It Could Happen Here Weekly 245

Summary

Behind the Bastards Presents: It Could Happen Here Weekly 245 (August 15, 2026)

Cool Zone Media / iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

This extended weekly compilation delivers wide-ranging coverage on global uprisings, American political currents, and signs of societal transformation, framed by the trademark irreverence of the "It Could Happen Here" team. The episode is divided into major segments: India’s student protest victory over Modi’s regime; a deep dive into the rise and limits of America’s meme-era technocratic liberalism; the saga of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton; and the latest on U.S. national and global politics, including immigration, surveillance, electoral upsets, and executive actions. With detailed reporting and signature humor, the hosts dissect the systems and "bastards" who shape our world.

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1. Indian Student Protests and the Cracks in Modi’s Regime

[02:50–35:55]

Main Points

• The Unprecedented Protest Win

  • For the first time in Narendra Modi and BJP’s 12-year rule, massive protests forced the resignation of a cabinet minister.
  • Protests, led by the satirical "Cockroach Janta Party," formed after derogatory remarks from India’s Chief Justice, highlighting growing generational resistance in the face of government contempt.

• Background: Rise and Rule of the BJP

  • BJP is described as the world’s largest fascist party, evolving from the RSS, a paramilitary group, not merely a political party.
  • The party’s rule has seen Hindutva nationalism and escalating violence against minorities, transforming Indian politics.

• The Educational Crisis and NEET Scandal

  • NEET, a crucial medical school entrance exam, had answer leaks sold on Telegram. The government forced a retest, causing widespread despair and 11 reported student suicides.
  • The system is both highly competitive and exploitative, with expensive coaching centers bankrupting families, compounding pressure on youth.

• Broader Societal Tensions

  • Youth unemployment is at staggering levels (40% for graduates under 25).
  • India’s situation is compared to pressures sparking the Arab Spring.

• Regime Response and New Tactics

  • The BJP’s response included both concessions (minister resignation, promised reforms) and counterattacks, such as harassment campaigns, especially targeting women protesters.
  • The mainstream media, dubbed "lapdog media" ("goatee media"), faces eroding trust as social media bypasses their blackout.

• Coalition-Building Dynamics

  • The protest became a unifying event, attracting students across the political spectrum, and even rural/urban workers, paralleling the class coalitions seen in seminal uprisings (Tiananmen, May '68, Occupy).

• Historical Legacies and the Anti-Caste Movement

  • Protesters invoke Ambedkar (anti-caste activist) as a guiding figure, showing the persistence and modern relevance of anti-caste politics—information missed by most Western coverage.

Notable Quotes

• "You can’t eat national pride. If the media tells you India’s great but you can’t feed your family, that’s an actual problem."
  — Mia Wong, [21:23]

• "It starts as a bit...and then one day 800,000 people show up and you forgot that could happen."
  — Robert Evans, recalling protest movement dynamics, [17:38]

• "The BJP is in their counterattack phase right now...large scale threats of sexual violence are a very common part of this."
  — Mia Wong, [19:23]

Key Timestamps

• [03:35]: Intro to the protest against the NEET exam scandal
• [08:28]: Scale and stakes of the NEET medical exam
• [11:28]: Youth unemployment and its revolutionary implications
• [14:51]: Regime's response—cabinet resignation, media control slipping
• [16:26]: Social media’s role, meme protests, generational divides
• [22:29]: Ideological underpinnings, Ambedkar and anti-caste radicalism
• [29:50]: Broader class coalition formation and protest history

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2. The Meme War for the Democratic Party: Neoliberalism vs. Populism

[40:38–89:31]

Main Points

• Inside GlobeCon: The New Liberal Action Summit

  • Garrison Davis attends the conference of the Center for New Liberalism (CNL), the meme-fueled, Reddit-born group trying to make moderation cool and push back against the growing influence of DSA (“democratic socialists”).
  • CNL evolved from the r/neoliberal subreddit and is now attached to the Clintonite Progressive Policy Institute, attempting to professionalize but retaining online “shitposting” roots.

• Who Are the “New Liberals”?

  • Young, policy-wonk professionals, mostly in their 20s and 30s, tech and law grads, campaigners, and politicos.
  • Their project is defined by an almost reactionary opposition to left populism and the DSA—more a product of online contrarianism than mass door-knocking activism.

• Ideology and Limitations

  • Technocratic, pro-growth, “pragmatic” policy agenda: deregulate housing, moderate social safety net, anti-wealth tax, pro-immigration, AI optimism.
  • The organization’s analysis of “working class” voters is criticized for being reductionist (“does/does not have a college degree”), missing the structural power of class under capitalism.
  • They see electoral victories as downstream from “stories” and technical expertise, not mass mobilization or material change.

• Crisis: Liberalism’s Story is Losing

  • DSA-style populism is on the rise in primaries; CNL worries left candidates have more energy, more on-the-ground organizers.
  • Their podcasts and summits reveal confusion and frustration: why aren’t voters inspired by the supposed prosperity (as measured by GDP) that neoliberal policies have delivered?

• Technocracy, Contrarianism, and the “Brightness Loop”

  • CNL’s leadership proposes a “brightness loop” to counter a supposed “populist doom loop”—leaning harder into technocracy and more overt patriotic messaging (“America rocks”).
  • The hosts and guest sociologist Ben Rose Porter dissect this “politics without politics” approach, exposing its undemocratic roots and complete detachment from actual material conditions.

Notable Quotes

• "You can only confuse technical knowledge for politics for so long before you lose touch with reality." — Garrison Davis, [82:25]

• "Liberals are losing ground to socialists in the Democratic Party. But in America, living conditions are still quite good." — Jeremiah Johnson, paraphrased, [102:07]

• "Their whole better things aren’t possible mentality makes it really hard to attract young people to your cause, especially young people who are struggling." — Garrison Davis, [86:35]

• “It’s a profoundly undemocratic politics. You pursue it to its logical ends...the people do not really know what their interests are. So it’s up to us, those who do, to basically call all the shots.” — Ben Rose Porter, [143:11]

Key Timestamps

• [40:38]: GlobeCon/CNL: Who they are and where they come from
• [46:30]: CNL Deputy Director on their mission (“We’re trying to say, look, no, we can be center left, moderate, whatever you want to call us, but actually have a real agenda…”)
• [60:30]: Working class, education, and class politics—critique of the liberal analytic frame
• [67:07]: Ben Rose Porter explains Marxist class analysis
• [82:25]: The limits of technocracy and the “politics of competence”
• [118:36]: CNL interpretation of Fukuyama/decline as “affluenza crisis” rather than material hardship
• [136:31]: The “brightness loop” as a counter to populism
• [147:14]: Final take: the point of the economy is people’s wellbeing—not just GDP

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3. Ken Paxton: Anatomy of a Bastard

[151:48–179:05]

Main Points

• Who is Ken Paxton?

  • Texas Attorney General described as “objectively, scientifically” corrupt and evil.
  • Rose to power through the Tea Party era, backed by Texas oil billionaires Ferris Wilkes and Tim Dunn, exploiting the right’s internal conflicts and the “no enemies to the right” strategy.

• Scandals and Survival

  • Long-running securities fraud case (from 2011) haunts his career; infamous for petty theft (caught stealing a $1,000 pen on video).
  • Survived innumerable scandals and an impeachment, turning legal troubles into badges of culture-war honor and, ultimately, folk hero status for the far right.

• Paxton’s Playbook

  • Used Attorney General’s office as a tool for the explicitly Christian nationalist and anti-immigrant movement, attacking everything from abortion to the 2020 election.
  • Escapes consequences partly due to complexity (“the more convoluted the scandal, the easier to call it a witch hunt”) and changing media landscape where right-wingers celebrate attacks from “liberal media.”

• Current Senate Race and Republican Fractures

  • Running for Senate against Democrat James Talarico in an unexpectedly close race.
  • Former patrons Wilkes & Dunn have mostly abandoned him, opening the race up and exposing fissures in the Texas GOP.
  • As Robert Evans notes: “It feels like, for once, this isn’t predetermined—a lot could actually happen.”

Notable Quotes

• “To be attacked by the ‘liberal media’ is now a badge of honor.”
  — Robert Evans, [167:20]

• “Ken Paxton is very much seen as a kind of, you know, emblem of that [far right] flank that for a while looked like it was dying—and instead of dying, it became more powerful than ever and started exporting all its stuff national.”
  — Hayes Davenport (Robert Downing), [164:49]

Key Timestamps

• [152:38]: Robert Downing’s firsthand reporting on Paxton and background
• [160:15]: Fraud and petty theft scandals
• [163:59]: When and why the Texas GOP turned against him—but why Paxton still survives
• [168:04]: Legacy as AG: using the role as culture-war instrument
• [172:04]: Senate race context and major differences this cycle

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4. U.S. National and Global Politics Roundup (Executive Disorder)

[183:23–264:30]

Summarized Segments

a. Executive Actions and Birthright Citizenship Fights

[183:51–193:01, 210:17–227:32]

• Trump issues executive orders targeting birthright citizenship, exploiting obscure exceptions and attempting new legal definitions to reduce citizenship grants. Both legally dubious and likely to be challenged.
• Context on evolving immigration court/judge training—now reduced to 12 days, stripping past expertise, as the Trump admin fires and replaces hundreds.
• DOJ lawsuits push states to restrict in-state tuition for undocumented students; comparison of today’s climate to the relatively bipartisan support for “Dreamers” and immigration reform in the ‘80s and ‘00s.
• Margaret Killjoy and others discuss how mainstream rhetoric on “amnesty” has flipped dramatically, highlighting the scapegoating dynamic in modern neoliberalism.

b. Surveillance Tech Pushback: Flock License Plate Readers

[199:12–210:17]

• Victory for direct action: Winona, Minnesota, ends its contract on Flock surveillance cameras after widespread destruction and public outcry; similar movements across the nation.
• Surveillance infrastructure remains unpopular, uniting unlikely coalitions—leftists, civil libertarians, and even conservative motorists.
• Fighting back can combine city council action and direct sabotage for effective results.

c. Electoral Developments: Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Left’s Traction

[240:03–256:37]

• Minnesota: Amy Klobuchar wins Dem primary for governor; Mike Lindell loses GOP primary, suggesting the limits of Trump's influence.
• Wisconsin: DSA-backed Francesca Hong barely loses to establishment candidate David Crowley in a fiercely contested governor’s race, highlighting issues of media framing, campaign spending (TV still matters), coalition-building, and the challenge of defending socialist policies in a hostile environment.

d. Tariff Refunds and Corporate Profiteering

[235:53–240:03]

• Tariff refunds, initiated by the Supreme Court ruling, are pocketed by corporations like Amazon, not consumers.
• Prices remain high—corporations are price setters, not simple market actors—showing another layer of contemporary “greedflation.”

e. The Presidential Decoy Plane Caper

[256:47–264:30]

• Revealed: Trump did not fly home from Ankara on the much-hyped Qatari-provided “Air Force One 2” after an Iranian missile threat. Instead, he faked boarding, slipped out via catering truck, and left on a decoy plane, sending press & staff on the “death flight.” It’s both textbook security protocol and pure Trumpian spectacle.
• This newest “bastard” caper encapsulates the surrealism and danger of the moment.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• "No, they're not [giving tariff rebates to customers]… if you believe that, I have the NFT of a bridge to sell you."
  — Mia Wong, [236:16]

• "America rocks. We're rich, we're successful and we're awesome!... I love the idea of setting yourself up against nerds being like, don't be a nerd, and then being like, 'America rocks!'"
  — Ben Rose Porter, [144:46], [145:20]

• "Ken Paxton has a similar ethos as Trump—people have heard so much about him, they've tuned it out. Amongst a lot of Republicans, to be attacked by the 'liberal media' is in itself a badge of honor."
  — Hayes Davenport (Robert Downing), [169:33]

• "Direct action gets the goods: police in Winona, MN announced they won't replace the license plate readers pulled down by local activists." — Margaret Killjoy, [199:12]

• "Why people are not convinced by the story liberalism is telling them with macroeconomic statistics… it's not material problems, it's storytelling problems."
  — Garrison Davis, [132:17]

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Thematic Threads & Conclusions

• Cracks in the Old Orders: Whether it’s India’s students, American young socialists, or anti-surveillance coalitions, the episode is an extended meditation on how “impossible” mass movements organize, break through media hegemony, and score victories—however partial—against entrenched, corrupt, or technocratic bastions.

• Limits of Technocracy and “Expertise”: The centrist obsession with expertise is shown to be self-referential, disconnected from material realities, and ultimately undemocratic—a stance mocked by the hosts and by material conditions on the ground.

• Material Conditions vs. Narrative Control: As living standards slip, especially for the young, the battle for narrative (whether via online memes or relentless TV ads) cannot obscure the need for concrete improvements—a lesson for political strategists and radical organizers alike.

• Surveillance, Direct Action, and Popular Legitimacy: Widespread resistance to new surveillance tech is uniting drivers, working folks, radicals, and old school libertarians—demonstrating the grassroots power of both legal and illegal direct action against expanding surveillance.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Mass mobilization and cross-class coalitions remain possible even in the grip of authoritarian or technocratic regimes—change happens suddenly, unpredictably, and often via meme-ification and protest spectacle.
• Technocratic liberalism is failing to inspire because it’s fundamentally undemocratic and out of touch with material hardship, leaving space for genuine populist renewal.
• **The surveillance state is vulnerable when enough people resist—**and the spectacle of resistance can become a self-sustaining movement.
• Elections are battlegrounds for both ideas and tactics: ground game, media messaging, and strategic alliances matter just as much as ideology. The fight for democracy and justice is ongoing—often absurd, sometimes bleak, but punctuated by flashes of genuine, hopeful resistance.

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Recommended Further Listening / Reading

• Read Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste” for context on Indian anti-caste radicalism ([24:06])
• For deep dives into anti-surveillance action, Margaret Killjoy’s “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff”
• “Natural Causes” with James Stout for more on public health, labor, and environmental justice

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Compiled from the August 15, 2026 episode of 'It Could Happen Here Weekly'—skip the ads, soak in the deep cuts, and be ready to organize or at least laugh at the bastards.

Transcript

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[Hayes Davenport]

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[Fred Armisen]

The dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.

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[Hayes Davenport]

Well, I thought you were all going to write a song.

[Carrie Brownstein]

I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia AO rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Hayes Davenport]

Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers, mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

[Garrison Davis]

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[Robert Downing]

can easily jump into any of our

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650 episodes and understand what's going on.

[Hayes Davenport]

We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller, Danny McBride, Riz Ahmed, and Mary Steenburgen.

[Garrison Davis]

Listen to Hollywood handbook on the iHeartRadio

[Hayes Davenport]

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

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 Happen is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

[Mia Wong]

Welcome to a Could Happen Here, a podcast where sometimes the Here is the world's largest democracy and that I think, I'm actually not sure how many Americans are aware of it. This is in fact India. A very basic fact about democracies around the world.

[Robert Evans]

If you're calling either the US or India the world's largest democracy, you got to put an asterisk, a couple of them in there.

[Robert Downing]

Either way, we'll get to that in a second.

[Robert Evans]

So land of asterisks, Age of asterisks.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. With me to talk about the age of asterisks and maybe how to get out of it is Robert Evans.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Asterisk on that too.

[Hayes Davenport]

Why not?

[Mia Wong]

Oh, boy. And I'm Mia Wong. I guess asterisk there too.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Mia Wong]

I don't know. I got nothing. I got nothing.

[Robert Evans]

Well, what are we talking about today, Mia?

[Mia Wong]

We are talking about the fact that a couple of weeks ago in India, protesters managed to accomplish something that is unprecedented in the 12 year reign of Indian Prime Minister and enemy of the show, the butcher of Gujarat himself, one Prime Minister, Modi.

[Robert Evans]

Narendra Modi. Thank you very much.

[Mia Wong]

Yep. Hate him. Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

The entire time he has been in power, no one has successfully been able to manage to force him to make a cabinet member resign.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Mia Wong]

And protesters just did this.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

This is the first. It's not the first because there was the most recent set of elections didn't go great for him, but this is like the biggest break in his armor we've seen since the Modi regime kind of clanked into place.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And to understand sort of what that means, we need to talk a bit about why Robert was like, yeah, asterisk, that's a democracy on both this and the us.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Which is that. So Modi's ruling party is the bjp. And I would classify the BJP as the world's largest fascist party. It has a horrifying 140 million members.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus H. Christ.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Not good. Very bad boy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it's also like not the only ultra right wing Hindu nationalist party in India. There are also others. So. Yeah, great, great things happening here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This is why you've had ethnic cleansings against Muslims and other non Hindu groups and chunks of India over the Modi years.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So they've been in power, like effectively uncontested. I mean, they didn't do great in the last elections, but they held onto power and they've been in power for 12 years now, during which they have both transformed Indian politics and also just continued to get more and more right wing.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

There's something I think is worth mentioning with the bjp, which is that it's not like most political parties, even fascist ones, in that it's not like it's a political party that like developed a paramilitary. Right. The BJP was developed as the political wing of, you know, a very, very far right, anti Muslim, like, Hindu nationalist paramilitary group called the rss, which was responsible for a whole bunch of absolutely hideous crimes even before the BJP took power or even existed. So again, like, this is a ruling party that is like the political wing of a paramilitary, not the other way around. And it's been running India for 12 years. And as Robert sort of mentioned before, the BJP has faced some challenges to their power. They've also faced large scale protest movements before, most notably sort of the farmers protests in 2020 and then 2024, which were about attempts to implement right wing market reforms to India's like, agricultural markets. But they've successfully been able to maintain this policy of just refusing to dismiss government ministers in the face of protests until now. So what has actually been happening? Yeah, so these protests have been rallying under the banner of, I guess, kind of a meme organization or. Meme.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it started as a, as a joke, right?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's called the Cockroach Janta Party, which is named after these comments. They were made by India's Chief justice of like the Indian Supreme Court.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Calling young unemployed people, quote, parasites and cockroaches.

[Robert Evans]

It's a little bit of a reversal of like the Hillary Clinton deplorables comment, where this person in politics uses a derogatory nickname to refer to a group of people he's opposed to and they kind of take it on as a badge of honor.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And because it's fascist. Right, right.

[Robert Evans]

It's also, yeah, fascist.

[Mia Wong]

The Chief Justice Supreme Court is calling them cockroaches. Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This party is like, obviously a joke. It's like CJP, like cockroach instead of BJP, etc. Etc. The main focus of these protests are a series of scandals in India's education system. And it feels kind of redundant to say, like, oh, yeah, like what kind of education you get has a huge amount of, you know, sort of determinants in, like, what your life turns out to be and what your economic conditions turns out to be in a sort of more intense version of, like, the way that American standardized testing works. But there are a bunch of these standardized tests that you take that can determine a whole bunch about what your future is going to be. And I think most famously, there have been a couple of big scandals recently, but the most famous one is called the NEET scandal. Neat. And ET Is basically, it's India's, like, pre med exam, basically.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's this huge exam that everyone who wants to go into pre med has to take and get a certain grade on, as I understand it, basically.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So it's one of these, especially for kids who, like, aren't rich, it's like a massive barrier that you have to get past if you want to, like, have a better life, basically.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And these tests, and specifically the NEET in particular, I mean, this is just the one if you want to become a doctor. But, like, you know, there's a huge number of people taking these tests. I'm going to quote from Al Jazeera, nearly 2.3 million test takers across India and at examination centers in Doha, Dubai, Singapore, and Kathmandu appeared for the NEET this year on May 3, battling out for less than 130,000 spots in medical colleges. So a very small percentage of these 2.3 million people who are taking this test can even possibly get a score good enough to get them into a very small number of spots in these medical colleges. And then it turns out for this year's test that the answers to the test had been leaked ahead of time and were being, like, sold on telegram channels.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this turns into a massive scandal, and the government forces the students to take the test again. And this is a complete disaster. 11 students die by suicide as a result of it.

[Robert Evans]

Good God.

[Mia Wong]

It's really bad because it's, like, a

[Robert Evans]

mix of everything you've heard about, particularly in Southeast Asia. You've got a lot of, like, pressure as a kid to do well in exams like this because there's not both for cultural reasons and because there's not other ways legally to, like, get those jobs if your family's not rich. And also the people whose families are rich, like, often can pay to get the answers ahead of time, which is what the leak of this shows. Right. Like, the fact that it leaks out is because people's rich kids. Kids are getting these.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, and also, like, if you're rich enough, you can send your kid to like a private college. Right, right. That's that too, you know, but if you're, if you're a working class kid, you cannot afford one of these, one of these private universities.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And so your only way in is through these tests.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly.

[Mia Wong]

And these tests are also, you know, they're like, they're like a huge sort of extraction engine inside of the Indian economy where like, you know, one of the things that Al Jazeera talks about is the story of this 21 year old kid who is one of the people who died by suicide, who, in order to get through these tests, you have to go through these, like, massive, extremely expensive coaching centers effectively in order to study enough for it. And these things are, these things are really expensive to the point where this kid's family like sold their ancestral lands in order to be able to pay for test coaching so this kid could become a doctor. And she had passed the test after, like not getting high enough scores like the previous two times, and then he had to take it again. There's stories like this all over India and it's just a nightmare.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So much of this too shouldn't be separated from the broader issues Gen Z and Gen Z Alpha are having all over the world. Right.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, this is part of that. Like, this is. We are fucked. We have no way of making it in the economy you've left us. And one of the tiny, slim slivers of a way to get ahead is just a scam too. Yeah, I get it. They should be pissed.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And like, it's, it's particularly intense in India because there was a story recently that CNN was talking about where there's a study that showed that there's a 40% unemployment rate for graduates under the age of 25. Good God, that is nightmarish.

[Robert Evans]

That's end of civilization kind of shit. Like any sane government would be worried about a revolution in these conditions.

[Mia Wong]

Those are the kind of unemployment levels that got you the Arab Spring, right? Like. Yep, that's, that's how this stuff happens.

[Robert Evans]

That and Facebook.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And Twitter, I guess.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, yeah, Facebook playing both sides on that one.

[Robert Evans]

Russia, Iran.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

A variety of foreign intelligence agencies from all over the world. A lot of things, like. Yeah, a lot of things.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And speaking of things that have a lot of problems, the education system as well, like, there's other issues with it. Right. The BJP again, they've been in power for 12 years, so they've installed a bunch of RSS guys like in the Department of Education. And so you get this curriculum that in something that I think is very familiar to Americans where you're just getting all of this right wing nationalist bullshit just like attempting to be pumped into the education system. They're doing that too.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And conditions over this are bad enough to that. Yeah. People take to the streets.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. As they should. And did. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It's, it's. I don't know, like a lot of the stuff. Reading this, it was like, oh, I've like, I've like been in this protest. Like so, so originally these, originally the protests are not that large in scale, but there's a, there's a big March on like July 20th that's, you know, like a march at the parliament and there's a giant police attack on it. That's an attempt to crush the movement entirely. And it doesn't work. It does exactly the opposite. It has, you know, a very, very familiar pattern of a bunch of people watch like a bunch of like actual literal children who are protesting like the answers to the test got sold to a bunch of rich kids, then they get the shit beaten out of. And this suddenly like accelerates the protest massively and massively increases the number of people who are in the streets. And you know, this eventually does the unthinkable, which is force the government to make the minister of education resign and they're also able to get some reforms. The Modi government in theory says it's going to address like some of the kind of like bureaucratic things around why it's so easy to get these questions. They also promise not to arrest any of the protesters. A thing that is never true. Every single time you are promised this, they are always lying.

[Robert Evans]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But is also the thing that a government does when it is scared.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's a sign that they know they can't start talking about cracking heads from the jump.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. And I think we're going to get a bit into more of the reason why the government was so alarmed about this later. But one of the things where I think this probably unfortunately was good strategic timing by the government is that these were, these protests were sort of like crystallizing into these more general anti Modi protests and by sort of heading it off at the past year over an issue where like in theory, the BJP also wants the tests to work normally. Although obviously this does beg the question, like, okay, so if it's government officials who are selling the answers to the tests, like who is running the government.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Which is you know, another part of this, and another thing that is a part of this is these products and services, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, God, I love a good product and a good service. Oh, we're back. We're filled with the bounty of products and services and we're ready to hear more about the cockroach Janta.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, so again, kind of very familiar to a lot of protests that we have seen over our lives. These are very, very social media driven protests in a way that's also similar to a lot of the protests that have been happening in actually. I mean, particularly in neighboring regions. Protests in like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, if you watch any of like the Instagram reels or whatever from these. God, I don't know, it's. It's so just depressingly familiar in a lot of ways where it's very funny reading people talking about this because they're like, ah, it's these like, irony meme driven, you know, like kids making these like, irony meme driven things about like, getting the shit beaten out of them by riot police and like, you know, it's like people doing fit checks and then like getting like beaten with batons. And it's like, oh, yeah, okay, we've all been there. Yeah, I've been having a very, like, I'm feeling old moment watching these because it's like, oh, God, I remember these from like 2013 when we were doing the same shit. And.

[Robert Evans]

Well, that's one of the tough things too, as you get older is both, you know, and this is less the case when we're talking about a foreign movement because I don't think I have any ability to influence that. But when you're talking to like, younger activists, it's a mix of wanting to like, let them know about the pitfalls and problems that previous generations have encountered when you see them, you know, kind of heading in that same direction. And also not wanting to be like, well, just because I'm burnt out doesn't mean you should be. Doesn't mean I should. Yeah. Like you shouldn't be excited about this thing just because I can't get excited anymore.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it's like, you know, and that's always the thing with these kind of protests. It's like sometimes you win.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And sometimes you win.

[Mia Wong]

And there's never. Oh, God, David Graeber had this quote. I forget who it was.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, I know the one you're talking about where he's talking about like, the dealing with like the surprise of victory

[Mia Wong]

Oh, I was actually gonna do a different one, but that one's also good. But she had this quote with a revolutionary in Egypt, like, from. From the 2011, like, uprising there. And, you know, she had this quote where it was like, you do these protests all the time, and sometimes 30 people show up and you're depressed and sometimes 100 people show up and, you know, you're really happy. And then one day 800,000 people show up and you kind of forgot that could happen.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And that's kind of what this is, right? Where it's like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's exactly how it goes.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

It starts as like a bit from a dude who's not even in India at the time. Right. He's at a school in the US and he. But. And so he just makes this kind of meme page and it takes off.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And then suddenly, you know, you actually have. And part of this is also like weird stuff about how algorithms work. But, like, part of what's been happening here too is that there's been a huge shift in the regime in India's ability to control social media, which is something they've been very, very good at up until this point. They've been really good at controlling both sort of online discourse and also have taken almost complete control over just the regular mainstream media and these protests. And like, the way that people are just sort of casually being like, hey, fit check, going out to a protest and like, the way that the stuff spread algorithmically and the way, you know, you have people going out for protest stuff. But that also mixes with just, you know, people who are going out just to film it for like their Instagram reels and it. But all of the. All of them end up like in the streets. And you get the situation where like, the mainstream media is just like, absolutely refuses to talk about the protest whatsoever. But then, you know, if you're like, on Instagram, you're on any social media site, it's the only thing you're seeing. And this kind of weakens the control that the BJP has been able to maintain over all of these spaces. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that they've lost control completely. The BJP is kind of in their counterattack phase right now. And you get a really bleak look at how right wing governments with long standing sort of right wing online bases and media bases work, where they do these harassment campaigns against women who went out protesting.

[Robert Evans]

They sure do.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. It's all the stuff that you're familiar with, Right. Like, they'll show clips of people like on news channels and then people will like dox them and like start stalking them and they get threats and.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I've heard people had to like hide and stuff.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Especially like female activists while they were during the protests.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. And it's also, you know, it's like, it's like large scale threats of sexual violence are.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

A very common part of this. And that's.

[Robert Evans]

God.

[Robert Downing]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

You know, that's like how these people are able to maintain power. But even as this sort of visual counter attack is happening and it's extremely brutal and it's really a mess, the control of the mainstream media is also slipping. One of the things I learned like reading about this is there's a term that I guess generally kind of like opposition people are using or the protesters also use where they call, they call the like the mainstream press like goatee media, which is like, it's like lap in Hindi. So it's basically like calling them like lap dog media instead of being watchdogs, which I love.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know.

[Mia Wong]

I like that a lot.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I do too. That's great.

[Mia Wong]

It's like, it's good. I don't know. I don't know exactly how to steal that for us, but I love it. It's great.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we should be thinking about that.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. But part of the problem with having this kind of incredible degree of media centralization that the regime has been able to pull together is that, you know, after being in power for so long, having their narrative be like completely hegemonic for so long, they're running into like the cracks, you know, these sort of cracks forming in their nationalist messaging because like they're running into the fundamental problem that you can't eat national pride. And so if, if literally the entire media all the time is trying to ignore that these protests are happening and then also was telling you that your country is great and like Modi is great and you're such a world great world leader, but then, you know, you can't feed your family. That that's an actual problem.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And like, and like normally the way that nationalists would sort of deal with this is to be like, yeah, you don't have jobs and your economy sucks because of like some either immigrant group or in this case it would sort of like the bishop probably be doing this with Muslims. But they've been in power for so long that it's like kind of hard to do that because it's like this is your country now. Right. Like you have taken control of It. And yet.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this kind of feeds into this, you know, question at a broader level about what these protests are actually about. Because on a very basic level, they're about education reform and they're about these tests and they're about the education system as a whole. But on a broader level, it's more complicated because these protests, as, you know, protests often do function as a sort of aggregator of different kinds of struggle with, you know, different beliefs and motivations. And you get a whole bunch of different kinds of people in the street. I want to read this quote from an interview Frontline India did with the guy who was the founder of the cjp, which is to say, just like the guy who made the meme that went viral.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That is how he got the job, so to speak.

[Ben Rose Porter]

And he's.

[Robert Evans]

He's done a really good job, by the way. Like, I think he's been really responsible.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

He could not have anticipated this happening, but he's. He seems to be really dedicated to the cause.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And I want to quote him here, talking about what the ideology of this party, if it existed, would be the ideology of the cjp. And many of our young people are also very progressive, liberal, secular, will be secular, democratic and socialist, and we strive for social justice. And he also mentions three people that he's, you know, he's. He's inspired by. And two of them, I think, are kind of not particularly surprising given this kind of like. This is kind of what, like, secular, progressive democratic politics look like, which is he mentions Gandhi and Nehru. But what's interesting and what I haven't seen literally at all in any other coverage of this protest is that the third person that he mentions is Ambedkar, which.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I assume you having been there and spent a decent amount of time in India, I assume. Assume you know who Ambedkar is.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, I don't. No, you don't. Oh, really?

[Mia Wong]

Interesting.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Not in a meaningful way.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No.

[Mia Wong]

This is actually kind of a good proxy. I assume people listening to the show know who Gandhi is. You've probably at least heard of Nehru, who was the first prime minister of India.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Ambedkar is a lot less well known. He's another one of the very important sort of independence era figures in India. But he is the guy around which, like the anti caste movement rallies.

[Robert Evans]

Was he in the 50s or 60s?

[Mia Wong]

No, he first starts this in the 20s and 30s and then he's alive through independence.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, okay. Really? That era? Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. He's around like in the era of

[Robert Evans]

revolutionary struggle against the British pre independence. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And then he survives through independence and gets to see some of that, the

[Robert Evans]

partition of India and all that good stuff. Yeah, all the fun things happen.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And this is a period, you know, if you look at like the 1910s, 20s, 30s, this is a period both about the anti colonial struggle and then also like what the struggle is going to be. Right. Like who's, whose vision of India is going to come out of a post independence world, if there is one. And Ambedkar's thing here is. Yes, like we want, like we want independence and we want socialism because you know, a lot of the people like Nehru is like a kind of socialist. Right. Like a lot of the, a lot of the independence activists are. But he's also in a position of we need to get rid of the caste system because he sees it as like, correctly as like an incredibly powerful sort of force of oppression in Indian society. And he thinks that that's not something that they should like wait until independence to deal with. And so he's a very, very important like leader in the anti caste movement. He's probably, I think he's probably just like their best known intellectual. I would really recommend reading his book the Annihilation of ca. Well, I say book, it's like not that it's not that long. Yeah, like it's probably like my favorite thing I've read from the writers of that era. It's an address that he's making basically to both, I guess you'd call it like more conservative pro independence activists and then also to the socialists to be like, hey, you should also talk about caste at the same time you're talking about British oppression and also class. The CJP founder like mentions this because he's from a low caste background and he goes like, yeah, like no, like I wouldn't have been able to go to school in the United States and like have the successes that I've had in my life without Ambicar. I thought this was really interesting because it's not mentioned in any other reporting even though it's, it's like in an interview he's said. And also I think this is a, a dynamic here that is like not well understood in most places that like this is a still operative system of oppression that people are still fighting against. And that is, you know, relevant enough to be like one of the things that gets mentioned by the guy who starts his movements and that's not to say the rest of the movement like necessarily is Exactly. This focused on it, which is one of the parts of this movement that's both why it succeeded and also one of the kind of messy parts of it. Right. Is that on the one hand, this has become a really powerful vehicle for these sort of like broadly secular, like pro democracy, like anti modi, anti dictatorship students. And there's always been like a fairly large like cohort of, you know, sort of like young left leaning or leftist students. I mean, there was a whole, I don't know what you'd call it, like social panic, government purge against this idea of like, quote unquote, urban Naxals, which was supposed to be like, oh, there's these urban versions of the Nax communist guerrillas that are in the universities, which is in a lot of ways very similar to, but a significantly more advanced and repressive version of the stuff that you see the Trump administration doing in the US education system and the sort of witch hunts over Palestine and stuff like that. So you have that group of center left and leftist students who were a lot of the people who started the protest movement, but also there's also just like BJP kids.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Who are in the streets because they're like. Yeah, like we all got fucked on

[Robert Evans]

our tests because it's bullshit. Yeah, yeah, it's the same reason. Now you've got a decent chunk, at least like a third of the 20 or something percent of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 are more people who'd voted for Biden or for Hillary a few years earlier. Right. They're people who, maybe they went for this guy, but as soon as it stops working for them, as soon as like the fascism isn't delivering what it promises, they'll get pissed. They'll get wide up in the streets.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You don't have to like them to recognize that as a phenomenon. Yep. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

There's a kind of like third phenomenon too, which is as these protests go on, you get more and more of different kinds of like both rural and urban workers, more urban workers and rural workers. But, but this is, you know, the thing about education protests at their core is that this is something that cuts across like rural, urban divides to an extent in the sense that like both poor rural kids and poor urban kids are still getting by this, you know, by, by the exam system. But then, you know, you get workers starting to join it who also have these. I, I think, I don't know. The, the way that commentators talk about it is that they're unconnected. I think they're a lot more connected than that. But, you know, you get, you get, you. You get these workers with these, like, cost of living crisis concerns who, who are also joining this protest. And I guess part of this is a girl who spent a lot of time studying and writing about Tiananmen. But this is kind of the exact class composition of Tiananmen and how those protests unfolded. Where you have its origins in, like this, in this specific student movement thing that has kind of specific student movement grievances that then, you know, goes into the streets around their specific demands, and then everyone watches them get the shit beaten out of them.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And that brings more and more people into the streets who have their own kind of specific demands around, like, the economic conditions they're in. And this is a very common, like, composition for, for revolts. I mean, it's, it's the basis of everything from, like, I mean, God, like, it's. It's part of the basis of the French Revolution. You can look at like, May 68.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like, you know, some of the revolts against Pinochet. Like, I mean, Occupy is like, a lot to a large extent, like this class base. Right. If you have a bunch of students who are very concerned about debt, and then that brings in a bunch more working class people who are like, not students anymore. But that's also what makes it dangerous. It's a very old kind of alliance, and it's a kind of alliance that can always materialize because students and poor workers are some of the first people to feel when the economic tides are shifting. And that constantly creates these kind of uprisings. Right. And they're dangerous enough that if you look at the last 30 years of Chinese politics, a whole bunch of the politics of modern China are about specifically making sure that this exact coalition doesn't form again. So when the old working class is sort of crushed with the remains of the welfare state in the 90s, like, there's a very deliberate attempt to buy off the students at the same time to make sure they never make common cause. And like, any time you've seen sort of student worker actions since then, there's this massive crackdown on it because the Chinese government understands that this is a very, very dangerous political coalition. And it's a political coalition that has outlasted, I mean, literally a lot of the working classes that were originally in these uprisings. Like the French revolutionary artisan class, that doesn't exist anymore. Right. Like the industrial working class in like, France or like Italy in the 60s, like, that also doesn't exist anymore. But you still See this specific configuration of classes doing these protest movements.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

There's obviously always a lot of different motivations, and conflict against the state tends to be the thing that can, like, solidify a kind of identity that allows you to do any kind of mass movement. Right. Like, this is one of the few things that can. Fighting the police and having the state repress you and then having the state as a force you can fight against, concretely, that just appears when you oppose it is one of the things that makes these kind of protest movements work. And then also underneath that, the economy is broken in a lot of the ways you saw in 2018 and 2019, which is, I think, the last big cycle of these mass protests where you have this economic instability. And what I think is particularly similar between now and, like, 2018 was that, technically speaking, if you look at the economy in India right now, as long as you ignore the youth unemployment rate, it looks like the economy is growing, things are good.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It's like the same thing as the US where it's like. Well, I mean, the economic indicators have been getting worse, but, like, you know, technically speaking, it looks like the US Economy is growing, but if you're living under it, it's like, no, it's not. And there's all of these sort of cracks and ripples in the global economy. And 2018 was like this where, like, the American economy was, like, doing fine, and a lot of, like, the major economies were, in theory, doing fine, but then, you know, there was a series of currency, like, crises and, like, there were, like, these economic collapses. Yeah, there's like this hyperinflation in Turkey. You get these things in, like, Chile. And then, you know, you start seeing these protests, you get, like, Haiti, you get the yellow vest. You see, like, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Iraq. God, like, Iran for the first time of this giant cycle of protests in Iran, Myanmar, even Russia briefly goes up. And I'm bringing this up to say that one of the things about a protest like this, and there's been several other ones, there were very big protests in Indonesia over the last couple of months. These protests, often A, recur and B, are in some ways an early warning signal before, like, there's going to be another giant round of these kind of protests.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, hopefully.

[Fred Armisen]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. I mean, I think there's a decent chance of it because, like, you know, the economy still hasn't, like, hit rock bottom yet.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Mia Wong]

And in the way that, like, you know, you saw that in 2020 where, like. Yeah, the bottom finally fell out of the economy with COVID Furthermore, maybe this

[Robert Evans]

is putting it a little bit too strongly, but, like, the people who do not like the regime, particularly the activists, have, like, tasted a little blood now.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, it's really hard once people win, once a movement wins, for it to not try to keep winning. Right. That's kind of the natural instinct.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And the BJP is, you know, obviously doing its best to do. To suppress this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, to suppress. Or co opt. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But the problem that they're facing is the fundamental problem of all of the regimes everywhere, which is that, like, it's a lot harder to maintain one of these kinds of regimes when you have been in power for a long time and suddenly the economy implodes. And that's coming for India the same way that's coming for the rest of the world. And also in very specific ways of, like, you know, we've talked about. I talked about on this show elsewhere. The effects of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been devastating in India in a way that it hasn't been in the U.S. yep. And, you know, you also have, like, heat waves that are also, you know, both economically and just, like, living, devastating. There was an expression in the Hong Kong protests that they were drawing from a Mao quote, but also it's way older than Mao, as, like, Mao says in the thing where he says it. But the Hong Kongers had this line that, like, a single spark can start a prairie fire. And the thing about the Indian economy is that it is throwing sparks off everywhere. And that doesn't mean that every individual spark is going to be the one that starts the fire. But it means that as you continue to get more and more sparks, the odds that you see another one of these revolts increases. And hopefully the odds that one of these protests and one of these movements can finally knock off the fascists and, yeah. Fundamentally transform Indian society. Rises.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Or at least get Modi out.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Just at a bare minimum.

[Robert Evans]

You know, I'll take the minimum if that's what it is.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Well, thank you, Mia. And thank you, the cockroach Janta over in India.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Good work.

[Mia Wong]

Hell, yeah, y'.

[Tobin Stone]

All.

[Robert Evans]

This is actually really nice to see.

[Robert Downing]

Fucking rocks.

[Mia Wong]

Give them hell.

[Robert Evans]

Proud of you.

[Carrie Brownstein]

This episode sponsored by She's Bertie. You lock the hotel room door, then check it again and maybe one more time, because even the nicest room can feel unfamiliar at night. That's why She's Birdie created birdiebox. With She's Birdie, you can bring peace of mind with you. BirdieBox is a portable travel door alarm for hotels, dorms, Airbnbs, and anywhere you stay away from home. Just attach it to the door frame, switch it on, and if someone opens the door, birdiebox blasts a loud siren and flashing alarm to alert you and everyone nearby. Because the best part of travel isn't worrying, it's sleeping soundly. Birdie Box from She's locking in peace of mind wherever you stay. For safer, more confident travel, visit she'sbirdie.com that's S H-E-S-B-I-R-I-I-E.com I'm Hoda Kotb, host

[Hoda Kotb]

of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. If you know me, you know I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover those things together through meaningful conversations with fascinating people. Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really, anybody hoping to stand out.

[Hayes Davenport]

You're not hired just to fill time and space. You're hired to fill the space with you. You have something in your guts, you go with it.

[Hoda Kotb]

And Shawn Johnson recalled the moment she realized her now husband, Andrew was the one.

[Garrison Davis]

He was just so unapologetically himself and knew nothing of Hollywood. He hadn't been on a plane before without his family. It was so pure.

[Hoda Kotb]

Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Fred Armisen]

Hey Portlandia fans.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Kerry Brownstein and Fred Armisen here, you

[Fred Armisen]

know us, or rather you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike and yes, the chicken.

[Carrie Brownstein]

We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia. AO rewatch our brand new podcast.

[Fred Armisen]

Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process.

[Carrie Brownstein]

How did any of this get made? Why did he think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it and

[Fred Armisen]

we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life, guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Krisel, the mayor himself, Kyle MacLachlan, legendary musician Amy Mann, and and many more.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Kyle is going for it. Here you fully improvise, not just words, but a song, a melody.

[Robert Evans]

I thought he was going to write

[Hayes Davenport]

I thought you were all going to write a song.

[Carrie Brownstein]

I remember you thinking that.

[Fred Armisen]

Listen to Podlandia AO rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Hayes Davenport]

Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook every episode. We're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how to they can help us improve our careers.

[Garrison Davis]

The show is famously super accessible, so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on.

[Hayes Davenport]

We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anyway too, right?

[Garrison Davis]

What do you think it is now?

[Hayes Davenport]

It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride, he loves. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on.

[Michael Bennett]

You make your own.

[Tobin Stone]

That's great.

[Hayes Davenport]

I call him Tarot Reed.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a good name.

[Hayes Davenport]

They're all named after cast members of American Pie.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I call.

[Tobin Stone]

I don't.

[Hayes Davenport]

I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Li Sobieski. Yeah, I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still haven't looked it up. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

Then Mary Steenbergen.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Why are you guys talking to me

[Garrison Davis]

like I'm telling you so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play?

[Hoda Kotb]

Play?

[Hayes Davenport]

I just really am trying to set you up for success here.

[Garrison Davis]

Listen to Hollywood handbook on the iHeartRadio

[Hayes Davenport]

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Garrison Davis]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. The past few weeks I've been covering the midterm primaries and the battle between the left and the establishment for the future of the Democratic Party. As evidenced just this month in Michigan and Wisconsin, left populism continues to be on the rise. A few weekends ago, the Democratic Socialists of America held their national organizing conference, the Socialist Summit, in Chicago, Illinois. I did not attend the Socialist Summit because instead I wanted to check in on the other side of the aisle. So last month I went down to Washington D.C. to attend the New Liberal Action Summit, or as it's affectionately referred to by attendees, globecon, named after the blue globe emoji used by liberals on Twitter symbolizing globalism, free trade, free market capitalism, liberal immigration and yimbyism. The New Liberal Action Summit was a three day event with one main conference day filled with panels featuring policymakers, fireside chats with liberal politicians, and networking opportunities for young liberals who share a passion for center left policies. I went to eight of the 14 panels. One of the first panels was on energy policy featuring two former politicians turned fossil fuel lobbyists. Next, Representative Don Beyer spoke about the need for AI regulation. A panel of policy advisors discussed why, quote unquote sloppy list tax proposals are stupid. Representative Richie Torres promoted Abundance. Congressional representatives from the New Democrat Coalition had a panel about how their caucus is fighting back against dsa and I listened in to a live recording of Francis Fukuyama's podcast. Abundance was probably one of the most frequently used words at the conference. There was a big focus on building, housing, zoning reform, permit streamlining, and a lot of speakers were nervous about the growing anti tech backlash and the public support for data center moratoriums. Interestingly, most panelists and attendees were impressed by Zoram Hamdani's reign thus far, but still very oppositional to stuff like wealth taxes, the rent freeze, populism in general, DSA as an organization and their other candidates about 300 libs attended the summit last July. They mostly ranged between their early 20s to late 30s. These are Econ, poli sci and law students, young professionals, campaign staffers, influencers, policy wonks and aspiring policy wonks. Just as the use of the Blue Globe emoji online was in response to socialists identifying themselves online via the Red Rose emoji, this whole conference and the org behind it is a response from young ish liberals to rising populism in the United States and especially the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party. The New Liberal Action Summit is put on by an organization called the center for New Liberalism or CNL. CNL is a non profit 501c4 quote digital first grassroots organization dedicated to fighting for liberalism during the age it is most under attack. According to their website, at the summit they were giving out CNL stickers which they sell on their website for $5. One of the stickers reads, quote we believe in economic growth through free markets, a robust social safety net, the free flow of people and goods, deregulating barriers to housing and employment, immediate criminal justice reform, a tech optimist society attacks on carbon freedom regardless of gender, age, race, religion or sexual orientation. Pragmatism over populism. CNLiberalism.org join the center for New Liberalism claims to have about 11,000 members and 50 local chapters in cities across the U.S. though according to their website, CNL's private Slack channel has just about 700 dues paying members of the organization. In contrast, DDSA is about 120,000 dues paying members. During the summit I spoke with CNL's Deputy Director Tobin Stone and he told me that the center for New Liberalism is specifically intending to serve as a counterweight to the dsa. Stone said that the populist right has their own little organizations like TP usa. The populist left has the dsa and the center for New Liberalism wants to be both a political organizational force as well as a social body for young center left liberals who believe in quote unquote lowercase L liberalism to meet with each other, organize and advance their ideas. Stone did admit that most moderate Democrats are kind of dropping the ball right now. The Republicans are super unpopular and voters are expressing all these things around affordability. But moderate Dems have failed to seize this moment. There is a big window open for Democrats and really the only people taking it are the dsa.

[Tobin Stone]

What we're trying to do is we're trying to say, look, no, we can be central left, moderate, whatever you want to call us, but actually have a real agenda that excites people and offers an alternative to what the DSA is saying. Because none of these, a lot of these current moderates, in some ways we'd rather have them than a DSA person. But at the same time, the moderates can't just be sitting there doing nothing. They have to be willing to take on the fights, fight the NIMBYs and build more housing because young people can't afford housing anymore. So that's what we're trying to do is be a counterweight and offer a real alternative.

[Garrison Davis]

About two years ago, CNL Deputy Director Tobin Stone told the Columbia Journalism Review, quote, were Hillary Clinton Democrats basically? Now that was two years ago. But last month I asked Stone, what kind of politicians does CNL want to see taking power, say federally?

[Tobin Stone]

Like you see people like Jake Auchincloss. I think when people hear him talk it resonates like he's incredibly smart and he knows how to talk to people about the issues that they're mad about.

[Garrison Davis]

Jake Auchangloss headlined CNL's opening reception on the first day of the summit. Akanklas is a Congressional Rep from Massachusetts and a former Marine. After Zoram Hamdani won the Democratic primary last June, Akin Glass wrote a blog post on substack reading, neither Democratic socialism nor crony capitalism will deliver financial freedom. I propose a 10 word agenda for financial freedom for the middle class. Treat cost disease, reduce the debt and save Social Security, unquote. Earlier this year his re election campaign accepted over $25,000 from Palantir, including $7,000 from Palantir's CEO Alexander Karp. In January 2023, Auchincloss was the first congressman to read an entirely ChatGPT generated speech on the House floor. This speech was in support of a bill to create a joint US Israel AI center for the development of AI research. And last year, Auchinglass told Politico that it's quote unquote readily apparent that TikTok's algorithm is quote, amplifying anti American, anti Israel content disproportionate to its actual frequency. Stone told me, quote, we need more people like Jake Auchincloss and not all of the electeds in this room, but like a lot of the folks here. But also what we're trying to do and eventually want to do is like have our chapters be the group that identifies some potential candidates. Stone also pointed to State Rep. Jasper Martis, who became friendly with CNL through the organizations anti Tariff advocacy.

[Tobin Stone]

We want to see what we can do as an organization to help elevate voices like him who can be young, charismatic and without offering an agenda that we think would do more harm than good.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you see a point where you will not just have to kind of offer an alternative to what the DSA is offering, but in primaries specifically kind of counter them directly?

[Tobin Stone]

That is like part of what we want to do. We have always been and will continue to be willing to get directly into those primaries, whether it's supporting someone we already know and work with. Like to be up here today if someone tries to primary. Jake Alton, our Boston chapter is absolutely going to be out knocking doors to support him, especially if it's a DSA candidate. But then also again, long term we would love to be able to be the group that can identify the candidates who can run against the dsa. We want to do the work to find those young charismatic candidates and get them to run against the DSA candidate and offer that real trend. We really just want to see like organization like five years be even bigger. We want to not just be like doing this conference here in D.C. but then go over like all over the country and say like we can go in Denver and host a whole conference in Denver with all of our members of a chapter and talk about the work we need to do to elevate the pragmatic politicians in Colorado or New York or wherever. Like as long term goal.

[Garrison Davis]

The center for New Liberalism's annual impact report for the election year of 2024 claimed that the organization made $5,500 in quote, successful campaign contributions and gained 186 new members. That's 186 new members during the year of a highly impactful presidential election. DDSA gained over 7,000 members in just the two months after the 2024 election. And since then DSA membership has more than doubled from 50,000 to 120,000 members just 10 years ago. DSA had only 5,000 members before Bernie Sanders first presidential campaign which breathed new life into the organization. But in order to fully understand cnl, you have to understand their deeply online origin because they essentially Internet trolled themselves into something resembling a real political organization. Center for New Liberalism can be traced back to R Neoliberal on Reddit, where after the 2016 election, a new team of moderators tried to grow the subreddit as a place to discuss liberal policymaking and free market economics in response to online conversations about politics being dominated by populism, whether from MAGA or the rejuvenated Socialist left. Following Bernie's 2016 campaign, these moderators turned the subreddit into an online community of policy wonks discussing economics as well as neoliberal shitposting in an attempt to compete in the arena of Internet politics and make center left liberalism cool and memeable. And I don't know about you, but when I think of cool, the first thing that comes to mind is Reddit memes about liberal free market economics. In 2018, two moderators from the subreddit, Colin Mortimer and Jeremiah Johnson, started to consolidate this loose online community into a real organization called the Neoliberal Project. They started a neoliberal Twitter account and launched the Neoliberal Podcast. All of this neoliberal branding was sort of a troll at the time, and still now the word neoliberal was mostly used as a pejorative in current political parlance. So the Neoliberal project's use of the term was almost this form of slur reclamation, tongue in cheek, semi ironic but largely sincere embrace of neoliberal economic policies. To quote a 2022 article in the Washington Post, quote Carl Nielsen, a 24 year old aerospace engineer who leads the D.C. chapter, told me his brother turned him onto this neoliberal community a few years ago and he was immediately smitten. I was like, dude, this is it. This is where we belong. The memes were fantastic. They were doing a neoliberal shill bracket, which is a Twitter tournament where you vote to determine who's the chief neoliberal shill. That was really easy to get excited about. So I jumped right in the neoliberal shill bracket on Twitter is like a March Madness style bracket for Twitter users to rank which politicians, columnists, lobbyists or influencers are the biggest neoliberal shill of the year. This basically amounts to stanning figures like Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias, Nate Silver and the streamer Destiny. The Washington Post described the organization as being on, quote, a quest to bring market friendly moderation into the age of Internet meme Politics, unquote. In 2020, the neoliberal project was absorbed into a centrist think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute. In the announcement, Will Marshall, the president of ppi, said that the young liberals, quote, fill a vacuum in our politics for a pragmatically liberal alternative to right wing populism and democratic socialism. Colin Mortimer, the Neoliberal Project's executive director, is quoted in the announcement saying, over the last several years we have built the Neoliberal Project into an online community of politically engaged young individuals who are pushing back against the ideological extremes that put our country in peril. Now we are proud to join one of the most storied think tanks in the country as we develop and advocate for a radically pragmatic agenda for change our country so urgently needs, unquote A quick note on the Progressive Policy Institute PPI was founded in the late 80s by the Democratic Leadership Council when the word progressive referred to center left pragmatism as opposed to the modern connotation of the term as used by left wing progressives today. In the 90s, PPI functioned as the idea factory of the Clinton administration and was a big part of the shift in the Democratic Party away from New Deal Great Society redistributive liberalism towards the neoliberal politics of maximizing economic growth that defined the Clinton era. Soon after joining ppi, the Neoliberal Project rebranded into the center for New Liberalism, displaying some awareness of the massive unpopularity of neoliberalism and that it might actually be pretty hard to grow a political project under such a banner. CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson, who also hosts the New Liberal podcast, told the Columbia Journalism Review that neoliberal is a great word to use, quote, when what you want to do is get in fights on the Internet, but it turned out to be less great for recruiting congresspeople to their cause. Two years after joining ppi, the center for New Liberalism started doing their annual New Liberal Action Summit. 2026 was the fifth year of GlobeCon. The Columbia Journalism Review wrote in 2024 that the center for New Liberalism is, quote, Biden's Fighters in the meme trenches doing what they can to make his brand of politics trendy again, unquote. The past few years, the center for New Liberalism has tried to legitimize itself beyond its Reddit shitposting and humble Twitter troll beginnings. Earlier this year, CNL brought on Greg Schultz as a senior advisor. Schultz was the campaign manager For Joe Biden's 2020 presidential primary campaign and general election strategist. One of the aspirations for the New Liberals is helping to secure a center leaning candidate for president in 2028.

[Tobin Stone]

One of our big goals is definitely to influence who our next president is

[Garrison Davis]

and maybe that there ends up being

[Tobin Stone]

a more compromised candidate or I don't think compliments is the wrong word. But like you're seeing right now, like a lot of people are gravitating towards Ossoff if he does end up running like people like him. But we would rather not see like a further left candidate. And we also want to see that the platform that we run on in 2028 is not. We understand that sometimes you have to have a little bit of populism, but like this kind of like sloppy. You see right now we're just like, oh, cut everyone's taxes. Like we want to see like a real concrete platform that doesn't over promise can be enacted and can maybe repair people's hope in government.

[Michael Bennett]

Again.

[Tobin Stone]

Senator Bennett talked about it earlier or alluded to it, but like people don't feel like government works anymore. So we want to make sure that The Agenda in 2020 is one about making government work again. Obviously we have to workshop that message and figure out what's going to appeal to the American people. The most part of it, obviously we're fighting the dsa. We are aware they're going to exist in America. They are part of the political climate. We don't want to take them away. We also think it will be extremely harmful. If they're in the driver's seat, they should absolutely have input. But if they're in the driver's seat in the presidential election, we're going to lose again and we want to make sure that we win because obviously if we lose again to Donald Trump or whoever his heir is, like it's not going to be great for America or the rest of international or international institutions.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, I think some of those DSA people would look at centrist candidates going up against Trump in like 1624 or like, you know, it's more center leaning.

[Tobin Stone]

And I would be very hesitant to call either of those centrists or even center left. Like if you look at the exit polling data from 2024, everyone thought common was much further like from the center than Trump, which is pressure. Trump is good at marketing, but like, yeah, I mean, and Kamala is not center. Like you ask anyone in this room who's worked for. We all work for a moderate organization. We all was not center left. There's a reason we lost and it's because Democrats or voters thought we were too far to left or not mean too far to left, but too, too out of touch. I think that's a good rate of frame. It's like too out of touch.

[Garrison Davis]

I think it's really important to understand that too far left and too out of touch are vastly different things. And secondly, what is considered quote unquote left is not at all clear. Does left refer to left wing economics, wealth redistribution, or like the sort of performative liberal wokeism that was completely captured by corporations and the elite before being quickly dropped as Trump took back power? Because the recent batch of left wing populists are running on economic policies to make life more affordable, their focus on uplifting workers and the poor would materially improve the lives of large swaths of marginalized populations way more than corporations posting black squares, academic language policing, White House pride events, and Nancy Pelosi wearing a West African kente cloth stole as a scarf. A New York Times poll from May of 2026 found that the majority of Democrats and Democrat leaning independents do not want the party to move to the center on health care or economic issues and should embrace economic populism. According to the Times poll, 63% of likely Dems said our political and economic system needs major changes and 20% said it needs to be torn down completely. 88% said the economic system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans. 74% of Dems oppose sending aid to Israel. Most respondents were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. 91% had not heard of abundance, only 5% said the economic conditions were good or excellent, and 49% said they were favorable to socialism versus 22% unfavorable. Only 20% of respondents said the Democratic Party was too far to the left, and respondents were evenly split on whether the party in general should move to the center. But most said that the party should move to the left on things like health care. A frequent topic of discussion at the New Liberal Action Summit was how the Democratic Party can win back quote, unquote working class voters. And spoiler, they think it's by moving to the center, something we've been talking

[Robert Evans]

about at PPI for a long time

[Hayes Davenport]

is winning back the support of non

[Robert Evans]

college voters, working class voters.

[Garrison Davis]

We have a new report coming out

[Hayes Davenport]

soon that showcases how center left candidates

[Ben Rose Porter]

are doing much better in that regard than their progressive counterparts.

[Garrison Davis]

We do a lot of polling of

[Mia Wong]

numbers, college voters, working class voters if you will.

[Tobin Stone]

Most of our data says that the people that voted for Zara tend to be heavily college educated, whereas it was people without degrees that voted for Cuomo which the best weight lens for working class students is not. I think it's just has college degree, does not have a college degree.

[Garrison Davis]

The new liberals believe that DSA is out of step with the working class and by working class they mean voters without a college degree. Moderates will often point to high profile races like Zoran or Abdul Al Said where the more center leaning candidate often quote unquote wins the non college or low income demographic. Now these wins are often in the single digits. In the Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo quote unquote 1 the under 50k a year income bracket by 8 points. Cuomo also won the highest income bracket, $250,000 and over by 11 points while Mamdani dominated the middle income brackets. Almost this exact same trend appeared in the Abdul El Said vs. Haley Stevens primary in Michigan. Left wing populist candidates are doing so well with college educated voters in part because they're just driving such high turnout, especially among Millennials and Gen Z. But center left liberals will often use the support of DSA from possibly downwardly mobile college graduates to point towards socialism as this kind of disgruntled elitist phenomenon that's not actually connected with the quote unquote real working class, which again to them means a voter without a college degree. And while income level or education can be an indicator of class, just defining working class as meaning a voter without a college degree doesn't really make sense. Nor does it tell you anything about the class interests of voters because it doesn't actually point to anything regarding their place in the capitalist production process. Just whether or not you have a degree doesn't even point to what your income is, which is itself kind of a flawed way of understanding what working class means, which in a Marxist sense refers to whether you live off selling your labor for a wage, that is being a worker, or if you own private property like a business and make your money off of controlling other people's labor. But all that matters to these liberals is voters proximity to higher education. Based on looking at election data where DSA type candidates do very well with college educated voters and maybe don't do as well with what is categorized as a non college educated or maybe sometimes a low income voter, even if the difference is only a few percentage points. The liberal analysis of class simply being whether or not a voter has a college degree offers no insight into why a middle class of educated workers are moving in droves towards social democracy or some form of democratic socialism and are voting for policies that benefit people largely more poor than them, instead of just supporting the center left Democrat who would advance elite interests. To this point, I talked with Ben Rose Porter, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, about why class analysis is important.

[Ben Rose Porter]

It indicates what your fundamental interests are going to be regarding, you know, the politics when it comes to how should the economy, how should our society be oriented? If you are a worker who makes your money by selling your labor, you are interested in a policy that gives labor a fair deal. If you are an owner, your interests are going to be geared oppositely, they're going to be geared towards capital, towards ownership of private property and the making of profit, being protected against the interests of labor. And so this is the conception of class that I think paints a much more lucid picture of the world than one that just sort of treats, you know, the poorer you are, the more working class you are. It's absolutely true that the base of the working class is always the poor, relatively speaking. I mean, the bottom strata of the working class is its source of power. And it's the better paid workers who while they are in a theoretical sense in the working class, they often are the ones who are comfortable with capitalist production because they're being compensated fairly well. But again, it's a kind of analysis that can't comprehend the liberal view, cannot really comprehend how college educated people who may be securing somewhat decent middle class jobs, they can understand how they are also a part of the working class and respond to the economic squeeze that happens when capital rules the economy, when capital is so unquestioned by its liberal administrators that it squeezes the whole of the working class.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, and there's these certain moments with technological advance like you're seeing with AI that lead to the de skilling of certain workers. The past 20 years, adults have been telling kids to just learn coding. Yeah, work in tech. This is like the last growth area of the economy. Learn coding. And now those skills are not as useful as they used to be because an AI can do it. And there's this like, proletarianization of tech workers happening that just this like liberal model, the working class then can't really understand why, why these people are going to be turned against liberalism.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Capital produces its own gravediggers. Marx writes in the Manifesto, right, that the socialist project sees that there is a fundamental antagonism in the capitalist mode of production. Not only in that capital appropriates, exploits workers. The capitalist class survives parasitically by squeezing the worker. That's fundamental to the capitalist system. Not only that, but it also is continually growing the working class. It's constantly pushing people out of their positions of property, but also out of positions of skilled labor into, you know, having to move down into proletarianized positions where you are not going to be paid as much. And by constantly doing this, it's building a class that goes against it. It's the socialist project which recognizes those antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production. And it is the liberal project that is utterly blind to them, that just to the liberals, no, capitalism is good. It increases gdp, right? It leads to economic growth. These antagonisms do not exist to the extent that you can show them to them. They absolutely refuse to, to acknowledge them or else to understand how they are fundamental to the capitalist system. And so they have no answer to this. You can see how these people who are themselves sort of like intellectual, you know, sycophants to the liberal institutions they perceive like, well, if you, if you're smart and you have the right policies and you believe the right things, you'll get taken care of. It's a very different experience from, I think, a lot of college grads who have tried very hard to do the right things and who do not have a place in the economy or a very limited place with very limited power and very limited resources.

[Garrison Davis]

While Andrew Cuomo slightly outperformed Mamdani among the lowest income voters in the 2025 Democratic primary, come the general election in November, that ceased to be the case. In the general, Mamdani won low income districts by 11 points. To quote the New York Times quote, Mamdani largely expanded on the base he built during the primary in neighborhoods across the city. He swept communities of every income level, save for New York's wealthiest enclaves, where his top opponent was former governor Andrew Cuomo, performed best, unquote. In the November general, Mamdani also won districts where less than 20% of the residents have a college degree by 13 points, though a CNN exit poll of less than 5,000 voters showed that Cuomo did just 5% better than Mamdani with voters without a college degree. I Think it is also worth reiterating that 1 out of 10 people who voted for Zoron in 2025 also voted for Trump in 2024. That's something that liberals never talk about and something else they never talk about is just how much these non college low income statistics graph onto age more than anything else. Both Mamdani and Abdul Al said overwhelmingly won with voters aged 18 to 45. Young people who are low income who maybe have not graduated college or are in college or maybe just graduated college but are still low income. Those young people are backing DSA candidates. Those young people are not going to Andrew Cuomo in the general election or the primary election. The sort of low income voters that are going towards either these incumbents or more traditional moderate candidates are generally older voters. And if we want to have a real discussion on how the DSA can appeal to older voters, maybe voters who are not as politically engaged as younger voters, then yeah, that is a real discussion to be had. But just breaking that down as DSA does not attract low income voters is just completely not true. Many low income people without a college degree are old retirees who tend to vote more conservative even if they're registered Democrats. Another factor is the effectiveness of ad spending Abdul Al said was outspent 11 to 1 and that is going to have an effect on the election results. Blanketing the airwaves with misleading attack ads can be hugely impactful in rural areas and districts with low information or less engaged voters. This same general trend happened in the June 2026 Democratic primary in New York City. That election was not divided by income or race. The largest indicator that skewed whether someone was backing the incumbent or the DSA was age. By and large, younger voters, whether they were middle class or lower working class, backed the DSA candidates like Claire Valdez, while older voters backed the incumbents, the moderates and the establishment politicians that these voters were maybe more familiar with that maybe has been representing their district for anywhere between five to 30 years. But what makes this whole college educated working class debate so absurd to me is that most of the city based center for New Liberalism chapters don't even seem interested in trying to appeal to the voters that they think DSA is overlooking.

[Tobin Stone]

Like if the DSA can only appeal to the people with a college jury, that's 60 to 70% of voters that we are missing and we need to do better than that.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you think that the new liberals should be going after like a totally different voting block than what DSA trying to go after?

[Tobin Stone]

I don't know if that's our role. Like most of our chapters do operate in cities where it is more college educated things. So our role we view as like trying to convince the college educated people that we have the better ideas and a more optimistic vision. Whereas then it's other groups. Like if we have a chapter in Swing district, obviously that's like our chapter in San Francisco is going to be focused on not that.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tobin Stone]

So like I think there are groups on the city left that should be doing that.

[Mia Wong]

I don't know if it's our role.

[Garrison Davis]

So CNL has already foreclosed themselves to really only going after college educated voters, despite insisting that their ideas are what actually can appeal to the working class. In evaluating the political potential of the center for New Liberalism, one must keep in mind how their online shit posting origins still influences their ideological outlook. If you recall, CNL describes itself as a quote unquote digital first grassroots organization, and on their website they claim, quote, our work reaches upwards of 60 million people a month. That number seems to be almost entirely based on the impressions from their account on X the Everything app. These are Twitter views. So as much as C and L likes to put on their little in person networking events, per their own metrics, the organization is essentially a glorified Twitter account. And I could just go through years of bad or offensive tweets. Tweets and many people at the summit were very concerned about old tweets made by DSA candidate Darieliza Avila Chavier. But rather than focusing on posting, I would prefer to engage with the actual substance of their politics and how CNL is trying and failing to place itself in opposition to the dsa, in part because of how much it's focused on on online edgelord contrarian liberalism. For whatever reason, be it their upbringing, class, position or type of education, these liberals have not hopped on the populist train, but still feel left out from the rest of their age peers who are all having fun with dsa. And so they have decided to define themselves in opposition to populism. It's a reactionary liberalism in response to the growing influence of democratic socialism in the Democratic Party. So in effect, their new liberal politics largely manifests itself as a form of contrarianism against popular left wing policies, while also continuously reiterating to themselves that left wing ideas aren't actually popular with the working class. It's a politics entirely downstream from trolling online in an attempt to make center left liberals cool again. I went to a bar after the summit with A few of the attendees and a law student was passionately trying to argue why we should abolish FEMA as a federal agency and just have states pay for their own disaster response so that quote unquote, my tax dollars won't have to go towards idiots in Florida. And like both myself and a writer from the journal Liberal Currents had to explain from like First Principles why it's good to care for poor people and care about a general public good. That's what I mean by contrarian liberalism. The Bay Area chapter of the New Liberals where involved with that pro billionaire march in San Francisco earlier this year in protest of California's proposed wealth tax and stunts like this march for billionaires is another perfect example of CNL's overly online irony poisoned politics, which still display a deeper sincerity. Before I interviewed Professor Porter, I had him listen to a recent episode of the New Liberal podcast hosted by the co founder of cnl, Jeremiah Johnson. The episode argued that liberalism is in crisis, but because there is no more great struggle in America, basically the economy is doing too good. And that's triggered a sort of postmodern crisis of meaning, resulting in voters sabotaging our own political system just to feel something. And confusingly, CNL's co founder proposes a centrist neoliberal technocracy as a way out of this crisis.

[Ben Rose Porter]

The guy on the podcast is talking about technocrats and how one of the central liberal programs of a revived liberalism has to be kind of technocratic politics and a renewed faith in technocratic politics. And I thought technocratic politics was very interesting because the point that you need technocrats to do good policy, to do good governance is a bit of an odd one because absolutely you need technicians to do good policy. Like, you know, complex social institutions at the scale of like, you know, a city or a state or a federal government. In today's world, you need people who know how to run systems and who are trained. You need intellectuals, you need technicians in a general sense, right? You need specialized people. What's interesting is that the whole thing elides like the crat part, like technocrat, the idea that, well, those with technical capacities also rule this way, in which it just completely conflates the idea of technical expertise and decision making at the highest level. Right. That it doesn't even think that those are two separate realms. It literally is the people who can technically do the job are also the people who should make all of decisions about what kinds of jobs we do, how the whole system functions. Right. Which essentially rests on this notion that there is only One game, right? That in the podcast, you hear it a lot is essentially the unspoken aim. And for them it doesn't need to be spoken because as they conceive the world, it is. The only real game to be played is economic growth, right? Is just growing the GDP machine. Capital growth, capital accumulation. They do not entertain the question of what kind of a society do we want to build. Their main drive is GDP growth. And so everything else is just sort of how do you technically do that best, right? How do you improve productivity? How do you grow the economy best? They have no concept of like that there's any kind of like political battle at the heart of that. It's a view of politics without politics.

[Garrison Davis]

Many of the attendees at the New Liberal Action Summit were aspiring technocrats, often self described as such. I think the main tendency among these overly online center left liberals is to confuse technical knowledge for politics, for the ability to govern. They display this deep failure to question authority, not just in like an authoritarian sense, but the authority of what is true or useful knowledge. To the contrarian liberal technocrat, something like rent control is not just bad, but it's actually evil because it disrupts the market, it unnaturally alters supply and demand. And here's all these studies proving this right. In this technocratic mode, there's no consideration that policies may have trade offs, that yes, rent control might negatively affect the class of landlords and for profit developers it might alter supply. But it might be still worth doing as a measure to provide relief to tenants, perhaps in addition to other efforts to make it cheaper to build housing, to increase supply. But that sort of appraisal of trade offs requires governing beyond a pure commitment to serving the market, to just acting on what studies say is true. The liberal technocrat thinks that politics is just the application of technical knowledge, which of course is a massive limitation on what you understand politics as being and what is politically possible. History did not end in the 90s. What is politically possible changes over time. And politics is about responding to different opportunities in history.

[Ben Rose Porter]

They're missing the part of history which is class struggle, right? It's the case that we're in a capitalist world and that requires economic competitiveness. You need to maintain a competitive production on the world stage and internally as well. Totally true. But that does not follow that. You know, you just pursue that blindly. There are very hugely significant decisions about how economic growth proceeds. The biggest one that is just completely left out by these people is the notion that in growing the economy, the wealth produced by that growth, how that's Distributed distributive politics. These people, they don't seem to conceive of it. The podcast you sent me, I think he literally, he says something like, you know, the biggest liberal struggle is that there is no struggle. Like, it literally just conceives the world as, like, there aren't really any problems. Things are fine there. Big citation needed on that one. He's just sort of like, yeah, things are. Things are fine. If you look at it, things are fine. Which is just, I mean, it's just an insane thing to say. Wages haven't risen in like four, 40, 50 years. You know, inequality has exploded, life has stagnated for so many people, especially the poorest people, which are most workers. So the idea that there is actually a realm of politics that revolves around class struggle, around, you know, how wealth is distributed and how we gear our economic growth, to them, that's a, that's a separate category. And so their entire politics is a politics of technocracy. And in that, you know, I'll give it to them, I think that they probably are pretty good at the technical expertise of governance stuff. I mean, one would expect liberalism has been in power in the United States for most of its history. So yeah, I would expect that they would be good at technical expertise. Their critique is not that they don't know what they're doing, it's that they have totally jettisoned politics. The deciding what do you do with that expertise, how do you gear the economy, how do you consciously control where it's going, how distribution happens, who is empowered in government and in the economy. Right, this is all to discuss class. Right, which these people basically never do.

[Garrison Davis]

This limited view of what politics is then determines what the neoliberal technocrat thinks is worth focusing on and what they view as being impossible. Like how they view Medicare for all as this impossible goal. Whether that's because they think voters will never support switching away from private health care, or that a single payer health care system might even hurt the economy and therefore we should oppose it. Their extremely narrow view of what is politically possible is the main reason why this sort of young new liberal organization will never succeed in rivaling dsa. Because the whole better things aren't possible mentality makes it really hard to attract young people to your cause, especially young people who are struggling. No, we can't pass Medicare for all because XY reason a rent freeze is actually evil because X, Y reason. I don't know how that kind of messaging is going to attract anyone except fellow aspiring technocrats, which, yeah, that is basically the entire makeup of CNL as an organization. After the summit, an elected member of CNL's Leadership Steering Committee got drunk at the bar and argued that child outcomes are better when certain types of fathers are incarcerated because some study proved that the type of father who gets charged with the crime would be a bad influence on his kids.

[Robert Evans]

I am Adolf Hitler, Commander the Third Reich.

[Garrison Davis]

That moment was very emblematic for this whole political project. This person was so delighted in their own contrarian commitment to cold, emotionless, uncomfortable truths that may run counter to what seems socially accepted. Their little knowing smirk, fully aware that what they're saying is morally detestable, while self assured in appealing to the authority of technical knowledge. Right? This tendency to fall back on the pretext that a study proved such a controversial fact, while willfully ignoring that there may be alternative solutions to the base problem here. When your main political solution to social problems is just incarceration, then you have lost. Your politics have failed. That's Globe Con 2026. Next episode I'll be doing a deeper dive into neoliberal technocracy as a counter to rising populism,

[Carrie Brownstein]

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[Hoda Kotb]

com I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. If you know me, you know I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover those things together through meaningful conversations with fact. Fascinating people. Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out.

[Hayes Davenport]

You're not hired just to fill time and space. You're hired to fill the space with you. You have something in your guts, you go with it.

[Hoda Kotb]

And Shawn Johnson recalled the moment she realized her now husband, Andrew, was the one.

[Garrison Davis]

He was just so unapologetically himself and knew nothing of Hollywood. He hadn't been on a plane before without his family. It was so pure.

[Hoda Kotb]

Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Fred Armisen]

Hey, Portlandia fans.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here, you

[Fred Armisen]

know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike and yes, the chicken.

[Carrie Brownstein]

We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia. AO rewatch our brand new podcast.

[Fred Armisen]

Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process.

[Carrie Brownstein]

How did any of this get made? Why did he think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it.

[Fred Armisen]

And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life, guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Krisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Kyle is going for it. Here you fully improvised not just words, but a song.

[Robert Evans]

I thought he was going to write.

[Hayes Davenport]

I thought you were all going to write a song.

[Carrie Brownstein]

I remember you thinking that.

[Fred Armisen]

Listen to Podlandia. Ayo. Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Hey.

[Hayes Davenport]

This is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook every episode. We're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

[Garrison Davis]

The show is famously super accessible, so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on.

[Hayes Davenport]

We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben still, or the definition of what is a movie is kind of changed anyway, too, right?

[Garrison Davis]

What do you think it is now?

[Hayes Davenport]

It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on.

[Garrison Davis]

You make your own.

[Tobin Stone]

That's great.

[Hayes Davenport]

I call him Tarot Reed.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a good name.

[Hayes Davenport]

They're all named after cast members of American Pie.

[Robert Evans]

I call.

[Hayes Davenport]

I don't. I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachy Sobieski. Yeah, I don't think she was an American pie, but I haven't looked it up. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

Then Mary Steenburgen why are you guys

[Garrison Davis]

talking to me like I'm watching the movie?

[Hoda Kotb]

So down to me that you think

[Garrison Davis]

I don't understand your little play?

[Hoda Kotb]

Play?

[Garrison Davis]

I just really.

[Hayes Davenport]

I get trying to set you up for success here.

[Garrison Davis]

Listen to Hollywood Hand handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Last episode I detailed my experience at GlobeCon 2026 or the new Liberal Action Summit, a three day convention for young liberal professionals to socialize and listen to panels about zoning reform, energy policy and broad based taxes. The summit is put on by a nonprofit called the center for New Liberalism, a digital advocacy organization that promotes center left policies and neoliberal economics. The center for New Liberalism, or cnl, basically started as a group of policy wonks on Reddit and Twitter making political memes during Trump's first term. But in 2020, CNL was brought into the Clintonite think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. Since then, CNL has been doing yearly summits and more IRL political engagement in hopes of filling in the role of something like the DSA, but for more technocratically aligned moderate young libs. The 2026 New Liberal Action Summit took place in the backdrop of an ascendant Democratic, socialist and left wing populist movement winning congressional primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and now Michigan, beating the more moderate establishment type candidates. A few days before the summit in dc, the New Liberal podcast release an episode about the current crisis of liberalism where CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson talks about why he thinks people are, quote, abandoning the idea that liberalism can help them and are turning to populism, whether from the right or the left.

[Michael Bennett]

The clear trend over time is that we are getting more and more extremely progressive members of Congress, representatives, et cetera, that we are getting more socialists and more DSA aligned candidates, and that the far left is simply out organizing and out hustling the moderate wing of the party or the liberal wing of the party. However you'd like to say it, and this is troubling.

[Garrison Davis]

Jeremiah Johnson cites the Mamdani DSA sweep in New York last June where socialist candidates beat establishment incumbents. And this episode came out about a month before the populist wins in the Michigan Democratic primary. But Johnson does bring up the Colorado primary where one of CNL's favorite politicians, Senator Michael Bennett, just lost his primary for Colorado Governor to the state Attorney General, who to quote Johnson, quote, frankly, was not even necessarily more progressive than him, but simply rode the wave of I'm the populist, anti establishment, I'm more angry, etc. Etc. Michael Bennett is an interesting case. In 2020, he ran for president as like the most centrist candidate of that entire bunch and only qualified for the first two debates. He used to be like one of the least populist senators in the country, like a very CNL type politician who weeks after losing his primary bid, opened the new Liberal Action Summit with a 45 minute fireside chat with C L's Deputy Director Tobin Stone. Senator Bennett's remarks earned a very tepid response from the attendees. Bennett blamed the Democratic Party for losing to Trump because they had no ideas. He talked about the need to build housing and transit from a bottom up approach that helps regular people, not just those at the top, how his constituents in Colorado can't afford to live where they grew up, and how people in their late 20s and 30s can't get a real job. He often mentioned, quote, working people and quote, affordability and referred to Bernie Sanders as his, quote, friend. The whole talk felt kind of Bernie Lite, which was especially odd because the summit schedule said that this fireside chat was going to focus on the threat of the ascendant populist left. But to the extent that Bennett targeted populism, it was the Trumpian right wing authoritarian variety. And like, don't get me wrong, Michael Bennett is still very much a moderate. But if even a longtime ultra centrist like him feels like he has to make overtures to progressives or populists, even when he's speaking to the completely wrong audience, then the libs must be really feeling the pressure. On that new liberal podcast, CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson asked his listeners to consider, if things continue on their current course, what the socialist movement could look like in 10 years.

[Michael Bennett]

But just ask yourself, you know, is this type of candidate winning Democratic primaries more or less often than they were five years ago, than they were 10 years ago, and five to 10 years from now, do you expect that they will have more energy or less energy? Because I think any honest appraisal of where we are at right now is that the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has the energy and the momentum. Their organizing infrastructure is far better, far more serious than the moderate or the liberal wing of the party. They have more people who are out there willing to do the work, knocking on doors, phone banking, posting on social media. That is where the grassroots energy of the Democratic Party is and we can talk about whether or not the voters are there yet, but the voters ultimately follow elite opinion.

[Garrison Davis]

It voters are not just mindless sheep that follow elite opinion. See here the 2016 and 2024 elections. They can be influenced by the power of capital, but voters do evaluate their material conditions and compare that to how different candidates promise to change or not change those conditions once in office. There may be an elitist side of the academic left, but the unspoken assertion here that the DSA is uniquely representative of the elite as opposed to the centrist Democrats who do not represent elite opinion and are more in touch with voters. That's patently absurd, and CNL's new senior adviser agrees. Here's Greg Schultz, Biden's campaign manager and general election strategist, who spoke on a Globe Con panel about winning back Maha voters.

[Ben Rose Porter]

I think part of the reality is the Democratic Party is a self righteous,

[Hayes Davenport]

know it all party and voters can

[Garrison Davis]

feel that and they can see it.

[Hayes Davenport]

We think we know what's better for you and your family than what you know is better for you or your family.

[Garrison Davis]

So one is we are increasingly a party of academic elite, academic cultural elite

[Hayes Davenport]

who I don't think actually talks for

[Ben Rose Porter]

understand their real concerns.

[Garrison Davis]

So while Greg at least admits among friends that the Dems are an elite party detached from the concerns of voters, CNL co founder and podcast host Jeremiah Johnson remains somewhat confused as to why people just don't support the smartest policies as defined by him and are instead turning to populism.

[Michael Bennett]

Any honest appraisal of where we are at says that liberals are losing ground to socialists in the Democratic Party. To some degree, the establishment has done this to themselves. I think it would be wrong for any analysis to leave that out. But having said that, in America, living conditions are still quite good.

[Garrison Davis]

Even in his explanation of why liberalism is failing, he still insists that that things are actually fine. He talks about how real median income is, quote unquote, as high as it's ever been, which doesn't actually mean that things are going great. It's barely keeping up with inflation. But Johnson relies on this narrow batch of macroeconomic statistics to insist that, quote, america is still thriving, life is still good. Last week I forced Ben Rose Porter, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, to listen to this whole Crisis in Liberalism podcast and then discuss his thoughts.

[Ben Rose Porter]

The mainstream capitalist order, which is to say the liberal order as its political correlate is, is breaking down, is failing. So you would expect to see political moves Away from it. There's a very famous graph of worker compensation to productivity. So worker compensation, that's wages, basically how much of profits more or less is going to the workers? Right. So how much are workers compensated, tracked with productivity, which is to say how much are firms producing relative to inputs, Right. Input to output, productivity over time. And this is over the course of the 20th century. And what you see in that graph is that for basically the whole of the 20th century, wages, worker compensation tracks very closely with productivity. So as firms, industries produce more and more stuff, are more and more efficiently producing, are creating more and more wealth, workers, wages are going up and keeping pace with that. So the, the, the share of wealth between the owning classes, the bourgeois and the workers is staying about level. Right. As there's more maid workers are getting some of that.

[Tobin Stone]

Right.

[Ben Rose Porter]

And they're getting an even piece. And around 80, 81, you know, the collapse of the labor movement in the 70s and especially with Reagan, right. You see worker compensation flatline and it basically has been inert since the 80s. Since the beginning of the 80s, productivity has continued to go up about the same rate. So we have been producing more and more wealth in this country. Right. This is what capitalist production does. It's basically almost always growing in productivity. Right. We've been producing more and more wealth and the share of that wealth that the workers get has flatlined. You cannot spin that as things are basically fine. That has all kinds of major effects. One of the big ones is, you know, inequality. Even if workers are not being paid starvation wages, living in that profoundly, in a profoundly inequal society has all kinds of effects, socially speaking. Right. It does for the middle classes too. People who are, you know, comfortable, who are doing well, who have, who have captured a bit of that growth. Because it gets worse the further you go down the line that when you look at like wages for the lowest paid workers, they've often even decreased. Right. But even for those middle class professionals and such who may very well be comfortable, and many of them, we should stress, are not, I think that when you go through and you look at the data, there's a lot of indicators of all kinds of ways in which people might not be comfortable, but even those that are comfortable, you know, they still have to live in a society that is profoundly unequal. That is letting the bottom strata just rot, right? That is just letting like people die on the streets. That has an effect. Anyone with a, with a soul, with a conscience is, you know, affected by that, having foreclosed.

[Garrison Davis]

The idea that there is anything economically or structurally wrong with society. Jeremiah Johnson is left to conclude that this, quote, crisis in liberalism appears to be a crisis of confidence, a crisis of storytelling. So to Johnson, it's simply that the liberal story is no longer as compelling as the alternative populist narratives. Johnson mentions two potential explanations for liberalism's decline, one coming from the right, the other from the left, neither of which he finds convincing. Johnson says that the right wing is promoting a cultural explanation for liberalism's decline, arguing that liberals have moved too far to the left on cultural issues and lost voters, while the left wing offers a quote unquote materialist explanation, claiming living

[Michael Bennett]

conditions have actually deteriorated. And your statistics do not capture this. And people can tell when their lives are getting, you know, materially worse. You know, when things cost too much and they don't have as much income. And that is why people turn away from liberalism towards alternate explanations.

[Garrison Davis]

Of course, in this entire 52 minutes of podcast, Johnson never talks about, like, wealth inequality as a real problem in society, because someone from his self described neoliberal economic worldview just does not believe that skyrocketing wealth inequality is actually a real problem in and of itself. But then he has to pretend to be confused as to why more and more people are falling for this materialist explanation of why there's a crisis in liberalism and why people are not convinced by the quote unquote story that liberalism is telling them with macroeconomic statistics. You know, the stock market is booming, unemployment is low. Things like that don't actually indicate what types of jobs are available, service industry or gig economy. Work is crushing and offers no path for a sustainable future. Buying a house seems impossible, rent keeps skyrocketing, energy costs are ballooning, all while the rich get even richer, even if on average, the median wage has kept up with inflation at about 3.5% per year. There are of course, many people who are not seeing that wage growth. And even if they are, that 3.5% is far below the 30% rise in the price of groceries over the past few years, or the 25% jump in residential electricity rates. And of course, minimum wage workers are not keeping up with inflation, let alone the massive bumps in housing, education and health care costs. A New York Times poll from last May showed that among Democrats and Democrat leaning voters, only 5% said the economic conditions were good or excellent, 88% said the economic system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans, 63% said that the political and economic system needs major changes, and 20% said it needs to be torn down completely. But Johnson would have you believe that the materialist explanation is without merit because DSA candidates actually get a lot of support from middle class workers.

[Michael Bennett]

The people who tend most to be sympathetic to this kind of leftist story tend to be the people with the most education and the highest incomes. If you look at, you know, the, the, the demographics of Zoran Mamdani's win in New York, he won the highest income brackets. And this is despite, you know, having kind of a eat the rich kind of Persona and very, very DSA aligned politics. And this makes me doubt the materialist explanation.

[Garrison Davis]

As we discussed last episode, this is just patently untrue. In both the Democratic primary and the general election, former Governor Andrew Cuomo performed best in the city's highest income districts and with voters who made over $200,000 a year. But no, it is actually the DSA who are truly representative of the elite. And the richest of the rich are Zoron's main base of support. Johnson needs that to be true because as we will learn after this ad break, he contends that liberalism might actually be suffering from its own success. Welcome back. CNL co founder and new liberal podcast host Jeremiah Johnson doesn't buy into either of the populist explanations for liberalism's decline, the cultural one pushed by the right or the materialist one argued by the left. Johnson thinks that if anything, these explanations should be reversed. He discounts the right wing cultural explanation because the places where those progressive cultural advances have gone the farthest are in deep blue districts that are still deep blue. And as for the materialist story told by the left, if you look at

[Michael Bennett]

the places that have actually suffered potentially under the, the liberal era of the last 40 to 50 years, I think the places you could most point to authentically that you could make the strongest case for would be the kind of Rust belt towns, small towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan and so forth, where the decline of manufacturing, you know, the decline of the auto industry or of the steel industry or whatever may have hollowed out the local economy. Now this is a very left leaning explanation, but the people in those towns have not bought into the left explanation. They've, they've turned into Republicans is the thing. You know, the, the materialist argument pushed by the left is actually most applicable to the areas that now vote for Donald Trump.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, that's the whole point. It's the economy, idiot. Just flatly dismissing any materialist analysis on the basis that such analysis, as argued by the left, is actually even more applicable in places that are voting for Trump rather than Democrats is completely missing the entire point of the left's analysis. Trump ran as a populist, a right wing populist, but that is like evidence for what the left is arguing. That is the left's explanation why those places, which used to be Democrat working class union districts, why they have gone to Trump, it's because he's offering a populist solution. Now, is Trump's right wing populist solution actually going to be a real solution to the base problems? No, because instead he's going to do economic nationalism, he's going to do tariffs, he's going to scapegoat immigrants as the reason for why housing is expensive, why the job market sucks. So he is offering a populist solution, but not a good solution. While campaigning, he was addressing the poor economic conditions, price of eggs, as opposed to the liberal assertion that things are great actually, or something as tone deaf as bidenomics is working.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Here's a better story, like a better explanation for that is just paying attention to the actual history. I'm from the south, right? The south is, so much of it is the core for, you know, a kind of reactionary cultural, right wing cultural politics. The south is also where the labor movement, the unions were just decimated. I mean, it's brutal there. Union density is in the shitter and has been for a while. And so one way of explaining this is like, yeah, people in these places, people in the south often gravitate towards a kind of cultural reactionary, confused politics precisely because there's no other option. They don't have a kind of coherent socialist project. And so they, they go towards these other things where there's more of a labor movement where it has held on to some degree. Somewhere like New York for instance, there is an alternative route, right? And it took us a while to get there. You know, this is a relatively new trend of the rise in socialism. But I don't know whether this is like cynical or if he just genuinely does not conceive of how. Well, yeah, it may be that these are real material stressors and pressures that are then interpreted through cultural lenses for all sorts of reasons. The idea that it must be one or the other, that if, well, if these, if people favor a cultural explanation, then there must not be material problems. It is also the whole thing is just fraught. I mean, like the idea that the only places suffering from deindustrialization or, you know, dried up economies are just Republican states and cities. That's just not true in any sense. There are Lots of places where a dying economy is responded to with very left materialist analyses. Nor also the idea that again, I mean, just very hand wavy, like just citation needed. We're moving. Things are fine. Outside of like a limited deindustrialized red states, you know, where things maybe are a little bad, everything else is fine. Like is the idea that in major coastal cities everything's fine and just completely ignores that, like service workers in the lowest rungs of workers in these places are being crushed right now, many of which have to then leave the cities they're in. And then, you know, people who may be able to maintain a comfortable income and comfortable there is, you know, a little strange. I mean, gig work is on the rise. People are having to work all sorts of strange hours at beck and call of their employers. Alienation from their kinds of work and the ability to choose one's job is really profoundly wrong. Incomes for college graduates have dropped. So professionals, while they may be able to maintain a somewhat comfortable income, are often still declining in that capacity. Enfranchisement in people's worlds, both in their economic world and in saying how they labor, how they work, but also in the wider political world and in getting a say in how government is happening, people feel totally disenfranchised. They are disenfranchised from those things. So it's just a very thin patina of things are fine that falls apart upon any examination. Ironically, these people represent the whole project of things are fine because we maintain full control. The other side of the coin of things are fine is we need not empower anyone else. Just let us, the technical experts, run everything.

[Garrison Davis]

So instead of a cultural explanation or a materialist explanation for the current crisis in liberalism, the center for New Liberalism seems to kind of embrace this sort of liberal affluenza, as if people are actually suffering from affluence. For this, Johnson turns to Francis Fukuyama.

[Michael Bennett]

Fukuyama, in his book the End of History in the Last man, very famously said that he believed man needs struggle. Essentially. You know, in the 20th century, we got the great struggles of World War I and the Great Depression, World War II and then the Cold War. And liberalism flourished under these conditions because it had an identifiable enemy to fight. It had a struggle that, you know, men and women could throw themselves into, you know, that we could defeat the Nazis, we could defeat the Communists. And then he predicted that if history really did end in air quotes, that men might struggle just for the sake of struggle. They would struggle against the very system that created this prosperity. Just for the sake of having something to feel. Of having something to feel useful for.

[Garrison Davis]

The idea is now that liberalism has conquered the globe, people don't actually require anything materially different, but will still desire for self worth, dignity and recognition. This is a sort of postmodern crisis of a struggle for meaning totally divorced from a materialist desire.

[Michael Bennett]

But Fukuyama argues that while modern liberal democracies can provide peace and material wealth, they leave people feeling alienated by not delivering that sense of higher purpose. And that that is what leads people to nationalism or populism or identity politics, because people want some sort of recognition.

[Garrison Davis]

To Johnson, ultimately, liberalism is struggling because, quote, there is no more great struggle.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah, There is no real struggle that this is all made up. It's all smoke and mirrors, like everybody's fine. I mean, if you pursue it to its, its logical conclusion, it's, it's the most condescending politics there is. It's literally just, you don't really have problems. You are just rebelling against us because things are so good and you don't have meaning other, other than opposing us. It literally. I was listening to that and I was like, this sounds like bourgeois revolutions of early modernity. Right. This is like how the monarchy reacted to so many times. You get like, you know, absolute monarchs. Just saying like, well, the people, there aren't really problems. You're fine, it's fine. Just chill out, like, I'm your king, we're doing fine, it's all good. Right. And of course that worked out brilliantly for them. Yeah, it's the same politics. It's just, well, there's basically no struggle. People are mad because, you know, they don't have enough meaning. I just, I don't know how that plays out to anyone is insane to me. The idea that, you know, all of the struggle and strife in the world today is just, it's not real. It's somehow a made up pretend we're all doing. It's ridiculous.

[Garrison Davis]

Johnson's contention is that things just got so good under neoliberal technocracy that it created a postmodern crisis of meaning, resulting in people struggling against the very system that provides for them to gain a new sense of purpose. Basically self sabotaging by electing bad populist candidates, which then do make economic conditions worse. But then Johnson's solution to this problem is just to put neoliberal technocrats back in power, but this time be even more cynical and also more patriotic. In contrast to the United States, Johnson points to Canada as an example of where Liberalism is currently succeeding. And he credits this to, quote, technocratic ability, cynical maneuvering and liberal nationalism, adding, quote, we need technocrats more than ever. I introduced the idea last episode that one of the main tendencies among these so called new liberals is the belief that politics is just the application of technical knowledge. You know, conflating having technical knowledge with the ability to govern well and do decision making at the highest level. A view of politics without politics, the

[Ben Rose Porter]

technocratic point of view sort of works like this. It understands that, like, okay, there's technical expertise. Let's say you're trying to, you know, reform tax policy. Tax policy is very complex. The way that taxes work, the way that, you know, government revenues work is very complex. So if you're going to rearrange that, yeah, you are going to need some people who understand how that works, who are intellectuals, you know, who have the technical knowledge required to make your policies work. That's a crucial part of any politics. You absolutely need that. Any political faction that seeks to have a chance of successful governance needs a level of technical expertise. Absolutely. But that is an entirely separate question from what does one choose to do? Your technical expertise is a key part to successfully doing what you set out to do. But politics at the highest levels, right at the level of like, party line, of like, what party strategy is about, what are you trying to do? The technocratic view basically thinks that that question is already decided. To them, it's obvious what you should do. What you should do is grow the economy, maximize economic growth, because in their view, that's good for everybody. You know, rising tide lifts all boats. That's good for everybody. There is no conflict here. And so if there is no conflict here, then that's the obvious pick. And then the only difficulty is just getting people in to do that job well. And so for them, politics is just about, okay, well, our team has the people who know how to do this job well, and the other team doesn't know how to do the job well. And they have trouble sometimes even conceiving that. In fact, no, the, the debate would be about what we're choosing to do.

[Garrison Davis]

Johnson explains that liberal governance has to walk a dangerous tightrope. If you lean too far to the left, you stifle the economy and feed radicalism and extremism. Johnson points to Europe as an example of this. But if you lean too far to the right economically, people will revolt if they don't share in the prosperity.

[Michael Bennett]

If you don't successfully walk this tightrope, then you risk entering a kind of doom Loop where, you know, oh, everything seems really bad, we're all dooming. And so people are going to choose an illiberal candidate, and that illiberal candidate is going to do stupid things that make things worse in society. And that's going to make people even more illiberal, even more tilted towards extremism, which will lead to worse candidates who will make things even worse than before, and so on, et cetera. There is real risk of entering that kind of doom loop, and that's why it's important to actually have smart, technocratic leadership.

[Garrison Davis]

The doom loop theory glosses over the fact that Trump came after Obama. The sentiment that this technocratic leadership wasn't working didn't just come from the right. Bernie Sanders also rose to prominence by arguing this from a left wing perspective. And the capitalist class were more threatened by Sanders. So they mobilized to take out the threat of left wing populism, even if that meant Trump's right wing populism would win, because they know that the left wing version is the one that could actually empower labor against the interests of capital. Johnson also claims that Joe Biden had big goals, but, quote, his technocratic ability wasn't there, meaning there was too much red tape prohibiting his policies from having an impact because he, quote, went about policy in a stupid way. Now, Johnson knows that calling for a technocracy isn't an election strategy. For that, he proposes more, quote, unquote, cynical maneuvering and that liberals should get more, quote, unquote, ruthless in terms of running elections. He says Kamala Harris should have forcefully distanced herself from, from Joe Biden, or the party should have pushed her out for being too compromised due to her association with Biden. Of course, Johnson does not acknowledge that the party is very capable of cynical, ruthless maneuvering when it serves their interests and the interests of their donors. Once Again, consider the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and the concerted efforts to take down Bernie Sanders, something that quite possibly lost the Democrats the 2016 election. But Johnson also talks about the need for cynical maneuvering in implementing policy.

[Ben Rose Porter]

The main things he talks about seem to be flatly at odds with each other because he says, well, you know, we need technocratic politics, which is to say you just need the right policies. You need the ones that are correct to do the job well. Again, what the job is, what we're trying to do is totally like not on the table. That's a given, right? And then you just need the people who can technically do that well. But then he also says you need some cynicism you need to be able to just be ruthless electorally and operate politically in order to win. Which seems to directly contradict. It's like, well, what should you do? Should you pick the policies that are correct? Pursue technocracy regardless of whether or not it's popular, whether it can win elections? Right. Which is this whole contention is that the right policies are somehow not popular among the people. Or should you be electorally ruthless and try to appeal to the masses and win elections by perhaps. I mean, he gives an example with the carbon tax where he says, I think this policy is great. I think this is the technically correct policy, but you have to abandon it. Again, I'm sure if you asked him, he would say, well, you have to strike a balance between the two. But as strategy, that's useless, right? It's like, well, how should you ride a bike? Well, you don't want to lean too far left, but you also don't want to lean too far right. You want to kind of stay right in the balanced middle. Okay, that tells us nothing. You should pick the right policies, but not so much. You need to also be ruthless and be able to win elections. Pick the right policies and win elections. Don't see Stalingrad take it immediately.

[Garrison Davis]

Johnson argues that the final necessary step in exiting the populist doom loop is quote unquote, liberal nationalism. Basically, the idea that liberals need to become loudly more patriotic and reclaim and be proud of the progressive parts of American history. But liberal patriotism isn't enough to win elections. And the Harris campaign already kind of tried this.

[Michael Bennett]

Liberals have got to be better at telling a story of how America is great. Liberalism made America great. Liberalism is why we're all rich and successful and awesome.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the massive contradiction at the heart of their project. They want to say, we're all rich, the economy is great, living conditions are fine. But the neoliberals do have at least some awareness of material problems, because most of the conference panels were about affordability, especially in relation to housing and energy costs. So are there massive economic factors driving voter behavior or not? How can you pretend that everything is great actually, and then also put on a whole conference focusing on how housing and energy are way too expensive. You, you do know that there are material problems. What's actually happening here is that you're frustrated that people aren't buying into your neoliberal solutions to the problems caused by neoliberalism. But to the technocrat, it can't be the policies that are wrong. So instead it must be that we are not Telling a strong enough story,

[Michael Bennett]

we need to be able to figure out a pro growth, patriotic, muscular, liberal message that works because people respond to two things. In the end, they respond to material conditions. If the material conditions are bad enough, they will get mad at you. But they also respond to stories. And it's hard to identify the story that liberals tell today.

[Garrison Davis]

At the very end of this podcast, Johnson finally admits that people do in fact respond to material conditions, but only if things get bad enough. But he also believes that the economy is good, we are rich, we are successful. So the problem has to be something else, and that something else is stories. Liberalism just isn't telling the right stories. Again, it's not material problems, it's storytelling problems. And Johnson says the story we should tell should be rooted in two a return to history and a vision of abundance. Johnson truly believes that this is all about stories and not actually about politics. And this is where the technocratic version of politics hits its own massive limitations. This is where it runs up against its extremely narrow view of what politics is and what is politically possible.

[Ben Rose Porter]

They're totally whipped by capital. Like, that's the thing is like, capital sets the agenda because as I said, they've ceded the territory of political decisions, properly put, right? They concern themselves with the technical administration of the system, but are totally uninterested in the commanding heights of the system of how is the economy structured. But ceding that territory doesn't mean it's neutral. It just means that, yeah, capital gets to call the shots then. And so capital basically says, well, here's what's possible and here's what's not, right? Based very much on capital's interests, right? In order for us to maintain our profitability at the levels we would like and the ways we would like these things are not possible. And the technocrats, they just accept that, right? Like it's a real belief for them. It's not cynical. You know, there is a time where with shrewder and more aware liberals, liberals who are aware of like class struggle, I think, and who were throwing in on the side of capital, like originally, like the classical liberals as well as liberals throughout the 20th century, right? When they really, when they had to contend with like real socialist politics, they knew, like they were self conscious about, well, we are on the side of capital, right? That's the biggest difference between sort of the past ages of liberalism and this, you know, upstart young liberals. They're so in the pocket of capital, they're so at capital's bidding that they don't even really know it's there anymore. And so they just perceive this as like, again, what capital wants is basically just the natural state of the world, what is possible, period, with, you know, like just such an impossibly narrow historical focus on like, what is possible. And I just don't know how anyone, like, looks at the past, you know, hundred years of history and feels they can conclude very solidly what is and is not possible. But they just feel that what capital says is basically the natural constraints of what's possible in society. And so given that, which they take as a given, the only question is competent administration. It's a fall from previous liberals who argued for like, no, we want to empower capital over labor to a certain extent, right? Or we want to achieve a balance between these things, usually with capital leading in some way.

[Garrison Davis]

It's time for one more ad break before we learn how Jeremiah Johnson believes that a quote unquote brightness loop might be the key to solving the crisis of liberalism. Welcome back. Johnson proposes the way out of this populist doom loop is what he calls a brightness loop, or basically like a positive feedback loop, which will be achieved through technocracy, ruthless politics and liberal patriotism, embracing America and our history and loudly

[Michael Bennett]

proclaiming, we are rich and we are successful and we are awesome. America rocks.

[Garrison Davis]

I wonder how that's gonna go over with voters who are struggling to pay bills and household expenses every month. Might they turn to another candidate who actually addresses the fact that maybe things aren't so great for everyone? The limitations of the technocratic mindset is a big part of why center left candidates are losing to left populists in very high profile races. I really don't know how CNL expects to grow their organization and build momentum among young people to advance their own candidates to claw back the Democratic Party away from the socialists, away from the populists, from the progressives. When their political project is calling for technocracy, cynicism and liberal nationalism, how do you think that will attract and then mobilize an actual energized, motivated base? Because the only people I can see that appealing to are those who aspire themselves to be technocrats. And true to form, that is who attended the New Liberal Action Summit last month in Washington D.C. it was a group of people who identify with and submit themselves to the mainstream neoliberal order and who understand themselves through identifying with the base structure of capitalist American society. That's where they get their self identification and in many cases their jobs and their income. This is people who want to work in politics, who want to work as a consultant, a campaign manager, a lobbyist, or a congressional staffer. In contrast, a lot of the people in DSA don't have an actual interest in politics as an industry. In fact, they might have a frankly aversion to electoral politics. And they're kind of involved in DSA somewhat begrudgingly. In a sense, most DSA members that I interact with would not want to work in politics as their job, but they are doing this because they believe in it and because there's material forces that are driving them towards wanting this sort of change versus the CNL approach of trying to base all your on the ground mobilization. Unlike other aspiring technocrats and professionals whose lives are built very materially around these politics, around doing politics. And so their efforts to promote neoliberalism could be interpreted as a form of class reproduction, an attempt to maintain their particular position within a class dynamic. Now, of course, the socialists do have their own flock of aspiring professionals and intellectuals who are seeking roles within civil institutions and political positions of authority. The difference lies in what political project you are a part of, what kind of class politics you're tied to, what class you're trying to empower. Are you intending to maintain or alter class relations? And ultimately, what does political success look like? Just growing the GDP as much as possible, Increasing the total amount of wealth? Or is it economic equality and democratic control of society and production? In their attempts to claim liberal history, right, the new liberals will associate themselves with, you know, fdr, the New Deal, maybe if they're shrewder, the Great Society. One of the most frustrating parts of the conference for me was hearing these lobbyists talk about, you know, the great legacy of fdr, while in another breath strongly arguing against wealth taxes, against taxing the rich. At the end of the Crisis in Liberalism podcast, Johnson says, quote, the populist left says that you don't actually need to have any form of economic growth as long as you can categorize people into good and evil groups and tax the evil ones and give all their money to the good ones, unquote. And I just don't think that is how they would describe New Deal or Great Society era tax rates. They would never describe those tax rates and the reasons for why they were instituted as like, we decided there are good and evil groups and therefore we must punish the evil ones and give all their money to the good ones. The new liberals have to play it both ways because they still want to associate themselves with the sort of heights of liberal democracy in the United States, which they point to these eras as. But they're both fundamentally opposed to what these eras actually are, the economic policies and tax base that made those policies possible, and also vehemently opposed to the organized labor apparatus that fought for those policies. So they want to claim the legacy of those things for liberalism. But short of all content, they have to completely ignore both the substance of those politics and the forces that drove those politics, which was chiefly the labor movement. And socialists were a huge part of that. But neoliberals don't want to acknowledge or promote labor because organized labor runs contrary to the interest of capital and because they know they can't compete with dsa. If you're going to play that game in somewhat breaking From Ezra Klein, CNL's strain of neoliberal abundance explicitly blames unions for why it's so hard to build housing and infrastructure. They think labor unions are bad for the economy and thus are evil, and that the general public are stupid children throwing a temper tantrum, sabotaging the greatest country ever by electing populists because liberalism made the world too good. There's no more struggle, and liberals just have to tell the sheeple a better story so that neoliberal technocrats can stay in power, that those with technical knowledge can rule.

[Ben Rose Porter]

It's a profoundly undemocratic politics. You pursue it to its logical ends. And it is literally. Well, the people do not really know what their interests are. And in fact, we'll go against them just for the sake of having meaning, I guess. So it's up to us, those who do know what the right politics are, to be in charge and to basically call all the shots. And who has the authority to say that we have the right politics? Well, us, of course. Right. It's why, you know, these people exist at the whim of capital. Without capital, they are nothing. Right? They have this idea that they produce their own authority by having the correct policies. They know the world, and that's where their power comes from. They exist at capital's whim, right? And if capital decides to move in a different direction, they have no authority. They have nothing. It's capital or labor. You either get your source of authority and political power from the economic powers that be, the property owners who control production and have an enormous amount of power in that sense, or you get it from the masses, from the people, the laborers, who actually power society and power all production. Those are the two forces. This idea that correct knowledge in itself supplies authority is not only obviously undemocratic, but it's I mean, just profoundly confused. It's completely oblivious to political reality. It doesn't believe in politics. It doesn't think there is a realm of politics.

[Garrison Davis]

With that though, you are forgetting that we're rich, that we're successful, that we're awesome.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah, we are rich, we are successful. We are awesome. America rocks. America rocks. God, what a. Yeah, he pairs that one with talking about like, you can't be a depressing nerd and talk about what America has done wrong. I love the idea of like trying to set yourself up against like nerds being like, don't be a nerd. And then being like, America rocks. We're rich, we're successful. We're all that is like the nerd

[Garrison Davis]

line is like, this is a whole nerd conference. This is like the most policy wonky. Will Stancil, Matt Iglesias, like, nerd central.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Well, maybe you're on the football team, but I have an A in math. Like it's literally that it's, well, we're rich, we're successful and we're awesome. We won World War II.

[Mia Wong]

We beat the communists.

[Ben Rose Porter]

We beat the communists. It's just very. Yeah, it's hollow too. I mean, I'm a red blooded American. You know, there's a lot to like about the American society. But this, like, America rocks. America is awesome. Like, I don't know, maybe there's a reason people aren't really feeling that one right now. You know, just shouting it into the faces of the misery of the masses is not the best move.

[Garrison Davis]

You don't think that's going to go over well with voters who are maybe not rich and who are struggling?

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah, I don't know, man. Look around. It's been a pretty bad like. Yeah, no, I don't, I don't. I think this kind of God, we're awesome.

[Garrison Davis]

As much as the New Liberals are upset and confused why the political momentum is with DSA and not them, the center for New Liberalism will never be able to build an organization of young libs capable of rivaling DSA because technocratic liberalism categorically rejects mass politics. So while CNL and the New Liberals make a big show online, ultimately they are just a front group for ppi, the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist think tank that convinced the Democratic Party to abandon the working class in the 90s, abandon redistributive new Deal liberalism, and embrace deregulatory free market neoliberal economics under Bill Clinton. So while the Blue Globe Emoji people will continue to post prolifically online I suspect that is where their political impact will largely remain. Here's a final note from sociology professor Ben Rose Porter.

[Ben Rose Porter]

I mean, look, economies are hard to figure out, but I think it's just worth saying, like, what are you growing the economy for?

[Mia Wong]

Right?

[Ben Rose Porter]

The whole point is to provide people with better lives, you know, raise their wages, give them more power and control over their lives and their society, and they just seem to have it very reversed. Where the point is to to grow the economy at whatever cost.

[Garrison Davis]

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[Robert Downing]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[Hoda Kotb]

I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. If you know me, you know I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover those things together through meaningful conversations with friends, fascinating people. Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out.

[Hayes Davenport]

You're not hired just to fill time and space. You're hired to fill the space with you. You have something in your guts, you go with it.

[Hoda Kotb]

And Shawn Johnson recalled the moment she realized her now husband Andrew was the one.

[Garrison Davis]

He was just so unapologetically himself and knew nothing of Hollywood. He hadn't been on a plane before without his family. It was so pure.

[Hoda Kotb]

Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Garrison Davis]

Hey, Portlandia fans, Carrie Brownstein and Fred

[Fred Armisen]

Armisen here, you know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike and yes, the chicken.

[Carrie Brownstein]

We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia. AO rewatch our brand new podcast.

[Fred Armisen]

Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning. Breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process.

[Carrie Brownstein]

How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it.

[Fred Armisen]

And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life, guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Krisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Kyle is going for it. Here you fully improvised, not just words, but a song about it.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I thought he was gonna write.

[Hayes Davenport]

I thought you were all gonna write a song.

[Carrie Brownstein]

I remember you thinking that.

[Fred Armisen]

Listen to Podlandia. Hey, yo. Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Downing]

Hey.

[Hayes Davenport]

This is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode, we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

[Garrison Davis]

The show is famously super accessible, so you can easily jump into any of

[Hayes Davenport]

our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of the. Our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anyway, too, right?

[Garrison Davis]

What do you think it is now?

[Hayes Davenport]

It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on.

[Garrison Davis]

You make your own.

[Tobin Stone]

That's great.

[Hayes Davenport]

I call him Tarot Reed.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a good name.

[Hayes Davenport]

They're all named after cast members of American Pieces.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I call.

[Tobin Stone]

I don't.

[Hayes Davenport]

I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leechy Sobieski. Yeah, I don't think she was an American pie, but I haven't looked it up. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

Then Mary Steenburgen.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Why are you guys talking to me?

[Ben Rose Porter]

Like, did you understand the movie so

[Hoda Kotb]

down to me that you think I

[Mia Wong]

don't understand your little play?

[Hoda Kotb]

Play.

[Mia Wong]

I just really.

[Hayes Davenport]

I get it. Trying to set you up for success.

[Garrison Davis]

Listen to Hollywood handbook on the iHeartRadio

[Hayes Davenport]

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. And in this case, the here we're talking about is Texas. And the it we're talking about is one of America's most corrupt and evil politicians, Ken Paxton. And I. I'm using corrupt and evil in, like, an objective, scientific sense. I need you to understand this. A matter of opinion. The Vatican convened a series of scientists who did confirm that Ken Paxton has the evil equivalent of midichlorians in a concentration never before seen in an American politician. And to talk to me about Ken Paxton and say things that are real and accurate and not Nonsense is a guy who actually reports on Ken Paxton directly as part of his professional job as a real journalist. Robert Downing. Robert down, welcome to the show.

[Hayes Davenport]

Thank you for having me. And thank you for that incredible introduction.

[Robert Evans]

Gotta have a little fun with Ken. Okay, Pax.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

First off, you want to introduce yourself? Put up your plugs up front here.

[Hayes Davenport]

Sure. My name is Robert Downing. I'm a writer at Texas Monthly. I've been in Texas for almost a decade now where I've kind of covered, I guess you could say religion, the convergence of far right politics and religion, extremism, et cetera, which is to say, you know, now I basically just cover the current Texas gop because they are kind of the incubator for a lot of policy that goes national.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it is like the breeding warren at the center of the fever swamps in a lot of ways.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You and I met a couple of years ago now at the RNC during 2024, which was a lot of fun. And I'm kind of curious. Cause I don't know that I actually asked you then when did you start kind of covering Ken Paxton? Do you remember when you first really became aware of him in a meaningful way?

[Fred Armisen]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

I don't know if you remember this. I think we were actually in the middle of talking about it and we were at some stake joint and I looked to my right and recognized a very large Rambo esque bodyguard sitting next to us, who happens to be Ken Pax's bodyguard, and realized that Ken Pax was sitting right next to us. So I don't think we ever finished the conversation.

[Robert Evans]

You're right. I don't think we did. Fucking the RNC guys. It's a wild time. Yes.

[Hayes Davenport]

And then I met Roger Stone. It was great.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Fucking Ted Cruz walked in. What a day.

[Hayes Davenport]

I started covering Ken Paxton probably officially in 2022, 2023. Before that, I had kind of covered, you know, Southern Baptist stuff. I was really focused more on the religion side of stuff. So, like, he's always been in my peripherals, but never, you know, been a sole focus. And then about, you know, five years ago, ish, I guess four years ago, ish, I started really focusing on this far right movement in Texas, the billionaires behind it who, you know, for that movement, Ken Paxton is kind of the tip of the spear. So he's been not a primary focus of mine, but someone who I'm paying very frequent attention to for quite a while.

[Robert Downing]

So.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Ken is. He's not a Texan by birth, obviously. Which doesn't matter to anybody but some Texans. But he was born in North Dakota, if I'm remembering correctly. And he first kind of comes on the scene politically in like 2003 when he's a state representative. Right, right. Yeah. When is kind of the first really notable moment in the Ken Paxton saga, in your opinion? Like, when you go back to, like, where does this guy start to differentiate himself from everyone else?

[Hayes Davenport]

I think you really, to kind of understand Ken Paxton's rise and especially the political climate of Texas right now, you have to go to this 2009, 2010 period where Texas really was on the forefront of what would become the Tea Party movement. We started to see, you know, this huge influx of billionaire oil money. In particular these two dudes named Ferris Wilkes and Tim Dunn, who I'm sure we'll get to in this conversation.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

You know, they kind of coalesce around this strategy in the Texas House in particular, where they're going to basically just accuse anyone who's not sufficiently far right enough for them as being a rhino and pump all of this money into a media and political ecosystem or, you know, network that kind of just becomes almost like this. This way that they are holding people's feet to the fire, to the point where, you know, they are funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, to primary opponents for incumbent lawmakers. A lot of these, you know, these candidates are, you know, dead on arrival. They have no actual chance of winning a primary. But the whole point is just kind of like bruise up these lawmakers, deplete their campaign coffers, and kind of make them second guess anytime that they're thinking about defying this political network in the next session. And so Paxton really emerges out of that, I guess, kind of movement. You know, you start to see around 2012, 2013, these groups that are funded by Tim Dunn, Ferris Wilkes really start to hold him up as this taxpayer champion. And then in 2014, he launches what was kind of thought to be a long shot bid for attorney general that he ends up winning against a little bit more moderate Republican candidates with key help from these billionaires. And that kind of, you know, is off to the races from there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, so this is a really, as you bring up, a really interesting thing that starts happening to Texas politically. It starts like right as the Bush years are coming to an end, because obviously George W. Bush was not just the governor of Texas, but he was kind of the governor of Texas, who his victory sort of heralded the defeat of the Democratic Party in Texas in A way that it, I mean, it still hasn't recovered from at least, you know, that's kind of the way I, I often see it. And you have, you have Bush come in and then obviously become the president. But because of the unpopularity of the neocons, Texas also winds up becoming kind of this incubator of the backlash, the conservative backlash to Bush too. And Paxton embodies that to some extent because he literally defeats a Bush as part of his, his rise to power. Right. Like much later on. But that is interesting to me.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah, I mean, I think the way to really understand the Texas GOP is for the longest time it was this coalition of, you know, big, big business interests, specifically oil. But then, you know, you had the evangelical cohort and they kind of existed in harmony with each other for a while. You know, there were obviously rough patches for the party, but, you know, overcoming the Democratic establishments that had ruled the state for so long, I think kind of it's much easier to stick together when everyone's winning. But then out of the Obama years, in the post Obama years, you have this Tea Party movement that is really led by Ken Paxton. These billionaires, to many degrees, they turn their sights on those in the party. So again, you have just this really, really ugly early days of what turns into a full on civil war within the party where, you know, people who in most other states would be considered, you know, the most far right member of the legislature are being branded like rhinos and traitors. And this is, you know. Yeah, this is in the pre Trump era, before that was kind of the, I guess, you know, animating philosophy of, you know, kind of, you know, borrowing from this no enemies to the right framework, that that was something that was really, I think, defined all of what's happening in Texas first and now national.

[Robert Evans]

And do you have a sense personally of when Ken's sort of ultra right beliefs begin? Is this something that's always a thing for him or is this something that he adopts opportunistically? Is it becomes clear that that's the future of the party?

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah, I mean, it's a really tough question and something I think a lot of us have spent a lot of time trying to figure out. He almost is so emblematic of the direction of the Texas GOP in general that it's almost impossible to differentiate whether he always harbored these beliefs and then translated that into political momentum towards them, or if the political momentum drove him toward it's a chicken or an egg situation. But I will say that starting as soon as he becomes attorney general, he really starts to use that position to aid the political objectives, both on social policy, but also on campaign finance reform. All these other issues really start to push the state and the state party towards the, I guess, policy positions of this far right billionaire network.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Now, when it comes to Ken himself, his first big scandal is kind of like a bribery allegation, right? Is, as I'm recalling.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yes. So in 2011, he, when he is still a state rep, he meets at a Dairy Queen with the CEO of a software company, very Texas. As we continue this conversation, you're going to notice there's a lot of fast food.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

This man loves a fast food joint.

[Robert Evans]

You know what? North Texas born and raised. Well, not born, but raised. So I do get that.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah. Anyways, so he meets this guy at a Dairy Queen. And again, this is all allegedly. This court case was settled, I think, in 2024. But basically the allegation from the SEC, which later indicted him, was that he was offered 100,000 shares in this new company. Ken Paxton claims that he tried to pay the CEO for the shares. And the CEO was like, no, God told me to give this to you. You can't give me any money. And then, so Paxton allegedly goes on and sells something like, you know, almost a million dollars worth of shares in this company to people without allegedly telling him that he was also an investor. So he gets indicted in 2015 on felony stuff, security fraud. And that charge is kind of hanging over his head for the next almost 10 years. And as we'll get into, is kind of like just looming off in the distance for all of his political rise, but also plays an important part of his impeachment. But there's one other scandal that wasn't criminal that kind of predates the impeachment, which is that in 2014, as he's running for attorney general, he is at a courthouse in the Dallas area. And there's a video of this. A guy in front of him in the security line leaves $1,000 Montlog pen in the. In the.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. This is one of my favorite K Pax tales. Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

There's this little video of Ken Paxton just kind of plucking it out there and putting it in his pocket and. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So saw something he liked and he took it.

[Hayes Davenport]

It's pretty funny.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, God, that is beautiful. And we have a lot more beautiful Ken Paxton stories to come, but for first, some ads. And we're back. I guess one of the things that occurs to me just kind of as I've. Every time I've looked over Ken's background is how much of his election history is ran unopposed in the primary, ran against a Democrat who had no chance of victory. Right. Like, once he gets in, this isn't totally the case, but once he gets into office, a lot of his elections are almost like a rubber stamp, pro forma sort of deal kind of.

[Tobin Stone]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

I mean, I think that I'd have to go back and look at the actual margins, but I think that he has actually historically kind of lagged behind, you know, as far as the margins he's winning by. Have always kind of lagged behind what other top Republicans are winning by.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

In 2018, you start to see some crack.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

And then in 2020 is when you start to see the quote, unquote, establishment Texas GOP starting to fund his opponents. And ultimately that doesn't work. And that lays the groundwork for, I guess, the kind of conspiracy theories around his impeachment, which I'm sure we'll get to.

[Robert Evans]

It is interesting that Ken has never been a great campaigner. He's benefited from the Republican Party's dominance in Texas and, like, the amount of funding and whatnot that he's able to raise as a result of that. But as you said, he's, like, lagged behind other Republicans in terms of, like, his. His electoral performance. And he has had some real close squeakers in the past, too, which is one of the reasons why, like, this current election is so interesting. But what do you think the Republican Party, the state party, starts to turn against him? What is it that does that? Is it just sort of the weight of scandals that this guy accumulates because we've only talked about a couple of them, or is it something else?

[Hayes Davenport]

I think that, again, he becomes very emblematic of this far right flank of the Texas GOP that's funded by Tim Dun, Ferris Wilkes. Like, there's this moment in 2017, 2018 ish, where the Texas House legislature has just gotten out of this brutally controversial session where they were doing early versions of the bathroom bill. There was really just acrimonious within the party. And there are these quotes of these, I guess we would call them more moderate Republicans, but again, still very right wing in any other state. Yeah, but they come out and, you know, there's a famous quote from then, you know, the man who became the House speaker where basically he says, you know, we're done bashing the gays, basically trying to move the party away from these, you know, I guess for lack of A better term, culture war issues that really the far right flank is, is trying to coalesce around.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

And I think that Ken Paxton is, is very much seen as a, as a kind of, you know, emblem of that flank that for a while looked like it was, you know, on the verge of being on the outs of Texas politics. I mean, if you go back to that summer before his impeachment, there are so many different things that happened in the lead up to that where you're like, oh, this Tim Dunn, Ferris Wilkes network looks like, you know, this is a death rattle moment for it. And instead of dying, it becomes more powerful than ever and starts exporting all of its stuff national.

[Robert Evans]

Why, why do you think that is? Like, what. How the fuck does this guy. Sorry, how is this guy though, the one who manages to like reincarnate himself at this moment? That should have been his end, I think I know that. Yeah. There's not an answer to that, but I guess I'm. Yeah. Your feelings on it.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah. So before we got on, I just was like, I need to almost refresh myself on everything that happened with his impeachment. And at the time I was covering it, like turn of the screw, like wall to wall coverage every single second of the impeachment hearing. And I don't think unless you were paying that much intimate attention to everything that was going on, people are fully capable of understanding just like how wide ranging and frankly insane the entire episode was. And I think because of that, it was really easy for Ken Paxton's defenders both in the impeachment hearing and just outside in the political realm. It was much easier for them to take this complicated scandal and turn it into just, oh, this is a witch hunt. They're going after Ken Paxton because they can't get to you. It's worth also backtracking here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

There are a significant number of people, because of this Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes operation that believe fundamentally that the Texas legislature and state has been under the control secretly of Democrats for more than like 20 years. I mean, this is, this is how successful this is. Yeah, yeah, it sounds insane, but it's the truth. And so, you know, when Ken Paxton gets impeached, he becomes again, this stand in for everything that these people, you know, fear about this supposed Democratic rhino cabal. And I think that that coupled with just like the complexity and often absurdity of the impeachment charges more broadly, really insulates him in a way that turns him into a folk hero once he survives the impeachment. Great.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, yeah, that's as much sense as I think can be made of the Ken Paxton story. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah. I mean, it's this whole thing, and I've noticed this even just in my time covering Texas politics, is there used to be a moment where if we wrote a negative story about someone, there were maybe not consequences, but people cared. And now it's not only that people don't care, it's to be attacked by the quote, unquote, you know, liberal media is in and of itself a badge of honor that like. Yeah, yeah. And I think that he really exemplifies that.

[Robert Evans]

They're waiting for it.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So how would you describe Ken Paxton as an attorney general? Which is kind of. Because obviously he's a state legislator too, before that. But, like, he's most known and has been most influential as the ag. How would you describe his work?

[Hayes Davenport]

I think that he has done a remarkable job of advancing a once non explicit but now explicit Christian nationalist movement that is very far right in its views on immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and basically every other social issue. I mean, he has used his office as at times a pretty blunt instrument in this, I guess, for lack of a better term, culture war. Has used it to investigate political groups on the left, has used it to advance 2020 election fraud, conspiracy theories. I mean, it names something within the Hodge, you know, the hodgepodge of right wing kind of culture war issues. And I guarantee you he is used his office to things.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there's some questionable decisions that attorneys under him have made about some specific relevant cases, including a pedophile. That's one of the biggest, like, most recent scandals against Ken. I talk about this on the ED that we did a week or so ago. And one of the things that you have to like, encounter looking at him is that throughout all of these horrible things that he and people have done kind of as part of his office, none of it has knocked him out. Like, and you get interesting quotes from different people who have run against him that are all variants of like, well, I had all of these opposition files, but also we had to make a decision of, like, how much to talk about it because there's so much out here. And like, what more do you say about Ken if you're trying to run against him? That could matter now.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah, I mean, I think that he has a similar, you know, ethos as Trump where it's like people have heard so much about him for so long that they just kind of, you know, at least amongst. Amongst a lot of the Republicans They've been able to just tune it out entirely. I mean, going back to his impeachment, which. That is an episode unto itself, everything that happened. But the people who were, who brought about Ken Paxton's impeachment were top deputies in the OAG's office. One of them was almost confirmed for a federal judgeship in 2019, but was deemed too anti trans at the time to survive a Senate confirmation hearing.

[Robert Evans]

My God.

[Hayes Davenport]

Another one of these guys went on to be a vice president at Alliance Defending Freedom, the group that, you know, has been kind of the tip of the legal sphere in the Christian nationalist movement.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So not the Wokes.

[Hayes Davenport]

No, arguably some of the most right wing people. Not arguably some of the most right wing people in the world at this point.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they would argue some of the most right wing people in the world.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yes.

[Michael Bennett]

Right.

[Hayes Davenport]

And I mean we're talking, you know, like the platonic ideal of a Texas Ranger, like people who by all extent purposes should be people who are taking very seriously by the Republican voters in Texas. And yet he, again, because of, you know, just. There's something about Ken.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know, man, that's so fucking weird.

[Robert Evans]

There's something about Ken and there's also something about the sponsors of this show who we're going to go back to for a minute and then we'll return. All right, we are back. So Ken Paxton is currently running for Senate. He just defeated John Cornyn for the primary and he's running against Democrat James Talarico. And I brought this up on Ed last week, but it's close and at least according to one poll, currently Talarico is, is ahead. One poll has been ahead by a good bit. Most of what I've seen has them like pretty much neck and neck. There's a few big differences with this election so far and all of Ken's previous elections. One is that he does not have a gigantic advantage in funding and in fact Telorico currently has a lot more money on hand. And the other is that at least per some of the most recent polling, Talarico is actually beating him with non college educated voters. That's the heartland for Ken Paxton. So yeah, it's, it's very unclear what's going to happen. Again, I would say it's smarter to say this is a neck and neck race than Talarico is ahead. But yeah, how'd we get here?

[Hayes Davenport]

I mean, I think a couple of important things. One, James Talarico has, I think that he has done a good. And maybe this is just the religion reporter in me, I think he has done a good job of finding palatable messaging around Christianity in ways that like, can appeal to the, you know, Republican leaning white Christian voter of Texas. That coupled with his kind of, you know, campaigning frequently on, you know, it's not left versus right, it's top versus bottom. That kind of stuff I think is playing really well here. The other thing about Paxton, though is that, you know, we've, I've mentioned Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes in this conversation a bunch of times because they really are crucial to this story. They both have basically entirely pulled out from supporting him in the Senate.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that is really interesting.

[Hayes Davenport]

Ferris Wilkes as a result of some very long story. But in 2023, there was some reporting I did about their network meeting with Nick Fuentes and having a bunch of ties to other pretty avowed white nationalists. There was a big fallout in that network and that, from what I understand, drove Ferris Wilkes out of politics entirely. And at the same time, Tim Dunn was adamantly opposed to Ken Paxton running for Senate from everything that we've heard. And so it wasn't until literally, I think on Monday, Tim Dunn's, one of his super PAC spent $100,000 to send out text messages against Talarico that we saw any kind of movement from Tim Dunn or Ferris Wilkes in support of Paxton. And I think that that does actually kind of speak to their level of concern that they have sat out all of this for almost two years now and suddenly with three months to go, are getting engaged.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, it's really been, yeah. Kind of stirring to see I'm not resigned as I usually am in a Ken Paxton election to like, well, clearly at some point he's just going to like leapfrog this fucker and wind up back in office as he. And maybe that'll happen, but it doesn't feel like it. It doesn't feel like that's the only thing that could happen, I should say.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Right.

[Hayes Davenport]

And you know, to be fair, there's this kind of myth that Texas is secretly blue if it's just a voter turnout problem. That's not true.

[Robert Evans]

It's not? No.

[Hayes Davenport]

Texas is solidly read. Yes. In order to win statewide here, like, there's a reason why Beto, when he ran here, he went to every single one of our 254 counties.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

It's because you have to really turn

[Robert Evans]

out rural voters and try to make personal connections with them.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah, exactly. Because of that, it's easy for Republicans in the state to wave away any kind of Forward momentum from a Democratic statewide candidate. But if you look at the polling in this race between Talaria and Paxton, like Talarico has been polling way ahead of where Beto was, where any comparable Democratic statewide candidate has been over the last 30 years. And I think that that kind of, you know, disbelief amongst Republicans that this state could ever elect a Talarico or Flip Blue, I think, has potentially left them kind of asleep at the wheel and made a lot of them much more willing to support someone like Paxton despite his many flaws as candidates.

[Robert Evans]

So I guess as we close out here, is there anything else you wanted to say about Ken? Anything we didn't get to that you think is really important to talk about?

[Hayes Davenport]

I mean, do we have 45 more minutes we can talk about his impeachment?

[Robert Evans]

But, yeah, I mean, again, a little bit.

[Hayes Davenport]

I'm just gonna read my notes. Just. Just a few fun things.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Hayes Davenport]

Fast food joints in all capital.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Hayes Davenport]

Walter Jr. From Breaking Bad was somehow involved. There's a lot there. Not directly involved, but his family.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Okay.

[Hayes Davenport]

The point being it was insane and.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Awesome.

[Tobin Stone]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man. Is there any reading you'd recommend to the listeners on the Kintax and impeachment?

[Hayes Davenport]

Honestly, there's 4,000 pages of court documents. I think that's it. I mean, someone's got to do a story about it. I mean.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Okay. Well, maybe we'll hire you to do

[Jeremiah Johnson]

that if we can.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah, we'll get Walt Jr. On it.

[Ben Rose Porter]

So.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you know, I did want to say, because it's very wrong when people think that Texas is, like, a secret blue state, but it's also not red in the way most of the red in it isn't necessarily red in the way that. That people think of it. Because, like, I think back to my family, who are, like, we're, like, solidly red and would never vote for a Democrat, but, like, my mom didn't own guns and didn't really think they should be legal and was very much, like, pro abortion. She was culturally a Republican. And that's, like, an important thing like, that. It's not just a belief system. It's that that is your culture and your team. And so much of the difficulty is there are a lot of people in Texas whose values personally certainly do not align with a man like Ken Paxton. But breaking rank is not a doable thing for a lot of them. I don't know how else to describe it. Like, it's. It would be like getting someone who was born and raised rooting for the packers to, like, support The Dallas Cowboys in a game against the packers or something. Like it's that fucking kind of mindset in a lot of ways.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah. I mean, I think that the other thing about it is kind of the ethos of Texas politics for the longest time has been this real antipathy towards, you know, D.C. like, one of the things that it's. It's always been kind of, you know, we are not DC and like the kind of the circus of it all, it plays here differently. There's circus here, but it's a different circus, I guess. So what you have is like a lot of these people. Again, the other thing about Texas is it's just so damn big. Like, there are parts of Texas that are closer. Like, there's a part of Texarkana that's closer to Chicago than it is to El Paso. And I think that, like, people.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

Really don't understand what that does to the politics here as far as just like, making people view politics as this really far off thing off in the distance that, like, it's like a libertarian, almost like, you don't. Don't mess with me and I won't engage with you kind of ordeal. And as I think that the state has become more DC Ified, for lack of a better term, I think that that's starting to really test some of these, you know, some of that kind of mentality you were speaking to. And then you add on, you know, the fact that the schools here are just really in bad shape. We're doing school voucher legislation and all of these things that, like, are actually rural issues are being kind of flipped on their head. And I think that that has the potential maybe not to flip those voters, but if enough of them stay home and you see enough energy in the cities, like, that is enough.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So, yeah, that is enough. And like, as individuals, some of those people can flip on a candidate. You know, they might not flip party wise. They're certainly a lot less likely to vote for, like, a Democrat for president. That may be completely out of the question, but you might be able to get them to vote for a senator or something like that. Like, that's not impossible for everybody. And it certainly looks like I think he's got about 4 or 5% of Republican voters voting for him right now.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah, I mean, he's got a lot of crossover.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Which is a good amount of crossover, by the way. Like, that's low in objective numbers, but it's pretty good for a candidate in taxes.

[Hayes Davenport]

Right, right, right.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

All right. Well, that has been A brief version of the Ken Paxton story. We'll have more about K Pack in the future, and hopefully we'll have Robert back as well. You have anything you want to plug before we end here?

[Hayes Davenport]

Just I'm on Bluesky. Robert Downdon. Subscribe to Texas Monthly. For $25, you can get two years of print, magazine and digital editions. So the best deal in journalism.

[Robert Evans]

Awesome. Check that out. Please do sign up and yeah, we'll be back probably tomorrow anyway. Go do something else now.

[Garrison Davis]

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[Hoda Kotb]

I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. If you know me, you know I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover those things together through meaningful conversations with fascinating people. Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really, anybody hoping to stand out.

[Hayes Davenport]

You're not hired just to fill time and space. You're hired to fill the space with you. You have something in your guts, you go with it.

[Hoda Kotb]

And Shawn Johnson recalled the moment she realized her now husband Andrew was the one.

[Garrison Davis]

He was just so unapologetic, apologetically himself, and knew nothing of Hollywood. He hadn't been on a plane before without his family. It was so pure.

[Hoda Kotb]

Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Garrison Davis]

Hey, Portlandia fans, Carrie Brownstein and Fred

[Fred Armisen]

Armisen here, you know us, or rather you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike and yes, the chicken.

[Carrie Brownstein]

We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia. AO rewatch our brand new podcast.

[Fred Armisen]

Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning. Breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process.

[Carrie Brownstein]

How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it.

[Fred Armisen]

And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life, guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Krisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Kyle is going for it. Here you fully improvised, not just words, but a song.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I thought he was gonna write.

[Hayes Davenport]

I thought you were all gonna write a song.

[Carrie Brownstein]

I remember you thinking that.

[Fred Armisen]

Listen to Podlandia Ayo rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Hey.

[Hayes Davenport]

This is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook Every episode. We're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

[Garrison Davis]

The show is famously super accessible, so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on.

[Hayes Davenport]

We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anyway, too, right?

[Garrison Davis]

What do you think it is now?

[Hayes Davenport]

It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on.

[Garrison Davis]

You make your own.

[Tobin Stone]

That's great.

[Hayes Davenport]

I call him Tarot Reed.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a good name.

[Hayes Davenport]

They're all named after cast members of American population. Pie.

[Robert Evans]

I call.

[Tobin Stone]

I don't.

[Hayes Davenport]

I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leechy Sobieski. Yeah, I don't think she was an American pie, but I haven't looked it up. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Hayes Davenport]

Then Mary Steenbergen.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Why are you guys talking to me

[Ben Rose Porter]

like

[Hoda Kotb]

so down to me that you

[Garrison Davis]

think I don't understand your little play, play game?

[Hayes Davenport]

I just really trying to set you up for success. Success.

[Garrison Davis]

Here, Listen to Hollywood handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is it. Could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I am Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, Robert Evans, and special correspondent Margaret Killjoy.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, I'm a correspondent. Hi.

[Garrison Davis]

For some small things, White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt will be stepping down to spend more time with her family. At 27, she was the youngest person ever appointed to the position. Now, I don't comment on women's age or an appearance. And yeah, I don't comment on that.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I. I do. I do want to mention that when we say stepping down to spend more time with her family. This is the first time I've ever seen this where that is actually true.

[Garrison Davis]

This is true. She did, she, she did have a baby.

[Mia Wong]

Actually, actually legitimately doing that and not.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, I just assumed you all were speaking euphemistically about like basically fired.

[Garrison Davis]

She did have.

[Mia Wong]

Not a euphemism, actually.

[Garrison Davis]

Actually Trump seems to really like her.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, unfortunately. Because she sucks. But yeah, just, just, just to clarify, not a euphemism actually doing that.

[Garrison Davis]

On the ninth anniversary of the Unite the Right rally, a former employee of the Southern Poverty Law center has been arrested on fraud charges for payments to informants within white nationalist organizations. We talked about the indictment against splc, the organization a few months ago. This is the first charge against a specific individual. For some other small items, let's throw to James Stout.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

I'm going to start by saying some small things. The Texas Land Commissioner has sent a cease and desist to CBP Customs and Border Protection claiming they illegally cleared state land to begin border wall construction. Quote, Texas sovereignty will not be infringed by failure to follow established protocols, said Commissioner Buckingham. Quote, my office has a proven track record of strong border enforcement and I applaud efforts to protect our border. I am committed to maintaining a positive relationship with cbp. But we will not allow rogue actors who breached our agreement to undermine the incredible work we do for Texas. The second quotation I've included there was oddly missing from lots of people's commentary on this because I think the people who make money from clicks or just have a relationship with clicks which is not healthy or good for them wanted to portray this as like Texas is going woke and fighting Trump. And no, they're not. Don't be silly. Read the thing. It's in the press release. Secondly, Almonitor reported that the United States was withdrawing its last forces from Erbil amidst Iran's campaign strikes on the region. The United States has a pre agreed withdrawal with a deadline of September 30. But another source told the new Arab that they had not left and that they had relocated them closer to the consulate. So the United States will be withdrawing from this region probably relatively soon. But it seems that at the time they didn't leave as people had feared, but they relocated. Keeping with the theme of the United States war in Iran. CNN reported last week that the Pentagon was looking for outside the box thinking in its war with Iran. Quote, we are looking for new and creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran. An officer in the United States Central Command's Intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts. According to a source familiar with the message. This is fucking spectacular. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

It sounds like a San Francisco startup trying to make like AI powered coffee or something. It's like we need to shake up the coffee industry.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Can we disrupt the bombing? Iran market, guys.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Move fast and break things in the regime of collective punishment.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

What we're doing now.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Except that moving fast and breaking things was kind of Plan A. So God knows what will come out of this. But I can't wait to see. I'm sure it'll be exciting and fun. I received news from the Pak that's the Kurdistan Freedom Party. Different party from PGA K. The Kurdistan Free Life Party. They let me know that an assassination attempt was made in a bill against Mukri Yazdan Pana. He's the son of their leader. The leader of the Kurdistan Freedom Party. Right. He was injured and he's currently under medical care in a hospital. They didn't want to make a formal statement about this other than clarifying that that had happened. It appears someone tried to shoot him in Erbil. Erbil, if you're not familiar, is the capital of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq. Then this is not the first time that I'm just going to go ahead and assume that this is an Iranian state linked assassination attempt. I think that's a reasonable assumption to make. Not the first time that this happened in a bill. And it is pretty clear that this is the Iranian government continuing its attempt to punish Eastern Kurdish parties for the United States aggression. Which we can draw a line all the way back to the reporting we did late winter, early spring of this year on people who were suggesting that there was going to be a Kurdish ground component to the United States war in Iran, which as of yet there has not been. This is continuing to have consequences for these parties. Right. And then finally from me, I want to talk about these two executive orders. The President has written a pair of executive orders this week aimed at reducing the number of people eligible for citizenship by birthright. And basically what they've done here, and I would suggest that people wanting more context and I'm able to give here, go back to our Supreme Court special episode of Ed that we did a few weeks ago where I talk at length about the 14th Amendment and the Wong Kim Ark case. They have taken the exemptions I outlined there and they've tried to kind of stick a crowbar in there and leave them open as far as they can. Would be the way that I would describe it, right. And particularly they've looked at the exemptions for foreign diplomats and for invading armies. There's one for vessels in the United States waters. Perhaps the most significant one is the one that is meant for invading armies. And when I say invading armies, I want to be clear what I mean. This is like Mexico decides that 1848 wasn't the end and they want some of that land back. So they decide to invade the United States. They push up into San Diego, right? They say they're in. They've liberated Cardiff by the sea and one of their soldiers gives birth. Well, they're here. That baby would not be United States citizen because that person was engaged in an invasion of the United States. Right. What the Trump administration here has gone for is adding, quote, either parent of that person is an alien enemy defined to include any member of a designated foreign terrorist organization under 8 USC 1189 or specially designated global terrorist. Now, we have to remember they have added a number of groups to the FTO list and that they have attempted to define people as members of those groups using absolute criteria, like having a tattoo. Right. That is the one that might be what they are going for here. If I had one where I suspect they will try and use this en masse, it will be that one. Using that same criteria that they earlier used to send people to Secot in El Salvador, they also added a broader way of people who have worked to work for foreign governments. They also add the person is born in a territory or territorial war to the United States where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute that refers to American Samoa. Now, we're covering this next week, actually in an episode with Carlos Berrios Polanco. But just very briefly, there is actually a bill to remove birthright citizenship from people in American Samoa. It's not going to go anywhere, but it just, it's a signal of where the Right is at on this, which is they're trying to remove access to being American from as many people as possible. United States American. The second executive order takes a swing. What the Right calls birth tourism.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Birth tourism has been a thing on like the VD Air tendency has been obsessed with this for a long time. I know we talk about this a lot, but you can go back to an episode in November 2024 that I did with Sophie and Robert, and you can hear us talking about the Right's concern with this, that the phenomenon they're talking about represents, generously, if we define it, a fraction of a single percent of babies born in the United States every year. It would already be fraud to enter on a tourist visa with the intent of delivering your child here so that they could be a citizen. But nonetheless, this is kind of a bugbear for the right. And so they're attempting to clamp down on specifically, like they believe that there are these giant companies sort of shipping people in to deliver their children. It's worth noting some people do come to the United States to deliver because the United States has very good medical care compared to other parts of the world, albeit also very expensive medical care. So people who might have the means to access that might choose to come to deliver, or simply, let's say you reside in Mexico but work in the United States and have health insurance in the United States, you might come here to live your baby. Right. There are reasons why people might do that. Nonetheless, it is a very limited phenomenon, but it is a thing that the right has been talking about for some time. And it's not shocking to see the Trump administration going after this again. These will both be challenging court. We will see how it goes.

[Mia Wong]

In other news, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is under 300 million barrels, which is the lowest level it has been since the US started filling it in the 1970s. It was created in response to the 1970s OPEC embargo. The Trump administration has been draining the strategic reserve in order to attempt to stabilize the price of oil as a result of his war in Iran. Now, the administration has stated that it will be refilling the strategic reserve next year. However, paired with Trump's statement that, quote, we are low keying it, we are only semi negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money. It is unclear how the reserve would be refilled because the war does not seem to actually have a way to end. It is also unclear whether the US Will succumb to likewise having no money and huge inflation in the meantime.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That seems bad.

[Garrison Davis]

Low keying it.

[Mia Wong]

It's not great. It's not great. One of the things I should sort of mention is that part of the reason the economy is still functioning is that the analysis from places like JP Morgan from the financial sector has been based on the fact that this war will end. And every week that it continues and every week that there seems to be no potential way for it to end increases the likelihood that the bankers will figure out that this war is not going to end and that everything is just like this now. So that is a financial collapse warning.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I feel like that's been like. Everyone has just been trying to figure out, like, why has this not collapsed the economy yet? And so I'm always curious your take on why hasn't this collapsed the economy yet. Because everything points to this should collapse the economy. But it keeps stumbling on energy prices are skyrocketing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And I mean, basically it's because it's not in the interest of the people who have money to believe that it will. So they're still behaving as if eventually it's going to end and eventually the prices are going to come down. And eventually everything from petroleum to fertilizer that comes through the trader for abuse is simply going to be available again. And the moment they realize that it's not, the pyramid collapses.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of money, Robert.

[Robert Downing]

So, yeah, for my little thing today, I mean, it's a little thing in terms of how, I guess, important the story is at this point, but it's a big thing in terms of the amount of money being discussed. Because y' all remember back when Elon Musk bought Twitter and he. What?

[Fred Armisen]

He.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah, he shared it. There used to be a website called Twitter Garrison.

[Mia Wong]

It's before your time.

[Robert Downing]

It's what X became.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, X, Yeah. No, I love X.

[Robert Downing]

The Everything app. The Everything app, yeah. So when, when Musk bought Twitter, he promised that he was going to take for like $40 billion, he was going to take the company's ad revenue for about four and a half billion dollars, which is what Twitter made in ad revenue 2021 to $12 billion by 2027. Sure. And also there'd be billions more in subscriptions income right now, given that it is currently, last I checked, pretty late in 2026.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Actually.

[Robert Downing]

We're like, most of the way through the year. You would expect Twitter's ad revenue to be pretty close to $12 billion. Right. Like, if I'm extrapolating from four and a half billion in 2021 to 12 billion in 2027, we should be somewhere around nine or 10 billion right now. Maybe, you know, that's not where we are. And there's a really good article in Tech Dirt, but. And the reason why we know all this is because once, once Musk bought Twitter, it stopped being a public company. Right. So you don't have any fucking knowledge at all about really what's going on inside a private company.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Robert Downing]

In terms of its, like, revenue and stuff. But because Musk recently folded X into SpaceX and his AI company, he had to include a bunch of revenue information.

[Hayes Davenport]

Oh,

[Robert Downing]

this came out in what's called their 10Q filing. And tech Dirt has, has done an analysis of it that I'm going to quote from now. All of X's revenue is now misleadingly labeled AI revenue. But even then, the reporting has to admit ad revenue took a big hit, dropping 160 million compared to the first half of 2025, which is already way, way lower than when Elon took over the site, going from 870 million in 2025 to 710 million in the first half of 2026. The company tries to claim this decrease in ad revenues because they transitioned to a new advertising platform which impacted ad sales for a short period of time. Which is a curious explanation given that on the analyst call, CFO Brett Johnson credited that very same overhauled ad tech platform for the very slight quarter over quarter uptick in ad revenue. The same overhaul apparently both tanked the business and rescued it, depending on which direction the number was moving. And yeah, so within the second quarter of last year to this year to where we're at now, ad revenue has dropped from 426 million to 367 million year over year. And in no way, shape or form is Twitter anywhere close to the numbers that Elon Musk claimed they would be in right now. In the second quarter of 2022, which is the last full quarter before Elon bought the company, Twitter brought in about $1.8 billion in ad revenue. By the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million.

[Garrison Davis]

Is that bad?

[Robert Downing]

That is a reduction of $713 million a quarter. In other words, from tech dirt, Elon has wiped out two thirds of Twitter's ad business over the exact period in which he promised investors he'd nearly triple it.

[Garrison Davis]

Just incredible stuff.

[Robert Downing]

That's just fun. That's just a good time.

[Garrison Davis]

I wonder how much like the recent drop off can also be attributed to like right wing political content getting much less engagement following Trump taking office than what it was 2023, 2024, when that was, you know, driving a lot of traffic to the site.

[Robert Downing]

That's gotta be part of it. Part of it has to be. Also that AI slop has reduced the value. Cause we're seeing this in Facebook too. You're seeing this across the board. Like all of them are seeing reductions in like in user engagement because people don't like the slop very much.

[Fred Armisen]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So there's. This isn't one thing.

[Robert Downing]

And honestly, as funny as it is, you can't even just blame it on Elon. Although you can blame it on things Elon has championed pretty much entirely.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah. Just a fun little story.

[Garrison Davis]

Sweet.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I. I have one short piece that I brought today, which is in a story of. Of good stuff, of people doing cool stuff against bad stuff. There is a tree sit that is currently blocking construction of the border wall in Arizona.

[Garrison Davis]

Hell yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No, it's. It's. I'm really excited about it. To quote a write up from crimefink.com about it, quote Two weeks ago, one protester decided it was time to block the machine that was about to destroy the last of our four ancient cottonwood trees that stood in the way of the wall's construction. A sheriff arrested him. He was released 12 hours later with no charges filed. This arrest galvanized the community. Less than two days later, friends installed a platform in the tree, and it seems to be ongoing as of this recording. And if you want more information about the group who is stopping construction of the border wall, you can read the whole piece on crimethink.com, which is entitled the border is an open wound.

[Mia Wong]

Speaking of open wounds, or I guess I'm going to call you our crime correspondent. Positive Margaret has another story about things that are open wounds in the face of our society.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I did pitch that if y' all ever need someone to come on and talk about crimes that I approve of, I am always happy to talk about crimes that I approve of. And this week, I can bring you really positive news, really happy news that you can file under direct action gets the goods. Because today, as we record this, August 12, 2026, two days before you're listening to it, the police in the town of Winona, Minnesota, have given up. Not entirely. They announced that they will not be replacing the 8 flock license plate reader cameras that were stolen last week. Because on or about August 3rd. Well, on August 3rd, the police department in Winona, Minnesota, reported a terrifying loss in just one night. Every single one of their eight flock cameras, their automated license plate readers that tracked every single person who came in and out of the city, that were set up in pairs along all the ways in and out. All eight of them were cut down and stolen. I said on just one night. But the cops don't actually know when it happened. It happened sometime between July 29 and August 1. And they only noticed when eventually the cop was like, how come our cameras aren't talking to us anymore? So they only noticed a while later. Each camera and its pole cost about $3,000. So there's a total of $24,000 in theft. The crime wasn't noticed for days. The wpd also said that some flock cameras in Buffalo county, which is a Wisconsin county just up, up from or across the river from there, were also cut down probably on July 29th. And when the police reported this theft to social media, over 900 people commented on the police's post, which takes more nerve. I don't comment things on politicians or police departments posts personally, not very often. And when I do, I delete it and call my lawyer. And so 900 people commented on the post almost universally in support of the action as reported by the Winona Post. One commenter put it, it's almost like people don't want to be watched 24 7. And so today, Winona Police Department declared surrender. They put out a press release saying how important the cameras have been for solving crime. But even more important to them than solving crime is building community trust, which they clearly have lost. And so they will not be replacing the cameras. Flock Safety is a brand name of automated license plate readers. Alprs. At this rate, Flock is probably kind of becoming the generic. Like I will run across headlines that say Flock like cameras that will be talking about something from Axos or other places. Axon.

[Garrison Davis]

Crap, I don't remember Axon.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Thank you. It'll probably become the generic. I'm working on a longer piece about the revolt against these cameras, but it is getting hot this summer. Red state, blue state. People just fucking hate the idea that they're being tracked everywhere they go. Cop after cop has been caught using them to stalk their exes.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And it seems very likely that if we stay a democracy, this style of surveillance will be found to be a violation of the fourth Amendment because similar technologies keep getting found to be violations of the fourth Amendment. You know, eventually they're like, oh, you actually do need a warrant to look at someone's cell phone data. That kind of thing. You know.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But here is a highlight reel. Among dozens or hundreds of other acts of vandalism against the these cameras. In June, a 40 year old man named Marcus B. In Monterey, California is alleged most of these people have not been convicted yet or will never be convicted. Is alleged to have destroyed three cameras with his truck. He's on camera doing this. They allege he simply ran down a bunch of these cameras. He has bull bars on the front of his truck. So he just was like, I got a big old pickup truck and bull bars and he just knocked them over. Possibly another one. He attacked Maybe a toe strap or a chain and yanked it up out of the ground with his truck. Also In June, a 21 year old in Alexandria. I'm just going to present the opposite kind of person doing this. Probably in June, a 21 year old in Alexandria, Virginia on the opposite coast is accused of climbing atop a Subaru Forester to smash a flock camera with a baseball bat. On a day where at least five other cameras were destroyed in the area. The suspect was caught by flock cameras. Houston has seen a rash of vandalism. One night four poles were cut down and left lying in the grass with their cameras still attached. But all during July, cameras have been spray painted and smashed and cut down. In Houston last year, Eugene, Oregon wound up canceling its flock contract after only about six months of the cameras being up due to an absolutely massive public outcry that includes lawsuits, statements before city council and at least six cameras being destroyed at the scene of one of the crimes. The vandals left a note that read, Ha ha ha. Get wrecked you surveilling fucks.

[Mia Wong]

I love these people.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Maybe the most public case is that in Suffolk, Virginia. Suffolk, I don't know. Where a 41 year old US Air Force engineer named Jeffrey S. Sovereign is facing felony charges for the destruction of 13 flock cameras between April and October. In 2025. It is alleged that he used vice grips to take apart the two piece poles and then took home the solar panels and the batteries, possibly to use for camping. That's what he said later when the cops raided his house and found solar panels there. His truck was tracked by other cameras near the scene of one of the crimes. The police put a GPS tracker on his vehicle, which is another thing that the fourth amendment. Eventually you actually have to get a warrant to put GPS trackers on people's cars. Now his house was raided by the police. They found solar panels and batteries. He is very open about being opposed to flock cameras and refers to them as a violation of the fourth amendment. But he has pleaded not guilty to the actual destruction. More recently, an independent candidate for the Tennessee House of representatives, a 37 year old man named Adam Lee Heimerman, is facing felony charges for allegedly shooting down four ALPR's automated license plate readers in two counties between July 14 and July 22. One of the cameras he is alleged to have shot down was like during church services. He allegedly went out into the parking lot and there was one within shooting distance. So he just shot it from the church. A GoFundMe was set up and bailed

[Hayes Davenport]

him out of jail.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Police in Long island report that all summer cameras have been run over, spray painted, or simply had their wires unplugged or turned around to no longer face the street. Oh, and there's also a guy in Florida who's just holding up signs that block them. He's retired. He's like a 77 year old retired Republican guy. So he just sets up lawn chairs and sits there with the signs on ten foot like painters poles and just blocks the cameras. And when police or news report on these incidents, the posts are flooded with supportive comments, including those that indicate that people should look into jury nullification. But of course, as cities canceled their Flock contracts, many of them are simply signing with other ALPR companies like Denver, which ended its contract with Flock in February, but by March had signed up with another company, Axon, for 50 cameras. So it's working, but people gotta keep up that pressure legally or whatever, do whatever you want.

[Mia Wong]

It seems like these cameras have kind of mobilized this coalition of like the kind of leftist people who generally hate these things. Different kinds of like civil libertarian from both kind of, I guess like the contemporary civil libertarians who tend to be on the left and then the kind of old school Republican, like, why is the state washing me people? And then it also seems important that these are like supposed to be license plate readers, which means they've pissed off like just people who drive cars.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It's like you, you've declared war on motorists.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Which is demographic people that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I was reading this. 88% of Americans drive a car on any given week.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

This. And data centers are the most. Red, blue. A movement that just has everyone being like, no, wait, I don't like that.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it seems like the general tech surveillance complex is just extremely unpopular right now and people are doing stuff about it.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Which is good because it's been going on for a while. And yeah, I'm really excited that people are doing something about it. And yeah, I'm really, really proud of Winona for canceling that contract. Like I know of people who've been convicted and done time for this and you know, it's wider than what's being reported on.

[Garrison Davis]

I think definitely the massive movement we're seeing around or against Flock right now is one of the biggest positive downstream impacts of Stop Cop City, which was one of the first movements to really put Flock into focus because Flock cameras were being first tested out on the site. Flock is an Atlanta based company. The first kind of articles you started to see talking about floch were Often in relation to reporting around Stop Cop City or activists discussing flock as this new emerging threat. Years ago, way before the public kind of realized that. Now these cameras cropping up in every city.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I think you're right. And I also think that the Stop Cop City method of being both direct and also showing up at city council.

[Garrison Davis]

Sure.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You know, I think nothing is more effective than when those two groups support each other.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And you know the fact that when the cop says, don't worry, we are. We're going to catch whoever did this. And everyone's like, nah, they were fishing with me last weekend, you know, but, yeah, I think. I think you're right about Stop Cop City building a lot of the framework with which to understand this kind of thing.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's go on an ad break and then hear from James again.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

And we're back. So this week I want to talk about a couple of immigration stories not getting as much coverage. I thought I would start by talking about some training materials for immigration judges that Matthew Hoppock obtained by Freedom of Information act request. They're in a Dropbox, which I will link in the show notes. It appears from these documents that the quote, unquote, judges, they are not judges in the sense that other judges are judges. Right. Immigration judges are effectively civil servants. They receive 12 weekdays of training.

[Mia Wong]

What?

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Jesus Christ.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah. Before this, many of them will have never seen an immigration case. Right. Like, as someone who has covered immigration for, oh, my God, a decade, like this is a topic of Byzantine complexity.

[Tobin Stone]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Immigration law is very complicated. I'm not going to do the thing where you compare the training to barbers or something, because I don't think that's particularly useful here. I think all of us can understand that 12 days of training is not very much training to be making decisions which are life or death for people. Right. These can directly result in people, as we saw recently with a couple, who were found tied up and shot after being deported. And there will be many more cases of that that we are not able to directly report just because no one has published them or in places where people fear to publish them, then they won't have got out.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

But we should be under an evolution that deportation and asylum cases are life or death. 7 Very complicated policy memoranda are packed into the last hour of the second day. So the foyer has the schedule, the day by day schedule.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

The entirety of asylum, withholding of removal and the Convention Against Torture are covered in a single day. And it's not the whole day. There's other stuff in that day. The materials also show that they provide templates to judges for making decisions, and they contain some errors and contradictions regarding the law as it stands today. The important context for this is that more than 200 immigration judges have been fired since 2025, and 250 have been hired. So there is a wholesale change in the immigration justice landscape and it is being repopulated with people who have very little training. They do get a slide. I was looking through the slide presentations. They do get a slide on judicial independence, but the nature of their employment is different to a regular judge, as I said earlier. And in their first two years, they're basically on like a probationary period and they have very little right to appeal if they're fired. This is another example of things that the Trump administration is doing that will take years to remedy, even if the next government is amenable to trying to do so.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Like these are the people who are making decisions for thousands of people that are life or death. The second thing I want to talk about is a DOJ lawsuit against New York, Connecticut and Vermont. The DOJ says it is, quote, challenging state laws that provide in state tuition to illegal aliens. The DOJ claims that, quote, these laws unconstitutionally discriminate against US Citizens who are not afforded the same reduced tuition or scholarships, create incentives for illegal immigration, and reward illegal aliens with benefits that US Citizens are not eligible for, all in direct conflict with federal law. Now, they have been going after this for a while, right? The DOJ has been doing these suits since last year in some Republican states. Texas is one I can think of. I think Kansas maybe as well, definitely Texas. In some Republican states, state officials joined the DOJ in asking their policies to be vacated. So they obviously had success with those.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

In Illinois, not a Republican state, the DOJ won a case and had the interstate's benefits declared unconstitutional based on a federal statute that reads, quote, notwithstanding any other provision of law, an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a state or political subdivision for any post secondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit in no less amount, duration and scope without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident. So I would attempt to simplify that and explain it to people, but as we are about to find out, the very nuances of that text matter.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, this sort of law is often complicated, but I was having trouble following what that means exactly.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah, that's A fuck. Like if somebody wrote that sentence in a writing class I was teaching, I wouldn't be happy about it. It's a sentence that requires you to do circular breathing to read it.

[Hayes Davenport]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

So in Minnesota, there was a case like this, but because Minnesota uses attending a state high school to determine tuition fees, this is therefore not a residency test. Right. So the residency part of that massive sentence matters. They also argued that the law says unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit, it does not say all citizens of the United States are eligible for such a benefit. And so Minnesota was able to show that a non Minnesota resident who did attend a Minnesota high school went to University of Minnesota was eligible for interstate tuition. So a US Citizen would be eligible. All US Citizens would not. And so they were able to hang their hat on those two things. Right. It's not about residency per se. A citizen could receive those benefits. I was looking around for residency requirements, and it seems that some of these states may be able to make a similar case to Minnesota. Others will not. Right. Some of them require residency in the more traditional, like domiciled in a state. Yeah. Perhaps driver's license, registered to vote, et cetera, et cetera.

[Hayes Davenport]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

And so it will be more challenging for some than others eventually. I imagine this is one of those things. We've already seen different decisions. Right. And that's because different states have different laws. But I'm sure this is one of those things that will eventually find its way to the Supreme Court in the next couple of years. Regardless. It's an attempt to drive undocumented people further into the shadows and create an underclass of underpaid labor without rights.

[Tobin Stone]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

People on the right constantly talk about assimilation. They used to, I think now they just straight up do more racist shit. But the act of assimilation will be much harder if people cannot access education.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

I am sure. I have had hundreds of undocumented students come through my classroom. I'm not going to be like, hands up if you're undocumented. Right. I'm not going. There's no need for me to know that. But I know that the universities I teach at do a great deal and provide a great deal of resources to undocumented people. Our universities are better because of that. Having a diverse range of experiences and opinions in the classroom makes your classroom better. It will make it easier for people on the right to make these arguments that they're stealing working class jobs because people will not have the qualifications they need to do other jobs. They will end up being underpaid and exploited. These policies, I should add, were relatively bipartisan when they were passed into 2010. And even for the last quarter of the last century, true heads will recognize this from a show I did in 2023.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, my name is David Grossberg and I'd like to know, do you think

[Robert Evans]

the children of illegal aliens should be

[Garrison Davis]

allowed to attend Texas public schools free, or do you think that their parents should pay for their education?

[Hayes Davenport]

Who are you addressing that to?

[Garrison Davis]

I think you're first in this.

[Hayes Davenport]

He was looking right at you. I said he was. Look, I'd like to see something done

[Robert Evans]

about the illegal alien problem that would

[Hayes Davenport]

be so sensitive and so understanding about labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up.

[Robert Evans]

But today, if those people are here,

[Garrison Davis]

I would reluctantly say, I think they would.

[Robert Evans]

They would get whatever it is that they're, you know, what the society is

[Hayes Davenport]

giving to their neighbors.

[Robert Evans]

But it has. The problem has to be solved. The problem has to be solved because as we have kind of made illegal

[Hayes Davenport]

some kinds of labor that I'd like

[Robert Evans]

to see legal, we're doing two things. We're creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family loving people that are in violation of the law. And secondly, we're exacerbating relations with Mexico.

[Hayes Davenport]

The answer to your question is much

[Robert Evans]

more fundamental than whether they attend Houston school. It seems to me I don't want to see a whole. If they're living here, I don't want to see a whole thinking six and

[Hayes Davenport]

eight year old kids being made, you

[Robert Evans]

know, one totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living with outside the law. Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals.

[Hayes Davenport]

These are good people, strong people. Part of my family is a Mexican.

[Garrison Davis]

That's wild.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

That is famous woke immigration advocate George Herbert Walker Bush.

[Garrison Davis]

That's really kind of mind blowing.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

It's genuinely remarkable, isn't it? To look back. This is not that long ago. Yeah. None of us were alive then, I guess. But like, you know, these are people who people still look to as like contemporary political people who they admire.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

This is to the left of a lot of Democrats right now on immigration. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. A lot of Democrats would be scared to talk about.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Immigration that way.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah. To say part of my family is Mexican to say that, like, I would never want to leave these children as an underclass like that.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, no, it's, it's insane. Yeah. Like, I mean, like this coupled with like the, the public charge rule, this, the concerted effort to increase this war on like the poorest, most marginalized people in our country and criminalize them and push them out of public life. Compared to. Yeah, George H.W. bush in the 80s is wild.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah. It's remarkable that we have come. So I'm not saying that things were great in the 1980s, to be clear.

[Garrison Davis]

No, that's part of what makes it so wild.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

These people did a bunch of really terrible shit. But Reagan and Bush would both be on the very progressive flank of the Democrats with some of their policies on immigration today. I guess the way I would like to finish this segment, if we can come that far that fast, then we can come back a long way pretty quickly too, I think. Yeah, it does take courage, especially from politicians because as Garrison said, a lot of politicians feel like they're going to lose the centre when in fact that position was a centrist position in many voters lifetimes. I think it just bears remarkable on how far we've come and how quickly we've got there.

[Fred Armisen]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Geez. I'm still just kind of, kind of in shock. I mean, my, my whole life I feel like the way I've heard debates on immigration, certainly on the Republican side, but also largely on the Democrat side. It's just pitting like workers against each other.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And just hearing a Bush talk about how, no, we should like, care for these people, they should be educated. Like, why would we want to have these people who are living here be not educated, not able to actually live like a meaningful life.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a level of like humanity that I just have not really experienced in, you know, politics in my kind of living memory. And certainly on the Republican side, like.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, George Walker Bush spoke Spanish.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Was it was Walker's middle name. George W. Bush spoke Spanish. W is his middle name. I think it's a sea change since even then. Right. Like we can draw a pretty straight line from Obama's massive deportation campaign to today for whatever people think of Obama. He deported a shit ton of people. Yeah. You know, the reason they called him the deporter in chief, but like, yeah, 9, 11, and then the war on terror and then the Syrian civil war, that certainly changed the discourse in Europe. Right. And I think, yeah. I mean, once we had little babies washing up dead on beaches and politicians realized that that wasn't going to trigger people to get in the streets and fuck things up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

They knew that they could do an awful lot and not acknowledge the humanity that George H.W. bush acknowledges in that.

[Garrison Davis]

The other thing that's really interesting to me about this is like, this is 1980, Reagan is on stage here. And how much of this is also a pretty determining fork in the road in some ways, and leading to neoliberalism totally taking over. How state capacity gets completely, completely reduced. And then you see this in like, you know, the next Bush era and Obama and it's getting accelerated with Trump, that their only solution to the problems caused by neoliberalism is not actually fixing neoliberal economics, but it has to be attorney workers against each other. Yeah, that is the, that is the last thing that they can do because they still serve capital. They still want to do neoliberal economics. But that system has completely stressed itself and has sabotage the economy, wrecked housing and jobs. And so now, no, we should not actually fix those things or have the government care for people. But it's these other people who are, you know, even, even more poor than you that, that are causing all of these problems.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Right. Like this pivot to scapegoating.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

As opposed to like doing anything useful with it. I mean, even Reagan.

[Hayes Davenport]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Reagan pies the IRCA. It was a massive amnesty, like, like 2, 2.6, 2.7 million people. Something in that range.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Were effectively like legalized by the Reagan administration. And to vault from that to where we're at, as you say, like, to vault from like the state trying to make any meaningful difference in making working class people's lives better, to scapegoating one group so the other group doesn't complain about their own situation. It's very obvious.

[Garrison Davis]

Every day for the past, like, month, Fox News has had a segment about the DSA's like, amnesty for all immigrants playing on their platform.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah. I'm not alone in pointing out that, like, Reagan did a similar thing. I think, like, yeah, I'm sure lots of people have like, tried to dunk on him that way. But yeah, I heard like a, a right wing metal song about like 2023 outdoor detention. Someone sent it to me today. One of the funniest fucking things. But yeah, for some reason it talked about the DSA amnesty, which is a hard thing to shoehorn into a metal song, but they did it, so I guess, like.

[Tobin Stone]

Right.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Well done. Congratulations. Yeah, that has become like the boogeyman of right wing politics from people.

[Ben Rose Porter]

I guess.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Like, I know I talk about this dude a lot. I would love to hear from this dude. I would love to talk to this dude, the dude who was walking around Minneapolis the day before Alex Pretty was killed with a sign that said, what Would Ronald Reagan do? And he was at the anti ice march. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Huh.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Seriously, like genuinely, if anybody knows who that person is, please put that person in touch with me. No, yeah, like I think that is a type of person who we need to talk to right now.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

And like not make that person feel like they can't grow in other ways. Hopefully, you know, by. Oh, I don't know, maybe there was just an ironic sign of it. Anyway, I'm fascinated to talk to that person. It's always real sad to me to look at these things and just be like, you know, it's not that long ago that this was a very bipartisan issue. And now once again, I guess bipartisan in that there is complete agreement that people who try to come here without passing through a port of entry should die in numbers that are large enough to dissuade people from doing it. And if those numbers have to increase, then so be it. And that migrants should be treated as humans without rights. Like the Biden administration absolutely did that too.

[Tobin Stone]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

And yeah, it sucks.

[Mia Wong]

You know, if you want to look at what the actual policy disagreement is about, it's. Should you use the state to carry out a full on ethnic cleansing or should you use the state to simply commit heinous acts of violence?

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Yeah, it should the basis of this purge be some arbitrary line along the line from full legal status to no legal status? Right. Or should the basis of it be as it is now? Anyone we can get out, we get out. Unless you're on that DSA amnesty point when. I guess that's a different point. But it is not one that the DNC is making as a whole.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I think it's useful to hold those things in distinction at this point right now. Will that change over time?

[Tobin Stone]

Maybe.

[Garrison Davis]

Will that its own contradictions over time? Maybe. But we will deal with those when they get there. Yeah, but meaning, yeah, it seemed the opinion of Trump now is no, unless you pay me a million dollars for the gold card or whatever, you are not allowed inside.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

It's mind boggling to think that this is the thing that yeah, within my parents lifetime was completely uncontroversial. Even like I remember those, you know, I was in the US when they passed those, the tuition things. This is at the same time, Right. When there was relatively bipartisan support for dreamers too. Yep. Like whether it was uncontroversial that those people who have grown up for nearly their entire lives here should be allowed to remain here. And all of that shit has gone now. And then like, I guess, like even the fact that there are some people who are so cowardly on both parties that they, they once supported it and now don't just because they think that's the way the wind is blowing.

[Tobin Stone]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Is something that shouldn't go unremarked upon. Like, I don't know, the least qualified people to be in any position of leadership are the ones who are cowards like that. And yet we have a great deal of them in Congress. If you want to hear about some people who shouldn't be in Congress, I have a podcast called Natural Causes. We will talk eventually about Mike Lee and why he is like this. Why does Mike Lee want to sell all the public land that we get to share, and who has donated to his campaign to make him want to do it. But we can hear about other stuff, too. This week we're going to cover cyclospora, which is the incontinence parasite spreading through the Midwest. And we're going to talk about what it tells us about the rights of agricultural labor, neoliberalism, NAFTA and all the massive corporations between you and your crunch rep. And after that, we're going to talk about fire. If you listen to the show, you'll know that I was in Spokane last week. So I'm going to talk to some people who evacuated about what you should do when your phone starts going ape shit and how you can prepare yourself for fire evacuations because this stuff isn't changing anytime soon. I'm going to talk to some people about how you can be a good friend to your friend who is being evacuated. And then I'm going to talk to some folks who lost their homes in Los Angeles and how they've recovered since then and what you can do to help them. And then a week after that, we're going to talk about what we can all learn from indigenous fire knowledge and how we can better take care of our lands to not suppress fire, but to have more say in when and how fire happens. So if you would like to hear about those topics, you can look up Natural Causes wherever podcasts are given away for free. Probably the same place you're listening to this one.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Talk about fucking golf as well. Hate golf.

[Garrison Davis]

Somehow that's both the most, at least British moment I've ever I've seen from you.

[Mia Wong]

Returning to the bleak present, Trump has issued an executive order on Monday about vaccines that is at the same time both extremely disturbing and somewhat unlikely to do do that much. There's sort of a few different components to this executive order. There's one part of it that is an attempt to ram through RFK Jr. S attempt to reduce the amount of vaccines that children get for absolutely no reason whatsoever. RFK Jr. We've talked about this previously on the show. RFK Jr. Has been attempting to reduce the number of vaccines that children get in childhood through CDC advisory boards, which is the way that you are theoretically supposed to do this. However, this was blocked in court, and as those litigations are ongoing, those policies simply have not gone through. So Trump's attempting to use an executive order to bypass that process. It probably won't work. There is another separate part about separating the MMR vaccine into three different vaccines. So the MMR vaccine is a combined vaccine from measles, mumps and rubella. And part of its executive order is an attempt to get get those spread out. And then there's also a part that's about threatening states who don't allow religious exemptions for vaccinations in order to send their kids to school. And then a lot of the total executive order is this kind of, in some ways, grandstanding, where Trump is talking about how this is what the government says the science is. And Trump is saying the government says that the science is at the MMR vaccine is bad and that you need three separate vaccines and that that's good and that that's what like the gold standard of evidence based medicine is now. It's almost more like a post than an executive order. It's just him saying this is the government's position on the science. Now, this is all very classic anti vax stuff. In particular, the separating out the MMR vaccine is just the classic anti vaccine stuff, dating back to a man named Andrew Wakefield who was stripped of his medical license after it discovered that he hired to produce evidence linking vaccines to autism by a group that was trying to sue the British government for damages over their belief that vaccines were, quote, unquote, causing their children's autism. So Wakefield was hired by this group to produce a study that would support their claims. And then also Wakefield turned out had lied to the parents of young children about the painful and invasive medical experiments he performed on them. So that's how he'd lost his medical license. There's a very good Age Bomber guide long essay video essay on this that I recommend watching. And Wakefield very specifically peddled a line about the MMR vaccine. His argument was that the MMR vaccine could be dangerous if they were taken together, but if taken individually, they were safe. This doesn't make sense even by the mechanism of the fake condition he made up, but it made him seem like less of a full on anti vaxxer and that he also did this because he was trying to get a patent to, to make a separate vaccine to sell them to the kids and parents who believed the MMR was dangerous. So this entire thing is a product of Wakefield's attempt to do a grift in the 1990s and the British media latching onto it and spreading it. And this has just sort of persisted as this zombie belief where in the speech where Trump is giving talking about him signing this executive order, he's talking about how the MMR together is lethal, but individually they're safe, which is the stuff that, that Wakefield was saying in the 90s. It was, it was never true then, it was never true now.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, but that's why we all died as children.

[Mia Wong]

I guess that's why I have autism. I don't know, like I didn't die at rubella or whatever.

[Margaret Killjoy]

No, that's caused by transness. That's not the other way around.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So basically we have, we have an executive order that is the sort of persistence of this zombie grift that has, that has transcended this guy's original grift and is now in an executive order from the President of the United States. But it's sort of unlikely that any of the stuff in here is going to actually have actual effects on children getting vaccines, which is mostly good. Obviously the attacks on states that don't have religious exemptions for vaccinating kids to go to school is bad, but it's really unclear how the legal mechanism for any of this would work. And another complication is that we don't have separate vaccines for the components of mmr. The US does not make them. Nominally. Nominally. This executive order is supposed to set up the option for parents to do that. And Trump said he would be like working with the private sector to allow this to happen, but this doesn't currently exist.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So we need another Operation Light Speed.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it's Operation Warp Speed, but like for anti vax.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, Operation Light Drive.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And obviously every single reputable medical institution recommends that you do them all at the same time because it's safe. And also there's actually does mean giving children less vaccinations so they're more likely to show up and do them.

[Garrison Davis]

But they have 72 vaccines MIA. 72?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. So let's make it 74.

[Garrison Davis]

All at once, all at the same time.

[Mia Wong]

More vaccines. I Want more vaccines, I want to catch less diseases. We should vaccinate our children even more. Like that rules.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I know. I want to get vaccinated for everything. It's like in D and D where you're like, oh, do you want protection from fire? And you're like, yeah, I want protection from fire.

[Mia Wong]

It rocks.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Give me a Lyme vaccine. I want it.

[Garrison Davis]

Wait, what is that?

[Mia Wong]

By God, Is that Mia Wong's music? Yes, it is. It is. Tariff talk. We have a, a brief tariff talk. So tariff refunds are continuing after the Supreme Court overruled the so called Liberation Day tariffs. But the question remains, who are these refunds actually going to?

[Garrison Davis]

I'm guessing it's all of the consumers, right?

[Mia Wong]

No, no, it's, it's corporations. And I, I, I, I'm gonna say right off the bat that Amazon is saying is claiming that some specific consumers will get refunds. No, no, they're not. Like if you, if, if you believe that I have the NFT of a bridge to sell you, like just. No, no, they're not.

[Garrison Davis]

You don't think Amazon's gonna pass off all like $600 million to consumers in like an equitable and fair fashion?

[Robert Downing]

Come on.

[Mia Wong]

I, I just, I just, I can't, I can't take this seriously. I, this is, this is one of those things where you read mainstream journalists talking about this and it's like, okay, yes, they have to at, at face value, quote the Amazon cfo. Yeah, and print the just obvious lie that they are telling. But I, I don't have to do that. No, absolutely not. They're just lying to you. Now in reality, it has been, you know, it has been large corporations who have reaped the over $100 billion rewards from the tariff refunds, not consumers. And prices meanwhile, have stayed high. Who could possibly have guessed that? Now this obviously allows corporations to double dip by both receiving their tariff rebate checks from the government, while also maintaining the increased prices nominally caused by the tariffs. This is because corporations are so called price setters. They do not, as neoclassical economics suggest, take prices from some kind of abstract market or like, you know, the point where two curves meet. That is not how prices are set. Prices in reality are set by guys in corporate offices whose job it is to set the price. And now increasingly, it is sometimes set by, you know, AI programs which are doing effectively the same thing, but trying to rip you off even more. Now what this means is that while you do have to take into account consumer sentiment to some, to some extent, right. In terms of like, you know, maintaining brand loyalty once you have an excuse to raise prices.

[Hayes Davenport]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Once consumers have been disciplined into accepting higher prices as the quote, unquote, result of tariffs, companies can simply leave prices high without fear of backlash and reap in more profit. This is also a decent amount of the inflation during the Biden administration where there were increased supply chain costs, which increased prices, but then those costs never came down again as supply chain costs decreased a little bit because corporations could simply leave the price sticky and keep, like, screwing you over. So the, the net result of the tariff refunds has been companies leaving prices at the points they were at already and consumers seeing absolutely none of it.

[Garrison Davis]

No. It's incredible. Even Amazon is saying that, like, they're not setting up a system for consumers to, like, file for a claim. Amazon will assess by themselves if individual consumers deserve a refund and then contact them individually.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, I trust them to do that. That makes sense.

[Garrison Davis]

It's incredible. It's incredible.

[Mia Wong]

There's a Canadian version of the song Daloi Polloci, which is down with the police with classical Yiddish song. A Canadian guy, his name I'm blanking on right now, wrote a version of it where one of the lines is, it's about, it's about the police, like, killing a guy in custody.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Hey, hey, Deloitte. Poorly say means the same thing now as yesterday.

[Mia Wong]

Out of your houses into the trees. Yeah, but one of the lines that has always stuck with me is specifically the line, at first, the situation makes the lawmen look so filthy, but they investigate themselves and it turns out they're not guilty. And that's what's happening here. They investigate themselves and it turns out they're not guilty. Who, who could possibly have expected this?

[Garrison Davis]

All power to the corporations.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Let's.

[Garrison Davis]

That's right, that's right.

[Mia Wong]

Electrification plus corporate power.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's. Let's go on one more ad break and then discuss everyone's favorite thing, elections. All right, we are back in Minnesota. Amy Klobuchar will likely succeed Mike Walls as governor of Minnesota, winning the democratic primary with 90% of the vote. Meanwhile, the Trump endorsed candidate for governor, Mike Lindell, also known as the My pillow guy, has lost the primary to Lisa Dem, the Minnesota House Speaker. So Mike ended up losing with 32% of the vote to Lisa DeMutz, 43%. This is a legitimate blow to, like, the power of Trump's endorsement. And, you know, obviously Mike Lindell's very public figure, while Lisa, you know, is an actual state politician that voters are somewhat more familiar with as A real politician and not that guy in that TV ad who, who thinks the election is fake. So this is an interesting referendum in the Republican Party itself on Trump's endorsement power and figures like Mike.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So kind of a basically picking old style Republicans to new style Republicans.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Like she is like the Minnesota like House speaker, like of. Of the city House. I think people that they know who are local, who are we not as die hard mega at least compared to Mike Lindell. Now not saying that Lisa DeMuth is a good politician nor. Nor Amy Klobuchar. Right. Like both of the people in this race I think suck.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But it in looking at like what the future of the Republican Party might be, the fact that Trump's endorsement here did not result in Mike winning is, is something that I find to be a bit interesting. Meanwhile the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota Peggy Flanagan.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, probably a Margaret.

[Garrison Davis]

You think so?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Peg is usually a Margaret.

[Garrison Davis]

Well there you go. She won the primary to replace Democratic Senator Tina Smith who is stepping down. Flanagan got 59% of the vote compared to the AIPAC backed moderate House Representative Angie Craig who earned 39.4%. So basically like a 20 point difference. Ice was one of the main factors in this race as a lot of the races are in Minnesota are being defined in large part by ice. Following Metro Surge, Flanagan attacked Craig for voting in support of the Lake and Riley act and voting for a resolution thanking ice. Meanwhile Craig attacked Flanagan for the post pandemic daycare fraud scandals in Minnesota regarding their state run social services. Peggy Flanagan has also been very outspoken in support of trans rights and trans youth.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, she's, she's been fairly outspoken in her support of trans kids getting gender affirming health care and also wearing the like protect trans kids like knife shirt.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I like when Margarets don't go in the Thatcher direction. So yeah, that's right.

[Garrison Davis]

That is, that is good. So House Representative Angie Craig, who was running for Senate is now out of a job after losing to Peggy. And in the race for her House seat, the former mayor of Lakeville, Matt Little, who's a progressive running on Medicare for all and regulating AI in data centers, just won the Democratic primary beating the pro Israel candidate, State Senator Matt Klein. This is 47% to 30%. Matt Little also participated in the community rapid response to Operation Metro Surge. Ilana Marr also won the primary for her reelection campaign by over 80%. But for the big election news this week, let's turn to Wisconsin where DSA candidate Francesca Hong who was Heavily favored to win in the polls, barely lost in an upset to establishment backed candidate David Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive who was endorsed by the sitting governor late in the race. And this, this race was so close. This is less than 4,000 votes. Like, I think it's at 3,700 some votes right now. That's the difference. It's 0.5 percentage point difference. This was an incredibly close race. As much as the polls were wrong about this race, in some ways, polls did have support for Hong about right around 40%. Some polls maybe had her overperforming by like 2 to 6%. But the main thing that polling did not account for was the electorate getting in behind Crowley. Late into the race to edge out Hong, polling had Crowley at about 22% and he ended up winning with just over 40%. Now this polling was also from at least a week or more before the election. And as we'll discuss in a bit, things can change pretty late in the game in some of these elections. Now, the turnout was also much higher than expected and over 800,000 votes, nearing like presidential primary levels. So, like, Hong got a lot of votes, just she needed 4,000 more to win the election. I think the way mainstream media is gonna be talking about this race will be somewhat frustrating. The Politico headline right now is, quote, the far left hits a wall, which is interesting framing because last week their headline following Abdul Al Said's victory was, quote, progressives didn't get the big election night they wanted, meaning Abdul did not win by as big of a margin as what progressives were expecting. And so this is actually bad for progressives. So whether or not you win or whether or not you lose, it's actually bad for progressives, right? That is, that is the line that media is going to take regarding this race. And again, this race was very close. Hong lost by less than 4,000 votes and, and did pretty well in some rural counties. These results come down to campaign strategy. This is not a massive referendum on, like, DSA politics and like this, this race was a stacked roster. There were seven people on the ballot. Over 150,000 votes were for other candidates besides Hong and Crowley, many of whom suspended their campaigns. And there's no ranked choice voting in this state. And oddly enough, Crowley himself suspended his campaign in early July before two other moderate candidates dropped out of the race for various reasons. And so then Crowley got back into the race with consolidated support from the party establishment. Though Crowley might not like that term establishment.

[Hayes Davenport]

Here's a. I'm trying to figure out who the establishment. I'm trying to figure out who the establishment is.

[Fred Armisen]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

I think that when we talk about

[Hayes Davenport]

the establishment, I don't know who that is. I'm a kid that grew up in 53206 zip code. My parents was drug addicts and suffered from mental health. I worked extremely hard to be where I am today. And so when people try to call me the establishment, I look at that as a slur.

[Mia Wong]

Particularly as an African American candidate, Hong

[Garrison Davis]

was also wildly outspent. Like many of these DSA or left populist races, she did end up spending $235,000 on digital and streaming ads.

[Hoda Kotb]

Ads.

[Garrison Davis]

But she spent $0 on traditional TV ads. And an outside group also spent about $220,000 in ads for Hong. But these ads were also digital. There was. There was no TV ads for Hong in this race. Meanwhile, to quote Politico, quote, two outside groups backing late reentry and David Crowley spent a combined 3.3 million, mostly on TV, while the Milwaukee county executive's own campaign spent nearly 900,000, unquote. So one of the takeaways from this race is that maybe you should spend money on some TV ads, at least. Now Hong's campaign was not, you know, flush in cash, but TV ads might be needed to edge out a bit more support in rural areas where throughout election night, Crowley kept building a lead little by little. And like I was watching Carnacki's stream last night, and that was the main way Crowley edged out a lead is that basically every 10 minutes, he would win, like, you know, 20 votes in some rural county and then, you know, 50 votes in another, and this slowly built up to, you know, hundreds and then thousands of votes in these little small counties. Now, Hong also did win some rural counties, specifically in the northern part of the state, and also a few rural counties in, like, the center of the state as well. And the fact that Hong did so well with no TV ads shows how good the DSA ground game was. This was a 4000 vote difference with no TV ads. And she did very well. She just didn't do well enough. So maybe as good as the ground game is, it might not be good enough alone. Now, the other sort of thing I'm seeing people talk about is that maybe a stronger base turnout could have crossed this 4,000 vote gap, right in specifically Madison and in Green Bay, where she was expected to do a little bit better than what she did and would have something like Bernie Sanders or an AOC endorsement rally have helped mobilize an extra few thousand votes in these areas where her kind of base is concentrated. Now, AOC and Bernie have said that for the cycle, they're mostly focusing on congressional races, which is why they did not get involved in this governor's race. But it is definitely worth pointing out that Hong did not do as well with college educated voters as other DSA candidates have in recent past. Or someone like El said she still won college voters, but not by like, sort of massive margins that you're seeing in other races. And as I mentioned before, a lot of this race shifted pretty, pretty late when the final weeks of the primary were spent arguing about, quote, unquote, electability. And this was, this was a joint effort from both the media, from news media and the Democratic establishment to question whether Hong is electable, if she'll be able to beat the Republican in the general or will her, like, extreme views and old tweets alienate voters. Here is the sitting governor, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, today wading into the governor's

[Mia Wong]

race as he was asked about Democratic

[Robert Downing]

Democratic frontrunner Francesca Hong.

[Garrison Davis]

Specifically, can she beat Republican Tom Tiffany?

[Hayes Davenport]

She's in a tough fight.

[Mia Wong]

She has spent her entire campaign dealing with, not with the issues, but what, what's on the Twitter. And I just find that that's not

[Garrison Davis]

a good way to beat Tom Tiffany. In TV news and online, there's a lot of questions about her previous stances on abolishing police and outlets like Fox News. And also on social media. They circulated an old clip from 2021, when she started serving in the state assembly, talking about being concerned about her son's quote, unquote, proximity to whiteness. Here's a former Biden admin official, the chief of staff to the White House press office, and a press advisor discussing Hong on the morning of the election.

[Carrie Brownstein]

She has no talent. She has no charisma. Her ideas, if a toddler said them out loud, would get put in timeout.

[Hayes Davenport]

She's not a real person.

[Carrie Brownstein]

She's actually, in my opinion, deeply unsettled

[Garrison Davis]

and she should really work through in

[Carrie Brownstein]

therapy some of her own beliefs. And I cannot believe that we might be on the cusp of having to lift up this person who is undeserving of a seat in Congress.

[Garrison Davis]

That's pretty wild. Also pretty wild because, quote, unquote, undeserving for a seat in Congress. Hong was not running for Congress. She was running for the governor of Wisconsin. But anyway, you know much of the news coverage of the campaign during, during the final week and a week and a half of the race was spent talking about this stuff and specifically talking about old tweets about, quote, unquote, canceling Thanksgiving and how Hong, who used to work in the restaurant industry, just doesn't really like holidays. And I think the way that this really dominated the race and she was, you know, bombarded with a lot of questions about this, kind of demonstrated how important message discipline is in running these races. And you do not need to answer stupid questions flatly, but you can rather use, use that as, as a way to promote or spread your campaign message, saying like, no, my biggest concern as governor is whether families will be able to afford to put food on the table and eat together no matter what holidays that they celebrate. That would be message discipline. Right? That is, that is something that Zoron did very well when campaigning. And the other thing I've kind of seen these past few weeks is a lot of these DSA candidates get asked about DSA's new platform. Workers Deserve More, which we've discussed on the show, which is neither like a minimum nor a maximum platform. It has a lot of like, immediate term things that are very, very possible, like in the short term that people, you know, should be collectively rallying around and pushing for. But it also has a lot of, like, long term goals that the platform's own prologue admits, like, won't be possible under our current system and would require like a complete overhaul of society. But the platform itself doesn't distinguish between its own, like, actual minimum and maximum proposals. All of the actual proposals are like, in the same section. And I think this is in some ways opened up attacks from news media, especially hostile news media. This is both a good thing or a bad thing.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Garrison Davis]

You, you could interpret the platform being structured the way it is as a way to kind of help keep DSA or some of these, like, some of these ideas from sliding over to the right and having all these proposals together. It does open the Overton window on a lot of, like, legitimately radical ideas where, you know, now the public is, is debating things like abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College, drafting a new constitution, you know, public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. But the way this platform is structured opens candidates up to attack from, you know, media journalists who do not have, you know, the best interests of these candidates at heart, where they're being grilled about a lot of things that they themselves are not running on. So instead of being asked about, you know, raising the minimum wage but ending gerrymandering, you know, ice, healthcare, childcare, data centers, whatever they're instead being asked about other, you know, maximum proposals in the DSA platform. And again, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. I think a skilled speaker can navigate this and defend their own positions without throwing DSA under the bus. But this is a sort of trend that I am noticing. I think specifically Oliver Larkin in Florida has handled this really, really well. And Chris Raab, who won the primary in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has also handled questioning on this really, really well. And I think Hong herself was getting better at this. Towards the end. To close, I want to play this this short clip of Hong on Fox News the morning of the election. Voters who fear that democratic socialism could turn into communism.

[Ben Rose Porter]

What would you want them to know?

[Garrison Davis]

No, this is a state where we still have a 233 tip minimum wage and 725.

[Ben Rose Porter]

725, 25 minimum wage.

[Carrie Brownstein]

I think it's going to be pretty

[Garrison Davis]

hard to turn that into socialism soon.

[Carrie Brownstein]

But what we can do with this

[Garrison Davis]

campaign is make sure that we're fighting

[Ben Rose Porter]

for the policies that working class people

[Carrie Brownstein]

first and we're fighting for a $20 minimum wage.

[Garrison Davis]

Interesting the way the anchor is there at the end. Just have no idea how to react. I think that that is really telling.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I mean, there's just a fundamental generational divide between people who are like that person said socialism. That should completely end their political career. Which if you're over the age of about 40, is just like an axiom.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[Margaret Killjoy]

If you're an American and you said the word socialism, you're not fit, you don't belong here. And if you're under 40, you're like, shut the fuck up. I don't know.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. I can't afford to like live at all.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So maybe I'll support politicians or policies that might, might make my life slightly better.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Anyway, that is Wisconsin. So let's close with Robert and a very funny story.

[Robert Downing]

Okay. So onto my main story for this week, which obviously is not really my story, but I thought it was the funniest thing I read this week, so I'm gonna tell you guys about it. So on July 8, 2026, Donald Trump was at Ankara, Turkey, with a bunch of his top aides and cabinet people, as well as his normal press corps retainers. He was there for a NATO summit. And overnight on the 7th, I believe he made the decision to have US forces restart their strikes against Iran. And after, I think this is like the fourth or the fifth, maybe the seventh breakdown in negotiations we've had. I, I honestly have lost track of how many times that has happened. But we started doing strikes again overnight. Right. So after that decision was made, but before Trump decamped from Turkey late on the 8th, CBS News reports that US intelligence detected a, quote, credible plot to fire a missile at Air Force One. Now, for clarity, the Air Force One that the president flew to Ankara is what I'm going to call Air Force One. Two, because it's the Qatari Air Force One that replaced the real Air Force One that Trump was given as a gift by a $400 million gift by Qatar.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Right.

[Robert Downing]

And this is legally distinct from a bribe. I need to specify that and I need to note we will be talking about a lot of Air Force is one in this episode. Well, we'll be talking about three specifically

[Mia Wong]

because, like, technically, technically, any plane the president is on is supposed to be Air Force One.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yes, yes.

[Robert Downing]

That said, it says supposed to. They're also supposed to, like, change the transponder, but they don't do that in situations like we're about to talk about where there's, like, a threat.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Robert Downing]

So I should talk a little bit about the Qatari Air Force One, which I'm calling Air Force One.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Two.

[Robert Downing]

Yeah, I said it was a $400 million gift that's legally distinct from a bribe. And it was, but because all they had done was make a really nice plane. Air Force One is a lot more than a really nice plane. Air Force One is presumably I. Everyone who is an expert on planes says. Says about the hardest plane to kill in the world. Right. Because it's Air Force One. The Qatari Air Force One is not that naturally that hardened. Right. Because it can't be. So they spent months and months and months and $750 million retrofitting the Qatari plane to ensure that it had the proper security features to transport and protect the president. Now, even though I just said that, that $750 million still did not bring this plane up, as far as I'm aware. It didn't even bring it particularly close to what the actual Air Force One is capable of. It does not have the whole suite of electronic countermeasures and stuff that the real Air Force One has. It's still not as secure. I also want to read one other note from aviation source news about the Qatari Air Force One plans to transfer the jet to the Trump Presidential Library foundation rather than extend use to the next president after his term. Add to the controversies.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, that's one of the most insane parts. The cutter jet is that it's technically not a personal gift to Trump because it's property of the government. And yet after he leaves office, it'll be transferred to his library foundation.

[Robert Downing]

He's keeping that fucker.

[Garrison Davis]

It's insane.

[Robert Downing]

Which he's put nearly a billion dollars of public money into anyway. So the plane that he flew to Ankara, the Secret Service is immediately like, well, now that there is a credible threat, we cannot have him fly out on the Qatari Air Force One because it doesn't have the countermeasures it would need. So at the last Moment on the 8th, Mr. Trump announced that for old time's sake, I think was very close to his exact statement. He's gonna be flying home from a car on the old Air Force One, which we'll call Air Force One One, right? So he says he's gonna fly home on this thing and to all, as far as everyone is aware, on the 8th, he does, right? He, he goes takes a, whatever kind of ride out to Air Force One. He's photographed at the door of Air Force One. He enters Air Force 11 and then Air Force 11 takes off with all of the, the press people and a bunch of Trump staffers on it. Now, what we didn't know then, but we know now is that Trump was not on Air Force 11 after it took off, even though he got on the plane. Because the day before we sat down to record this episode of Ed, the Washington Post published one of the funnier investigations of the second Trump era. Its title is contradicting public statements. Trump took secret flight from Turkey amid Iranian threat. Now, CBS and the New York Times had previously reported that Trump had boarded the old Air Force One due to this threat. That was a lie. In reality, the Secret Service had Trump board the old Air Force One on camera and then put all of the normal people who would be on it on it and then sent it on its way without Trump as a decoy in case the Iranians wanted to try

[Mia Wong]

to shoot it down.

[Robert Downing]

Any major administration visit to a summit like they held in Ankara is going to include not just Air Force One, but a couple of other Air Force marked passenger jets, which are all suitable for hosting cabinet officials and other high ranking members of the government, but are also there for another reason, in case the President needed to make a discreet escape on a different plane. This is not the only time the President has not been on Air Force One when people have thought he was right. The White House doesn't have a history of lying to people about this. It's more they'll obfuscate it kind of

[Robert Evans]

in the moment like they did with

[Robert Downing]

Bush, or they'll just say, we're not telling you where the fucking President is, because shit's happening right now. So the fact that they did an elaborate lie and sent Air Force One into the sky full of people as, like, a decoy for an Iranian missile is pretty new and fucked up.

[Robert Evans]

But the fact that the Secret Service

[Robert Downing]

is like, we probably shouldn't send him out on any of the obvious Air Force ones is not really all that, like, weird of a moment. What is weird is how they did it, right? And I'm going to quote from the Washington Post. In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane, an Air Force C32A via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies pre flight, according to the US Official corroborating material reviewed by the Post. That made Air Force One a decoy with media and some White House staff aboard the official set. And the article goes into a hysterical amount of deal. They're combing through all of the pictures of the airport on that day, and they show the catering truck when Trump would have been on it. You can see that in the article. Like, it just looks like a catering truck on a plane. But it's really funny to know that he's just squatting in there.

[Mia Wong]

Unfortunately, he's gotta be having the best time of his life doing this, right? Like, he's just like, I bet it was really fun. I bet it was super fun.

[Robert Downing]

And he felt like a spy. I know.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, it's a bummer.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

God.

[Robert Downing]

But it is really funny because, like, there's a lot that's funny in this right now, and I can't. To be fair, I can't imagine any member of the White House press corps would be surprised at the President using them as a decoy. In fact, before it was revealed that Trump had left the original Air Force One, or Air Force One one, for what I guess we'll call Air Force One three. This happened, quote. Asked why reporters had been instructed to lower the window shades on the plane in Turkey, Trump said that it was because you're probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleaze bags we have to deal with. Trump said that he has a threat all the time against his life and that he is number one on Iran's list. But if I go, you go, right? Trump suggested to reporters, perhaps someday you want to change professions. He's really funny sometimes.

[Robert Evans]

I'm sorry.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, it does feel like an 80s movie like side plot.

[Robert Downing]

It really does. It really does. Now the people I'd imagine might be kind of hurt by this are the staff members, like the members of Trump's White House who got chosen to fly on the Human Shield flight without being told, rather than being rerouted to Air Force 13 where the boss was flying, because not all of them were. Pete Hegseth was on Air Force One three with Trump, right? He got rerouted to the real one. But a bunch of Trump's people just found out today that he put them on the death flight to see if a missile would hit him. And I think that's beautiful.

[Garrison Davis]

Anyway, that's what I got. Margaret, where can people listen to more cool people doing cool stuff like slock cameras?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Well, you can listen to cool people who did cool stuff, which is usually about history, but lately I've been doing a lot of history that sometimes happened a week or so ago and it's on this very network or even in this very feed. You can listen to Cool Zone Media Book Club, where I read a different story every week to you.

[Garrison Davis]

Also, James's new show, Natural Cause is coming out soon.

[Mia Wong]

Put a trans goal on your couch.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Hayes Davenport]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Mia Wong]

It Could Happen.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us

[Garrison Davis]

out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

[Mia Wong]

or wherever you listen to podcasts you

[Ben Rose Porter]

can now find sources for It Could

[Mia Wong]

Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

[Garrison Davis]

Thanks for listening.

[Ben Rose Porter]

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[Carrie Brownstein]

Ah, DSW Earth, place of the humble brag here.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The shoes are so good.

[Carrie Brownstein]

No one would ever know how little

[Hoda Kotb]

you paid if you didn't go telling everyone that is.

[Garrison Davis]

And with never ending options for every

[Carrie Brownstein]

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[Garrison Davis]

great prices, we'll definitely give you something to brag about. So go ahead, stock up on fresh

[Carrie Brownstein]

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[Hoda Kotb]

those boots you always secretly need can pull off. Find the shoes that get you at

[Garrison Davis]

prices that get your budget at DSW stores [e-mail] let us surprise you.

[Hoda Kotb]

I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. You know, I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy, like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out.

[Hayes Davenport]

You're not hired just to fill time and space. You're hired to fill the space with you.

[Hoda Kotb]

Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Hey, Portlandia fans, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.

[Fred Armisen]

The dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.

[Carrie Brownstein]

We're launching Podlandia AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made.

[Fred Armisen]

And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life, guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Krisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

[Carrie Brownstein]

Kyle is going for it. Here you fully improvised not just words, but a song.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Well, I thought you were all going

[Hayes Davenport]

to write a song.

[Carrie Brownstein]

I remember you you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia AO rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.