly, okay, even a more future version of Garrison here. Apparently I've been told by Daniel that his name is Charlie Chaplin. I don't know he's a pedophile. So whatever, Charlie not Daniel, oh boy, And I do want to say I did try multiple times to take Matt to the Hard Rock Cafe or the Hooters, either one, and he refused my offer multiple times, very very rudely. So at some point when I'm back in Atlanta, I will have to gather a troop of fanboys and
head over to the Hooters anyway. Next was the Community Movement Builder's rally on the evening of Thursday, March ninth, which had fewer jokes that night, but there are a few embarrassing recording bloopers at the expense of my own ego, So I will play those for your amusement. You absolute seck Fox.
Yeah, we'll start.
It is a kind of raining.
We'll see how many people show up and how how large the police response will be. In comparison, what could happen here?
Well, it could happen here. A podcast by Robert Evans. We are at the site of the Martin Luther King Memorial.
Did you see the two Sandy Springs police buses?
I did see that, Sandy. I lived in Sandy Springs for a year and that brought back some memories. But yes to Sandy Springs police buses, Sandy Springs, of course, being mostly outside of the perimeter. A good A good drive from here. That's good, that was good. All right, hoggers, absolutely hoggers.
The police police has has been stating, well, I'll never mind, I cut that. What am I saying? Big puddle on the street, demonstrating the city's commitments to infrastructure. That was that was a joke because the drawing was plumped. I accidentally turned off my my my recording by tripping on some stairs. They're so they're so close together, we're just
they're just sandwiched in. Got a New York Times reporter standing in the middle of the street, of course, the only person allowed to stand in the streets the one, the one New York Times reporter. I would estimate almost about a kilometer, But I'm Canadian, so that's not very helpful to you, to you us listeners.
The real outside agitators is Sandy Springs. Please. Yeah. The police were ready to mass rest the entire time. I don't know if you mentioned this. So in between the police line in front of the APF building and the protesters was essentially like a mixture of Copwatch and National Lawyers Guild and a CLU, because of course you had to have like both both legal observer factions just to make sure everybody's watching each other.
Get you can watch energy, Get a westrested, who can watch acil you get arrested.
It's turtles all the way down, legal observers.
All the way down. Oh and we are back. That's that's great, all right.
One of the stops on the tour of the Blondie Forest that Joe Perry was doing throughout the week was the area of the land swap between the former owner of Black Hall Studios, Ryan Millsap, and the Cabot County's Entrenchment Creek Park. So on one side there's this beautiful forested park that Ryan Millsap wants to trade for. Then on the other side is this massive amount of dirt that he currently owns, which is right next to Bouldercrest Road.
That's a huge, huge dirt field that you see. And what happened is while that swap was being orchestrated, Blackhall was bringing thousands and thousands and thousands of dump truck loads of dirt and just filling it up, filling it up, filling it up, and somebody else is gonna have.
To do the math.
But I don't know if you say, like fifteen acres of dirt that is twenty feet plus high, how much dirt that is.
It's a lot.
It's not natural. It's not something that's helping this flood prone area. All that's gonna run into here, no matter how many silk fences you put up. So that's what they're calling Michelle Obama Park. That's exactly exactly right. If somebody needs to talk to Michelle and say, Nahu, you need to take your name off of that. And I don't know who who got away with that, but that's not it.
You're seeing the most picturesque side of that piece of land.
Yeah, you get gets the top worse.
It's just it's just it's garbage.
Well the thing, and it is literally garbage because a lot of this stuff, this dirt cave. You know, Ryan millsp has he is. He's not a movie mogul, He's he's a land baron. He's he's in real estate and he's made billions of dollars in real estate, and so that dirt comes from other properties. He's he's digging up a place on you know, a boulevard to put some apartments in. He's pulling dirt out of there. That's what's coming in here. That's dirt coming from all these other construction sites.
Yeah, that is not top soil.
You can, and I believe me, I'm not saying I'm not making that up. I've been over there and I've walked and I've seen what's in there. I've seen water heaters in there. I've seen gutters in there, I've seen pipes, I've seen all kinds of crap.
It's trash.
It's a big trash mountain. That's what they want to have be Michelle Obama Park and hanging a hath So. Yeah, that's I just wanted you to kind of lay your eyes on what the county thought was a good idea, in what Black Hall thought. Of course, you know, Ryan Miller is a great idea for Ryan millsatt because the land that he acquired is worth way more millions more. It's now worth millions more than than when he made
the swap. So he has made a lot of money on this swap, and that's why he's angry that he can't get his hands on it. Yet nobody knows what he's gonna do with it, because the original agreement between him and the county was that he was gonna build movie studios on that land. Well he can't now because he sold his rights to the movie studios to a company that's now called Shadow Box. They're the ones that owns his previous studios, so he can't have a rival
company right across the street from them. So he hasn't said and nobody knows exactly what he's gonna do with the property if he wins this court case, and it's those forty acres, who knows. It's a mystery. So that's that's where that stands right now. Hopefully we win the lawsuit. If we do, he will be he will have to put the bill for repaving the path and redoing the parking lot and putting a new gazebo in. That's what the judge decreed. That's why they said we don't need
a restraining order. All that is replaceable. So except for the trees that he tore down, you know those are going to take another seventy five years, but who's counting.
The fate of Michelle Obama Park is still up in the air as of time of recording. So yeah, I'm excited to visit that if the landswap gets passed, almost done, we're gonna we're gonna briefly, briefly tap back into my conversation with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective and then unfortunately, our jokes must come to an end.
I think one thing that's been lost in all of this too is all of the lighthearted events that have continued to gone through the week. And you know, we have this this, this youth rally or there's the youth rally that's happening on Saturday. Of course recording this beforehand, and like the joy of the movement that was represented in the Bouncy Castle rip which was first pointed at a rifle was pointing at and.
We haven't talked about the gun, talk about the guns in the bouncy castle.
So so one thing I think that that.
We didn't mention.
How can you forget about the guns and the bouncy castle. So when when the police came running up onto the tarmac at RCA Field where the bouncy Castle was, of course they had to point a rifle at the bouncy Castle. And if that doesn't show that police are not here to have fun and have joy. I don't know what what is I I don't know if anyone was in
it at the time. I don't think so. I think they were literally just pointing a gun at an empty bouncy castle which they have they destroyed, and and I think we have to take a moment to mourn that.
Did they destroyed or like deflate it? I think they destroyed. It wasn't like a rental or something.
Yes, So rip bouncy house, you will be missed and all the joy that you represented. Uh, my girlfriend's texting me cringe.
Let me let me check my my note my notes.
In case Garrison doesn't cut this. Ask about Garrison's neck?
What hmm?
What what did you say?
Ask about what Garrison did?
Friday fire, burn Tower Saturday, Gresham Park Sunday, Monday noon Tuesday. All right, all right, okay, I'm gonna just gonna look through my other notes app because I keep my notes in three different notes apps because I'm normal.
So one thing that's been notable, especially in how the police talk about the forest, is they've begun using like these these militarized terms, like the denial of operating area that we saw when Ryan millsap was important to Cap County. He said, the GBI told him to clear the area
to deny operating space. And you know the use of terrorism, like there's there's some eerie parallels between the language that was used to describe insurgencies in countries that America is invading or the United States is invading, and a lot of that language, like the military equipment that was used there is has come home and it is now being used against Americans engaged in like these liberation struggles.
I wonder where we've talked about that before.
I don't know it happen where speaking of it is still happening. The last week, approximately five hundred people came out to City Hall as the city Council is now in the process of voting to approve public funds for the Cop City project. Nearly three hundred people signed up for public comment, with one hundreds more waiting in line. A public comment lasted seven hours, and during so not a single person voiced support of using taxpayer money to
fund the police training facility. The Atlanta Community Press Collective have recently reported that the proposed city funds toward the Cop City project have ballooned to a minimum of fifty one million dollars, with the thirty million dollar package awaiting final vote in City Council, plus another at least twenty million dollar chunk to be given to the Atlanta Police Foundation via a quote unquote loan, which indicates that the
Atlanta Police Foundation's private fundraising has not gone as well as they initially had hoped. For more on that, I'd recommend checking out The Press Collective's recent article from May twenty fourth, and you can also donate to them to support their continued reporting of the happenings in Atlanta.
You can find us on Twitter at Atlanta Underscore Press. Our website is Atlpress Collective dot com, and you can find our Instagram at atl Press Collective. We have partnered with Open Collective. We are fiscally sponsored now by the Open Collective Foundation in a way to transparently fundraise in
order to sustain our reporting. Everything up until actually the Week of Action, everything that we have done up until the Week of Action was all unpaid, and it is our desire to continue to grow with the movement, and so we were excited to find a partner in the Open Collective Foundation that can continue that sort of horizontal open in organizing that that we have done internally.
Okay, yeah, I think I think.
I think we're good.
I think we have it.
Good job team.
Oh shit, I wasn't required.
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