It Could Happen Here Weekly 189

Summary

Behind the Bastards: It Could Happen Here Weekly 189 Summary

Release Date: July 5, 2025
Hosts: Mia Wong and Rick Jervis
Provider: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction to Organizing and Meetings

In this episode of It Could Happen Here Weekly, hosts Mia Wong and Rick Jervis delve deep into the foundational aspects of organizing movements through effective meeting management. They emphasize that successful organizing hinges on mastering the fundamental skills of running productive meetings—a crucial component for building democratic and free societies.

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The Importance of Structured Meetings

Mia begins by posing a critical question to listeners: "Are you organizing because you want to feel cool, or because you want your efforts to genuinely work?" She underscores that while passion and enthusiasm are vital, the lack of structured, effective meetings can render all organizing efforts futile.

Mia Wong [04:24]:
"If you want your organizing to work, literally no matter what it is, you actually need to listen to this episode and you need to have some rudimentary knowledge of the thing we are about to talk about."

The hosts trace the evolution of meeting structures through historical movements, highlighting that modern meeting technologies are refined versions of methods passed down through groups like the Quakers, Civil Rights Movement, and anti-war protests.

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Essential Components of a Meeting

1. Venue Selection [09:29]:
   Choosing an accessible location is paramount. Mia lists various venues—from restaurants and libraries to churches and parks—emphasizing that the space must accommodate all participants comfortably.

2. Avoiding Robert’s Rules of Order [12:27]:
   Mia strongly advises against using Robert’s Rules of Order due to their complexity and potential to derail meetings. Instead, she recommends "Rusty's Rules of Order," a streamlined 25-page guide tailored for activist circles, making meetings more straightforward and less prone to obstruction.

   Mia Wong [14:17]:
   "Do not use Robert's Rules of Order. They suck."

3. Roles and Responsibilities [17:12]:
   Implementing specific roles within meetings ensures smooth operation and prevents dominance by any single individual. Key roles include:

   • Facilitator [18:06]:
     Guides the meeting, keeps discussions on track, and ensures consensus is reached without allowing any one person to monopolize the conversation.

     Mia Wong [19:08]:
     "One of the biggest ways that meetings fail is that someone just keeps talking and keeps talking... nothing gets done because the entire meeting is one hour of this guy just yabbering."

   • Stack Taker [27:26]:
     Manages the speaking order, often using a progressive stack to give voice to those who typically speak less.

     Mia Wong [28:42]:
     "The stack is just literally a list of names of who's going to talk, in what order someone raises their hand they can add to the stack."

   • Timekeeper [30:01]:
     Keeps track of allotted times for each agenda item, providing reminders to ensure the meeting adheres to its schedule.

   • Note Taker [45:14]:
     Documents discussions and decisions, allowing for accountability and reference.

   • Vibes Checker [49:12]:
     Monitors the emotional and social dynamics within the meeting, addressing any tension or discomfort promptly.

4. Agenda Setting [15:51]:
   Every meeting should have a clear agenda outlining topics and estimated time allocations. This transparency helps participants stay focused and aware of the meeting's progression.

   Mia Wong [16:27]:
   "An agenda is what the fuck are you doing? And generally speaking, secondarily, you want to try to have time planned out."

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Enhancing Meeting Efficiency

• Hand Gestures and Signals [30:57]:
  Utilizing predefined hand gestures can facilitate non-verbal communication, allowing participants to express agreement or request to speak without interrupting the flow of conversation.

  Rick Jervis [33:04]:
  "There are things like people will say like, please move this along. It's a way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this person up."

• Rotating Roles [24:04]:
  To prevent power concentration and ensure all members are proficient in various aspects of meeting management, roles should rotate among participants. This practice fosters a more inclusive and resilient organizational structure.

  Mia Wong [24:44]:
  "If you're controlling distant parts of the movement, if you haven't involved most of the people who's involved, if the people at level one don't understand what's going on in level two, you have a failing movement."

• Inclusivity and Accessibility [56:07]:
  Ensuring all participants can attend and contribute is vital. This includes providing for childcare and considering dietary restrictions, making meetings welcoming and accommodating for everyone.

  Mia Wong [56:07]:
  "Having a place to meet and that place to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying to go to the meeting."

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Advanced Organizational Structures

1. Spokes Councils [58:36]:
   Spokes Councils are meetings where representatives from various groups come together to coordinate actions and share information. This structure allows for decentralized decision-making while maintaining cohesion across different factions of a movement.

   Mia Wong [60:11]:
   "Spokes Council is a meeting of groups... a meeting of spokespeople."

2. General Assemblies [67:34]:
   Unlike Spokes Councils, General Assemblies bring together individuals rather than representatives, fostering direct participation and collaboration among all members.

   Rick Jervis [67:04]:
   "A fishbowl is a spokes council where everyone can come and only the spokes can speak, so you can look in on the fishbowl."

3. Fishbowls [67:38]:
   A variant of Spokes Councils, Fishbowls allow observers to watch the interactions between spokespeople without direct participation, maintaining transparency while managing group size.

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Practical Tips for Effective Meetings

• Facilitator Skills [19:23]:
  The facilitator must adeptly guide discussions, prevent monopolization, and ensure that the meeting remains goal-oriented. They should foster an environment where all voices are heard and respected.

  Mia Wong [19:23]:
  "One of your most important jobs as the facilitator is to make sure that your meeting is not one person talking."

• Vibe Management [49:45]:
  The Vibes Checker plays a crucial role in maintaining a positive and productive atmosphere, addressing any discomfort or conflict that arises promptly and effectively.

• Inclusion of Food and Childcare [54:48]:
  Providing refreshments and childcare not only increases accessibility but also encourages participation by addressing practical needs of attendees.

  Mia Wong [56:07]:
  "Having food, having childcare was part of keeping the meeting feeling like a place that is worth going to."

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The Political Implications of Effective Organizing

Mia and Rick highlight that the ability to conduct well-structured, democratic meetings is fundamental to resisting authoritarian tendencies and building a free society. They argue that modern challenges, such as restrictive immigration policies and dismantling social safety nets, can be effectively countered through organized, democratic action rooted in strong meeting structures.

Mia Wong [71:38]:
"This is the entire political situation of the modern United States. Right. We are trying to get food, we are trying to get childcare, we are trying to have a place to do our thing, and we're trying not to be ruled by a fucking king."

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Conclusion and Call to Action

Wrapping up the episode, Mia and Rick encourage listeners to apply the discussed meeting structures and roles in their own organizing efforts. They emphasize that mastering these skills is essential for creating resilient, democratic movements capable of challenging and changing oppressive systems.

Mia Wong [75:32]:
"These structures are the fundamental building blocks and tools of democratic life. You can go out in your community and do these things. You can form spokes councils, you can form assemblies, you can work with the people around you to do things and change the world."

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Mia Wong [04:24]:
  "If you want your organizing to work, literally no matter what it is, you actually need to listen to this episode and you need to have some rudimentary knowledge of the thing we are about to talk about."

• Mia Wong [14:17]:
  "Do not use Robert's Rules of Order. They suck."

• Mia Wong [19:08]:
  "One of the biggest ways that meetings fail is that someone just keeps talking and keeps talking... nothing gets done because the entire meeting is one hour of this guy just yabbering."

• Mia Wong [28:42]:
  "The stack is just literally a list of names of who's going to talk, in what order someone raises their hand they can add to the stack."

• Mia Wong [30:01]:
  "It's the single most important and common one is a way of saying I agree. And so that way people, when they really want to say something but they're not on stack and they get really frustrated, they can do that hand gesture which is very easy to make fun of."

• Mia Wong [49:12]:
  "The vibes checker is someone who actually has a really, really important role. And your role is to figure out like, is everyone in the group okay? Does this meeting feel okay?"

• Mia Wong [56:07]:
  "Having a place to meet and that place to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying to go to the meeting."

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Final Thoughts

It Could Happen Here Weekly 189 serves as an essential guide for activists and organizers aiming to build effective, democratic movements. By focusing on the intricacies of meeting management and the roles that facilitate productive discussions, Mia Wong and Rick Jervis provide listeners with the tools necessary to transform passion into tangible change. Their emphasis on structure, inclusivity, and collective responsibility underscores the episode's core message: effective organizing is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society.

Transcript

[Erica]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Ebony]

Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebony, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebony, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Erica]

The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila, and we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Yeah, we're moms, but not your mommy. Historically, men talk too much and women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. Listen to the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect PODC, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast.

[Mia Wong]

I'm Jeff Perlman. And I'm Rick Jervis. We're journalists and hosts of the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat. At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat a couple years ago. We set out to find him, but in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down and he never woke up. But then I see my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the I Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, this ain't it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft and whole. The Unwanted Sorority is where black women, femmes and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co president of this organization, Dr. Lea Tritate. Listen to the Unwanted Sorority new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Coal Zone Media.

[Jeff Perlman]

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 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 gonna be nothing new here for you. But you can make Your own decisions.

[Mia Wong]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is, in many cases, about organizing. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is one of the most experienced organizers I know, Margaret Killjoy.

[Rick Jervis]

Oh, no, hi. I'm a little out of practice, but I have done it a lot.

[Mia Wong]

You know, Margaret says this and also has been doing shit for like one bazillion years. And this is. This is. And I will say this, the. The sign of you that you are running into a good organizer is when you talk to them about their organizing and they immediately start downplaying it. That's when you know that you have encountered a good organizer. If they start immediately going, I'm the best fucking organizer in the world, run like hell. This is an asshole who sucks. If you had someone who's like, ah, I did this a billion years ago. I'm not good at. Didn't matter. Very good organizer.

[Rick Jervis]

Thank you. Yeah, I remember once I went to a thing, wait, that was put on, and there was this. They were kind of turfy people who were coming through, and we didn't totally know that right away. And their pitch about why they were such good, experienced organizers is one of them was like, and this person has been organizing for more than three years.

[Mia Wong]

And it was just like, more than three years.

[Rick Jervis]

Okay. Every person you are giving this talk to has done this for at least three times as long as that. Like, and don't get me wrong, if you're listening, and you've been organizing for three years, you've learned a lot. I'm not trying to tell you that.

[Mia Wong]

You'Re a bad organizer.

[Rick Jervis]

You might be a better organizer and someone's been doing it longer, but don't use that as your selling point anyway.

[Mia Wong]

That's very funny. Yeah. So, okay, this episode, we are asking you a very, very important question. Okay? You. You want to change something about the world. I don't know what that thing is. That is up for. That is for you to determine. The question that you need to be asking is, are you organizing because you want to feel cool, or are you organizing because you want whatever you're doing to fucking work?

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And if you want your organizing to work, literally no matter what it is, you actually need to listen to this episode and you need to have some rudimentary knowledge of the thing we are about to talk about. Because if you do not, your organizing will fail. If you cannot do this, the thing we're going to talk about in this episode, if you cannot do this, everything else, you know, all of your Experience. All of your knowledge, all of your passion, all of it is fucking useless because the actual work of organizing is incredibly unglamorous. It is unsexy. A lot of it is very time consuming. A lot of it is not cool. It is you sitting there and talking to a bunch of people.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And if you want your movement to succeed, you have to be able to do this kind of like groundwork logistical work. Because if you don't, it won't work. So what we are going to teach you the very, very, very, very basics of in this episode is a social technology that has been developed over the course of literal centuries of movements. Right. This is some. This is something that has been passed down and refined like through generations and generations of organizers. I mean, I could do a genealogy of this. A lot of the modern stuff sort of came through the Quakers, moved through the civil rights movements, moved through the anti war movements, moved through, like in Vietnam, moved through a whole bunch of other movements like to be passed down to you today. This is a complicated social technology. It does not sound complicated. If you do not know how to do this. It is impossible to try to replicate on the fly. And that is, we are going to explain to you the very basics of how to run a meeting.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, I really like this way of phrasing it, that it's a technology. It's a way of applying ideas to get something to happen. Even if a lot of it is instinctive, there is an art to it. But yeah, no, there's stuff you can learn and apply. And yeah, technology is a good way of framing it.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it's one of these things where, you know, you can kind of, if you don't know how to do this and you have group people, you can kind of sort of maybe approximate something that is a little bit functional. And the moment it runs into a stress point, it will collapse completely. And this is a thing that, like, you know, I have talked to, I have done a lot of these. I have talked to a lot of people who've done this. I have like, I have been in rooms where people knew how to run meetings. I've been in rooms, people didn't know how to run meetings. I have talked to a bunch of people who have been in rooms who don't know how to run meetings. And like there are rooms of people with collectively hundreds of PhDs. And because nobody in the room knew how to fucking run a meeting, complete disaster. Their organizing didn't work.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Right. You have to be able to do this. And it. And it doesn't really matter. You know, we're not going to get that much into like what mechanism you're using to make decisions, because this is, this is like even like a layer below that. And so this is something you can use, you know, regardless of whether you're doing consensus. And like, you know, like, and I think that, like, if you're trying to make a decision as a group, right. And you're trying to get everyone to want to do the thing and do it, I think that some version of consensus is a good idea. But this can be for a sort of just like a, you know, like a majority rule democratic process. Whatever process you are using to decide things, you need some kind of structure thing there. Otherwise it's just not going to function like none of it will.

[Rick Jervis]

What's wild to me is that it's almost like the important thing is that there is a structure. There's so many different structures you can use. Like when we come at this, I don't actually know. I. I'm the podcast idiot on this episode. Mia's gonna explain stuff to me. But like, there's a lot of different ways to do this. And the important way, the important thing is that you do one of them. Like, there are ways that I think are better or worse. Right. But you do actually need to create a structure and move forward with that structure in order to get anything done. Which is the whole secret of organizing. Like, that is what organizing is, is you actually have to say, not only do I want something to get done, but I'm gonna figure out the steps by which to get that done. And it, it also applies to meetings. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And like that kind of undergirding thing of figuring out how, how you're going to do it. Right. Like that, that's the part of organizing that as you're saying, it's like nothing works without it because it is like half of what organizing is. And otherwise you are just saying things into the wind. And admittedly my job is to say things into the wind. So I hope you do it. So like, you know, I have a little bit of respect to that. But also you need to have some way of getting other people to do things.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, it's like a. When you sit around with your friends and like, oh, someone should do this. No one's actually named someone. Yeah, you know, I mean, somewhere there's a non binary person, but shout out to someone.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

If you're listening to someone, congratulations, you're a master level troll. But like my friend, don't ask. Her name was. Don't ask. It's great. Anyway, whatever.

[Mia Wong]

But.

[Rick Jervis]

But someone needs to get something done. And if you leave a thing being like, ah, someone should do this. You didn't organize. You have to say this is what the following people are doing.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Rick Jervis]

Also, shout out also to everyone who has been in meetings with me and are like, why is Mark. I'm insufferable in meetings. I try really hard. But anyway, whatever.

[Mia Wong]

Oh God. Okay. Okay. So this largely is going to be like how to run a meeting 101. We're going to start at like 000, which is you need a place to meet and that place to meet has to be accessible to everyone who's trying to go to the meeting. This is a thing that people screw up a lot. It is not that hard to find a place that's accessible for everyone to go. You can do this. There are lots of places you can have meetings depending on how sensitive the meeting is. You know how formal, informal it is. I've done meetings in restaurants and meetings and bars. I've done them in libraries. People use churches sometimes like queer centers, union halls, parks.

[Rick Jervis]

I want to shit talk bars really quickly.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I don't think bars is a great idea.

[Rick Jervis]

But I don't think it's accessible to people who are under 21. And I don't think it's accessible to people who have problems being around drinking. That said, they happen there. And I'm not trying to say you're bad for having had meetings there. But I just want to say that.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, bars is one that people go to a lot. And yeah, there's definitely issues with it.

[Rick Jervis]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

But I don't know. You can have them people's houses. Sometimes you can go into like a mesa or whatever. You can go have a meeting there. You can get people to just like go out somewhere and do it. You know, I don't know. Like you, you, you. You are capable of thinking of lots of places where you could have meetings. But you actually do need to have a location. And this is actually. Again, I've talked about this before but it's like one of the organizing things that's actually really important is like knowing how to get a room for a meeting or get a room for something to happen. You have to be able to do this. This is like 000. Like okay, you know, okay, so you've now achieved this. And congratulations, you clowns have now achieved a location. I am going to stick a provisional thing in here which is this. Is this is jumping the gun a little bit. But I need to put in here, do not use Robert's Rules of Order. One of the things you will be told, and if you have been in organizations before, a lot of them use a thing called Robert's Rules of Orders, which is this old, like, incredibly elaborate set of parliamentary procedures. Do not use them. They suck. And this, this gets into before we can even talk about what a meeting is. Right. And how you do it. You really, really do not want your meetings to get bogged down in everyone having to learn 1 million lines of parliamentary procedure. And this is a problem for any meeting technology that you use because they all do involve a little bit of technical stuff because you have to get people to be able to do things.

[Rick Jervis]

Totally.

[Mia Wong]

But the thing with Robert's Rules of Order is that, like, it's like hundreds of pages, right? And in those hundreds of pages are the recipe for one asshole to derail your entire meeting by doing a whole bunch of unhinged parliamentary shit. I have seen this happen. It sucks. This is something that you can technically do in any meeting structure, but the more opaque the rules of the meeting are, the easier this shit is to do and the harder it is to be like, please stop.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, you have to have a certain amount of flexibility in the way that you do things. Because every system, it's the problem with law as a concept, right? Is every system can. You can find loopholes. And anyone who's been in a lot of meetings has seen people learn how to abuse the process in order to get their position to win by making everyone else too tired to continue or to use up all of the space in the room or, you know, whatever. But I think that, yeah, this idea that the rules that are used in your meeting, I think that a good facilitator, which is something that I tend to believe in for meetings, is capable of explaining the process in such a way that. That even when a lot of people come who are not familiar with the process, they will leave. Familiar with the process.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. Like, to that sort of end, if you need a. Like, okay, we need a written procedure thing. The thing I would recommend is called Rusty's Rules of Order, which is an unbelievably pared down version of Robert's Rules of Order that was like, specifically developed to be used in, like, union circles, activist circles. And it's like the total PDF of it is 25 pages. That makes it sound way longer than it actually is. Like, several of those pages are like a glossary. And like, the COVID It's very easy to read. It's easy to understand if you. If you have to use a. Like, this is a formalized procedure. Do Rusty's. Don't do Roberts. This is just a. I need to do this before we say anything else, because a bunch of people are going to push you to use this, and it sucks. So having gotten that out of the way, we can now get into. Okay, things from meetings.

[Rick Jervis]

Oh, I was supposed to make a joke about at the top of all this. I'm sorry, everyone. Everyone has been waiting for me to make this joke. I'm certain. But, Mia, which one of us is going to keep Stack during this meeting so that we know who can talk?

[Mia Wong]

The products and services that support this podcast are gonna keep stack and we're gonna go to the Right. The f. Now we are back.

[Rick Jervis]

And I really just want to say, as timekeeper, I'm a little bit upset about how much time that those ads used during the meeting. And if we can.

[Mia Wong]

God damn it. Okay, we will explain what a stack is and what a timekeeper is in a second, however, comma. So things you need to do at the very start of a meeting, you need to take, like, two minutes to do this, but you need to explain how the meeting fucking works. And you need to assign everyone roles. And you can't assume that everyone who is going to be in this meeting understands how the rules work. Like, you cannot. And this is something I've run into is, like, you can't assume that everyone understands what your hand signals are or even just basic. Like, everyone has been in a thing before and understands what a stack is. Right? You can't assume that unless you know everyone in the room. And more than that, like, unless you know everyone's level of experience in the room and you've been in meetings with them before. Like, you can't assume the level of knowledge that everyone has. And I have watched these processes not work because people just did that. And then a bunch of people in the room were like, what the fuck is going on? So you need to, at the start of the meeting, explain how the meeting is going to work. Like, at least a little bit. This doesn't have to be super formal. This can be like fucking two minutes of like, we're going to have a stack, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Rick Jervis]

And for anyone, just so you know what we're saying right now, we'll explain stack more. That is the order in which people talk. It is a way of keeping track of the line of who's going to talk when.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I'm realizing this explanation is jumping around a little bit. But you need to make sure that everyone understands how the meeting is supposed to work. And usually that's really quick. Sometimes someone will just not know something and then, okay, you explain it to them and that's fine. And chill and. I don't know, I remember being a little tiny baby anarchist and not knowing anything and going to my first meeting and people were talking about restorative justice, and I was like, hi, what's restorative justice? I'm like a little tiny child. I don't know anything. And they explained it and it was like, chill and good. And you can just do this. And it helps people feel included and. Yeah, totally. Okay, so general meeting facilitation. Things you need. You need one, an agenda. An agenda is what the fuck are you doing? And generally speaking, secondarily, you want to try to have time planned out, because one of the failure modes of a meeting is the meeting goes for fucking 30 hours, hours and everyone's miserable. So you generally want to have an agenda that has what you're going to talk about and then kind of guidelines roughly for how long you think it'll take to talk about the thing. We'll get more into that in a second. Sometimes people create the agenda beforehand. Sometimes you start, you set the agenda at the beginning of the meeting. But like, you do want an agenda so people know what you're doing.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. It should be somewhere that everyone can see on a whiteboard or like, I guess in a zoom meeting notes or a doc that everyone has opened.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, you want to make sure everyone has it. Okay. And this is the point where we need to talk about roles. So part of the technology for this. Right. And the stack is a big piece of technology to keep track of who's talking. But a big part of what the technology of this is, is a bunch of roles that you assign people and that ideally everyone rotates through. So you learn how to do all of them. And so to prevent people from sort of concentrating power by like monopolizing one role. So the first role we need to talk about, and this is, I don't know if the big one's the right one, but this is the one that I think people know kind of, I don't know if intuitively understand is the right word, but like, this is the one that there are usually versions of in a meeting and a lot of those versions are bad. Is a facilitator.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So, okay, my explanation of what a facilitator is. And Morgan, I'm going to ask you for yours too, because I don't know. So as a facilitator, your job is to like point to the agenda and go, okay, we're talking about this. Your job is to move people through discussions. Your job is to try to get people to a consensus on what you're doing. And your job is to stop people from giving speeches. And this is. I'm going to take a little digression here, which is. Okay, we've been talking about ways meetings fail. Right. Number one, no one can go to it. That's way meeting fails. Two, you don't have an agenda and everyone, it just goes off the rails and no one has any idea what you're supposed to be meeting about.3, and this is a huge one, is that one of the biggest ways that meetings fail, And I have seen this in every single context I've ever worked in, is that someone. And it is usually a dude. It's almost always a dude. It cannot be a dude, but it's usually a dude just keeps talking and keeps talking and keeps talking and will not shut the fuck up. And nothing gets done because the entire beating is one hour of this guy just yabbering.

[Rick Jervis]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

And one of your most important jobs as the facilitator, and this is genuinely a huge part for social technology of the structure of meetings, is to make sure that your meeting is not one person talking.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This is why this exists.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like, and you know, if you want to get into the sort of dire part of this. Right. If you do not stop all of your meetings from being one annoying guy talking, your projects will fail. You must do this. This is the one thing here that is like, you absolutely positively must get this guy to stop talking.

[Rick Jervis]

I think that the important thing to think about a facilitator is that most people come from a background of assumed authoritarian politics. Assumed politics where someone is in charge. Even our democracies are built around this idea that you elect someone to tell you what to do. When we talk about meetings, we are talking about building bottom up structures. Even when we later, I think we'll end up talking maybe a different episode or something about larger structures you can build up out of these sort of local assemblies or meetings.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

The idea is that everyone is empowered. And so because we're really used to this competitive decision making around who is in charge, we struggle a little bit. Adapting to egalitarian meetings and also to consensus isn't the only way to make decisions. But people struggle with consensus, because they'll think of that as meaning 100% vote where everyone votes for the same thing. And that's a mistake. And so we think of the facilitator accidentally as the leader. And they are a leader in the sense of a.

[Garrison Davis]

Whatever.

[Rick Jervis]

You could use the word leader in a lot of ways. And some of them are positive and not authoritarian. And so in that context, they are leading people through the meeting, but they are absolutely not only not the decision maker, they are less the decision maker than everyone else. Choosing to be a facilitator of a meeting is choosing to go in and say, I'm not actually even going to push for my side. Unless you were in a, like, tight knit enough group where everyone knows each other and everyone kind of knows, oh, in this group, Margaret's opinion is always going to be this. And so. And so's opinion is always going to be this. If you know people really well, you can kind of still be both facilitator and a participant. But by and large, when you are the facilitator, your job is to help the decision form. It is to help take what people are saying and say, okay, this seems like what we're saying, is this the proposal? And not say, I think this is the proposal, but say, is this the proposal? And yeah, it is to keep people on track. And every meeting is going to have different. I really like a strong facilitator. I really like someone who's going to shut me up. I really like someone who's like, yeah, that's not what we're talking about right now. And it, it's hard because your feelings get hurt. Like, especially, for example, someone says a joke and then someone else says a joke, and then you're the third person and you say the joke too. And the facilitator's like, yeah, that's enough of that. We got to keep going. You're the third person who said the joke and you're like, why am I getting yelled at? And the other two people didn't. Yeah, and that's the wrong way to look at it. We're not yelling at anyone. We're trying to keep things moving forward. And, and you're absolutely right, also about the people grandstanding. And, you know, a particular habit that men often have, especially CIS men, is that they'll come in and be like, they'll listen to what someone else says and then repeat it louder and then be like, yeah, yeah, right. And as if it's their idea and they don't even realize they're doing it. It's kind of cute. But there's a lot of that you can learn about yourself by going into these meetings and learning about your own habits and what you've been enculturated to do. And it shouldn't be about shaming people around this as long as people are able to, like, kind of get called in and listen to it. And one of the things that I think when you teach the meeting, at the beginning of the meeting, you also explain some of this social stuff and you say, like, you know, we believe in a step up, step back thing. If you are someone who generally feels comfortable talking in large groups, we invite you to step back a little bit. And if you're not someone who generally feels comfortable expressing your opinion in groups, we invite you to step up.

[Mia Wong]

Yep, yep, yep, yep.

[Rick Jervis]

Do you know what also needs to learn to step up is I actually think we don't get enough advertising in our lives. I think that the people who are afraid to take up space are the people who pay a lot of money to.

[Mia Wong]

I'm using a block. I'm using a block.

[Rick Jervis]

Sorry, babe, this ain't consensus. Here's ads.

[Mia Wong]

We are back. I think this is also, you know, as we've talked about, sort of in some ways, in a lot of ways, like how important the role of the facilitator is. This is a role you need to rotate because that is a role. It's like those are skills that everyone needs. Like, if everyone knows. Did you just do the. You just did the hand?

[Robert Evans]

I did. I did.

[Rick Jervis]

I don't know whether people still do it. Metal hands versus twinkle fingers.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, sorry. Okay, this is complete. Unfortunately, podcasting is an audio medium. So all of you just missed me losing my mind because Margaret did. Margaret did one of the hand signs for agreements. That's like, shit. God damn it. Okay, sorry.

[Rick Jervis]

We're talking about meetings. It just came naturally.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, we'll get the hand signs later. But, like, you know, you actually do. You. All of these things should be rotating and you should be teaching everyone to be able to do all of the facilitation roles because a. Okay, there's lots of reasons for this. Right. One facilitation in particular can be kind of dangerous because there's a real risk of someone who is facilitating deciding that they are the leader and they're going to steer how everything goes and they're going to make their decisions. And by rotating that around, it becomes a lot easier to not have that happen. And also doing a role makes you A more active participant in the meeting. A lot of times it depends on the role, obviously, but, like, it's a way to get people, keep everyone engaged in a thing.

[Rick Jervis]

That's a good point.

[Mia Wong]

Thank you. I stole this from my friend who is going to remain nameless. But if you're out there, I love you.

[Rick Jervis]

Your friend's name is nameless. I understand.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Friend's name is the nameless child.

[Rick Jervis]

Somewhere there's someone whose name is the Omelas kid. And anyway.

[Mia Wong]

Whatever.

[Rick Jervis]

Anyway.

[Mia Wong]

Okay.

[Jeff Perlman]

He's good.

[Mia Wong]

Okay. Yeah. But the other thing about it. Right. Is the more everyone knows about these skills, the more effective of a participant and the more effective you can be at making decisions in the meeting. Like, the more everyone understands how the process works and knows how to do it and knows how to. Because, like, being in a meeting and being in community with other people and making decisions together is a skill, and we don't have it. There's this great David Graeber, the anthropologist David Graeber, who actually spent a lot of time, like, writing about these meetings in a way that doesn't usually happen as, like, as.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, as an anthropologist.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, as an anthropologist. Right. Cause he was both an activist and an anthropologist, and he has this great line where he says Americans are great at communism and terrible at democracy, which is that they're really, really good at, like, doing things each according to their needs and from each according to their ability. Like, if you try to organize a barbecue, everyone can do the things to do the barbecue, but no one knows how to make decisions together. Because that's a skill.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And the more you're rotating through all the roles, and the more you understand how everything works, and the more you understand, you know, how to do the facilitation stuff of, like, getting everyone to figure out what the thing that they want is and how to express that and how to, like, how to work together. The more you understand that as, like, a person who's not facilitating, the more you can understand, like, how to actually do democracy.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it rules.

[Rick Jervis]

And there's also the fact that, like, if you are indispensable to your group, you've actually failed your group.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

Especially when you're talking about stuff like activism that has a certain risk. If you are the only medic in your affinity group, that is a problem. Because if you get arrested now, there's no medic. If you're the only facilitator who is a very skilled facilitator, what happens when you're sick or in Jail. And you all have a very intense meeting that you have to do. And you need a skilled facilitator. Not that everyone needs to be equal in all skills within any given group, but you, you need to learn to. If you are very good at something, your job is to make someone else very good at it too.

[Mia Wong]

That's the thing both for meetings and the way it was explained to me. And this is a more kind of. I don't know what term you'd use for, but it was taught to me as your job is to organize yourself out of a job.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, totally.

[Mia Wong]

Okay, so we're going to move on to the second role, which is the stack taker. So, okay, the stack. This. When I first, like, started talking about this as a social technology, the thing I specifically meant was the stack. And then eventually I was like, no, this is actually the whole process, but the stack, very, very simple invention. But if you don't have it, it's a disaster. The stack, as we said before, is just literally a list of names of who's going to talk, in what order someone raises their hand they can add to the stack. Yep, that is very simple. It is also absolutely crucial to making sure a meeting runs at all. Most groups tend to use some variation of what's called a progressive stack. Where, you know, this is part of. We were talking about earlier of like, step forward and step back. But when. When you're compiling a stack, you want to have the people who speak less in front. And this works sort of in two ways. Right. One is it's okay. So if there's someone who's not like a CIS white dude and who is trying to say something, you probably want them to say something because they are less likely to be the one who says something.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like, just because of the way this sort of whiteness is structured, because of the way that, like, masculinity is structured, because of the way that these things work. So you want to give opportunities to speak to people who, like, don't usually get heard. And then also if someone just like, hasn't been talking in a meeting and they want to say something, and that's also part of the sort of facilitation. And sometimes I know this is the thing that, like a role that I've seen passed out between a bunch of different roles. And I guess everyone kind of has a responsibility to do this, but if there's someone in a meeting who has not been saying anything, it's generally a good idea to be like, hey, are you okay? And also like, more importantly, to some extent than. Are you okay. Of like, what do you think about this?

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. Although I do think that there's a little bit of a. Like some people don't want to specifically be called on in that way. And so that's kind of a like learning to read the room skill about when you want to encourage people to step up versus other people are like, no, I don't have anything particular to say and I don't want to get, you know, singled out. I think that in smaller meetings, sometimes the facilitator can keep stack. Larger meetings. That's a terrible plan.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Large meetings, you need two. You can't have them both be doing it.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

Because you need someone keeping track of who's raising their hands when and things like that. Sometimes you're actually even writing the stack on a whiteboard so people can see.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. You have like a piece of paper. Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

I have been in meetings that sort of self facilitate fairly effectively in smaller groups where a thing that people can do is if they have. They have a thing they want to say, they hold up one finger and they keep that finger up. And if someone else has something that they want to say, they put up two fingers. And then if someone else has something they want to say, they put up three fingers. And so you can have this method by which people track their own stack. But this is a small group thing. This is not a. And this is a people who know each other and know how to do the balancing that we're talking about. About making sure everyone gets heard.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And I think part of this also that's important to remember is like, this is like 101.

[Rick Jervis]

Oh, yeah, sorry. As an advanced skill, kind of.

[Mia Wong]

And I'm introducing some things that are probably more advanced than 101. Like the.

[Garrison Davis]

Like.

[Mia Wong]

Okay. Figuring out why someone isn't comfortable talking on a. Like, this person wants to talk but doesn't feel comfortable to. And if you ask them, they will say something. And this person doesn't feel comfortable talking because they don't want to talk. That's kind of a more advanced thing.

[Rick Jervis]

Fair enough.

[Mia Wong]

I guess we should talk about hand gestures here, which is that, okay, over the course of these meetings, one of. Over the course of like, movements, one of the things that is built up is hand gestures because they can be a very effective way of, you know, someone expressing something without having to talk over someone else. This is. I don't know. This is the 101. I'm not gonna teach hand gestures because everyone has different ones. And there are some that are pretty universal, but like, the number of different gestures I've seen for, like, direct response and shit. Like, it is the thing that like, like, hand gestures can work and can be really efficient. Yeah. See, you're doing one of the hand gestures. You're doing one of the point of process. I don't know what that one is.

[Rick Jervis]

Where you make a triangle with your hands.

[Mia Wong]

Fuck, I forgot about point of process. Oh, no, there's all of this very, very complicated stuff. It's not that complicated, but like, like, point of process sucks. Like, that shit's actually complicated.

[Rick Jervis]

I'm actually derailing again. I'm so sorry. This is an example. If there was a facilitator in this call, they would be making me shut up is what's happening.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, no, but, but, but this is actually like, I, this, this, this is, this is the one time I've ever wished there was, like, video so you could see the hand gestures. Because, like, the, the thing about this, right, is once you are good at meetings and like, if you have people who do this and you talk about what the hand gestures are beforehand, that's also important. You can't. If, even if, if you're very good at meetings and you're still listening to this episode for some reason. I mean, I don't know. It's a good episode. But like, you can't assume that everyone knows what your hand gestures are.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And sometimes people have different hand gestures for different things. Sometimes you have contextual hand gestures for like, like there are, like. Okay. Like you're. If you are trying to meet in the dark.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Your, your, your hand gestures don't work. Right. This is also stolen from another friend. Right. Like, sometimes you need to use snaps for that because. So that you can hear. Right. Like, what all of this is to say that, like the stuff with hand gestures, it can make your meetings a lot more effective. This is a thing you can do if everyone in the group understands how they work. I'm not going to be like, teaching you sets of hand gestures here because I can't guarantee that any gesture I teach you will be the one that people use.

[Rick Jervis]

Can I, Can I though, like, speed run the concepts of some of them? Because I think they're useful to understand.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

Because it's hard to imagine when you imagine meetings. I think about this a lot because I write meetings into fiction, which is a very hard thing to do and make them entertaining because they're also hard to be entertained in by when you're in them unless they're contentious. But there are certain things that you learn derail meetings. And there are ways in which by using hand gestures you can avoid having more people speak. And the single most important and common one is a way of saying I agree. And so that way people, when they really want to say something but they're not on stack and they get really frustrated, they can do that hand gesture which, you know, is very easy to make fun of. You know, when I was coming up, it was twinkle fingers where you waggle your fingers. And then we were like punk, so we did metal fingers instead, which was literally the same thing but reversed.

[Mia Wong]

It's kind of like the look that.

[Rick Jervis]

You do when you like really like music. And it's actually sort of like mimicking playing a guitar. And so that's a very important concept. And sometimes people use snaps, although sometimes people prefer non audio and other people prefer audio.

[Mia Wong]

Um, yeah, yeah. And sometimes slip. That's like. And that's. That's partially what I was talking about. Like, like that's. That's dependent on who's in the room and what the room is and like.

[Rick Jervis]

But I think that a, A I agree without needing to say anything is essential.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

[Rick Jervis]

Other ones to just know of is that there are things like people will say like, please move this along. It's a way of saying, hey, facilitator, please shut this person up usually. Or can we talk about something else? There's ones that our direct response which is saying, I would like to jump stack because this person has just insulted the honor of my family or whatever. And it's like it's up to the facilitator to decide whether to do these. Another one is point of process which is saying like, hey, I actually don't want to talk about the thing we're talking about. I want to talk about how the meeting is going. Meetings get real meta and it's real frustrating anyway, so it's worth knowing that this is part of the technology. It seems cringy from the outside, but like our other options. I mean, there are other technologies about decision making that people have developed, but like actually living democratic lives in which we all have a say in our decisions sometimes means that we go to meetings and we can actually kind of learn to. I'm talking shit on meetings, but that's. Meetings are also a ways to get to know your friends and express yourself and get things done.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. You know, as much as I've been talking about them being boring Like, I've had things that were technically organizing meetings that were like some of the most transformational experiences of my life.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, totally.

[Mia Wong]

Because me and a bunch of people who, you know, a bunch of people really close to me, like, came together and we figured out how to do something. And there is a beauty there that is. And this is partially why it's hard to talk about these things. Right. Because like, the technical process of it, like the technical description of what we're saying is at the same time being used to do something that can only be described in sort of poetic terms.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like the actual experience of like you and a bunch of other people coming together to do something and figuring out how to do it and fucking doing it is a transcendent act of creation.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And these are like, you know. Yeah. Like it doesn't. Like the fucking hammers and shovels and like fucking slide rules that you use to construct something don't look very pretty and then at the end of it, you've built something together and it's beautiful.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. No, it's the other side of the coin of the first time you watch the police run away from you.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

It is a way of coming together with other people to accomplish something and make something powerful is meetings. And it is also, it's interesting because we talk about how men will often take up too much space in meetings. So this is not a universal thing anytime we say this kind of thing, but it is actually often feminized labor because it's this invisibleized labor that happens behind the scenes that is not as sexy. Right. And is about just actually hearing people out. It is like conflict resolution. Speedrun. Anyway, I accidentally went off on the meta of meetings also, but.

[Mia Wong]

No, it's good. Well, but. And I think there is an important thing here though, because like, we're talking about the politics of like meetings themselves. Right. Of like the, you know, the actual political angle of what it means to have a democracy, where what democracy means as you make decisions together.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this is something. There's also a very important actual procedural meeting note here, which is that one of the things you will learn over the course of doing meetings is that a lot of times people wage battles over the content of political ideology in the form of fighting over how a meeting works.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, totally.

[Mia Wong]

And you can see this everywhere from like your fucking local organizing meeting and people yelling about who's on stack or whatever all the way up to like, you know, when, like, when like the Democrats are saying that like, like in, in Congress that like the Parliament, the budget Parliamentarian won't let them like raise the minimum wage. That's what they're doing. They're using an argument over procedure to like disguise the fact that what they're really arguing about is like, it is an actual political argument.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And, and, but this is also a thing where like the way you structure a meeting is political.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It doesn't seem like it. Right. But you can have a meeting where, you know, it's like the fucking plenipotentiary meeting of like the Executive committee of, I don't know, the, the People's Congress, the Chinese Communist Party, whatever. Those are not the right words. I'm on five hours of sleep. But you can have a meeting where it's just like. Yeah, the way the meeting works is one guy stands out there and he gives a speech and he tells everyone what to say and then everyone votes yes. Yeah, that's the way you can do a meeting. Right. And that's political and it fucking sucks. And we're trying to teach you how to do a meeting where, you know, we do democracy where everyone comes together and we like do a thing.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And we will get to more roles next week. This was originally planned to be one episode. It is not one episode. It is now two episodes. But the upside is that we solved a bunch of the fundamental logistical problems about how to build a free society. So stay tuned for that. Stay tuned for more roles you want in your meetings and, and yeah, spinnake can happen here. And thank you Mark for coming on the show.

[James Stout]

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[Ebony]

Welcome to Pretty Private with ebony, the podcast where silence is broken and stay stories are set free. I'm ebony, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles and more. And found the strength of to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

Sometimes it's hard to remember, but going.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of your life.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

That was my dad reminding me and so many others who need to hear it that our trauma is not our shame to carry and that we have big, bold and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co president of this organization, Dr. Lea Trittate. On my new podcast, the Unwanted Sorority, we wade through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like and sounds like in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who've lived through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The Unwanted Sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's lock in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the Unwanted Sorority new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Erica]

The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila, and we're the hosts of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much and women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe, with guests like Corinne.

[Ebony]

Stephens, I've never seen so many women protect predatory men.

[Mia Wong]

And then me too happen, and then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

How I was going.

[Mia Wong]

She was like, dad, all they do.

[Garrison Davis]

Is talking about your thing in class.

[Mia Wong]

I ruined my baby's first day of high school.

[Erica]

And Slumflower, what turns me on is when a man sends me money.

[Mia Wong]

Like, I feel the moisture between my.

[Erica]

Legs when a man sends me money.

[Mia Wong]

I'm like, oh, my God, it's go time. You actually sent it.

[Erica]

Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your.

[Mia Wong]

Podcast Foreign Here, a podcast about organizing. I am your host, Mia Wong, and in a moment, we will be continuing our episode about how to run a meeting, which is one of the fundamental tools of building democracy and free societies. Here we go. Okay, so other roles. So we talk about that. That was a long digression about the concept of a stack taker, which is at a very simple level, you write the names down, you call the names in order.

[Rick Jervis]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, we're going to move on to some of the other ones. Those are like, the two. I don't know if most important is the right word. Funnily enough, stack taker is not the one I thought the digression was going to happen on. That was. I thought that was going to be the last one we're going to get to.

[Rick Jervis]

But note taker.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is Vibes checker.

[Rick Jervis]

Oh, shit. The Vibes checker. Oh, the vibe is. Okay, okay, okay. Please continue.

[Mia Wong]

Okay, let's do timekeeper. Timekeeper. Extremely important person. You want someone with, like, a watch or something. And the timekeeper's job is to give people reminders of, like, how much time things are taking. So, you know, a thing you can do is like, okay, so we know we have this much time allocated for something, right? So we have 20 minutes to talk about this. Okay, so like, 10 minutes. In you go. We have 10 minutes left. We have five minutes left. We have, like, 15 minutes left. Yeah, this is really important. And at the end of it, the timekeeper's job is to go like, hey, this is our allotted time. Do we want to keep talking about this and use more time, or do we want to move on? And that's a really important role. It's also kind of why you Want to generally have an idea of how long you want to talk about something in the agenda. It's also worth noting that this is all guidelines.

[Garrison Davis]

Right?

[Rick Jervis]

These are all MIA's guidelines of order. Is that what you're calling this?

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God, no. We're taking one more digression. One more digression, which is that the anarchy symbol, the A with the circle around it is from a pradon phrase. That's. The circle is actually an. Okay. Because the original thing was anarchy. The original saying is anarchy is the mother of order.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And that's. That's where that comes from. So I was gonna make a, like, Mia's. Mia's, like, procedure, disorder, whatever joke. But it's like. No, no, no. This is actually like, anarchy is order, baby.

[Rick Jervis]

I believe in an organized society. I just believe in an organically organized society. That is from the. To use the Zapatista phrase, from the bottom and the left.

[Mia Wong]

Yep. Okay, so that. That's the timekeeper, the note taker. Sometimes you need to decide whether you want notes of your meeting.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. It depends on how crime you are.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. I hear this all the time from people making jokes about the scene from the Wire that I. I've never seen the Wire, but everyone's making jokes. It's the scene from the Wire where a guy goes, are you taking notes on the criminal conspiracy? So, okay, are you going to have a note taker? And then secondly, like, okay, the note taker takes notes on what's being talked about. I actually. This is also Mia going into a little bit more advanced stuff. I actually like the practice of kind of rotating this throughout the meeting. Because the problem with being the note taker. So if you're the timekeeper. Right. You can be involved in the conversation. Stack taker is also hard, too. But the thing about the note taker. And if you get good enough at this, you can rotate all of these roles during the meeting so that everyone has a chance to participate. So you don't just have a group of people who perpetually can't.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Be in a meeting. And so note taker is a thing that you can pretty easily just, like, pass to someone else and be like, hey, you're not the note taker. So the person who's being the note taker can, like, say things.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. Although. Okay, so there's two weird, funny things about this. One, sometimes people who tend not to want to talk much in a meeting, but also maybe have an attention span where they would prefer to be doing something at all times, prefer to Be note taker. But famously the International Working Men's association or whatever. The. The First International was a organization of a lot of different stripes of leftists. And someone went to someone's friend's apartment, this anarchist went to this anarchist friend's apartment and was like, hey, I want to invite my friend to this meeting. And this guy answers at the door and his name's Karl Marx. And he's like, oh, well, so and so is not here. And he's like, all right, well, you can come too. So an anarchist invites Marx to the International. I don't have my notes in front of me. Don't me. But then Marx goes and he becomes the note taker. And by means of that takes a minority position within the group and makes it the majority position by controlling the way that a lot of the media and expression and stuff around this was because Marx was a good writer. And for better or worse, I have my opinion about whether it's for better or worse. And so there's a power within note taker that actually is a reason to rotate this task.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

On the other hand, if you're like not worried about that, you can just have a person who's like, I just really want to be the one who takes notes. It really depends on everything's going to be contextual. I just wanted to tell that story about Marx.

[Mia Wong]

No, no, no, no. Like this is the story of how Marx became Marx by taking the note taking job and then becoming the person who could. Who would write the declarations for the organization. Yeah. We should note this is also kind of how Stalin took power was by being the person in the back of the room who didn't say anything and keeping track of what everyone was doing and saying and being able to manipulate the inner workings of these sort of parliamentary procedures that the Bolsheviks were using.

[Rick Jervis]

That's what the Robert. Not of the rules of order, but of the behind the bastards was saying about. Oh, the Cambodian man, the horrible man who killed everyone.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, Pol Pot.

[Rick Jervis]

Pol Pot. Was that. He was the quiet guy at the back.

[Mia Wong]

Yep, yep, yep. Same kind of guy can be extremely dangerous. The. The guy who says everything all the time can be dangerous. Quiet person also can be very dangerous.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. Just never trust anyone. That's the answer. Wait, no, hold on.

[Mia Wong]

Hopefully we're not producing Pol Pot in these meetings. Okay, so the last, like official roll that I want to talk about, and there's a lot, there's like a million other rolls that people use. I want to talk about the vibes checker. So this is the one that's kind of not obvious from like the name, but the vibes checker is someone who actually has a really, really important role. And your role is to figure out like, is everyone in the group okay? Does this meeting feel okay?

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And is there something we need to do about it? And some of this is like, okay, everyone is clearly really tired. Let's go get lunch. And that's like a pretty easy sort of vibe checker thing. But then also like, yeah, I don't know. This is partially a facilitation job. Like, I don't know if someone says something racist at a meeting and a bunch of people are uncomfortable, it's like, now you're suddenly glad you have the person whose job it is to be like, hey, what the fuck? Like, and that's also, that's like, obviously like, that's a blatant enough thing that everyone can be like, hold on, hold on. Like, don't like say a slur or whatever. But like, you know, the vibe checker's job is if there's a lot of people who are uncomfortable with something or if something like they're kind of there if something is going wrong or if people are checked out or if like stuff's happening. Sometimes this is behind the scenes thing. Sometimes this is like explicit. Like you make a. You bring it to the group to be like, hey, this is a. Okay, we need to address this.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Kind of thing. I don't know. It's a hard role to sort of like explain.

[Rick Jervis]

It's fuzzy.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

I mean, but it's, it's in the name. How are the vibes? And vibe is a fuzzy word. And you know, it's a word that people are going to interpret in different ways.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And like I, as a very sort of materialist, godless atheist, I. It's like, okay, this is how people are feeling. Right. People also take this in sort of more new agey directions. People take it in like. But like, you know, like, the important thing about this is, right, you can feel in a meeting when it's really tense or when things are like just weird. Everything feels off. Everyone is like pissed off or tired or like just grossed out or like, you know, and that's this person's job. This is why I'm putting it in here. Because it's. It's one of these roles that like, ideally, I guess this person doesn't do anything for a whole meeting, but they're just there sort of watching it. I mean, like, and it can be good if they intervene. But, like, it's especially important if something is going wrong in ways the group isn't addressing totally.

[Rick Jervis]

It is good to have someone who's ready to step up and say, yeah, this is what's going on. Can I make a pitch for another role?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

I don't have a name for this role. The very first activist meeting I went to when the world was young, during the ultra globalization movement, I went into a meeting for New York City indie media and I had no idea what was happening. But it was a public, open meeting and I was a young activist anarchist or whatever, and I went to this thing and someone sat next to me, knew that I was new and sat next to me and explained what the fuck was happening.

[Mia Wong]

That's a good role.

[Rick Jervis]

And I don't know if I would have become an activist if that person hadn't done that. Because I went in and it was the middle of a contentious meeting about people talking about some stuff that was pretty important. And I had no idea what was happening. And someone explained it to me. I think it is very important to have someone know who is new and help them feel comfortable. You could call like an usher, if I was going to have a word. But that's like. Because I'm really into this idea that our movements don't need gatekeepers, we need ushers. We need people to help people figure find their seats and figure out how to plug in.

[Mia Wong]

Yes, onboarding.

[Rick Jervis]

But then the other thing I want to say is that with roles, the larger and more formal a meeting, the more likely you need these to be formalized roles. But I also think that these as generalized skills can be dispersed through. I think that a lot of groups, especially if they're kind of comfortable with each other, you maybe have a rotating facilitator, you maybe have a stack taker, and you maybe are like, who's taking notes right now? But stuff like timekeeper and vibes check might be a thing that everyone feels empowered to do. I think that understanding these as roles is different than saying at the top of the meeting, this is the way it is done. You must assign these things. It is always contextual based on the meeting.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, the range inside of meeting structure of how formal and informal it is changes a lot. And that, yeah, that changes the roles. That changes how all of this stuff works totally. And that's one of the most important things about this, is being flexible. Because the point of a meeting is not everyone followed the exact parliamentary procedures. The point of a meeting is we did the Thing we came there to do, or sometimes if we did it, we did a different thing. Right. But it's like we. We. We all did something together, and that thing happened, but we figured out how to make that thing happen. And that's the actual important part. The content of the meeting is what's important. Not this. All of the structure is. Is to enable the content. It's not the other way around.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, totally.

[Mia Wong]

Right, Totally. And, like. Yeah, I don't know, like, if. If you have a timekeeper and someone else ends up doing time stuff too.

[Jeff Perlman]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Like, that's a significantly better result than.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

We just kept talking, so.

[Rick Jervis]

Okay, can I make one more pitch about a thing that's important at a meeting?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

Food. I think that it's not always going to be appropriate in every specific situation, and there's a lot of things around dietary restrictions and all of these things, but making the meeting feel like a place that is worth going to and a thing that, like, I think food is basically like hosting and good hospitality and these sort of, again, invisibilized feminine labor things goes a really long way towards making everyone feel comfortable. It also helps people's attention spans and blood sugar. Like, whether every meeting's a potluck or whether everyone just brings snacks or whether it's at someone's house and they're like, fuck, yeah, I'm hosting. I'm gonna make a bunch of food. And, you know, whatever it is.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. I've been theorizing this for a while that, like, we need. Because, like, obviously a lot of this technology has been worked out already, but also, we have so much further to go in order to, like, be able to make decisions together in a free society. And, like, I think we need to just have an initiative of, like, how do we make meetings? Fucking rip. One of my ideas has always been, like, you have a meeting that's just like the standing barbecue meeting that happens, like, every. Like, it's like the endless meeting, and it's like, okay, you have it at, like, this time, and there's just like, a barbecue, and everyone does barbecue stuff. And.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, it's a standing thing where if you want to come and, like. And then, okay, just to keep talking about some of this stuff. Childcare.

[Mia Wong]

Childcare.

[Rick Jervis]

I think when you. You mentioned at the beginning being, like, making sure that the space is accessible to everyone, and there's a lot of stuff that gets forgotten about. In particular, I would say that single parents are often forgotten about. And I think that having. Or parents in general or Children in general are often forgotten about. And I think that having a plan in place for accessibility of all kinds of different people often includes childcare.

[Mia Wong]

I used to do this.

[Rick Jervis]

Oh, that's cool.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, that was like one of the things that I did for some meetings. And like, yeah, there were like meetings that happened. There were like tennis meetings that happened because like people stayed and played with everyone's kids.

[Rick Jervis]

It was a good time. And yeah, there's also this idea where sometimes meetings people can come in and out of the society that I want to live in, has neighborhood assemblies that then move up to larger structures and make decisions.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Rick Jervis]

And in those there's also this thing where it's like, you don't always have to go to meetings. There's a thing that, about democracy that people don't quite always get, which is that sometimes the most beautiful thing we can do for each other is give our agency freely to other people to make decisions for us that we trust. Working groups are actually a good part, big part of this where I'm like, I don't actually want to have a say in every single decision that affects me. I want to be able to have a say in every single decision that affects me. Anyway, I'm again going kind of meta on this. Sorry.

[Mia Wong]

No, no. Well, this is important. Right. And also doing the childcare was part of that because. Yeah, it meant like I was kind of. I was like trusting my people in the group to do the meeting without me while I was just sort of taking care of, like just taking care of kids. And that was a really beautiful thing. And it worked really well. It fucking ripped.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. And you can build multi generational movements, which are the only movements that accomplish. That's not true. Sudden movements also accomplish things. But when I look at some of the real high water marks from the bottom and the left organizing around the world, you're talking about people who are drawn from hundreds of years of radical legacies or at least a couple generations.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Speaking of generations, I don't know. I don't have a good pivot into this, but okay, so we've been talking a lot about a lot of the technology that's been used for meetings. I want to talk about a couple of other kinds of meetings that you can have. When I originally was writing this, I was like, oh, I could fit this whole section how to run a meeting. This will be like 20 minutes. And I can have 20 minutes about like spokes, councils, and 20 minutes about general assemblies. And we're now like an hour. This is like, this is episode.

[Rick Jervis]

This is not Margaret on.

[Mia Wong]

And we have not even started talking. So. Okay, that's going to be another. The General assembly episode is going to be another episode completely in and of itself. But I do want to talk about Spokes Councils because this is a thing that I've been finding really, really useful that I think people just don't know about anymore. And because people have lost the knowledge of this, a really valuable organizational tactic has been lost. So, okay, the thing that a meeting is there to do is so a group of people can come together and make decisions. But how do you make decisions between groups or. And this is also often more important less than having, like. Because, you know, a lot of spokesconsils aren't usually supposed to be like, we're all making, like, we're all sort of like, this is like a binding decision handed down by, like, spokesconcil.

[Rick Jervis]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

This is also a really useful coordinating tool.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this is what it's, you know, what it's like, actually designed for is how do you get groups to sort of talk to each other and work with each other in a way that also lets them continue to be like their own groups and not, you know.

[Rick Jervis]

A sort of, like, subservient to the larger coalition. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And, you know, the answer to this, turns out, is a technology that was developed. I actually don't know the history of the Spokes Council. I mean, it's been around for like, a long time.

[Rick Jervis]

I don't either.

[Mia Wong]

Like, at least like 30, 40 years in anarchist circles, but it hasn't really made it out of them. And so Spokes Council is a meeting of groups, and so it's a meeting of spokespeople. Right. So your group sends like one or two people to a thing, you send like a couple of people, and all of the other groups send some people and you come talk about a thing.

[Rick Jervis]

Yep.

[Mia Wong]

And this is really useful for a number of reasons. One, it's a way for different kinds of groups to interface with each other in ways that they usually don't. So this can be anything from like an affinity group to like an NGO to like a union. Yeah. It can scale between different kinds of things. It can. Theoretically, you can do this with like, you're like fucking Spokes counsel could theoretically send a person to another Spokes Council.

[Rick Jervis]

Totally.

[Mia Wong]

Right. And this is, you know, we'll get more into this in a second. Right. But like, like, this is a way for a bunch of different types of organizations to come together and do something and It's a way for them to coordinate with each other. It's a way for them to share information. It's a way for them to. And this is like one of the sort of secrets of organizing is that like actual organizing is built through personal relationships and people knowing each other.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And so this is a way for like people to like meet each other and get to do things. There's different kinds of these. The traditional one is, is like, okay, there's like a thing happening, right. Like there is a, there is a giant protest and like a bunch of people who are going to be a bunch of the different groups and organizations and affinity groups and whatever who are going to be at this thing come together and they're like, okay, how, what are we doing? How are we going to sort of do this and how do we coordinate this with each other? Yeah. And yeah. Margaret, I assume you've been in like a million of these.

[Rick Jervis]

You know, I have been in a lot of spokes council meetings. I've been in a fewer of them and I think that you're right. There's been a bit of a drop off.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

It's funny, we were talking earlier and I was like, oh, I haven't done this in a while. I actually do go to meetings every week. But I like. But I used to go to meetings specifically for direct action protests. And that is a thing that I used to have more direct experience with.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

And so I don't want to be like, oh, people stop doing it. Because I don't totally know. I'm not totally plugged in. But I do think the alter globalization movement of like 1999-2003 or so is where a lot of modern protest tactics and stuff were developed. Or rather it came to a head. The tactics had been developed for decades by various different groups. And actually a lot of the technologies around spokes, councils and stuff, they come from a lot of different sources, including I think anarchists and the Spanish Civil War, but I'm not 100% certain about that. But a lot of the ultra globalization movement stuff comes from the Zapatistas and Chiapas. I know you didn't ask for a history lesson and I'll speedrun it.

[Mia Wong]

No, no, no, no. This is good though.

[Rick Jervis]

You know, the folks in Chiapas and the Zapatistas have developed a lot of different ideas about how to have bottom up democracy and they've been moving through different ones. They actually moved to a more decentralized model than they were doing about two years ago. In 2023. But they went around the world and built organizations by saying, everyone, send your people. We're getting together the people's global alliance, like all of these Global South. I'm putting air quotes here. We're getting together and we're building direct action movements together. And that is where the ultra globalization movement comes from, at least as much as anything else. And some of that is that technology of saying send your representatives and do this thing. But it's interesting because in some ways it's actually just an upside down version of parliamentary democracy. Right. Where theoretically we elect a politician and they go speak for us. They don't. Yeah, that is the concept behind a democracy. Right. And so theoretically you can send a delegate and there's two ways of doing it. There's a decision making larger body and there's a coordinating larger body. And if you want to maintain every group's autonomy, it is a coordinating body. You get together and at the spokes council you say, the 10 people I represent who will remain nameless are all willing to get arrested tomorrow and we're all willing to lock ourselves down. And someone else will say, we don't want to get arrested. The 14 people that I'm representing kind of want to break shit. And then other people will be like, the 15 people that I represent kind of wish y' all wouldn't break shit. And you can get together and coordinate and then the break shit people can be like, oh, okay, well we'll make sure we break shit somewhere else than where you are and, and, and all of this stuff. And whereas a decision making body would get together and your spoke would have a mandate from your group, they would be empowered to make decisions for everyone, knowing that the decision has to be within a certain framework. And then basically when they're done, you'd be like, okay, you did or didn't succeed at your mandate, we're going to send someone else next time or whatever. So there's two different ways of doing spokes, council meetings. I think one of the reasons that they fell out of favor is, is that by and large, open organizing of direct action has diminished in the, the movement because it may or may not be legal to show up somewhere and say, well, the 15 people I represent want to break shit. Or even the 15 people that I represent want to lock ourselves down into big puppets with lockboxes. Right. And disrupt global trade. Because of the ramping up of repression, people have backed off of certain types of open organizing. Yeah, I have opinions about that, but that's kind Of I'm actually not trying to tell anyone what to do about it, but so I think that that's part of why the spokes council has a little bit diminished. And I actually think that we just need to adapt the spokes council to the modern context. And I'm sure people do still do them.

[Mia Wong]

So this is. This. This is where we're getting. This is. This is what I'm calling the MIA technology, which is. There have been spokes councils recently that are not like that, are not this. That are using the idea of the spokes council, but are kind of a different thing.

[Rick Jervis]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

Because there's another thing that you can do with this organizational form. Right. Of everyone sends their delegates together or whatever. Like, everyone. Everyone sends their like, spokespeople.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And everyone meets each other. You can also do this for like, not planning a direct action.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, totally.

[Mia Wong]

You can do this as a way to get all of the different organizations and like affinity groups and shit in a city talking to each other.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this turns out to be extremely useful.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I've seen this a lot recently in sort of trans organizing where like all the trans different, like, groups in the city will be like, fuck it, we're showing up to a thing.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This is a different thing that we will be talking hopefully to some people who run this soon. This was originally supposed to be part of this episode before I realized that it was impossible to fit this into this episode, which is now two episodes. But there's a really, really cool thing in Portland that was called the transgeneral assembly.

[Rick Jervis]

Cool.

[Mia Wong]

Where they people were just like, fuck it. We're running a general assembly for like, all of the trans people come. You can say things and everyone meets at the end. And that was awesome.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But you can do this on a very, very. On a targeted level with like, okay, I know a bunch of different orgs that like, for example. Okay, we need. We need to coordinate a response to like, the situation of trans people in the U.S. yeah. So you can go through all of your networks. You can be like, okay, I know this person who is in this org that does this thing. Right. And you can bring all of those resources together and then you can turn that into a spokes council. That's not quite the same thing. Exactly.

[Rick Jervis]

As.

[Mia Wong]

As the kind of like, direct action spokes councils that have been organized.

[Rick Jervis]

Right. It is a closer to a general assembly. Maybe, but maybe that's a pedantic difference or semantic difference.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it kind of is, but it's. Well, so. Okay. The way I've been conceiving of it is like if you're specifically getting people together who are there as organizations, it's a spokes council.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, totally.

[Mia Wong]

If they're there as themselves, it's a general assembly.

[Rick Jervis]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Mia Wong]

Even if they are sort of like representing a thing, but like. Yeah, the scopes and who shows up to them are very different, I think.

[Rick Jervis]

Oh, and there's also fishbowls.

[Mia Wong]

Wait, what's a fishbowl? Actually, I haven't heard this one before.

[Rick Jervis]

A fishbowl is a spokes council where everyone can come and only the spoke can speak. So you can look in on the fishbowl.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, that's what that's called. Interesting. Okay.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. Anyway, which is a way to do it. It maintains transparency. It's a way to have a still open meeting, but only. But if only one person from the group is empowered to speak, then it's not a nightmare of trying to have 6,000 people in a room talk.

[Mia Wong]

The basic beating technology. All of these things can be used for a whole bunch of different things in a whole bunch of different ways that like we haven't thought of yet.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. You could arrange trash pickup in a neighborhood. You can make the government obsolete.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

With meetings and spokes councils and general assemblies and federations and all of these like levels of bottom up organizing. And there are places in the world where people have done this.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And you know, if we want to close on sort of like this is the political angle of this. Right. Like a free society is one that is structured like this.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Where a bunch where things happen by people coming together to do them.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Right. And you can take the sort of like, I don't know, I guess you'd call it the workerist angle of like, I don't know, we need to run a waste treatment plant. Right. So the way the waste treatment plant is run is that the people who do waste treatment have their own like workers council or whatever.

[Rick Jervis]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And they decide how they're going to do it and they go do it. Right.

[Rick Jervis]

Almost every, I would say every real revolution and revolutionary movement in history is doing a version of this. You can even look at the, the Soviet concept. The Soviet was the decision making body, it was the assembly and all power to the Soviets was this slogan that literally was inverted by the Bolsheviks where it. The entire idea was a democratic but revolutionary movement. And this happens constantly, even when societies break down on some level. Naturally. And a ton, not all, a ton of indigenous societies, this is the default model. And so you Know, in Chiapas, with the Zapatistas, what happened was, is that you had this, like, Marxist Leninist army. And they were like, oh, we're going to do this thing this way. And the indigenous people who lived in Chiapas were like, that's not how we do things. And they were like, this is how we do things. And then the Zapatistas, who are good people, were like, you're right, that's how we do things. You know, and they, like, built up this model. And you have a similar thing happening with the area called Rojava in northeast Syria, where like, basically people are like, actually, the indigenous Kurdish model of doing things is much more this egalitarian method and democratic method. And then. Okay, and the other thing is you can do it in the workroom model, but there's also people who've messed around with it and done things like, you know what? Maybe the school isn't run by the teachers. Maybe the school is run by the teachers, the parents, and the students.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

You know, and maybe the food distribution center is a combination of the workers of the food distribution center and the people who make use of it. So maybe the trash pickup is both the workers and the people who need the services. But the specifics almost, they do matter. And we can. But we don't know. We don't know the actual formulation. But this is the core of bottom left organizing, and it is a beautiful thing. And it is funny how it all comes down to meetings and making sure that there's food and childcare and not one person taking up all the time, which is really hard when you podcast for a living, I will tell you that.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but I mean, this is like, you know, I have had to learn to shut the fuck up in meetings.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, me too.

[Mia Wong]

And by doing, it has made meetings better. I know. Great. You can learn to shut the fuck up.

[Rick Jervis]

Someone else says the thing and you don't have to say it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. But then also, I do want to put this out. Right. The things that we're describing here. Right. It's okay. Like, how do you do the beach work? You need food, you need childcare, you need structure that makes sure one person isn't running the thing.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This is the entire political situation of the modern United States. Right. We are trying to get food, we are trying to get childcare, we are trying to have a place to do our thing, and we're trying to have to not be ruled by, like, a fucking king.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, totally.

[Mia Wong]

Again, this all seems like very, very basic. Like, Shit. Right. But if you don't have this, this is a problem that the US has constantly. Jean. Protest movements is like most Americans don't have a democratic tradition, right? And so when shit happens and there's suddenly riots and there's suddenly like mass protest movements break out, Right. People don't know how to make democratic decisions. So they don't.

[Rick Jervis]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And that means that nobody's talking to each other. That means that everyone is locked in these very small circles of extremely violent paranoia.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And that sucks.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And we can avoid that by knowing how to do democracy because that's fundamentally what running and beating is. This is what democracy looks like.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And I also want to say one more thing. This is a podcast that would probably. That could have used a facilitator, especially on my end right now, because Unmedicated MIA is a fucking trip. But like, you know, when we talk about sort of our. How do you apply this to your sort of broad vision of society, right? And it's like, okay, anarchists, how do you run usaid? Right? Because like, yeah, like the destruction of USAID is going to kill an unbelievable number of people because people aren't getting HIV vaccines.

[Rick Jervis]

Right, Right.

[Mia Wong]

And the way you run that is the way that you run a meeting, right? The workers who produce.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Who are the people who actually figure out how to make an HIV vaccine, distribute it, Distribute information about it. Those people form fucking. Form fucking councils and they form fucking meeting groups and they work in collaboration with the people who need them. And that is how you build society.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

It's like David Graeber's thing was always like the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something we make and we could just as easily make differently. And when he says something we make, he was talking about it in a more abstract sense. But like we do literally make it.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like all of this stuff is the product of stuff that we did, Right. Like we all physically built every aspect of this world, right? Everything. Everything that you see and touch and hear right now are things that we designed and engineered and built.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And we don't lose that capacity when we cease to be ruled. We can still do that. And as long as we have the ability to do democracy, right, and we have the ability to make decisions with each other, we can fucking do those things and we can do them for each other and not for a king.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. It's like people ask, how would you make and distribute insulin in an anarchist society or an anti capitalist society or a bottom up society? And you're like, well, we know how to make and distribute insulin and we just need to change some of the social technologies that are doing it. And I think we could probably do it better because it's currently not working great. And my other go to quote, I love the Graeber quote is the Darutti quote. Anarchist general in Spanish Civil War. Probably didn't actually say this. It was probably a journalist put these words in his mouth, but we're not actually certain. And he says, I'm paraphrasing. The bourgeoisie can blast and ruin the world on their way out of history. That's fine.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Rick Jervis]

We the workers built all of these cities we can build. We know how to do that.

[Mia Wong]

The part of it always stuck with me is like, I think the exact quote that I got was, we are not in the least afraid of ruins.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

We are the ones who built this world and we'll do it again.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah. And yeah. So I don't know what these, meaning these episodes are going to be called, but if they're called, the answer is meetings, comma, sorry, I think.

[Mia Wong]

Okay. I don't know if it's gonna end up being the provisional title right now is the most important organizing Skill. You don't know because unfortunately we do need people to click on this and they won't if it's a meeting thing. So I'm sorry. Clickbaiting. You're right into this.

[Rick Jervis]

All right, well then that's the monster at the end of the book is that it's meetings all the way down.

[Mia Wong]

Yep, yep, yep.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Margaret, thanks for, thanks for talking with me about the actual fundamental building blocks and tools of democratic life.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for talking about this stuff.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And this has been a can happen here. You can go out in your community and you can do these things. You can form spokes, councils, you can form assemblies, you can go work with the people around you to do things and you can use structures to do it and you can change the world.

[Rick Jervis]

The secret is to really begin.

[Mia Wong]

Hell yeah.

[James Stout]

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[Ebony]

Welcome to Pretty Private with ebony, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebony and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all childhood trauma again, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles and more and found the strength to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant. But he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast, it's your personal guide for for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

Sometimes it's hard to remember, but going.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of your life.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

That was my dad reminding me and so many others who need to hear it that our trauma is not our shame to carry and that we have big, bold and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co president of this organization, Dr. Leetra Tate. On my new podcast, the Unwanted Sorority, we wade through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like and sounds like in real time. Each week I sit down with people who've lived through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls mothering as resistance and the tools we use for healing. The Unwanted Sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's lock in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the Unwanted Sorority. New episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Erica]

The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and better than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila, and we're the hosts of the Good Moment Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much and women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe with guests like Corinne Stephens.

[Ebony]

I've never seen so many women protect predatory men.

[Mia Wong]

And then me too happened, and then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay.

[Erica]

Problem.

[Mia Wong]

My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh, dad, all they.

[Garrison Davis]

Doing was talking about your thing in class.

[Mia Wong]

I ruined my baby's first day of high school.

[Erica]

And Slumflower, what turns me on is when a man sends me money.

[Mia Wong]

Like, I feel the moisture between my.

[Erica]

Legs when a man sends me money.

[Mia Wong]

I'm like, oh, my God, it's go time. You actually sent it.

[Erica]

Listen to the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast.

[Jeff Perlman]

Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is normally about the terrors, but today. Today we're talking about. I mean, technically still the terrors, but we're talking about a more fun part of the terrors. We're talking about the Liver King. Thank God. Thank God.

[Robert Evans]

Gods and kings. Two things we famously appreciate on this podcast.

[Mia Wong]

Ah.

[Jeff Perlman]

With me today is James Stout and Mia Wong. What do y' all know about the Liver King?

[Robert Evans]

I thought you were gonna give us cool titles. Just. If we could just go back and you could each give us some kind of nobility and a foodstuff.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, sure. James, you are the tea leaf salad that made you really sick that one time king.

[Mia Wong]

It's true.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think that tea leaf salad of ruled me actually. That.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It made me in subject.

[Jeff Perlman]

And I. Mia, you know you and I haven't eaten a lot of meals together. We need to do more of that, right? We need to do more of that. You're the. You're the. I have not eaten many meals with me yet, but hopefully will queen.

[Mia Wong]

Incredible, incredible, incredible.

[Jeff Perlman]

Now, the liver king is the king of liver, as you're all, I'm certain, well aware. And we did a baster's. This is a live episode. I did a couple of years ago with Dr. Kavehoda. And in case you're not aware, the Liver King is a guy who like three, two or three years ago, started to get really famous very suddenly and obtained millions of followers. I think up to like 6 at one point on Instagram by getting super jacked. He was this huge shredded guy. Or he's not. He's not actually very tall, but he was shredded and he would. He was always perpetually shirtless, usually wearing very little and talking about his different primal rules, how mainly you need to eat nothing but liver and testic, often raw, and that's all you need to do in order to get huge. That and then you can just lift hundreds and hundreds of pounds and you'll get swole and gigantic. Totally natty. Because we're supposed to eat like primal cavemen who only ate testicles and livers.

[Robert Evans]

Livers.

[Jeff Perlman]

And they left the rest now accepting how none of this is accurate. It came out very soon after that because the Liver King, prior to becoming the Liver King, had been a series of petty grifters of lower nobility and had written an email to a guy who was like an expert on performance enhancing drugs asking, like, what kind of regimen he could take in order to get the size that he eventually became. Anyway, it came out that he's been spending like $13,000 a month on steroids. Like that. That's how he got huge. It's not the testicles, it's not the livers. It's not these absurd videos of him eating different organ meats or making his kids eat different organ meats. It's not his, his weird workout tactics. It's the fact that he's taking $13,000 worth of gear a month right now. One of the first people to call him out before this came out was Joe Rogan, who saw the. And you know, I'll give Joe Rogan credit for one thing. He knows when someone's on steroids.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Jeff Perlman]

So Joe Rogan had called him out initially being like, there's no way this guy's natural, right? Like he's taking fucking steroids. It's very obvious now, to be fair. And everyone knew that because it's very like.

[Mia Wong]

Like I don't know shit about steroids. And I look at that guy, it's.

[Jeff Perlman]

Like his belly button pushes out.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yeah, it is. Like, Robert's not talking about an outie.

[Jeff Perlman]

No, no. I'm talking about.

[Robert Evans]

It's a golf ball sized protrusion. The organs are trying to escape.

[Mia Wong]

This man is so clearly 80% steroids by volume. It is like that is the highest volume of steroid to body mass that has ever existed.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, it's nut stuff. So he lost a shitload of his followers and he's still got like 3 million on Instagram. But his videos, he's lucky to get a couple of thousand likes and shares these days on an Instagram video. And before that all came out, he was doing much more. He had to do a mea culpa. He claims he's all natty now, and he has just, over the last couple of years, just continually degraded. Right now this guy's business, which he made millions doing, or one of his businesses, was selling different supplements, these very expensive supplements. And he's built kind of a little cult at his compound in Texas around what, you know, listening to dance music from the mid aughts, a lot of like, Mike Posner remixes and weird rants about being a caveman and like, pulling tractor equipment. And he likes to always walk around with a, with a plate carrier on which he calls his exoskeleton in order to, like, you know, build up muscle mass or whatever. And anyway, he's continually degenerated to the point where those of us who call ourselves Liver King watchers have all kind of been saying for a while now, oh, he's not just on gear anymore. Like, he's doing other drugs and they are really having a negative effect on his mental health.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he doesn't seem well.

[Jeff Perlman]

He does not seem well. So I'm gonna put a video, play a video on. This is a video that started it all. He started a couple of weeks ago, increasingly threatening Joe Rogan, and he doesn't live that far away from Austin. He started posting this series of videos trying to threaten Joe Rogan to a fight. And I'm gonna post to you the one. This is kind of like the key video that gets this series of events started. It's the video that is the inciting incident video for everything that's happening now. Right? So that's what I'm gonna play for you guys. You see the Instagram, okay, so in this video, listeners, you're gonna hear him talk. In this video, he's got again, like music playing in the background. He's wearing a badly taxidermied wolf head that's like a cape over his regular head.

[Mia Wong]

It looks like so cute.

[Robert Evans]

It's like a dirt wolf.

[Jeff Perlman]

He is shirtless. He's. He's wearing shorts. And as one user noted in the comments, his pants are vibrating as he talks. And he is carrying in each hand he has a gold plated AR15 short.

[Robert Evans]

Barreled rifle with a blast forwarder.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. In my entire life, I have never seen a man look less intimidating while holding a gun. Wearing a wolf pelt.

[Robert Evans]

Two guns, Mia.

[Mia Wong]

Two guns. That's a second gun.

[Robert Evans]

Two guns. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Holy. It looks like a blunderbuss.

[Jeff Perlman]

Those are two gold plated AR15 SBR.

[Robert Evans]

With a gold eotech on top in case he hadn't spent enough money.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, yeah. And I think a gold one on the other. So anyway, I'm gonna. You listen to this man.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Joe Rogan, I'm calling you out.

[Mia Wong]

My name is Liberty.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Man to man, I'm picking a fight with you.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

I have zero training as you did, so you're a black belt. You should dismantle me.

[Mia Wong]

But I'm picking a fight with you.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Your rules. Whatever you want me to.

[Mia Wong]

Wait.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

I wanna wave.

[Mia Wong]

I waved 190 this morning. I'll come. Wait. I'll come to you. Whenever you're ready. Whenever you're ready to go. I'm on a vibration plate, by the way.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

That's what I'm chasing a lot.

[Jeff Perlman]

And then he just starts dancing.

[Mia Wong]

I'm sorry.

[Jeff Perlman]

So.

[Robert Evans]

I'm on a vibration plate, by the way.

[Jeff Perlman]

That's a healthy man. That's a guy who's doing well. Right. We could all agree he's literally buzzing.

[Mia Wong]

I saw a video one time where someone was reacting to a Drake video and his response was, those are the least intimidating goons I've ever seen in my entire life. And that is the entire vibe of watching him trying to like threaten someone to a fight.

[Jeff Perlman]

It's something else. It is special. It is special. And if you couldn't quite make out the audio over whatever the fuck that music was, what he says in that is Joe Rogan, I'm calling you out. My name's Liver King. Man to man, I'm picking. I have no training in Jiu Jitsu. You're a black belt. You should just dismantle me. But I'm picking a fight with you. Your rules. I'll come to you whenever you're ready.

[Robert Evans]

Holding the ARS does give that a slightly different.

[Jeff Perlman]

A slightly more terroristic threat vibe. Right. Why are you holding the ars? Because he goes on to say in another post, you never come across something like this willing to die hoping that you'll choke me out, because that's a dream come true. Which makes it sound like a sex thing, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah, it does.

[Jeff Perlman]

That makes it sound like a Sex thing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he closed out Pride Month.

[Jeff Perlman]

So this video comes out, and then Liver King starts making a series of videos in Austin, right? He drives to Austin. He's making videos on the way. He makes videos when he gets there. And he keeps saying he wants to fight Joe Rogan. Now he's just saying he wants to fight him, right? He's not saying, I'm gonna kill you. He's not saying, like, I'm going to assault you. He's like, he's asking for a consensual fight, but he's also posing with weapons. And he has now traveled to Austin, and he's clearly unwell. So Joe Rogan has a security team. He's got a bunch of, like, former operators and shit that he pays to watch over his security and whatnot. And sometimes go on his podcast, if I'm not mistaken. And they do their job, which is, oh, there's a guy threatening our boss, holding guns and photos. And he's traveled to Austin. We should probably call the cops. We should probably do something about this. So they. They give a call to the police, and they're like, hey, we consider this to be, like, numerous threats, right? He's traveled to Austin. Like, this seems like a guy who might actually act seriously on his threats. We're concerned about this. So the police wind up talking to Joe Rogan himself. And Rogan says, yeah, I was. You know, my security team told me about this. I consider these to be threats, like, and I'm willing to file a police report, right? He tells the police that Brian Johnson has a drug issue, which is, again, it's weird to be like, yeah, Joe Rogan so far, not wrong about any of this. And he's like, he's unstable. He's probably needs help, which, again, probably accurate, right? I don't think. I don't think there's much to argue with here. So the police decide these cross the line into terroristic threats, and they file charges. The Liver King is arrested. He's not in jail long. He's released within a day on $20,000 bond. There's a restraining order. He's not allowed to have guns anymore for a while. He's got a State Good idea 200 yards away from Rogan. So the Liver King does exactly what a guy like the. You'd expect a guy like the Liver King to do, right? In. In the wake of something like this happening, which is he immediately gets out of jail and starts making more videos. Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah. From his hotel room in Austin. And again, These are just the videos of a really healthy guy who's doing well, whose brain is not. Has not liquefied and isn't coming out of his ears. Just a man who seems healthy.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Thank you for all the prayers, by the way. People praying for me. You should also pray for yourself. Pray for your family.

[Jeff Perlman]

Lock that down.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Fist bump, pound.

[Jeff Perlman]

Lock it down.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

You should do all that. I am going to the Capitol. I'm already in the Capitol, but we're going to, like, capital. Capital. The location. And I've been given the gift of a restraining order just recently. And so if anybody knows if. If someone else whose first name rhymes with Blow, whose last name is Rogan, I'm not allowed to say it for copyright. I might sue you about every. You're not allowed to laugh. I'll see you. Put you in jail on that one, too.

[Jeff Perlman]

Okay, so first off, he starts this. He admits in another video he posts a little earlier that he hasn't slept in days and he hasn't been eating, and he is slurring his words at the start of this. He is not well. I don't think he's sober, but it could just be sleep deprivation and the fact that something else is awry. And he's, like, going to the Capitol. He says he wants to go to the Capitol to start a legal precedent. He says Liver King v. Joe Rogan is gonna be like one of the great legal battles of our century in terms of setting precedent. What kind of precedent?

[Robert Evans]

It's gonna be the new dread. Scott.

[Jeff Perlman]

I gotta play you guys another video from right after his arrest in terms of, like, seeing how well this man is doing. This is the one where he talks about having not slept in days. It's gonna zoom in on his eyes. And I need you to look at his pupils. Okay? Because this is. This seems like a man who's had a serious head injury to me because his. His. One of his pupils is a very different size from the others.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Good morning, Prime.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, wow.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

From the vibration plate. At the greatest state in the world, Austin, Texas. Texas is the state. Just to be clear. Bags under my eyes. Haven't slept a whole lot. And it's been an amazing gift.

[Jeff Perlman]

What do you. What do you see there? People with medical training.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

The human eye shouldn't do that.

[Mia Wong]

That is like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they're not supposed to look like that.

[Jeff Perlman]

That's one of the serious.

[Robert Evans]

One of the bad signs.

[Mia Wong]

What if his eyes is, like, 20 times bigger than the other pupil?

[Jeff Perlman]

It's bad. Like, it's. If I cared about this man, I would get him to a hospital immediately.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeff Perlman]

Now, to be clear, I don't.

[Robert Evans]

I gotta wonder. The liver, a filtering organ, right? It takes the bad stuff out. I feel like if that's all you eat, you're gonna concentrate the bad stuff.

[Jeff Perlman]

You're gonna get vitamin A poisoning, which he almost certainly has by now.

[Mia Wong]

Did someone, like slip him a bear liver or something? Polar bear liver? Like, what is going on here?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He went up the food chain until he ate that wolf's liver and then put it on his head.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah. It's very unclear to me. Is he actually eating that much liver? Like, there's videos where he does, but, like on a daily basis. He's also taking gear, so maybe he has a normal diet in order, like, you know, outside of it. And it. This is just for show. There's been a lot of theorizing about that and we just don't know. But either way, I think it's safe to say this is a sick man. Right. This is not a well person.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. His Instagram comments are not helping.

[Jeff Perlman]

Give this man a gun immediately.

[Robert Evans]

Keep trying to fight Joe Rogan, but I believe you can do it.

[Mia Wong]

To be fair, right now, if so, someone is putting out a casting call for Deranged man. And like Prophet in the desert. He looks exactly like that.

[Jeff Perlman]

Absolutely be incredible at it.

[Mia Wong]

Before he went completely.

[Jeff Perlman]

He looks amazing. He looks incredible.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

He's got like two foot of beard. His hair is unkempt. He looks like, you know the mural of John Brown where John Brown is like yoked and really angry? That is what he looks like.

[Jeff Perlman]

He does.

[Robert Evans]

Different vibes.

[Jeff Perlman]

Speaking of different vibes, let's change up the vibes and play some ads. And we're back. So, friends, I gotta play you this next video, which is after he gets out of jail, he goes to the Capitol. And this is him going through security at the Capitol, as best I can tell.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, God.

[Jeff Perlman]

And he is. He's wearing like fucking waiting length pants. Like pants that cut off just below your knees. So, like they're high water sweatpants. He's wearing like a sleeveless green hoodie and he has the hood up over his head and then he's wearing a plate carrier and he's trying to go through Capitol security. It's just. It's just really funny. It's just two ladies in like security uniforms, they're letting him try to go through. And I think this proves that he's. If he was wearing ceramic plates, I don't think it Would set off the metal detector. So he's got to be wearing those cheap AR 500 metal plates.

[Robert Evans]

Oh. Instead of detector.

[Mia Wong]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Perlman]

I mean, it's possible. This doesn't look like just a weight vest. That looks like just a normal plate plate carrier. Although it's.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's a 511 tactic.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, yeah, it looks like. Yeah. So I think you just get AR 500 plates in there.

[Robert Evans]

Of course, I mean, they're probably just weight plates. They may not even be AR5.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah. They may not even be ballistic iron. He tells them it's his exoskeleton so he has to keep it on. I don't think he gets in wearing this.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, man, I love.

[Jeff Perlman]

I love the Liver King.

[Mia Wong]

I was really not expecting him to turn into a lobster, but apparently that's just where we're at now.

[Jeff Perlman]

That's where we're at.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Given his redness.

[Jeff Perlman]

So there's one more video from his time in Austin before we'll get back to the Liver King compound and see the Liver Queen a little, little bit.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, no.

[Robert Evans]

That. That person is going through like the mental health equivalent of a Q course right now. Watching their one source of income.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah. I don't know. I have to hope if you're the Liver Queen, you have pretty good insurance for the Liver King.

[Robert Evans]

You hope so. I don't know how long they've been liver monarchs together, whether she was with him before he went completely fucking mongers.

[Jeff Perlman]

Or I don't know how much time there was before that happened, to be honest.

[Mia Wong]

Was it an arranged marriage like previous monarchies?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, sure, yeah. She's actually from the Lung family, but they had to marry her after for fortunate alliance. I'm gonna have to demand that we watch is LK's back vulnerable if he only stands to strike. Because I need to see that.

[Jeff Perlman]

There's a lot of Liver King fighting videos and none of them are all that impressive.

[Robert Evans]

Is there one where he fights like a horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?

[Jeff Perlman]

There's a video where he goes hunting with his kid and he's talking about how it's like a primal experience. But all that happens is he pays a guy to take him into the woods like 40ft away from a deer and then they just shoot the deer where his native American guy is like, okay, you can shoot it now. It's really funny. It's pretty good. Okay.

[Mia Wong]

What?

[Jeff Perlman]

What the fuck? He's just crab walking like a gorilla down like the whole of his. This hotel.

[Mia Wong]

What's happening?

[Jeff Perlman]

It's beautiful stuff. It's good stuff.

[Mia Wong]

What's happening now?

[Jeff Perlman]

He's doing fake martial arts moves, and.

[Robert Evans]

He comes out the door straight.

[Jeff Perlman]

Gorilla crab walking. Yeah, he's just doing his gorilla crab walk that he does. His, like, fist bump. He has, like, a little chant that he makes people say.

[Mia Wong]

Lock.

[Robert Evans]

He appears to be wearing an ankle monitor.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, he is wearing an ankle monitor. Yes. That's my favorite part of the video. He does have to wear an ankle monitor.

[Robert Evans]

Now, someone's commented. Is that an ancestral ankle monitor?

[Mia Wong]

I can't emphasize enough. That is not a normal crab walk. I don't know how to describe what that is. It genuinely defies description. It is the weird. One of the scariest forms of motion I've ever seen the QFG undertake.

[Robert Evans]

Imagine if a gorilla was drunk. He's probably the.

[Jeff Perlman]

So we're gonna go back to ads real quick, and then when we come back, we're gonna finally see the Liver Queen and him back in his compound talking to his fellow friends about how things are really good, how he wanted to get arrested for threatening Joe Rogan, how it's a blessing to have a restraining order against him and to not be able to be in possession of his guns anymore. Jesus Christ. And we're back, and I'm gonna play that video for you guys once again. So he is standing in the yard of the Liver King compound. His wife is drinking a giant. A glass of wine next to him, and at a point of this, kind of reluctantly takes his hand. They are listening to a. Like, I think it's a. I think you'd call it a trance remix of Mike Posner's I Took a Pill in Ibiza. So I don't know why. It's just bland. Over the yard as he talks, as he rants about his arrest.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Zero.

[Jeff Perlman]

Grace.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

There's zero. I really understand.

[Mia Wong]

I really. I get it.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

I really do.

[Mia Wong]

And I'm not asking for it.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

I don't need it, but it's.

[Mia Wong]

It. It's hard.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

It's.

[Mia Wong]

It's.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

The hardest part's over.

[Mia Wong]

The hardest part's over.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

That's gravy.

[Mia Wong]

That's really good.

[Jeff Perlman]

The hardest part's over getting arrested for threatening Joe Rogan. His wife really doesn't want to take his hand.

[Robert Evans]

He has a keffiyeh draped around his shoulders. A tactical keffiyeh, no doubt.

[Jeff Perlman]

He's wearing a tactical keffiyeh. He loves his tactical keffiyeh.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[Jeff Perlman]

It's good stuff. Yeah. He's just Doing really, really healthy.

[Robert Evans]

He seems to have, like, added mag pouches for this one, which suggests that he removed them for his trip to the.

[Jeff Perlman]

He didn't have to remove the mag pouches to go to the capital.

[Robert Evans]

So he really thought it through and thought, I bet I can wear it if I take the mag pouches off.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which is fascinating to me.

[Mia Wong]

It's a pufferfish. It's incredible.

[Jeff Perlman]

It does look like a puffer fish.

[Robert Evans]

It looks like he's taken so many steroids that he is literally inflated. They are trying to get out.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah. So in this last video that we're going to play, he's sitting on a throne. He's got a throne. He talks about how he thinks the throne is silly now and how he wouldn't have liked past liver cake and how people talk about how he's lost it. And he thinks that's a compliment because I think he's making a point about ego death here, but it's not very coherent. So here's the liver King talking about how it's good to lose your mind.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Just walking through the foyer and I saw these old thrones and I just kind of laughed and I was like, oh, God, you know, kind of a little bit embarrassed. And I thought, oh, you know what? I don't know. I don't think I made a video today. I said I was going to, so I better. I better deliver on it. But it was Sunday, Family Day, God's day, Capital G day. And we did that thing, man, it was. That was good. And so I'm walking by this one, this throne, old throne. And I thought, buffalo's real. That's. That's legit. That's gonna stay. But I thought, oh, my God, you know, the Price predecessor me, I would have hated me, too. I read some comments today or yesterday, and I saw he's losing a lot. And this is. Says it on my desk. Lose yourself. The thing is, like, when you actually lose yourself, though, and you lose the ego, you can't really tell people, you know, because then it's like, hey, yeah, I actually shed my ego and now I'm better. You know, that's the ego talking. So if other people are seeing it, Whoa. Thank you. Thank you. Or I can also go back to the egomaniac or whatever.

[Jeff Perlman]

So here's the thing, folks. The new DSM that's coming out, I think they're going to increase the age at which you could be diagnosed as a schizophrenic for a male up to like, 40 or something like that. And boy howdy.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, no, real, truly, like real Russ Putin vibes from this one. He's got like a hood on.

[Jeff Perlman]

He really is obsessed because his hair, he's got less and less of it every day.

[Robert Evans]

That'll happen with testosterone.

[Jeff Perlman]

Would you. Taking nothing but pure test. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Would you pour testosterone on your cereal in the morning?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Jeff Perlman]

So anyway, that's. That's my update for everyone on the Liver King. He's doing well. I'll be shocked if he's alive in a year.

[Robert Evans]

What a fantastic man.

[Jeff Perlman]

He's got kids, but he also makes them eat raw testicles. So I don't know if they're gonna be worse off.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that is probably one of those rare state should intervene moments. Yeah.

[Jeff Perlman]

Something should have. Something should be done here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This doesn't seem like a healthy guy. I know. If you should eat just organ meats.

[Mia Wong]

No. Apparently like eating a diet that is entirely consists of raw organs, random pharmaceuticals and gear makes you like talk exactly the same as like a 19 year old art student.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like another incompetence. Like, like sucking enough ketamine to like tranquilize a horse. These are apparently equivalent states of being. This is what I've learned from this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah. I think ketamine is one possible explanation because some of his, some of his behavior is definitely like ketamine, cod.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[Jeff Perlman]

But I also think there's a good chance that this is just like he's been abusing drugs for such a long period of time that his. He's just suffering permanent brain damage now at this point. Right. Like, he's not able to. Like he's not very cogent anymore. And I don't know, I feel like the people who are still around him are largely taking advantage of him for money. Like, he was good at making money at one point. There's still cash flooding in and that's kind of what's happening here. But on the other hand, this guy made his own hell, he made his own bed. He's getting exactly what he wants.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. He lied to people about their health, which is a pretty fucked up thing to do. I didn't have a lot of sympathy for the Liver King.

[Jeff Perlman]

No. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the Liver King. Anyway, any questions about the Liver King before we roll out?

[Robert Evans]

I mean, so many, Robert. More than you can ever imagine.

[Mia Wong]

But okay, on a scale of like 0.01 to 1, Gaddafi, how. How were his golden ars?

[Jeff Perlman]

I mean, they're golden ars like they're fine. Like, they are. Like, they're definitely like dictator grade ars. I'll give them that. Like, if, if you, if you saw that in like some hunter leader, you know, carrying it around and screaming about executing his enemies, you'd be like, yeah, that fits. That said, I do think if you are going to be carrying a gold plated weapon, an AR is just inherently less impressive than an AK47. Like a golden AK47 says something about you. And a golden AR just says that you have like $15,000 to light on fire for no good reason. Whereas a gold plated AK47 says you've probably mixed cocaine and gunpowder, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, why not? Yeah. That's some advice for the Liver King. For free.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

You have to be sending positive messages out into the world with your apparel.

[Jeff Perlman]

Exactly, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Which is why I'm wearing the derpiest wolf. Nighttime. You guys have to just find the fucking wolf. Like the indignity of it being killed is not its final indignity, as it turns out.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, no, that's as bad as it can go for a wolf.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, pretty much. You go from the top of the food chain to this guy's balding cranium. Yeah, I don't know. Have a fucking vegetable, everyone. That's what I have for you.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, have vegetables. Eat more vegetables.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, we haven't talked about how he squats. He doesn't squat with the bar, he squats with the rack. We squat.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, no, we forgot to mention that. That is very funny.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. God, go on this. It's a terrible fucking time to be alive. Go on his Instagram. It's funny.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah, it's really funn. Have some fun. Enjoy the Liver King's Instagram while he's still alive for another like four to six months. I'm not taking any pleasure in this. I don't want him to die. I'm just looking at a man and being like, well, that's not going to last much longer.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This is like watching a car without brakes traveling downhill at speed.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yeah. All right everyone, have a good night. Triple crown.

[Mia Wong]

Yaya boy.

[James Stout]

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[Ebony]

Welcome to Pretty Private with ebony, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebony and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles and more and found the strength to make it to the other other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant. But he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast, it's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

Sometimes it's hard to remember, but going.

[Kirsten Gillibrand]

Through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of your life.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

That was my dad reminding me and so many others who need to hear it that our trauma is not our shame to carry and that we have big, bold and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us.

[Mia Wong]

Us.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

I'm your host and co president of this organization, Dr. Lea Tritate. On my new podcast, the Unwanted Sorority, we wade through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like and sounds like in real time. Each week I sit down with people who've lived through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls mothering as resistance and the tools we use for healing.

[Mia Wong]

Healing.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

The Unwanted Sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's lock in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority. New episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Erica]

The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and better than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila, and we're the hosts of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much and women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe with guests like Corinne Stephens.

[Ebony]

I've never seen so many women protect predatory men.

[Mia Wong]

And then me too happen. And then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay.

[Erica]

Problem.

[Mia Wong]

My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh, dad, all they.

[Garrison Davis]

Were doing was talking about your thing in class.

[Mia Wong]

I ruined my baby's first day of high school.

[Erica]

And Slumflower, what turns me on is when a man sends me money.

[Mia Wong]

Like, I feel the moisture between my.

[Erica]

Legs when a man sends me money.

[Mia Wong]

I'm like, oh, my God, it's go time. You actually sent it.

[Erica]

Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast podcast.

[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I am joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and later, a special report by Robert Evans. This episode, we are covering the week of June 25th, 5th to July 2nd. It is the end of Pride Month. It was Canada Day. Fourth of July is coming up. I will say no one in our team wished me a happy Canada Day. Not that I noticed.

[Robert Evans]

That's correct.

[Mia Wong]

I hate the Trump administration because I can't do my death to Canada jokes anymore. It sucks. It's terrible.

[Garrison Davis]

Canada. Welcome to the resistance. I'm going to start with a brief news roundup because there's been so many news stories this past week that we cannot do big sections on all of them. We have. We already have three main stories, but there's some mini stories that I didn't want to get forgotten. I'm going to start by talking about the Supreme Court, which has now limited the ability of lower court judges to use nationwide injunctions. So now Trump's order to end a birthright citizenship can be enforced, if even temporarily, for those who are not affiliated with the actual court cases on the constitutionality of, of ending birthright citizenship. What this means on a broader scale is that Trump's very obviously illegal executive orders can now be enforced in a lot of states because the injunctions that judges are putting on only apply to the people in those specific cases. So enforcement of the orders can start before the final order on if it's legal or not gets, gets issued. So this is really bad because it will cause some intense, if temporary, like short term headaches for, for many people whose now citizenship is, is in a big question mark. But this also affects many other cases regarding judges ability to actually issue injunctions that affect things across the whole country.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. There is some sort of like weird hack shit you can do where like there's been some stuff the judges have been trying to do and to be like everyone in the country is a plaintiff or whatever the. Yeah. And I don't know how long that's gonna hold up. And like, and like the fuck thing about this is again, it's just like what this means is the Trump administration can kind of do whatever the fuck they want and it's just legal until the Supreme Court like looks at it. And that's completely unhinged.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Like egregiously illegal orders can now be enforced for a period of months to years.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

As the court cases eventually will churn their way up to the Supreme Court.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And this is a particularly egregious one too because like birthright citizenship is so obviously it's just literally in the Constitution. It's literally the Constitution just says if you're born here, you're a citizen.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, it says the section of the amendment that is under question is subject to the authority thereof, which is what is being litigated here. There is a section there that I guess is perceived by some people to be debatable. It doesn't seem very debatable to me. Right.

[Mia Wong]

No, it's completely insane. It's like unhinged shit. Like, it's like, like, it's like stuff you wouldn't have seen even from unhinged conservative legal cranks 15 years ago.

[Robert Evans]

You absolutely would have seen this particular case, unfortunately.

[Mia Wong]

Well, I guess the absolute most unhinged maybe. But you wouldn't have seen even like, I don't know, the normal person on Fox News kind of unhinged thing arguing this even like 15 years ago.

[Robert Evans]

And now this was like on the blogs I have the GeoCities era. Web design.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Trying to restrict and quantify citizenship is going to be probably the main theme of this episode, as we will get to in the future, and if even temporarily, trying to strip the citizenship of already thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who are. Who live in this country is incredibly worrying considering the massive amount of increased funding that ICE is about to receive. Speaking of ice, second little mini story. An explosive ICE raid in Huntington Park, California.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Quartak and ICE agents used explosives to breach and raid the home of US citizens. A drone was sent into the home after explosives shattered the windows, sending glass shards flying into the home occupied by a mother and two young children. The target of the raid was not in the home. Border Patrol was looking for a man that got into a car accident during a previous ICE raid, who was questioned at the scene and was allowed to leave. But now the DHS alleges the man was obstructing the actions of ICE when he rammed his car into a vehicle carrying CBP agents. Though witnesses at the scene say that the feds brake checked, leading to a rear ending. The man turned himself in on Friday after the raid. So what actually happened here is that ICE caused a car accident and in response they blew up the home of U.S. citizens.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Well, they dynamically breached. Yeah. A home with a little child in. In. Right. Like you see in the video.

[Garrison Davis]

Two. Two young kids, I think like a six year old and a two year old.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You see presumably the mother of the two with the child in her arms leaving.

[Garrison Davis]

They sent a fucking drone in there. They're acting like it's a house full of like active combatants. You have like dozens, dozens of people in military fatigues raiding this home.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, except they didn't do it in such a fashion as you would if you. If you were actually worried. Right. Like they didn't. There wasn't a flashbang. Right. That they breached, stood around for a while, sent a drone in. They didn't dynamically breach in a dynamic way. Right. Like they would if they were expecting a real threat.

[Mia Wong]

No, they just wanted to blow up this person's house because they were pissed off that they. That they caused a car accident.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

These are the tiniest fucking baby secret police I have ever seen in my entire goddamn life. Fucking Christ.

[Garrison Davis]

It reminds me of that one picture of a police raid in the 90s that conservatives used to use in terms of the government's taking over of this retro 90s SWAT cop pointing a gun at a family that's hiding in a closet.

[Robert Evans]

The Elian Gonzalez raid, do you mean?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And how much this was used is like fear of like Federal overreach, like, used by conservatives. And now this is like their entire platform is raiding the home of U.S. citizens.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's probably worth noting, I believe, Huntington park, their mayor, has directed their police to enforce the California law, which requires law enforcement officers to identify themselves. Right. It's been very common to see ICE agents refuse to identify themselves and wear masks. Right. And I believe this was passed by their council. And then their mayor, whose name is Arturo Flores, released a statement calling the ICE abductions masked abductions and directing his police to intervene if what was happening was unlawful or unauthorized. And I can't help but think that that is why we saw this happen here.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

I think it may not be. So my Saka Crash has a chance to do something in this city which has.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Been one of the very few that has taken meaningful action to prevent this.

[Garrison Davis]

Absolutely. Because people don't like ICE. There's new ICE approval ratings that came out by Quinnipiac on June 24, 2025. Net approval of ICE, negative 17%. Democrats minus 80. Independents minus 32. This is the centrist position. Independents, negative 32%.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, you've got, like, Bush admin staffers saying, abolish ICE. It's a win for Mia.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

GOP is up 60. But that's it. This is like the centrist position now. And also 60% is nearly half the GOP. Like, people don't like ICE. The majority of people in this country don't like ICE. Minus 17%. Candidates need to run on abolishing ICE. This is like one of the most important issues facing the country right now. And they are wildly unpopular, including for independence. For this is this that abolishing ICE should be the centrist position.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Well, and. But this is. But this is. This is sort of the problem. Right. Which is that the Democrats did this. Like. Well, at least some of them. At least aoc. So some of that Democratic wave ran that in 2018. And then the Democrats were just like, eat, we're never going to do that again. And like, AOC never mentioned it again. Like, they all came into power and we're like, okay, we have to deal stupid border crackdown shit. It's like they need to. They fucking need to do this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But people should bring it back. I think that the data here is in support.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And like, ICE is younger than I am. ICE is younger than all of us. Like, ICE is a island, a fucking fake agency.

[Robert Evans]

And DHS is younger than most of us.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, the ICE as an agency should be like disappear. And we should like try to be forgiven for it over the course of hundreds of years. Like, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

People want to learn more about the history of DHS. I did a series about Title 42 where I talk about it a whole lot.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of agencies that shouldn't exist, the BBC cut the feed of the Glassbury Music Festival during kneecap performance to block pro Palestinian messaging. But they failed to stop Bob Villain from leading a Death to the IDF chant. Wait, Bob Dylan from being Bob Villain.

[Mia Wong]

Based Bob Dylan?

[Garrison Davis]

They are a punk rap group and they were leading Death to the IDF Chance broadcast live on the stage. Both of these music groups, Kneecap and Bob Villain are now under investigation by the British police from their political comments at this music festival. And the U.S. state Department has revoked Bob Villain's work visa ahead of an upcoming US tour as punishment for criticizing the military of a foreign country. The party of free speech strikes once again.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I do want to say that like as a, as a consumer of Glastonbury Music Festival content. Right. I guess as a British person. Yeah. And at the target, like age demographic, I guess.

[Jeff Perlman]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

What this has overshadowed is the massive amount of support for the Palestinian cause that you saw like go watch a Glastonbury video and you will not, not see Palestinian flags in the crowd. Most of them. You will hear the artists acknowledging that there is a genocide in Palestine. Right. I don't know if anyone at the BBC is familiar with Bob Villain. Like I'm sure they've played their music, but whoever made the choice to stream them and not stream Nika clearly had not done a like a fucking, like a Wikipedia level research. Because you know what you're getting into with these guys. Both the people in the band are called Bobby Villain, right? No, that's their stage name that they use in order to have a little bit of privacy. But there's an interview with him a while ago where he's like, yeah, I just like pissing people off because it's the only thing that brings me joy in this miserable fucking country.

[Mia Wong]

Incredible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they've been very outspoken about a large number of things.

[Mia Wong]

The British police have been going completely unhinged with this too. The Parliament's currently. I don't know what the result. I think they may have voted to do it already. They've been trying to vote to like make it illegal for like Palestinian action to exist. After they did a. After they did a pretty big action at Palestine action. Yeah, after Palestinian action did a pretty big like action at a like fucking British arms Manufacturer that sells to Israel. So they're going so unhinged on all of this shit.

[Garrison Davis]

And they've been going after Kneecap for years. There's multiple investigations into Kneecap now. You should check out Kneecap's new movie. It's pretty good. For our first main story, I guess I'll throw to James to discuss denaturalization.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Less exciting than Glastary music festival. So denaturalization. If you're not familiar with the removal of U.S. citizenship from people who became U.S. citizens at some point in their life, the DOJ has issued instructions to its Civil Division employees to pursue denaturalization proceedings against naturalized U.S. citizens. Quote, in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence. It goes on to list some categories. These include some of the things you might expect, including like being a nexus to terrorism and organised crime, people who engaged in war crimes, people who committed violent crimes or failed to disclose felonies on their application for naturalization. But they also include fraud both against private individuals and against Medicaid, Medicare and the Paycheck Protection plan, maybe program the PPP Covid era government bailout.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

The last one however, is the most concerning. Quote, any cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division considers sufficiently important to pursue.

[Garrison Davis]

Any cases that are found to be sufficient, sufficiently important.

[Robert Evans]

Just if people aren't familiar, right? Civil and criminal law are distinct, right? Civil law has a lower burden of proof and crucially, the accused person is not entitled to legal representation. In addition, this could have trickle down effects, right? Children of naturalized citizens are also citizens, so their citizenship derives from their parents citizenship. So it's possible that children who are not even accused of doing anything wrong could be denatural, not naturalized, de citizenized and left stateless. Right? Many of these children will not be dual nationals.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the other big problem with ending birthright citizenship.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, it will lead people. So this is something that I do feel like, much like I feel like in the uk people should have pushed back against the government prosecuting people for saying shit that was fucking hateful and disgusting about migrants when there was a stabbing attack last year. I still feel people should have pushed back because it's not a good situation when the government gets to decide what you can and can't think. Likewise, in this instance, nations in the global north have been leaving people who fought for the or people who are accused of fighting for the Islamic State or joining the Islamic State stateless for a long time. And I think that was a bad precedent and they were able to as we'll get into. They will always use an odious person as the first example. Right. To set the precedent and then go from there.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

So in the odious person example in this case is someone called Elliot Duke. They have been denaturalized. Duke was a UK citizen, served in the United States military. While serving in Germany, they received and distributed child sex abuse material. According to the doj, they were later contacted by the FBI about this and prosecuted. The DOJ stated that their case was identified as part of Operation Prison Lookout, which aims to identify sex offenders who have naturalized. I haven't seen any reporting on Prison Lookout. It's in the press release, but I think maybe people don't read to the bottom, but it appears that the doj, this case has been going on for months. The Duke case. Right. And so the doj, as early as February this year was looking through prosecution records to find naturalized citizens who have been convicted of sex crimes. Duke was not able to get an attorney to represent them.

[Mia Wong]

Them.

[Robert Evans]

They also, it appears, renounce a UK citizenship. And it's not very clear what happens now.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like in other stateless person cases, where does this person go? Denaturalization has been used before. Right. The time when the United States did the most denaturalization was during the second red scare. Second red scare, aka McCarthyism. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And oh boy, are they trying to bring it back.

[Robert Evans]

20,000 cases a year in the McCarthy era. For reference, stats I could find suggest about 25 million naturalized citizens in the United States. Both Obama. Obama had something called Operation Janus that identified people who were eligible for denaturalization. Trump 1 also had higher rates of denaturalization, but Nothing on this McCarthy era scale. Right. People will be familiar with denaturalization. Also before that it happened to Emma Goldman, for example.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

One other story from this week that's kind of related is it was announced that tool to check the citizenship status of all Americans. This is the first time we've had a centralized tool like this or we've attempted to.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The U.S. has for a while has resisted creating like a dossier of like official citizens because this is like a kind of problematic thing to have. There's a lot of issues with this concept. Actually verifying that this list is accurate is very tricky. You have to add people who have been naturalized, how they've been naturalized. There's other people who acquire citizenship through other means than the standard, like naturalization process. Like including, like through. Through your parents.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

There's the Child Citizenship act of 2000 where if one of your parents is a US citizen and you are not a US citizen, but you live with your US citizen parent while being a legal permanent resident, that then gives you automatic citizenship. But you don't need to apply for the naturalization process. So this is, like, a really weird thing to prove. You have to, like, apply for a certificate or apply for a passport as proof of citizenship. How would those cases be added to this list? This is an incredibly problematic thing to have, and it's going to be used mainly just to hunt people down and try to deport them.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Massive information security risk.

[Garrison Davis]

It's really problematic. And tied in with these other denaturalization programs, it's a really worrying sign of where things are going to be going.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Talking of worrying signs, this is a worrying sign that we have to pivot to advertisements.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, we are back. James, you do have one, one piece of good news in the immigration front.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I do, Garrison, but I gotta hit you with some bad news first, buddy.

[Garrison Davis]

That's the way this show works.

[Robert Evans]

That's how we do it here at Cool Zone Media.

[Garrison Davis]

It could happen here.

[Robert Evans]

Special Immigrant Defenders Law center, illegal nonprofit, says one of their clients, Julie Calderon, was abducted by armed men in Los Angeles and taken to San Ysidro. People are not familiar. San Ysidro is the border that you might call San Diego border.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

The town that actually has the physical nexus of Tijuana is San Ysidro. The city of San Diego also has some land down there. She was told at San Ysidro that she was to sign voluntary deportation papers. She very reasonably refused to ask to see a lawyer and a judge. And at this point, she was taken and returned to the armed men and is now being detained in a warehouse with no beds, blankets, or food. She was able to make a call to her family from a blocked number. She described the people as bounty hunters. And at this point, she said she has not seen any uniformed officers in her detention. Right. She's being detained in an area where men and women are mixed, which is not usual in Border Patrol detention. According to imdef. According to imdef, she has not been able to shower and the only water source is a sink. The Mexican consulate has been informed and thinks that she might now be in the Otay Mesa Detention Center. That because she's not showing up on the ICE detainee locator. They don't know that for sure. And they are therefore still a little bit unclear on where this lady has gone. I have seen reports of bounty hunters many of you have sent them to me. I have seen none that I find to be credible before this. IMDEF are an established group. They are not people who I've found to be prone to making things up or exaggerating. Like, I trust them as a source. And this is deeply, deeply worrying. I don't know why it's not getting more coverage, other than most people on the migration and border beat perhaps don't speak Spanish or have actually just turned up on this beat a few weeks ago and have no notion of who the actors and these groups are. And they tend to go off government press releases. This is like shit that we haven't seen in the United States since. I know, the Fugitive Slave Act.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, it's appalling.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. This is like the most just actual straight up 1930s Nazi shit that we've seen from them. Like, it's hideous.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's happening here in San Diego. But it's also, of course, like, as Californians, we are entering this time with the most cowardly and pathetic governor that we've had in a long time. Like, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Republican, but I bet he'd have handled this better than Newsom, who is just a slime ball.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. The fact that Newsom isn't like, if this was happening in fucking Illinois, Pritzker would have SWAT teams. These people would be dead right now. But this is. This is completely fucking unhinged.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. No, this is.

[Mia Wong]

What the fuck?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

James, I was promised good news after the break.

[Robert Evans]

You're right, Garrison and I do have some lucky you. Finally, a judge has ordered that Trump's sweeping asylum ban exceeds his authority as president and granted broadcast protection. So we're going to see, like, literally, this happened maybe 30 minutes before we started recording. I'm going to read over the court documents. I've linked them in the notes here and see what this means. But it suggests that Trump's authority and under the Immigration Naturalization act doesn't allow him to just say, we're not doing asylum anymore. And therefore, that could mean that it's possible for people to once again apply for asylum in the United States. I don't know how that will look. The Biden administration had great success gating asylum through CBP1. Right. And making it practically impossible for many people, people who have darker skin, people who don't have fancy ass cell phones, people who don't have access to WI fi, et cetera, et cetera, to apply for asylum. That was the Biden administration, the people who we're supposed to think are good. They were terrible for migrants, but they did, they got that, they got that through.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So what we'll see from the Trump administration, I don't imagine we will see a return to like regular Title 8 asylum processing as we saw. Like, you know, last time we saw it, I guess was in the Obama area. And that was pretty bad. So, yeah, I don't know what we'll see here.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, now I'm going to throw to Robert Evans for a special report on the Diddy trial.

[Jeff Perlman]

Hey, everybody, Robert here. I guess I'm our resident P didy expert because I did the bastards episodes on him. Just felt like it was appropriate to give y' all a brief update. So on the day that we record this, which is Wednesday 2nd July, Sean Detti Combs was found guilty on two of the five charges in his trial. He was being charged with racketeering, conspiracy and sex trafficking. And he was not found guilty of racketeering, conspiracy or of both sex trafficking counts, each of which carried 15 year mandatory minimums. But he was found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. These were four. One for a woman who was pseudonym to Jane and one for his former partner, Cassie Ventura. So, you know, this is not what people who understand the case had hoped entirely. Right. Like, this is not ideal. It's not nothing, but it's not ideal. Now, if you're looking at like, why did this happen? Right. Why didn't he get convicted on these higher charges he was absolutely guilty of? And it's because the prosecutors fucked up. Right. There were a number of different felony charges they could have gone after him for that were less difficult to prove than racketeering and sex trafficking and did he had good lawyers. Right. And there's a lot of weirdness about like, well, they didn't go after him for the guns and drugs that he had both at his properties or for a number of the other things that they could have gone after him. You know, this is because prosecutors have to make choices as to, like what to charge someone with. And they tried for some of the harder stuff that was always going to be a little more difficult to prove. Now, the two charges he's been convicted on, he could do up to 20 years. Each has up to a maximum 10 year sentence. So he could get sentenced to do 10 years for each. Prosecutors have said that they're looking for a four to five year prison sentence, which I think is much too light. 20 years would be, I would say, like, okay, that's A serious punishment. Anything over, you know, 10 years or over, I would say that's still at least, you know, we can say it's not all the things you should have been convicted on. But that's not. You can't. You know, no one's going to spit it. Ten years in prison, especially at his age, he's in his mid-50s right now, but four or five years, you know, I wouldn't quite say that's a slap on the wrist, but it's not nearly what is deserved here right now. You do, with federal sentences like this, tend to serve a lot more of this. This is not a. And he'll be out in a year kind of situation. One of the things that's kind of worth noting here is that he and his team did ask for bail while he waited for. Because next week he's going to. They're going to, like, set up when he's going to get sentenced. Right. So that doesn't mean he'll be sentenced next week, but they'll be scheduling his sentencing next week. Right. The legal system moves pretty slow. And his team asked for bail. There's evidence that he had people, like, setting up, getting extra security up around his primary home, and they were kind of expecting him to be able to go home today. That's not going to happen. The judge has denied his bail. This is after one of his accusers basically said, hey, I think this guy is really dangerous. He has a history of going after his accusers. I don't feel safe with him out before sentencing. And that's maybe a good sign that maybe the judge will go further than the prosecutors, although I don't know if that's likely again. And I'll be like, okay, well, at least this is serious. If it gets 10 years or something like that, if it is four or five, I'm gonna be pretty frustrated. But, you know, that's the case. This is. We are talking about a billionaire going to court here. So any serious prison sentence is more than you usually would expect. And this is a guy who's been used to living with kind of impunity for a while. And if he spends years in prison, either way, it's not. Not totally impunity, but, yeah, not ideal. That's the situation as it stands right now with P. Diddy. You know, we'll see again next week. They're going to schedule his sentencing. So, yeah, we'll see how things shake out.

[Garrison Davis]

Now we'll pass over to Mia to discuss our second main story. This episode, the formerly named One big beautiful bill.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God. So actually reading through this, I refuse to call this anything other than the genocide budget, because this budget, what it is designed to do, is a genocide. And that's not an exaggeration.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, there's multiple types of killing included in this bill, not just genocide. Yeah, the Medicare cuts, I think that's true. Aren't technically genocide, but they, but they could lead to mass death. So we should be, we should be inclusive. We should be inclusive of all the types of deaths.

[Mia Wong]

I think we'll get into the Medicaid shit later. We need to start with the mass deportation. We want to do an ethnic cleansing. We want to just simply wipe out entire peoples who live in the US and like fucking deport them from this country.

[Garrison Davis]

Right, and by we, you mean the bill, not you, Mia Wong, or us Cool Zone Media?

[Mia Wong]

No, no, by we, I mean the Republican Party who fucking wrote this bill.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay, just checking.

[Mia Wong]

So, okay, what is actually in this? There's a very good write up of this from the American Immigration Council and a lot of the stuff is from there. Okay. So across Homeland Security and government affairs, the judiciary and the military, the version of the budget that just passed The Senate allocates $170 billion to their fucking unhinged deportation.

[Robert Evans]

Shit.

[Mia Wong]

This would be the third largest military budget in the world. It is 30% larger than the military budget of Russia, which is currently fighting an active full scale ground war. War. Right. This is a genocide budget. They are trying to get $170 billion for all of their border enforcement shit because they want to do a genocide. They are trying to remove entire peoples from the United States. And to do that, they need this kind of money.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So let's, let's, let's break down a little bit of where this money's fucking going. We're going to do a longer thing. I'm going to do a longer episode about this thing probably Tuesday about like everything that's in this budget. But this needs to be understood. They are running $45 billion specifically for immigration detention. And as, as the American Immigration Council points out, that is at minimum five and a half billion more dollars per year than the entire budget of the entire federal prison system.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

What the. That's again, at minimum. That's like four. It's like 14. It's like 14 and a half billion at minimum for detention. Just, just for immigration detention. Again, significantly more like over 50% larger than the budget for the fucking entire federal prison system they want to put into this. They're also giving out $3.5 billion to state and local governments spent on working with ICE. The American Immigration Council estimates this could be 125,000 holding beds for people, which is, and I quote, only just a bit below the current population of the entire federal prison system.

[Garrison Davis]

They basically want to create a whole new PR system just for immigrants.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And again and again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the United States has one of the largest prison systems on Earth, and they want to.

[Garrison Davis]

The. The largest.

[Robert Evans]

I think China might push it.

[Mia Wong]

It's. I think it's technically smaller than the Chinese. Let me, let me. Let me actually pull the numbers up. Yeah, I think it's technically small numerically per capita. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like, it's like, there's, like, no contest.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Well, the statistics are weird because there's countries that have, like, a really, really small number of people. Sure. Like, in terms of, like, large countries.

[Garrison Davis]

For major countries for major companies.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Not even close. Now, obviously, that's also counting, like, state prisons, but, like, still with our federal prison system is still, like, unfathomably massive.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And they basically want to double the size of it specifically just to fucking do this. Just. Just to do these deportations. They. There's $30 billion in this for direct deportations and just like to hire 10,000.

[Garrison Davis]

More ICE agents, which Trump's also been calling for in executive orders.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. There is $48 billion for building the wall in, like, border and, like, physical border enforcement infrastructure. There's an additional $5 billion for checkpoints and like, like border patrol, like, facilities and outposts and shit. There's also about $15 billion for states to do deportation. Shit. There's so much unhinged, anti immigrant shit in this bill that, like, again, I can't. We don't have time to get into it here. This is going to be a full episode on fucking Tuesday.

[Garrison Davis]

This is why you have people like Stephen Miller trying to rally the whole party in support of this bill which massively raises the deficit, something that Elon's been complaining about quite famously.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. $5 trillion hole in the budget. It doesn't matter.

[Garrison Davis]

Now there's all these Republican congressmen who constantly complain about the federal debt, who are totally fine increasing the federal debt massively. People compromising their fiscal conservatism in support of a bill that furthers the United States as a white supremacist penal colony.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And if these others and congressmen vote against it, then that will be used against them in future elections. Being flanked from further on the right with Attack ads claiming that these senators failed to round up the illegals in not voting for the big, beautiful budget bill.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And I want to point this out. Right? Like, they're not gonna stop at immigrants. I need to make this incredibly clear.

[Garrison Davis]

Once you have this infrastructure, you have to use it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Okay, look, like the people on the. On, like the furthest left of the US have talked about for a long time that this is a country that is built on genocide. Right, right. This is an apparatus that is designed to turn the US Specifically into a machine. To. To. And again, I need to point this out. The definition of genocide includes, like. Like removing people from a place. Yeah, right. Like, that is a genocide. If you. If you force a bunch of people to. If you round them up, put them into camps, and then send them somewhere else, that's a genocide. That is what they are trying to do. Like, Laura Loomer has been talking today about, like, the number she was citing was 65 million people, which is just every Latino person in the entire U.S.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's Latino people. That's what she's talking about.

[Garrison Davis]

Specifically talking about how she wants to feed them to alligators, which we'll talk about later.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. The context of the number was feeding them to alligators. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Right. So, like, Trump has been joking for a long time about how if Stephen Miller got his way, there would be, like, 115 million people in this country and they would all look like Stephen Miller. Like, that's where they're going. And that's not like, oh, this is. Blah, blah, blah. You're like, this is the infrastructure for them to be able to do this. And so, like, killing this fucking bill is unbelievably important. We're going to get into more of the fucking unhinged shit in here. But, like, they only passed it by one vote in the House last time. And because of the way that that reconciliation works. Right. If anything changes in the House version of the bill, it has to go back to the Senate, where they also only barely passed it by, like, buying off Susan Collins.

[Garrison Davis]

It was a 50. 50 split.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

In the Senate.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. With, like, Murkowski voting for it, for example.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So, like, you know, on the one hand, being able to pass this bill is precarious. On the other hand, if they do it, that limits the window for which we have to, like, make ICE non functional a lot. Because as they ramp up this capacity, it's going to take them a while to ramp up this capacity. Right. Even if this pass. But they haven't had the capacity to do the genocide they've been trying to do. Right. This will give it to them. With this amount of resources. Yeah. With the third largest military budget in the world, they can do this kind of shit. And we have to stop them before they get there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This is one of those call everyone you can in Congress situations. I'm not always a big call your rep person.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, we're going to get to at the end of this how we've actually met it. We've gotten provisions killed from this bill already. We're going to get to that later. We also need to talk about the Medicaid shit because Garrison, you were saying, oh, I don't think this can be considered a genocide, but it's still killing. I actually disagree with that because. Okay, let's explain what's going on with Medicaid. They want you to do a trillion dollars of cuts. I think it's like just slightly under a trillion or maybe it's actually a trillion dollars of cuts over the next 10 years to Medicaid. They want to put an 80 hour a month work requirement for Medicaid and food stamps. Now if you are disabled, Right. This is just like a fuck you die proposal because there are a lot of people who fucking can't work 80 hours a month. And this is just like literally eat shit and die. Right. They're also expanding this. The work requirements to. They want these work requirement requirements to apply to people who have children ages 13 and older. So if you are trying to like raise a child, you eat shit and die. And again also like this is both Medicaid and snap. So this is a targeted the estimates by the cbo. This is per pbs, the Correctional Budget Office estimates that it will that by 2034, 18.8 million people will be uninsured from this. It will keep 3 million people off of food stamps. A lot like a lot of those people are just going to be disabled and unbelievable numbers. People of those people are going to fucking die. And that's the point of this. Right. Also it's going to be just hideous for trans people who use Medicaid and SNAP at enormous rates because disabled and trans people are like the two poorest populations in the U.S. it's fucking hideous.

[Garrison Davis]

These systems are already so hard to get in on and stay on. Like both, like both SNAP and Medicaid require substantial revisions and reforms to make them easier to access, to strengthen the infrastructure capacity of these things to get more people on them. They need more funding. This is basically trying to Take an already kind of dying system and just take it out back and shoot it in the head.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, well.

[Mia Wong]

And they intentionally just want it to be like harder and more frustrating and shitty to use. Like they literally rolled back, like part of this bill is rolling back a bunch of reforms that Biden made to make it like slightly easier to get on.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this is just going like, yeah, fuck you. This is going to be an absolute fucking catastrophe. Not just because of the people that it immediately affects, although it is again going to kill unbelievable numbers of people. The other thing with this is that this is going to fucking annihilate rural hospitals because rural hospitals get a huge amount of their money from Medicaid. And you know there's a very good Kaiser Family foundation report where they talk about how like, yeah, one in four people in rural areas get their health insurance from, from Medicaid and that it's estimated $155 billion decrease in, in, in money to hospitals in rural regions over the course of a decade. Those hospitals are already closing. Those hospitals are fucking gone. Like if this fucking passes as is and there is a provision in there that's like, oh, we're going to spend $50 billion on like to give money to rural hospitals. That's not enough. That's like, that's a third of the amount that they're getting cut by. Right. Like, and even if those hospitals are open, how the fuck are people going to pay for the treatments? Because they're now kicked off Medicaid. But this is going to fucking just absolutely eviscerate like the tiny remains of our rural healthcare system which is a complete fucking symbolic mass. This is just going to fucking liquidate it. It is going to cause mass suffering and death on a scale that like we are going to look back at the height of the opioid crisis and like in fucking nostalgia because we're going to have the opioid crisis and this at the same time. So it's real, real fucking bad. I'm going to mention a couple of other things that are in. It's like there's two points to this bill, right? One of the two points of it is to do is to again just like ethnically cleanse every non white person from the U.S. the second point of this bill is to give corporations $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. It's mostly for rich people. That shit sucks. That's like the buy in for like the business people is you get these tax cuts. They also want to end the tax credit for Electric cars because their response to climate change is fuck you, die. Now again, as I mentioned, this only passed in the House by one vote last time and that was actually a less extreme version of the. Well, okay, there's some more Indian shit in it that we'll talk about in the other episodes in the House version of it. But this only passed in the House by one vote. And it only passed by one vote because three Democrats died in office.

[Robert Evans]

Great system.

[Mia Wong]

It's great. So things going great, however, comma, it is possible to like, like it is possible to beat these people. It is possible to get shit cut from this fucking bill. To end on a positive note on this. We talked a bit last week, maybe.

[Garrison Davis]

Last week, two weeks ago, one recent executive disorder.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, we talked about. I think it's on two different ones now about how we beat the fucking ban on using Medicaid for trans healthcare. And by we, I mean a combination of trans journalists like Maddy Castigan, Vera Levine, David Forbes, our like resident trans policy analyst Kerryn Green. I did some work on it. Not like a huge amount but like, I don't know, I did a little bit. A lot of like local queer orgs did a bunch of really good work on this. And like quite frankly, like the other people who killed this is every single one of you who like fucking called and emailed and harassed your senator, like Ron Wyden. There was like there was, there was, there was queer orgs like lobbying him directly. And then also his office got fucking flooded by shit from like you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Who went and like screamed at them until they stopped doing this. And because of that we got this thing killed from the fucking bill. And the Republicans are so mad about it that like, like they could theoretically re add it to the House one. And there is a chance where they get so mad that they re add this to the House bill and then that causes the House bill to fail in the Senate because if they re add this into the House bill then reconciliation fails and they have to go back to the Senate again. So you know, it is possible to fucking beat these people. And it's also important to understand that this was not done by like the giant national like gay Inc. Huge nonprofit like Human Rights Commission bullshit council stuff. They did a little bit of stuff on the fucking trailing end. This was accomplished almost entirely by a combination of non white and working class trans journalists and organizers and just like a bunch of random fucking people who were like eat shit, fuck you, get this out. And you know, on a thing that would have killed unbelievable Numbers of trans people. We fought the Republican Party and we beat them. So this can be done. And this bill is not guaranteed to fucking pass.

[Garrison Davis]

The bill can still be. It can still be killed.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. Like, it is. It is. It is devastating enough to like, rural health care that even Republican senators are talking about not wanting to cut Medicaid.

[Garrison Davis]

So it's a very unpopular bill. And when you tell, yeah, regular Republicans about the details of the bill, they don't like it. They fucking hate it. They're being like, the Republican media machine is being so selective in how they're talking about the bill because if you discuss the way that it's. It just rips the heart out of Medicaid. That's not what most older Republicans want because they actually also rely on Medicaid. So it is a pretty unpopular bill. And the more people learn about the bill, the more they dislike it. And you can see stats on this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And the unhinged thing about this, Right, is that even with limited information most Republicans have about this, it still has like a 20 to 30% approval rating. It's so unpopular, even in the low information environment we're currently in, it has is like a 20, 30% approval rating. I think if everyone actually understood what was in the bill, I think its approval rating would fucking drop even further. Yeah, nobody wants this. Except. Except for like the overt genocide people.

[Robert Evans]

So most people, if they're not personally harmed, will know someone who's being personally harmed.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you know what is popular, James?

[Robert Evans]

I can guess.

[Garrison Davis]

The products and services that support this podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Beautiful.

[Mia Wong]

You know what else is extremely popular? It is my hit theme song about tariffs. Let's go. Rocking the chasm.

[Robert Evans]

Rocking the chasm.

[Garrison Davis]

Mia, what do we have for tariff talk this week?

[Mia Wong]

So this is an important week for tariffs. Next week will be the really, really critical one. So next week, allegedly. Allegedly. We'll see.

[Garrison Davis]

I'm skeptical.

[Mia Wong]

So, so next week, all of the tariffs on every other country in the world, from the Liberation Day turf tariffs are supposed to, like, come off. We're going to see what happens.

[Garrison Davis]

I've become. It could happen. Here's biggest tariff denier. I'm. I'm the tariff denier conspiracy theorist.

[Mia Wong]

Well, so here's the thing. Ok. So the Trump administration is claiming that they cut a deal with Vietnam again, as of time of recording on Wednesday, I haven't actually seen anything from like, Vietnam confirming this. It's just a Trump tweet.

[Garrison Davis]

It's totally real.

[Mia Wong]

Who fucking knows? So the deal that he's Saying is that Vietnam is going to Levy, or the US is going to levy a 20% tariff on all goods from Vietnam and a 40% tariff on goods that are produced elsewhere and move through Vietnam. Now. Now I know we're all used to like looking at like 130% tariffs, but I cannot emphasize enough that like a 20% tariffs on good, on goods from Vietnam is also just fucking ruinous. Most tariff coverage on Vietnam focuses on the fact that like companies like Nintendo for example, deliberately move production to Vietnam to avoid tariffs on China. Now coverage is like this because all of these people fucking learned about Vietnam producing things like a week ago. They missed a decade of capital flight along. I mean it's a decade and a half really. Since 2011, a bunch of Chinese capital has been flowing into Vietnam like down the Mekong Delta. So these tariffs are not just affecting the ability of China to, to, to evade the tariffs on it by like moving products to other countries, which has been a lot of what's been keeping the inflation from just fucking exploding has been the ability of producers to route goods through places like Vietnam. This is also hitting one of the world's largest manufacturing hubs. Hubs. Right in a developing manufacturing hub that has very good infrastructure etc etc, etc that capital from China had been moving to. This is still, even this 20% tariff on Vietnam is like catastrophic.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So we'll see what happens next week if the rest of the turf tariffs kick in. I don't know what's going to happen. Who fucking knows? I've been leaning towards, I think they will. But yeah, even, even this stuff is really fucking bad and we're going to start seeing the impacts of it. But yeah, this has been tariff terror talk.

[Garrison Davis]

There's, there's enough skepticism in the market about the tariffs in general that so far not, not, not all but, but most corporations have been eating the tariffs in the short term. Yeah, not all. Like famously like, like, like Walmart like has been, has been raising some prices but a bunch of corporations have been eating the, eating the, the costs because they do not think these will, these will be largely effective like long term. And I mean this will slowly change especially as, as more of these start like being taken into effect on like a rolling basis. We'll probably see corporations adjust to this and we'll see the market adjust to this. Yeah, but I think that's, that's part of why maybe people haven't been seeing the massive price hikes that were expected back, you know, like two months ago.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, well, and I think also, again, the important thing here is what this is going to do to logistics firms, which have very, very low margins. And right now, they've been surviving by just running shit through other places. But, like, again, if. If this is. If 20 is the rate on Vietnam, plus, there's now a massive incentive not to run goods through Vietnam. That's really bad because that, like, kneecaps, the evasion tools people have been using.

[Rick Jervis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So we'll. We'll see what happens.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Wait for me and Ma to come into play.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's talk about alligator Alcatraz.

[Mia Wong]

Fucking God.

[Garrison Davis]

Florida's new immigration detention center has opened this Wednesday. It's built on a remote airport with aircraft hangars outfitted with cages and bunk beds to incarcerate between 3 to 5,000 people. The facility is surrounded by a moat of alligators and python snakes. They're calling it Alligator Alcatraz. It was designed to be the most efficient deportation machine in the country. National Guard members will act as immigration judges on site to speed up deportation proceedings. I'm going to play a short clip here, apologize for hearing Desantis.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, this is going to be. Illegals will come in, they'll be processed.

[Robert Evans]

There'll be places for them to be housed.

[Mia Wong]

You'll have an ability for. For food.

[Jeff Perlman]

You'll be inability for them to consult.

[Mia Wong]

Legal rights if they have that, because.

[Robert Evans]

There is a process that's involved with this.

[Garrison Davis]

So the Florida Attorney General has called this a quote, quote, one stop shop for immigration enforcement. Come in, get your process, and fly out. Unquote.

[Mia Wong]

Jesus.

[Garrison Davis]

So immigrants will be flown here. They will have some degree of due process here. Not really real due process, but enough to fast track their deportation. Stay basically at this facility, like, less than a week and get deported from it. It has a working airport. They. They want to start running thousands of people through this facility basically every week.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Trump toured the facility on Tuesday, and he said, quote, biden wanted me in here. Okay? He wanted me. Didn't work out that way, but he wanted me in here. That son of a bitch. Unquote, which is an insane thing to say. And. But it gives you an actual look into why the current Trump administration, like. Like why Trump term 2.0 is. Is kind of different from 1.0 because it's purely built on this, like, this, like, animosity. It's built on this idea that Trump thinks that the entire, like, entire world conspired against him to lock him up and somehow he beat them, and now he's getting his Revenge on the entire world. Right? This is what's, that's how he's governing. It's because Biden wanted to send him to the Alligator Alcatraz, but he was able to beat him and now he's going to get revenge on, on everyone who's, who's tried to stop him, him. And that's how he's running the country because that's the thing he's obsessed with. He can't stop talking about Biden. He brings up Biden fucking every day. Because it's not about what Biden actually did. It's this, it's this like, symbol of like everyone who has tried to like, tried to beat me, everyone who's tried to like, lock me up now, Now I get to take my revenge out on them. They wanted to disappear me to this Alligator concentration camp, which no, they didn't because this thing fucking didn't exist a week ago. Like this, this facility was built in the last eight days. Yeah, it's going to cost, cost $450 million annually to operate. I remember when I went to the, the Charlie Kirk event in Atlanta. They're talking about like how much money we're spending to give immigrants like free cell phones and to, and to give them housing. Meanwhile, you have not only this, this bill that massively, massively increases the deficit in ways we've never seen before. Plus, on the, on the local level, you have $400 million a year for these deportations facilities. And this facility specifically built on the Florida Everglades, it's not hurricane proof, of course. After one day of operating, they've already had flooding issues. This is an incredibly dangerous facility. It could lead to like a natural disaster, could kill thousands of people here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And currently the state of Florida is selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise on their website.

[Robert Evans]

It's always a grift as well.

[Garrison Davis]

So you can get deportation merchandise, you can get concentration camp merchandise. This is the, this is, this is the soul of the, of the Republican Party. For our last main story tonight, let's talk about how Trump and the Democrats are trying to stop the Zomentum because ranked choice voting has now been completed. Zoron has defeated Cuomo 56 to 4412 points, which were tallied in just the third round of ranked choice voting. The other tallies will come out like eventually, but this is like the last like legitimate tally because of like the elimination rules. Zorin got 150,000 more votes than Eric Adams won with in 2021, like phenomenal sweep.

[Mia Wong]

That's so huge.

[Garrison Davis]

It's. It's. It's wild. Like, we've never seen anything like this.

[Mia Wong]

Hot coffee, summer, baby. Let's go.

[Garrison Davis]

So Republican Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking to investigate Mamdani for denaturalization on the grounds that he obtained citizenship through misrepresentation or concealing material support for terrorism. I'm going to read this disgusting quote from Ogles because I think people should hear it. Quote, zoron, little Mohammed Mandani is an anti Semitic socialist communist who will destroy the great city of New York. He needs to be deported, which is why I'm calling for him to be the subject to denaturalization proceedings.

[Robert Evans]

This is a guy who. Who would be petrified if he ever had to walk around New York because seeing brown people is. Is very scary when you're this kind of person.

[Garrison Davis]

Zoran's been facing this huge wave of egregious, like, Islamophobic attacks, including from. From the Gillibrand of his own party.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

On a radio show, Democrat New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand falsely claimed that Mamdani had made references in support of, quote, unquote, global jihad. Outrageous stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

On Monday, she apologized for these comments in a private call to Mamdani and expressed that she believes that Zoron is sincere when he says he wants to protect all New Yorkers and combat anti Semitism. But fucking. Fucking gross stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, It's.

[Mia Wong]

It was so hideous. It's like 2003 level.

[Garrison Davis]

It's. It's. Yeah, it's really bad.

[Robert Evans]

Wait, no, it's considerably worse than that. Like, like Bush gave the Islam is the fabric of America speech in 2001.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, we now have Democrats just knee jerking to fuck them all. They're terrorists, like, in their own party.

[Garrison Davis]

And like many top New York Democrats have still refused to endorse the now, like, Democratic nominee.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Including Governor Kathy Hochul, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Senator Chuck Schumer.

[Robert Evans]

Jeffries posted in support of him today.

[Garrison Davis]

I believe some of them have expressed, like, support of him, specifically support against Islamophobic attacks, but have explicitly refused to endorse him as the nominee.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Which is like, it's vote blue no matter who, until you have, like, a Muslim Democratic Socialist. And it's like, we have to discuss, like, you know, there's some. We. We have some skeptical things about his candidacy and his ability to keep New Yorkers safe. And you're like, oh, boy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. You voted for the three people who died. You endorsed the three people who died in office? I guess, like since the last election in the House, like.

[Garrison Davis]

Now the attacks have continued. On Monday, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt about deporting Zoran. Let's play the clip, Peter.

[Mia Wong]

Thank you, Caroline.

[Jeff Perlman]

Does President Trump want Zoran Mandani deported?

[Mia Wong]

I haven't heard him say that. I haven't heard him call for that. But certainly he does not want this individual to be allowed.

[Rick Jervis]

I was just speaking to him about it and his radical policies that will.

[Mia Wong]

Completely crush New York City, which is.

[Rick Jervis]

Obviously a city that the President holds near and dear to his heart.

[Mia Wong]

There's this congressman, Annie Ogles.

[Jeff Perlman]

He wants the Attorney General Bondi to explore denaturalization proceedings because he thinks Mamdani could have misrepresented or concealed material support for terrorism based on rap lyrics he wrote in 2017.

[Mia Wong]

Does President Trump think this is a.

[Jeff Perlman]

Worthwhile use of the Attorney General's time?

[Rick Jervis]

Well, I'll let the President speak to that.

[Mia Wong]

I have not seen those claims, but surely if they are true, it's something.

[Rick Jervis]

That should be investigated.

[Robert Evans]

It's ridiculous to suggest that you could wrap your material support for terrorism like that. They have to prove that you materially supported a group which is listed as an fto.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Then on Tuesday, day later, Trump himself attacked Zoran, threatening to arrest him if he interferes with. With ice.

[Mia Wong]

Your beloved New York City may well be led by a Communist soon, Zorhan Mandami, who in his nomination speech said he will defy ICE and will not allow ICE to arrest criminal aliens in New York City. Your message to Communist Zorhan Mandami. Well, then we'll have to arrest him. Look, we don't need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I'm going to be watching over them very carefully on behalf of the nation.

[Garrison Davis]

Later, Trump suggested that Zoron, quote, unquote, may be here illegally and that the Trump administration would be looking into that. While in the same, in the same clip praising the now independent nominee and current mayor, Eric Adams.

[Mia Wong]

Independent running Mayor Adams, who's a very good person, I helped him out a little bit. He had a problem and he was unfairly hurt over this question. He, he made a statement to the effect that this is terrible. New York City can't have all these immigrants came, come in and like, he was indicted the following day just openly.

[Garrison Davis]

Admitting to corruption and collusion. He had a little problem and I helped him out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Just A little problem with accepting massive payments from Turkey to fucking corrupt his whole city.

[Mia Wong]

And I want to say here, too, like, as you're watching, just like Trump openly targeting and Tom, Donnie, like, all of the Democrats who are attacking him are just on the side of Trump here. And this has been a significant problem, the entire administration is that one of Trump's, like, core bases of support is, like, sitting Democratic legislatures. It's like Chuck Schumer. Yeah, like, all of these people.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, they're working with Trump rhetorically on all of this.

[Mia Wong]

And sometimes literally with, like, Schumer voting for the original, like, budget resolution, like, they're just. Just. They're just actively collaborating.

[Garrison Davis]

On Tuesday, Zoran released a statement regarding Trump's comments saying, quote, the President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, and put in a detention camp and deported, not because I have broken any law, but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city. His statements don't just represent an attack on our democracy, but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows. If you speak up, they will come for you. We will not accept this intimidation. That Trump included praise for Eric Adams and his authoritarian threats is unsurprising, but highlights the urgency of bringing an end to this mayor's time in City Hall. At the very moment when mega Republicans are attempting to destroy the social safety net, kick millions of New Yorkers off health care and enrich their billionaire donors at the expense of working families. It is a scandal that Eric Adams echoes this president's division, distraction and hate. Voters will resoundingly reject it in November, unquote. And former Mayor Bill de Blasio came out in support of Zoron, saying, quote, donald Trump will have to go through a lot of us first if he wants to arrest his own momdani. We New Yorkers will put a human shield around him if we need to. No one gets to intimidate us.

[Mia Wong]

Bill de Blasio, if you get arrested doing the human shield, we will forgive you for one of your many crimes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, what a crime.

[Mia Wong]

Off for arrest.

[Rick Jervis]

Good for Bill.

[Garrison Davis]

Good for Bill. But, no, everyone needs to do this. Like, everyone needs to get behind him right now if he's going to be the target of this, like, denaturalization push.

[Mia Wong]

No, fuck this. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

If he becomes, like, the symbol of everything that Trump hates, like, Democrats need to fall in line fucking right now. And you can't be attacking this guy for, like, innate Islamophobia. Yeah, it's It's. It's outrageous.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. He also has made one of the funniest music videos I have ever seen.

[Garrison Davis]

There's some good stuff.

[Robert Evans]

His video about how much he loves his grandmother with Marta Jaffrey in it is outstanding.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, we do have some good news to close this episode on, including the return of the stinky Musk segment. In Pennsylvania, a Tesla turned into train tracks and drove into an. Drove into an oncoming train. It's okay. People were able to exit the car before the crash, but great stuff, great stuff in the self driving car department.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, God.

[Garrison Davis]

And Trump truthed on Monday, quote, elon might get more subsidy than any human being in history by far. And without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more rocket launches, satellites, or electric car production. And our country would save a fortune. Perhaps we should have Doge take a good hard look at this. Big money to be saved. And then on July 1, on his way to Alligator Alcatraz, Trump was questioned again about Elon and said, quote, we'll have to take a look. We might have to put Doge on Elon. You know what that Doge is that monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn't that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies. Elon responded to this on X, the everything app. Quote, so tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now.

[Mia Wong]

I will say Musk has also been talking about forming a new party if this budget bill passes. So.

[Garrison Davis]

God, I hope so. It would be the funniest thing.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, it'd be so good. Good.

[Garrison Davis]

What other good news do we have to end on here?

[Robert Evans]

I think the other good news was the. The asylum ban getting stopped in the court.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, we already did that. Good news.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we already did that.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, that. That's it then.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

All right.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, people, people like Ed being an hour long, I've. I've been told the longer the better.

[Robert Evans]

It's one thing they say about Ed.

[Garrison Davis]

It goes without saying, James. We reported the news.

[Mia Wong]

We reported the news.

[Jeff Perlman]

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

[Mia Wong]

It could happen.

[Garrison Davis]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Jeff Perlman]

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.

[Mia Wong]

Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcast podcasts, you can now find sources for.

[Garrison Davis]

It could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

[Jeff Perlman]

Thanks for listening.

[Ebony]

Welcome to Pretty Private with ebony, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm ebony, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Erica]

The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and better than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila, and we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Yeah, we're moms, but now not your mommy. Historically, men talk too much and women have quietly listened, and all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast.

[Mia Wong]

I'm Jeff Pearlman. And I'm Rick Jervis. We're journalists and hosts of the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat. At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat a couple years ago. We set out to find him, but in 2020, Reddy fell into a coma after police pinned him down and he never woke up. But then I see my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dr. Lea Tritate]

If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, this ain't it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft and whole. The Unwanted Sorority is where black women, femmes and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co president of this organization, Dr. Lea Tritate. Listen to the Unwanted Sorority. New episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mia Wong]

This is an I Heart podcast.