It Could Happen Here Weekly 206

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Hey everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. It's a very special round table podcast today where we're going to discuss the United States ongoing campaign of bombing small boats in the Caribbean. I'm joined by Michael Palberg, an associate professor of political science at vir Junior Commonwealth University and a fellow at the Center for National Policy. Hi Michael, thanks for joining us.

Hi, thanks for having me.

And Andrew is also here. Listeners of the show will be familiar with Andrew's work. He joins very often. In this instance, Andrew is talking as someone who is from Trinidad and Tobago, which of course is very much being impacted by this. Hey Andrew, Hey, what's going on much? Well, let's talk about what's going on, because something quite constantial is going on. What's going on is that the United States is carrying out a campaign of drone strikes against

Right?

Is that these people are members of TRENDERRAA or potentially some other cartels that the Trump administration likes to talk about. We've talked about the prevalence of those groups, but can you explain very briefly what they are and I suppose the function that they have in Venezuela or what they're doing there versus what's been claimed that they're doing.

So sure, I do research on organized crime in Latin America and ren de Aragua is a real organized criminal group in Venezuela and now all over Latin America. It is a street gang that started out as a prison gang. It does not primarily engage in international drug trafficking, moving large quantities of drugs across national borders or across oceans. It is primarily engaged in human trafficking.

And extortion rackets.

And it primarily follows the Venezuelan Niaskara people who have left Venezuela.

And at this point it's an.

Incredible twenty percent of the population over the last ten years of Maduro's presidency, so nearly eight million people wherever they go, and they take advantage of them, they extort them for money. They will also take money to move them across borders. But they're not a cartel in the way that we traditionally think about cartels like the Sinalo cartel or some of the Colombian cartels that that are

Yeah.

Yeah, so we should talk about the other Caribbean nations. Now, I guess I want to talk about trendent Tobago, but we should probably cover Columbia first, right, because we've seen significant pushback from Petro, President of Columbia, and then we've recently seen the President of the United States accused Petro, who is again President of Columbia, of being a drug trafficker himself, which is a fairy ludicrous claim on the face of it. But let's talk about Petro because he

Yeah, So Petro is a mercurial figure in Columbia politics, has been for a long time. He is known for starting his career as a gorilla with a minor anti government guerrilla movement called the M nineteen Movement.

Now, this is the.

Movement which I don't know, maybe Western audiences are familiar with from the Netflix series Narcos, for having participated carried out the Palace of Justice siege at the Columbian Supreme Court, which was a major design during which the Clemian military went in guns blazing to rescue hostages of Supreme Court justices and other people just employed in the Palace of Justice, and most everyone died in a fire as a result. Petro was not involved in that operation as far as

Yet too, he's a president of being a drug craft for is fairly ludicrous, like he's been, like even in his time as a senator, right, he was like I think he was sharing some like investigations or committees that looked to drug smuggling, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, And so I would say Petro has been very critical of the War on Drugs approach generally, but he does still inherit this long standing deep relationship with the United States, and he's not exactly a full on peacenick

Other armed groups.

Colombia has gone back to war against them. The ELN has engaged in some pretty horrific violence, including a suicide car bombing the police barracks and the distant farc as well taking down a helicopter and a drone attack. So there has been a return to fairly high level, you know, armed insurgency in Colombia, even if it's nowhere near the level it was from the late nineties and early two thousands.

Right, Yeah, And all of this is happening in the Caribbean, which is not a vast ocean, right, It's not a massive area of space. And as Andrew and I were talking about before we recorded, this has impacted other Caribbean nations, nations which are not the target of the Trump administration's

Yes, I suppose I should provide some context. So there have been seven strikes to date and the fifth strike results in the deaths of two fishermen, the village of Las Cuevas in Trinantobago being claimed among the victims. The governments Transpigo has not made a statement about it, and the families have not really been contacted or providing any

Yeah, as you said earlier, right that them in this instance includes at least two of her own citizens.

Yeah.

And I will say that this sort of Zone of East designation for the Caribbean, it is something that I would this is my personal opinion and consider more of a hopeful ideal rather than a reality. You know, the trafficking that takes place in the region does visit a lot of violence upon people. Is you know, by no means in reality a zone of peace. Even before the

And for the.

Prime Minister to deviate from that solidarity in such a blatant way, it's really quite sad. But it shouldn't come as a surprise because there have been efforts by the US to divide Cara con in the past. During his first term, Trump had pulled some Cara Con countries into the LIMA Group, which was a US promoted coalition of right wing governments that was push in for regime change in Venezuela. And he's not doing the same thing with trying to get some Caracon governments to facilitate his actions

Yeah, I think, I know. I say this a lot, but if you've listened to the song Washington Bullets by the Clash, and then you go to the border, you can kind of join up all the people from all the countries mentioned there and the outcome of US policy and what that does to migration over time. We should

Yeah.

So the big news is that Maria Quina Machado, who is the leader of the Venezuelan opposition as we as we know it today, was award of the Nobel Prize, which was a bit of a surprise and from a very US centric analysis. One idea that has been floated is that the Nobel Committee didn't want to award Trump the prize, but thought that maybe awarding it to an ally of Trump would we be away to modify Trump also possibly to encourage.

Him to take a more peaceful approach at a.

Time that the US is threatening armed intervention in some way in Venezuela, whether that is a counternarcotics operation or more likely a regime change operation of some kind, even though it's very unclear how they would get to regime change from blowing up boats, Wrea can blowing up people.

Maybe we should pause and talk about regime change actually, because I like it's such a problematic idea. Right we have attempted regime changes. My career for the last several years has been reporting on the United States failed attempts to facilitate regime chams all over the world, right, Like, it's not something we're very good at. I don't think that the United States is going to invade maybe do

Well, it's undlikely to happen, because well, it's a very large country and it would take a lot more troops than what are currently deployed, which is approaching ten thousand now. But that's actually that includes all sorts of logistical support. The actual fighting force, the Marine Expeditionary Unit is actually a much smaller I've lived in Panama as a kid, and I was not old enough to be there for the invasion, but I lived there some years after that.

Of the Pentagon.

We had thirteen thousand troops already there ready to go. I think they doubled that for the invasion, which was officially termed Operation Just Cause, usually called Operation Blue Spoon.

But they had to come with the sex of your day.

And of course Panama is a tiny country and Venezuela is twenty times larger than Panama.

Yeah, it's fuss, so it's very odd.

It's obviously they have deployed many more troops and a much larger fleet than it's necessary for a counter narcotics operation. Incidentally, it's the US Coast Guard that carries out counter narcotics interdictions and does it very effectively, and incidentally does it with the cooperation of other countries which coordinate intelligence or just simply surveillance of suspicious ships or boats or planes and tip off the US Coast Guard. Even the Cuban

Clearly.

It is meant to be more of a regime change operation, but again I don't see how the one leads to the other. I believe that Trump thinks that if he just saber rattles a little bit and possibly tries some decapitation strikes the way that the US did on Soleimani and Iran, that's somehow the regime is going to collapse, and that does not make any sense. Maduro has surrounded himself with the security, a lot of it, including through Cuban advisors.

He keeps his whereabouts very secret.

Even if somehow they were to drone strike him, it's not as if the regime as a whole would all because it is an extremely militarized regime that is upheld by the armed forces who are not going to break with him. Because they have a hand in every lucrative business both legal and illegal, in Venezuela.

They're not going to be.

Paid off or not be swayed by a bounty that is currently what something like fifty million dollars. I mean, there are people around Madula that have made upwards of a billion dollars in oil rents. So it's not like you could pay off people to betray either.

Yeah, and it's not. Nor is it like a cult of personality situation, like certainly not. Now, Java has had something of a sort of charismatic leadership role, but Madula

But there was an election quote unquote that took place last year. It was broker largely by the US. The US under the my administration was pushing for some kind of negotiations between the opposition and Venezuelan government. They convinced enough people in the opposition to stand for elections under what was called the Barbados Agreement in twenty twenty three.

Incidentally, oil the.

Price of oil was about one hundred dollars a barrel when he was president, and he was able to spend a lot on social programs, but that is sid Yeah, it helps. Madudo is pretty unpopular with this point. He is pretty widely seen as both a tyrant and also quite incompetent at managing basic state services. So he was going to lose unless he stole the what he did.

Yeah, and a sad margin.

Yeah, yeah, No one believed it, And I have to say one of my critiques of the bottom administration is that I think the whole thing was rather naive. I think they calculated that somehow Maduro would let himself be voted out of office. Maduro is we talked about under a bounty, has a bounty on his head. Many people in the US politics, of the US Republican in particular, have promised that they're going to send him to jail. So why would someone in that position, you know, give

Who ran against Alto in the first election.

And it's even within those factions there are there competing personality. It's a lot of it really is more personal and ideological. But Marie Corna Machado, she is on the right politically. She you know, styles herself after Margaret that she is also, I will give a credit for this, a very good organizer. She is famously kind of gone into communities that have historically voted with the Cha Vista left and convinced many

Try to best them on the first one to kill a novel laureate.

I guess, right, right, yeah, But you know, will it bring peace? I'm not so sure, because Marik Gordon Machaalo has also been very closely allied and supportive of the Trump administration, and her side of the opposition has been encouraging the military strikes, backing sanctions, even though the sanctions both have done nothing to dislodge Maduro and also contribute to a great deal of suffering for the Venezuelan people.

I think that nothing.

Appears likely to lead to regime change. But I can understand the desperation of people living under what is broadly acknowledged to be an extremely repressive region.

Yeah, and just the grinding poverty of everyday life in Venezuela is so like I've heard so many stories from so many people of such a difficult existence there. I can understand people's desperation, Andrew, you know, it's spoken about it like the Gulf between the government of Trinidad and Tobago and the people of Trinidad and Tobago right now, And obviously the same is true in Venezuela.

Right.

It's not the opposition figures living in Spain who suffer when we have these sanctions, Right, it's not opposition can to get blown up when they go fishing. It's regular working class when it's way than people. Yeah, so do you want to talk about like, I'm not even sure what we can do by way of solidarity with these of these nations, But maybe you have some thoughts on that.

I'm honestly at something of our loss myself, speaking from a small island, I think the US's superpower status is almost like into an eltriche horror. It feels like it's unfathomable how you could even go about approaching Other times, you don't try to remind myself that people have thought, and one you know, people have resisted, and one you know, currently there isn't that much going on.

There are murmurs.

They are momas of fair of disdain or disagreement, of distrust. In terms of grassroots effort, there's a lot still to be done.

The leader of the move On for.

Social Justice, which is a small a progressive political party in Toronto, Bago, it's a guy named David Abdullah, and he has been part of this assembly of Caribbean people who have been signing and issuing a declaration reasserting our desire for peace, and that has been signed by various

We don't want intervention, you know.

And right now, all we can really levy is our voices, you know, our woods and all we can really do. I think, besides protest, what is going on is prepare for the worst, to ensure that we have you know, sit and support systems in place in case, you know, push comes to shove.

Yeah, that's pretty bleak, Michael. Do you have anything to add on how people can can be in solidarity with the people of Venezuela currently.

Well, I've been calling for people broadly throughout the world to have solidarity more with people than with states, and certainly with veness world people as opposed to the Venezuelan state. I wrote something for the Center or International Policy about this, and listen, you know, it's not my place to police

So it's just it's not.

Helpful to view the world for in this campus lens. You know, I think that if people, whether they identify as on the left or or whatever, want to show solidarity, I think it should be with the Venezuelan people, which means.

Listening to voices within civil society.

In Venezuela.

There are a lot of NGOs, there are a lot of labor unions, there are a lot of human rights advocates that are not opposition parties, that are not running for office. They're not necessarily calling for regime change. Made them very critical of sanctions, but they have tried to push for better changes, you know, quality of life, you know, reforms that might lead to less repression, open up more space for civil society, and you know, those things are necessary when people are really living.

Day by day, you know.

And I think that if people on the left want to play the long game and understand care about the prospects of the future, they need to understand that the Maduers is the worst model for them to be associated with, you know. And this has already been taking place with campaigns, selectoral campaigns around Latin America where Cannon's on the right run against the boogeyman of you know, Chabbismo, of like

They're all carrying.

With them stories about why they left right And so if there ever were to be democratic collections in Venezuela, it's pretty clear the country would turn to the right.

And I don't think we should be surprised by that, you know.

And I think we should also recognize that many of the things that Maludor embodies, these strong men politics, are things that are embodied by other strong men, not just on the left too.

You know.

I would just point out that least according to his son, Trump has privately expressed a lot of admiration for Madudo. I read John Bolton's book, and you know, the former National Security Visor. You know, maybe he has a lot of reasons to lie, but you know, he did say that Trump privately expressed a lot of admirasy for Maludor being, in his words, too smart and too tough to be overthrown. You know, was really happy to see him sprounded by

Yeah, definitely. I find that tendency on the American left or and that sort of Internet left to be massively frustrating. Like as someone who went there to see the revolution, who went there to understand it, and who spent masses of time with Venezuelan people in the Darien Gap at the border in Venezuela, I'm very fond of Venezuelan people, and I think, yeah, our sort of direity should be

Sure, at least on my end, I suggest looking into all local news. Now, it's not the best source in terms of actual interrogation of the issues and the ways in which some of the narratives just kind of get repeated uncritically, but you do get at least the occasional interview, the occasional quote from a non ust Department source. I would also suggest on Instagram there are a couple of pages that bring a more radical progressive voice from the Caribbean.

Yeah, I don't really have any go to sources on this.

I would say that it's enough of an interaction once and that all.

The major news sources you're covering it.

So you can read really any news source in Latin America if you speak Spanish Portuguese and see how that recording is different. Also, incidentally, by in Spain, you know quotes on the side.

They do pretty good reporting. Yeah, they've been doing pretty.

Good reporting and there's lots of blogs as well, and you know, newsletters check out. I will say, just made this. I'm biased because I focus a lot on crime. The site Insight Crime is pretty good in terms of looking into specific criminal groups, liked Aragua and calling question if you know, if this really is a you know, it's something that is controlled by the puppet master from you know, Flores, you know, Likeldor and some of these, some of these narratives that are justifying this.

I'd also just as.

A recommendation, I would say, you know, maybe it should be a little bit skeptical too about the timing and the purposes of these things. I did point out in a piece that I wrote for the Center for National Policy. Then the first boat strike happened on the same day that the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a redacted number

Yeah, leak, I think it's probably a reasonable conclusion. Give them where we're at. Where can people find both of you on if they want to follow you online on social media or find more of your writing. We'll start with you, Andrew.

Shure, Well, you can find me on my YouTube channel YouTube dot com, slash Andrew's own, or you could just call my website for all my other links, Andrew sage dot org.

How about you, Michael, I do have a website. You can look up my name and that should come up. I haven't updated it recently, I probably should. I'm also on Twitter x blue Sky as my name m.

P A A R L B B r G, so you can look me up there.

Great, Thank you very much.

With you.

Welcome to it up here a podcast where you good and not everything that is called co op is good.

Sometimes they're not actually really co ops.

I am your host, Mia Long, and today we are joined by the people struggling under the tyrannical fist of a co op, a thing that shouldn't be possible and yet somehow.

Yeah.

Yeah, So we are talking today with Es and Finley, who are booksellers at the Seminary co Op in Chicago. And yeah, we are welcoming the union back to the show. And dear God, what a disaster.

What a year it has been.

Well, it's really great to be found. I wish we were back with slightly better news or yeah, since we were last here, certainly, Yeah, because when we last spoke, we had just sort of theatrically announced to our management that we were in an organized shop with the IWW and we were going to be bargaining with them for better wages and humane working conditions.

For us all.

And they were like, yeah, you're a union, we so recognize that, and then they have sat on their hands ever since.

Yeah, so let's roll back all the way to the beginning and explain a little bit about what the Seminary co Op is for people who weren't here. How many years ago was that though?

That must have been last year.

Yeah, yeah, it was a while ago.

I don't know, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the Seminary co Op is a set of two bookstores in Hyde Park. The Seminary co Op Bookstore, which is a misnomer on two out of free counts, it's not a seminary anymore. It's not a co op anymore. It is still a bookstore, although it is a not for profit bookstore, which is a mysterious category of business, said that doesn't exist anywhere else, baffling.

Yeah, briefly, just to enerject, I do think when I would announce events and sort of give this exact breakdown for audiences, like I said, not for profit bookstore whose mission is book selling, right, And when I was hired of, like about three months before we announced we were unionizing, the way it was put to me was other not for profit bookstores, they do a lot with like family literacy,

It's just real library, Like we have this, it's called library, so they're.

Really big book store. Just I don't know, it was vague, yeah.

Baffling, baffling, yes, yeah, And then I guess. I guess the second part of it is like when they say it's a co op, what does that mean?

It means truly and as conspeaks more that it was founded by Chicago Theological Seminary students and there was a reason for that.

Yeah, like they did want to buy corsebooks at the at the prices that retailers got them wholesale, and so the thought was, I forget their names, but we have the pictures of them. It was like a Cavanaugh or something. But these two guys just you know, if you were a student at Chicago Theological Seminary, we're even like a

And then when they dissolved the like ownership shares and stopped being a co op. That was twenty nineteen when they organized as this not for profit. It's not a five oh one C three, they don't have nonprofit status.

But like, up to that.

Point, we couldn't do that because we were not a legitimate nonprofit. We were this other thing.

Yeah, so since twenty nineteen it's been that, and then since twenty twenty four, it's been that plus Chicago's standalone unionized bookstore.

For now, we're hoping that others follow in la they will.

Yes, I feel like it is not a great sign of your business being a well run when you are doing a thing that like rookie activist campaigns do, when they're like, oh shit, we got a bunch of buddy, we need to borrow someone else's five O one three status, Like yeah, great, great job management, like but incredible stuff.

And like, for me, part of what's been so like just mind boggling is like the not for profit bookstore who's messed this. Book selling does sort of give this, you know, if we're like a five oh one C three who often does it they don't turn a profit or what they do they reinvest it back into the

Yeah, well, and it's and I think it's also worth noting that, like even from the perspective of capital, like all of the giant tech companies didn't make money for like decades and all those motherfuckers were walking off with like one hundred billion dollar payouts, you know, like they only ever started making money when they started like reeling in a bunch of government contracts for like web services

It's like, motherfucker, Like have you seen the rest of capitalism?

Like shit pay.

Your workers, Like yeah, oh yeah, God damn well.

We keep using that one meme over and over and then it is true, like we're trying to balance the budget.

It's true.

The candles drill, thank yeah, yeah, because our management is so infuriating. And they also in the year since we've been bargaining having an interim director and spent most of his tenure searching for an executive director to take over, that person is being paid one hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year to our knowledge, Jesus Christ.

And that's the.

Offer that we know of. We have yet to get his contract, even though we did make a formal information request for it.

Yeah, which is fucked. And it's also like yeah, like every time these companies are like, oh, we don't have money, and it's like, okay, I can find like an unbelievable amount of money that you have given to someone to like to give a random, nonspecific example that has nothing to do with with with any company that is in any way related to this show.

Live or Dead.

By a board Ape Yacht Club NFT.

Like this is like there's spent three hundred dollars on Google homes speakers for fifty seventh Street books and I'm like, wow, my having that three hundred dollars would change my life. But also like, you're paying that union busting lawyer thousands of dollars that you could be paid reverse. Yep, but that's that's capitalism.

Yeah, they have enough money to make your lives miserable, but they apparently never have enough money to you know, like bake your lives not miserable, because they have to spend that money on making your lives miserable.

Yeah, and it's so intentional because making us miserable means that they are wearing down the number of people that they have to deal with and making the people who are left so tired and so frustrated and so much less capable of fighting them.

Yeah, and that feels like just you know, fens leaving. We've also had a number of folks like our bargaining unit that the last time y'all spoke last year was like twenty five people. Now we're down to eleven and it's there. They've refused to hire anybody time yeah, of course, but they've been giving seasonal workers sort of like extra hours, and that is someone's got to start counting they have, like unless they work for ninety days, they don't have to.

The classification of signal workers and particularly of event runners, has been a point of contention throughout negotiations this whole time, because obviously, from our perspective, we want anyone who's working in the store in any capacity to be involved in the union. We want them to not have this random scab force that they can deploy at will. Yeah, And that has always been the point that gets revisited over

Those are i'll say, the most recent member, like part time, full time member of our staff who's not me. None of us knew she was hired, and she just came up took a book right off my cart and I was like, bitch, what but she But those were events, those were the seasonal workers at the store. The other day, like I worked one of the Chicago Humanities events with them, and it is like, yeah, then they just changed the qualification of who can be in the union.

Yeah, it's been very intentional, and it's been just like over and over they revisit and classified and less down.

Yeah, we've done I think too. Since you last spoke, like a couple of work stoppages and then picketed outside of our store as well. But that I don't know in terms of like sort of regressive bargaining to attrition that we're seeing and that like they refuse to hire other people even though they're kind of shooting themselves in

Yeah.

And I mean, like you know, like I sound like we ran into organizing cues. We spent like I think it was two years bargaining for our contract, and they didn't have the capacity to literally force half the workforce to quit.

But like, oh, don't worry.

They don't have the capacity to lose this many people are falling seas and they are how few people they have Yep.

This whole thing is it's just like a really really common managerial tactic, yeah, which is just like we're going to make everything unlivable and try to get as many people as we can to quit and then just make everyone else's lives a living hell, which is like this is I think I've said this before, but it's like the extent to which the strategy is just the deliberate infliction of terror.

Yeah.

Well, and the strategy is just tank your business, which seems incredibly conintuitive from their perspective.

And like there have been events for like it's been a book about like Karl Marx labor organizing, whether it's a history or like a like sociology book, and folks are like, I waited to buy this book here because it's the union bookstore, And like there is a way that us being a union bookstore could look given like that folks on our board are really progressive, people like Adam Gettichew, like State Senator Robert Peters, who's like running

We hold on sidebar Ale Gritch, she was my professor.

Yeah, I talked to her today.

Wait, she's just part of the management team.

No no, no, there's okay, so this is part of it's just.

Like a different thing. Okay, sorry, sorry, this is okay.

No, no, no, this is This is where like us being a not for profit bookstore but not actually like having any legal standing as a not for profit gets a little confusing. And like Finn, you can probably speak more to how this has come up in the bargaining meeting. But when we I don't know if this was around before the cooperative was dissolved and shared are basically like

That because what we were told when we first unionized and when the management team was kind of shifting and reorganizing itself around to the board, was the board is there primarily to advise and supervise and higher the executive director for the stores. And so there is a financial contribution, like they're all significant donors. That's part of the way that they secure their seats is making a large donation

This is bonkers.

Yeah, oh yeah.

That is to say that somehow that experience did not act as a wig up call for this board of directors, and they said, what we will do is hire the next way man we can find and take our hands back off the wheel.

Jesus Christ, is this an institution that people like it would be helpful to put pressure on or.

That's what it's hard to say, because there's this and I think I talked about it the last time we were on the podcast. But there's this responsibility carousel between management who in a bargaining session. Because the other thing is because we can't tell how involved the board is, because they tell us that they're not involved at all, and then they make decisions and we hear about the

Yeah, it seems.

Their involvement has been to recommend that our management hire Jenny Goltz to be their lawyer, and that as about as much as they want to do she is christ like.

Two things too. Then I think there was supposed to be a board member president at the next bargaining meeting, but because our meeting was contingent on having the full financial information that we requested literally a month ago, and when we requested that information the next day a board member, the president of the board said Okay, we'll get this to you. We got it. I think you might know more about the timing of this fit like at the last possible minute we.

Got at the day before the meeting, oh god, yeah, and it was half of what we asked for. Yeah, and then we said this is not what we requested and we cannot meet because we said we couldn't meet without this full information. They were like, we're disappointed that you can't do that, and we were.

Like, yeah, shocking, Yeah, we are back.

Let's get more formally into like what the marketing process has looked like. It sounds like it's been extremely chaotic. They've been not turning over a information. It's deeply unclear who's making decisions which all seem and I can say, this is my professional opinion, not good a technical anout life assessment. Yeah, this is why they pay me the mediocre books.

Well, I think you were just so well informed, yes.

Journalistic insight.

Yeah. So the way that we set it up on our end when we entered into negotiations was we had a core team of three people who were going to be our core bargaining unit who would attend every meeting, and then we had a small team of like three more people including myself that were like alternates in case something got scheduled on one day that one of the core team couldn't be there, and we made sure that we would always schedule one person who was not negotiating

To do that at the same time.

And when we first started negotiating, the management team was sending Dan Meyer, the interim director, and name Kanno, who's our deputy director, who is basically the one person on the management team who is not she's not supposed to be a direct supervisor. She has not actually let go of the people that she was supervising, but she's like in that middle space between like supervising management and like

It is it is a board member, and I think it is Tira Goldstein. Is her name Tia Goldstein?

Yeah?

Yeah.

Every so often in niotiating sessions, Dan or Nai would make some reference to like a financial decision that we were trying to bargain about being like not their choice and being something that would be up to the board, and we'd be like, so take it to the board, and then we'd be like, okay, and then we would never hear anything about it ever.

Again, incredible, incredible work. Seems like a great tactic to never address anything you're supposed to be addressing.

And so the way that we were negotiating, we were trying to come to terms on things that didn't affect the finances of the store first so that we could land some easy wins and like feel like we were making progress and then address the stuff that we expected

That you want.

And we were like, Okay, that's not how negotiating works. And then, in an email that labeled it their best and final offer, which is language that they have yet to take back, they sent us a version of the contract bargaining agreement that we hey, let me just back

Yeah, I've never heard of that before.

But so when we drafted it, we drafted a three year term collective bargaining agreement with a bunch of stuff about procedure and wages and benefits that we wanted done, and so zooming back forward to that best and final offer. Suddenly, the draft that they've sent us back of the collective bargaining moreement is a two year term, and up to this point, all of the offers that had gotten anything close to our ask on wages were in year three, and everything in year one and two was still like

So that's just regressive bargaining.

Yeah, it is.

It is, which, by the way, okay, do you want to explain to our dear listeners what regressive bargaining is and why you're not allowed to do it.

Yeah, regressive bargaining is is a dirty negotiation tactic where one side, without making any sort of give and take concessions like they should to balance a big move, just unilaterally decides to change a term, especially a large term like wages, contract term, et cetera. And so it is taking something that has been tentatively agreed upon and like in good faith taken as a part of the contract that will stand and acting it.

Yeah, and you are not allowed to do this is this is under the under the terms under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act, which you know, who knows. But by the time this episode goes out, there is a small chance it won't exist anymore. A bunch of provisions of it are under attacked right now.

But like that is like, we have a few unfair labor practices filed with the NLRB since the terms of Negotia have been in effect, and they are not, in fact progressive bargaining charges, but issues of status quo where they're trying to change the way that they do scheduling, change the way that they do like absence discipline, which are topics that are covered in bargaining and should only be changed in bargaining while bargaining is active, but they're

God literally gaslighting, yeah, like actual, actual, straight up. You could pick up the gap the psychologue the psychology textbook plight to it, like oh.

Yeah, just pick up that whole lamp well, and we have their words in writing of every step of the way where you can see the language change and be like, no, you are the person who said before that it was

Yeah, and it's also fun because Trump I legally fired one of the Democratic people on it, so I don't have a korum any on the board of the National RELATIONSIP. Boys, they don't have a korum anymore, which is a shit show. And snaking any NLRB like attempt to get anything done to the NLRB really annoying.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think the direct action has been helpful where like just that reality where just they just it would drive me crazy. And it is it is gaslighting. This is traumatizing. If her boyfriend does it to you, it's a red flag. But when your boss does it to you, you know, it's like, yeah, the public's fine with it. Business, Yeah, it's a cost of business.

Yeah.

It is just the continuous, non stop onslaught of regressive bargaining tactics that like from the minute we started, despite the fact that like I was sitting next to the director when we say reunionizing, it was like a split second before she said, yep, we recognize it. And so our direct action at the workstoppage. I remember our first workstop, if you sat for half an hour, management was very cool with that. The second time we did it, we

Yeah, we got a very very email the next day Elevet illustrating what the consequences would be if we tried to do a similar action again in that manner.

And so we picketed outside their store. That was the next direct action that we did. But like I do think our most impactful direct actions have been the ones that have been noisy, that have been incredibly visible. When we picketed last it was on the first day of classes. We sell like a lot of core core course books for the college at the university, and so there were students like that. We we were like, hey, do you have the bookseller who sold you that book to have

I heard so much eat the rich that day from sillennials.

Hell yeah, hell yeah. But it's it is clear that when the public is made aware of what's happening at a store that a lot of people love just so much, like it is a part of the community, and I think so much a part of people's even like my own before I work there, our experience of being in this fight knit bizarre community, and folks are upset like they and I think rightfully so, and that's just I think, really the beauty of direct action is not just that it empowers u f but it really just like in

So and I think they're really effective for that reason, especially because people are really like on our side when they talk to us, but they're also really surprised because like part of the instant recognition thing, part of the being cool with us having union buttons on the register. Part of all of that is the fact that management is benefiting from the illusion that they're on good.

Terms with us.

And so like one of the reasons that we held that picket was to be like, hey, just because they are not stopping us does not mean they have done anything to improve the material conditions that we have been organizing around this whole time.

Yeah.

Well, and also to be incredibly clear about this, like it's so obvious it has to actually directly be stated, which is that all of the things they are doing our union busting tactics, because their strategy here is to do a recognition and then go for the second place where unions was commonly collapse, which is once you're recognized as as a bargaining the second place they fail is getting the first contract, and that that's what they're really

And that's really all it comes down too when you look at what the facts on the ground are is the decisions that they are making are directly tied to the fact that they feel like they have no money, which is directly to the fact that they are paying the executive director too much, which is directly died to the fact that they want to have an excuse to not pay us anything.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like, oh, wow, we don't have enough money because we're spending like one hundred and sixty thousand dollars on an executive director. Have you considered you can simply eliminate this entire expense by turning this into an actual co op. You could do it in like one day, and you suddenly would not have the administration expenses because those people wouldn't be there. You could do this yeah, really easily.

Oh well, And as the like movement in and out of that position over the past year demonstrates, it has

Which there's is something like I know for a fact that like multiple people on that board know what a speed up is, Like, that's a speed up. I know for a fact that you know what this.

Is, and most of them who know what it is have written against them.

Yeah, just kind of like expanding a bit, like or the staff at the Museum of Science and Industry has also unionized, and they were outside of their store, you know, threatening to strike and so like I loved on the picket line, like I had a sign that said fire Jenny, and I went to explain to the Yeah, I want to explain to the UI employee who Jenny was. The UI employee who worked at the Graduate Students United at U Chicago, and she went, oh, I know who Jenny is,

Yeah, yeah. And it's also it's like that that's the thing where this this whole metaphor of like the boss acting as an abusive partner is suddenly getting very literal in terms of who they're who are the people that they are employing do for their other ship, which is defending those people. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's almost like there's a structural connection between management and patriarchy. Wow, who could possibly who could possibly have done this?

Between systems of abuse?

Yeah, Like who could possibly have written about this? Check's notes?

Looks at the books that were written by the members of the board. Yeah, like, yeah, I'm so mad about this, Like we'll nicking after Empire is really good?

It is? Yeah, And I like I don't know how much I can like hold those individual board members responsible, and it seems like so many of them are like just now finding out about it. Yeah, that's some abuse.

But it is also like there's a deep irony for him accepting an award from another union and rescheduling a meeting with.

Ourskay do it?

No, no, no, no, no, it's because we have Jacob, I always say it incorrectly asked me. Yeah, the BigInt. But that's also like part of the other great community support. Like I mentioned that UE employee, but you know, there are other union employees who just because they love the bookstore so much, will show up to every outreach event

So yeah, yeah, the MSI Union, the grad Students' Union in particular, have been incredible allies to us and have been they were huge like presences on our picket because like, because we did an open store running picket, we had only about half of our actual union members available because everyone else had to be on desks in the stores

Yeah.

So my first picket line, I mean, I think it makes its last episode, but my first picket line ever was the grad student picket line in twenty nineteen. Those those the first time I was ever want a picket and it rocks. Yeah, and yeah, it makes it really happy to see that the whole base of sort of union organizing from that has like you know, it's it's this thing that like I remember when this was like you know, like I was there and like one of

Well and then they'll always be like, hey, one thing that we know about Jenny GOLs is she likes to lose, and.

We're like, thank thank you. Then it's not that she likes to use the quote, is she's very good at losing which that's true. Even better. Yeah, like what you were saying about GSU, I don't remember what I think, Like two thousand and eight. Two thousand and seven was like when they said we starting organizing for unionizing the graduate students. I had a roommate who was like a twelve year PhD student who was around when that shit started.

But.

Well, she's just doing postdocs. You're just hanging out. But we had a baby yesterday anyway. Oh but yeah, like I was around he came back to finish his PhD like about the time, like when the contract was ratified, and I just with what is it, sixteen seventeen months of bargaining no contract in the name of my blessed Lord Jesus Christ. Like Jesus Christ. GSU has had, like has such a wealth of knowledge because they've been through just like heaps of bullshit and it's years.

It's like, okay, I will like you the the fucking gs you think they had a whole thing when I was there, like in like twenty nineteen, the whole the

Yeah, shout out to GSU.

Well, And they are a great, great, great example to us all in terms of like how to persist on a fight through attrition, because one of the things that like you try so hard as a management team to do is just wait until ever and gets tired and leaves. And like it seems like Grand Students would be the perfect population just just wait out because they rotate out constantly.

Yeah, there's the thing I remember from I think the last place I read into it was like one of Mike Duncan's things about the French Revolution.

But like one of the things he talked about was like the ways in which part of what caused the French Revolution was that like they spent a whole bunch of time teaching all of these kids these like incredibly radical enlightenment ideas and then they were like, wait, we live in like the most absolute water key that has ever existed. What the fuck?

I hate this?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, Like wait, hold on, And it's like there is obviously always sort of contradictions between like the number of people I have seen write books about labor resistance and then like go bust unions is pretty large. But there's a reason why everyone from like Pinochet through like the Trump administration, I mean back through like the original Nazis.

This or you're fucked.

Yeah, But the workers and the students love each other. They're all kissing. Yeah, And we're the.

Same person sometimes, you know. Yeah, so often.

Yep, yep, yep.

All my comrades a kiss on the forehead, y ah.

Yeah.

And I think like that is I think like the filment of all of this is like the way that one campaign winning can transform the lives of everyone else around you is so astonishing. And I've seen it happen in so many places where like one shop wins and suddenly everyone else is like, it could be us, It could be us.

Yes, it's possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, and I think that we're trying to capitalize on that and trying to make sure that we can be the next person to like capitalize on GSU's win and

Yeah, and that's.

Been really encouraging and bolstering, while management continues to like just not acknowledge us when they feel too cornered. Like they simply never spoke of the picket because it happened outside and so they couldn't be mad about it, so they didn't have to tell us all about it, but they also just didn't speak of it.

Yeah, this is Chicago is a motherfucking union town, and that's what. Yeah, I'll admit I'm angry when I go into work. They don't care enough to get the mold and the dust remediated, you know, and the DUTs, and I can't really breathe when I go into work. And I also don't have health insurance right, oh my god, Well, I do have health insurance, but I have to pay for like, you know, I have to pay for my own premiums through a marketplace there. Yeah, and that's that's

The union crew that we have is a incredibly worthwhile team to be on. It is a group of people that I feel very solid standing shoulder to shoulder with. I think that is, like, without question, one of the things that like keeps the stores a place that you can work, even if it's not a good.

Place to work right now.

Yeah, yeah, And honestly, I think that would have sustained me a lot longer if you were different, you know.

Yeah, yeah for sure.

Wait, okay, sorry, could ripole back to the part where you can't breathe because there's I feel like because there's bolds I feel like you just dropped that very quickly.

It was like, oh, yeah, that's like a normal bar of the work.

What the thought.

Well, so for a very long time you've been allowed to request that you only work at the co op because there is a known mode problem at fifty seventh Street that they can't afford to or can't get the landlord to ameliorate. But there is also at least in our lung experience some sort of growth issue in the venting at the seminary.

Come up, Yeah, it's it's very dusty at beast. And like I when I wear like like a kN ninety five for a little bit, like that helps a little. I take like five bena drill usually and then that je's that kind of that kind of helps. And that's more just I think, like I mean not more. That is in part like my own health. But if I had the resources too be able to take care of my health and get what I need, maybe I could withstand the mold and the dust and the ducks a little bit easier.

But like that well, but also like like as an employer, it is your responsibility to not have your workplace poison your employees, Like I'm sorry, like that part yeah, yeah, yeah, that also make them pay for the medical care to treat medical problems that they're having because you'd poison them with mold.

Like what that's yeah, what Jesus Christ, it's so evil.

Well, and we had a couple of pauses in our first draft of the Collective Bardnaining Agreement that included demands regarding mold remediation at fifty seventh Street, and I do believe th clauses have been struck in subsequent round.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that's a thing that you could ask people to do, which is go ask people to complain about the fucking mold. Like it seems like a thing you could do.

Yeah, that's another direct action. I also noticed, like people in the store, like they cough when they enter. Yeah, you know, and like, oh god, this is where the like the snake eats its own tail. The wheel turns inside the fucking wheel, right, because like maybe, like if I'm giving them good faith benefit of the doubt, management would have if they weren't overloaded with so many tasks that they have to take on, you know, sort of

But because people.

Hire new workers until there's a contract, you are just so overworked and you can't and it's just like this this turns until the boss decides that it doesn't, and it's like this is their responsibility to to bargain in good faith and to treat their workers correctly, Like this is an active decision that they could make that they are not making.

So yeah, I gotts say that that might be the single wildest thing I've ever heard, like an hour into an interview, is oh, yeah, they're poisoning.

Guys in the mold, just the mold. It's just also just like prove that this is the craziest place to work, because like that doesn't even land on our radar anymore because we've been just like banging our head against walls for a year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I keep going back to the abusive relationship metaphor, but like that is one of the big things about the beusive relationships is that because of the information control and because of the way that your world gets condensed down into a really really tiny, narrow set of experiences where you're isolated and you're only interacting with like one person who was controlling everything about

Just to thought, wow, well, and it also just like means that you are too busy to actually interface in any meaningful way with your workers. Like, yeah, if I tell you that it took me two thirds of the day to schedule a fifteen minute conversation with any of four managers who were on site to quit, I would not be lying.

Jesus Christ. They can't even take your resign, bitch.

They at one point tried to reschedule that conversation which I was attempting to have on Friday to Monday, and I was like, I think you want.

To know this. Yeah, it's like managers, you two are getting you too, are getting.

Strewed over by by understaffing.

Oh my god, I do think that's starting to take a toll to on management, which is a little encouraging. They're losing it. Yeah, they are not feeling well, and because like for me, I don't know, I'm not gonna trust a boss like I just stated, for three months in the nineteen ninety seven UAW strike like that's oh yeah, bosses are canceled. Yeah you know, I know how that ended.

Because here's the thing. I think she only talks to us. I feel like the other managers do not speak to her. I yeah, am I crazy.

Yeah I could just talk about that for a very long time, and I don't think we have the time.

So yeah, yeah, before we get into what can people do the help? Is there anything else that you want to make sure that you get to.

I think the big thing that we should emphasize too is as much as we are complaining and frustrated about the process, we know that this is not impass and that we are so sure that like there is still negotiating to be done, there is still conversation to be had, and that like we have been emphasizing that at every opportunity to management as we have to. But like, just because we are tired and frustrated means nothing in terms of us giving up, because this is a fight that is going to continue.

Yeah, yeah, And like to that point, Finn, we're doing this because we love the stores. Like the stores were a really important place for me, just putting down roots in the neighborhood. And I think when you love something a lot, like you got to be brave enough to wrestle with it. And that our unionizing is the right thing. It is the thing that will like hopefully create an environment where the people who make that bookstore run, who

So yeah, we're never going to feel bad for continuing to fight for what is the right.

Thing to do. Yeah, I'm too broke to feel bad.

Yeah, don't be poisoned by bold. Every time you go to the bookstore, support the union.

Yeah, wear your mask at seminary co op. Yeah, take a sab acap pin.

Yeah. Ask to talk to a manager, make it a long talk.

Yeah, honestly, see if you can get one on the floor, we'll help you.

Yeah.

So how can people help support y'all? And do you have places where people can find more information about the campaign and follow updates?

We have a change dot org petition that I think if you can link it somewhere in the description.

Yep, yeah, we will link in the description.

Yeah. So that that does ask folks to sign off and support the termination of Jenny Goltz, their union busting lawyer, as well as releasing like the full state of financial information too. So there's a change dot org petition. You can also follow us on Instagram at some booksellers union We've got the little icon with the sabocat sign up tian.

Yeah, I'm so glad about this.

This is I am going to lead the description with they are poisoning you, because like, I'm so angry about this.

Thank you, I'm too tired to be angry about it.

I'm so glad at this woman the French perspective has remembered that the mold is totally bogus, because I had forgotten.

It's crazy. Yeah, it's so bogus. It's also like it's in such plain sight, like if you're in fifty seven Street Books and you look to the right of the air conditioning unit and room one, you see that shit growing on the walls, and it's like, but I also feel like if I talked to management, which I tried about this, it just is a got a priority. My breathing not a priority. Yeah, it is wild. Thank you for reminding me.

That someone one day, when you win, someone's going to write a paper by necropolitics in this or something like good.

Lord, jeez, yeah some shit. Yeah, sign the petition, follow us on Instagram, help us make our.

Ruckus and come talk to us and our managers at the bookstore because we love to talk to people while we.

Saw them books. Yeah. Yeah, I'll take any good will we can get, so very much.

So hell yeah, Well, thank you to both so much for coming on and just for doing this and I don't know, like a place that was really special to me when I was yeah, when I was there for a long time.

Thanks for your help, Thank you for following up with us.

Of course, it's really nice to have this platform every so often.

Yeah for sure.

Oh yeah, well, hopefully we'll have you back on when you fucking win.

And yes, very round.

I'm buying I'm personally buying the cool Zone media team around at Jimmy's. When we win our contract.

I will come back to my park just for the celebration.

Change everyone's oil while you're down to yeah, yeah, yeah, no, don't take that long.

I won't be ready for a second.

Yeah, this is, this has been. It could happen here, and you too can resist both your abuser and your boss, even when they're the same person, and.

You should, ay man, get them and welcomed.

It could happen here. I'm Andrew's age.

I run andrewism over on YouTube, but I'm here on this podcast with the one and only.

Mia Wong, who does this podcast most of the time.

Exactly exactly, and I think you and I both have something in common, which is that we are people, and we are two people, but the world has a lot more than just two people. It's a really convoluted way of saying that. For this episode, we're going to be talking about population. You know, how many of people there are, and how many of them there will or will not be in the future, and all the different conversations that end up happening around.

That, most of which suck. So it's a time truly.

Yeah.

I mean, every single one of us humans is a product of billions of years of reproduction. But for most of that reproduction, population growth was pretty slow.

You know.

The world's population is.

Estimated at around five million in the eight thousand BC. So five million is like the population of New Zealand right now, or Costa Rica, or Ireland or Norway, but spread across the entire planet. Can you get so many people who are alive in the year one? See though,

You know.

You had famines, you had plagues, you had the occasional war, and you especially had a lot of infant mortality. Yeah, and that's what really kept populations in check. You know, I remember hearing I don't even remember who it was, but this one person had like nineteen children and only eight of them survived to adulthood.

Yeah, they honestly did pretty good, like by those metrics, Like, yeah, then infant mortality rate was unbelievably high.

Yeah.

Yeah, So families had a lot of children, but only a few of them made it to adulthood. Thanks to the industrializations, were able to change a bit. You know, we improved agriculture, we invented refrigeration, we got better fertilizer, and most importantly, we developed advancements in sanitisia. You know, doctors were actually washing their hands. You know, we developed vaccines, so children were dying of measles and mumps.

Imagine that, good Lord.

And we also had an overall improvement in medicine. You know, one of the greatest inventions of humanity, I think is the vaccine. And it's such a wonderful thing that there's not this massive movement of people who challenge it's very legitimacy in this day and age, and threaten all of our lives as a result.

You know, imagine being in that world.

God.

So we eventually hit one billion in the year eighteen oh four, which is just below the current population of China, and things began to accelerate from there. We end up creating something called a Jacob of exponential population growth thanks to like I said, the decline in infant mortality and improvements and fertility and food production and the other billionaire milestone started rolling it. By eighteen oh four, Kiti had

Now he was.

Obviously proven wrong, but in nineteenth century Britain, Marthus's ideas helped justify the harsh wealthare policies that that government ended up implementing, like the spread of workhouses around the country. Also, we speak about faminis if it's this natural phenomenon that can't be helped, that is just almost like a hurricane or a tornado. But famines are usually not actually the result of not having enough food.

You know.

Amartya Sen found that famines usually happened despite food surpluses. He was usually distribution and not scarcity, you know. A famous example being you know, during the Irish famine, Ireland was still exporting tons of food to feed its colonial overlord. So we fast forward to nineteen sixty eight and the biologist Paul Erlich publishes The Population Bomb. He describes visiting Delhi and feeling the crush of overpopulation, convinced that massterviation

Yeah, I think it's really.

Funny, you know, whenever other people push that sort of yeah, humans are destined for the stars kind of narrative. You know, it's a story, a really powerful story coming out of science fiction, and it's good that it has inspired people to learn more about space, and you know that their lives to the study of the stars and that kind

Yeah, that's a full Like get back to me. In a thousand years, we could baby start talking about moving like thousands of people.

Yeah, even thousands or hundreds of people. I mean, we don't have those those massive generationships. We can't even get those off the ground at this stage in our spacecraft. And we also have a lot of issues to resolve on Earth before we spread our problems across the galaxy as far as I'm concerned. But Beyond these solutions, the ideas and public discourses around population have also boothed a lot of conspiracy theories. You know, I'm sure you might have heard a few of them in your time.

Oh boy, yep, this is one of the big Alex Jones things. For example, So he's convinced that there's like a giant plot by the globalists to kill off an enormous part of human population to stop over population or something.

It's yeah, yeah, Honestly, any combination of conspiracies can be smushed together to fit that kind of narrative, and they can talk about all the vaccine sterilizing people, the chemtrails, the five Gita was, the Bill Gates, microchips, they are even the food supply, all these things allegedly being used to sterilize people. I'm not to say that there isn't validity to any claims of the things that we consume contributing to lower fertility. The fact that we clothe ourselves

You know, like if you think it's.

Five gitas, I guess you'd put a I don't know, a tinfoil hat on your junk.

But I mean, to be fair, there was one of the five g guys who did like blow himself up at a giant car bomb.

I did not hear about that a couple of years ago down.

Oh yeah, luckily he only killed himself, but giant giant car bomb in the middle of I wanted to say Memphis or something down Yeah. But yeah, so like every once in a while he gets some real oh boys stuff from that.

Yeah yeah.

I mean, honestly, people could take even the simplest things and turn it into a threat to themselves and others if they're not in the right headspace. So they haven't been given the right sports sad rely and obviously like none of the conspiracies of A nine. I mean, if you have people rejecting vaccines, you know, it's almost like we're in the world that I alluded to earlier, you know, where we have our residence and measles.

For example.

Yeah, Jim O'Neil, who's the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and the acting director for the CDC literally on Monday, called for splitting the MMR vaccine it's multiple vaccines, like, which is basically which is just straight up the Andrew Wakefield I think, like I've said this on seven podcasts on this show now, but this is literally just straight up the Andrew Wakefield anti vaccine thing from the original giant anti vaccine panic in the nineties.

That was the autism seeing thing.

Yeah yeah, like and this is this is this is the guy who's currently running the CDC. It's just being like, no, yeah, you should do this thing.

That's yeah, yeah, you guys are cooked.

Yeah again, this thing that was developed specifically so that Antie Wakefield could sell his own vaccine.

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean that's that's the thing.

If I was conspiracy brain, I would say that actually the popularization of vaccine conspiracies on social media sites contributes to exactly that kind of population control that those same conspiracy theorists famonga about. But that's if I was conspiracy brain, which I'm not.

God, So someone someone believes that somewhere, absolutely, there is someone who's like, the anti vaxxers are a conspiracy to call them goal population or something like.

No, because I mean, we have this very straightforwardly effective human invention and one of the best in the history of humankind. And you're telling me that a couple of people on Facebook and are responsible for the entire government rejecting the effectiveness of vaccines and you know, jeopardizing the healthy entire population.

Come on, yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the true believers are in charge now.

Indeed, indeed they are true believers, and of course people who stand to profit from the dip in the sales of paracetamol and whatever else. So they're those conspiracies about population. And then there's the typical far right Nazi conspiracies about great replacement, right, the idea that shataway elites orchestrating falling blue rates among white populations while encouraging immigration from the

Yep.

The thing about this, obviously is that if you believe that you need to reduce the human population, that it's your obligation to go first.

Yes, well, we are going to talk about those types of people in the next episode. But you know, speaking of the overpopulation, I think nowadays at least an opposite concern that is dominating the headlines. You know, in wealthier, more developed countries, fertility tends to be lower, and that's tied to things like back to education, more women working, urban living, greater choices, greater access to contraception, et cetera.

I live in Trinan, Tobago.

But speaking anecdotally at least, which obviously is not representative of the full picture, I can count, maybe had one hand, the number of people I know my age who think that they'll be able to bring children into the world, whether they want.

To or not.

You know, very few people I know actually want children, or if they do want children, they don't think they'll be able to afford to have children. But maybe that's a selfishness. What do you think.

I mean, I don't know, like I am not interacting with a representative example of the population. But no, yeah, I mean it's a lot of people who are like no, and it's too expensive. It sucks, I don't want to deal with this. But again, like, not not a representative sample here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean you could just look at the economy. Things have been getting wood for my entire life. You know, there hasn't been any point in my life where anyone in my generation could look around honestly and say, yeah, you know, this is we be cooking. You know, it's time to double double it. You know, let's have a child. You know, the housing situation has gotten worse. The cost of living and as a whole has gotten worse, child

It is worth pointing out the last year there was a pretty massive raise in the retirement age people in China. That's being phased in a way where're going to take over the course of fifteen years. It goes up gradually to sort of like spread out the anger over it. But yeah, it is worth noting that China's is like significantly increased or is going to significantly increase over the course of the next fifteen years.

M Yeah.

And then on the other side of things, there is in the retirement age now, but the young people who are working today are more than likely not going to get any kind of pension.

Yeah.

Yeah, I've rather the world of my sixty don't look like the world of my twenties, that would be my preference. So I would rather that we've reached a point as a society where pensions are not the necessary band aid that they are right now. But until then, you know, there's quite the powder keg.

Yeah.

We also have in Eastern Europe, you know, you have countries rolling out pro natalist policies that tie financial support directly to family size. I'm going to get a bit more into pronatalists in the next episode. But there's also the darker side of that pronatalist push in terms of the policies meant to reverse the population decline. Some governments, instead of making life better for potential appearance, are criminalizing They're turning to anti choice policies. They are strict in abortion,

You know.

Obviously, I'm in support of people moving and living wherever they want to move and live as they please. I don't believe in borders, especially as the climate consequences are

Teak.

On the next episode, I'm going to be talking about the ideas around the population, the pro natalists and the anti natalists. But until then, I've been Andrew Sage here with Mia Wong on it could Happen Here.

This.

Trigger Trader, I heard ah, Hello, Welcome to It could Happen Here? The Spooky Special. I'm your host, Garrison Davis. Once again, there has been far too many important world events taking precedents that we here at the show are unable to provide listeners with an entire spooky week's worth

Part of it is.

Just into the microphone. I'm sorry, how you can you can you can get you can get prety close to.

It, Okay. It's a kind of a mix of things really between conventional chaos magic and more theoretical like weird theory stuff like Mark Fisher and the CCRU adjacent things.

We talk a lot about Mark Fisher, some landstuff, metafiction theory, fiction, hyperstition, Delta myself talk about magic through the Internet quite a bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which is relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left.

I've been recruited along on this magical journey. I'm Ryan. I practiced the Vasriana, a Greco Egyptian magical practice, and also am involved in a Haitian voodoo house. Prior to that, I was also an academic for a good period of time where I studied Renaissance rhetoric and political theory, philosophy, and economics. So my contributions are going to be wide and varied.

We've been making a lot of Hegel jokes this weekend, so many Hegel jokes our last crew member, which people may have heard before on various shows him.

My name is Elaine, and I make art and research a lot of Renaissance script mark magic, and most of the things I do are a lot of idiosyncratic practices and based on various folk magic and chaos magic and Balkan folk magic.

Before we continue the conversation between myself and my three guests, let's start by discussing the word a culture, the namesake of the conference. Obviously, this is a combination of the word ac cult and culture, and it describes how the two influence and possibly undermine one another. To read a quote from the person who originated the term, quote, a culture is a word that was inevitable during the hyperactive phase of the Temple of Psychic Youth in the nineteen eighties.

In terms of the conference itself, as we'll get into later, the term a culture very specifically seems to be focused on the study of the interrelation of magical practice and the material aspects of occult culture and its influence and appropriation by wider society. So in terms of political projects or social projects, you can probably relate this. I think that it would be fair to say that it's something like culture jamming if we're looking for some familiar concepts

And relevant to our discussion later. It's influenced in the tech sector and the emergence of AI, which the current manifestation of has some heavily occult origins regarding around a whole bunch of people in the nineties who were writing about AI as this as this occult project, and that influenced many a AI engineer and coder who are now building this stuff and it's becoming an ever present part of our lives, and the occultists now are trying to

I think a culture is a concept is something that's basically been around as long as there's been magical practices, just looking at so much of things, like you know, the concept of the British Empire being invented by John

There may also be one other aspect that's important for our American audience is given that we're recording this in Deutschland, this conference varies significantly from other American equivalent, or something that might be an American equivalent formerly Pantheaicon in and around San Francisco and San Jose specifically, or Paganicon in the Twin Cities, which specifically has much more of a new age neopagan reconstructionist, and so most academic discussion is

As an editorial note, when we're talking about magic, to clarify, we're not talking about stage magicians. We're referring to magic with a K. That is, rituals and practices based on occult knowledge. It seeks to cause change in accordance with will, whether that's changed within yourself or in our consensus reality.

A significant deal of incense given that we were in a former German forge warehouse. The you know, billowing smoke that existed throughout the conference, from fires to incense to various other inflammatory items was rather impressive. But in terms of actual ritual design, it met several elements that I found to be rather impressive. One, it was encompassing of all of those elements that we would later expect to

Dark and spooky.

Dark and spooky, but something to be admired.

They did a very good.

Job, definitely one of the more high effort rituals of the weekend in terms of the performative aspect, with there being little less than a dozen hooded cloaked figures stationed at different points, either holding specific positions in a meditative state for probably over half an hour, standing still in a decision that would become uncomfortable, and swinging, swinging incense, or holding torches or lights. Setting intention specifically is usually

So our first talk by castro Opstrop, who I believe was Swedish, one of those.

He was working at the University of Copenhagen.

The University of Copenhagen certainly Scandinavian of some flavor of variety, focused on William S Burrows and Brian Geyson, I think that it's important, and I appreciated this claim on the outset that they argued that both Geyson and Burroughs are actually closer to the late Surrealists rather than to the beat poets generation which we typically associate them with, which, interestingly enough, I made both of these figures far more

So Burrows definitely popularized the cut up method, which Geyson originated, but Burroughs changed its different forms of manifestations to various mediums of art like the tape recorder and his own writings and just words and language. And I guess the reason why I think talking about this current is important

Yeah, I think looking at some of my notes, some of the things that stuck out to me, especially in view of the fact that the other classes going on at the time began with Alistair Crowley, but we're diving into a lot of more classical and historical magical traditions.

And this is like you know, based on forms like social engineering and the manipulation of the reproduction of reality, which Burrows believes language plays a key role in, even though I might disagree with him in a few ways on like the nature of like a language as a as a human concept versus this like alien concept which it's like infected to human delta. You should explain what the cut up method is.

Yes, well, the name itself kind of is self explanatory, but the idea of being essentially too thick any form of texts or writing, cut up the words or pieces of sentences, jumble them up in a hat or a bucket or whatever, and then kind of like play a jigsaw puzzle with language, reshifting sentences into new ideas and new forms of poetry, especially which I'm just looking at my own cut ups right in front of me.

To force like randomized combinations of the word that you would not choose to combine on your own volition, and seeing why that sort of thought that generates what're kind of meaning can be constructed through that combination exactly.

We're on some of the first cut ups done with books and just making holes, cutting out words and seeing the other words that would appear underneath, and if new meaning would arise through the surprise combinations.

Words from like the future or the past presenting themselves into a current present within the book.

Yeah.

I think one of the Boroughs quotes is when you cut into the present, the future leaks out, which.

Is related to the concept of time sorcery that was talked about towards the end of that discussion. I think another element to the cut up method that's important, especially as it was framed in this a culture context, is as the we quoted from the or as I wrote

As two people work together on something, there's a composite mind that like emerges and affects the work is the concept there.

So when two people collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you through the revelation of the new that was already present. And I think that that's really important to point out because it's not as though there's this outside thing. The implication is from this method is that the new reveals itself through this process that's already present

Not all, not all of us got vaccines.

Okay, care.

You heard it here first vaccine did not know where was it going with this? Okay?

Speaking of methods of speaking of methods of control.

I mean a lot of it.

The new just came out there. Wait just one moment, Sorry, Elane. I likened this to this process of dialectics. But that's because I couldn't shut up about Hagel the entire time we were there, because I don't think enough occultists are talking about Hegel. Why is no one talking about Hegel? Everyone should be talking about Hegel.

I mean, as fun as it is to think about this, like third mind as like an egg grigor figure, which we've we've mentioned before, is like it's like a group thought form, like a being or a force that is generated through through multiple people believing in it. You make up an imaginary friend in a way, that's what of a severtre, but true in a grigoras as a is yeah, of a form of thought that they gained its own, like an autonomy and becomes kind of, you know, like a like a little tiny.

God, I guess.

Or they also combined the third mind idea to like network consciousness. The one last thing I will say on this before we get to like the AI aspect, I guess.

All that happened was they changed their menu and he couldn't order the one food that he ordered every day.

There's been some menus that have changed that I would consider us using this tactic where he recorded sounds from from outside of like people talking or arguing, or walking by or plates dropping, and then played them back outside of the cafe for a series of months until the cafe closed. And this is like the funniest, the funniest form of this sort of magical obsession, because this really is just a crazy guy playing loud sounds in front

There's one other thing that stuck out to me. Given what a lot of the other talks in that space ended up dealing with, along with AI and stuff, was really the speaker talking a lot about the fact that for Burros and Geyson, the reproduction of reality is how

Yeah, and this is something our materialist friend does talk about, is how there's a quote from some neo cons about how like Democrats just have to kind of like you know, react to reality versus the Republicans who generate it, and

The thing about that, though, is that the high perstitional model itself requires to the acceptance of the idea that everything is a fiction.

Yes, like well yeah, I mean a lot of those things go through a process like this, yes, yes, yes, but doing doing such a thing like intentionally and like offensively, right, which is which is the idea that we're discussing here in like a political context. Is this this this offensive reality formation where you literally decide what is real and like what isn't. And you know, if you have hundreds of millions dollars in like a news company at your disposal, this can become easier.

Are you saying that media companies are currently cutting up reality to shape it in the image of the people who fund them.

Yeah, yeah, I mean they are. They are much. It's it's funny because like occultists, I think, are the people who are often.

The clips are you going to use from the conference?

And I will later in my written work, But I think on that note, I think occultists are a class of people who are maybe the worst at doing magic, because the people that are really good at this sort of thing are perhaps way better at the occult element of hiding their their you know, awareness of what they are doing, because they at a lot of them know

That was an excellent segue to an ad break, Laye. Thank you for that, and now a word from our sponsors on this note, though, Gary, I agree with you completely As a former academic and just a healthy level of skepticism going into any magical conference. I sat down, I listened and I've been to enough conferences listening to magicians attempt to map on rather poorly magic onto a cultural figure, and I think Burrows is really unique here.

AI specifically be discussing debates and uses of generative AI in this conference because the last A Culture conference was in twenty twenty three, as these large language models and image generation platforms were just just starting to gain popularity and now they have a stranglehold over at the stock

Well, actually AI came up because the initial discussion question for the panel was what does it mean to talk about art as magic in the digital era? So everyone was very specifically being asked to discuss the differences between the creation process is magic when you can use AI, when you can use large language models to just generate things, and if the generative method using AI was at all related to say, the cut up method or other things.

Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged by the other two talks that we didn't really discuss. The Austin Osman spare was about automatic drawing. So this conception and of you know, this drawing that is coming from the outside, coming from the subconscious, coming from within, with all within one line. But more than that, it was a very traditional kind of European nineteen seventies lecture.

I mean, the initial question was really that people started asking after the panel was proposed, was so, what did the panelists think about ai art? Do the panelists think aiart is magic? Do the panelists think that ai art is channeling? Do the panelists think that, you know, putting a prompt and a language model is the same as

That's actually not true because I got triggered almost immediately because it was our first speaker that responded not to that first question, but to the second question. And the second question had to do with the role of technology and whether we see that there's a possibility for these tools, you know, as a technology, a techne in magical practice, and our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and give us a tentative yes to the tech, to the tech that's core to AI.

They were like, their initial rerection was still also no.

But yes they they indeed got there, but it was unclear at first, and I was a little raw about it, given that seemed completely contrary to the talk that you know that he had mentioned before. There was a question about NFTs. Do you remember this question?

Oh, I tried to put it immediately out of my head.

Yes, that was the fact.

That it started with, like, well, NFTs failed because people like weren't ready to embrace the blockchain as a generative idea for making art, as opposed to the fact that why would I own an NFT if I can screenshot the picture?

Yeah, Well, it was this idea that like NFTs themselves, were part of this breaking up of the control process, the linearity of money and financial systems, that somehow it was related to the cut up method. It was one of those questions that was a narrative before it finally got to your question that really just invited the readers

Yeah.

I think the closest actually that we had to some really like someone even trying to approach it was asking about, if you're making this art, if you're generating these new things, does it matter that corporations are controlling the algorithm by which you're doing so, which started to touch on some of the problems, but still was definitely relying on the base assumption that using a large language model to produce stories or art, that you're interacting with something else that's

And to her credit, my girl Kate Lady, who was talking about Leonora Carrington, the one that seemed to be kind of tangentially separate from the other two but the hybridity really made it was the one that just gave us a great straight Marxist answer of like, no, this

It is also, like I mean, from my perspective, it's also a labory she write, because these large language models and generative AI just scrape like so much data that that's like writing from real artists and created by real.

Like painters and whatever.

And it is the appropriation of human labor to shit out some advertising. Essentially, that is like my main well, aside from all the ecological and the political issues with it, it's like very much that labor angle to it that frustrates me.

Well, in the context of the talk, it's really important to then ground And this is the comment that that I made that the panel broadly seemed to agree with, although I didn't really leave them much opportunity to disagree with me. I mean, you're right, Thank you.

Go on.

So this Burrow's concept of the third mind, this book that he wrote, right, when two minds collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you, again, not about creating the new, but about revealing itself in what was already present.

Yes, but the idea is that you have to have two.

Minds in order to get this dialectical third mind that was inherent in the conditions, the situation, the language of the two. When one interacts with any form of large language model or chat GBT, I in my mind and with what I carry sit in front of a computer and type my input. That's one mind. Can you tell me where the second is?

Because even if you're cutting up a book, there's a mind in the book. There's a story, there's an actual thing there, there's a thing that you are interacting with that were thoughts that were produced by someone that you are cutting up. You are not just scraping the toilet bowl of humans production.

But even if we're going to be generous and say that these large language models are the ones that are doing the cut up process and you are secondary or tertiary or even further down the line to it, I mean it doesn't involve a human intelligence at that point. So just in terms of the you know, the Barosian current, it's just not a third mind. It's the material conditions are such that it is not and cannot be a third mind.

Where I would like to take this discussion is actually the very next talk that I attended as part of a three talk series called the Politics of Taro, and the specific one that I think continued on this line of thought and even stuff like automatic writing was from Icon to Index by Thomas Leak, the Generative Logic of Taro, in which he discussed I will have to check his name later, but discussed an author in the eighty who was trying to use Taro as a way to remove

No, Yep, yep, it's it could happen here.

Electile Disorder Executive Disorder, which is our weekly newscast which we've been doing all year, so we should we should know what it's called by now.

Yeah, that's why I'm so good at doing it naming it.

Yep.

This show covers what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you and me and everyone else. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, and Maya Wong, and we are covering the week of October twenty second to October thirtieth.

Yep.

So I think we should start off the bat by but the same thing we started off last week with, which is that as you're the Halloween. Yeah, well that so on the upside, Halloween woo spooky. On the downside, like forty million people lose, lose, there's no benefits the next day on Saturday.

Yeah, but what's spookier than that. Look, one thing you can't say about the government is that they're not failing to celebrate the holiday.

I am scared of the consequences.

Yeah, stock up on the trigger, treater candy. I guess, steal as much candy as you can.

You're going to need it to stay alive.

See a group of children you run past him.

Tick them. Oh they're kids. They can't stop you.

Ye, hold it above your head. They can't reach it.

No, it is. It is extremely grim, and there seems to be no indication from the Republicans of the Trump administration that they are going to work with the Democrats to resolve this without sacrificing healthcare for millions of Americans.

Yeah. So, Gavin Newsom, a friend of the show, has deployed the California National Guard to assist food banks in the state.

Oh my god.

Yeah. Like, Look, the thing is, when you participate in the largest crackdown and protected First Amendments speech in recent history, you don't get to show up and hand out snacks and feel good. And many food banks, including some in the Bay Area, have refused the help of National Guard members, right because they have this very obvious concern that some people might be reluctant to go to places where the soldiers who are standing right next to all the different

One of the biggest problems is how much food banks get food also through these programs, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I mean support. Yeah, food banks themselves are going to be struggling right now. So like I actually I did a thread on lib on blue sky. Where were you going to say? Lived Twitter and then corrected to blue Sky. I was going to say lib Sky. Yeah, yeah, I fact checked myself. It's blue wave Sky.

There you go.

You cannot get that past me. I could pick up on what you were doing.

I garitone Davis like a viper struck. Yeah, at the core of my thought process. Yeah, So if you're on if you're on Skeeter, then you can you can find the threader made I link in the show notes with food banks that are looking for donations, and you can also had to find a food bank in your area if you're interested in that. But yet, this is a

Doing the thing that like. There's a representative. Clay Higgins of Louisiana made a tweet today blaming Snap recipients for not stockpiling a month's worth of food.

Does he understand how this works?

He said, Try to get your head wrapped around how many pantries you can stock with forty two hundred dollars, which is what people get on average per year. If he says, with Snap benefits in properly shopped groceries, any American who's been receiving forty two hundred dollars per year of free grocer reason does not have at least one month of grocery stock should never again receive Snap because wow, stop smoking crack.

That's inhumane.

Dealing with the shit that they talk about is almost pointless because they're all liars. But like, as like what you said, Like people are on Snap for a wide variety of reasons. They're largely employed. They're just not getting enough money to actually like survive and feed their family. And like the forty two hundred dollars a year for a family is not in fact enough to stockpile a huge quantity of food.

No, it's not like it's remarkable how totach the people who make our laws off from Yeah, the working class experience.

There is no way that guy knows how much of banana costs, No way, zero, Well.

He has no idea. That man isn't shopped for himself in fucking twenty years.

Yeah, yeah, that guy does not know how much it cost to buy mac and cheese for your kids.

And obviously you know we hear we talk about storing food, about canning your own food, and there are things you can do even on a budget when you don't have much money to build a stockpile. And that's why I encourage people to pay attention to things like prices at the grocery store when things are a lot cheaper because they're in season, and learn how to do things like pressure can right and pickle different foods you want it,

Right.

And I don't say that as like a critique of people or to like shit on people. It's just like it's a it's a fact. It's the fact that people need to increasingly accept because this is not going to be getting better in the long run. Yeah, let's talk about Graham Platner.

All right, Oh god, I do so to touch politicians.

A couple of weeks ago, James brought up Graham Plattner, who is running for Congress in Maine, and some ads that he had put out which were really and I still think are really good ads, good ads in terms of they were effective objectively. He raised a lot of money. He was leading in the polls prior to us. We'll talk about a bunch of scandals coming out. He's no longer leading, but he was doing very well for a while.

They called maniacs. Technically I think they're called maners. That copy right Garrison.

So he was coming across as a very like blue collar guy, right, like a very and kind of crude, but crewed in a like I'm a straight talker sort of guy. And that worked. That that was a good campaign, and we highlighted that because I think it struck you know, James is the one who brought it to our attention, but I think it struck all of us as, oh, yeah, this is a guy who was kind of doing talking to voters in a way that we wish more Democrats

On you bad, Yeah, not cool.

Platner has said, basically, it was a dumb tattoo I got when I was young and just joining the Marine Corps, and I didn't know what it meant. And I am willing to believe that like a nineteen year old who joins the Marines would make a bad tattoo decision, because I have a lot of friends that were in the Marines and they all have bad tattoos, right, none of them have Death's heads.

So you got it well in like Croatia drunk.

Yeah right, and he was, he was hammered.

And yeah, the probability of walking into a tattoo shop in Croatia and coming out with a Nazi tattoo is extremely high.

Sure, Yeah, it's not low.

Yeah, Yeah, they're on the flash seat for Friday the thirteenth. They probably are.

If it had just come out that he'd had this for some period of time, being like, yeah, I got like I was hammered in Croatia and I got a fucked up tattoo and realized it and got it covered. I had it been like not a story, right, like man gets bad tattoos, dumb kid. But number one, he kept it until he got it covered in like the last week or so.

Yeah, let me tell you that was a real piece of odd that he covered.

It with, which is a wild choice to just keep it for that long. But also he and I had no idea until it like came out as a story because I forget what outlet, but some news outlet found out that he had it and was going to publish it, and I.

Think his team told Pod Save America when he went on the PUD Save America pod.

Yeah, yeah, but he had heard that there was opposition research.

Yeah, yeah, because he had sent out to like another thing that he went on, like a picture of him with his shirt off, and they were like, wait, what, Like.

There were a few of them floating around.

Huh.

If you've lived that kind of life, there's going to be pitches of you with the shirt off, you know, like the refusing to acknowledge.

Yeah, I knew earlier in my life that it was a death's head and like there's reports from people who knew him that he called it a tote gough and joked about it.

I didn't know that. I'll be clear.

I don't actually think that Graham is a secret Nazi sleeper agent. I really don't. I think he's a guy with really questionable judgment, which is where he's and you know,

What do you think that Joe Rogan of the Left meant? Vibes essays.

We wanted a guy who took loads of steroids and didn't have problematic opinions.

I'm never gonna say this in any other instance about Joe Rogan, but he wouldn't have gotten that tattoo because he knows what a death said.

I don't know if he knew in like two thousand and seven or what. I think there's a very strong innate world where two thousand and seven, Joe Rogan is traveling at accidentally gets a god tattoo.

It's not impossible. You're right, You're right. I guess I'm just assuming he's watched enough World War two documentaries to know.

Yeah, but watching those while like smoking weeds, so he doesn't remember anything.

That's fair. These are fair points. You're making Garrison. So a couple of surprising things about this, and this is not the only scandal that's kind of come out about him recently, but at number one, it did not immediately take a strong hit to his polling. This seems to be primarily just because a lot of voters aren't aware of it. Because in poles where they at where they informed people that he had a Nazi tattoo, his support

Sure.

And yeah, at present, according to so called strategies who did a pole very recently and it's the most recent poll, Mills has forty one percent from likely voters and Platner has thirty six percent, although about a fifth of respondence are undecided. And yeah, this is a pretty dramatic upset because prior to the whole Nazi tattoo news coming out, Platner was leading Mills by about thirty four points. So this has gone from Platner looked to have it in

Yeah, polling never wrong.

But yeah, so I don't know. It's one of those. Somebody got angry at us on the subreddit, being like, I can't believe they're hiding that like this has happened, you know, with this guy that they endorsed like we did Endor seven Uber two like this, this shit was breaking. When we were recording the ed last week. We made like a reference about it, but not much had come out, and there certainly hadn't been time for us to really

A little bit.

No one's voting yet, so It's not like we're influencing the election by not coming out or whatever.

Yeah, like we only get to coup so much. We have one hour of like News round up show a week, and the Blue Sky Twitter drama about Grand Plannery is not as important as the fact that millions of people are losing their food this week.

Now.

One thing that is interesting, and I do think this is an important race just because of kind of what it says about what sort of strategies are working now and igniting the base, and what kind of stuff does matter in terms of scandals. I think there are some things that are really relevant here. One thing that is interesting to me is that, according to a poll, very recent poll the article came in October twenty sixth, twenty twenty five, majority of young Democrats still back Graham Platner

Explain your generation to us Garrison, why you like this.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff that the Zoron campaign kind of like ignited around.

Yeah, you're right, exactly absolute rhetoric.

And then you know, Sanders and AOC had their anti oligarchy tour, which I mean, we don't need to like debate like the use of like that term. But no, there isn't a huge frustration at the geriatric Democratic Party, and this sort of populist rhetoric is very popular among young people as it as it has been since the Sanders campaign in twenty sixteen. This isn't like new a revolutionary information. The fact that this guy has gotten to this point has gotten either past scandals or it's navigating

Yeah, and I want to be clear, I didn't bring this up because it's bad even that, like young people are still supporting him. I think this is something that people, especially in the Democratic Party, who care about winning, And I think it's people on the left who are trying to look at what can we do to get more progressive and combative candidates who are going to do something both about the right and about the billionaire class. What

Yeah, and because surely there's one other guy who can say these things enough. You can find one person who could use rhetoric, is good on camera and has not had a totalent CoV tattooed on their chest for almost twenty years.

Yeah. And also the most wild part about this, I don't even think is that it's that this guy was in Blackwater, like so Eid's constell Us, but he calls it Blackwater.

He was, yeah, that's the other scandals. Please, let's let's yeah.

He deployed to Afghanistan for Blackwater in twenty eight their first shrug administration. No one at any point in this process went, hold on, wait, this guy went to fight in Afghanistan, like in twenty eighteen.

Like, yeah, they prosecuted the guys from Nisar Square, Yeah, from the Sour Square massacre. Yeah, after the square, Like those people got prosecuted four years before that.

And he joined Blackwater in twenty eighteen.

And to be clear, because this is something James brought up when we talked about this in our chat previously, he didn't technically join Blackwater because Blackwater has changed its name and I think merged for a couple of countries. It was a culprit.

But to be fair to me, yeah, he got all that Blackwater. He said, I worked for Blackwater. There's a way in which like, I'm okay with people fucking up if they acknowledge they funked up, right, Like, I'm okay with him saying I did this and it was wrong, So I left and I regret doing it.

I mean that that is what he's saying, though it was specifically after this deployment. Yes, this is where he says that like this marked his like political coticalization or like yeah, during the path of like how he viewed his life in politics specifically was negative experiences during this deployment.

Yeah, yeah, And I guess that is something I have really complicated opinions on because I'm I'm not and I really have a lot of issues with folks on the left who are like anyone who was ever in the military is forever and deeply like I think that's yeah, deeply, deeply unseerious and incredibly counterproductive. And I don't I think that, like it's good that someone can do something as fucked up as joined Blackwater and realize that they did a

I don't know.

Yeah, it was like that was it was like a decade after like he was one of the so he wasn't one of the like the torture guards. But no, no, like when he was a marine. He guard, He was like one of the guys he was like assigned to guard Aubu Grab. Yeah, I think, yeah, the torture scandal. But it's it's like it took you, it took you like a decade after that. Yeah, is that maybe the thing I'm doing is bad? Like I just I just oh god.

Well yeah, And that's that's kind of like the because I don't, you know, I don't think having been stationed to guard a place where horrible thing like war crimes were committed necessarily damns you forever, because like you don't choose where you're stationed. A guard who knows when he became aware what was going on in the place he was guarding, But at some point he did and that wasn't like the moment where he was like, ah fuck,

The invasions, this guy ship out in twenty sixteen.

Yeah, that's like it took him.

I would it took him, manutes, it took him reasonably long time. And also when you read his interviews about it, he's like, I did it because it was.

Fun, which is just like, that's that's honest.

Yeah, it's honest. It makes me insane.

Look, I mean, that's that's why people join the Marines, is they like money and or they're adrenaline jokies.

Right, I'd rather he was honest about that shit. Actually, like I I am. It is just like distressing.

I actually like that. And again I do kind of like because there's not a there's not a perfect answer as to like, well, when should you have had a change of heart about something like this before you can like be trusted as a political leader on the left. And I actually don't really know. I think I would be inclined to be like give him the benefit of the doubt on that stuff more if it weren't for the not.

Yeah, play shift out with plug eighteen.

Yeah, all those things together are kind of sketchy.

Maybe do a couple of tours as a dog catcher first.

Like, you know, I'm seeing a lot of because there's a whole lot of like, well, no one else who has a chance of winning in Maine is supporting the progressive policies he is. You know, you can't have it all be perfect or whatever he's you know, we should at least hope that he gets in and he does

Right, it's his reaction to it. It was really disqualifying, right, like, right, there's a world I guess I didn't know that he told people it was a total golf that's pretty fucking incriminating.

But yeah, there's reports from people who have said that it's it's unclear.

Okay, there's reports, got it.

We don't know objectively, but people have talked to the press who knew him and said that he described it as a total cough to them several years ago.

Okay, Yeah, if his response had been like, oh fuck, I didn't know let me get that covered up immediately. That's his response was so bad. To defend it and to be like there's a conspiracy against it. Really bad. It's that failure. And it also just shows like a lack of judgment and lack of ability to like be critical of his own actions, which is worrying.

It shows the kind of Trumpian fancifulness that really worries me.

Yeah, demnic Augay kind of thing.

A lot of populists are like this, like this is this is a part of populist Yes, yes, I don't think you can fully decouple.

That's probably true, Garrison. Yeah, that's probably true, But I I don't know. I'm not gonna tell you how to vote. I've made a habit of never telling people how to vote. So if you're in Maine, enjoy your mc lobster and do whatever your heart tells you. It's the right thing to do, my friend. But also, please don't eat a mc lobster there. It's clearly poisoned, you know. Avoid avoid a mc lobster's at all costs.

Yeah, buy an oyster ins to it.

The strongest endorsement Robert Ethans can make, is it not by a MC lobster.

Avoid a MC lobster at all costs.

If you're on the West coast, avoid shellfish, and in some months it will costs because you can get paralytic shellfish poisoning.

Oh yeah, I mean some people, that's just basically getting free muscle relaxers.

James's let's do it ad break for muscle at excerpts. Okay, all right, we are back. Can I do my Halloween ice Nazi? Sure Bevino segment? Is that how you say his name? Bavino?

Greg?

Yeah, Greg Green?

It looks like a Bavino to me. So we're gonna talk about him playing dress up and how border patrol disrupted a Halloween parade. So last weekend, while conducting an immigration enforcement range, border patrol disrupted the root of a children's Halloween parade in Old Irving Park in Chicago, using tear gas and arresting several people, including two US citizens. A crowd gathered around after a border patrol arrested a thirty five year old construction worker who has lived in

Yeah.

Body of Troll agents have generally, just to give some context here, not worn body worn cameras for a number of reasons. Firstly, they just don't want to. Secondly, no one's making them. Thirdly, they believe that it is possible for people to detect the bluetooth signal that the camera gives out and thus find them. This is something that

Now this judge is trying to force them to. They're just refusing to follow the order. Even despite Bavino saying that ninety nine percent of agents have these cameras, which is bizarrely specific claim.

Yeah, like, is he the one percent?

Like, I guess it's like he's just so obviously lying. It's just oh god.

Yeah, it's it's just it's lying. We I think we that should be enough to say. Yeah, I don't know if I said they never wear them. To be clear, they have gone forward and back on wearing them. But it was earlier this year that the specific security risk.

They have access to the cameras. Yes, yes, they're just refusing to follow this order.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now.

The same complaint that alleged that Vino threw a canister with their justification into this crowd also details an incident from the next day, October twenty third, where agents without wearing identification as required by the order, shot a protester in the neck with pepperball from five feet away, and while driving away, pointed a pepper ball gun and I'm gonna read from the complaint quote and then a real gun at declarant Chris Gentry, a combat veteran who was

Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that, I mean, they do this every single time there is any kind of protest, they do stuff like this. They've been pointing guns at people the entire time they've been here.

They've been putting a lot of guns the past few months, as we have reported.

Yes they have.

Yeah, they they kill people, two people.

They've shot more than two people. Yeah.

Yeah.

Saying something like this is insane.

Yeah no. Yeah, it shows obviously like a complete lack of concern for accountabit right now, like like absolutely no thought that you could be held accountable for this.

Yeah no, And it also shows a desire to kill liberally, yes, yeah, which liberals need to be aware of.

Yeah, I mean yeah, yeah.

You can't let this organization continue to exist, nor can you let the people doing this stay free. If you ever take power again, there has to be accountability, and there has to be an end to their ability, to the ability of any law enforcement agency to exist knowing that they are unaccountable and cannot be punished for the violence that they do to civilians.

Yeah, I guess I'll take this point to mention that we've covered CBP and DHS's previous shootings in previous years and the internal review process they have for those, which has led to a lack of accountability even when compared to other law enforcement officers.

Yeah.

During this hearing this last Tuesday, the judge declined to alter the tier row to ban the use of tear gas completely, saying that she believes Baveno quote understands where I'm coming from. End quote. I don't know that we're gonna see a whole lot of tear gas being deployed over the next week. Unquote cool, great, amazing stuff, jumping out an our traditionary.

Greg's picking up on the vibe. So we should be fine now.

Yeah, this Buffdo guy seems incredibly trustworthy. Though Judge Ellis did instruct Blevino to meet with her every weekday evening throughout Operation Midway Blitz till the next hearing in November to provide instant briefings on use of force, though just one day later, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals blocked

Yeah. So the role of Border Patrol Germany is into patrol the physical border and to do enforcement in that one hundred mile border zone. Right. Their role of ICE, the majority of ICE agents are not the people that you see out there, yea, jumping out of cars and doing these these smashing grabs. Right. The majority of ICE agents people who will work in the office, who will check in with migrants through their intensive supervision program, which

Now the border patrol agents are like particularly brutal.

I have not heard that's same. That was a reasonable professional about border patrol agents from migrants. Yeah, border patrol also has a pretty high churn, right as you know, so that they have a lot of people who have joined since let's say the first Trump admin.

Yeah, and that may kind of change things because those people are joining specifically because they want to fuck with migrants. And while that's always been a thing for Border Patrol, a lot of people join the Border Patrol because it's the easiest way to become technically a federal agent. Yeah, and it can be a path to becoming a better kind of federal agent.

Sure, you can be.

A career thing, which is why part of why there's so much ch part of why.

BP just to like characterize some of the issues the organization has had, right has consistently offered waivers the academic qualifications other agencies would not offer waivers for they have a problem, a serious problem with sexual assault, not just of migrants, but of women in the Border Patrol. They call the women in the Border Patrol the fierce five percent because this is an agency that has not succeeded in getting more than five percent of his agents to

Yeah, I mean all of the most brutal incidents have used forced in like Portland in twenty twenty that came from FEDS was Border Patrol.

That was Bortech, Yeah, boord Tech. Yeah. I would encourage people, if they want to get a sense of how Border Patrol sees itself, to go to the social media page that Baveno curates and has created for a while to look. And again he was my understanding, like hemmed up for his social media posts in the Biden administration. He's obviously not being restrained in that way. Now, go and look at I think it's called Border Patrol Special Operations Command

Yeah.

And and that is what they are doing in Chicago.

Yeah.

NBC is reporting that the White House has approved three assignment of at least a dozen directors of ice Field offices, with sources telling Fox News that the cities will include Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Philadelphia, El Paso, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, and New Orleans. This is almost half of the ice

So Bavino like has been on this for a minute, right like, and I'm now realizing we need to cover his his career in more depth. But like I've seen this, Oh where did Bevino come from? Stuff? In twenty ten, when he was out of at the Blithe Border Patrol

The official statement made by DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin at this point says, quote, while we have no personnel changes to announce at this time, the Romme administration remains laser focused on delivering results and removing violent criminal legal aliens from this country. And she followed up this statement with a tweet naming a whole bitch of people involved in all of these news stories, including Bavino and like, praising them for their patriotism. Let's take a look at

It looks like a statue of Stalin.

He looks like a guy in the SS is dressing as a guy in the SS for Halloween.

I don't think it's very Stalin. I think it's very German.

N Actually, that.

Is an ssque looking coat. I'm sorry, it's intense.

He has the little is little stars on his collar and yeah, this this like boxy wool trench coat. It's very with the like shaved sides of his head. It's very clear what he is trying to evoke. This is a little bit koy, but like come on, come on, dude, and to follow this up, like DHS is really is really pushing Bavino now is like the face of this, this mass deportation push and they're making fucking like fash wave pype fash wave hype edit reels.

Of show it. God it's mass.

And I will I'll play the whole thing, but really it's the first two seconds that demonstrate what's what's going on here.

This will be linked in the notes. I didn't realize it was Hampster Dance Coldplay on the soundtrack, Like I I had never listened to that.

Yeah, that's a choice.

We're not gonna play much of that audio, garretson, We're gonna play we are not playing thirty seconds of copyrighted audio, but just the first literally the first two seconds of him doing what is very clearly a se kyle and then transferring it into like military hand signals, but like come on, dude, and then throughout throughout this the rest of the little fash wave edit, it's like pictures of him and his like uh, you know, tactical gear, and then pictures of him in what you I would describe

All of DHS, we need to get rid of.

Yeah, the fact that this guy wasn't fired is going to be looked back upon in the same way that like Allende promoting Pinochet is looked back on.

Just yeah, yeah, it's.

It's yeah, what how else do you describe it?

Yeah, Like, if there was going to be a free country, all of this shit, all of the DHS agencies, all of this needs to cease to exist as a minimum, and these people need to be like haled in front of a neurobird tribunal, and that's that's the minimum viable. There might be a democracy after that.

We need so many Neurembergs.

Yeah, yeah, And like it's not but I don't want to burn a bloat about this. It's not hard to have seen this coming. We have talked about this four years, right, Like, yeah, this began in the nineteen nineties with Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Hold the Line. We've documented this extensively. We've documented the fact that under the Biden administration there was virtually no oversight, right that they were able to detain people outdoors without food, water,

And somewhat more amusing news during the ongoing trial over the different federal agents deployed to Portland and the necessity of that federal deployment and potentially the mobilization of National Guard troops in Oregon being sent to Portland, which is still being fought over in the courts. Portland police were brought up on the stand and testified that during one night out at Ice, federal officers gassed Portland police and

Yeah.

And when Portland Police confronted the FPS agents afterwards, they responded help or get out of the way.

Uh.

And this is simply there's no actually, there's no there's no rules of engagement, right, rules of engagement for you know, soldiers in the like are supposed to be stuff like you don't fire until a certain standard of danger exists. Right, you don't. There are rules at which point you are allowed to engage with which kinds of weapons, right your r Oh, we may say one thing about using a night stick or and it will say something else about using dear gas or whatever. There's no actual ro for

Most FS agents are contractors. They're not full time law enforcement officers.

Right.

Talking of things that it would have been easy to see coming, I want to talk about ICE's facial recognition app. So I've seen a piece of four four media. Four and four media is the most annoying outlet to read pieces in because they will send you seventeen emails a day. Four A form media suggests that ICE is claiming a facial recognition match in its app mobile Fortify is a

There's just no way to know.

It's impossible to say you can't do data on anything happening that far back.

Unfortunately, I have a new one which is more recent, which we're going to talk about next.

Groc This is real.

But CBP one was effectively determinative for migrants, right. We've covered this in great detail here. There were some public records about CBP one that I've looked at extensively. There's sort of too long didn't read. Version is app did not work well on Android phones, especially previous generation Android phones, which are very common among people coming from the Global South.

I've all this stuff does that's the same thing with like how there have been like motion activated fossets and stuff that wouldn't recognize dark scale.

It's a data set that they put in right to my understand Yeah, the results of those scans were determinative for migrants, right. It could determine their ability to make an asylum appointment and therefore to enter the US and make a claim for asylum. This caused people to remain in various very dangerous situations. It has probably led to

Right.

The bill would also inventory fires and damage to wilderness caused by migrants. I guess this is just an attempt to say another bad thing about migrants. It also prohibits any housing of migrants on federal lands unless it is in a prison. It's Lee taking this border hawk stuff and trapping it onto this crusade that he has been on for a long time to deprive people in the United States and people visiting the United States have access to their public lands and eventually to sell those lands

This is.

Maduro does not need your help. Fuck that guy talking of things that don't need your help. Here are some adverts.

I can't believe you're throwing the People's Republic of Venezuela under the bus like that, as there facing down war with the United States of America.

Right now, standing in the breach against imperialism. Yeah, I read a lot about it.

What happened? Does hashtag solidarity? Jane?

I'm sorry. I read about it on the Gray Zone and I'm changing my opinions, having spent more time than I'm sure half the staff the Gray Zone in Venezuela.

Speaking of Spooky, the ship Trump's getting is part of terraff negotiations who.

Jazz, jazz rock, jazz rock, jazz bo.

All right, So, as we talked about last week, Trump has been in East Asia to do a bunch of meetings for conversations already happening. And this is where terrificagotiations have been being handled. This has been being held in South Korea. South Korean President Lee JM Young presented Trump with South Korea's highest honor and also gave him a giant golden crown. Have you all seen the giant golden crowd?

It's that easy, folks. All you gotta do, it's all you gotta do is just these little stupid things, and then he loves.

You, giant gilded crowd.

I haven't seen the crown. I'm gonna look at the crown.

Look up the crowd. I am beseeching you all yet. I however, big you think this crown is? It is way larger than that it is.

Oh wow, yeah, no, it's Jesus wow.

It's like the size of all fire hydran. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe they directly they directly took the one that they took from Prince Andrew for being a nonse and melted it down.

It's really something now, now, Lee J. Meung is a name you might recognize because he's the guy who was famous for that video of climbing over the fence to stop the coup last year. And one year later he is giving Trump what I think might be the largest crown I have ever seen. Now, this crown is being described as quote a gilded replica. So I don't know how much of this is actually gold. I suspect it's gold paint or whatever. I don't know. I do not

Is he like an Austrian like economists, like libertarian type, Like I know he's like a libertarian guy. I'm just trying to figure out what specific flavor.

He's like an he's like one of the Austrian like gold standards, but also like those people are still free trade people, like really hardline.

Last time I heard Charlie Kirk talk in person, he was debating like five Austrian economists the most annoying people mean.

To Like, honestly, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. That sounds like that sounds like why would you agree to do that, especially if you're already rich. I don't understand that. I don't understand it.

Now, Okay, it's just also word doating though that despite these votes, none of this is going to take effect because the House right now effectively does not exist as.

A legislative body.

Yeah, it doesn't exist in general because they keep not calling sessions because every time they try to call a session, the Democrats in the one political theater thing that like is kind of a good idea, but they're so bad at it. They keep being like, you have to release the Epstein files, and the Republicans keep being like, no, so we kind of don't have a House of Representatives.

I keep thinking about that one scene from Mars Attacks with the presidents, like, you've still got two out of three branches a government, and that ain't bad.

Yeah, we basically have one branch of government.

We have one branch of Yeah, we have one branch of governments, and like.

But that doesn't work as a Mars Attacks Joe.

Yeah.

But and also it's worth noting the House voted to not allow any tariff legislation until March twenty twenty six, a thing that it could apparently do. It is totally normal.

Sure, Oh well, yeah, you.

Know so, and speak of things are totally normal. We're gonna close this with Trump getting mad at Canada because we saw an ad they were running, Oh my god, yeah series that God it was.

It was.

It was a bunch of clips of Ronald Reagan being like, tariff's bad because Reagan Reagan's domestic protectionism took the form of currency devaluations and not tariffs, et cetera. Et cetera. But like, yeah, so and and and Trump saw this, lost his mind, said that it was Ai. There's a whole saga here about him claiming that it was like

You know this is a blue Jay's hat. Mia, How fucking dare you try to? Uh, she'splain my own, my own country, myself.

Yeah, it's Toronto's team.

Garrison's wearing a hat for those who are not working for coolers own media.

It's the Toronto Blue Jays. Oh my god, yeah yeah yeah, in Toronto blue.

It was the Toronto Blue Jays.

Yeah, but there's not.

A J on it.

Why well no, it just has the map, but.

It's only three points. It's not a not a traditional maple leaf.

James, are you gonna Are you gonna she explain my own country.

To me, Garrison when it comes to birds and leaves, I am.

Going to Canada explain to you it rocks. Yeah, but that's fun. That's just how tariff policy is set. Now, is you pissed off the king and he decided to put a teriff?

This is.

I don't know, I don't really know how to do analysis of the fact that we just have a child king setting tariff policy. It's it's great.

Look quick, fact, Jack, do you read can you read this?

Oh?

Wow?

It does say Blue Jays.

Read this genuine m LB merchandise. Okay, wow wow wow.

Yeah. They one would ever put that in fake MLB merchandise, Yeah, wouldn't be allowed.

I've never seen any genuine MLB merchandise in markets in a Rocks for example.

Yeah, Hey, I'm the owner of a proud Fixing Gan shirt that I bought at a market in there.

All right, all right, all right, everybody, Okay. I think it's politically important for the Blue Jays to win the World Series and contribute to the American Century of humiliation.

I still have my my Tumberland boots that I bought in Syria.

Yeah, I have a five dot one dot one jacket.

Oh and I've got it. I got a greater Adotus track suit when I was in Istanbul.

Do you want to do this fallection right now?

And yeah, let's do it now. Let's talk about talking of things which are not as they seem. California Attorney General, look at that Charason. That is why they pay me the medium bugs. California Attorney General Rob Bonter is warning.

Such a fake guess name.

I'm sorry, sorry, Garrison is wearing that hat for those not watching this podcast. On top of the head in the fashion of affairs, California Attorney General Rob Bonte is wannering about election interference by the federal government. The federal government has sent monitors to California to a number of different counties in California in order to monitor the elections that are happening here on the fourth of November. To

So today the trop administration announced they're sending election monitors to five specific counties here in the state of California. They have no business doing that, they have no basis to do that. In fact, we have a state wide election for a statewide constitution. This is about voter intimidation. This is about voter suppression, period, full stop. And it's a pattern, isn't it. It's consistent with what they've done with the federalization of the National Guard and the intimidation

Mass men watch that space showing up.

In and around polling booths and voting places. But this is a bridge too far, and I hope people understand it's a bridge that they're trying to build a scaffolding for all across this country and next Novembers election. They do not believe in fair and free elections. Our republic, our democracy is on the line. We all need to wake up.

I met Monkencerne with the stuff around that. I think he's probably right that we will see like more federal agents around polling places in election time. What California was doing in response is assigning monitors to monitor the federal monitors, which will be interesting and it seems unusual, right for the federal monitors be monitoring. Think that one of the things that's on the ballot this year is Prop fifty right,

To it's revenge gerrymandering character Jerry The bill is specifically we not we're going to do this, but we're going to do this if the there's redistricting in Texas.

Yeah, yeah, it's yes, it's an attempt to rectify the very obvious gary mandering Texas.

It's kind of mad. Mutually asserted destruction is applied to Jerry Man.

Yeah yeah, yeah. Neither of these things are great. That's here we are. I think that's what I had on this Actually cool.

Yep.

I think that's that's U E eisode. That's where we're at, all right, everybody.

Well, until breaking autism news, God Texas is suing Thailand and all specifically a pharmacytic company Johnston Johnson for marketing tile and all the pregnant women and failing to disclose. But a turny general can Paxton calls quote a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders unquote.

They don't market it to pregnant women. Like Geremany.

It says like if I'm not mistaken, it says on the bottles, don't take if your nurse you're pregnant.

We covered this in a previous episode. But like Germany, drugs are not very few drugs are marketed to pregnant people, right, be the women or otherwise.

Yeah.

No, the only thing you're supposed to take is a pregnant woman is cocaine, and you got to make sure it's pure.

Non Binary people thought you can take anything.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you're If you're not pregnant, it's okay to do whatever.

Yeah, if you are pregnant, not a woman, it's okay, go right.

Hell yeah yeah sure, yes, wait, no, I don't think that that's how it works.

Transmasting double yeah yeah, yeah, true.

I think if you have a fetus gest dating in you, you're only supposed to do cocaine.

Definitely the least autistic for people, non binary people. Yeah, definitely definitely. They can just take whatever or do or do take whatever.

Yeah, too many drugs like like they'll they'll say that you should consult with it with your doctor.

Consulted doctor.

Yeah, and none of them are risk free. But it's it's it's a cost benefit analysis, right.

We covered this the autism and Thailand all like correlation versus causation based on that one Sweeter s this is. I'm interested to see how Johnston and Johnson argues this in court and if that will have effects across you know, the rest of the Trump of administration's anti Thailand all push. If they're able to successfully defend their product against Ken Paxton so critical support sant Thailand. All, I guess.

Welcome to the resistance, Big pharma Jesus.

Yeah, if people listen to more and that we can get back and find out previous episode.

All right, everybody, until next time, try not to be on a fishing boat anywhere south of the US southern border. It's not safe right now.

Good luck trick or treating. Happy Halloween.

Yeah, good love trick or treating. It's not safe right now.

Oh yeah, don't be trick or treating in a boat.

This year we've reported the news that sucks.

Yeah, we reported the news.

Hey.

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

It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.