It Could Happen Here Weekly 188

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards - "It Could Happen Here" (Weekly Episode 188)

Release Date: June 28, 2025

Hosts:

• Robert Evans
• James Stout

Guests:

• Leticia James (Street Medic, Collective: Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness)
• Dr. Richard Ferro (Family Practice Physician, Los Angeles Area)

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1. Protests and Street Medic Response

Overview:
The episode delves into the dynamics of modern protests, emphasizing the role of street medics in addressing injuries primarily caused by police actions. The discussion explores the types of violence encountered, common injuries, and effective treatment methods.

Key Points:

• Violence Predominantly from Police:
  Leticia James notes that over 90% of the violence encountered during protests stems from police interactions, with occasional aggression from non-state actors like the Proud Boys. [02:55]

  "It is mostly violence from police. Sometimes it is violence from non-state affiliated or at least not on duty fascists." — Leticia James (02:55)

• Types of Injuries:
  Common injuries include those from tear gas, pepper spray, nightsticks, and impact munitions like rubber bullets. Environmental factors such as heat stroke and dehydration also pose significant health risks. [09:58]

• Effective Treatment for Tear Gas Exposure:
  The panel emphasizes water and saline as the most effective treatments for tear gas exposure, debunking myths about remedies like milk or onion juice. Continuous eye flushing is recommended to mitigate the harmful effects of chemical irritants. [20:24]

  "What you actually do is flush out the eyes with water. I mean, that's it. That's water." — Leticia James (21:33)

• Misconceptions About Tear Gas Treatment:
  Leticia James highlights the ineffectiveness of alternative remedies and stresses the importance of proper medical protocols during protests. [23:12]

2. Less-Lethal Munitions: Rubber Bullets and Impact Weapons

Overview:
The conversation shifts to the use of "less-lethal" munitions by law enforcement, examining their actual lethality and the misconceptions surrounding their safety.

Key Points:

• Mislabeling of Munitions:
  Despite being termed "less lethal," rubber bullets and similar impact weapons have been responsible for numerous fatalities and severe injuries globally. [32:59]

  "They're often called non-lethal and or 'less lethals,' but they can and have killed." — Jordan Melgar (33:00)

• Statistics on Injuries and Deaths:
  Studies, including those by Amnesty International and the British Medical Journal, indicate that these munitions have a significant mortality rate and cause long-term injuries. [33:44]

• Policy and Usage:
  The panel discusses how these weapons are often used indiscriminately, leading to preventable harm, and the need for stricter regulations and accountability. [36:10]

3. Preparation and Safety Measures for Protesters

Overview:
Practical advice is provided on how protesters can prepare for potential confrontations, minimize risks, and respond effectively to injuries.

Key Points:

• Essential Equipment:
  Bringing water, masks, eye protection, and first aid supplies is crucial. Multi-language outreach and situational awareness are also emphasized. [44:53]

• Medical Support:
  Leticia James discusses setting up clinic spaces and the logistical challenges of providing continuous medical care during protests. [30:31]

  "Your priority in the immediate moments after somebody's been sprayed is to help them so that they can get out of there if they need to." — Leticia James (30:31)

• Training and Skills:
  The importance of basic first aid training, such as "stop the bleed," is highlighted to empower individuals to assist effectively during emergencies. [53:10]

4. World Classification and Externalization in Capitalism

Overview:
The hosts explore various frameworks used to categorize nations and regions, critiquing their oversimplifications and inherent biases. They delve into the concept of externalization in capitalist systems, where the costs of economic activities are shifted onto marginalized communities and the environment.

Key Points:

• Classification Frameworks:
  Discussion covers binaries like civilized vs. primitive, East vs. West, Clash of Civilizations, Global North vs. South, and World Systems Theory. The limitations and racial undertones of these frameworks are critically examined. [65:26]

  "It's a value statement. I think, like, James C. Scott talks about... the inherent message is that the state is the final and superior form of human organizing, and people who have chosen to exist outside it, it are not because they chose to, but because they haven't made it there yet." — James Stout (65:54)

• Externalization in Capitalism:
  The episode critiques how capitalist systems externalize environmental, social, and economic costs to the Global South and marginalized communities, perpetuating inequality and exploitation. Examples include pollution, labor exploitation, and resource extraction. [72:05]

  "Capitalism relies on these flows, these very smooth flows of labor, energy and resources from periphery to core." — Donald Trump (84:56)

• Impact of Externalization:
  The panel discusses real-world implications, such as how pollution in developing countries is a direct result of Western consumption patterns, and how migration is influenced by climate change and economic disparities caused by externalization. [95:07]

5. Closing and Additional Insights

Overview:
The hosts wrap up the episode by emphasizing the importance of collective action, awareness, and support for marginalized communities affected by systemic externalization.

Key Points:

• Solidarity and Support:
  Encouragement to support jail-based initiatives, participate in mutual aid, and engage in community training programs to build resilience against systemic harms. [49:12]

  "Help not just people who are arrested, but anybody coming out of jail..." — Leticia James (46:45)

• Building a Better Future:
  The discussion concludes with a call to action to challenge and change the existing capitalist frameworks that perpetuate externalization and inequality, advocating for cooperative and community-driven solutions. [140:02]

6. Satirical Interlude and Fictional Dialogue

Overview:
In the latter part of the episode, the conversation shifts to a more satirical and fictional exchange involving characters impersonating political figures like Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo. This segment serves as a humorous departure from the serious topics previously discussed, highlighting the absurdities in political rhetoric and actions.

Notable Exchanges:

• Character Play:
  Impersonated voices of Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo engage in exaggerated and humorous dialogues about global classifications, nationalism, and political maneuvers, blending real-world issues with fictional banter.

  "The world is quite the puzzle... we are carved up and divided in so many different ways." — Donald Trump (64:25)

• Humorous Commentary:
  The fictional dialogue critiques historical and contemporary geopolitical frameworks, mocking the oversimplifications and persistent biases in global classifications.

Timestamp Highlights:

• "Would you consider yourself civilized or primitive?" — Donald Trump (66:18)
• "They are less lethal only in that it is less likely to kill you than being shot with live ammunition." — Leticia James (36:50)

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Conclusion:
The episode "It Could Happen Here" provides a comprehensive examination of the complexities surrounding modern protests, the misuse of non-lethal weapons by law enforcement, and the broader systemic issues of externalization in capitalist societies. Through expert insights from street medics and physicians, the hosts emphasize the importance of preparedness, solidarity, and proactive measures to mitigate harm. The satirical interlude serves to underscore the often absurd nature of political rhetoric, adding a layer of humor to the serious discourse.

Listeners are encouraged to engage with their communities, support medical initiatives, and critically assess the frameworks that shape global and local power dynamics.

Transcript

[James Stout]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Garrison Davis]

Call zone Media.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Robert Evans]

Sometimes there is a topic that is too big for just one podcaster. Sometimes a simple medical podcaster, a simple wartime journalist can't handle a topic on their own. They need to combine forces. A special team up has to happen. And that, my friends, is what's happening today on this special crossover edition of.

[James Stout]

The House of Pod.

[Robert Evans]

And it could happen here in Hopich. HOPPICH Special, myself, Dr. Kaveh Hota. Hope I'm saying that correctly. And James Stout are going to be talking to you along with two very special guests about what's happening out there in the protests, what risks the protesters are facing, what health concerns we have for them, how they can best prepare, and more. James. Hey, buddy.

[Mia Wong]

Hey.

[James Stout]

It's nice to be podcasting with you again.

[Robert Evans]

I really enjoy our team ups here, our special Marvel team ups that we do.

[James Stout]

It's a fun one. You're my favorite collaborator, Kavi.

[Garrison Davis]

Hey.

[Robert Evans]

I'm gonna take that as total sincerity, even though I'm not entirely sure. So I thank you for that because I think that sounded sincere enough.

[James Stout]

I like these. I like these. It's fun.

[Robert Evans]

Me too. I do, too. Let's introduce our guests. We have some very special guests. I will actually ask you guys to introduce yourselves. Start with you, Miriam. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background in this field is?

[Leticia James]

Sure. Hi, I'm Miriam. I use she or they pronouns. My background in the field of podcasting is that I am with the collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which puts out the podcast Live like the World Is Dying, as well as the podcast Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and the spectacle and my experience in the field of. What I think we're here to talk about today is that I've been a street medic for over a decade, which means I have treated a lot of injuries on people who've been messed up by interactions with police.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, we're going to talk about this more, but my first question is, is it pretty much 90% or more violence from the police that you encounter? Do you ever encounter anything else like violence amongst protesters? Themselves or something else that happens along the way? Or is it solely what you're experiencing is treating violence from the side of the police?

[Leticia James]

So that's a good question. It is mostly violence from police. Sometimes it is violence from non state affiliated or at least not on duty fascists. So your proud boys, other people like that, or just generally sort of hostile right wing actors. Sometimes it is also sort of underlying medical stuff, more so like somebody has been out at the march all day and they didn't bring their medication with them and so they're having a seizure. And you know, then there's also environmental stuff, your heat stroke, your hypothermia, your. I was running to catch up with the march and I stepped off the curb. Weird.

[Robert Evans]

Ow.

[Leticia James]

You know, stuff like that. But in terms of violence, yeah, it's, it's mostly coming from the cops. I've, I've certainly never seen a, a friendly fire incident of violence amongst, amongst protesters. I'm sure it could happen, but, but I have not seen it. I've seen people that, that I'm in the streets with or wherever with, attacked by, by people who wish them harm who are people from the state or, you know, like I said, not currently on duty as cops, but you know, basically cops.

[Robert Evans]

I know I'm digressing too far and I need to introduce our other guests, but I have another follow up question and I need to ask, I'm so curious, please. Have you ever had to take care of say, someone on the other side who's been injured?

[Leticia James]

So as anybody who works in any kind of emergency, you know, medical will tell you, anybody who's an EMT or even anybody who's like a lifeguard, the first thing you do before you approach a patient is establish scene safety. So if a Nazi has been hurt, it is not safe for me to approach that patient because there's a Nazi over there.

[Robert Evans]

I see. Okay. I think I'm picking up what you're putting down on that one. So it has not happened.

[Leticia James]

Yeah, anybody who is acting as a street medic is acting under what are called Good Samaritan laws, you know, which protect you from any kind of bad outcome if you start taking care of somebody, you know, start helping somebody out in the streets based on whatever training you have, you know, same thing like if somebody collapses at a bus stop and you start doing CPR based on the Red Cross class you took. That's Good Samaritan stuff. Same way it does not obligate you to intervene, especially in approaching somebody who is actively seeking to do you harm. So I would not consider that within my lane.

[Robert Evans]

Understood. Well, let's introduce our second guest. We have Dr. Richard Ferro, who is a doctor in the Los Angeles area and is a family practice physician. May I call you Richard?

[Jordan Melgar]

Yeah, you may.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, very good. Richard, welcome to the show.

[Jordan Melgar]

Thank you very much, Kavya. It's a pleasure to be on. You kind of mentioned it already. I'm Kelly, Medicine. I've also had experience in street medicine in the LA area also. You know, this is obviously something that's really important to me right now, given everything that's been going on in the city. And also important for me just given the fact that I'm a Latino, I'm a proud Costa Rican, Cuban, and just that's part of the huge reason why I'm in medicine. So really happy to have an opportunity to talk about, you know, the ICE protests and the stuff that's been going on to protect our community.

[Robert Evans]

That's great to hear. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been involved with recently down in Los Angeles?

[Jordan Melgar]

So I. As far as what I've been involved in in Los Angeles, you know, I've been coordinating with some of my colleagues who I knew from residency and just other colleagues just who are all involved in social justice as well as the cir. The physicians union, you know, who are engaged in trying to like, provide medical support to the protests in the area. So I've had experience working on some of the protests that have occurred both in LA and oc.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's really good to hear. I think people will have been spending a lot of time, like, watching footage of the protests. Right. In the last. I don't know what week a week in now. Fuck knows. It seems like a long time. I haven't been sleeping very much, give.

[Robert Evans]

Or take eight to 12 years.

[Leticia James]

Time has meant nothing since March of 2020.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah. It is March 16th of 2020. And here we are, people seen a lot of people get hurt, right. And I, like, as a journalist, like I was in LA last week, you kind of tend to get towards the more violent end of things because that is our job. Most people who go to protest don't get hurt. Right. And I don't want people to, like, hear anything we're saying today and think, oh, God, I'm going to get up because most people don't get up. And like, my stance is that you don't fight fascists because you think you're going to win or you think you might not get hurt. You fight fascists because they are fascists and sometimes people do get hurt. So let's talk about the ways that people get hurt. Either of you is welcome to answer this, but like, what are some of the common mechanisms of injury that you see when you are out there street medicing when, when the cops are out there hurting people?

[Jordan Melgar]

And I would say that like, in terms of the things that we would typically see, I just want to start off by saying, like, absolutely, we're not out there just because we know that we're going to be successful in any type of advocacy. If that was the case, then we wouldn't have that many people, you know, on that front. You know, a lot of people know that it's. You might be losing ground, but you're not there because you're trying to win. You're doing it because you know that you want to be on the right side of history. You want to do the thing that you believe to be morally right as far as, like the, the type of injuries that you would typically see. I think in order to answer this question, I would kind of break it off into two sections. Like you have mainly protests that have not devolved into violent confrontations with law enforcement. And you have protests where things like, you know, for instance, riot control agents have been deployed in like the, like the non dangerous side of things. Like you might have the kinds of stuff that you would encounter in any sort of major event. You know, you're going to deal with dehydration, you're going to deal with people who are like in overcrowded areas that might, you know, accidentally fall, hit and trip over one another in those kind of circumstances. You know, when we enter into the space where, you know, riot control agents are being involved, the quote unquote, less lethals, non lethals, which I'm going to kind of go into later, is a bit of a non. A misnomer in those circumstances. We look at like chemical exposure to things like tear gas. You know, there's a lot of different ways that that manifests that type of exposure and we can kind of get into that a little bit as well. And then also we have, you know, projectile weapons like rubber bullets, you know, flashbangs, those type of things that you might encounter, you know, like sort of blunt trauma to people's bodies.

[Leticia James]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Anything you'd like to add, Miriam?

[Leticia James]

I mean, first of all, like, you're doing great out there. Good for you for being out there. It's hell of a time. There's regional Variation, I think, to, to some of the stuff that we see. So I am based in New York City, not, you know, not all of this. The work I've done has been in New York City, but most of it has. And in New York City we don't have tear gas. They just don't do it here. Because the police found out after deploying tear gas extensively during the RNC that the thing about tear gas is it gets sucked into vents. And when it gets sucked into vents, it gets on all kinds of, in the subway and in buildings and that causes lawsuits. And the NYPD does not enjoy that. So they use pepper spray instead. Because pepper spray is more directed. It doesn't linger in the air the same way you hit the people that you are trying to hit, you know, and anybody else who's walking by and also your buddies who are standing next to you because you fired into the wind, which is always a good time.

[James Stout]

Any such cases?

[Leticia James]

Yeah, so many. There's a whole series of what we are calling locally Peppa Pigs, which are Peppa Pigs. It's what you think it is. So, yeah, we see a lot of pepper sprite. We also, because one of the primary weapons of the NYPD are just sheer overwhelming numbers. We see a lot of just direct hands on violence, just cops hitting people, punching people, throwing people to the ground. We see a lot of very rough takedowns. Now if you're, you know, acting as a street medic in that situation, you don't get to treat those people because if they are taken down by a cop, they are then swarmed by many other cops and they, they get taken away. Then that's something that we might see when we meet that person later at jail support. But the other weapon that, that we used to see quite a bit, but haven't in more recent years is the lrad, which is a sound cann. Yeah, they do still use it, but they use it to like make announcements and annoy people. Yeah, they use it to like make obnoxiously loud announcements, but not to blast out people's eardrums, which was sort of its, its weaponized form. We haven't seen that recently though. Police will, you know, they all carry tasers. You don't tend to see a lot of that at protests, but it's certainly something that we're constantly aware that they have the ability to do. But yeah, it is here. It's mostly pepper spray, nightsticks, fists, knees, you know, that kind of thing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I would assume that a lot of what they do like, for example, tear gas was, to my understanding, first developed in World War I, really to cause confusion amongst the. The enemy. And. But I assume a lot of these things that they're using the sound cannons is to create panic and confusion and hopefully get people to run and move in mass, unorganized ways. And I wonder if you're seeing crush injuries, if you're seeing injuries related to just the people moving and being scattered around and running in different directions. Is that something that you have seen in this process, either of you?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Leticia James]

Well, just real quick, like, to the first thing you said, the absolute, like the purpose of every police weapon is to cause fear. One of the reasons that I think they so often use things like tear gas and pepper spray when they could simply choose to not is like one because they have it. Because their budgets are outrageous and they have, you know, all the weapons they could ever dream of. And why not? You know, well, we have it. But I think that the other reason they use it is because it does freak people out. It scares people. And so, you know, a lot of people have had like a big dude shove them before. You know, that's like not a super unfamiliar situation. It's not a great situation. People don't like it, but they kind of, they're familiar with it. They're, they, they're familiar with the concept. Getting sprayed by a mysterious chemical that makes you feel a thing you've never really felt before, that's a lot scarier. And you don't know what's in it. You don't know what's on your body. You don't know why, why it hurts, the way it hurts. Like, you just know, like.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah.

[Leticia James]

I mean, I guess, I guess this is what tear gas feels like. I guess this is what pepper spray feels like. It's frightening. And yeah, people absolutely get hurt. Running away, it makes it difficult to see. Like, squeezing your eyes shut is like a very immediate reaction. So people run, they lose whoever they were at the action with. They get separated from their group, they get disoriented, they may be having trouble breathing. They may be panicking because they're having trouble breathing. Then they're having trouble breathing because they're panicking, you know. So, yeah, you do absolutely see all of that.

[Jordan Melgar]

Yeah. I mean, I really want to second what, what Miriam has been saying here. You know, as far as like, the most common agent that you see in tear gas in the United States at this time, it's believed to be agent cs. And this is something like you mentioned, it Was developed right around the time of World War II. They started coming into effect in like, in the, in like the late 50s. A point of thought for this is it was actually made illegal for use in warfare in the 90s by the Geneva Convention. So you don't see the US or other armies like, using this on soldiers, but we're using it in protests.

[Leticia James]

Well, you don't, you don't necessarily see the US Military following the Geneva Convention.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Okay, well, we can.

[Jordan Melgar]

That's a fair point.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Of the wars of law, the tear gas is one that it is. Wars of law, laws of war. People do be using tear gas sometimes, but. Yeah, they shouldn't be.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And you're right, it was first in the Geneva Conventions in 1945, but then in 1997 specifically it was prohibited. The thought behind that is they did it because they didn't want someone to get one gas and not know exactly what it was and then use the really nasty stuff like Syrian gas, etc. And the reason our police are able to do it on our protesters is because they're pretty confident that our protesters don't, don't have or wouldn't use Syrian gas. So they feel, they feel free to use it at our. Yeah, but speaking of sound cannons and disturbing noises being shot into your ear holes. Commercials. We'll be right back.

[Mia Wong]

All right, we're back.

[James Stout]

We should talk about noxious gases. There has been this persistent rumor. I don't just mean in the last like 10 days, there has been a persistent rumor every time that people have been tear gassed that this time the cops are using super tear gas. Special tear gas, cancer tear gas. To be clear, like the effects of tear gas on people, especially to my understanding, like, people who menstruate are fucking long term and nasty. So let's just address like, what are the reagents in tear gas and what are some of the outcomes we can expect short term and long term? And then do we suspect that the cops are using super tear gas this time?

[Jordan Melgar]

Well, I guess in terms of like the agent, like we kind of mentioned it a little bit ago. Agent cs. The more complicated long name. O. Chlorobenzylidine Malan nitrile. Actually, it's. So that's absolutely the kind of thing you talk about in dinner conversations. But the, the, the compound itself, it's actually not in a gas form. It's actually a solid. It's a crystalline substance that's released, it's aerosolized after any type of like, explosion from, you know, a grenade or canister. And it's as far as you know the types of things that you will experience. It takes effect in the first 20, 60 seconds of contact with the body. It's a nucleophilic substance so that means it will adhere to tears. It'll adhere to moisture on your skin like sweat, any type of like subt. Saliva or mucus. And like. The first things you'll typically notice are the tearing, the redness, burning, blurred vision in your eyes, specifically on your skin. You could develop burns or rash. A contact dermatitis is also then associated with a development of this on your skin. Burning, irritation in your mouth. You can also develop runny nose. The more kind of more serious long term effects that can be more systemic. You can actually develop shortness of breath, wheezing or chest tightness. You can also develop nausea or vomiting if you ingest much of it while you're in, in the protest. And you kind of already brought it up as well. Unfortunately we don't have a lot of systemic research that has been done on the impacts of agents like CS that are in tear gas on. On people. But we have a couple of things that have come up about pregnancy outcomes. We do see increased rates of uterine cramping, menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness and delayed menstrual cramping as well in pregnancy. We also don' know how well it crosses into breast milk. So you know, it's a this kind of challenging question and the CDC's official like stance on it is this idea that like they don't believe that it crosses. But again we don't have that research so we can't know for sure.

[James Stout]

Great. Cool. Good thing to be fogging large city blocks with.

[Leticia James]

Yeah, well we don't know everything it does, so probably some of it is fine.

[Robert Evans]

You know James, when you're mentioning how it keeps coming up and there is these concerns of there being like a causing cancer, we have no proof of that right now. But I mean we really don't know. So it is a little concerning long term, especially journalists like yourself who are exposed to it a lot. So that is something I would love to see. But I mean how are you going to study it?

[James Stout]

Who gonna fund that?

[Robert Evans]

I mean, I don't know. RFK Jr might, who knows, it might be like we're not funding real research anymore like vaccines.

[James Stout]

So if we get on the right path broadcast, we could probably make that happen.

[Robert Evans]

So before we move off of the gas, let's just talk about treatment of it and what you will do out there in the field, someone comes to you, and let's try to address some of the most common misconceptions about what you should be treating or how you should be treating.

[Leticia James]

Yeah, I'm so ready to go. So since forever there have been rumors that there are these. I think because of sort of the way that it is mysterious, like the cops have these, like, you know, containers of this awful poisonous magical potion that they spray on you, and then we have to find the antidote. So things that I have heard as being good for tear gas and pepper spray include raw onion, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, coca cola, avocado.

[Garrison Davis]

Delicious.

[Mia Wong]

So far.

[Robert Evans]

It sounds. Sounds like a nice salad that you're making.

[Leticia James]

Great, actually. And then the classic milk as well as Maalox. My personal favorite is when somebody jumps in to correct somebody on milk and is like, no, no, no, no. Actually, it's milk of magnesia, not regular milk.

[James Stout]

Oh, you gotta get it from a magnesia cow. Which is.

[Leticia James]

What you actually do is flush out the eyes with water. I mean, that's it. That's the only thing. It's water. The number of things that should go into a human eye are basically water and any. Any medicine that is designed for the human eye and saline solution, I guess, you know, and definitely you could do an eye flush with saline. It's just that if you have saline in your bag, it weighs just as much as water and you can't drink it when you get tired.

[James Stout]

You can.

[Leticia James]

Well, you can, but it's not recommended. And you can't refill it from a tap.

[Robert Evans]

You can drink anything, James.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, if you know the calorie.

[Leticia James]

But if you have a bottle of water, you can do a bunch of eye flushes. And then when it starts to run low, you can refill it from a tap because that has water in it too. It's very readily available water in most places. And all of the other things that are out there that people will tell you you should use, you should not use. I have. I have never seen any good evidence that any of them are better than water at getting pepper spray or tear gas out of your eye. All of them are kind of predicated on this idea that there's like a chemical reaction you are trying to affect. And then that is sort of further based on the idea that the reason this stuff hurts is because it is acidic. Because I think people think like, what's a chemical that burns Acid?

[Robert Evans]

Right, right.

[Leticia James]

These are not acidic. That is not how they work. They are chemical irritants and you don't want an acid base reaction in your eye anyway.

[Robert Evans]

You want to be doing chemistry experiments in your eye.

[Leticia James]

Yeah. You actually usually wear goggles when you do chemistry experiments. I'm not like a chemist, but.

[Robert Evans]

Miriam, water sure is great. But what about all that fluoride you're getting into your eyeballs? Okay. Have you thought about that?

[Leticia James]

That'll prevent eye cavities.

[Robert Evans]

Richard, anything else to add to that?

[Jordan Melgar]

No, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think that when I look at what physicians typically recommend in terms of response to tear gas, I always think back on the Dr. Glockenflecken thread that became very popular on, on Twitter. I'd be very interested to hear what your thoughts are. Were on that. On that, Miriam. I think like one of the things that tended to come from, from that particular thread because he does have experience as an ophthalmologist, he mentioned washing your eyes with baby shampoo and rinsing copiously. I think like, the challenge with that is obviously like what Miriam had mentioned. One, water, saline are the better options for, for irrigating your eyes, especially after exposure. For one, the fact that it's, you know, you, you never know what else. Like, it's, it's better to avoid any other type of irritants that you could, you know, be exposing to your eye. Also the fact, like we already mentioned the fact that the agents in tear gas, they're, they're nucleophilic, meaning they're, they're attracted to water. So by using water itself, you are effectively going to help to irrigate it. And, you know, we typically recommend anywhere upwards of 20 minutes for, for that type of exposure. And then as far as I think, I'm not sure if you mentioned milk already, Marianne.

[Leticia James]

Milk haunts me.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we can't mention it enough.

[Jordan Melgar]

Eyeball cheese.

[James Stout]

We cannot mention eyeball cheese enough.

[Robert Evans]

What about 2%?

[James Stout]

Is the percentage 2%?

[Jordan Melgar]

So let's, let's think about what the context of where we are in, in a protest. It's very typically outdoors for many hours. Usually in summertime, hot.

[Robert Evans]

Usually milk is a bad choice.

[Jordan Melgar]

Who likes the ide of putting this, you know, this, this culture on people's eyes?

[Mia Wong]

Like, I think far too many people.

[James Stout]

As you answer, just yogurt, actually, yogurt.

[Jordan Melgar]

You may as well, you may as well go and get some, get Greek yogurt and pour it on your eyes. Yeah. So, you know, it really gets back to the idea of like constant irrigation. Clean water is perfectly fine. If you have Water at the protest. Usually the best thing to do is have the types of water bottles that have like a flip off cap. So that way you can eas know, pour it over their face and then recap it for later use on someone else or yourself. I think the other thing too that's really important to discuss is, you know, because it's this solid aerosolized substance, it can sometimes adhere to your clothing. So, you know, there's a couple of different approaches. You know, Physicians for Human Rights has a PDF that I strongly encourage anybody who's listening to review. If you find yourself in the position of either being a protester at a protest or being a medic at a protest, they recommend if you've been exposed to tear gas, to hang your clothing afterwards in a heavily ventilated place for up to 48 hours. If you're not able to do that, placing your clothing in a plastic bag, including your shoes outside and not mixing it with any of your other non exposed clothing is the ideal response afterwards.

[Leticia James]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I'll add when Dr. GlockenFlecken was on our show talking about this back during George Floyd, we discussed it and the other thing that he recommended and he is actually not just a very, very funny Internet person, he's also a very good ophthalmologist and he also recommended initially when it happens as soon as you can blink rapidly, that really helps initiate the tear response. You're still going to need water, but it's going to help start, get that, that jump started for you. And it's going to require a lot of water. About 1 to 2 liters is generally what people will say. So it's hard to have that much with you on hand when you're out there protesting. But if you're able to, I feel like water is one of the more important things you can bring with you.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Leticia James]

So to the thing about the baby shampoo, first of all, yeah, I think the recommendation with that is to wash the skin around the eyes with the baby shampoo. Not, not directly in the eyes, but that that's like a less harsh way of removing the chemicals from the skin there because you would definitely wash skin with soap and water. But I could see maybe using like a gentler soap directly around the eyes that that makes sense. As far as like my technique with doing an eye flush in, in the streets, a continual 20 minute irrigation just is not feasible. Now sometimes at big actions for you know, medics will set up clinic spaces, tents, stuff like that. And occasionally, very occasionally you can do the like, true gold standard of eye irrigation, which is 20 minutes of continual saline irrigation, where you, like, have a bag of saline, like in a hospital, and you plug it into a nasal cannula and you tape that to the bridge of the nose and just let the person lie down. That works. But, like, it's just not feasible in most street situations. So what I do is I will basically, I'll put on gloves, I will get consent, because, you know, anytime you're treating somebody who's been brutalized by the police, you are like, you are treating an assault victim, and you should prioritize their consent as much as you can. So I, you know, do a quick like, hey, what's up? My name's Miriam. I'm a medic. Can I help you? I guide them out of the area of immediate danger if they can't see. And then I flush first one eye twice, and then I have them blink a whole bunch and then the other eye twice, and I have them blink a whole bunch. And then they're usually able to open their eyes and navigate safely on their own. Sometimes they need another round with that. Especially if I didn't, you know, if I missed being, you know, if it's dark and their things are moving around and I miss the eye or something. But usually that gets enough out that they are going to be able to navigate the situation. And because they are tearing a lot, that's part of the flush, too, right? The body is doing that on its own and flushing too much with water. I think in that initial moment, you're just washing away tears at that point. So doing, like, a first round of, like, forceful. A forceful flush, you know, you're really, like, using a forceful stream to push the chemicals out. And then, okay, their eyes are open and they're still in pain. And, like, that's just gonna last for a while. Your eyes are going to continue to hurt, and, like, that sucks. You've been harmed, Somebody did a harmful thing to you, and you are going to continue to have pain for a little while. But if you can see that your immediate danger is reduced and you can get out of there and you can, you know, in a calmer moment, maybe do another couple eye flushes, maybe, you know, use soap and water on the face, clean up a little bit, and, like, be a little bit happier with how you feel. But my priority in the immediate moments after somebody's been sprayed is to, like, help them so that they can get out of there if they need to, because they probably do.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Well, speaking of Things that will make you tear up. I'm sorry, I'm terrible commercials. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.

[James Stout]

Beautiful. All right, we are back. And I guess let's talk about rubber bullets or various impact nations and then let's talk about how people, actions people can take to keep themselves a little bit safer. Right. Understanding that like, you are not the one who gets to choose if violence arrives at your protest. The cops are, and we're recording this on Sunday, late date in June, and people had their big no Kings march yesterday. They were largely like extremely non violent and they still got attacked by the cops in la. So let's talk about impact munitions. Right? One thing we didn't mention actually was pepper balls. I've had the.

[Leticia James]

It was a combo.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right. I've had the ill fortune of receiving some pepper balls in the balls. Oh yeah, Very uncomfortable. Cops will try and shoot you in the groin.

[Jordan Melgar]

I had a colleague who encountered this just a few days ago.

[James Stout]

I'm sorry. It fucking sucks. Like, there's no. Yeah, it happens with such frequency that you'd have to be really trying to believe that it was an accident. So let's talk about things that can hit you, right. If we, if we start with pepper balls and then move on up to like what people call rubber bullets, which I think baton rounds is like a more technical description of what they are or mark arounds for big foam or rubber things that hit you. Sometimes they leave a little puff of chalk on you. In theory, like that identifies you for the cops to arrest you. I guess in practice it's just another thing that they can use to smash into you. But let's talk about some of the things that the cops can shoot from their little guns. Beanbag rounds is another one that comes out of a shotgun and it's what it sounds like. It's a beanbag traveling very fast. Somebody here in San Diego lost their eye to one of those in 2020. But let's talk about some of these impact munitions and like what the potential risks are for people there.

[Jordan Melgar]

Yeah, I think that, I mean, just the, the one point I want to bring up in terms of these, they're often called in the media non lethal and or, or, or quote unquote, less lethals.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Jordan Melgar]

And I think that what's really important to recognize, and you kind of already hinted to it, James, people have been killed with rubber bullets, plastic bullets. We actually have. Amnesty International did a report in 2023 that, you know, showed that over the course of about five years, you know, Dozens of people have died as a result of the use of rubber bullets. We show that between 1972 to 1989, just in Ireland, 16 people were killed. In Palestine, between 87 and 93, 20 people died just from the use of rubber bullets. And you know, that's reports. We don't know how many in truth actually were impacted by that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I would also add that the British Medical journal back in 2017 looked at about 2,000, a little bit under 2,000 people who had been affected by these projectiles. And 3% actually did cause immediate mortality and then 15% was long term chronic injury or illness or some sort of being maimed from the event. So, yeah, you're exactly right. It's pretty significant, especially with the number of these that are shot. You know, they don't have to keep record about how many of these they shoot. So actually one other question I have for you, Richard, that you could help answer. 2. One in LA, did you see them shooting these things? And you kind of allude to that. You felt that they were actually directing them towards you. Did you feel that being there as a medical professional that you were being targeted?

[Jordan Melgar]

I myself was fortunate and not hit by a rubber bullet from witnessing my colleagues who were actually there present at this protest. They themselves were hit with rubber bullets below the navel. He had previous experience from an earlier protest that week where he had actually been struck. And the thing he always, he told me that I remember is like, I'm never going to one of these things unprepared again. Because he did have that situation where he was kind of hit closer to the groin. So we ended up wearing, I remember he was wearing a kind of a fanny pack for this particular protest that we were at. And you could very clearly see the dust marks, like the chalk marks of the bullets struck on this, on his, on his fanny pack. Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's definitely something that, that we noticed. Many of the other medics at this event commented that they had been previously struck or targeted once they, the police began firing rubber bullets. As far as we, we, fortunately we didn't see anybody who was struck, you know, closer to the face. But there were reports after the no Kings protest yesterday that, you know, several people had been struck in the eye or on the forehead. There was one picture, I think earlier from earlier this week that one of the reporters in downtown LA had been struck with a non lethal foam round directly in his forehead. And it was, you could see this very clear, enormous wealth, the size of Like a grapefruit.

[Leticia James]

Yeah.

[Jordan Melgar]

And bleeding. And it was. It was, you know, very clearly like aiming above at the face in these cases.

[Leticia James]

Yeah. There was a huge number during the Chilean protests in 2019. 20, 20. Eye injuries were huge. There were hundreds. There's a. There's a club somewhere of journalists who've lost eyes to rubber bullets. I think they call themselves the Cyclops Club or something. They're writers. They, you know. But, yeah, like, these things are incredibly dangerous, and eye injuries especially are really common.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Leticia James]

They are less lethal only in that it is less likely to kill you than being shot with live ammunition. But, like, most things are less likely to kill you than live ammunition.

[James Stout]

Grizzly Bear is less likely to kill you than life.

[Robert Evans]

My friend Rebecca Watson says, you know, Samurai Blade is less lethal than a, you know, AK47, but it's still not something you want them to have to use against you.

[James Stout]

Be ideal if you weren't being attacked doing what is a constitutionally protected right in the U.S. yeah. Hey, everyone, I just wanted to record a little pickup here to explain a little bit more, I guess, about 40 millimeter and 37 millimeter less lethal projectiles. They are sometimes called baton rounds. I saw baton round written on the safari land. 37 millimeter 1. But they are not the same as the baton round you will have seen the British military using in Northern Ireland. Most of the modern ones that I am aware of are not designed to be skipped off the ground, albeit there certainly are, or at least were rubber bullets that were designed to be skipped off the ground at one point. The use of a bullet made out of rubber that's fired out of a conventional rifle is very rare in the United States. There are things called simunitions, which are munitions that fire out of a conventional rifle using a different bolt. And they are generally used for simulated force on force training. You can think about it like going paintballing, but with regular guns, albeit with a bolt that makes it so you can't load live ammunition into that gun while it's set up for simmunitions. Those were used extensively, I believe, in Colombia. Identified some simmunition casings. I've not seen those used by police anywhere in the United states. What the LAPD uses is a 40mm exact impact round. It has a plastic body and a sponge nose. And that is designed to be point of aim, point of impact. Right. So shot at someone, like you would shoot a gun at somebody. There are other less lethals in use. Even in LA. I saw a 37 millimeter safari land round. I saw FN 303s, which is like 17 millimeter. I saw pepper balls, various different versions of less lethal munitions. But most of the ones that I'm aware of in 2025 are designed for point of aim, point of impact. They're also extremely dangerous. And as we've said here, they can kill you. It's wanted to clarify that. So, like, yeah, these things are dangerous, right? Like they have caused serious injury or death. Let's assume for a minute that like, the folks listening have not attended many actions before, right? That they are either younger or like, they just haven't been in that world in that part of their life and they've seen what's happening recently and they're pissed off and they want to attend, but they're afraid, right? And they want to know what they can do, what they can bring, how they can prepare themselves in the understanding that, like, it isn't 100% safe because the cops can decide to attack you whenever they want. What can people bring? How can people repair to be as safe as they can be?

[Leticia James]

Bring water. I mean, not just eye flashes, but like, bring snacks and water. Like, you're gonna be out there for a while. You need to keep yourself going. You need to keep your friends going. Bring friends. Like, be there with somebody who is gonna watch your back. Somebody who knows a number for, like your emergency contact, you know, if, if you get grabbed, stuff like that. Especially if you're new to this, like, try not to run alone.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

Even if it's like just hooking up with people when you get there, you know?

[Leticia James]

Yeah. I've been at a protest that was starting to look scary, and a woman turn me and said, I'm here alone. Are you here alone? And I said, yeah. And she said, now, now we're here together.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leticia James]

Which is beautiful.

[James Stout]

It's a good place to make friends.

[Jordan Melgar]

It's a very, like, honest feeling to have. I mean, you're seeing. For the problem for many people is probably the first time that you're seeing someone aiming a projectile at you and aiming. Aiming a firearm at you and firing. So, yeah, you know, there's a good reason to feel worried. That's like the fact that we have to worry about in this country, period, is, you know, it's very chill. Think that, you know, Miriam mentioned it. Bringing friends is like, really important. Something else that, like, we've talked about in circles in la, I think is like, really understanding going in, what is the amount of risk that you are Willing to take, Entering into these spaces, I think is extraordinarily important. I think some of my colleagues who were at the UCLA protests earlier during the, the Palestine movement. Yeah, they kind of asked the question like, they kind of framed it in like green light, yellow light, red light, like in terms of green, meaning, like, I'm okay with, you know, whatever risks might be involved. Like, as far as, like, what my understanding of what this protest could entail. Yellow being like, I'm, I'm not prepared to go, go so far as to be arrested, but I'm willing to be present on record if necessary, serve as a witness for my other colleagues who are going to be in this space. Red, meaning, you know, I, I'm not necessarily prepared at this point to go that far. I don't, I'm, I want to support, but I also don't want to get arrested. And I think it's important to like, you know, recognize that, not necessarily shame other people in terms of like, where they're at in this.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, 100.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Jordan Melgar]

Because, because everybody comes at this from different places. I think it's really important, like, when you're in these spaces to like, you know, kind of understand the risk of the other people who are alongside you. Because if you're a medic and you're trying to treat other people and then you have, all of a sudden you're by yourself because the other people are like, well, this is what I sign up for.

[James Stout]

I'm out.

[Jordan Melgar]

Yeah, that is also scary, even if you're very willing to be there. So I think just having those conversations and planning, more than anything. Planning, planning, planning is extraordinarily important.

[Robert Evans]

I think that's very well said. Great points. And everyone has a different level of risk. And just to be totally clear for our listeners, There was over 2000 different protests yesterday and there was the minimal amount of violence and they were all peaceful. For them, the protesters were the vast, vast, vast majority peaceful. And things went fine. And some, like the one I attended was actually kid friendly. So there was, it was a safe place. But particularly in certain places, there's always a small chance, if not large and depending on the police presence there, that things could go the wrong way. And it is something to keep in mind. So I, I particularly like your point regarding everyone has a different level of risk and that's okay. You're still contributing. I mean, I'm not a place myself where I'm planning on getting arrested. That's just not something I want to do. But I would like to protest that I would like to support. And along those lines, what are ways that other people who have medical backgrounds could potentially contribute or support you in.

[Jordan Melgar]

Terms of the ways that medics can respond in these situations? I think, think for me, I, I have, you know, a box of medical equipment that I, I, I want, I go to bring on site. Like I'm obviously, like Miriam said, I'm bringing water because that's going to be foremost, like my most useful tool to help anybody who's going to be affected by things like, like tear gas. You know, as far as other things, like having extra masks, I think is really, really important, you know, because it's a huge way of reducing respiratory exposure to the aerosols that are going to be in the air there. And then. Eye protection. Eye protection. Eye protection. Now the thing about like, you know, we, we've seen different types of protection for your eyes that are effective. We've seen goggles being used like the ones that you would, you would see in a lab. They're not actually effective unless you close the sides, the vents with tape because otherwise the aerosols actually can still get inside the mask and irritate your eyes. So if you are going to be like bringing that type of eye protection, it's important to think about that. There's like some higher end, you know, more effect tools that provide both eye protection and helping to filter particles. Just using a basic goggle mask with the vents covered in an N95 for just about anybody, I think is a useful tool. So having those types of supplies for people who need them is helpful for sure.

[Leticia James]

Yeah. And as far as like a really low risk thing that people with medical training can do is show up to jail support because that's like, that is a huge way you can help not just people who are arrested, but anybody coming out of jail is by doing jail support. And what that entails is hanging out where people get released. People will usually bring food, drinks, clothes, shoelaces. People often get out without shoelaces, belts, and like a couple of, you know, extra layers of clothes if people get let out and it's cold. And check out people's injuries. Often people will be taken to the hospital during processing if they have something that the police can't ignore. But people often get released with injuries and it can be really good to have somebody there who can evaluate them honestly. It's often just giving them like a judgment call on, do you think this needs somebody else to take a look at it in a professional environment or can I put some ice on it and go home type thing. And almost everybody getting out of jail has handcuff injuries if they were arrested in a mass arrest. Because in mass arrest situations, cops tend to use the plastic zip ties, which can get incredibly tight, even more so than metal handcuffs, which have a little bit. A little length of chain. They strain the shoulders especially larger people, especially if somebody has a bag on their back, cops will often cuff them in such a way that the bag pushes on their hands and makes the cuffs increasingly tight. And having a medical professional or a street medic or even somebody who's like, just there to, like, take a look and be like, yeah, man, I see that. That's really fucked up that they did that to you. I'm so sorry. Can be useful having somebody there to. To witness and acknowledge and. And to document if somebody is planning on doing something with that.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Leticia James]

You know, then that's. That's important too. So if you cannot be arrested, find out what's happening with jail support and go support them. Because that's chill, that's calm now. I mean, there are no guarantees in this world, but. But it is far more likely to be chill and calm.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Leticia James]

And. And you can hang out and eat snacks. Oh, and this is the one situation where, medically speaking, bring cigarettes. People want cigarettes when they get out of jail and they need. They deserve a cigarette. Is it good for them?

[Donald Trump]

No, I know.

[Robert Evans]

I just am sorry. I hate cigarettes so much. I. Listen, I'm not gonna say you can't, but I will never give someone a cigarette. It goes against. I'll bring them a ticket. There's certain things I just can't. I. Listen, there's certain lines I will draw as a doctor. One, I have to help everybody even if I don't like them. Two, I can't give them cigarettes even if I like them. So I just can't. Those are two things I can't bring myself to do. The cigarette one really drives me crazy, but I get it.

[Leticia James]

In that case. Case, maybe bring some cards for whatever your local public transit is. Or failing that, you know, have some cash on hand to send people home in a taxi or have somebody standing by with a car to help people get home. Yeah, stuff like that. That's really important for jail support. Perhaps even more important than a cigarette.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I would add that another thing you can do if you're medically like a medical professional especially, it's help other people learn really basic skills. You don't even have to be at a protest right it could be a week later. There are medical professionals who do street medic training. You can teach people stop the bleed in, in a day and potentially save someone's life. And so if that's something that you, you know, are skilled enough to teach and you need to be honest about whether you're skilled enough to teach that or not, you know, if you've watched a few YouTube videos and you're not, that's something you could use to, to really help with other people who are, who are going to be there at times when you're not comfortable or safe being there, I guess, for the end of the show to wrap up. If people are just attending to be mad, and there are a lot of people who are mad right now, what should they bring? And if people want to access training, right, like, what are some, some resources that you would suggest? What are some types of training in terms of like first aid that people can access, that people should access if they're thinking of attending these things and they're worried?

[Jordan Melgar]

I mean, I think in terms of the type of first aid that you need to be really conscious of, especially in any type of event where you're going to be with a lot of people and you're going in as a medic. And this isn't just for protests. I think it's for any type of event. We do live in a world where unfortunately there is a lot of mass shootings. Even if they're firing carrying rubber bullets, we don't know who else may also attend, who may also be going with the intention of being violent. So, I mean, you mentioned it yourself, stop the bleed. Having basic understanding of how to. What types of, on the field, first aid should be done for individuals who have got. Received a gunshot wound, I think is really important if they've been struck by a car. We've already seen earlier this, this weekend that there were shootings in, I believe in a couple of different cities. I, it's. I'm missing which one unfortunately happened. But I do know of at least one report of, of a Tesla being driven into a crowd of protesters this weekend. So it was, yeah, if I get.

[Leticia James]

Killed by a Tesla, I'm gonna be so mad.

[James Stout]

The indignity.

[Robert Evans]

That is actually the thing that concerns me the most at most protests is some actor coming in from outside to do something like that. That part really does concern me, especially because so many of these are like I had mentioned, kind of family friendly and they should be, I think families for the most part should be able to come to these Things. So that is something that I am always constantly on the lookout for.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Cars fucking scare me. Like, I experienced car bombs in my career, but also just like cars driving into crowds can cause.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Untold damage and, and Americans do be loving large cars and.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And the cops won't stop them. Like, at least in la, my experience with the cars were kind of in and out the whole time and that did not make me feel secure.

[Jordan Melgar]

We had one individual who was stood in front of a van that was carrying ICE agents and that person essentially got run over.

[Leticia James]

Yeah.

[Jordan Melgar]

In that situation, you know, they were not at all stopping for that.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Big cars, it's a big risk. Like, I guess with that in mind, one thing I think about sometimes, whenever these things is like, you don't want to be going into this like, like traumatizing yourself by doing this. But a degree of situational awareness to include.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

What are my points of COVID and what are my ways out? It's good to have.

[Leticia James]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It helps. It helps me feel safer anyway.

[Leticia James]

Yeah. And that's another huge reason to always run with a buddy. Right. Because if you're running with a buddy especially, I mean, I, I think, I personally think that if, if you are doing medical stuff, you should always have a buddy. Just because if you're going to be stopped and like, somebody's got to watch your back and like, it's. And you know, you, you, you might need a second opinion, you can call in that buddy for a consult, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Leticia James]

The, the medic collective that I, that I run with on really big action days will put together, like, little bingo cards that we'll distribute to all the medic buddy pairs as a situational awareness game. So, like, if we're all rolling out to this, you know, to a big, big action, we'll put like, there'll be squares for like a cop who, who clearly is not awake or your ex or, you know, person who forgot sunscreen or, you know, just, just things to, to look out for.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leticia James]

And I think honestly, like making it a little bit of a game like that if you're going to be out all day can be kind of fun. And it also makes you keep looking. It makes you not just look down at your feet as you, as you march another mile, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, please. It's another great reminder. Please prepare for the weather, prepare for the elements. Bring water, bring sunscreen, bring hats, all that stuff.

[James Stout]

Sunscreen can trap the chemical irritants next to your skin. I like to wear a sun hoodie like a. You can get hoodies with a spf. I am a pale ass person. Right. Some of you can see me for listeners.

[Robert Evans]

It is indeed true.

[Leticia James]

I was gonna say is that sun hoodie. Why you in no way have a watched hand?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[Leticia James]

Friends.

[James Stout]

Friends can see my absolutely brutal tan right now.

[Robert Evans]

Absurdly white.

[James Stout]

When I was a bike racer, I used to have the logos of my sponsors burned into my back and that was cool and normal.

[Leticia James]

That's unsettlingly literal.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. That was a political moment for me actually.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I like to wear sanity because sunscreen, it can trap irritants against your skin. But if it's a creamy kind. Right. I think after a point it absorbs and it doesn't. But I've definitely experienced that kind of paste on your skin kind of situation.

[Robert Evans]

Interesting.

[James Stout]

Some of the gnarliest like injuries I've seen have been heat related at protests.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

If you're organizing a protest, don't send it straight up a hill. Like just don't let like, like go easy on people. Yeah. You know, people will be bringing a lot of stuff and they have signs and stuff. Like they might not wear the comfy shoes. Like you go easy on them with the.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

With the hill climbing. And then because you're doing it in the middle of the day often as well, like, you know, don't hurt people. Richard, I know you were going to mention something else.

[Jordan Melgar]

The thing I was trying to to mention this is this is less so for I'd say ems, non physician individuals. Actually, before the the podcast I had a chance to talk with one of the regional vice presidents for cir, the physicians union that I was formerly a part of when I was in my residency. Kayla. She has a lot of experience being involved in protests in street medicine. And the thing that she likes to mention is like physicians have a tendency to want to do a lot in a moment. And so Miriam mentioned situational awareness. I think situational awareness is extremely important. Being able to know when you have the time to do a certain intervention versus when it's time to like get this person out of here into a safer place, I think is like very, very important.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Jordan Melgar]

So less does more in these situations is. Is what I would say is pretty important.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. One thing I do like as a journalist primarily not a visual one, I often work with photographers. Right. As a two person team. I have been a photographer approaches in the past. And your world is very small in that viewfinder. And it's kind of the same if you're helping someone, right, who's injured, that becomes your whole shit. I will have my physically have my hand on my photographer a lot of the time on their back, right. And if they need to start moving backwards, I am going to start moving them backwards. Obviously you don't want to sleep someone who's hurt, but like, if, if you're the buddy, it's good to be that close to the person who's providing care so that you can have a way out if you need to have a way out.

[Robert Evans]

This was so incredibly useful, helpful and insightful. We appreciate both of you coming on. Let's close up here. What I would like to do is not only plug something for yourselves, but what I'd like to hear and our listeners actually enjoy is to hear something that's bringing you some joy in these times. Some piece of media, art, film, book, podcast, anything, you name it. A good restaurant that you really love. You want to give a shout out to whatever it is, something that's bringing you a little bit joy. So let's do those two things. Miriam, let's start with you. What can we plug and what's something that's bringing you some joy?

[Leticia James]

So thank you for having me on. This was delightful. So I will plug Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which is the collective that I'm a part of. You can find us at Tangled Wilderness on Blue sky and Instagram and nowhere else. And we have a website which is Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We have a Patreon, all that stuff. But the main thing I want to tell you about those guys over there is that James and I did a podcast recently for the show Live. Like the world is dying on protest, health and safety. And we go really in detail on specifics of gear, specifics of first aid techniques. And I think people should maybe check it out if they're. If they're going to be out there.

[James Stout]

We'Ll put it in the show notes.

[Mia Wong]

Notes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, because we're professional podcasters like that.

[James Stout]

You can cruise on over to. It could happen here if you would like to find the show notes.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Wait, Miriam, so what's the thing that's bringing you joy?

[Leticia James]

Oh, I have.

[James Stout]

Do you remember that Joy?

[Leticia James]

I'm familiar with the concept. I have been rewatching the she Ra and the Princesses of Power cartoon.

[Robert Evans]

Wow, nice.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Love it.

[Robert Evans]

What about Jim? She is outrageous.

[Leticia James]

You know, they didn't remake that as an overtly queer Netflix series, so I have had less exposure to it. But, you know, cartoon sword lesbians can't Argue with it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome. All right, Richard, what about you?

[Jordan Melgar]

As far as something to plug, I. A huge pleasure of being able to work on Blue sky, helping to put together the Med sky feeds. So if you're on Blue sky, be sure to subscribe to our labeler. So that way you can get your medical specialty on your account and you can get your posts on one of our 40 different feeds. And then also, as a Latino, I can't leave the podcast without mentioning also we are working on Latin sky. And it's.

[Robert Evans]

It's.

[Jordan Melgar]

It's a. It's the amount of la penidad and joy that I've been seeing on that feed over the last few days, despite the pain, it's been very inspiring. So I think that's, like, the plug that I, I want to put out there. And as far as the thing that brings me joy right now, I, I, like, I was torn. I hear that, like, a bunch of people have already plugged Andor. So I'm not gonna plug andor you can.

[Robert Evans]

You can.

[Jordan Melgar]

You know, I. I'm gonna. I'm gonna give some love to Ryan Coogler's Sinners, which is easily one of the best movies I have seen in at least the last five years. It is an extraordinary movie. Every. Everything about that movie is like, art. I just hope that Ryan Cooler can just make original movies for the rest of his life and that he doesn't have to, like, be stuck doing franchise stuff because when he's just given a canvas, he. He makes beautiful, beautiful art.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, right on, right on. Pura Vida.

[Donald Trump]

Vida.

[Robert Evans]

That's for the Pura Vida. So, James, what about. What about you? What can we plug? What can you plug for you?

[James Stout]

What can I plug? I know there was a hot dog guy who went on the freeway in Los Angeles when everyone else went on the freeway. So that person's a hero. I would let you know if you're. If you're in the. I'm vegan, so, you know, maybe the bun. But for the rest of you, get after it, you know, you can. You can listen to my podcast. You maybe already are. It could happen here. If you haven't listened. It would mean a lot to me if you had listened to the podcast that I made in the Darien Gap last year when I traveled with migrants who were on their way to the United States. There's people and there's. Their stories are really important to me.

[Mia Wong]

Me.

[James Stout]

So if you would listen to one thing I ever made, it would be that you can find it by searching Darien, where dreams die. And then it could happen here. Podcast and it will come up unless you're using a really shit search engine or Google has been even more fucked by AI. And then in terms of stuff that gives me joy, recently I have been listening to like the music of the anti apartheid movement. Again. I kind of, when I was a very young person, my sort of stuff first exposure to activism was through people who had resisted apartheid in South Africa. And they were very inspiring to me and they still are very inspiring to me. I listened to that music with them. Right. Like apartheid, to be clear, ended when I was like 8 years old. But like it was cool because it seemed like at that point the good guys were winning.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Right. And, and so here we are. Anyway. Yeah, I listen to that because it reminds me that they always lose in the end.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

So yeah, enjoy like, like the Specials and Eddie Grant and even the incredibly eclectic Sun City album.

[Robert Evans]

Great choices, great choices. And for if you happen to be listening on the House of Pod, you've heard James come and talk about the Darien Gap. That was a. A really amazing story and it resonated with a lot of listeners. And you should listen to the full multi part series that he put out on that. It's so much better. So please do that for me. If you happen to be listening on it could happen here. Listen to the House of Pod. You'll like it. You'll hear James and lots of people you already know and love and meet some new people. And you'll hear us make fun of medical grifters in the wellness community and that sort of thing as well.

[James Stout]

And members of the cabinet.

[Robert Evans]

I can't believe it. Oh boy. As for the thing that's bringing me joy, I recently had a chance to expose my kids on a long drive to the work of Jeff Buckley, who is for you younger listeners out there. You may not know who he was because he unfortunately passed away when he was only 30, but he was really a once in a generation talent. His voice, his songwriting transcended different genres. There was rock, there was jazz, there was folk. He could span a vocal range that just really is amazing. And he only had one studio album, Grace. But it is amazing and I highly recommend that or really any of his live albums. Mystery White Boy, they're all fantastic. His cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is the best version of it, in my opinion. I will fight you. I will fight you. If you say Rufus Wainwright better, I will physically fight you. So it's just Raw and beautiful. And I hope you guys check it out, if you haven't already. Last thing, I'll plug June 28th. If you happen to be in the Bay Area, my band will be playing at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco. It is one of my favorite places to watch or play music and it's just super fun. Come up and say hi and we'll chat and we'll maybe share a drink if we have time. Okay, thank you all so much. Thanks, James. This was fun, huh?

[James Stout]

Yeah, that was fun. It was beautiful. I had a nice time.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, let's do it again. Okay, bye.

[Donald Trump]

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm here once again with.

[James Stout]

It's James again.

[Donald Trump]

Great to talk to you again, James.

[James Stout]

Yeah, likewise. Glad to be here.

[Donald Trump]

You know, I spent a lot of time thinking about the world and how it works and all that, Jaz. And I assume you do as well.

[James Stout]

I do, yeah. Yeah. Increasingly worrying about the world of Netflix.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah. This place, this home, is quite the puzzle. And much like a puzzle, it has been carved up and divided in so many different ways. Sliced, labelled, ranked and measured from all kinds of different angles. And that's really what I'm interested in talking about today. The different ways that we try to explain the differences we see on the global stage. So going from the concept of civilized and primitive to the east and west binary, to the imagined communities called nations, to the clash of civilizations, to the concept of first, second and third worlds, to the development spectrum, to the global north and global south, and finally to the core and the periphery. So we have a lot of ground to cover in this episode.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I really like this stuff. Like, as a historian, like, we're always kind of forced into certain divisions, right. Like. Like, even when you apply to your. To your funding. Right. Like you're normally in like a geographical area or like you're trying to shoehorn something that's just interesting into one of these boxes that gets funding. And I think, like, often that impacts, like, how we see the world. So we have to write with that goal.

[Donald Trump]

Absolutely, absolutely. I find the way that we approach the telling of history so fascinating. And in another life, maybe I would have been a historian.

[James Stout]

I know. If I can recommend it. Yeah. But yeah, it's. I enjoy the doing of history, it's the doing of academia that I don't enjoy so much.

[Donald Trump]

So I suppose as a historian, I'm going to ask you a discomforting question.

[James Stout]

Great.

[Donald Trump]

Would you consider yourself civilized or primitive?

[James Stout]

Oh, that's a fun one. I don't Know, like, I. I don't like that binary because I think it's. It's a value statement. Right. And I think, like, James C. Scott talks about this. Actually, this is a really interesting. This. I've had this. James C. Scott. Right. Talks about the idea of people who exist outside of the state being labeled as primitive by the state. It's in the art of not being governed. And that. That's the sort of the narrative there. The, the inherent message is that the state is the final and superior form of human organizing, and people who have chosen to exist outside it, it are not because they chose to, but because they haven't made it there yet. And of course, Scott problematizes that and suggests that maybe it's a choice, not a failure to accede to that civilization. And it's a concept that, like, young Burmese fighters have. Have echoed back to me. I. I don't think they're aware of James C. Scott, if I'm being honest. But they, they will say to me, like, when. Because when they left the cities to live with the ethnic revolutionary organizations there, they had always been told that the reason those people lived outside of the Burmese state was because they were primitive and violent. But then they came to live and fight alongside them, and they were like, no, these are. These are our family. They are brothers and sisters and siblings. And like, they want the same thing as us. Like, they're not primitive. They just don't want the state. So I guess in that sense, I would want to be, like, labeled as primitive, too. I think the primitive people are doing cool, and then the civilized people are not.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one of, I think, one of the more enduring global binaries, one of the oldest. You know, you'd hear that sign, that kind of juxtaposition. Or civilized and primitive, or civilized and barbarians.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

You know, in ancient Rome, you see that distinction between the civilized Roman citizens and the barbarian other.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And in that instance, and in a lot of instances, it's used as this ideological tool to assert superiority.

[James Stout]

Definitely. Yeah. Like, I think we have to be really careful as historians about these assumptions that we make. Historians love to make a lot of, like, assumptions about revolutions, too. And I would wager that I've attended more revolutions than many of my academic colleagues, and I think many of those are grounded in the truths that people accept as truth without ever testing them. And, like, I think this sort of civilized barbarian one, kind of the same like that.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, it's a classic one. I mean, do you know where the word Barbarian even comes from.

[James Stout]

Isn't it the language thing, like, because they didn't speak, is it Latin, they were just going like, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. Is that right?

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, it's because of what, you know, Rome did this all the time where they just borrowed wholesale from what the Greeks were doing.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

So in Greek, barbaros meant anyone who did not speak Greek as the Romans just kind of took that and expanded it to talk about anybody who wasn't on their whole wave of urban plans, canon and, you know, codified legal systems, their philosophy, the education, their art, all of that stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Donald Trump]

The barbarians didn't have those, those refinements.

[James Stout]

Right. Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

You know, but of course, the relationship between the two is. Is not so simple. Right. Because then later on in Roman history, as you'd know, barbarians, quote unquote, were incorporated slowly into the state and became very useful armies and a reserve pool of labor and all these different things for what Rome was trying to do with the expansion.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And luckily contemporary American. Right. Has been very normal about that and isn't using that for like, it's sort of eugenic. Eugenic agenda right now.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, Very, very much eugenics vibes these days.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Where my father lives is right on the border between England and Scotland and you can visit Hadrian Wall. I rode my bike all along it a couple of years ago.

[Donald Trump]

Oh, wow, that's cool.

[James Stout]

It's. Yeah, it's like a fun edge of empire kind of thought experiment. Like, you know, you're beyond this line of the barbarians or the uncivilized people today. It's like unremarkable. Yeah, like, like it's literally. It keeps some people's sheep in their fields at points along.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, it's like a two foot.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Feet high.

[James Stout]

Exactly. Yeah. Like it's some stones kind of piled on top of each other. It's kind of an unremarkable novelty. But it's funny to think that at one point there was this binary world. Right. And they felt that the outside was so dangerous to them that they had to provide a physical barrier. Something we're still doing.

[Donald Trump]

Indeed. And as we're speaking of walls, by the way, this reminds me of another major empire, like where this sort of dichotomy was occurring. You know, it wasn't just taking place in the Mediterranean world. You had, in, of course, ancient China, this whole identity constructed around these moral and cultural and political ideals. Of course, you had the whole Confucianism, Taoism and legalist thought all shaping what it meant to be, you know, conducting yourself properly and in a civilized manner.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And so those who did not ascribe to those ideals would have been people who were labeled barbarians.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Often the people on the other side of the Great Wall.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we are. The United States is literally doing the exact same thing. Right. Like, it's. We're. We're building a giant wall and labeling othering the people on the other side of it.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah. You definitely see the genealogy there.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

But I think there's a closer genealogy we could draw upon for that particular reference, though, which is how later European empires would appropriate the Roman civilized barbarian binaries to justify their assimilation, extermination and colonialism.

[James Stout]

Definitely one of the things I. I like to do, even with, you know, the United States and its informal empire. Right. Like, I love to show my students cartoons, like, political cartoons. Like, there's one of the white man's burden, which, like, distill. You know, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, but it distills that whole binary so well in a. In a way that seems like, repugnant to most of my students today. I guess. I don't know, maybe. Maybe folks are moving back that way. But, like, the imagery and the distinction between the way. Or even, like Lewis and Clark, when they're addressing the indigenous people they meet and calling them children. Right. Like. Like this. This binary distinction is so. It's so apparent. And like, it. I know it seems so outlandish, I think, to most folks today, but then we do similar things, I guess, in, you know, just in a slightly more subtle way sometimes.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, when you look at what was taking place with the Enlightenment and that whole development of this particular order, what's steeped in these particular values, where the European culture was the ideal standard, and everything that did not measure up to that standard was barbaric or primitive. It's just. That has never really gone away, you know, and it's continues to be used to justify the domination of Western powers.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Particularly in the way that they've instilled these European norms and practices across the world. When it comes to things like relation to the land, when it comes to things like the divisions between people, between genders, all these things, all these attitudes that are now so widespread originated from, in part, this elevation of one above the other. And speaking of. I mentioned the word Western there, and that's really another way that we've sort of maintained this binary in a different coat of paint, although it's not quite the same. So there's this Sort of lingering framework of the notion of the east and the West. Right. In the ancient times, it was China versus Rome. These days it's probably China versus America. Yeah, China really is that old.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And okay, this is probably a very, probably very Gen Z reference for me to make, but I don't know if you've seen these edits circulating on social media of the Chinese president Xi Jinping going like, what's up, Beijing? And then there's like a whole bunch of like skyscrapers and like, like hardcore, like electronic music edited to show like all these advancements and people in the comments always saying things like, be China, do nothing, win.

[James Stout]

I have not seen those.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, yeah, that's definitely dating me a little bit in terms of my social media diet. But yeah, just seeing the dynamic between China or between the east and the west, the Orient and the Occident, to use an older term. It's just another way that we've created this sort of boundary between people that either on one side or the other, there's a necessary tension between the two. You know, this concept of the Orient and Orientalism is something that Edward Said identified famously as something that was constructed by the west as an exotic, irrational, decadent and dangerous place. And so that whole dualistic narrative was then put into the imperial project to legitimize their domination and to position the east as a passive subject without a voice of their own and in constant need of Western intervention and guidance. So this west becomes this sort of stage for modernity and science and region and progress. This whole idea of the protagonist of history and the Orient, the East, they're the primitive, I guess, side of that binary.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Although unlike the civilized primitive binary or civilized barbarian binary of old, I think while there could have been racial components to it in the past, this one is more explicitly racial and geographic in its division because, I mean, in ancient Rome anybody could essentially become a Roman citizen. You know, it wasn't necessarily racially, you know, pure Aryan sense that a lot of neo Nazis and stuff today, like to look back at that period as you had a quite a diversity of phenotypes in the Roman Empire.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

But you know, when you come to this Orient and Occident dichotomy, it's. It's very much racialized. You know, a lot of times when people talk about the Western world, it really tends to be, I guess, a more politically correct way of seeing the white world.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Donald Trump]

At least in my observation.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, definitely that. That's often the subtext because, I mean.

[Donald Trump]

That'S something I've always struggled with pinning down. Right. Because why isn't Brazil considered part of the West? You know, why isn't Mexico considered part of the West?

[James Stout]

Right. What are we west of? Like, it's not the Western hemisphere, like, as you say.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

I mean, Western hemisphere is more straightforward, but is it because there are too many colored people in Mexico and in Brazil?

[James Stout]

It seems to be. Right. Like, it's not even countries strongly. Either from Western Europe or strongly impacted by settler colonialism from Western Europe.

[Robert Evans]

Europe.

[James Stout]

Because the entirety of Latin America is.

[Donald Trump]

Is impacted and they should be included. But they're not.

[James Stout]

But they're not. Yeah, yeah, it. Yeah, it's. I've always struggled with that one. Other than. Yeah. Neoliberal, capitalist, white countries, it seems.

[Mia Wong]

It's.

[James Stout]

It's what people don't want to say.

[Donald Trump]

And Japan some Sometimes.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Japan, strangely enough.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Like an honorary member of the club.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Or like, sometimes also not Spain. This is a particular, like, bugbear, I guess, of Spanish historians.

[Donald Trump]

Really? I don't think I've seen that one.

[James Stout]

Yeah. For years. Like, literally, you would be excluded from European history. Like. Like, Africa starts at the Pyrenees is the sort of phrase that needs to be used.

[Donald Trump]

That's hilarious.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like, I guess it compounded because Spain was so isolated under Franco.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

But, like, yeah, this. They called it the black legend that, like, Spain does not belong to Europe. And literally the. And it's not, again, it's racialized. Right. It's because Spain had this exchange with the Muslim world. Right. And, like, that. That culture deeply impacted Spanish culture.

[Donald Trump]

Indeed.

[James Stout]

And even after Reconquista, like, it's like. It's like, you know, the French historians were just like, nah, you guys are tainted. Like, you. You don't get to come back.

[Donald Trump]

It's kind of a similar situation with the territories of the former Ottoman Empire as well. Well, technically part of Europe and yet, you know, maligned in some way.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Like, less than still.

[Donald Trump]

It's like, ah, y' all had too much. Too much Turkish, too much Muslim influence. Y' all gotta.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You need like, a thousand years to decompress before we let you back in.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

I mean, honestly, if the Pope wasn't based in Italy, I'm sure Italy would have a similar dynamic. I mean, Italy is a recent construction. Right. In terms of. As a country.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

But when you look at the Two Sicilies, for example, that was under North African rule for a significant period of its history. But let me not get too far off track one, One more tangent. And, and that is I'm far from being a Dengist by any means or a Maoist or anything of that nature. But there is something to be said for the way that the east, the Orient has been sidelined, marginalized, treated as lesser than for so long and now they're at a point where their geopolitical sway has to be respected. Yeah, I'm not rooting for them by any means. I'm not one of those people that's like, yeah, multipolar world. I would rather we have no poles. You know, as an anarchist.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, I do know what you mean.

[Donald Trump]

But it's like it's a bit of schadenfreude, I guess.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is, you know, ironic, but yeah, not necessarily in a, in a good way. Like I just seen Xi Jinping meeting with Min Anhuang, the dictator of Myanmar today and then like, like I'm not excited for that poll of the world.

[Donald Trump]

Not at all. Not at all. Yeah. I feel the same way about the way that the Sahel Federation has kind of kicked out France. I'm like, yeah, stick it to France. But also military juntas, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, like the rebranded Wagner Corps now, like.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah. And the collaboration, close collaboration with Russia. But you know, a lot of this thing is really. Yeah. A lot of these relationships, these geopolitical relationships are so opportunistic. It's all opportunism. And the day they don't really, they're not really necessarily guided by principles.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like the difference, I guess between like for instance, I, I, I've, you know, I've been thinking a lot about anarchists at war. Right. And people who go and fight in other people's to defend other people. Right. Like, like the, the people who went to Rova to fight, people who went to Myanmar to fight. Like there's a difference between doing something out of a sense of solidarity and doing something out of root opportunism. And like that always shows itself in the end.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah. I mean the Wagner group's involvement in Africa is the most blatant capitalist driven opportunism.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like that these people are not there for the anti colonial, they're not like.

[Donald Trump]

Standing with the oppressed peoples of the world.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Like watching the battle of algae is. And setting off to immediately liberate the people of Africa.

[Donald Trump]

Literal mercenaries. Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Donald Trump]

But getting back onto the main topic, talking about all these ways we divvy up the world out of the linguistic and cultural and geographical differences that we observe. Around us came this concept of nations. Right. Nation as an idea also came out of the European imagination. It's commonly defined and it's used worldwide today. But it's commonly defined as a large community of people who share common identity, often through language, culture, history, and sometimes ethnicity, and who usually inhabit a specific geographic territory with its own political organization. There can be nations without states as simply a cultural community force, people who feel a collective longing and share destiny, money. But nations are, as we know, mostly tied up with states today. Hence nation being used as a synonym for country.

[James Stout]

Yeah, this is one of my bugbears, I guess, as an academic, like I. I tried to develop this concept of Catalan nationalism that like at the time was inherently anti fascist, I think, or was trying to be like, but it ain't now. Like that's a very Catalan right now. And yeah, I do still find it hard when people say nation instead of state, especially Americans. Like, it's very hard. Right. Because state is like a subset of the state here, the sort of motivated division of the federal state. So it can be hard to explain those differences.

[Donald Trump]

And as you mentioned, the sort of way that Catalan nationalism has shifted, it really, I think, gets to the whole weakness of the nation idea. So Benedict Anderson famously called nations imagined communities because the community exists as a collective fantasy. You know, they imagine a deep comradeship with people who they've never met.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And this fantasy has boundaries, not just about who is included, but also famously who is excluded. And this fantasy is not necessarily something that is automatic or natural as we tend to see it today, but it's really the rise of things like print capitalism with the mass production of books and newspapers. And that's what really shaped the standardization and formalization of these imagined communities through the creation of like common cultural reference and a shared sense of history.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And then of course, you had the nation idea further being developed by liberal revolutions and through the shared experience of colonial rule, you know, where subject populations would mobilize nationalism to claim self determination.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely like it, I'm sure. I'm trying to remember I've borrowed this from someone, but the idea of like identity entrepreneurs is one I like. Like it's when religion loses its claim on universal truth. Specifically in Europe, there's like a market for identity that is open and the creation of nations is like to my mind, like a bourgeois project. Right. Like it's an entrepreneurial endeavor that they seek to create something to benefit from it. And like. Yeah, to a degree that's turned against them. It's still an entrepreneurial endeavor. Right. Like, still, you could be creating a nation which wants to kick France out of Morocco. Right. That that nation may not have space for everyone who inhabits that territory of Morocco. Like, it's still. It's a sort of, for some people, construct.

[Donald Trump]

Absolutely, absolutely. I think the elite intellectual current of a lot of nationalist movements can go understated. You know, oftentimes what stirs up the masses toward that specific direction because, I mean, the masses will revolt against their conditions, but what sort of directs it in that national independence direction. And this concept of nation is. Tends to be that sort of elite intellectual current. I often look at the history of Trinidad and Tobago go as a reference point, seeing as that's where I come from. The whole process of nation building is always ongoing and we are in a position where there's an effort, there's a very strong effort to both push for a nation building, but also recognize our divergent pasts. You know, because we have this sort of almost equal in population, Indo Trinidadian and Afro Trinidadian populations, and then a mixed population as well. And then you have some Chinese and Syrian and Lebanese and. And Venezuelan and Filipino, and all these different groups come into Trinidad. And because of that colonial past, there are tensions between those groups and things that still play out to this day. But while those tensions are played out, there's also an effort to create. To construct a unity through an allegiance to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, to create a sense of national identity. And as a very young country, it's still quite difficult to do. I could imagine, especially in the early United States, it might have been a similar situation where you have all these different European populations and different populations from around the world who are in the US and there hasn't quite yet been a fully built up American identity yet. And so a lot of those tensions are still kind of playing out. And so it takes a couple generations for there to be a sense of American identity that arises out of that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely.

[Donald Trump]

Trinidad being one, a younger colony and two, only recently becoming independent in 1962, it hasn't had enough time yet to, I suppose, develop that patriotism that America is so known for. And so you still see a lot of people continue to have allegiances to their ancestry, to their heritage, even before they have any sort of sense of connection to the country concept of Trinidad.

[James Stout]

Yeah, the American one is interesting because the people who did the American revolution would often call themselves English, right. Like, and it's this kind of post hoc nationalism that is applied, right. Like they did begin constructing a nation, but after they. After they gained the apparatus of a state. Right. They can. Sometimes they'll talk about their freedoms in terms of English freedoms, which they themselves are not granted. Right. Like, they don't have the same freedoms as English people in England when they are a British colony. This concept of freedom they will elucidate like. Like so much of it is based on, like, English common law. Right. They didn't necessarily see themselves as distinct. That comes later. And like the US One is interesting because they have to develop this kind of civic nationalism much. I guess France does that too, of course. But like France, probably the OG there. But like, indeed, this idea, it. Like, you subscribe to these ideals, therefore you're an American, because they're like this. This nation constructed by people from all over Europe. For the most part, the phrasing is universal, but the implementation is not. Right. It's also a country where people own other people.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, yeah, I think. I mean, like I was saying earlier, it does help in our struggle for autonomy and independence from colonial rules to have this construct as a nation. Right. But it also obscures a lot of the real material divisions in society, you know, between the working class and the elites. And so you have this national identity that is constructed by intellectual and, you know, economic elites. And it's overlaid onto a population that does not really have a say in that construction. And so these nationalist projects will try to downplay or suppress differences in conflicts. And that is part of why nationalism so often lends itself to fascism. Because fascism is an outgrowth of this idea of nations where they promote this vision of national unity and stifle class conflict and create a collusion of glasses that pushes aside the people who don't fit within their concept of the nation.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. I often think, like, when I'm talking to my undergrads about nation, the most succinct way I can say is like, the salient we through both space and time. Right. Like, it's the people you identify with, it's the US and fascism weaponizes us against the rest of humanity or against us, mostly like against a scapegoat group who become them. Right. And then, like, the nation is for us, the state is for us, it's not for them. Thus they must be exterminated.

[Donald Trump]

Exactly.

[James Stout]

Is an obvious outgrowth of nationalism.

[Donald Trump]

Hence xenophobia, hence anti Semitism, anti blackness, anti indigeneity, all these prejudices. I mean, and that's the thing about nationalism. It's not necessarily consistent because you'll Say all people from this land, you know, we should deserve to be united. Except for those people who are also from this land. They don't get to come, you know, they are perpetual outsiders. They don't share the true culture. They aren't part of our destiny. So even if they're legally citizens or legally long term residents, or they haven't residents there for a long time, their entire lives, for generations, whatever the case may be, they don't count. They're outside forever.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. They can never ascend to like a sort of higher status of being one of us. British people like to mobilize this one a lot. Right. Like, you can be British, but you.

[Donald Trump]

Can never be English.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I forget who coined that, coined the phrase cricket nationalism, but it's just particularly kind of ridiculous. Like, oh, if, you know, if, if there's a test match between Britain and Pakistan or Britain and Trinidad Tobago, who do you support? Like, is that, like, are you really going to make that the core of your national identity? Like the sine qua non of being Brit is like, which flag you take to the cricket match. Like, it's particularly like, ridiculous.

[Donald Trump]

Oh, yeah.

[James Stout]

And as if it doesn't reflect exclusion. Right. People aren't taking their flag to the cricket match because like, that's the core of their entity. They're just like, yeah, well, kind of. I, I get treated differently because of my ethnic boundary, like makeup. Right. My ethnic presentation. So I guess you guys don't like me. So, like, it'll be funny when we kick your ass. Cricket, like, it's, it's the causal arrow.

[Donald Trump]

Points in the wrong direction, I guess I could imagine. I will not be bringing any flags to any cricket match because I don't attend cricket matches. I'm not, not too big of a fan of cricket.

[James Stout]

I can't be doing it.

[Donald Trump]

Let me stick to my football. And I say football in the international sense.

[James Stout]

Good. Yeah, yeah. I can't stand around long enough to play cricket.

[Donald Trump]

To be honest, as we're talking about national liberation, these struggles often took place in the context of the Cold War.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Donald Trump]

Which is where we get this other sense of this other framework for divvying up the world. Now, growing up, I was always told that, you know, Trinidad and Tobago is a Third world country. I had a social studies textbook and it taught first World, second World, third World, but it didn't teach First World, second World, third World in the context of the Cold War because I grew up in a post Cold War world and these terms came from the Cold War. But persisted after the Cold War. So, so what happened? I was taught we are Third World because we are still developing. We're not at that intermediate stage of development where we could say that we're Second World and we're not at that First World level of development like America. Right. And that's a small aside for me, but I've always found it mildly irritating when I see people use this famous social media catchphrase or America is a Third world country in a Gucci battle belt.

[James Stout]

I haven't seen that one there yet. That's annoying.

[Donald Trump]

I'm sure you've seen similar sentiments. This idea, oh, America's Third World. America's Third World is.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I have.

[Donald Trump]

Like, it's just annoying to me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, off.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's annoying to me.

[Donald Trump]

For one, it completely divorces the concept of the Third World from its actual origins. And two, it also, I think, reflects a kind of a blindness to what's happening in the rest of the world in the countries that are actually considered Third World and the differences between them. Them, you know, for everything that we can express frustrations about in the U.S. anybody in the third world, I think, and I've. When I, when I visited the US I've seen it with my own eyes, you know, there's still things there that Americans might take for granted.

[James Stout]

Oh yeah.

[Donald Trump]

That are just not 100% that would never be taken for granted in another context. I want to. And I see, of course, the division in America's version of the First World versus, you know, some of the European social democracies version of the First World. So I get that frustration, you know, the lack of free health care and that kind of thing, investment in infrastructure and all that. But let me just get into the background behind the term. Right. As step into the Cold War, you have this concept of the three world model that came after World War II. The pre war status quo was over and you had new conflicts on the horizon. And so the term first world originally described the capitalist bloc led by the United States in Western Europe, where capitalist markets, liberal democracy and economic progress were celebrated. And then you had the Second World bloc, which referred to the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, where what I would consider state capitalism and centrally planned economies shaped their societies. So in the First World you had countries like the us, Australia, Africa. Today might be shocking. You know, Iran was even considered part of the First World bloc during the Cold War. That might be shocking now because when we think of some of these countries like, oh, those are Third world countries. Those are Underdeveloped countries, they're not at the developed level of the west yet. But in the context in which this three world model originated, these were countries that explicitly aligned themselves with the policies of the United States and its allies as capitalist nations against the Soviet bloc. And on the Soviet bloc you had, of course, countries like China and Vietnam, Laos, Ethiopia, Yemen, Cuba, all these different countries aligned themselves explicitly with the Soviet Union, but in the Third World. And where the Third World concept came in was with all the countries that stood against picking a side. Yeah, a lot of these were former colonies and nations that chose not to side completely with either. And so this whole concept, this whole idea of the Non Aligned Movement, it really kicked off thanks to the joining of the Indian Prime Minister, the Ghanaian president, the Indonesian President and the President of the United Arab Republic alongside Yugoslavia. And so all these countries who all had very different economic arrangements. Yugoslavia famously was kind of doing its own thing compared to a lot of the other countries associated with socialism. India and Ghana, they were also kind of doing their own thing, kind of a mix. Trinidad and Tobago is also considered part of the Non Aligned Movement. And so this, these classifications at the time, these were geopolitical and they're all political ideologies, not necessarily economic development. So technically speaking, the terms shouldn't even be relevant to us today. I mean, the Cold war of the 20th century is over. But over time the narrative began to twist. You know, so because you didn't pick a side, you didn't pick the red team or the blue team, you didn't pick the first world, the second world, this narrative developed where, oh, you didn't pick a side, you're politically independent, so you're poor, you're chaotic, you're a failed state, all these different things. And of course there were incidents in part influenced of course by state actors in the U.S. and state actors in the, the Soviet line bloc would have contributed to this outcome. But over time you get this sense of, oh, the Third World is failure. All these states were trying different paths of development, different approaches to governance from either of the two camps, mixed hybrid approaches. But in the end this just got them stuck with the label of underdevelopment and at having them being seen as lesser. Now today people don't use Third World as much as they use developing, at least in, you know, the more above board discourse. But that division also has its own implications, right? The developed countries versus the developing countries. It's kind of a softer sort of version of the same.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's kind of gentler. Yeah, Same shit.

[Donald Trump]

What those terms do implicitly, it's like, you know what, you're a fish, you're in water, so you can't recognize water. It's hard to recognize these things, these ideological impulses, when we're submerged in them. If you take a step back, you realize, oh, these terms developed and developing, they have very heavy implications. And the implication is that there's a single linear path to progress modeled after Western capitalism that all societies are progressing towards through industrialization, through consumerism, through the almighty GDP growth. And so development or your underdevelopment becomes a tool of intervention. It becomes a way to mask imperial interests with the sort of veneer of, oh, we're just kind of helping you out. You know, it's like we move from you're a savage, you're a primitive, to you're just not developed yet. But don't worry, we'll help you out. And that's how you get the whole sort of. Of IMF and World bank introductions of models of debt and policy conditions and metrics and all these different things to sort of shape these countries into client states, states that can be used to further Western development. The Cold War is technically over now, as I said. So I suppose we've reached the end of history, as the famous saying goes, but not exactly. In the early 1990s, Samuel Huntington came up with a thesis to explain the conflicts that would define the post Cold War world. And as we entered into the 21st century. And so he argued that the future of global conflict would not be defined by competing ideologies or economic systems, but by cultural fault lines. In his 1993 article in Foreign affairs, which later expanded into his 1996 book, the Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, Huntington predicted that the primary source of conflict in a new era would be between distinct civilizations. His model would have pointed to clashes between the west and other groups, Islamic nations, the Confucian East. And it of course, set up this sense that the west is this pinnacle of rationality and modernity and all these others are in competition with the fantastic and amazing West. And I always like to call out some of the strange ways that he has divided the world, right? So. So sub Saharan Africa is all grouped up into the African camp, all of North Africa, the Middle east into West Asia. All of that is considered part of the Islamic civilization. Forget all the differences between any of them. By the way, Indonesia is also part of the Islamic bloc. You have the Cynic or the Confucian bloc, that includes China, Both Koreas Taiwan and Vietnam, except for the parts of China that are under the Buddhist camp, such as Tibet. So Tibet is kind of carved up on its own as its own camp. Mongolia is also under the Buddhist camp. Thailand and all these others in Southeast Asia considered part of the Buddhist camp.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And then you have the Latin American block, which is everybody part of Latin America and even people who are not technically Latin America. And I kind of swept in there. And I'm going, by the way, based off the map that I saw on the Wikipedia article on the subject.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I found that map now. Fantastic stuff.

[Donald Trump]

It's some very bizarre divisions and ways to cut up this world. You have the Western world versus the Orthodox world, which includes Kazakhstan and Greece and Ukraine and Russia, all under that civilizational banner.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

The Philippines is somehow part Islamic, part Western and part sinic.

[James Stout]

Interesting. Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

It's a very unusual blend.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And then he's just got, like, Japan. It's just hanging out there by itself.

[Donald Trump]

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, Japan is kind of its own thing.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It just literally says Japanese. I forgot about that. And then he goes on to freak out about, like, the, like, Latin world as he sees it, like. Like dividing the United States. Right. Like in his. His. Is it called, like, who we are or where we are or something? His book about migration in the United States, it was after Clash of civilizations. He wrote this book about, like, how the, like, I think. I don't know quite remember how he terms it. Like, does he use Latino or Hispanic or something else? But like that, that. That population increasing in the United States will, like, divide the United States into two fundamentally opposed civilizations.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, yeah. He has some interesting compulsions.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And unfortunately, his thesis found its voice following the events of 9 11. Politicians, media, these people were taking his ideas to kind of justify the war on terror that would unfold. It also create sort of cultural divides that settle into place at home, will not create, but shape those cultural divides as you create the sense of, oh, if we're experiencing a clash of civilizations right now, then this flood of people from another civilization is a threat. It's an invasion. It's something that needs to be targeted and fought against. And so in a sense, his clash of civilizations is kind of a repackaging of a lot of the binaries and divisions we've spoken about before. You have elements of nationalism, you have elements of civilized versus barbarian, you have elements of east and West. The Cold War dichotomies, all of that kind of comes together in this neat package. Finally, we enter the 21st century. And there are two very popular ways that we now categorize the world. People tend to use the phrases Global north and Global south as a softer or more politically correct alternative to develop developing or first and Third World. It's considered less loaded, more neutral sounding and is originally popularised via UN frameworks and the Brandt line, which was done in 1980, which drew a literal line across the globe separating the wealthier north from the poorer South. To be clear though, despite the geographical language, it's not literally about hemispheres. Australia is considered part of the Global north and Mongolia is considered part of the Global South. But generally speaking, the Global south refers to the post colonial regions and the Global north refers to the wealthy industrialized countries of the world. To me, again, it's not really a flawless framework. It has all the same binaries and smoothing over of complexities of internal class divides between, for example, rich elites in the Global south and poor communities in the North. It gives the impression that entire countries share unified class experience. I think.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

I think it also has the potential to obscure inequality between south south relations. So yes, two countries may both be a part of the Global south, but there could be a massive power differential between them that, you know, sets them up for interventions and equal treaties and also sorts of different sorts of meddling.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

For example, Saudi Arabia, at least in one map that I saw, is considered part of the Global South. But as we know, Saudi Arabia's famous first meddling across Africa and the Middle east, its interventions, its financing of different conflicts across the region. Now I get why the term is used. It creates a sense of shared struggle, especially in anti imperialist and climate justice spaces. But I think it has weaknesses, you know, in how we construct solidarity on that basis.

[James Stout]

Yeah, very much so, yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And the other and final system that I wanted to mention that has gained popularity these days is World Systems Theory, which is actually older than Clash of Civilizations. It came out of Emmanuel Wallerstein's work during the Cold War and he kind of stood out and said that he was rejecting the three world system and the simplistic country by country development model. Instead, he created this World Systems theory that saw capitalism as a single global system, not a patchwork of individual national economies. So the focus was on labour rules, on commodity flows and on power concentration. And I think in an even more globalised world, it makes the most sense. So to Wallace Dean, you have three different zones of the global economy. You have the core, which has, you know, have strong states, financial capital, tech, heavy industries, control over global institutions and they tend to exploit the labour and resources of the periphery while exporting high value goods and debt structures. And the periphery of the countries that tend to have weaker institutions, extractive or agrarian economies, reliance on exporting raw materials, debt dependency and structural adjustment policies. And they're often the dumping grounds for pollution, waste and arms from the global North North. The semi periphery are then considered under his model the countries that mediate between the core and the periphery. These are industrializing economies with mixed labor and capital exports. They sometimes exploit others while being exploited themselves. And these include countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa. And they tend to serve as the buffers that stabilize the system while chasing core status. I think this model is very dynamic. It could be more dynamic, but it does have the capacity to highlight the systemic interdependence of this global system. That one region's wealth is contingent on another's dispossession. It makes it very useful for understanding that poverty is not something that just happens. It's something that is very clearly structured and developed by the wealth of the North. And I think also with the corporate free model, you see the sense of a one way flow where value and labor goes from the periphery to the core. But there is another direction that flow goes, right, because the migrants from the periphery, they go to the core. They fill precarious roles in core economies like care, work and agriculture and logistics. And so they almost become an imported periphery within the core. And their absence from the periphery also deprives the periphery. Hence the phenomenon of brain drainage where people are siphoned away as labour and the educated population tends to leave their countries of origin. But I'm saying it's not just a one way flow because you also have that sense of diaspora and diasporic networks that kind of reverse the flow. Remittances for some countries can be a significant chunk of their national income. I think the Philippines is a classic example of this. Some of the Caribbean countries, either historically or presently were very dependent on remittances from their diasporic population sending money back home. Lebanon is another example. El Salvador is another example. They become key parts of the national gdp. That sort of relationship of migration. Yeah, but I think what I want to do with this core periphery model or this core periphery semi periphery model is expanded. And one of the ways that I found very useful to do so comes from fellow podcaster Shout out to Eliah J. Ayub. Yeah, I read an article of his that was on the Anarchist Libraries called the Periphery has no time for Binaries. He made this, this very crucial point. And I quote, we are as peripheral to the global south regimes crushing us as they are perceived to be by the Western think tanks and foreign ministers who view their imagined space as the centre of the the world. China and Russia and Iran are peripheral to the west and any and all activists in China and Russia and Iran are peripheral to their governments. So I kind of like this sense of not just looking on the country level but looking at particular populations, populations within countries, the relationships between them, bringing in that class dynamic.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Between populations more prominently.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like if you look at the, like the example I'm familiar with. Right. Like the we. Or we could look at Kurdistan or Myanmar. Right. There are ethnic groups within that country that are subject to colonialism by the core groups within that country. Right. Like Assad's Arab belt stuff or the Burma majority using like classic colonial divide and rule tactics right now against Rohingya in Myanmar. And like I think it doesn't make sense to see that whole country is peripheral. Right. Like that binary doesn't function when like, like the salient colonial violence happening especially in Myanmar is happening within Myanmar, but it doesn't make it any less salient and like the experience of colonialism is still violent and if we only use this like state level binary we will totally miss that.

[Donald Trump]

Exactly, exactly. And I think it's important to be clear. Obviously I've rejected a lot of these frameworks in covering them. You won't see me using the civilized primitive binary anytime soon. But some of these concepts can be useful. You know, they do shape the way that we view the world, how we see ourselves. The imperfect, of course, because they're trying to map onto reality and reality is a shifting beast. But I think it's, it's good to have some sense of, or some language to understand the inequality and power dynamics present in the world. So we can reclaim these frameworks or we can reject them. You know, we could use them for solidarity or for division. But the question I want to leave us with to wrap up this episode is how do we build a world where these divisions are no longer descriptive or relevant? And that's all I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace. Hey and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage and I'm back with James.

[James Stout]

It's me again.

[Donald Trump]

Welcome back.

[James Stout]

Yeah, good to be here.

[Donald Trump]

Great to have you once again. Or for you to have me. I'm not sure the dynamic is here.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, me neither. It's nice to be together.

[Donald Trump]

It's an egalitarian dynamic. You know, we're both having each other in a sense.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

We're sharing this podcast.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah. I think there are a lot of concepts that it's good to grasp to get a sense of how this world works. Kind of continuing from the previous episode where we spoke about all the different ways that we can divide up the world and understanding the world. And so in today's sort of pursuit of that endeavor, I wanted to get into a particular concept that is so benign, yet so pervasive in this system. And it's the idea of externalization. You get what I mean by that?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like making people of things other.

[Donald Trump]

Yes. But specifically, I think I want to address how capitalism persists by pushing harm onto the other.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Onto the someone or something else. Shifting the costs of particular actions, either environmentally, socially, or economically. I think the easiest example I could point to is how a company may choose to save on disposal costs by dumping their waste into a river which can thus poison the water supply, the ecosystem, and the health of all those humans, human and non human lives who rely upon or live near that river. Do you have another example you could probably point to?

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think there are lots of them. One of them that I think of a lot is like how in the U.S. right. Like products that we can't recycle or that we can't landfill, we will literally ship to somewhere else to be dumped. Like, our consumption creates so much excess and so much waste and we can't be confronted with that waste, so we ship it to places where people consume less.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, it's. I mean, I don't know if you've seen any of the footage of some of these places, their whole coasts of fast fashion waste, for example, in Africa, or just e waste leaching into the soil. It's really quite tragic.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I remember someone I met once was telling me that like one of the things that children did where they had come from was they would pick through e waste, specifically charging cables to get the copper out. This would result in them having like these terrible injuries to their fingers because they were like prying the cables apart. And over time they would get little pieces of little shards of metal embedded in their fingertips.

[Donald Trump]

Damn. Yeah. That's terrible.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's pretty. Pretty grim condemnation of our way of consuming.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, it's messed up. It's messed up. And I think when you see that sort of stuff, it's hard to unsee it. When you see that impact onto the world, it's hard to unsee it. But that's part of how this concept thrives, this externalization thrives. It's by obscuring itself.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

So that's what we kind of want to do, this episode, get a full breadth of its history, its present and its apparent future so that we can not not see all the different ways that this occurs. Now, this passing on of costs may have always been an option on the table, but we can see that a lot of traditional economies did not go that route, because traditional economies were often human economies, as David Graeber used the term in debt the first 5,000 years. These were economies focused on human relationships. They were embedded in kinship, in land, in customs, in obligation and reciprocity. So what you owed was really financial. It was to your neighbour, your elder, your clan, the land itself. And so you could not really avoid the costs of your actions on others, because that was at the centre of it all others. But the transition to capitalism was a shift in what the economy was. It enforced the idea that everything is or should be up for sale. The economist Carl Polanyi Plani called it the great transformation, when land, labour and money were turned into fictitious commodities, treated as if they were products for sale. Pliny saw the modern state and the capitalist market economy as a package deal. Graeber also made this very clear in debt as well. For this new kind of economy to take hold, people had to change how they thought about work and trade and relation with each other and seeing the world, world, those conditions had to be created by the state. So you could look at how a lot of traditional economies and commons had to be disrupted to force this shift. In England, you had people pushed off of common land that they had used for centuries and they had no choice but to sell their labour to survive and go into the factories. Yeah, we have to remember that it never started in the factories. It actually started in the colonies. This dispossession of people, people and from place started through that colonisation process, or really amplified through that colonisation process, extracting the wealth of people or of labour, of land, of resources from one place to concentrate it in another, to displace people and land and costs. And so colonialism was capitalism's sort of training ground for externalization. You plunder a little bit over here, you profit a little bit over there. And this is really where we get to the core of capitalist externalisation, with the shifting of the costs. On the small scale, that looks like the river pollution example, but on the global scale, it looks like what Wallace Team is getting into with world systems Theory how the wealth and stability of the core nations depend on the exploitation of the periphery. So slavery and genocide and ecological ruin, all of these are costs that create the wealth that the core enjoys, but is made invisible to that core. Because when you're part of an ongoing relationship with community, with land, with ecology, with people, your actions have consequences that matter. They reverberate, you can feel them. And that demands a level of responsibility on your part. But when you take the things that have been woven into relationship and turn them into plain old transaction, those transactions can then offload the costs, offload the consequences, make them someone else's problem. So, yeah, clothing is very affordable now, but it's affordable because somebody somewhere was underpaid and overworked. The smartphone, it's convenient, it's useful, it's accessible, but it's parts of mind under dangerous conditions. You know, your food is delicious, nutritious, not exactly affordable these days, but it's picked by hands that cannot afford that same meal. So the harms of these systems, the harms of these actions, of this level of consumption doesn't cease to exist. It's just externalized. So it could be rendered invisible to one point of view. Yeah, and it's not something that can be set up without a fight. You know, people would resist. Enclosures were met with resistance, Colonization was met with resistance. And even today, workers strike. You know, people do fight back. It's not just this sweeping, inevitable process, but because of the collaboration between state and capital, that collusion of statist and capitalist interests, the whole system has managed to persist thus far. It's a very formidable foe we're dealing with. So we can set it back here and there, but we have not defeated it yet. Yeah, and I say yet because, you know, as we get into, there are ways to loosen its grip. I think what's fascinating about capitalist externalization today is just how much it has scaled and cost. More sophisticated in terms of the work that makes the world run. The most essential labour is often the most invisible and undervalued and precarious label. You know, when we're talking about the work that's necessary to clothe ourselves, the work that's necessary to feed ourselves, the work that's necessary to build infrastructure. Such as in the Gulf States, where you have literal modern slavery taking place to build up those countries, Were they talking about gig work, transportation, delivery, that sort of thing, or reproductive work, stuff like what is called housewifery or domestic labor? Sure, you could think of other examples as well.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I like the One you gave about your cell phone. Right. Like those rare earth materials. Like it's not some slick, safe mining operation. The brink serves out the ground. It's human hands in dangerous conditions that kill people.

[Donald Trump]

Exactly. Poisons people. It's not even necessarily a quick death. It's often a slow, lifelong death and.

[James Stout]

It poisons that part of the world for generic. We could stop right now and it would take generations for the damage to stop.

[Donald Trump]

Exactly. That's the thing about destruction. Right. Destruction can be very quick as the rebuilding. That can take a long time.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And if you look at how quickly Gaza has been flattened versus how long it's going to take to recover from that, it's like night and day.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it. I mean, I'm very familiar with that particular example. Right. Like how quickly you can destroy something with a bomb from an airplane and how hard people had to work to build it. In October of 23, I was in Kurdistan and left. Like, I know how hard people work to build up Rajava. Right. To try and build a little island of democracy without the state, in a place where the state has been weaponized against tons of different ethnic groups who are not Arab and even against Arab people who didn't agree with the state's particular line on. On a thing. And one night, you know, like, the power station's gone. They bombed while I was there at la. Like a oxygen bottling plant for people who need supplemental oxygen, either temporarily or permanently. And like, it's gone now. And now to build that back up in a world where you are largely alienated from the system of states and capital. Right. You're trying to build stuff back up as much as you can from networks of solidarity and ingenuity. That takes years and.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

But it's not visible.

[Donald Trump]

And that's not even getting into the emotional and mental toll of something like that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Oh, that. That can be a setback as well.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

Like we're not even talking about resources. We're talking about. Yeah, that loss. Yeah, that, that, that pain.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, the pain.

[Donald Trump]

It made even worse when the skilled people, skilled workers who are responsible for upkeeping such as something like that are also wiped off by that same bomb. It makes it all the more difficult to recover.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Or drawn away. Right. By conditions becoming unlivable. So you have this like, brain drain where people who have skills that are considered to be commercially valuable have an opportunity to leave. People who. Who don't have those have the opportunity to stay or don't have the opportunity to Leave, I guess like, or even like, you know, the US made a. It's a different version of externalization, I guess, but like the US made a big thing of how it defeated the Islamic State in, you know, 2019, I guess. I can't remember when the last Athlean Albagus was, I think 2019. But like we externalized it, offloaded the.

[Donald Trump]

Cost of that struggle.

[James Stout]

Yeah, the dying part, like the US pilots did a whole lot of killing, but the dying part, that, yeah, we, we externalize that. Right. To Kurdish and Arab and Assyrian to f. Yeah. To people who would. Whose lives didn't matter. Yeah. And like I remember time standing in a cemetery there, just looking at lines and lines of graves and I just left the house of someone whose 13 year old son was killed in a drone strike and just thinking like each of these is, is a mother burying her child. That like we essentially asked for the most part. Right. Like to do that. We said, hey, will you guys do the dying part? Because we don't want to. Like it kind of sucks. Sucked for the United States and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we'd like someone else to die now and then, you know, here we are a few years later. Right. And like the night before Turkey has been bombing the place where I'm looking at these graves. And the US ain't doing shit to help. Right. Like, like, even though these people had like made this massive sacrifice, the US wasn't like, yeah, we, we're your friends. It's not a friendship relationship, you know, like it's, it's like you say it's like a, an interaction like, like a. Yeah. Purchase more than a solidarity based thing.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah. And once again we really see that core externalizing its cost onto the periphery. And we see that both in the sense of on the global stage between countries or between populations, cores and peripheries, but even internally within countries, as we mentioned in the previous episode, talking about that divide between the core and the periphery where you have what a lot of people have called economy's biggest trick, you know, your socialized failures and privatized profit. Profits.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

So in 2008 with the financial crash, people were evicted while the banks got bailed out. In the early stages of COVID corporations got relief gig workers were exposed.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

You know, in the process of austerity resulting from neoliberalism, social services get cut in order to balance the books, but there's never any consideration of, oh, let's try cutting profits.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

You know, that's one thing that can never Go down.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, exactly like, or even like within. You know, we all, all food come from the soil at some point. Right. But like, I can't tell you how many people I know, like my family are in agriculture.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Who have died or lost limbs on farms. The same is true if you're in the mining industry. Right. Like. Like, that's not something that's visible. You know, you don't, like, go to the supermarket and buy your bread. Right. And you don't think that someone got their arm in the combine harvester when they were doing the field that went to the flower that made you a loaf of bread that cost $1.90 and now the person doesn't have an arm, it's invisibilized. Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

I mean, it's the same thing when you see, like these natural disasters taking place. Right. Floods or burn ins, when California is on fire and when Pakistan is completely flooded out, those are the consequences of the actions of corporations, of the actions of this entire global economic system. And meanwhile, corporations are getting carbon credits to continue doing what they were always doing.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Donald Trump]

You know, and so the actual consequences of what they're doing, they're paying for carbon credits, but the actual consequences of what they're doing are being paid for by the communities that are displaced by the consequences of this climate change.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. And we never talk about. When we talk about migration. Right. Like, that's a great. The climate change is a great example that we don't talk about how the bulk of people coming to the United States are coming from the places most heavily impacted by climate change.

[Donald Trump]

Yep.

[James Stout]

Or like I was in the Marshall Islands a few years ago and there will be no more Marshall Islands within our lifetime.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Because of the consequences of massive corporations have made.

[Garrison Davis]

Made.

[James Stout]

But like, they didn't have any agency. It made me really, like, it was hard because they're doing stuff like they use a. To get it to get around the atolls. Right. They use little like two stroke outboards and they're trying to build solar canoes instead and solar boats so that it's, it's cleaner energy. Right. And like less than a percent of a percent of the world's carbon emissions come from the Marshall Islands. And they're like, trying their hardest to do their part to reduce their emissions. But, like, they can't make the impact that needs to be made to stop the sea levels rising. And arguably, like, when the world had a chance to do so, like, you see them speaking at the United nations and then the UN being like, line has to go up.

[Donald Trump]

Yep.

[James Stout]

That. That means your island has to sink.

[Donald Trump]

And that's why, you know, reform is not and can never be enough. Because this is how the system is designed. It's designed to push risk downward and outward onto the working class, onto the global south south and onto the next generation. Because that's another dimension of externalization. Right. Time, even our future gets externalized in a sense. You know, all of our resources are limited or finite resources that can used up now at an increasing velocity. Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

The national debt of some countries is being sunken further and further into now. Right. The emissions that send out all those emissions, now, fossil fuels, you know, all that stuff. Because we don't have to deal with the consequences. It's the future that have to deal with the consequences as the system digging its own grave. Because even though the system needs stability, it will sacrifice future stability for present profits. It will sacrifice nature, which is the basis of the economy. It will sacrifice nature to the economy in service of the economy. It will treat nature as disposable and infinite and something external to the way that we run things, as if. As if it's not going to catch up to us. And so as collapse will accelerate as the consequences become more apparent on the sacrifice zones of the periphery, the powers are beyond interested in fixing it. You know, they're going to fortify themselves against it through border patrols, through climate walls, through militarized disaster response, that it's going to double down.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Make it harder and harder to see the consequences of our excessive consumption of capitalism until the levy breaks, I guess. Literally or metaphorically.

[Donald Trump]

Yep, literally or metaphorically. And I want people to keep in mind who are listening, you know, this corn periphery is on this just the periphery out there. It's also the periphery within that we're talking about in terms of consequences, the internal dumping grounds, whether it be, you know, indigenous reservations or the neighborhoods of black and brown people, or the prisons that often serve as the holding tanks for. For discontent and for poverty and for all the nasty consequences that society doesn't want to deal with because of the way society has been structured. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Or just like under the bridge near your house, you know, like. Like we exactly treat our homes exactly like it's. San Diego has this particular legislative initiative which I find, like, obviously it's fucked, but also like, it's very. So it's so obvious, like they. They pass this thing called a camping ban where they're going to make it illegal to be unhoused on the sidewalk. Like, you're like It's a band, It's a ban against camping on the sidewalk. Right. And all it does, it doesn't provide housing for people, and thus it doesn't solve the issue. It moves people. Our city's very hilly and we have lots of canyons in which they can't build. So it moves people into these canyons. Wow. And it just makes the same people invisible. Right. Like, that's the goal. That. The goal is not to provide any form of solution. It's just to move these people away so they don't have to be poor in public. And so, so the people who. Who use homes as a vehicle for wealth creation, not as a place for humans to live, don't have to see the consequences of their actions.

[Donald Trump]

Exactly. It's all about what they want, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, in a sense, depending on how you look at it, any one of us can be a core, and any one of us can be a periphery. You know, to our rulers, we are all the periphery that they can push their consequences onto. In another sense, you know, I am part of the periphery and you are part of the core, James. And in another sense, you know, I might be considered part of the core in my own country in some ways because of my class position, because of my educational background, because of some of the ways that I can be insulated. Whereas, you know, other ways, you know, you might be the periphery in the United States to the core, to the elite, to the ruling class. And so this isn't to diminish the very real differences between the global core and the global peripheral. It also to make it clear to those of you in the global core that you should be in solidarity with that global periphery because their consequences are ultimately your own. You know, ultimately we are all the ones who are going to be holding the costs, cleaning the mess, surviving the fallout. And I understand how tough it is, because when you live with a system that is based on externalization of harm, you can end up lashing out on others as well. You know, that. That. That logic, that systemic logic becomes internalized, becomes part of how you navigate even your relationships. But we don't have to accept that way of doing things. The periphery, regardless of which periphery you're referring to, does hold the potential for change. And so, you know, in the beginning, when we were speaking of externalization of economic. In the economic dimension specifically, it's important to understand capitalism relies on these flows, these very smooth flows of labor, energy and resources and data from periphery to core, however you define those terms and so when we interrupt those flows, even briefly, we can shake those foundations. And that sort of approach, that effort to interrupt is really part of what social revolution is about. It's how we make the changes that we want to see.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Donald Trump]

You know, I speak of social revolution as not some flashy one time event or moment in history, but as an ongoing process, as something that is taking place right now at different levels, in different ways, all over the world. And so we can speak of the things we do to oppose the current system. Like the strikes and blockades that have taken place around the world, the indigenous land defense struggles that are taking place around the world, the rent strikes and mutual aid that have taken place around the world. And then beyond that sort of opposition, talking about the things we do to propose an alternative, to construct the kind of world and the kind of life that we need so we don't have to rely on these systems anymore, that exploit us to make these systems obsolete, to build cooperatives, to build worker control collectives and disaster response outside of the state, to sort of crack the system and to create in those cracks the space where a different system, a new life can grow. Yeah, to not become one big machine or one centralized struggle or movement, but to multiply and interconnect and adapt to the niche circumstances we're all dealing with. Like mycelium, you know, like the mushrooms.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, I like that analogy. Like, it's sort of you're like opening a crack thing, paraphrases Zapatista texts, right? Like, and they have this phrase I like from Succom Andante Marcos that translates as like, we don't have to change the world because we're building another one right now. And you know, you don't have to, we don't have to conquer. Like, there's this obsession on the left with like revolution as like you said, like an act that occurs at a point in time.

[Donald Trump]

Capital R revolution.

[James Stout]

Yes, yeah. As as opposed to like building the world where the things that we don't wish to see become irrelevant through our actions every day. Like, you use the example of people being unhealthed, which I mentioned before. Right. Like the way we build a world where those people aren't externalized is by not externalizing those people. Like, you know, it's not hard to do. You probably talk to human beings every day anyway. Like, just continue to do that. You know, take your neighbor a sandwich and like, that's the revolution that you can build slowly. And maybe it's not as exciting. It's like, you know, the, the one where you. I've, I've attended the revolutions where people fight against the state, but that you still have to do the hard work, you still have to do the like day to day building of a different way of relating to one another. Even in those revolutions where things change quickly and violently.

[Donald Trump]

Exactly.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Donald Trump]

And I mean even before we get to that point, you know, to be able to change the way we relate to each other, it starts with mindset. It starts with shifting our realm of possibilities, you know, not necessarily killing the memes of capitalism. And I mean memes in the sense that Richard Dawkins originally used the term as these cultured ideas that persist, that spread, that adapt. It's difficult to kill those memes, but you can't replace that them with better memes. And so replacing and popularizing those memes, those ideas, challenging the idea that rest is laziness, challenging the idea that the end goal is profit, that there's no other system besides capitalism, that something better isn't on the horizon, shifting that sense of reality, I think is a very important part of the struggle. And with every act, because I think, think the ideas have to be accompanied by act. With every act, I think it helps to break the spell to cut off, to put an end to that externalization. Because even though capitalism will continue to try to push its harm outward and downward and away from view, we can continue to challenge it inwardly, to push our struggle upward and to center our struggle the center of our view so that we can see it, so we can feel it, and so that we can act against it. And that's all I have for this episode. All power to all the people. Peace.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Foreign.

[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong. I am reporting from the beautiful and sunny People's Republic of New York City. And we are Zobak. It is Clover. Dimes Square is on suicide watch. Zomentum is sweeping the nation, has won the Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City, beating veteran sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo. It was, it was quite a night in New York last night. We are recording this Wednesday morning. The final ranked vote will be done in about a week. But Cuomo has conceded the race to Zoran who has, has declared a pretty decisive victory.

[Andrew Cuomo]

It's been very funny. Seeing the dashing weeping of the Cuomo camp has been very funny. New York has officially been upgraded from a tier 2 to a tier 1.5 Chinese city. Give it, give it another decade. It will have Entered Chinese civilization. The vibes are good. The vibes are good.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, the only difference is that now we will have an actually communist government in a city instead of the fake state capitalist governments of the Chinese mega cities.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Objectively, more communist. 1.5 Chinese city government. An American boji lie.

[Garrison Davis]

It was, it was a pretty exciting night in New York last night. I, and many people were not expecting a clear result so soon. I think Cuomo conceded around 10:30 as the vote was still coming in. But it was pretty clear that Zuron did a like very, very impressive, very impressive sweep. Really solid turnout across the boroughs. Just to like get a sense of like where we were at, like, I, I got to announce to a pretty, a pretty large room full of trans people at the Metropolitan Bar that Cuomo conceded to Zoron and Zoron has won. And I had not felt better in months. It was really invigorating. This was like the first like ray of hope in a political sense that I've, that, that's been like so deeply felt. Nothing ever happens. Camp is, is, is finally, finally taking.

[James Stout]

It.

[Andrew Cuomo]

So Joe for nothing ever happens.

[Garrison Davis]

The, the sheer, the sheer like joy and excitement being in like a room of like a hundred, a hundred queer people as, as, as Cuomo gets defeated, ends are on securing the primary. It was, it was just invigorating. In many ways this feels a lot bigger than even like AOC's win a few years ago. And it feels so much more real than like the Sanders campaign really ever did because New York is such as like a, it's such a condensed, concentrated area now. It has not quite like an inevitability, but a pretty strong certainty of what's going to happen come November in the general election.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. And I think the thing that's maybe in some ways the biggest deal about this is that New York was the capital of the giant sort of right wing backlash inside the Democratic Party to 2020. This is the city that elected Eric Adams in 2021. Right. Just straight up a cop is broken, ruled for like four years by just like this unhinged corrupt alliance of like real estate developers and like unhinged right wing billionaires and the cops who ran this really, really effective sort of politics of like the demonization of unhoused people and like anti immigrant politics. And the shift right in this, in the near Democratic Party like single handedly shifted the entire country to the right. You could literally see where the New York media market was in the 2022 elections. See on the map who was getting the news because it was so right wing. And that's just broken that whole thing. Like this place was just like, which was like the capital of the kind of revolution broke. And that whole tide, like you can, it's it, you know, in the same way that like Hunter S. Thompson talked about how you could see, like, you could see the, with a tide of the 60s broke. Standing in Vegas, like sitting here right now, you can see the place where the tide of that right wing surge in New York broke. And it was last night we saw their high point. Yeah, they couldn't elect the sexual predator. That was as far as they could go.

[Garrison Davis]

A Cuomo too. Like, like, yeah. I know some people are slightly annoyed about like the outsized influence of the New York mayoral election affecting everybody who's like, online and cares about politics in the United States and, and even, and even abroad. But this is, is like not, not only is New York like the biggest city in the country, this is like more so a representative battle for the future of the party. And like what the future of, of Democratic politics, not just the Democratic Party, but literally like, like democracies and like what the future of politics in this country is going to be is kind of emblematic over how this race went. Are we going to go back to like the same old establishment Dem party stuff, the Clintons, Cuomo knows, Obama, Biden, Harris, or are we actually going to legitimately chart a new course forward to counter this fascist element taking power across the country? And against nearly all odds and like $30 million, the underdogs actually won and pulled it off really strongly. And this really is like the battle for the future of the party. Early turnout was massive for this primary and a final three days of early voting. Voting. We saw like the youngest demographic of voters come out in high, high numbers. One quarter of early voters were first time Democratic primary participants, and young voters between the ages of 25 and 34 made up the largest share of early turnout. And this was all up against like the entire forces of the Democratic Party establishment coming together in the past few months specifically to stop Madani from, from taking the primary election. There was $25 million of super PAC funding behind Andrew Cuomo, which is the largest in New York City mayoral history. This PAC was backed by Michael Bloomberg doordash Bill Ackman, a Trump funder. And this pack allowed Cuomo backers to spend three times as much money than what Cuomo's actual campaign legally can. In comparison, Mamdani's pack had just $1.2 million plus 500,000 in anti Cuomo spending from the Working Families Party. In an attempt to seal the deal, the Cuomo team got the coveted Bill Clinton endorsement. Really, really forming like the touchers alliance with Cuomo and Clinton.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. There's no more sex pests for you to endorse. It's time for you to endorse Donald Trump. One world job.

[Garrison Davis]

That, like, that, that really was like emblematic of like the type of Democratic Party that Mamdani was up against. Right. And the one that, that working people of New York and people around the country were, were hoping might finally get defeated after it's won, won over on Sanders for the past like eight years. And last night it finally happened.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. And I also want to say, like, this is not just when we're talking about the sort of political apparatus of the Democratic Party being deployed in support of Cuomo. It wasn't just like the doordash guys like bringing out their checkbook. It was like the actual internal political machines of a whole bunch of very, very important and influential local and sort of mid level political officials threw their entire political machines behind Cuomo and then got fucking rolled in ways that are just absolutely hysterical. Entire political machines basically just got annihilated trying to stop this. It was, it reminds me in a lot of ways of like the way that like a bunch of the old machines broke in in Chicago with, with Brandon Johnson where like you're like Mike Madigan making one last appearance. The most powerful figure in Illinois politics for 30 years and just gets crushed in that election. So this was, this was both a money effort and a. We're using our political machines on the ground to try to do this. And they fucking lost. And it rules.

[Garrison Davis]

They were photoshopping images of Zoron to make him look more brown and Muslim. They were, yeah, they were making his beard longer. They were making his skin and his hair darker. Like they were pulling out all the stops and it didn't work.

[Andrew Cuomo]

It was like Clinton 2008. Like Barack Hussein Obama, like birther conspiracy.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Like, that's the last time I remember this party being this racist, like very, very specifically in these lines.

[Garrison Davis]

And in fact failed. And it didn't work. It failed.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

We'll talk about some of the actual results and Zoron's campaign itself after this break. All right, we are back. It's a beautiful sunny day in New York. It's actually way too hot. There's a massive heat wave week going, going through the entire east coast. New York has been like 100 degrees the past few days. Thank God it was 100 degrees on the day of the election. It kept all those Cuomo supporters home. We're calling him Mandate of Heaven Mandani. Good stuff. So let's, let's, let's talk about the actual results so far. So as of, as of this morning, Wednesday morning, we got 93% of the vote in on the first rank. Madani has 43.5% versus Cuomo's 36.4. And Zordon ally Brad Lander with 11.3, followed by a whole bunch of others. Now really as soon as like, numbers started coming in, like, like after the early vote, which, which we expected would, would lean in favor of Zordon, but after more and more results started coming in, Manhattan started looking more and more orange. And that's the, that's color the Times is using for Zordon. And this was the first like, sign for me that Zora might be having a pretty good night because people were expecting that, you know, pretty big chunks of Manhattan and certainly like Staten island in the Bronx would be, would be going towards Cuomo decisively or at least if, if this, if this was going to be Cuomo's night, that's what we would be seeing. And that's not what happened. The northern tip of Staten island leaning towards Mamdani, and really most of Manhattan except for the Upper west side and the Upper east side side went to Zordon. And that is like super, super, I guess, like surprising, but like positive surprise. Like surprisingly this is, this is like, this is great. Yeah, like a really, really strong night.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. One of the most interesting trends of this was that Mandami just, just absolutely annihilated like every Asian district.

[Garrison Davis]

Up, up 15.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Up 15. And not just okay, so you would kind of expect this in South Asian districts. He, he, he went in to a bunch of what are generally pretty conservative like, like Chinese districts and like Queens and shit and just fucking rolled them. Yeah, like in like South Brooklyn, like a very, very powerful sort of like right wing Chinese political machine like went to war against him. Just got annihilated. Right. The, the Asian vote in general had kind of been trending right, in the last half a decade based on sort of like anti immigrant shit, anti homeless shit and all of that.

[Garrison Davis]

Just like instantly pivoted everything south of Astoria in Queens. Just, just full, full zoron.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. And like just rolled these districts. And I think this is a thing where I think we're gonna talk more about the ICE stuff later, but I. I genuinely think part of what we're starting to see here is like, Brad Lander, who.

[Garrison Davis]

MVP Brad Lander, honestly, like, like a.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Critical part of this.

[Garrison Davis]

Kudos to him. Like, absolutely. Like, we certainly have different opinions on some key issues, but. But he really pulled out the stops to make sure that Cuomo does not get in.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And help Mamdani defend against some pretty, pretty horrific Islamophobic attacks.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. And like, and that alliance, I think was actually, was really, really important because it meant that the kind of like left flank of the liberals and the progressives and sort of social Democrats weren't fighting each other, which has been what's happening in like fucking every other city is that these two factions go to war and then like just the fucking sex predators win the election because of it. And here you get a very, very important strategic alliance that allows a bunch of people to vote for Bomdani who wouldn't have. And this, this sort of alliance that they forged here was just like stunningly successful. Basically, like outperformed expectations basically everywhere. I think this is also a kind of decisive anti ice thing because both Mamdani and Lander have been actually straight up on the front lines of like, anti ice stuff. Lander famously got arrested for trying to get in the way of a just hideously illegal disappearance of one of his constituents and got arrested for it. And I think that stuff we're seeing the political impacts of everyone being like, holy. They're trying to deport like every non white person in this country.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Mamdani up six points with the Hispanic, up five with white plus 15. Asian. Cuomo is, is up 18 with the black vote.

[Andrew Cuomo]

And Cuomo like underperformed there too.

[Garrison Davis]

He did underperform.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

One thing that's interesting is the medium income levels. Madani did better with middle class and high income vote. Middle class up 10, high income up 13. Whereas Cuomo did better up 13 with lower income, which, I mean, this is like some classic. We see this a lot in like national elections where like, like people vote against their own interests.

[Andrew Cuomo]

This is weird.

[Garrison Davis]

This is like what the Republican Party gets so much of their support from. Some of this is also like education bracket difference.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. And I think some of it also is like a lot of the voters who would have voted Lander and would not have supported Mamdani, like were given permission to back him and that boosted his vote share a lot.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. But like, in terms of like why lower income is swinging towards Cuomo, know.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Specifically people making under 50k a year swinging more towards Cuomo, even though Zoran is running a campaign specifically for those people that is also largely up in the Bronx.

[Andrew Cuomo]

I, I will also say like the other thing that's very weird about the way these are tabulated is because it's, it's tabulated by area, not by the actual people.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, correct.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Which means you can get these things where like you see this with Trump sometimes where like it looks like he's doing really well in like a district with like a really, with like really low median income. But what's happening is like every single rich person in that district voted and then no one else did.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

So the numbers are a bit weird when you're looking at these sort of like precinct counts.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Votes. But yeah, it's, it's been a, I don't know, it's a, is a constant trend in America. Although again, this is another thing that was actually very, very different from Chicago where in Chicago it was like basically pure income line for Brandon Johnson, the sort of like vaguely left person.

[Garrison Davis]

There is like New York is a very like middle class city in a lot of ways. Like there's a lot of people in the middle class bracket, a lot of people in the lower class bracket as well. But in terms of like, like medium income levels, there's like a huge huge number of like middle class voters. Specifically like the vote map for the, for the middle income is so much bigger.

[Mia Wong]

Bigger.

[Garrison Davis]

I think it is worth highlighting what made Zorin's campaign special. Right. Like people are probably pretty familiar with like the slick videos which. Yeah, he was really good at making videos. He is a great communicator. Probably his like biggest, like biggest strength is his ability to be like personable and is of just a pretty good public speaker. It's great at communication. His mom's a relatively well known filmmaker. Not super surprising that he, he put, he put a lot of work into making sure his like online and TV ads were like top notch. One of the more unique things that he did is a huge focus on multi language outreach.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Which like, obviously New York is a city of like dozens and dozens and dozens of languages and the Cuomo campaign did not focus on that, but this was a huge, a huge focus of Zoron's campaign. Like when you signed up for phone banking, you got to go through a massive drop down menu of languages to phone bank in. And Zoron himself was like speaking multiple languages on the campaign trail. He had a huge, huge volunteer ground game. There's canvassing, door knocks, phone banking, my apartment had people stop in multiple times in the past week alone. The biggest focus of his campaign itself was a focus on affordability. I want to play a ad that started running on TV and online about two weeks ago. This is one of his like less personal ads, right? Like, as opposed to his ads where he's like walking around New York talking to people, like addressing straight to camera, that kind of stuff which has kind of been the staple of his campaign. It's like this ad is not that it is more of like a classic political ad, but I think it still hits really hard. And like this, this one like kind of brainwormed itself into my head because of how like concise it is. And it hits so many things that, that even because of like the last like general election, right? Like the 2024 presidential, it, it reflects the things that a lot of voters are concerned about, which is affordability. Even if that means they will vote against their interests and vote in support of these like crazy tariffs. But I'm going to play this 32nd ad here.

[Andrew Cuomo]

There is a myth about this city. It's the lie that life has to be hard in New York. I believe we can guarantee cheaper groceries, we can raise the minimum wage, we can freeze the rent for more than 2 million tenants and build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes. It's city government's job to deliver that. We are done settling for less. Are you ready for a city we can afford?

[Robert Evans]

Are you ready to win this race?

[Donald Trump]

Paid for by Zoran for nyc.

[Garrison Davis]

So that was the main ad that's been going across TV the past two weeks. This is, this is his like final, final push. And it addresses this like conception of New York that's definitely been in my mind ever since I was a kid. I always thought this is a city you can only live in if you're, you know, very rich, if you're well off and like upon visiting here for the first time, I just realized how much that isn't true. How much this is like actually a working class city. How many people keep this massive like concrete machine running who do not live in like a Manhattan penthouse, obviously. And yes, it can be challenging, but we've like almost abandoned this place as like a zone of combat, as like a place to actually like build like an affordable, an affordable stable life. And to see a candidate just directly address this is so invigorating. He ran on freezing the rent free buses, a pilot program for city run grocery stores, free to low cost childcare, raising minimum wage, and he didn't cave or waver on controversial issues or apologize or redact for past states statements. He got really good at deflecting when people asked him about like previous statements about how you know, the NYPD is terrible. He did really good about moving towards talking about how NYPD should not be handling people in like mental health crises, how there should be other public safety workers who can help people in distress who are not the nypd. And just a very, very slick job handling some like massive, massive amounts of, of anti woke attacks referencing like the 2020 era of politics. Let's go on a break and then talk about his acceptance speech and the reaction from the national Democrats and Republican parties. Okay, we are so back. So the past few months Democrats have been asking this question like how do we, how do we reach young voters? How do we reach the young white male vote? We need like a Joe Rogan of the left, all these types of crazy things. And you had this guy Zordon who started to get massively popular with young people, including young, young men. And you saw this entire party mobilized to, to stop him, to, to suppress any, any movement that Zorro was able to make. And David Hogg, who is currently also being rat by the Democratic National Committee has been campaigning with Zoron the past few weeks. And, and he, he said a few days ago, quote, the same establishment that is spending millions to destroy Zoron will say in a few months that we need to spend millions on polling and testing to win back young people. Open your goddamn eyes.

[Mia Wong]

Lies.

[Garrison Davis]

It's free. And yeah, he's right. This is, this is the solution. The solution staring them in the face. And they were wanting to stop it.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah, young people are begging you to co opt them and they won't do it because they don't want, they would rather have Nazis and 1% higher taxes. They want to be co opted.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, and like actually fight for something. Like actually have something to like strive for. And like that's something that the Democrats have been so resistant to the past eight years. Like even, even Joe Biden's campaign wasn't like fighting for anything. It was to like return to normal. Kamala Harris's campaign wasn't really fighting for anything either. It was just to stop Donald Trump. And this is like this campaign wasn't just about beating Cuomo. It was also about like envisioning an actually positive future of the city. And I was legitimately surprised that Cuomo conceded so early on in his speech. He said, quote, tonight was not our night. Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won. And from the moves that Cuomo is making, it seems like he's probably not gonna run as an independent in the general like he maybe have been planning to if it was closer. It does not seem to be going that direction. It seems like he's kind of realized that his career is finished.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah, he got rolled. Go back to the suburbs.

[Garrison Davis]

Chuck Schumer called Sauron Wednesday morning and posted, quote, I've known Zoran Mamdani since we worked together to provide debt relief for thousands of beleaguered taxi drivers and fought to stop a fracked gas plant in Astoria. He ran an impressive campaign that connected with New Yorkers about affordability, fairness, and opportunity. I spoke with him this morning, and I'm looking forward to getting together soon. Hakeem Jeffries said congratulations to Zaran Mamdani on a decisive primary victory. Assemblyman Mamdani ran a strong campaign that relentlessly focused on the economy and bringing down the high cost of living in New York City. We spoke this morning and plan to meet in central Brooklyn shortly. The top dogs are bowing down.

[Andrew Cuomo]

All these Chuck Schubertreats are just straight up, please don't primary me, because AOC is going to beat him by 30.

[Garrison Davis]

He's going to get primary like, he's done.

[Andrew Cuomo]

He's going to get obliterated.

[Garrison Davis]

But I was expecting slightly more resistance. And it seems like parts of the Democrats have, like, realized that this actually is the future of the party now and there's no use fighting anymore. This is the way to go.

[Jordan Melgar]

Go.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. It goes against what all, like, the consultants are saying, right? To be like, you know, the Democrats went too woke. We went too far to the left. We have to return to the center. Even though that's what we've been doing for the Democratic Party for eight years, this election shows how much of that is, like, a complete bullshit lie. That, no, it's not about going too far left. It's about actually wanting to fight for something real. And I'm kind of surprised that the. These. These two top dogs are giving in to the Zomento.

[Andrew Cuomo]

I. I think also, and this is the thing, like, some of my friends brought up, is that, like, Mamdani, like, isn't really like, aoc.

[Garrison Davis]

No, no, no.

[Andrew Cuomo]

And this is something, like, very, very important for, like, New York politics, which is, like, he's not like, like, obviously politically he is, but, like, he's not a complete outsider to New York politics. All these people know him. They know him from, like, legislative shit, right? And he has, like, relationships with them in a way that would be very, very different if he was, like, I don't know, just like some, like, a complete outsider who'd been, like, a protest leader or whatever the fuck.

[Garrison Davis]

He has. He has proven himself.

[Andrew Cuomo]

He has, like, tense relations. But, like. Yeah, but, like, like, he, like, these people know him and that's something that can matter a lot in terms of, like, how these reactions play out and in terms of, like, how desperate they are to stop him.

[Garrison Davis]

The Attorney General of New York was making, like, Obama 2008 references being like this. This was the energy in New York last night. And, And I wasn't around for, for the 2008 presidential election. I mean, I was alive. I just don't remember because I was also in Canada. But it did feel pretty exuberant last night walking around Brooklyn. And like, this absolutely still is, like, a rejection of the Democratic Party establishment. That's what these results show. And we have to, like, claim a firm victory now, like, hardline with, With. With. With such a strong fist that, like, any potential fuckery in the future, whether it's from, like, other Dems or from the Republicans, like, from Trump, right? Like, they're obviously willing to arrest the New York City controller. So, like, any potential fuckery needs to look so much worse. People have to close ranks around Zoran, like, immediately and, like, strengthen him.

[James Stout]

He needs.

[Garrison Davis]

He needs to be, like, the face, like, if they're going to take this guy down, he needs to be, like, the face of everything for, like, the next.

[Andrew Cuomo]

While we're sort of seeing, like, slightly smaller sharks, like, like, trailing around the wake of the shark. Like, you were talking about the Democratic Attorney General, Leticia James, who gave a really, really compelling speech. Like, I actually think she's, like, a better speaker than any of the people involved in this race. And she is, like, she is 100% primary in the governor. Like, not 100%, but, like, probably primary in the governor next year. Like, this is, you know, like, people. People are sort of. People have been flocking around this for a while and I think, think. I don't know. This is. This is some real. Doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the winds are blowing. Like they are. Yeah, they are. They are. They are living in fear. They are. They are bending the knee. They are, etc. Etc. Very funny.

[Garrison Davis]

And now the Republican Party is going to be on the attack. The batons being passed from the establishment Dems to the Republicans to try to take down Zordon, or at least paint Zordon as this new, like, radical face of The Democratic Party like, like racism levels are going to. They're going to reach never before seen heights. It's going to be like post 911 all over again.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The National Republican Congressional Committee is already calling Zoran the new face of the Democratic Party, which yeah, he should be. That's like, like fudgeing. Bring it. If you want just like a breath of fresh air, I would recommend watching some financial news from, from Wednesday morning.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Oh, it's so good. Hot coffee.

[Jordan Melgar]

Summer, baby.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Hot coffee.

[Mia Wong]

Summer.

[James Stout]

Woo.

[Garrison Davis]

Executions in Central park are about to begin. The workers republic is established.

[Andrew Cuomo]

The Commonwealth of Labor rules.

[Garrison Davis]

We're waiting for Chairman Mamdani to make the final call. Lists are being made.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Only you can form. The Soviets seize your workplace.

[James Stout]

It's.

[Andrew Cuomo]

The time is now.

[Garrison Davis]

I do want to play a brief click from cnbc. Have you seen where what Batman is up against in Gotham and what the guy running for mayor is up again? That's what it reminds me of.

[Mia Wong]

They're taking Wall Streeters and making them walk out onto the ice in the.

[Andrew Cuomo]

East river and then they fall through.

[Mia Wong]

I mean there is a class warfare that's going.

[Leticia James]

So what's happened here?

[Donald Trump]

I think eat the rich type.

[Andrew Cuomo]

There's a division within the Democrats.

[Garrison Davis]

That's right. There is a division.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Long live the revelation, baby.

[Garrison Davis]

Eat the rich. There is a division of the Democratic Party party.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Walk them out onto the ice.

[Garrison Davis]

We're sending him onto the ice. Zoron, hand in hand with Bane and Killian Murphy are gonna be sending them onto the Hudson.

[Andrew Cuomo]

The spirit of Occupy lives.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh my God. Bill Amman, Cuomo and Trump backer said, quote, I was a bit depressed when I woke up this morning. Morning. But now I'm optimistic. I have a great idea on New York City and I will share it as soon as I can. We are looking into legal issues. Good luck. Good luck, Bill. Have fun out there.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Oh no, they're going to wait.

[Garrison Davis]

This is.

[Andrew Cuomo]

They're just going to do birtherism again.

[Leticia James]

Who cares?

[Garrison Davis]

Oh no, bring it, bring it.

[Andrew Cuomo]

I will say like this, this coverage, like I like people don't understand how unhinged his coverage is going to be. Like in Chicago when, when, when Brandon Johnson won the election. Brandon Johnson is like significantly to the right. Right of Mamdani. Right. When Brandon Johnson won the election, the Chicago press went so insane that all of them pretended to be pro immigrants.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Like do you understand how unhinged the press has to get here? Because like, like one of Johnson thinks that he was like fucking over like immigrants here and he was like the immigrant. The shelters are putting, put in more substandard and people are getting sick. And like we had the best coverage of immigration issues under Biden in the country because specifically that was the thing they were using to attack him.

[Garrison Davis]

I'm super curious what the Times is going to do because like they've also pulled out all the stops the past, the past few weeks to try to, to try to stop Zordon.

[Andrew Cuomo]

It's going to be unhinged.

[Garrison Davis]

The wind's blowing in his direction now. Though. Like I, I don't know what they're gonna do.

[Mia Wong]

I, I don't know.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Like, I think that specific class of people is just going to hate him until the end. Like, I think, I think like, like David Brooks is going to be writing calls about how there are like pogroms going on, like on the streets. Like Bret Stevens is going to be like, I don't know, they're, they're going to call it like Super Lebanon. Like it's going to be like levels of unhinged no one's ever seen before.

[Garrison Davis]

Now speaking of the Times, Obama's chief strategist was quoted in a New York Times article Wednesday morning, quote, there is no doubt that Trump and Republicans will try and seize on him as a kind of exemplar of what the Democratic Party stands for. The thing is, he seems both principled and agile and deft enough to confront those sorts of confrontations. Plays I do want to read off from a Fox News screenshot this morning showcasing Zoron's horrific, terrifying communist platform which includes housing freezing rent building affordable housing, creating city owned grocery stores, fare free buses, raising the minimum wage to $30 by 2030 and LGBTQIA plus protections expanding and protecting gender affirming care citywide wide, making NYC an LGBTQ AI plus sanctuary city and Trump proofing NYC to end ICE cooperation.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Hell yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Thank you, thank you Fox News for that, for that great list of reasons it's so great to like Soran Mamdani.

[Andrew Cuomo]

I think, I think, I think it's actually genuinely, really important is he's like the only Democratic candidate in fucking ages who actively campaigns on like putting more funding in the trans health care. Like $65 million of funding. Yeah, fucking being pro trans wins. Being anti trans gets your ass kicked back to the subur. Like fucking Cuomo.

[Robert Evans]

Eat shit.

[Garrison Davis]

Eat shit.

[Andrew Cuomo]

All of you Democratic strategists, fuck off and die. Eat shit. You will be the ones in the fucking graves that you're digging for us.

[Garrison Davis]

Like fuck off.

[Andrew Cuomo]

We have Dug your electoral graves.

[Garrison Davis]

This is why when I was at this, like, trans open mic at Metropolitan last night, like, the whole room just, like, lit up in cheers. Because, yeah, like, we've been. We've been dealing with the past, like, six months, this idea that, like, trans rights is. Is like, the thing that's killing democratic politics and fucking. No, it isn't.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

And quote Cuomo, Cuomo red as a fucking transphobe, because he is. And it didn't work. This is the joint, joint feminist transgender victory over the forces of the terf sex predator. Fuck em.

[Garrison Davis]

To wrap up my stuff here, I do want to play one minute from Zoron's acceptance speech, which I think speaks for itself.

[Robert Evans]

And it's where the mayor will use.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Their power to reject Donald Trump's fascism, to stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbor, and to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party. A party where we fight for working people with no apology. A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few. It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker. If this campaign has demonstrated anything to the world, it is that our dreams can become reality.

[Garrison Davis]

I sure hope this is the model for the Democratic Party going forward. Mia, you wanted to close on a sad note.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah, I was really depressed this entire night because I remember feeling a lot like this in, like, 2023 in Chicago. Well, yeah, because this happened in Chicago.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, well, it's not this, but a version of this. Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

And, like, obviously Brandon Johnson was, like, significantly to the right of, like, everything that's been happening in New York. Like, not.

[Donald Trump]

Not.

[Andrew Cuomo]

He wasn't like, a right winger, but he was like, you know, like the local DSA had conflict with him from other stuff, but, like, you know, I remember feeling like this. And then one year later, like, SWAT teams, like, deployed by the mayor that he claimed he didn't send were beating up art students outside, like, literally in the middle of downtown for trying to have a Palestinian case. Enchantment. And, you know, like, my bitter, cynical, personally got rat by the mayor's office.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Like, cynicism on this is like, it's gonna be weird. There's gonna be a lot of that sucks.

[Garrison Davis]

This. This guy is, like, advocated defunding the police and. And has attacked, like, the NYPD for years.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And now he's ostensibly going to be in charge of it, and he's. He's not going to be able to abolish the NYPD like that. That's not gonna happen.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Garrison Davis]

So there's going to be a degree of like, you know, moral like crisis. Like he's going to have to work against some of the things that he stated he believes in.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

And on a structural level, there's, there's a really significant problem here, which is that like the moment you become the leader of a capitalist city, right. It becomes your job to keep the economy running. And the problem is that like, keeping, keeping a capitalist economy running means you have to, your job is now maintaining growth, growth for the, for this economy.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Andrew Cuomo]

And maintaining growth through the economy means figuring out how to, how to have corporations continue to make more and more money. And that's not compatible with being a socialist. And everyone who has ever tried to like, deal with this crisis, you either, like, you, you, you have two paths. It's like one, you become a capitalist, right? And we see this all over the place, right. It's like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's Barcelona and Camboo coming into power, which is like this sort of like left wing council kind of like book tonight thing. And then they immediately start like evicting migrants.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Or two. Or two. You actually do the thing, you do the thing you do. You do the actual socialism and we fucking, we like, you know, this is, this is the beginning of the end of fascism in a way where we see a fundamental change in the structure of our economic system and that can be the outcome of this. But we have to build it. Not him, him, like.

[Garrison Davis]

And I, I think the most he's going to be able to do is provide a bit of a safer zone for us to operate in in New York.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

He's going to be introducing more like social democratic, like, policies. Like he, he's going to make the city like financially easier to live in.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. Things will suck less, which is good.

[Garrison Davis]

He is going to, to the extent of his power, fight against Trump's efforts to deport your neighbors. And like, that is, is so much better than both what Cuomo would do and Eric Adams who is actively collaborating with the Trump administration. So this man's not going to actually be the Lisa Al Gib. He's not actually going to be like the guy that ushers in the red revolution, which is not even something I necessarily want, but I think what he can do is make this an actually better place to live right now.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And specifically make it a better place to live as the national politics in this country are controlling. Controlled by a fascist and a cabinet full of fascists.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

And he can make the largest city in the country the rock upon which the tide of fascism breaks. And that matters.

[Garrison Davis]

That does. Well, that does it for us today. Greatest city in the world.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Tier 1.5 Chinese city. Let's go.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, who's got Ed?

[Garrison Davis]

That's not how we start these episodes.

[Donald Trump]

Wow.

[Mia Wong]

That's how we're starting this one. Garrison. It's our.

[Garrison Davis]

Welcome to Executive Disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you.

[James Stout]

Yay.

[Mia Wong]

That's right, motherfuckers.

[Garrison Davis]

That's Robert Evans. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm also joined by Mia Wong and James Stout. This week we are covering the week of June 18 to June 25.

[Mia Wong]

That's right, a good week where nothing but good things happened. Assuming you are someone who manufactures 30 pounds gravity utilizing bunker busting bombs.

[James Stout]

30 pound. That's quite a small one.

[Mia Wong]

30,000.

[James Stout]

30,000.

[Mia Wong]

30,001. Sorry. Anyway, we're talking about Iran. We're going to start with Iran. We're going to start with Iran's nuclear program. And I think we should start. We need to. We need to start by giving the Cool Zone Media Cool Kids guide for how to enrich uranium.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Oh, no. I don't want to get arrested. Robberish.

[Mia Wong]

Now, Mia, it's not illegal to tell people how to enrich uranium. Google will do it. And I assume they're correct. Correct.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Robert, it is. It is legal for white people to do this. I don't know if it's legal for.

[Mia Wong]

Me to do this. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. Look, if I've learned one thing, it's that it's okay for white people to talk about any kind of bomb on the Internet. So we'll be fine. I'll be fine. That's what matters.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Robert, do I have kidnapping insurance? Do we have an extraction team for me when I go to ice prison?

[James Stout]

No, we don't.

[Mia Wong]

We have an extraction team, but it's not the cool kind anyway. So let's talk about how to make nukes. Because one thing you'll constantly hear whenever the US or Israel talks about Iran's nuclear program is that they're just three to eight months away. Right? Or weeks away. This is what you'll hear sometimes, just technically. If three months is a number of weeks away, whatever.

[Garrison Davis]

And they've been saying this for longer than I've been alive.

[James Stout]

Yeah, for longer than Robert and I have been.

[Mia Wong]

Here's the thing.

[Robert Evans]

Thing.

[Mia Wong]

It's technically correct. Not in a way that, like, is correct in the way they are trying to push it, but in a way that is like, literally correct, which is that Iran paused their nuclear program in 2003. The current Ayatollah has not given the command to start it up again. There is no evidence that it is currently operative. Back in March, US Military intelligence, the dia, concluded that there was no indication Iran had decided or attempted to restart their nuclear program program. That said, it has been true since 2003 that they are potentially about three months or so away from having a nuke because of the way that making nukes work. So in order to make the standard kind of nuclear weapon that we're talking about here, you need a bunch of enriched uranium, right? And there's two kinds of uranium. There's 235 and there's 238. And naturally they always show up together and there's always a lot more 238 than 235. And 238 is fucking bullshit if you're trying to make yourself a bomb, right? You want the 235. And I'm not going to go into a ton of detail about, like, how you do this, but because of just the nature of how uranium 235 and 238 work, they're chemically identical. So you can't use chemical reactions to separate them, right? So you can't use any of the easy ways that you would like, separate one from the other in order to concentrate the kind of uranium that they would want. The only way to actually do that is by using a centrifuge, which is it, in short, uses the magic of spinning in order to separate out the uranium that, that you want from the uranium that's not very useful to you. And Iran has a substantial quantity of like 60% enriched uranium, which is basically one step away from 90%, which is like what you need to actually build the bomb that they need. And they've had a shitload of this uranium sitting around for a while, right? Because it keeps well and theoretically, if they were to start their program up again, it would be theoretically possible to enrich it in fairly short order to the concentration that you need, right? And at that point, once you have a sufficient quantity, and you'll hear slightly different numbers, but generally agreed that they have a sufficient quantity of uranium that is is fairly enriched, that if they were to finish the process, they could make somewhere between like 8 to 10 warheads with it, right? Like something somewhere in that vicinity and they could have a functional warhead within a matter of weeks after enriching. Because enriching the uranium is the hard part. Once you've done that, it's very easy to make a nuclear weapon. Right. Sufficiently skilled people could do it with like fairly minimal technology if they like. Getting the enriched uranium is the hardest part. So it's technically true that Iran is that, you know, close to having a weapon. They have been since 2003. But the more important part of the story is that they have not been working on a weapon. And there's no evidence, even the DIA concluded in March that they were not actively working on a nuclear weapon. So what's actually been going on here is that while the Ayatollah has not reauthorized the program in quite some time, pressure has been, it's been generally agreed by people watching, you know, Iranian politics that pressure has been building on him in order to reauthorize the program. Right. There's a good CBS News article on this that notes that the U.S. intelligence Community Assessment stated that there was an erosion of a decades long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public brought on by all of the pressure against Iran by Israel. Right. In other words, the more Israel and the United States threaten and actually do bomb Iran, the more public support there is and the more, the more acceptable it becomes to talk about restarting the program. Right. Because continuing to bomb and attack them makes the case very strongly that, well, we probably need one of these fucking things, right? Because like other, like, otherwise they're simply not going to stop. And that's been the lesson of the 21st century, which is if you are a country that has beef with the United States or any other nuclear power, the safest thing to do is get a nuke and then get more nukes as quickly as possible.

[Garrison Davis]

Possible.

[Mia Wong]

Right. So that's the situation that we're in. Iran has not moved any closer to having a nuclear weapon over the last 20 some years. But because they've got this uranium, you can always technically say, well, they could be months away. Right. So this all leads us up to last week's strikes on Iran. These were using a wing of B2 bombers. They're actually quite. There was quite a few aircraft involved. Involved Prior to the bombing attack. There was a lot of discussions like the United States preparing for much more extensive action in Iran because we flew all of these different like, refueling planes all around the world and we're like setting up very clearly this like massive set of infrastructure to refuel and keep a bunch of planes in the air. Now the reality is that all of these refueling planes and whatnot were part of this bombing mission. And the bombing mission did not just include the seven bombers that actually struck a rocket on, but another wing of B2 bombers that flew in the opposite direction as part of a feint, as well as fighter jets and recon planes that, you know, were necessary to help set up and protect the whole apparatus that we were setting up to get these seven B2s to the target area. Right now the actual mission was about 37 hours, which is not the longest mission B2 crews have flown. That was 44 hours. And it was over Afghanistan in Thousand Two, 2001. And keep a pin in that because we will be talking about how successful that mission was because there's some similarities between it and what was done in Iran. Now, the B2s that we flew over Iran were armed with these big 30,000 pound bunker busting bombs. And we'll talk about these as well in a while. But there's a very interesting article on CNN Politics by Michael Williams that interviews one of the guys who was part of the law longest B2 mission, that mission over Afghanistan, who talked about like, what you have to do in order to carry out a mission like this. And I want to bring it up because, you know, in the middle of this very shameful episode for the United States, it reminds me of what makes me proud of this country and what makes me proud of this country is our tendency to dose bomber pilots with massive quantities of amphetamines so that they can be absolutely spun off their asses when bombing a foreign country. And that's exactly how you get bomber teams over to a country like Iran and for 37 hours of flight time is everybody is prescribed amphetamines and they are high as shit. They are pissing in Ziploc bags full of kitty litter. They've got a chemical toilet in the back. They're just spun off of their asses pissing into cat litter. And that's, that's how strikes like this are managed, which I think is beautiful.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, except for the whole, you know, Trump starting a little war aspect of it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, sure, sure. The massive civilian casualties are always a trap.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The death of innocent people.

[Mia Wong]

But, you know, it also, it was from fighter pilots that we get swinger culture. And it's from fighter pilots and swinger culture that we get popularized amphetamines in the United States. And without that, you know, I don't know, we actually probably wouldn't miss out on much. That was very good. No, but the 70s would have been different.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Nothing of value was lost.

[Robert Evans]

Might have been better.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it might have been better. I don't know. I feel like Jefferson Airplane wouldn't have been as good.

[James Stout]

But maybe they'd been called something else.

[Mia Wong]

Jefferson Train, yeah, maybe they'd have been called something else. So the primary munition that these B2s were supposed to be dropping over Iran and the whole reason why the United States was needed because Israel had carried out a bunch of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. But basically Iran, being intelligent, knew that like, well, they're going to bomb these facilities like as long as they exist. And it's very difficult to get like these centrifuges made, right? Like that's the hardest part of getting a nuclear weapon is getting the equipment that will allow you to, you to enrich uranium. And so it's very precious. And you can't, you don't just have, you can't just remake it super easily. So Iran buried this shit, right? They had a number of different sites which were hit by both the US and Israel, the most deeply buried of which was a place called at a place called Fordo. And the actual facilities were buried underneath like the ridge of a mountain beneath 90 meters or about 300ft of rock, right? And we have this tendency in the west in part because, because of generations of like military industry propaganda and in part because the Air Force really wants you to believe this, that bombs are a lot more powerful than they are now. Bombs are great at blowing up buildings that are just hanging around on the surface of the earth. And they're great at killing people, they're great at killing civilians, people who are not, you know, armored or defended against them. They're awesome at that. You know what bombs suck at is going more than a couple of feet below the earth. They're terrible at it. Even really big bombs, even the scariest bombs we've ever made, absolute dog shit at getting through, especially like stone and rock. And so Israel was like, we don't have the capacity, we don't have the technology to actually like crack a facility like Fordo. The only thing that can is these bombs that can only be carried by the B2, which are these 30,000 pound bunker busters, right? And the question that comes up then is like, okay, well this Fordo is 90 meters. It was beneath 90 meters of rock. How deep can these GBU 57s, these massive ordnance penetrator bombs, which had not been used in combat before, how deep can these fuckers go, right? That seems like A simple question you will usually see most of the graphics on the news will show that it penetrates 60 meters, right. Or 200ft. And then it detonates. Right. Which could do damage to a facility that's buried deeper. Right. If you're detonating it like 60 meters down and it goes down 90 meters, that explosion could do enough extra damage that it could damage a facility that's just like another 30 meters below. Right. Theoretically. However, that doesn't tell the full story and I'm very indebted in this part to an NPR article by Joff Brumfell, who did actually like the math. Right. So we figured out a long time ago when we started bombing things, there's like a mathematical equation to how far a bomb that's a given weight and dropped from a given height and has a given explosive payload load can penetrate through different kind of substrates. Right. That you can just kind of plug that equation in. And yeah, I want to quote from Jeff's article right now because it does a very good job of like looking at kind of why this was sort of a dog plan from the start. I went back to take a look at the math from those early studies and I found it was actually straightforward. The so called penetration equations have existed since the 1960s and depend on a limited number of factors. Factors including the shape of the nose cone, the weight and diameter of the weapon, the speed at which it hits the ground, and crucially, the type of earth it gets dropped on. It depends enormously on the kind of rock, says Raymond Gene Laws, the professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the original Authors of the 2005 National Academic Study on Earth Penetrators. When I ran the calculations using a key equation from that study, I found that the GBU 57 could go up to 80 meters underground if it was dropped in silty cloud in medium strength rock. Things looked far different. The GBU 57 could only go around 7.9 meters beneath the earth. So that's not nearly the 60 meters that you're seeing claimed on most. And it's nowhere close to 90. Right. And there's a good amount of data we already have. Trump obviously claimed as soon as we did this bombing run. Cause we, you know, dropped a fairly heavy cluster of these bombs, 12 on Fordo. And Trump's claim was that like, yeah, it was completely destroyed. His press secretary said when you drop 12 30,000 pound bombs, bombs with perfect precision on a target, there's only one result, complete destruction. And that's not true. Even if you just, like, look at the past of us using these weapons, I mentioned earlier that 2001 mission to Afghanistan, that was us trying to blow up that purported, like, cave fortress that bin Laden had.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You may have seen the diagram in.

[Mia Wong]

Tora Bora, and we didn't. It didn't work because it's really hard for all of our technologies might. It's very hard to blow up something buried under rock. Like, it doesn't matter how many of these giant bombs you have, we're shit at it right now. There's still some debate. The DIA assessment says that basically we did damage, but it was at most maybe enough to knock them back by eight months and probably less than that. Right. It's kind of debatable. And we don't have perfect data on this. Right. I don't know that Iran has perfect data on this, because one thing we can confirm is that the bombing sealed the entrances. So it's possible they can't get into Fordo quite yet. Right. Like, there's going to be some work needed to do to be able to get these facilities. If they were to do that, which again, they were not based on US Military intelligence, were not doing prior to the bombing. But based on satellite imagery, it does not look like there's not really good evidence that we did any kind of significant damage. There's some reports that some centrifuges were damaged, but those reports state that other centrifuges were intact. So it's one of those things where, like, there's not any strong evidence. And in fact, the DIA's report suggests that, like, the damage done was fairly minimal given the extreme cost of this operation and the brags that the administration has been making that, like, they totally destroyed this. These facilities. Right. We simply did not totally destroy these facilities. Now, it's a little too early to say so precisely, like, how bad is this? Right. But, you know, again, that's kind of the. The early data is that, like the DIA assessment says we set them back maybe a few months at most. One of the fun things about this is that Iran moved their uranium prior to the bombing. Right. Like, you can't really move these giant centrifuges or these big underground facilities, but you can take the uranium and you can just drive it places, and we don't know exactly where they hit it. The head of the iaea, which is the international, like, Atomic Energy Commitment Mission, has already come out and said, like, I have no idea where Iran's uranium is. And it's the job. The IAEA's job is to account for every fucking gram of uranium held by every country in the world. Right? They are supposed to know at all times where it is. And he's like, I have no fucking idea. Like, we don't know where it is and we don't know how much damage is done, but we don't know where this is. There is at least one report stating that Iran's plan was basically load this up into the trunks of a bunch of cars and park them in public parking lots. Because they probably. They're not going to bomb a public parking lot outside of, like, a store. Which is really funny, actually, to be.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Fair, the US Might do that.

[James Stout]

Israel will certainly bomb a fucking parking lot. They hit a prison.

[Mia Wong]

But which parking. There's so many.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. And they'll play a shell game, right? Like, they will send hundreds of trucks and vans from every location.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, right. They'll send way more. It's just the funniest thing in terms of. It also points out how doomed efforts like this are, where you're just like, well, with our technology and our fancy stealth bombers, clearly we should be able to figure this out. And it's like, nah, we're just going to park. We need 100 cars. We'll bring in 600 cars and we'll park them randomly all around the country. Fuck you. What are you going to do? Bomb every parking lot? Like, it's very funny.

[Garrison Davis]

Quote from Parking lot bombed. What are you going to do? Bomb me?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Anyway, that's what's going on with us. Bombing Iran. And so again, very expensive, probably did not do much.

[Garrison Davis]

Trump the Dove strikes again.

[James Stout]

The peacemaker. They call him the peacemaker.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. We'll talk about the peace bullshit after this. We should throw to ads first.

[James Stout]

Thank you, Northrop Grumman, for sponsoring this segment.

[Mia Wong]

We're back. So, like the Ford O nuclear enrichment facility, Trump is between a rock and a hard place with. With this whole carrying out illegal strikes on a sovereign nation thingamajig in that he came. He came to power in large part by promising, I'm not gonna do a World War iii. I'm not gonna. All these Democrats are crazy warmongers, but not old Donny T. You know, you can trust me to be a peacemaker. And then he fucking bombs Iran, which is kind of a major escalation. Right? So. And we're not gonna. There's been people arguing, would this have happened under Kamala? Yadda yadda. I don't. I don't. I don't give A shit, I don't give a shit. It's happening now. Fuck it. Fuck off. Like, I, I, it's not, it's not worth talking about. We'll talk about what's happening, which is that this is a major escalation. But Trump has had to, he's kind of been hedging between like, yeah, look at how fucking cool our weapons are. We fucked them up so bad. And also, and now it's time for peace. We have to stop the violence. Pilots, why don't you guys come to the table, let's all be friends.

[Garrison Davis]

And getting pretty pissed at the Israeli government.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. Because he announced a ceasefire and Iran was like, after striking back and hitting U.S. bases in a number of countries was like, okay, we're done. Like, we did the thing we had, we, we did the face saving thing. We have to launch missiles after you bomb us. We can't not do that. Yeah, but we did it. We got our strike off and we're not going to continue if you guys don't continue. Right. And Trump was like, I did it, I made peace. Look at how good I am. And then Israel immediately starts carrying out more strikes and Trump is, are we gonna play the audio of him cursing on tv? Cuz it's very good. Here's Trump being confronted about this, like within hours of this Israeli strikes.

[Andrew Cuomo]

You know what we have? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

[James Stout]

Do you understand that?

[Mia Wong]

So that's a pissed off man. And he's pissed off again. I do think people are generally wrong when they're like, oh, Trump's much better on Israel because he can confront Netanyahu. That hasn't really proved to be the case yet. But unlike Biden, Trump clearly doesn't care about, like, he's willing to be pissed at Netanyahu. And he was really pissed in this.

[Garrison Davis]

Like openly, like, yeah, absolutely.

[Mia Wong]

Openly, very. Because again, he's hanging a lot, lot on, like, nobody would dare go back to war when I said they were at peace. Right. Like, that's that this is like an ego thing for him more than anything. He certainly doesn't give a shit about the human cost of any of this.

[James Stout]

No, certainly not.

[Mia Wong]

But yeah, and so that's where we are right now. Are we done? Will there continue to be more strikes and retaliation strikes? Something's got to happen. It's not done. Right. None of it's done.

[Andrew Cuomo]

No.

[Mia Wong]

But you know, also, Iran's not stupid, stupid Right. This is a country that has been in these circumstances and in variations of this conflict for a long time, and they are neither foolish nor suicidal. So they're, they're not going to be completely reckless here. Right. Like, I, I think you're seeing, and what you've seen is pretty calculated responses where they are aware of how much they think they can push when and where. Right. And so I, you know, I think we're likely to, like, I don't know that I think the escalation ladder is in like a runaway state. I don't see that as evidence right now. But this is not the end of, of this, right?

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. So something we got news of today in the last, this is Wednesday. We got this in the last, like hour or so is that Trump, like, said on tv, the thing that you're not actually supposed to say, which is that the US And Iran coordinated to have the Iran shoot these bases.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, my God.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Just like, okay, like they, like, we literally went on TV and said, coordinate, quote, you saw that working vessels were shot at us the other day and Iran was very nice. They said, we're going to shoot them at one. Okay. I said it's fine, everybody evacuated, not the bases. So, like, obviously the US has always done this, but like, we've never had the President go on TV and just say, yeah, we let Iran shoot empty military bases.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, we worked it out with them.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yep, yep, yep.

[Mia Wong]

This highlights something that's so interesting. And when I, when I say this, I don't mean to ignore the fact that real people are dying, like, particularly in Iran.

[Andrew Cuomo]

It's horrifying.

[Mia Wong]

But there is a massive degree of this at the, at the, at the nation state level. That is kayfabe. Right. And that, that proves it. Like, Iran is like, okay, look, kayfabe.

[Garrison Davis]

With the cost of like, yeah, thousands.

[Mia Wong]

Of lives, people will die.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's dick measuring the.

[Mia Wong]

Fact that Iran is willing to talk with the US about like, okay, what can we strike? That's not going to escalate things for you. And like, yeah, we'll pull, you know, whatever. And also, so that's, to a degree that was going on with the strikes on Iran, right, where they got enough of a warning that they were able to move their physical material. Right. Like this is there. Which is not to say that, like, things are like, copacetic and friendly, but everybody's got everybody. But Israel has like a vested interest in things not escalating too much. Even the Trump administration, right. Has a vested Interest in, like, there's a line we don't want to cross because we just don't see any, like, benefit in it. Right. And that is. That is a part of what's going on here.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Anyway, that's probably enough talk about Iran and nukes and stuff. But anyway, remember, folks, you too, could be a nuclear power if you can just figure out how to make a functional centrifuge and get a shitload of uranium. You know, it's not that hard. It just comes out of the ground.

[James Stout]

Depending on where that ground is.

[Mia Wong]

Depending on where that ground is.

[James Stout]

Should we talk about immigration?

[Mia Wong]

Sure.

[James Stout]

All right.

[Mia Wong]

I love immigration.

[James Stout]

Sadly, Robert, Congress does not agree with you.

[Mia Wong]

I guess they rarely do, James. They rarely do.

[James Stout]

Yeah. One of the things they say about Robert Evans. I want to start actually with a little I know disclaimer rant. Almost every day for the past six months, someone has sent me a tip saying that ICE are raiding a hospital. This has happened almost every month for the past 10 years. I have received this tip thousands of times. To my knowledge, it has never been true. Nonetheless, this rumor persists, and especially among people who might be newer to migrant advocacy or newer to observing immigration enforcement. What is happening in 100% of these cases that I have looked into is that Customs and Border Protection or ICE or some other immigration detention agency is taking somebody who is in their custody to the hospital, and then that person is getting treatment, and then they are released again to that immigration agency. Normally, those immigration. Immigration agents can't enter non public areas of the hospital, I. E. Treatment rooms, but they can enter public areas, I. E. Lobbies. This rumor, which continues to spread, which I've seen people, including journalists, sharing on social media, kills people. Right. I'm aware of one incident in which someone was having a medical emergency and didn't want to go to hospital. A medical emergency which could very well have killed them within hours and didn't want to go to hospital because they had heard that ICE was at the hospitals. I understand that people are coming to this with varying levels of experience. It's cool. It's great that people are showing up for migrants, but people need to exercise caution around this because it is not harmless to spread that rumor unless you are absolutely certain that it is true. It hurts people. And I keep seeing it, and I think it's important to say something about it. Including two other journalists. Okay. With that said, let's start with some good news about immigration. ICE agents in San Diego scattered from the San Diego court when the newly appointed San Diego Bishop Michael Pham, who is himself a refugee, he was an unaccompanied minor from Vietnam, entered the court to accompany people to their immigration hearings. Bishop Pham was joined by Imam Taha Hassaneh, I hope I'm saying that correctly. Of the Islamic center of San Diego and Our lady of Guadalupe Church Pastor Scott Santoro. They say they're going to keep doing this, quote as needed. So this is actually one of the very few things, at least in courthouses, that seems to have worked. We've covered this in previous weeks, that what is happening is that the government is dismissing the case against people and then immediately detaining them and forcing them to fight for their asylum while detained. This has been happening all across the country. San Diego is the only place I'm aware of where religious leaders right. From across the religious community are accompanying migrants to their detention hearings. So we saw Brad Lander doing this in New York. Politician. But this is the only instance I'm aware of where clerics are doing it. And it seems to have worked. It seems to have in this instance or in these instances, prevented ICE from detaining people. And, like, I'm not a religious person myself, but I will say that I respect this. I think this is cool. I've reported before, I spoke a lot about Jesuits in the Darien Gap and how impressed and in awe of their work with migrants I am. And I think this is another example of people organizing with groups who they might not normally organize with, but that having really beneficial results. Right. Huge win for the woke Marxist Pope as well. It's always good to see. Yep.

[Mia Wong]

Hell, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Huge win for Marxism this week.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Generally a big week for Marxism. In other news, a district court has ordered another man, Jordan Alexander Melgar Salma, returned from El Salvador. He's Salvadorian, but he was removed 30 minutes after a court order barred his removal, and thus he was removed in violation of that court order. Right. And the district court has ordered him returned. I'm not aware if he's been returned yet. On Wednesday. We shall see, I guess, because the Supreme Court court has allowed the Trump administration this week to continue removing migrants to countries which are not specifically noted on their removal orders. Right. We spoke about this before in the case of the attempt of the DOJ to remove people to South Sudan. We've spoken about it in terms of removing people to El Salvador who are not themselves Salvadorian. Right. This isn't really deportation. I think rendition is a more accurate way to describe it, and it will certainly result in people facing hardship and more likely than not, people facing torture and probably being killed, it is a disaster. It was a very short and unsigned order. And the justices did. It wasn't a final decision. Right. But they paused the Massachusetts district court ruling, which had in turn paused the process. So the process is now ongoing. Again, it's worth noting that the Massachusetts district court ruling didn't stop them doing it. It allowed them a meaningful attempt at expressing their reasonable fear of torture. Right. Three justices dissented. Sotomayor, Keegan and Jackson. Sotomayor wrote the dissent. I'm just going to quote from it here briefly. Apparently, quote, the court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a district court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the government to provide notice and process, process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled. As she pointed out, the government was seeking relief from disorder in the Supreme Court, but had also been openly flouting it. Right. This flouting of lower court orders lines up with Arez Ruveni, a DOJ lawyer who was fired for, I guess, not following the DOJ line in the Abrego Garcia case case. He filed a whistleblower complaint in Congress this week that the NYT has seen. You can read the whole article in the show notes, but in there you can hear Emile Beauvais, who's. He was, he was Trump's personal lawyer in 2023. Trump has now nominated him to be a judge, but he tells DOJ lawyers that they need to be open to responding you to court orders. The allegations in a whistleblower complaint are pretty concerning. Right. In terms of the ability of the courts to stop the DOJ doing anything, I would urge you to read it. It's going to be linked in the show notes. We don't really have time to summarize all of it here, but I think, I think the fuck you comment summarizes it pretty well.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And speaking of things that you should buy, here's Ants.

[James Stout]

We're back.

[Mia Wong]

And since we've just done ads, let's let James give an ad for something that's not a product or a service, but is better than either of those.

[James Stout]

Things if you have any money left after investing in all the wonderful gold that our advertisers want to sell you. One of the people who we have interviewed on this show extensively, who came into the United States through Hukumba and who provide provided us with a really in depth account of his immigration detention, has let me know that he is struggling to find a lawyer and pay for a lawyer. So far he's been taking care of all of his legal paperwork himself, which is very admirable. But obviously, like many migrants, he understands that his chances of success will be much, much better with a lawyer. Something he himself is struggling to pay for right now, whilst also supporting a family. If you would like to help, help. The link for that is www.gofundme.comf standing with our family. It will also be the first link in the sources for this episode. So if you're listening on your podcast app, you can scroll down to the show notes, find it there, click it and help out if you'd like to.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, I think it's time for G's good news roundup. And let's start with some actually, like, fantastic news. Mahmoud Khalil has been released after 104 days in ICE custody. He missed the birth of his first child.

[James Stout]

Was it his first time meeting his child or did he get to meet his child?

[Mia Wong]

I think he'd gotten one visit where he got to meet his kid, if I'm, if I'm remembering correctly, kind of about 2/3 of the way through his detainment.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But now he is back in New York.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

As his case will continue. This is a good step in the fight against disappearing people for political differences. Like, this is important fight. This is possibly like the, one of the most important, like national pieces of news that's still a developing story right now.

[Mia Wong]

I've seen some responses that are like, yeah, so after 104 days of being illegally detained, you know, a guy finally got released. This is still a bad thing. And like, that's true. This is a bleak story. But like, it's actually kind of like foolish to not acknowledge this as a significant win. Right. Like, it's important.

[Garrison Davis]

They did not want to release it. They wanted to keep him locked up forever.

[Mia Wong]

They did not want to release him. Yes, this is good. This is a good thing. And it's proof that it is worth fighting because you can win.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like every day he's not in jail and that he's with his family is a better day.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. Is a win. Yeah, it's a victory. Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Also some good news in New York. It is so quiver. Zoran Mandani won the Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City Tuesday night. This is quite exciting. I got to announce to a massive room full of trans people that Cuomo conceded to Zoron and I have not felt better in months. It Was like the, one of the, one of the, one of the brightest rays of hope that we've had and a rejection of like the old Democratic Party establishment.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Zoran had to beat like $30 million of super PAC funding against him. He mobilized the youth vote in ways we've never seen before. In New York, a quarter of early voters were first timed Democratic primary participants. Zoran ran a very, very solid campaign with slick videos online and on TV, multi language outreach, 50,000 like on street volunteers canvassing door knocks, phone baking and a distinct focus on affordability including freezing rent free buses, pilot program for city run grocery stores, free to low cost childcare, raising minimum wage and resisting Trump's efforts to use ICE to deport New Yorkers. Myself and Mia did a full episode yesterday if you want to have a more in depth look at the New York mayoral primary.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. We should also note here that per a CBS New York interview with former Governor Cuomo, he has stated that he is considering running against Mamdani as an independent. So we'll see how that goes. We might get to see Cuomo lose twice in a year, which would be pretty funny.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I mean honestly I would be surprised if he actually decides to run in the general. A lot of like, like Ackman is, is going behind Adams it seems. There's certainly going to be targeting from like Republicans and maybe even some Dem like establishments.

[Mia Wong]

Oh yeah, sure, definitely.

[Garrison Davis]

So to like remove Zordon as like a viable candidate, they're going to pull out some crazy like red scare communist shit from the 50s.

[Mia Wong]

Absolutely.

[Garrison Davis]

They might try to remove his legal status as a citizen citizen. Like they're going to pull out the stops. But this is like after the 2024 election. This is like the first, first like clear look at what a new Democratic Party could look like. And right now it is the face of Zoron. Yeah, that's all I have.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And you know, it's nice to see a win again. It's like the Mahoud Khalil thing, right? It's nice.

[Garrison Davis]

Absolutely.

[Mia Wong]

Like this is, this is good things can happen now. Does this mean. Is this a part of a fucking progressive wave that's sweeping the country? Does this prove that, you know, being pro Palestine and pro trans is the best electoral strategy in 100% of districts? No, like this is, this is New York. We like, this is one election, but it's like good news. And it, I think it, there's a very solid possibility that we will see this as like part of a growing trend that with when candidates are actually left wing and unabashedly so, when they don't try to tack to the middle, when they don't try to embrace, you know, a hodgepodge of like, contradictory policies in order to please some sort of like, farcical median, theoretical median voter that they do better. I do think that, like, maybe that's what we'll see. But you know, obviously one election in New York City is not one. One primary in New York City. City isn't enough to prove that, like, this is going to be the same kind of thing we see nationwide.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, but it did show how to mobilize like a huge number of like, young people and like, a lot of, a lot of like, young men, which the Democratic Party's been like, whining about for the past few months.

[Mia Wong]

Terrible about. Yeah. And that's a big deal.

[Garrison Davis]

Like how, how, how do we reach out to, to the young men in this country? And like, Zordon showed you how to do this. He's actually fighting for, like, real things that make your life better.

[Mia Wong]

You can get people excited about your candidacy. If you're stand and getting people excited, it's even more important than just being like, well, this theoretically polls the best. Because if you do take all the positions that poll well, but nobody gives a shit and you don't have any kind of excitement or the ability to build like a grassroots ground game, then you'll do worse. Like, if you have that behind you, if you have all that enthusiasm, you can make less popular positions more popular. That's how politics works. Right. Look at Trump. You know, like the whole everyone's always wondering, like, how does he get away with all these things that were forbidden for so long is because he had a lot of enthusiasm behind him and that wave allowed him to push a bunch of boundaries. And like, that's how it works. It can work the other way too, if you try. If you're not just gutless, if you're not a fucking Schumer.

[Andrew Cuomo]

So in less good news, and by less good news, I mean really, really horrible news.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, terrible news.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. So last week we got the results of the United States versus Scrometti. I think most trans people have been expecting that this was going to be really bad, but it was, it was, I guess, technically not as bad as it theoretically could have been. But this ruling was. There's a 6, 3 ruling that upholds Tennessee's. Yeah. Ban on gender affirming care for minors. That ban is, is, I mean, just like hideously illegal. It's like very obviously sex discrimination Supreme Court gave. I genuinely, like, I, I had a friend describe it as like, we're just in pure Calvin Ball land. Like it's, if you read the decision, it's nonsense, it's gibberish. That also makes it hard to figure out what it's going to do because the, the legal reasoning is just so unbelievably nonsense sense.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, it, it leaves, it, it leaves in place the 2020 ruling on sex discrimination in the workplace for trans people intact. But it invents this new justification that you can discriminate against trans people if you're discriminating against gender dysphoria as a diagnosis specifically, not necessarily them being trans, but, but the, but the ability to treat gender dysphoria.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah, it's. It's really, really, really fucking weird. I'm probably gonna do like a full episode looking at like, like bringing in actual legal people to talk about what the legal impacts are going to be. This is really bad. This means that like 25 states bans on gender affirming care go into effect.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

One of the worst parts of this. Right. Is that, you know, and this is, this is one of the, the biggest issues with like, targeting trans kids in general is that just the structure of the family and of childhood makes it really hard words to help these kids because they're significantly more isolated than trans adults.

[Donald Trump]

Right.

[Andrew Cuomo]

It's harder for trans kids to find community. It's harder for the community to find them.

[Donald Trump]

Yep.

[Andrew Cuomo]

And because of the structures in place here, like, they are denied the autonomy to keep living. And if their parents decide to just be like, fuck you, we're just doing. We're gonna do conversion therapy on you by refusing to let you transition. They can do that. And it's extremely hard to resist it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. The root of so much authoritarianism, I would argue, like the abnormal absolute core of the fascist movement is the idea that parents own their children. Yeah. And that like, that is the most. That is the single most important property. Right. That exists is your ownership of kids.

[James Stout]

I was going to say it's bedtime if we really get to the core of it, isn't it, Robert?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, no, Robert's going full, like, no future queer theory. Like, I, I agree with you.

[James Stout]

No, he's right.

[Mia Wong]

No, this is. I don't think this is even debatable as someone who was raised in it. It's that this and it's, it's not a simple problem. Right. Because, like, kids are not adults and shouldn't like, have Full autonomy about choices. Like, you know, because they'll, they don't understand the world fully. There's a degree to which kids need to be like, guided.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

You should stop a child if they're gonna walk into the street and get hit by a bus.

[James Stout]

Right?

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. Like grab a fire or if they.

[Mia Wong]

Only want to eat candy for, for dinner. Right. Like, that's.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

There are limits. But the idea that, like, and so parents own their kids, they're like that, that is just. It's pure poison and it's killing us all.

[James Stout]

And like, more broadly, like, guys who hate their kids are the fucking forefront of fascism right now. Like, yeah. Elon Musk bought Twitter because he hates his daughter.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[James Stout]

More. More than if any. Any other thing. Like, it's.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

It's a repugnant ideology. It's disgusting.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Anyway, we'll do some sort of more detailed look at this, that. Like that at some point, but I think we've, you know, covered the news.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. I mean, I think the last, the last thing I want to say about that is like, if you're trans, and I know this was a bigger thing in the immediate wake of last week, but keep living.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Stay alive. Maybe get a passport, because you can do that right now. There's a lot of benefit even if you're not going to travel, if you don't have the money to travel. There's a lot of benefit in having that, I think. Id.

[Jordan Melgar]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Yeah. We're all going to see the sunrise together, like we are, and it's going to be beautiful.

[Garrison Davis]

But do you know who won't? Is a man from Norway who will probably never be seeing the United States ever again.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay, Garrison, so to finish this episode.

[Garrison Davis]

We'Re going to talk about the one deportation we're kind of allowed to laugh at. Not because the guy is bad, the guy seems perfectly fine. But the circumstances around the deportation are so bizarre. Bizarre.

[Mia Wong]

It's wild.

[Garrison Davis]

And it affects Norway. So it's, you know, it's like, whatever.

[James Stout]

Garrison, anti Norwegian action over here.

[Garrison Davis]

No offense to Norway. I'm just saying it's. It's not like this guy's getting deported to a place where he's in danger.

[James Stout]

I love you Norwegians. Even if Garrison doesn't.

[Mia Wong]

This is not a guy who's going to suffer.

[James Stout]

He's not going to South Sudan.

[Mia Wong]

Severe life threatening or whatever. He's fine. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

A Norwegian man was coming to the United States for vacation and at the border checkpoint and I think Newark. He was questioned and handed over his phone. On the phone, Porter agents found a photoshopped picture of baby J.D. sorry, of bald baby J.D. vance.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And for this reason, he was baby JD Denied entry into. Into the United States and deported back to Europe.

[Andrew Cuomo]

This is the dumbest country on earth.

[Mia Wong]

Anyway, said photo has now been shown in the Irish Parliament. Because we live in a. It's beautiful. The world's beautiful.

[Garrison Davis]

They're deporting Norwegians for JD Vance memes. Now. This is the level that we are at, like, like the party of free speech, deporting people who has. Who have JD Vance memes on their phone.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Like, on the one hand, I think you can make the argument that fascism has always been this stupid.

[James Stout]

Like, Google.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Google Mussolini's headquarters, and look at that building. It is this dumb. But, like, good Lord. Like, I just.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, my God.

[James Stout]

Personal vanity.

[Andrew Cuomo]

There's such fucking tiny babies about it. Like, that's like. That's like the really defining characteristic of this era of fascism is that if you make fun of them the tiniest bit, it is the worst consequences they've ever suffered in their entire lives and they fucking lose their mind that everyone doesn't fucking love of them.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, they're. They're fully, like, willing and like, desire to use the. The complete might of the state to. To step on anyone who dares defy their authority. Even. Even when that defiance is manifested through having a picture of baby JD Vance with a bald head like that. That is too far. I. I don't. I don't know what else to say about bald baby J.D.

[Mia Wong]

You know, get. Get a tattoo. Get a full facial tattoo or like a Ben Affleck back tight piece.

[Garrison Davis]

You're gonna get denaturalized for your J.D. vance back tattoo.

[Mia Wong]

Can't punish you. Not for a tattoo.

[Garrison Davis]

No, it is, it is. It is funny how much Vance and the border patrol do not understand the Barbra Streisand effect. This picture is now everywhere. It shows how. How hurt J.D. vance is by these Photoshops, even though he's tried to laugh along in the past. Pass.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I'd love to know, like, how is there a directive that has come down? Like, no Vance memes? Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Who made the call?

[James Stout]

Did some, like, Office of Field Operations guy?

[Garrison Davis]

Did they send it up to Stephen Miller with like, hey, Stephen, is this okay? It seems like. No, no, no.

[James Stout]

Someone at the border take offense on behalf of Vance?

[Garrison Davis]

Like, that could be very likely.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I think that is what happened. Like, that. All of the data suggests that's what happened.

[James Stout]

Robert talked about this, like working towards the FURA stuff before, but like we're seeing a version of that here, right?

[Garrison Davis]

Like, oh yeah. I mean, like all of the current border EGYP agents are like Trump cultists, essentially. Like they are. They're the most evil people you will, you will ever meet.

[James Stout]

I mean, of the, of all the federal agencies. Right. It's CBP that has had the lowest vaccination rate. They're playing one American News in their break rooms. Like, yeah, they are more ideologically sympathetico with what's happening than I would imagine most other feds are.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Certainly like ICE pretty much in lockstep with the Trump administration. Yeah. If you want to help Amos, I guess don't send a jdviance baby meme, but you can send your money again to gofundme.com f standing with our family. That'll be in the show notes too. And if you would like to contact us, you can do so using ProtonMail, which is only encrypted end to end. If you are sending from an encrypted email address like a Proton mail address. And the way you can do that is by typing the email address Cool zonetips Proton me into the to field and sending an email to us. That way we do read them all. We don't respond to them all, but all of them get read.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[James Stout]

We reported the news.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Andrew Cuomo]

It could happen.

[Garrison Davis]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

[Leticia James]

Or wherever you listen to podcasts, you.

[Andrew Cuomo]

Can now find sources for it could.

[Garrison Davis]

Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

[Robert Evans]

Thanks for listening.

[James Stout]

This is an I heart podcast.