It Could Happen Here Weekly 205

Summary

Behind the Bastards / It Could Happen Here Weekly 205

Date: October 25, 2025
Podcast: Behind the Bastards (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Episode: It Could Happen Here Weekly 205

Overview

This compilation episode brings together several recent episodes of the It Could Happen Here podcast, covering key issues of land ownership and resistance (with a deep dive into the history and politics of squatting in England), the current US-Israel-Gaza ceasefire deal and the so-called "20-point peace plan," the economic underpinnings of global steel tariffs (with a focus on China), updates from the US Borderlands under the second Trump administration, and the ongoing spiral into authoritarian and fascistic politics in the US. The tone, as always, is equal parts bleak analysis, dry humor, and dogged commitment to truth-telling—from anarchist, anti-authoritarian, and left-critical viewpoints.

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Segment 1: Land Ownership, Squatting, and Resistance to Property ([02:52]–[33:34])

Speakers: Andrew Sage, James Stout, with comments from Robert Evans

Main Points

• The Housing Crisis Today:

  • Housing affordability and security have sharply declined, particularly for younger generations (millennials and Gen Z) ([03:04]).
  • Public spaces and community "hearths" have also been lost to privatization ([03:54]).
  • Ownership is often concentrated among rich elites, corporations, the state, and sometimes literal aristocracies ([03:54]).

• Historical Roots of Property and Domination:

  • Land ownership in its modern form is rooted in violence, conquest, colonialism, slavery, and repression—not peaceful agreement ([06:16]).
  • Laws, armies, and police serve to protect landlords, not ordinary people ([06:28]).
  • “Ownership today is just violence legitimized by law.” – Andrew Sage ([06:30])

• Resistance and Squatting—A Political Tool:

  • Squatting is the natural human impulse to stay and survive where possible, criminalized only relatively recently ([05:32]).
  • Resistance to enclosure and land theft has a long global history—referenced by anarchists and left theorists like Ricardo Flores Magón, Berkman, Kropotkin, Bakunin ([06:28]).

• Economic and Social Consequences:

  • Modern property structures cause massive inefficiencies, idle land, environmental damage, and perpetuate poverty and hunger ([14:03]).
  • Treating land as a speculative asset rather than a common resource leads directly to deprivation.

• History of Squatting as Resistance in England:

  • Examples stretching from resistance to Roman imperialism to the 17th-century Diggers massacred for reclaiming commons ([15:26]).
  • Post-WWII, a massive squatting movement among veterans and working-class families forced the British government to make concessions ([16:30]).
  • Key squatting movements by Bangladeshi immigrants and queer communities in the 1970s-80s, particularly in London (Brixton)—intersectional spaces for survival, solidarity, and organizing ([18:04]).
  • Gentrification and new laws eliminated the golden age of squatting, as neoliberal governments cracked down through the late 20th and early 21st centuries ([22:14]).

• Contemporary Lessons:

  • Squatting is both about material need and political imagination for a world without domination and “absentee landlordism.”
  • The practice exists globally today as a form of mutual aid, collective survival, and resistance—even as states criminalize it ([27:30], [29:11]).

Notable Quotes

• “What we call ownership today is just violence legitimized by law.” – Andrew Sage ([06:30])
• “Direct action solved an issue that their bureaucracy couldn't solve.” – Andrew Sage on postwar UK ([17:46])
• “It's envisioning another world, literally in the ruins of the old world.” – James Stout on Greek squats for migrants ([28:39])
• “The lesson of history is that in times of housing deprivation, people squat the empties.” ([29:11])
• “What is not allowed is still possible.” (Dutch squatting slogan, quoted by Sage) ([29:29])

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Segment 2: The “20-Point Peace Plan” for Gaza—Critique and Context ([38:24]–[54:12])

Speaker: Dana Al Kurd

Main Points

• Outline of the Plan:

  • Trump administration, with Tony Blair and Jared Kushner, proposes a heavily US-and-Israel-controlled “peace plan.”
  • Calls for a “demilitarized” Gaza, international security force, and a technocratic Palestinian administration with almost no real authority.
  • "Board of Peace" (run by Trump, Blair, etc.) would oversee this government.
  • Statehood only possible if Palestinians behave, “redevelop,” and “reform” their PA in unspecified ways ([41:33]).

• Deep Problems with the Plan:

  • Absolutely no meaningful Palestinian input.
  • “Reform” of the PA means installing someone acceptable to the US/Israel, not actually democratizing or representing Palestinians ([44:33]).
  • Sets up an “authoritarian conflict management” scenario: compliance, subordination, no rights or negotiation ([47:41]).

• International Law and Hypocrisy:

  • Israel’s leaders—explicitly accused by human rights groups of genocide—face no accountability under this US plan.
  • Massive contrast shown with international processes in Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia (where public buy-in, referendums, and at least partial accountability featured).
  • “A peace process where Palestinians aren't even allowed to participate; no one can be surprised when this doesn't last.” – Dana Al Kurd ([53:55])

Notable Quotes

• “In a fair and just world where international law meant something, there would be consequences for this. Instead, today I want to talk about this plan that's been proposed by the Trump administration…” ([38:38])
• “It looks like reforming the PA doesn't mean all Palestinians will be allowed to participate if limited elections are held…this is a dangerous game to play.” ([46:40])
• “Authoritarian conflict management…means Palestinians wouldn't get the rights they have under international law, the right to self-determination, and it means the occupation in some form doesn't end.” ([49:37])
• “A peace process where Palestinians aren't even allowed to participate; no one can be surprised when this doesn't last.” – Dana Al Kurd ([53:55])

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Segment 3: The Political Economy of Global Steel Tariffs—Overcapacity, Blaming China, and Capitalist Crisis ([59:05]–[92:29])

Speaker: Mia Wong

Main Points

• Why All the Steel Tariff Drama?

  • Steel serves as the symbolic battleground for trade wars (US, EU, China).
  • Current and proposed tariffs are escalating (US and EU both talking 50–100%+ tariffs on steel).

• Is China to Blame? A Closer Look:

  • Multiple competing (and usually political/ideological) explanations for supposed “overcapacity” of Chinese steel ([68:14]).
    • Local government officials’ incentives in China lead to GDP-bloating overproduction.
    • Structural issues: wealth inequality reduces internal consumption in China (so less steel is needed productively).
    • Subsidization of state-owned enterprises is real but overemphasized by Western politicians ([68:14]).

• The Deeper Global Crisis:

  • Overcapacity and underconsumption aren’t just a China problem—they’re global, arising from the contradictions of capitalism itself (automation, declining wages, the “immiseration thesis”).
  • Surpluses are universal, not the fault of Chinese policy—a Marxist, systemic critique ([80:42]).
  • Nationalist scapegoating, protectionism, and deflection of blame for capitalism’s woes onto “the other" (e.g. China) is politically expedient but misleading.

• Conclusion:

  • No return to the past (“free trade”) will solve this—only a fundamental restructuring of economic relations, especially the wage relation between owners and workers, has a chance ([91:18]).

Notable Quotes

• “Ownership today is just violence legitimized by law.” – connecting the subjects of land, property, and the global capitalist system ([06:30], thematically echoed here)

• “It is a way of deflecting the blame from capitalism onto another country and using nationalism to paper over the actual economic contradictions of capitalism.” – Mia Wong ([90:58])

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Segment 4: Borderlands and the Expansion of the Security State ([97:25]–[129:10])

Speakers: James Stout, Eric Meza (Sierra Club)

Main Points

• Current Border Wall Projects:

  • New stretches of border wall being planned in the Otay Mountain Wilderness and other remote areas of California and Arizona ([98:09]).
  • Massive environmental cost: blasting, destruction of rare ecosystems, barriers to wildlife (e.g., mule deer, mountain lions), desecration of indigenous sacred sites (e.g., Kuchoma/Tecate Mountain) ([100:15],[102:03]).
  • Community input is solicited as a formality; previous experience suggests little will change ([103:36]).

• Double Walls, System Attributes, and Ever-Expanding Militarization:

  • New funding includes plans for “secondary” walls, increased technology and roads—borderlands further militarized ([107:13]).
  • Displacement simply pushes migrants into deadlier, more remote areas, resulting in more deaths and greater environmental harm ([108:07], [109:31]).

• Grassroots and Community Organizing:

  • Resistance and hope persist: community action can at times stop bad projects (e.g., the Arizona shipping container barrier) ([110:51]).
  • Direct action, cross-group solidarity, and local organizing are ways forward.
  • The importance of shifting the “sacrifice zone” narrative about the borderlands and seeing their intrinsic value and beauty ([115:25], [118:25]).

Notable Quotes

• “The loses are much more than the win sometimes. So that can be disheartening. But there have been some glimpses of hope.” – Eric Meza ([110:36])
• “[They] spent $200 million of taxpayers money to build this border wall. We showed up... and those shipping containers are gone right now.” ([111:01])

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Segment 5: Executive Disorder Weekly News—Shutdown, ICE, and the Mainstreaming of Fascism ([133:24]–[197:27])

Speakers: Rotating panel—Garrison Davis, Robert Evans, Mia Wong, James Stout

Selected Highlights

Government Shutdown and Food Insecurity ([136:46]–[139:43])

• SNAP benefits for ~40 million Americans set to run out due to ongoing government shutdown.
• Crisis will deepen hunger and may spark instability (“bread riots”) if prolonged ([137:57], [139:09]).

  “If you're looking at predictors of violent instability in countries, mass starvation is top of the list.” – Robert Evans ([139:09])

ICE & Weaponization of Immigration Agencies ([141:41]–[148:24])

• Viral claim that ICE is buying “guided missiles” and “chemical weapons” debunked; mislabeling of equipment contracts (flashbangs, pepper spray).
• Main danger is the swelling of budgets and further militarization of ICE and Border Patrol, not fantasy armaments ([147:54]).

Propaganda, Infiltration, and Authoritarian Crackdown ([164:53]–[170:28])

• White House hosts “antifa roundtable” with figures like Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo—continuing to frame all dissent as “domestic terrorism.”
• Real risk is ramped-up surveillance, infiltration, and criminalization of ordinary activism and left-wing organizing.
• “Be aware that anything said at something like this...is going to be used to try and destroy people's lives.” – Robert Evans ([166:46])

Young Republican Fascism and the Reaction of GOP Leadership ([187:08]–[192:11])

• Leak exposes New York Young Republicans group chat full of Nazi/fascist rhetoric; Vice President Vance (and many on the online right) downplay or excuse.
• Matt Walsh (Daily Wire): “The right doesn’t stick together. That’s our biggest problem by far...we need to band together in the wake of Charlie's death.” ([190:18])
• Shapiro splits from Walsh over antisemitism, but the fascist entryism into the GOP is clear: “These are just Nazis. And every time one of these group chats comes out, it looks like this.” – Mia Wong ([192:56])

News in Brief: Tariffs, Marines’ 250th, Plutocrats & Nuclear Power, Alaska Disaster Relief ([154:13] forward)

• Trade war updates: tit-for-tat tariffs on China, rare earth metal export bans, port fee hikes, and spiraling instability in global trade.
• Marines’ 250th celebration features meme music and artillery accident.
• Alaska Native villages devastated by climate disaster; direct action funds are needed ([194:40]).

  “It's an example of decades of ignoring the voices of indigenous people...when they tell us that the climate crisis is real and that it's already here.” ([195:13])

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Conclusion & Overall Themes

• The episode weaves together economic, historical, and political themes: land and home as the foundation of life; squatting, mutual aid, collective struggle against dispossession; the dangers of endemic capitalist crisis and how nationalism is used to obscure them; and the escalating dangers of white supremacist authoritarianism undermining democracy and civil society.
• The hosts continually point out the necessity of community solidarity, bottom-up organizing, and direct action in the face of deepening crisis and state repression.

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Additional Notable Quotes

• “The housing crisis...is particularly generational...for our generation compared to the previous generation in terms of housing security.” – James Stout ([03:24])
• “Slavery may have been formally abolished, but we still find it in the prison system. Serfdom may have been formally abolished, but we still find it in...the way that people are tied down by debt.” – Andrew Sage ([09:41])
• “People lack a right to land they don't use. Absentee landlordism...can be rejected outright.” – Andrew Sage ([31:04])

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Links & Resources

• Border Wall Resistance and Sierra Club Borderlands
• [Alaska Native Village Recovery Fund – see show notes for link]
• Crimethink: Article on Squatting

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For detailed segment timestamps and speaker attributions, see within each section above. This summary omits advertisements and non-content materials.

Transcript

[James Stout]

This is an iHeart podcast. This is Jim.

[Mia Wong]

Hello. Jim started advertising with iHeartradio way back in April and now I have customers out the door.

[Robert Evans]

And this is Sarah.

[Maggie Freeling]

Hi.

[Mia Wong]

She started putting a portion of her marketing dollars in podcasting back in June.

[Maggie Freeling]

Business is booming.

[James Stout]

That's why I'm working on a Saturday.

[Mia Wong]

Want to be like Jim and Sarah?

[Robert Evans]

It's easy.

[Mia Wong]

All you have to do is own or manage a business and reach out to iHeart. Get started today at 844-844-IHeart or iheartadvertising.com Johnny Knoxville here. Check out Crimeless Hillbilly Heist, my new true crime podcast from Smartless Media, Campside Media and big Money Players. It's the true story of the almost perfect crime and the nimrods who almost pulled it off.

[James Stout]

It was kind of like the perfect.

[Mia Wong]

Storm in a sewer.

[James Stout]

That was dumb.

[Eric Meza]

Do not follow my example.

[Mia Wong]

Listen to Crimeless Hillbilly Heist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pod or wherever you get your podcast.

[Maggie Freeling]

The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[James Stout]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

[Maggie Freeling]

Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Mia Wong]

Michael Lewis here. My bestselling book the Big Short tells the story of the buildup and burst of the US housing market back in 2008. A decade ago, the Big Short was made into an Academy Award winning movie. And now I'm bringing it to you for the first time as an audiobook narrated by yours truly. The Big Short Story. What it means to bet against the market and who really pays for an unchecked financial system is as relevant today as it's ever been. Get the Big Short now at Pushkin FM Audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Andrew Sage]

Hey, what's up and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'M Andrew Sage. I'm Andrewism on YouTube and I'm joined by James.

[James Stout]

It's me. It's nice to be back with you, Andrew, once again.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, indeed, indeed. In a time of poly crisis, unfortunately. Yeah, the housing crisis. People are pretty familiar with the lack of affordability of housing, the way that housing has been speculated upon, you know, the way that more and more people are finding it difficult to get something as simple as shelter.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And it's particularly generational, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Like, I don't generally love generational discourse, but it is a marked difference for our generation compared to the previous generation in terms of housing security.

[Andrew Sage]

The data bears its out in terms of the age at which people of previous generations were able to get housing versus, you know, what millennials and now Gen Z are dealing with where housing is concerned.

[James Stout]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Andrew Sage]

And then on top of that, we also lack in a lot of public spaces, places to gather, places to reflect, to socialize, to game, to explore, to interact, to discuss. Land and housing and social spaces are really what are at the heart of human survival. You know, we speak of the hearth as in that space where humans would gather in, but unfortunately that ownership of that space has been concentrated in the hands of a few people, rich elites and corporations. The state, and in some cases still literal aristocracies. I'm sure you're very much familiar with that.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah. Just thinking about the land I grew up on. For people who are not privy to Andrew and I talking before the show, I just spent some time with the Gwich' in people, like in the very north of Alaska there, just in the subarctic. And someone was asking me like about, like how I related to my ancestral land, I was thinking about it like the village I grew up in was entirely owned by one family. They owned our house and every other house and my dad worked for them and so did almost everyone else who lived there. Like an extremely feudal relationship.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, that. That's unfortunately the experience of a lot of people through human history. The external experience of landlessness or homelessness. Oh, well, homelessness is relatively recent.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

All things considered, but. Or paying extortionate rents, which a lot of people unfortunately would have experienced throughout that feudal period into capitalism.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely.

[Andrew Sage]

But the thing is, for as long as humans have been humans, long before the states existed and long after the states existed, people are going to stay where they want to stay. They're going to be where they want to be. Right. And although the state could come up with all these laws and restrictions and property Rights and all these things and criminalize a very natural human inclination. People are still going to do it. Right. And that thing that people do is now known as squatting. Yeah, right. But it wasn't always so chastised and criminalized with our terminology before. It was just, you know, you find a piece of land, nobody else is living, there you go, and you use that piece of land to survive.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

So today we'll be talking about issues with land ownership, looking into its history as a resistance practice in England.

[James Stout]

Nice.

[Andrew Sage]

And seeing where a politicized approach to squatting could take us in the future.

[James Stout]

Oh, cool.

[Andrew Sage]

Crimethink's article on squatting was really helpful for this, so I'll link it in the show. Notes. Land ownership and governance are inextricably linked. Private property in land didn't emerge out of peaceful agreements, but violence, wars of conquest, colonialism, slavery and state repression have been the true foundation of these now considered noble and official property titles. What we call ownership today is just violence legitimized by law. And it follows a very similar structure. Whether you're talking about feudalism, an empire, land inclusion, colonization. It starts with violence, it becomes officialized, and then rent is extracted. This is not something that people took lying down, of course, people have long resisted it, you know, but this is why the government responds with the police and the armies to protect the landlords. And the people have criticized and have called out these practices. Thinkers like Ricardo Flores Magon and Alexander Berkman, Peter Kropotkin, Bakunin, all of these hammered home the point of the absurdity at the heart of land ownership. The idea that Thomalee could just pull up somewhere, claim an area of land as theirs, and back it by soldiers and pieces of paper. Now, anarchists are not in the business of fixating on just one system of domination or the other, because they're very connected. You know, landlords and governments and all the other authorities contribute to the system of domination that we all live under. As Anders Koh writes in Anarchist Squatting and Land Use in the west, land ownership and government use, exploitation and manipulation. In a similar manner, where a landowner builds a fence, the government erects a boundary. Where a landowner charges rent, a government levies taxes. Where a landowner advertises a vacant house so as not to waste it as an income producing property, a government encourages migration to those of its territories which are not producing adequate revenue. Where a landowner evicts a tenant, a government wages war against a population. Right now in the United States, as we can see, the government is waging walnut only against its indigenous population, its black population, but also its migrant population and a few other populations. The list unfortunately goes on.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like the two are so tied, right. That like, in many parts of the United Kingdom, like, as it was moving towards, like before, we had a universal franchise, Right. Where people could vote if they were citizens. And over a certain age they had a property owner franchise. Right. Like if you owned land, you could vote and if you didn't, then you couldn't landed voting.

[Andrew Sage]

Yes.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And in a sense, that is still reflected in the way that the government operates today. You know, the landowners, the capitalists, they still have far outsized influence over anyone else, considering the laws and the policies that all governments carry out.

[James Stout]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Andrew Sage]

And this is really getting to the heart of it because, you know, we may have had the abolition of slavery and the abolition of serfdom, but in no way did the formal abolition of those things end exploitation at all. It just continued in new and old forms. You know, without the police and armies and laws propping them up, private property would collapse. But those things still exist. And it is through those things that the power to exclude, extract and dominate continues throughout our society and continues to uphold violence throughout our society. You know, slavery may have been formally abolished, but we still find it in the prison system. Serfdom may have been formally abolished, but we still find it in slightly different forms with debt and the way that people are tied down by debt. And as long as that principle of extraction and exploitation and rent is not dealt with, we will continue to see new forms and old form is springing up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

I'm gonna play the devil's advocate for a moment, right. And see that maybe, you know, the problem is just the violence of its origins, the problem of land ownership and property. If it just came from violent origins and no other violence continued, maybe it could be excused. Maybe we could say, okay, well, that's in the past and we can do stuff about that, but we could leave the system as it is. Yeah, but the violence didn't stop with the way that the system originated. The violence continues. You know, as Anders Koh notes, quote, ownership is enforced through eviction. You know, families are thrown out of homes, squatters, beaten back by police, villages raised to expand mining operations, etc. Yeah, and then there's economic theft and cultural destruction involved as well. You know, because communities are uprooted, indigenous traditions are severed, neighbourhood cultures get erased by gentrification, and then all this dispossession drives unemployment, because without access to land, people are forced into wage labour on the terms of capitalists. This is really how that rapid period of industrialization got started, you know, with the enclosure of the commons.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I was just thinking about that with the folks I was with. Right. Their lifestyle is to hunt caribou. That is how they've lived for 20,000 years. They also fish for salmon, but there are still salmon. There are fewer salmon due to climate change and the downstream effects of that. But they have their own land, a large portion of land. But it's the fact that someone, in this case the Trump administration, could lease oil rights in other land, which would directly impact their land, because in this case, the caribou can't carve if there are oil wells where they want to have their cars. Right.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And so, like, it's not just that them having some land of their own does not provide a solution to the issue, which is that people can, under our current system, own, exploit and destroy a resource that should be common.

[Andrew Sage]

I mean, it really highlights the absurd notion of that you can just cut up land.

[Mia Wong]

Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly.

[Andrew Sage]

But you can separate it by. By boundaries and that it's itself contained. In that way, all of the land and water on the earth is connected.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Through all the cycles and systems. It's one big biosphere. Right.

[James Stout]

The damage done in one place will have an impact on another place. And I mean, that's so very obvious to most of us now, but our system of land ownership ignores that or pretends it doesn't happen.

[Andrew Sage]

Right, yeah, yeah. Instead, we're upholding this ridiculous notion that you can maintain exclusive lordship, literal landlordship, over a couple acres of property and just do whatever you want with it because it's under your name.

[James Stout]

Right? Yeah. And that's your problem, because it's your land. It's ludicrous. It's completely ridiculous to make that claim.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. And on top of all of these consequences, you know, we're also dealing with poverty and hunger because while people are producing lots of food, rent and mortgages continue to keep people in a permanent state of peeing just to exist.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Right. And then this concentrated ownership of land and of property produces inefficient production and environmental degradation because property ends up sitting idle was used to speculate, even though millions of people are in need of that land, are starving as a result of lack of access to that land.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Also because so much land gets traded around as assets, as property, rather than, you know, it being what it is, which is our commonwealth, there's no need for the owner at the point in time to really care about, you know, the quality of the soil, the impact on its ecosystems. They don't have to. All their concern is their only need is to concern themselves with profit.

[James Stout]

Right. Like, it's a. It's an asset to be traded, not a. Not a thing that has inherent value and should be protected, not just because of its economic value, but because it's all that we can leave for future generations.

[Andrew Sage]

Right, exactly. And, I mean, with all these issues with land in mind, I think we can talk now about how people have resisted, particularly in England.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Which is really why I want to talk to you in particular with this episode.

[James Stout]

Yeah, okay. I'm excited to hear which. Which particular movement you want to talk about.

[Andrew Sage]

I mean, the story can begin in the first century.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Andrew Sage]

With the British tribes resisting the expansion of the Roman Empire.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

We could also speak about the diggers of the 17th century in England being massacred for trying to reclaim common land.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

England has a very long history of land struggles.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely. And it's completely. Oh, it's not lost to us now. People have reclaimed, especially at the diggers. Right. But there are still commons to an extent, but they're nothing like what they were. Right. Like, you couldn't go out to Clapham Common and just go graze your sheep if you wanted to. And it's really sad that we've lost that. We've completely, as a nation, like, accepted that land is the thing that people can own. It shouldn't just be for everyone.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. But I mean, I kind of see how that would get to the extent that it did, because, you know, it was the capital of the British Empire, and in many ways, the British Isles was the laboratory where that sort of experimentation with the control of people and land got started and was then able to expand elsewhere.

[James Stout]

Yeah, very much so. Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

So, I mean, there's a long timeline that we could go through, but I really want to focus on the. All the ways that people have been squatting in England over the 20th century. You know, after the Second World War, it's no surprise to anyone that Britain was going through it. Right. Whole neighborhoods were flattened, housing stock was in ruins. And for the six years while the bombs were falling, not a single new home was built. So people took matters into their own hands. You know, across the country, families and veterans began to squat because they came home from the war and they had nowhere to live. In Brighton, a group of ex servicemen calling themselves vigilantes, led by the legendary Harry Cowley, started cracking houses for families the spirit of it eventually spread like wildfire.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And abandoned army camps, which were once meant for demolition, soon became makeshift neighborhoods. By 1946, over 45,000 people were squatted in more than a thousand locations. And, I mean, the government was concerned this could only lead to anarchy. But faced with tens of thousands of people who had cell free housed, the state didn't really have any choice but to step back.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, direct action solved an issue that their bureaucracy couldn't solve. And the PR of kicking out a bunch of veterans from homes was not a line they seemed willing to cross at that point in time.

[James Stout]

Times change, but, yeah, they wouldn't have any fear of doing that.

[Andrew Sage]

Now it is only the English that were squatting in the uk. You know, you also had Bangladeshi immigrants that end up coming into the UK, particularly around the 1970s, and the issue was that single men couldn't get council housing unless they had a family or they couldn't bring their families over into the UK without housing. So it's like a catch 22. You had all these rows of council flats sitting empty, rotting, and young men who wanted to bring their families over can't bring their families over, can't get housing. What are they going to do? They end up squatting. Right? Organizers like Terry Fitzpatrick, working with groups like Race Today and later the Bengali Housing Action Group, opened up derelict blocks to Bengali families. Pelham House, for instance, which was slated for demolition, was transformed into homes for 300 people by the end of 1976. Over a thousand Bangladeshis ended up living in East End squats during that period. And eventually, through that, taking that first step of direct action, they won. By the early 1980s, the council caved, rehoused the squatters locally, and they ended up getting to live right where they wanted to live. But unfortunately, as you might expect, this came with racist violence. In 1978, Al Tab Ali was stabbed to death by three skinheads in Whitechapel. And there's now a park that was renamed in his memory, where the history of his people can be remembered and live on. Beyond the English and the Bangladeshi immigrants, you also had another marginalised group that took on the tactic of squatting. In Brixton, the Gay Liberation Front took over houses along Railton Road and Mile Road, creating a network of communal homes with shared gardens. And as you can imagine, in the 70s, 80s and 90s, you know, this was really a refuge, you know, for queer people dealing with isolation and hostility from their families, from their communities. These squats ended up becoming places where they could Find love and solidarity and theatre and radical politics. Railton Road was also home to black radicalism and black radicals squatting in that territory. Olive Morris and Liz Obi squatted there in the 1970s and resisted multiple eviction attempts. And their space evolved into Sabah Bookshop and later the Anarchist 121 Centre, which lasted until 1999. Now, this intersection of black, queer and anarchist squatting created Brixton's reputation as a frontline of resistance. Police harassment, racist violence and neglect would boil over into days of rioting in Brixton in 1981. And amidst that chaos, the gay squats of Railton threw open their doors, even dragging tables and chairs into the streets for a kind of riot party. A mix of drag and defiance. And through all this, these squats allowed people to survive. They became places where people could experiment with alternative living. You even had some people declaring independence. There was a space in West London called Frestonia.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Which issued its own stamps and had a two year old as Minister of Education.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And then you had other squats ending up becoming seeds for future cooperatives and social centers and even some businesses. But this golden age of squatting kinda came into a decline by the 90s and 2000s. Gentrification and new laws had to tighten the screws. You know, streets like Bonnington Square or St. Agnes Place, which were once thriving squattered communities, were cleared up. You know, the law was changed to make adverse possession harder, so long term squatters could no longer as easily claim ownership. And then certain councils like Lambeth Council, began selling off properties that it had ignored for decades, evicting people who had been living there for decades, raising families.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I guess post Thatcher, like when they could sell off the council houses, like that massively contributed to the decline of working class communities, right? And then Britain went through this extreme neoliberal turn in the late 90s with like new Labour. And Labour's entire thing came to be punching down on young people and the working class. So, like, it lines up with our general political. Like, that was. I was a teenager at that time, right? I remember how bleak it felt to be like all the time getting this like, oh, Cool Britannia, you know, like, Britain is having its, like, renaissance as this, like, like, like outside of empire, right? Like as a cultural capital or whatever. Meanwhile people are struggling to get by and people are fighting it hard to put food on their table. It was just such a. I mean, looking back, it was the way things were going to be for the rest of my life, at least up till now. I guess. But at the time I remember it being such a jarring experience.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. That's quite an interesting quote unquote. End of history, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Right. Yeah, it's just the, the end of caring. Like it was just such a. Yeah. To be, to be told that we'd like perfected human existence. Meanwhile, racialized violence was on the increase. Right. Like people were struggling. We like had become more connected and aware of each other's struggles. Like we could see people around the world, not just in the uk, struggling. Right. We saw the communities that like my parents grew up in just gutted by the withdrawal or the failure of the industries that were there before the whole towns with no reason for existing anymore. And then to come on top of that and have like, oh yeah, but it will cost you more just to exist in this town, which is shit now. And there's nothing to do. But we're going to use all the power of the state to try and extract every penny that you have.

[Andrew Sage]

Let's just squeeze everything out of you.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Just a bleak vision. Going home. Now I just see the, the continuation of that decline of like some of those towns, you know, where there's no particular reason people to live there other than it's where they're from and it's where their community is. But it's getting harder and harder for them to live there. And you know, the industries that used to at least give people a chance to like have a dignified life there are now gone. Yet the, the ability of the, of landlords to extract, you know, mega landlords now. Right. These giant corporations building these generic homes all over the uk, it's still very much there and like the state has doubled down on supporting them and completely refused to support its own people.

[Andrew Sage]

Yep. In London, as and elsewhere, the state and capitalist market have worked hand in hand to really erase our autonomy, our independence, our ability to live and survive.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, even as places like Berlin and Amsterdam and Copenhagen had some leaps forward where squatting was concerned, you know, legalized housing cooperatives and that sort of thing, particularly in London, that was the opposite of the case. You know, things got harder.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like Britain led the charge in like this kind of particularly cruel and callous neoliberalism Right. From the, from the 90s to today, like with absolutely no concern for the well being of its people even. Yeah. You would see it going to, to continental Europe. You know, compared to living in Barcelona, which I did later, like squats still existed. People economically things were equally dire.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

If not worse. Spain Had a really rough time, especially after 2000. But like the communities hadn't been quite so destroyed by the state as they were in many areas of the uk.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't want to paint a completely dark picture of London. Right. Because there is still anarchist struggle, there's still radical social centers, there's still.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Squatting. I mean, some squats end up being temporary, you know, short lived social spaces and centers. Spaces to help organize or to protest or to, you know, create counterculture.

[James Stout]

But yeah, like it's not. Yeah. I mean, I've made London sound like some kind of like Blade Runner thing, which is not by any means. I have not spent a great deal of my life in London. It's too much city for me.

[Andrew Sage]

That's fair.

[James Stout]

But I do like, I enjoy visiting friends and their projects there and that kind of thing. And I think even post Covid, there's been some resurgence. It's difficult, I don't want to suggest that things are not still extremely difficult for people trying to make ends meet, because they are. But like people are aware of the concept of mutual aid who may not have been before and that has been good. Yeah. There still are squads, there still is struggle, there are still people fighting very hard to live a dignified life and secure that for other people as well.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah. And that's really what I want to highlight that what squatting represents really is, you know, both a struggle for necessity, but also an example of where our imagination can take us. You know, our resistance does not have to take on the same old forms of protesting into the void, per se. Right. There are things that we can do as ordinary people, whether we're black, whether we're gay, whether we're a Bangladeshi immigrant, whether we, a veteran, just an ordinary person. You can also, you know, take on direct action to create homes, resist racism, build communities and fight the state.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like I think about a lot in Greece, right, where anarchists have squatted, places that were built for like the era when people could come from northern Europe to Southern Europe to spend their money and avoid the winter. And since, you know, general economic decline, that doesn't happen as much. And now people have squatted those hotels to allow migrants a dignified place to live. Right.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, that's.

[James Stout]

It's really beautiful project. It's envisioning another world, literally in the ruins of the old world.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly.

[James Stout]

I think it's a really beautiful thing that people do to, to, you know, take that action to address not just to protest something, but to say like the system which deprives people of even a safe place to live, even the dignity of being able to sleep in it under a roof. At, like, we are going to take action that strikes at the roots of that, to ensure that we give others the dignity that they deserve. And that's really special.

[Andrew Sage]

Agreed, Agreed. And I mean, I don't want to romanticize squatting as, you know, just a easy way of life. It certainly is not. But to quote crime think the lesson of history is that in times of housing deprivation, people squat the empties. The fact that this has been made illegal does not blind people to the empty buildings or to the use of squatting as a tactic. The crack speaker in Amsterdam east promotes the slogan what neat mag can nogsteets? What is not allowed is still possible. Forgive my terrible Dutch.

[James Stout]

Yeah, mine's not much better. Yeah, I like that slogan a lot. Like, I think the issue of homelessness in the United States in particular is something that, like, I think about a lot because I travel a lot. I remember sitting in a cafe in Kurdistan and I'd just been. I was outside, I was just walking around, and some people invited me to join their dominoes game. So I was playing dominoes and, you know, like, practicing my terrible Kurdish. And these guys were asking me, like, is it true that that, like, people. And they were especially interested in the veterans who had been US Soldiers sleep on the street in America. And I was like, yeah, that's the thing. And they were like, why? What's the deal with that? And the answer is that we have enough houses for everyone, but we've just treated them as a commodity to exchange. Right. We've been told that people can't live there even though there's space for them to live and even though it's actively hurting them living on the street. Right. It's such a condemnation of the situation we're in as a society.

[Andrew Sage]

Indeed it is. What does the future look like? You know, none of us can really know.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

But maybe we can sketch some outlines of how we can approach land use differently. We could look to the past and common traditions of the past as inspiration for what might return. And we could look to our own imagination of what the future can look like as we refuse domination. You know, we can squat, of course, to show the cracks in this concept of property. You know, we can collectivize and collectively organize spaces for farming or production. You know, we can really be. Really could do any number of things. I think the guiding thread, though, has to be equity. You know, it has to be recognition that nobody has a right to land they don't use. That absentee landlordism is something utterly absurd and can be rejected outright. I think we can also consider the non human in our approach to land in the future, you know, considering the rights and responsibilities we have toward animals and plants that live in species that you know should have their own existence beyond human utility. There will always be conflicts about how we can use these spaces and also how we might resolve these disputes. But I think it is clear that wherever there is somebody who attempts to monopolize land by force, we can respond adequately. I think the tactic of squatting is one small, unfinished, but necessary step towards a future where we reject property, where land is shared, where domination is abolished, where we as a human community and as a living community can freely decide together how we live on this earth. We'll just have to see. That's it from me. All power to all the people this has been. It could happen here. I'm Andra Sage, that is James Stout and Peace.

[Maggie Freeling]

Life's messy. We're talking spills, stains, pets and kids. But with Annabe you never have to stress about messes [e-mail] Discover Annabe Sofas, the only fully machine washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699. Made with liquid and stain resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind. Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers allowing you to refresh your style anytime. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly. Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes. Plus, they're earth friendly and built to last. That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

[James Stout]

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

[Andrew Sage]

So.

[James Stout]

So whatever your customers are into true crime, sports, comedy, culture, they'll hear your message. Plus, only Iheart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. And all this reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for you. Think podcasting can help your business think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com that's iHeartAdvertising.com or call 844-844 iHeart. One more time, call 844-844-IHeart and get podcasting working for you. All I know is what I've been.

[Andrew Sage]

Told and that to have truth is a whole lie.

[Maggie Freeling]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Eric Meza]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Maggie Freeling]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[James Stout]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Maggie Freeling]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Garrison Davis]

I did not know her and I.

[Eric Meza]

Did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

That y' all said.

[James Stout]

They literally made me say that I.

[Andrew Sage]

Took a match and struck and threw it on her.

[Mia Wong]

They made me say that I poured.

[James Stout]

Gas on her.

[Maggie Freeling]

From Lava for Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[James Stout]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Maggie Freeling]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts. In early 1988, federal agents raced to.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Track down the gang they suspect of.

[Mia Wong]

Importing millions of dollars worth of heroin.

[Maggie Freeling]

Into New York from Asia.

[Mia Wong]

We had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.

[Maggie Freeling]

But what they find is not what they expected.

[Eric Meza]

Basically, your stay at home moms were.

[Mia Wong]

Picking up these large amounts of heroin.

[Andrew Sage]

They go, is this your daughter?

[James Stout]

I said, yes.

[Robert Evans]

They go, oh, you may not see.

[James Stout]

Her for like 25 years.

[Andrew Sage]

Copies.

[Dana Al Kurd]

In between a federal investigation and the.

[Maggie Freeling]

Violent gang who recruited them, the women must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray.

[Eric Meza]

Once I saw the gun, I tried.

[James Stout]

To take his hand and I saw.

[Garrison Davis]

The flash of light.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Listen to the Chinatown sting on the.

[Maggie Freeling]

Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Hello everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Al Kurd and I'm a writer, analyst and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics. I'm an associate professor of political science and a senior non resident fellow at the Arab Center, Washington. I'm recording this on October 19, 2025. Negotiators from a number of countries and Israel were in Cairo recently discussing the next phase of the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel. Hamas has since released all remaining Israeli hostages as well as the bodies of those who were killed. And Israel has withdrawn from certain parts of the Gaza Strip and started to release political prisoners as well as the bodies of Palestinians who have been killed after they were detained since October 7. Some of the testimonies from these prisoners is just incredibly hard to stomach. The degree of dehumanization that's been allowed to take place in these Israeli prisons, the torture and abuse that they faced is truly, truly harrowing. Some of the Palestinian bodies that have been released are mutilated with extreme signs of torture. Some were released blindfolded and cuffed, returned with a noose around their neck. Greta Thunberg, who was on the flotilla recently trying to break the siege of Gaza, just also returned from Israeli prison where she was also abused and stripped and mistreated. She said in a recent interview, if they do this to a white person with a Swedish passport, we can only imagine what they do to Palestinians. And of course, we are seeing this play out before our eyes in a fair and just world where international law meant something, there would be consequences for this. Instead, today I want to talk about this plan that's been proposed by the Trump administration, the 20 point peace plan for Gaza. Reportedly, ex UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has been consulting with Trump and his son in law advisor Jared Kushner for some time, hashing this plan out. We'll get back to him in a bit as he's quite the character. This plan, as the name suggests, has 20 points, but it's a little light on details. It outlines the return of remaining Israeli hostages very quickly within 72 hours. It says the Gaza Strip needs to be, quote, demilitarized. It talks about the creation of an international stabilization force, an international security force to operate on the ground in Gaza with the eventual withdrawal of Israeli troops, but within a buffer zone. And this force would consist of soldiers from other countries. It also talks about the formation of a, quote, technocratic, apolitical Palestinian temporary government to run the Gaza Strip territory until the peace process is concluded. But this temporary Palestinian government would only be allowed to engage in service provision, nothing more. That government would also be overseen by a, quote, Board of Peace run by Trump himself, his pal Tony Blair, and other yet unspecified members. There is some language on the economic development, a quote, new Gaza, and some discussion of initiatives to promote tolerance, essentially to de radicalize Palestinians. Notably, the plan does not endorse ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, which was wildly a serious thing on the table for a few months that Trump endorsed. But what it does say is still pretty insidious. Essentially, the plan says that a possible pathway to Palestinian self determination and statehood is conditioned on advances in, quote, Gaza's redevelopment and a, quote, Palestinian Authority reform program that is faithfully carried out. Only then the plan says, quote, conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self determination and statehood. Basically, if the Palestinians do good, if they comply with the international security Force, if they take orders from the Board of Peace and quote, reform the PA in some way, and what that means is a really big open question, then maybe their demands for self determination and statehood will eventually be discussed. As I've said before on previous episodes, that statehood part is a bit tricky because statehood means different things to different people. Apparently Jared Kushner talked about maybe giving Palestinians a state without the annoying little detail of actual sovereignty. The Israeli Prime Minister that signed the Oslo Accords, Yitzhak Rabin, which was the first time Palestinians and Israelis agreed to anything directly said after signing that Israel would only ever give Palestinians something, quote, less than a state. The international community keeps recognizing a Palestinian state when the Palestinians don't really have control of any territory. It's like, is the state in the room with us now? It's also important to note here that the plan that Trump is proposing doesn't really include any Palestinian input, at least meaningfully. The goal from Israel and the US's perspective is for Hamas to be removed from the equation altogether. There's some discussion actually still of whether they will actually disarm or not, because Hamas has said to the media that it's not considering this. And as I mentioned, there is this throwaway line about reforming the Palestinian Authority. But what that means and how the Palestinian people actually factor in isn't addressed. Here's my educated guess. When Trump and Israel and the international community say they want to reform the pa, we have to look at what they've been doing and pushing for in the past couple of months to understand what that actually means. So for them, if we look at their track record, reforming the PA means figuring out an acceptable alternative from their perspective, to replace the octogenarian Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. So that The PA can seem on paper more legitimate and better positioned to sign away Palestinian rights during future negotiations. They've already been pushing behind the scenes to set that up. They pressured Abbas to convene the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council, change the bylaws, create a vice president position and appoint a guy that's acceptable to the US and Israel to that role. That man was Hussein Al Sheikh, Palestinian businessman and former security guy who polls at 2% with Palestinians. What reforming the PA does not mean, it looks like, is actual democratic reform, where Palestinians can choose not only their president, but also on their legislative representatives and on the PLO legislative body, the National Council. It looks like reforming the PA doesn't mean all Palestinians will be allowed to participate if limited elections are held. And it seems it doesn't mean responding to what Palestinian civil society has been asking for, which is reforming the PA by reforming the PLO altogether so that all Palestinians can participate in the discussion of national liberation. We can guess that the us, Israel and the international community, quote unquote, are unlikely to offer any of this because they've propped up the PA in the past and seem intent on propping up some puppet government of the PA in the future. But they need the PA as some acceptable Palestinian entity to be even tangentially involved in future negotiations so that they can say, look, the Palestinians agreed too, this is legitimate, even if that PA doesn't represent people. Even if most Palestinians, 85% in the latest poll are dissatisfied with the PA's conduct and 42% support the dissolution of the PA altogether, this is a dangerous game to play. Any sort of peace process in the future, as impossible as it seems at this current moment that isn't predicated on the complete annihilation of one side of the conflict, will need some degree of public support. It will need societies involved in this conflict to buy into the process. Otherwise you get spoilers. You get political actors engaging in violence to disrupt the peace process, or you don't really resolve the underlying issues in an even compromised, satisfactory way and people get upset and the conflict continues. So if you don't include people's buy in, what you're banking on is being able to suppress people. And what you want isn't really peace, it's authoritarian conflict management. It's illiberal. It maintains structural violence in the name of preserving peace. It means Palestinians wouldn't get the rights they have under international law, the right to self determination, and it means the occupation in some form doesn't end. Thing is, this is well understood and it's well understood by the people involved in this 20 point peace plan for Gaza. Tony Blair, for example, was Prime Minister of the UK when the Northern Ireland conflict was being negotiated and settled. He understood then that public buy in was important. The Good Friday Agreement which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland for the past 27 years, had not one, but two referendums, one for the people of Northern Ireland and one for the people of the Republic of Ireland. The process of getting to the Good Friday Agreement also included all groups, militant groups from both sides of the conflict. This is what it takes for a conflict to be contained in some shape or form. But for some reason, when international leaders or ex leaders, in the case of Tony Blair, think about conflicts in the Middle east involving Arabs, then public buy in democratic processes, sustainable peace no longer factor into decision making the buy in and opinion of the public matters, but apparently only certain publics. In other conflicts also, like the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the perpetrators of genocidal violence were held accountable by international law. They were taken to the Hague. They faced repercussions, of course, not perfectly, not entirely. Not everyone. Some parties of the conflict that emerged in Bosnia after were rewarded for their violence. The vision of the Serbian leadership that committed war crimes in Bosnia came to fruition to some degree in the form of Republika Srpska today, which is a semi autonomous region that divides Bosnia Herzegovina. But nevertheless, the international community at least understood the necessity of holding perpetrators accountable for violence and war crimes. Even if the execution was incomplete. In this case, there is no such discussion. A number of human rights organizations and the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory have found Israeli leaders, President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant personally responsible for the decisions made in Gaza, the decision to engage in genocide in Gaza. But the ceasefire plan, which they are billing as a quote, peace plan for a new Gaza and they're trying to make the basis of future negotiations says nothing about accountability for crimes committed. Trump in fact went in front of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament and insisted on his support for Prime Minister Netanyahu. He even got involved in Netanyahu's corruption case that he has domestically in Israel, addressing President Isaac Herzog as Knesset members clapped and jeered.

[James Stout]

Hey, I have an idea, Mr. President.

[Andrew Sage]

Why don't you give him a pardon?

[James Stout]

Give him a pardon? Come on.

[Dana Al Kurd]

That's what we're dealing with here. Just an audacious, outrageous display of corruption on so many levels. The fact that these guys are the guys putting together the so called peace plan votes poorly for the sustainability of this ceasefire agreement beyond the first phase, beyond Israel getting what it wants, the hostages, a huge buffer zone that leaves Israel in control of Gaza's former urban areas, and possibly they might get the neutralization of Hamas. It's not clear that this ceasefire agreement can actually advance into a sustainable negotiation that maintains peace in the long run. It's why scholar Marika Sosnowski at the University of Melbourne, who studies ceasefire agreements in particular, calls this a strangle contract. She notes that Israeli withdrawal, release of hostages and full aid being led into Gaza is the, quote, bare minimum you would expect both sides to acquiesce to as part of a ceasefire deal. She expresses concern that this agreement is highly coercive and that it enables the more powerful party to force the weaker party into agreeing to anything in order for them to survive. This is in direct contrast to a bargain between two equal parties that can sustain peace. She also very rightly notes that Israel could at any time claim the Palestinians are not abiding by the terms of the agreement and end the ceasefire, justifying restarting the war. The Palestinians have no leverage at all in this agreement, and obviously they can't rely on unbiased international mediation with the Trump and Kushner and Blairs of the world at the helm of this. Sosnowski quotes a Palestinian leader from Yarmouk camp in Syria who said to her, if there is a ceasefire, people know the devil is coming. I think that captures exactly everyone's fears in this moment. The Palestinian Civil Defense Agency says 40 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza today, October 19th. Children have been shot and killed in the west bank after the ceasefire agreement. Israel raided the family homes of Palestinian prisoners in five districts across the west bank before releasing them. Netanyahu has said he won't open the Rafah crossing. These all seem like Israeli violations to the ceasefire to me, but that's not how it'll be reported. And because the Trump administration has twisted the meaning of words where domination equals peace and injustice equals stability, once this happens, I fear very few will question the premise of this agreement and the entire peace process to begin with, a peace process where Palestinians aren't even allowed to participate, no one can be surprised when this doesn't last. And no one can be surprised that this cannot be the basis for sustainable peace. But hey, I hope I'm wrong. Thank you for listening to this episode of It Could Happen Here. Here's hoping for justice and pe.

[Maggie Freeling]

Let's be real. Life happens. Kids spill, pets shed and accidents are inevitable. Find a sofa that can keep [e-mail] starting at just $699. Our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out so you can say goodbye to stains and hello to worry free living. Made with liquid and and stain resistant fabrics, they're kid proof, pet friendly and built for everyday life. Plus changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want. Neat flexibility. Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment. Plus they're earth friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stick stress free mess proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save that's washablesofas.com offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

[James Stout]

Run a business and not thinking about Podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers are into true crime, sports, comedy, culture, they'll Hear your message. Plus only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. And all this reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing the number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for you. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com or call 844-844 iHeart. One more time call 844-844 iHEART and get podcasting working for you. All I know is what I've been.

[Andrew Sage]

Told and that's a half truth is a whole lie.

[Maggie Freeling]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Eric Meza]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Maggie Freeling]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[James Stout]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Maggie Freeling]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Garrison Davis]

I did not know her and I.

[Eric Meza]

Did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

That y' all said.

[James Stout]

They literally made me say that I.

[Andrew Sage]

Took a match and struck and threw it on her.

[Mia Wong]

They made me say that I poured.

[James Stout]

Gas on her.

[Maggie Freeling]

From Lava For Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[James Stout]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Maggie Freeling]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava For Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Mia Wong]

Michael Lewis here My book the Big Short tells the story of the buildup and birth of the US housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy Award winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short story, what it means when people start betting against the market and who really pays for an unchecked financial system is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the Big Short now at Pushkin FM.

[Andrew Sage]

Or wherever audiobooks are sold.

[Mia Wong]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that has increasingly become about tariffs in the second Trump regime. I am your host Mia Wong and oh boy, it has been a big few weeks for tariff news. We have tariff numbers on China that I'm not even going to bother to actually record right now because by the time this goes out, the numbers will probably be different. There are supposed to be major negotiations underway between Trump and the Chinese government to attempt to come to yet another trade agreement and stave off yet another round of hundred percent tariffs. Now, if you want to follow the sort of blow by blow of what exactly is going on, I'm going to just sort of refer you to my section Tariff Talk on Executive Disorder. However, comma, we need to take a deeper look at what structurally is going on in the global economy that is resulting in the demand for tariffs in the first place. And I think the place to go if that's the thing that you're trying to figure out. And we've talked about the sort of ideological aspects of this in other episodes. We've talked about the ways that the sort of politics of fascism, the politics of antisemitism, the politics of masculinity lead people towards these extremely ultra nationalist policies that are specifically supposed to sort of protect the like domestic blood and soil national industry and are supposed to protect material goods over services. But there are things that are happening structurally in the economy that make it such that people would consider things like the tariffs that have been happening under this regime as a solution to things that are kind of structural problems of the economy specifically. And this is what we're going to be focusing on today, overcapacity in steel. Now, some of you may be asking, Mia, why are we talking about steel over capacity? And I think there's a few important notes here. One, steel is in some ways emblematic of American tariff policy. It is, I guess you would call it, the most material of the tariffs in the sense that it's the one where there's the most actual direct sort of material forces and direct lobbying groups asking for these specific tariffs. The American steel industry has been lobbying to some extent for some measures, kind of like this. Steel is also one of the industries where as, as tariff rates have fluctuated and got up and down and whole waves of like Liberation Day tariffs got put into place and then removed and some of them got put back into place a little bit. The steel tariffs were set at 50% and they've stayed at 50% since they were set. Basically there's been a little bit of variation sort of before the final 50% number was arrived at. But the steel tariffs have been one of the most stable tariffs. And the reason why it's been this stable, if people can think back all the way to 2018, which I know that was a long time ago, but there was a miniature trade war between the US and China in 2018 and significant portions of it were focused on Chinese steel production specifically. And you know, this is one of the sort of fights that was had out. Nothing really structurally changed much from those. There was kind of a back and forth and then both sides kind of pulled back. But, comma, that's not happening this time. And what's interesting, and the reason that I'm specifically talking about steel here, is that it's now not just Trump that is attempting to institute large scale tariffs on steel. The European Commission for the EU has released a proposal to double tariffs on imported steel up to 50% which is matched in the US and also reduce the amount of steel that could be imported into the EU without paying any tariffs at all. And this is actually massive because this is an example of the EU effectively following US trade policy for very, very similar reasons as the US and if we can get to the bottom of what is going on here, and I promise we will, and I promise this will go towards something that is explaining really truly the macro dynamics of the entire global economy and why it's fucked if we can actually trace out what's going on with these steel tariffs. We can do that. So let's talk about steel overcapacity. Overcapacity as a concept is sort of convoluted. You know, you have to sort of ask the question, what is the quote, unquote, correct amount of steel? Because overcapacity, you know, implies that there's capacity to produce steel over the amount that should be produced. So, okay, how do you figure how much steel should be produced? Eh, very nebulous. It's also very difficult to measure because, okay, we're going to try to measure steel over capacity. There's a lot of ways to do it that rely on things like utilization rates, right? So you look at the steel facilities, you see how much they're being used at, you see how much, you know, excess capacity there is, how many factories are sitting empty, what percentage of factories, you know, total outputs being used. This doesn't work because the utilization rates of these factories, of this fixed capital varies seasonally, for example, and it varies due to not just the season, but a whole bunch of other factors. Things like, you know, labor supply, weather, demand pulls, and a whole bunch of other factors. Utilization rates of steel producing facilities are very rarely at 100%, even in markets where demand outstrips supply. And this makes it very, very difficult to measure China's actual quote, unquote, overcapacity. I am not going to even really try to give numbers because it's extremely subjective. How do I say this based on the research that I have done? I think the numbers you normally see in the west are inflated because they are not accounting for things like the weather, because it is in the interest of sort of Western research institutions. But for example, Western financial institutions, specifically steel companies, and they're sort of like allied China hawk, you know, sort of like academics. To have the number be as high as possible. You will also see numbers from people who are tied to the Chinese government. And when I say tied to, I mean kind of in a loose ideological sense, in the same way that the China hawks are or the China hawks tend to actually be more directly connected to the US government. Their numbers are probably also too low. But I don't want to give you the impression that I have a extremely certain understanding of what the exact number of billions of tons of excess deal production is happening. What we can sort of agree on is that there does seem to be some kind of overcapacity in the Chinese economy, right? And this is something that the Chinese Communist Party also agrees on. If you go back to a document that really, really few people in the US have ever seen to have heard of, which is the wonderfully titled opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Further Promoting the Development of Ecological Civilization, which was one of the founding documents of Chinese environmental policy and the ideological sort of underpinnings of this thing called ecological civilization, which is the basis of Chinese environmental policy. One of the things that they mention a lot is specifically over capacity, right? They are actually very concerned about the overcapacity of steel from an ecological perspective. And this is sort of fascinating because we'll be looking at some scholars later who are favorably quoted in Chinese state media's sources describing how there isn't actually overcapacity because states say different things in different places. And this is in fact extremely common. But there does seem to be some kind of overcapacity, and the Chinese government was to some extent making attempts to reduce it during this sort of period of trade war. Now, the other issue with talking about overcapacity is that overcapacity is an extremely political issue now, right? It's extremely weird because Chinese yield overcapacity is like my most niche thing that I've studied. I've had like a paper on this sitting in a drive on my computer for over half a decade. I have never brought it out until.

[James Stout]

Now.

[Mia Wong]

But it's become an extremely political topic because the different theories of steel overcapacity have become a basis for a lot of genuine trade policy. Now, I think a very, very interesting look at Chinese steel overcapacity is from the book Understanding China's Overcapacity, which is written by two Chinese economists that I think is a really interesting literature survey. This is from about 2018. But I think what's interesting about it, it's from before the period where everyone in the west had sort of decided what they think caused Chinese steel overcapacity. And so you can go back. You know, it's sometimes useful to sort of go back in time and look at the other theories that, that were sort of floating around Academia before a few of them got specifically selected for ideological purposes. Now, I mentioned earlier we'd be talking about some economists who don't think that Chinese steel overcapacity is real. That's these people. I think that part of their thesis is not very good. I think their survey of the literature on overcapacity though is very good. And one of the very interesting arguments they make, this is an argument that's made by a couple other economists that has sort of disappeared from the literature, is an argument about, okay, so there's steel production that's happening, that doesn't need to happen. I think it's pretty fair to say that something is over capacity if it's producing a bunch of steel that sits there and rots because no one can sell it, which is a thing that happens with Chinese steel. And one of the most interesting theses that has really been abandoned, even though I think it is actually to a decent extent explanatory of a lot of very, very weird stuff that happens in Chinese policy circles and a lot of just very baffling investment decisions is specifically something about local cadres and their performance incentives. So, okay, something that's very important to understand about the structure of the CCP is that Chinese government institutions are sort of run by these cadres, right? And so if you are, for example, I don't know, you are the mayor of a mid sized city, right? You get performance evaluations and those sort of yearly performance evaluations sometimes are less frequent than that. But those, those performance evaluations rank you at sort of how good you're doing your job. And obviously there's political maneuvering here too. But if you do a good job of hitting your targets, this is your path to advance upwards in the party and be moved from, you know, like sort of running a small city to like being brought into cadre in larger cities and you know, moving your way up the party, moving to national positions. These evaluations are extremely important. You can also get sort of busted down if your evaluations suck again. There's also like politics here too, but these evaluations actually do matter. And one of the issues with these evaluations, and these are also policymaking implementation tools, right? You know, the central government can decide what kinds of policies they want to pursue and then they can use these cadre evaluations to make people at the sort of local level who are usually semi autonomous in ways that I think is not very well understood in the West. These cadre valuations are ways to try to ensure that Chinese sort of local and Provincial government policy kind of aligns with national party policy. And the weighting on these examinations is such that it has very, very weird effects. And what I'm specifically talking about here is that GDP numbers are very, very important to these cadre evaluations. And it matters that it's specifically gross domestic product, because GDP is a very, very weird number. And there's a lot of stuff you can do to sort of juice GDP numbers that aren't really necessarily beneficial to an economy. So you can have a bunch of firms that are basically unprofitable or doing something that's like, not particularly economically or socially useful and that can still boost GDP numbers. And one of the things that happens with this is that you can boost GDP numbers by making a shit ton of steel that nobody actually really wants or uses. And because of the priority that that's set on GDP numbers specifically. And there's also a whole bunch of these sort of weird financial games that you can play. That's also played a major role in the way the Chinese housing bubble has played out and the way that the government has been unwilling to sort of, you know, and when I say the government here, I mean both the national government and also sort of these lower level governments have been unwilling to sort of let a bunch of debt bubbles that they've accumulated pop because those things prop up GDP numbers. And the incentive on the local level is to keep these numbers up. This used to actually be one of the things that people would talk about when they talked about Chinese steel overcapacity. But it's complicated. Like, you can't very, very easily explain this to, you know, like a right wing congressperson and have them go, oh, yeah, right, this is unfair to the American market. And so it kind of has like fallen out of favor in sort of like the explanation to steel overcapacity you see in places like the New York Times. But I actually think this is one of the things that does to some extent cause Chinese steel overcapacity. Now, do you know what doesn't cause Chinese steel overcapacity? That's right. It is the products and services that support this podcast. So I wanted to talk about the local cadre explanations because I actually think these are kind of important. And I, I want to talk about one other argument that's also not really used much, that used to be a lot more common, which is an argument that a Chinese economist makes, that one of the reasons that there's overcapacity in Chinese steel production is that upwards wealth distribution leads to lower levels of consumption and thus overcapacity. And so what this basically means, and this is something that I think is actually also a thing that's been a structural problem in the Chinese economy, is that the Chinese economy is extremely highly unequal. And wages, you know, like, they have risen to some extent, but they're not rising anywhere near, you know, like we've, everyone in the US has seen that famous chart of productivity versus like labor gains, right? It was like wage gains versus productivity increases. Wages in China have gone up. They have absolutely not kept pace with sort of productivity growth. And they also absolutely like have not kept pace with the amount of the profit being produced that is going to a very, very small number of capital owners. And this actually creates a structural problem. And this is, we're seeing a very similar structural problem to this in the US where there is a lot of consumption, that if that money wasn't just all going to a bunch of rich people, people would actually be spending it on things. And particularly in Chinese context, the argument was that if there was a better distribution of wealth, people would buy more houses and this would actually reduce overcapacity because suddenly a bunch of the slack capacity would be to like build houses, except people can't afford the houses. And this is a structural problem that like economists have sort of known about for decades and decades, which is that China has been for a very long time. The whole thing was that they were trying to transition into a consumption economy, which is to say they were trying to transition into an economy that was fueled by its own internal consumption. The US is to a large extent, sort of, kind of works like this where, you know, you want to increase the level of consumption, the amount of stuff that people in your country are buying, buying. And this is, this is a way to sort of like create a middle income country, right? And China has historically not been able to do this and haven't been able to do this because they won't raise wages. But you know, if they won't actually raise wages enough to increase people's consumption levels, then you're left with structural overcapacity because demand is being lowered because people don't have any fucking money. Now this is another argument again that I think is also probably correct that is very much not talked about anymore because the argument that is used in sort of understanding what's going on with Chinese steel capacity is about the Chinese subsidization of state owned enterprises at the expense of sort of private firms. And the argument here basically is that the state is propping up a bunch of unprofitable enterprises and they're holding sectors of the economy that should be taken over by more efficient private firms, but they can't because they're being subsidized by the government. And this is sort of true, but this became a massive geopolitical argument because the argument from the American side, and when you hear anyone talking about steel capacity now this is the argument that you hear, right, which that China is flooding the world with cheap steel because there's a whole bunch of like Chinese state owned industries or just like Chinese businesses are just getting money from the Chinese government to produce steel and they're pumping cheap steel to the rest of the world. And this is not really, I mean like kind of this is happening, but it's also not the reason why there's large scale steel over capacity. And of course the argument is that China isn't competing fairly in the market. Like this is very silly. Markets have never worked without large scale state quote unquote interference. Like American companies also get extremely high level subsidization, et cetera, et cetera. See all of us corn policy. But you know, this is the political imperative that's behind a lot of the rhetoric coming out of steel producers and out of the American right about why there should be tariffs on steel. Now there's a problem though, which is that all of these arguments are very specific to China, right? The argument is that there is specifically steel over capacity in China because there's something structurally specifically wrong with the Chinese economy that makes it not a free market. And because of that, China's like unfairly competing global market. And this is why there's so much overcapacity of Chinese steel. This is wrong. There are individual parts of this where, yeah, like there are things where there is excess capacity being produced by cadre valuations and by to some extent like SOE subsidization. However, comma, there's a problem. And the problem here is that overcapacity and overcapacity in steel is not just a Chinese phenomenon, it is a global phenomena. It has been a global phenomena for a long time and it is largely a product of the fact that we do not live in a global economy that can actually support the amount of production capacity that exists in the world. This has been a problem really since the 70s and arguably even since the 60s where as countries rebuilt from World War II and as some, some sort of developments in global capital that we're going to be sort of like talking about soon happens, the, the product of all of this is that production has. And this is the, this is kind of the thing that the sort of fascist, right, kind of intuitively understands. Production has become zero sum, right? It's very difficult to increase production in one country without having it, you know, affect production in other countries. There isn't enough demand in the market to sort of like fuel all of these things. So why is there not enough demand to fuel the amount of supply that would be, that would be necessary to make there not be overcapacity? The answer to this in sort of Marxian theory is that as they sort of put it, overproduction and under consumption are doubly constructed. I'm going to read a quote from Endnotes volume two, and then we're going to explain a little bit what that means. The wage allocates workers to production and at the same time allocates the product to workers. So what that means is that under consumption and overproduction are in effect the same thing, right? Because the way that we allocate workers to what thing they're going to do and at the same time allocate products to those workers is the wage, which is one thing. So overproduction and under consumption are the same thing, right? And they're caused by the same structural elements of the wage relation. Now this means that the Chinese capacity crisis is actually part of a larger crisis, right? The thing about the double construction of overcapacity and under consumption, the fact that they are really the two thing that's unified in the fact that your wage allocates what kind of production you're doing and what you can consume. The fact that both those things combined are realized in this sort of secular crisis in what's called Marx's absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. So what the fuck is that? The short version is over time, in capitalist economies, there's supposed to be an increase of what's called the organic composition of capital. Basically, the organic composition of capital is a way to measure how much in the Libra process is fixed capital, variable capital. So it's like how much factory is there relative to the amount of worker? There is. And Marx's thesis, which has generally been borne out, although we'll talk a little bit about that more later, is that this composition is going to increase. And as it increases, accumulation also needs to increase in order to maintain employment levels. This is sort of accomplished by things like automation, which reduces the size of the labor force. And thus, to quote end notes again, as accumulation proceeds, a growing superabundance of goods lowers the Rate of profit and heightens competition across lines, compelling all capitalists to, as Mark said, economize on labor. So basically, what this means is like as. As capital gets turned into more capital and larger amounts of capital, this is the accumulation process. As this continues, right, you get this massive sort of increasing the amount of goods that are being produced. Eventually that lowers the rate of profit in a sector. And eventually what that does is in order to sort of economize on labor, capital increases the amount of automation, reduces the amount of people that they need in the labor process. This is what's generally known as automation. And the sort of crisis of people getting kicked out of the jobs because of it. As this process is sort of generalized across sectoral lines, across different parts of the economy, the relative demand for labor decreases and workers are spit out of the wage relation, which is the fancy Marxist way to say they become structurally unemployed. And, you know, the thing that happens when you get kicked out of the capitalist wage relation is you get kicked into informal labor and slums, which, you know, decreases demand and increases overproduction. At the same time, overcapacity is skyrocketing, right, because you have increasing numbers of people who have been spat out the formal economy, who no longer have access to regular wages. The wages they get in the informal economy are less than the ones they would get in the formal economy. And as we were saying, right, access to, like, the wage both determines production and consumption. So if you lose access to the wage, right, and there's still more stuff being produced because of automation levels, what you get is a massive skyrocketing double increase of overproduction and under consumption, right? Because there's just not enough money to fucking buy the stuff. And the result of this is immiseration. Everything gets fucking worse. This sort of used to be an academic argument. It is no longer an academic argument. It is just the terrain on which economic policy unfolds. Now, the immiseration thesis, as this, as you know, as a sort of like, general law of capitalist accumulation is called, has been argued about constantly. There have been ways that it's been avoided. One of the biggest ways traditionally has been by capitalism sort of transforming goods into services. So, for example, like the operative example of this is the transition in the US from rail lines to cars, something that endnotes points out. So you get these new industries that are both labor and capital intensive. By replacing train with car, you can absorb huge populations of workers as well as incorporate the peasantry into the industrial economy by sort of like converting these things into services. This has sort of been what the economy has been increasingly converted into, a service based economy of various kinds of. That's kind of what's happening now. And you can see this process at work in the Chinese economy back when it was really growing in the 90s and 2000s. But once the peasantry had been absorbed as both a new market and a new labor force with lower cost of reproduction because wages are cheaper, for a bunch of structural reasons, the old tendencies of capital set in. And so what happens inside of China was what was happening everywhere else in the world, which is that as labor saving technology begins to be implemented and a bunch of services refuse to be turned into new goods to bolster the ranks of the industrial working class, you get what's happened in the US which is this full transition to service economy shit that doesn't actually really grow. And if you look at Chinese growth rates, they've been slowing for a decade, actually a little bit longer than a decade. And so, you know, as China was integrated into the global economy, it too became caught in this cycle of industrial booms where, you know, you, you get an industrial boom where you have a country with favorable exchange rates, the US Dollar, that inevitably sets off, you know, the economies on the bad end of the exchange rate to collapse as they're forced to bear the weight of global overcapacity. As, as I've mentioned 100 billion times on this show, it is the one thing I will make sure every it could happen here listener will be able to explain the Plaza Accords and the reverse Plaza Accords, you know, but this is sort of, this is sort of what the reverse Plaza Accords and the Plaza Accords were about was the U.S. this is the last time the U.S. tried to, you know, use its just sort of like pure political power and military might to be like, eat shit, I'm going to force all of your countries to fuck with your currency so that our manufacturing economy will come back. And again, the US did that successfully and the Japanese economy collapsed because we kneecapped Japanese economy to do it. Right? And to some extent Trump is attempting the farce as farce version of this with, with these steel tariffs, right? To some extent this is, these tariffs are his attempt to pull the Reagan maneuver of, okay, we can just like force other countries to lower their capacity and increase our capacity at their expense. The problem is that again, this production is zero sum and if you do this, it will annihilate the rest of the global economy. And this is the sort of context behind all of the stuff that we've been seeing for the last like 30 years, which is that actual profit rates have been collapsing for ages. And right now we're in the middle of a just unbelievably, hideously, staggeringly massive bubble that is maintaining the sort of last like fake vestiges of economic growth where billions and billions and billions of dollars have been sunk into all of this AI bullshit. And it's, you know, like tech driven AI is a significant, specifically the AI stuff is a significant portion of total US economic growth. If you want to listen to why that's all going to go to shit, turn on effectively literally any episode of Cool Zone Media's own Ed Zitron's podcast Better Offline. And you will, you will hear a lot about this. But you know, this has been that like tech has been sort of the escape strategy of the United States traditionally. It's going to implode, it's going to do tremendous damage to everyone. But in the remains of that, and in this world in which profit rates are declining, and in this world in which increasing portions of the population are being spat out of the capitalist production cycle, in which increasing percentages of the world population are being kicked into an informal economy, and in this world of generalized overproduction under consumption, what's happening is that there is an enormous effort to get everyone to think that this is because of very specific tendencies of the bad government over there, right? That, you know, overcapacity and steel. Oh, it's just because the, like, the evil communist government in China is cheating at capitalism by giving their companies money and so we're going to do tariffs on them instead of that. And again, like, it's easier for these academics to make this argument because there is kind of stuff going on, right? Because there is this sort of cadre valuation stuff because there is to some extent state subsidization of steel production. They can present this boogeyman to sort of pin what is really a global overproduction and under consumption crisis onto just, you know, it's just this government we don't like. And then you can sort of implement these ultra nationalist tariff policies. It's, it's a way of deflecting the blame from capitalism onto another country and using nationalism to paper over the actual economic contradictions of capitalism. And if you want to escape that, it's not enough to sort of just get rid of Trump and go back to the previous free trade regime. You have to actually structurally change the thing at the center of all of this, which is the wage relation, right? You have to fundamentally change the fact that this economy, the entire economy, is based on there being classes of people who make money from owning things, and that there's an entire class of people whose labor is stolen every single day so that those other people can make money by owning things, who do all of the actual work. And that's what's actually fundamentally at stake here. It is this question of are we going to continue to do tariff bullshit or are we going to take power from the people who caused all of this, from Trump, from Elon Musk, from all of the billionaires, from Thiel, from all of the tech billionaires that funded them, from all of the Republican Party Koch brother networks? Are we going to destroy these people completely by getting rid of the social relations of capital that make this all possible? Or are we going to sit here and let them continue to produce AI videos of them shitting all over us while they take all of our money and commit an ethnic cleansing and continue to fund genocides abroad?

[Maggie Freeling]

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[James Stout]

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers are into true crime, sports, comedy, culture, they'll hear your message. Plus, only Iheart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. And all this reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results now let's get those results growing for you. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com or call 848-44844 iheart. One more time, call 844-844-IHEART and get podcasting working for you. All I know is what I've been.

[Andrew Sage]

Told and that's a half truth is a whole lie.

[Maggie Freeling]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Eric Meza]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Maggie Freeling]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[James Stout]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Maggie Freeling]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Garrison Davis]

I did not know her and I.

[Eric Meza]

Did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

That y' all said.

[James Stout]

They literally made me say that I.

[Andrew Sage]

Took a match and struck and threw it on her.

[Mia Wong]

They made me say that I poured.

[James Stout]

Gas on her.

[Maggie Freeling]

From Lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to.

[James Stout]

Blame America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Maggie Freeling]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Mia Wong]

Michael Lewis here. My book the Big Short tells the story of the buildup and birth of the US housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release and a decade after it became an Academy of Award winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short Story. What it means when people start betting against the market and who really pays for an unchecked financial system is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the big short now at Pushkin FM Audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.

[James Stout]

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me, James, Today, and I'm very lucky to be joined again by Eric Meza, who's the borderlands coordinator for the Sierra Club. Eric, how are you doing?

[Eric Meza]

I'm doing okay, James. Thanks so much for the invitation.

[James Stout]

Yeah, thank you for joining us. Sadly, we don't have a lot of good stuff to talk about right now. It's pretty difficult time in the borderlands. But maybe we could start off with something that I've reported on briefly in our weekly news show. The Border Patrol is currently soliciting comment for its plans to build border wall through the Otay Mountain Wilderness and other areas west of Tecate. Right. Could you explain a little bit about what they're proposing and what the consequences of that will be?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

Well, hi, everybody. So happy to be here and not so happy to be sharing this news, but so what the announcement was recently by the Border Patrol, especially on the San Diego area, is the announcement of the approximately 9.7 miles of new border barrier system. And on top of that, over 51 miles of what they call now system attributes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

And this is going to have a huge impact on the area. This is going to be about 2.9 miles west of the Tecate Port of Entry, going through an area that it is very remote montane region. Some of people here in these are more familiar than I am. I've actually never been. But I've been talking to some of the local organizations that do humanitarian aid in the region. And I know the Tecate Peak is in that area. And then you start going west into these beautiful mountains that are also the birthplace of the Tijuana River. That's exactly the area where it's going to go.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

So right now CBP is accepting comments and asking people in the community, what kind of concerns do they have? Concerns in regards of the environmental impacts of a project like this. What kind of social and economical impacts. So they open up this section on their website with an email address where people can share some of these concerns. As you mentioned, I'm part of an environmental organization, but we also have all kinds of concerns for a project like this, including the border barrier and the system attributes, which are very poorly describe what they mean. Some of the things that they mention as system attributes is the increase of lighting Infrastructure, surveillance equipment and new roads for access for border patrol vehicles.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

So one of the things that we're going to expect that we have seen in other areas is more blasting through the mountain. Especially on areas where the mountain is so uneven. The terrain. There is a lot of heavy machinery has to come into those places to start bulldozing to level the terrain so they can start building this border wall. So we can expect some of that. And with that come a lot of issues because there's going to be the need to start drilling wells at the border to extract this water for mixing the concrete for the foundation. If there was any road out there, they're going to probably widen the road two or three times to allow this having machinery to access these remote areas. This is just going to be the beginning, just setting up the panels. But whenever you go to these places and start disturbing the native soil, you can expect all kinds of consequences in regards to invasive species of plants. You can also expect some flooding and removal of native vegetation in some cases. There is some species that are rare on the area.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

That having these impacts, you know, can be long lasting for them to be able to recover if they're able to do so. The area on the south side of the border is also an area where animals need to be moving back and forth. So species like the native mule deer colony that lives there, there is mountain lion and other species of mammals and pretty much everything that is 4 inches wide that it's not going to be able to make it through that border wall.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

So, yeah, we're just raising these concerns and sharing with the community. So they're able to also as well send an email to cbp, Cosmos and Border Patrol and express these concerns and also to remember that these areas have been sacred sites for the indigenous communities since time immemorial. So we might lose some. Some very sacred sites for the tribes forever.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, I know the topic, Tekate Mountain has been sacred to Kumeyaay people. I believe it's Kuchoma in Kumeyaay. But it's been sacred to them for, as you say, much longer than this has been the United States.

[Eric Meza]

That's correct.

[James Stout]

You and I have both seen it in different places. Right. The damage that the border wall does, not just to people. I've seen mule deer running along it, like, trying. They're clearly trying to find a way through. This is their habitual pathway. There are some areas near, very, very near the border, like within a hundred yards of the border, where there are naturally occurring creeks and little ponds which will hold water at a time when water can be very hard to come across here. And so I've seen deer kind of distraught almost, trying to get to this place where they've obviously learned that they can get water, but now they can't. It's really heartbreaking. On top of all the other cruelty that it does, I suppose we should address, like, I'm not sure how much we can accomplish by the. By the comment period. Right. But it has value nonetheless. Like trying to do something, I think adds value. It shows that we didn't let this just happen.

[Eric Meza]

Yeah, that's right. I honestly am not very hopeful from these common periods because this is not the first time they're asking the community to provide input. And with past experiences that we have organized in other areas, other segments of the world, even in other states, we haven't get a response even, or an acknowledgement of these concerns. So that by itself is really concerning. But I think it is important that the communities around these areas are aware about this and they get involved and that there is this community sentiment against this abuse of power that the administration continues to do in the borderlands and using them as the sacrifice zone, as these testing grounds for what can potentially continue to happen or expand not only on the border, but in other series like we are seeing with the expand of militarization nowadays.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely. Like all the stuff that is really bad in America right now, it started at the border.

[Eric Meza]

That's right.

[James Stout]

People are seeing it in their communities now, but we've been seeing it where we live for a long time. Can we talk a little bit about. There's been some other construction, Right. San Diego is not the only place. Right now there's a significant budgetary allocation to construction a border barrier. And there's more construction east of San Diego, right?

[Eric Meza]

Yeah, that's right. Most of the construction that is happening right now, it was with all funding that was from the 2021 funds that were available since the first Trump administration. So we were hoping that that was going to be like the end of the funding. But since the proposal and passing of the quote, unquote, big beautiful bill, we gotta remind ourselves that now the administration has allocated $46.5 billion for border security, and that includes border barriers and system attributes. So pretty much anything related to border security, right now they have the funding to do it. They pretty much have the funding to put a dou wall across the whole US Mexico border.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's.

[Eric Meza]

That's huge. You know, in recent days, we got A, a new wave of contracts that were awarded in October 10th, we got this announcement that out of These funding, the 46.5 billion, they allocated for a little bit over 4 billion. And this will fund them 230 miles of new physical barriers and 400 miles of surveillance technology across the US Mexico border from California through Texas. And they put up a new section on their website where there is a map that you can navigate. It's an interactive map that shows every single section of the border and what they're planning to do with it. And as surreal as it sounds, they're planning to double up the wall. So in some places in remote areas in the desert, like in Oregon, Pipe National Monument or Cabeza Prieta in Arizona, in those areas there is plans to build a secondary wall. So on top of the 30 foot barrier that they have, they're planning to do a second one.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we have that in San Ysidro. Right? We have, we have a double 30 foot barrier. Yeah, the Biden administration used it to, to corral people seeking asylum.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

They kept them in between the two walls and then denied that they were in detention. I don't know if we'll see that again. But like, I guess just from my own experience, you know, participating in mutual aid along the border, like those remote desert areas are where people go when we build wall in Otay.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

When we continue to detain and turn people back in less remote areas, they will take the risk of going to a more remote area and forcing people into those remote areas and then constructing barriers there too. It's just going to cause more deaths. It's not going to stop people trying to come because there are things that they are leaving which are terrible, but it will mean that they get stuck out there in the heat without water for longer rain.

[Eric Meza]

That's correct, James. So exactly what you said. People in San Diego like the border in Otay, you already have the double wall. So you know, like having this hyper militarized area and how that juice is going to expand and the consequences of that is as you mentioned, you push people out further, more remote areas. And two things happen by doing that. First and most important, more people die. But also remember that these areas like these remote areas were also like semi pristine wildlife environments that you never had humans moving through before. Now, as people have been pushed to these remote areas, you have these human traffic and not only migrants moving through, but you also have the Border patrol chasing these migrants. And now you have border patrol wanting to build new roads to these wilderness areas. And all of these just keeps building up into what's already a very fragmented landscape. So by adding all these quote, unquote, system attributes, because you're pushing and pushing people further and building these double walls, it's just going to end the last of the remaining wildlife, remote migration corridors as well. So the impacts that this is going to have are huge.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. For like all living creatures, as you said. Let's take a break, Eric. We'll come back and talk about this some more. All right, we are back. Let's talk about, like, how people are organizing. Right. Like at this time when it does seem really bleak at the borderlands. Like, the Trump administration didn't really construct very much wall in its first iteration. It did construct a bit, but not as much as it wanted to. And you and I are both very familiar with the consequences that has had. Right. Like it has caused more people to die. The Biden administration continued constructing and quote, unquote, repairing border barriers. They also pioneered outdoor detention. And like, it just seems like things with whoever gets elected but more rapidly under Republicans get worse. What are people able to do? We've spoken about this a lot on this show, but I'd love to hear your perspective, too.

[Eric Meza]

It's been hard, honestly, as a person working on environmental issues in the border, because definitely the, like, the loses are much more than the win sometimes. So that can be disheartening.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

But there has been some glimpses of hope. I think one of the things that we did here in Arizona that was definitely felt really good and gave us some hope is when the governor of Arizona decided to put some shipping containers and make his own makeshift wall. So a bunch of people really came together on the community outrage because this was just some really dumb idea. And one of the most remote, beautiful areas where there is not even people moving through and it was just going to destroy the environment. And the governor went out there and spent $200 million of taxpayers money to buy these shipping containers and build this border wall. So we were actually, all the community came together. We showed up out there in the desert and stopped the machines and we said, no, you're not going to move any further. And because what they were doing was actually illegal, we were able to get away with it. And those shipping containers are gone right now. Still, Arizona taxpayer paid $200 million to destroy their own environment. Just let that sink in. We can be using that money for much better things. So I think that president and that movement, that sense of community that was built after that resistance has continued after that there is a lot of self organized grassroots efforts going on for border resistance, and that encompasses humanitarian aid groups, environmental groups, and we are also organizing nowadays here in Arizona to do some direct action, try to show up to the San Rafael Valley, which is where the border construction is going, and start raising some national attention to this issue, trying to invite our politicians, start inviting our native communities to speak out and using different methods, such as art performance, bring up some different strategies together. Now, with the technology that we have available, is that how can we make this more mainstream and tell people across the nation what's going on in these remote areas? You know, a lot of people have a lot of connection to this valley. And this is the headwaters of the Santa Cruz river, the lifeblood of many communities across the southern Arizona. And at the same time, on the other side of the coin, you know, there is all these oppression by the government to anything that is against their will. So a lot of people feels a little bit afraid of showing up to direct action.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

So it is, it's just walking that fine line of how, what can we get away with and still be able to make a bold statement and show opposition without putting people in danger?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. I think that is something a lot of people are really worried about. But it is important within the realm of things that we can do to show our opposition to this, like to and to stand in solidarity with the animals and the. The indigenous people whose sacred spaces are being defiled. Right. And with migrants whose lives are being put in danger by this. I wonder, like, I find it so strange, I guess, that, like, we're at a time when reporting on migration is becoming like, like a major growth industry, I guess. Editors who I could not get to respond to an email or pick up the phone for the last four years are now commissioning pieces on migration. But there still seems to be like a blind spot about the border in the American news media. I don't know why that is. I don't know if you have ideas about why that is, but the borderlands are such a special place for me anyway. You know, I've spent nearly 20 years of my life here. Some of my favorite places in the world are near the border. I think people think of the border as like San Isidro, but it contains some wonderfully remote and special places. And I wonder if you have thoughts on why. Like, the border isn't something that gets talked about that much on a national level.

[Eric Meza]

I think it does get talked about, but unfortunately the narrative that is usually built around that is really Negative.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Eric Meza]

And of course that's with an intention. Right. Of continue to build up this militarized state or sacrifice zone. And so whenever I talk with people that is here for the first time, you know, I do these group presentations for delegations that come from all over the country to experience the borderlands region. And they're like, they have all this perspective, you know, for what they hear on the news about how horrible this is. And then they come here and they're like, wow, people here is like, really nice and we have had a great experience and I really inspire. And it's like coming with this free fabricated narrative on their minds of this wasteland sacrifice zone, you know, like, and then going out after experience and yes, some of that. And of course, if you go out to the, to the border and experience the wall and the roles and rolls of concert, you know, wired and make it look like you're on a war zone. Yeah, plus the, plus what you already have in your mind, you know, it just keeps building up the intensity. And then you hear the stories from people, the struggle from migrants and stories from back in 2023 when we had the surge of migrants coming and, and all these things, you know, but at the end, people leaves with. With a glimpse also, like, wow, this place is really beautiful and a lot of wonderful things are happening. A lot of movements of people trying to organize and make it a better place and trying really hard to shift this narrative. You know, the borderlands provide us a good opportunity, you know, because what we see today, like a friend of mine said, it can get worse and it's going into that direction. Yeah, yeah, it's going into that direction. But at the same time, it gives us an opportunity as a society, you know, because whatever happens at the border is definitely going to have a ripple effect in the rest of the country. So we are able to figure out a way to shift that narrative and look at the border like. Like people that lives and experience the border there and the culture of the beautiful things that the border has to offer, then we hope that that's going to help change a lot of the things that are happening in this country. You know, but we need to start, I think, organizing from the bottom up. Yeah, a lot of grassroots effort need to be happening and I think a lot of media needs to cover this. You know, we usually don't cover the good stories, so.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, you're right. Like, it's funny, the right does cover the border. You're right. Or the, you know, the Fox News kind of cadre does cover the border. Like I don't like the way they cover it, but like the only national network guy I will see down there is the Fox guy for the most part. I know one thing I like to do with my friends or like if someone comes to visit, you know, sometimes I have either independent journalists come visit to walk down to the border wall. And it seems very bleak, right, because there's this big wall and it's covered in concertina wire, as you say. And maybe there are marines or National Guard or border patrol or any other. Like it's people with guns, right, in different uniforms. But then if you turn around, you're in this really special place where you don't see the people and you just, you can appreciate how beautiful it is. It's also very beautiful that like you say there's so much bottom up organizing, that there's so much people helping people of all different kinds. And that's something we all saw in 2023 when Title 42 ended and subsequently the Biden administration detained people outdoors. Like we saw an incredible community response of all different kinds of people, of different political persuasions, different faith groups, which was a really beautiful thing. Like it's a thing that a lot of the rest of America right now could, could learn from. The government was brutalizing people and people made that less bad. They kept them safe. And there'd have been a lot more people who, who didn't make it throughoutdoor detention if it wasn't for community support. Like, I want people to see that. I wonder if people want to support, let's say they're not in the borderlands. Can you think of good ways for them to be in solidarity, for them to even to experience? I know a lot of people who listen to this have come. It's really wonderful for me to meet people when I'm not working, when I'm just out there in my capacity as someone who cares about other people doing water drops, doing mutual aid with, with migrants, or helping people at street release. To hear of people who listened to this and then decided to come from wherever they were and spend some time here and help. Like that's a really a special thing. But do you have other ideas on how people can, can be in solidarity and can come and help?

[Eric Meza]

Yeah, definitely. I get this question very often from different people that comes to visit. Yeah, I usually recommend people to start where they are, you know, in their own communities because there is reflections of border issues in your own community. There are people that are migrating that Might need some help. There's people that shelters and all these. Or just kind of like get involved with your local whatever you're passionate about. You know, it doesn't really have to be an environmental issue, but we gotta remember that social justice and environmental justice is the same thing.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

You know, we got a really like whatever you're passionate about just getting involved. But I think the worst thing that we can do right now is just to ignore the fact that we are in a bad spot. You know, I think a lot of people just wants to continue riding their comfort zone wave and it's. That's gonna end, you know. And I think we need to not only think about ourselves, but we need to think about the generations coming ahead of us. And I think it's especially for the people that has already had the opportunity to somehow live a life, you know. But there's some that are about to start that journey and I think it's our responsibility to make it the best as we can for them as well. So whatever you're passionate about and if you really want to, and you're passionate about border related issues and you're not able to come try to support, you know, like financial help is, you know, we like it or not, we're in a capitalist society and we move with financial support.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

So a lot of these events that we're creating, a lot of these outreach that we're doing, a lot of the people like new generations that need jobs that are wanting to join, like let maybe a non profit work or create their own movement or doing something related that's going to help the community. Yeah. Support those if you are able. Those are really good ways to get involved and make some change.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely. Like there's a lot of things you can do, as you say. And I think it does help to build up networks of caring for people everywhere. We want to live in a world where people take care of one another. And to do that we have to start it everywhere. It's not like the border is the only place where bad things are happening. I know we draw a lot of strength as people who live at the border from that solidarity, but also from seeing people do their own things wherever they're at. That is how we build a world where systems of oppression are less able to oppress people.

[Eric Meza]

Yeah. And one of the things we see here, most of the decisions taken for the border are not taken by people from the border. A lot of these big policy decisions. For example, Senator of Utah right now is putting up a bill for the border to sacrifice a lot of public lands for new roads and, like, new military installations. So it's like, people from Utah are not directly on the border, but yeah, they can also send letters and comments or vote these senators out, you know, and somebody that really, like, cares for the environment.

[James Stout]

Yeah, if you're in. If you're in Utah, your senator has been advocating to sell off the public lands that you own that are safe. I mean, they're native land. It's all native land, and it should be returned to it, its original custodians. But in the meantime, you own it. And at least all of us can access it until Mike Lee gets his chance to sell it all off to his buddies in real estate. And, like, you could be an extremely conservative person and we could disagree on a lot of. And I think we could find unity on that. Like, I do not understand how there is a constituency that wants to take land from the public domain and turn it into military bases and oil fields and McMansions for rich people to have as their second home. Like that should be. It's a thing that everyone agrees on. And, like, he didn't stick the landing on it the first time in the reconciliation. The, quote, unquote, big, beautiful bill. But I think that's a really good area to engage people. Folks who might not be like, yeah, I will show up for migrants. I think a lot of people. They could be people who enjoy the outdoors, people who just care about the environment, the hook and bullet crowd. Like. Like, there are a lot of people, even if they don't, quote, unquote, use public lands. Like, we all benefit from them being there and future generations benefit from them remaining undeveloped in a. In a substantial way.

[Eric Meza]

That's right.

[James Stout]

Sorry, I just went off on that guy. Really pissed me off. Shit. Makes me so mad coming from a country that it's entirely private land, to see someone being like, yeah, that's a good idea. It's fucking asinine. Eric. I wonder if people want to keep up with the Sierra Club. Keep up with, like, how they can submit opposition comments if they want to know more about this new border construction and the impact would have. Where can they. Where can they follow along? Is there a website or social media?

[Eric Meza]

Yes, James, thank you. Yeah, we do have all of it. We try to engage people where they are. And we know social media is a powerful tool. We have a website, Circle of Borderlands. People can look up some of the work that we do there. We are also active on social media. We are here at Club Borderlands however you look at it, you're going to find us. We're based out of Arizona, but we do organize in different states. We're in collaboration with other organizations as part of a larger coalition. Even if you are in Texas or New Mexico, feel free to reach out and if you have any concerns, ideas, things that come up to your mind that can make the border a better place, feel free for, feel free to reach out and we can collaborate, work together on this or at least connect you with some of the local people that are part of the network. Because we're always looking to make this network bigger. You know, I think to strengthen numbers, going to get more and more people to join this coalition in the different states. So even if you're not on the border states, if you're in D.C. and you do lobbying and you're into policy change, like, yeah, come, come reach out and you can find us, like I said, on website or we got an Instagram account. We also have like a grassroots video right now called Rally for the Valley and that's what we're trying to do for the San Rafael Valley over there. You're going to be able to find updates. And we created a decentralized website right now that is called Border Wall Resistance. I invite everybody to take a look at it. It's full of beautiful pictures of the border. When James and I were talking about how beautiful this place is, go to that website and you understand what we're talking about because it's so diverse. You know, the border is so unique on each area. You know, the border is not defined by Tijuana, San Diego or Nogales. You know, it is just 2,000 miles of wonderlands. So unfortunately separated by in many cases by this huge metal, 30 foot structure.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Eric Meza]

Anyways, so that's the website, the social media for Circle Borderlands and rally for the Valley and the borders and stones.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely reach out if you, if you recently found out that you live within a border enforcement zone and weren't aware of that, because I know a lot of people in Chicago and other places have very recently found out that as far as the state is concerned, that they too are in the borderlands. So it'd be good to build some solidarity there.

[Eric Meza]

That's right. Two thirds of the population of this country lives on the borderlands region. So because that includes coastlines and the Great Lakes. And the Great Lakes. So we're talking about a lot of communities.

[James Stout]

Well, thank you very much for your time, Eric. We really appreciate it. That was a good discussion.

[Eric Meza]

Thank you James and hoping that continue to be in touch and continue organizing I guess all these things and thanks so much for the space and thanks for all you listeners.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you're welcome.

[Maggie Freeling]

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[James Stout]

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[Andrew Sage]

Told and that's a half truth is a whole lie.

[Maggie Freeling]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Eric Meza]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Maggie Freeling]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six and that got the citizen investigator on national TV through.

[James Stout]

Sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Maggie Freeling]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Garrison Davis]

I did not know her and I.

[Mia Wong]

Did not kill her or rape or.

[Eric Meza]

Burn or any of that other stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

That y' all said.

[James Stout]

They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

[Maggie Freeling]

From Lava for Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[James Stout]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Maggie Freeling]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[James Stout]

What's up everybody? This is snacks from the Trap Nerds podcast. And we're bringing you the horror every week, week all October long.

[Mia Wong]

Kicking off this month, I'll be bringing.

[Robert Evans]

You all my greatest fear inducing horror.

[James Stout]

Games from Resident Evil to Solid Hill. Me and Tony bringing Backfire team on Left 4 Dead 2 and we just.

[Mia Wong]

Gonna be going over some of the greats.

[Andrew Sage]

Also in October, we'll be talking about our favorite horror and Halloween movie and figure out why black people always gotta die first.

[James Stout]

The Umbral reliquary invites any and all foolish brave enough to peruse its many curiosities.

[Eric Meza]

But take heed, all sales are final.

[James Stout]

Weekly horror side quests written and narrated by yours truly with a full episode read and a commentary special. And we will cap it off with.

[Mia Wong]

Horror Movie Battle Royale.

[James Stout]

Jason versus Freddy. Michael Myers versus the alien thing with.

[Andrew Sage]

The little tongue monster.

[James Stout]

October, we're doing it Halloween style.

[Mia Wong]

Listen to the Travelers podcast from the.

[James Stout]

Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio.

[Mia Wong]

App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to ejectorial dysfunction.

[Garrison Davis]

Wait, that's the worst one yet. That's the worst one yet, folks. We did not think it could get worse. And yes, here we are.

[Robert Evans]

I knew it could get worse.

[Mia Wong]

Can always get worse.

[James Stout]

Oh, quitting our jobs today, this is.

[Garrison Davis]

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'm joined by ejaculator in chief, Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Wow, Garrison.

[James Stout]

Garrison.

[Robert Evans]

That's much worse. You made it way Worse.

[James Stout]

How many of those videos have you not watched, Garrison?

[Robert Evans]

I think we're all pretty behind on the required trainings.

[Mia Wong]

My labor conditions are intolerable.

[Garrison Davis]

Robert Evans, James Stout and Mia Wong. This episode we are covering the week of October 15th to October 22nd and a little bit of the week before because we were off in honor of the government shutdown. We ourselves took a week off because.

[James Stout]

The CIA stopped paying us.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. That's right. I've always considered us a branch of the US Government, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you and half of the anime people on Twitter. Robert Evans. We're back.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know, it feels a little bit weird to be doing this White House weekly episode knowing that there's actually less White House than usual.

[Robert Evans]

There is.

[Garrison Davis]

Trump has begun demolishing the east wing of the White House to build a privately funded $250 million ballroom. And I think we should all have a moment of silence for the east wing.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, I was going to say a moment of celebration. Cause now, James, people can finally shake hands with the United States government and destroy. Destroying large portions of the White House.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I saw it was a Volvo excavator too. So we also got the Swedes on board, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[James Stout]

Couldn't even find an American excavator. Sad.

[Robert Evans]

We don't make things in this country anymore.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, that's because we're still waiting for the tariffs to get fully enacted.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Once we get that Swedish tariff on.

[Garrison Davis]

We are almost four weeks now into the government shutdown and there's not really a clear end in sight. And SNAP benefits, food stamps are set to run out in a little over a week on November 1. Amiya, did you want to say something on this?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So we've been seeing sort of tech start to go out to people who are on food assistance in various states. There's one circulating from Minnesota that is saying that the food part of SNAP benefits are, yeah, going to shut down in a few days on November 1st when the funding shuts down. This is a critical lifeline for food for an extremely large number of people. And this is also coming in a period where food banks are already being stressed by just the other cuts to SNAP and other other food assistance programs that have already taken place. So, yeah, we're coming to a very, very critical moment in terms of wide scale food insecurity in this country for a whole bunch of the most vulnerable people in the country. And, yeah, this is a good moment for if you have actual access to food, which is a very Very bleak thing to be saying. But you know, something is going to have to try to pick up the slack or a bunch of people aren't going to eat.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And that's probably going to have to be us because it's sure as fuck not going to be the government.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well. And yeah, just the people's need to eat is inelastic.

[James Stout]

Just to put some numbers on it. Like snap in 24 was 41.7 million people, which is about 12% of the US population.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

This is a massive cliff.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it's particularly bad in certain states. For example, Oregon, you know, where I live, is set to lose about three quarters of a million people's SNAP benefits. There are like 4 million people in the state. Yep, yep.

[Mia Wong]

And it's also like those people are also disproportionately non white and disproportionately and very disproportionately trans. Yeah. And this is something that if straight up the shutdown continues and we don't cease, not benefits pay out. This could also be a major source of instability because you know, the thing that happens very quickly when suddenly 40 million people don't have food is bread riots. What is going to happen with that is deeply unclear. But yeah, we are heading into an extremely bleak time.

[Robert Evans]

If you're looking at predictors of violent instability in countries, mass starvation is top of the list.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yep.

[Mia Wong]

Particularly bread riots usually are in sort of the modern era happens with 2 or 300% increases in food prices, usually as a result of sort of IMF structural adjustments. But if there was going to be another one, this would be it. Yeah, yeah. So it's worth sort of being prepared on both ends in terms of feeding people and also. Yeah. With whatever was going to happen if this cuts out.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Meanwhile, during, during all of this, during the shutdown and during snaps ticking clock, Trump wants his Justice Department to pay himself $230 million in compensation for damages coming from past investigations into him.

[Robert Evans]

Seems fair.

[Garrison Davis]

Trump claims that he will give this money to quote, unquote, charity. Seems real unclear what that means, what charity that will be, how that will really qualify as a charitable donation. But he is currently seeking $230 million of government money to be paid back to himself. In the end, it will be him making the final call on this, which he says he feels strange about.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, well, it's good. He's an honest man, you know, it's great.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. We've just fully entered the looting the storehouse as part of the regime.

[James Stout]

Yeah, they're taking a very British approach.

[Robert Evans]

Looting is, is putting this too mildly.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Did any of you see the, the article about the plans to, to let AI companies apply to get old weapons grade plutonium to, to fuel the nuclear reactors?

[James Stout]

Good.

[Robert Evans]

Seems fine. That's what I trust Sam Altman with his weapons grade plutonium. I feel like he's going to use that safely. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Hopefully the AI bubble collapses before they get weapons grades.

[Robert Evans]

You know what a great attitude to approach having weapons grade plutonium is? Move fast and break things.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God, this is great.

[James Stout]

It's this week where we're announcing the start of Quds Force AI.

[Robert Evans]

There we go. Bring it on. Oh, God.

[Garrison Davis]

Breaking breaking news. U.S. sanctions have been placed against two of Russia's largest oil companies in an effort to pressure the Ukraine Russia peace deal, which Putin just backed out of negotiations from as there was plans for him and Trump to meet. So that just happened.

[Robert Evans]

Sexy. Not sexy. So I think one of the first things we want to cover right now, just because this is maybe the number one thing I'm seeing people talk about on social media right now, is there have been articles written about ISIS new weapons budget. Famously their budget has increased by something like 700%. A huge amount of that's being spent on, you know, bonuses in order to get people to join, cash payments and whatnot, as well as retention bonuses. But a lot more of it's being spent on weapons. And right now the number one thing I'm seeing people freak out about is the supposed idea from these documents that ICE is purchasing guided missiles and chemical weapons. I have heard people say this is ice, which is obviously Trump's ss, you know, making their own Waffen ss, which were the armed units of the ss. I'm seeing a lot of shit like this spread and as James is going to tell you, none of that's true. Yeah, I mean the fact that ICE has a massive increase in budget and is buying a shitload of weapons is true. But they're not guided missiles.

[Garrison Davis]

Heat guided missiles.

[James Stout]

Yeah. We're not getting a death head. Ice. ICE unit.

[Mia Wong]

Come on.

[Garrison Davis]

At the next Canal Street ICE raid, they're going to be launching heat seeking missiles into Chinatown.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it's not what people are saying it is. Yeah, Sorry, James.

[Mia Wong]

All right.

[James Stout]

The source of his claim is a substack page called Popular Information run by a guy called Judd Legume. And he has claimed in this piece, I'm just going to quote the is first purchase quote, chemical weapons and quote, guided missile warheads and explosive components. I guess the main thrust of the piece was looking at the fact that ICE spent $9 million on Geisler pattern rifles. Border Patrol spent more than twice that. He appears to have missed that in his reporting. This reporting is extremely dishonest, to put it mildly. It's either deliberately misleading or massively incompetent. The piece in question doesn't link to the individual contracts, which, like on the face of its bad form.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

If you're going to be talking about contracts, your contracts are in the public domain. Just link to them. The piece doesn't do that. I went on USASpending.gov and I filtered by contracts that have been awarded by ICE against a date range, the date range that pertains to the things being discussed in the article. And then I filtered by the product or service code for chemical weapons and guided missile warheads.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Two different product or service codes. Product or service codes are like these, these four digit codes that exist in federal procurement. Right. To put things into buckets, basically. And I found the contracts. The contract very clearly states the guided missile quote, unquote contract. The contract with the guided missile product or service code very clearly states it is for multiple distraction devices. Yeah, it's a contract with a company called Quantico Tactical. I did call them yesterday. Something that again, any competent reporter should do. Before publishing a piece that does not appear to have been done by the substack guy. They gave me an email. I sent an email more than 24 hours ago requesting comment or clarification. I didn't receive a response at the time of us going to press. If I hear back from them before we release this, I will let you all. No, the chemical weapons, it was OC spray. It was pepper spray.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And a distraction device. By the way, folks, this is something like a sonic grenade, which sounds crazy, but it's a grenade that makes a loud noise to distract people to bang them. A flashbang is also a distraction device. When used the way that they use in riots, it's a little bit of a different thing when you're using one to breach, bang and clear a door or something. But when you're throwing a flashbang at a riot, it's a distraction device because the goal is you've got a bunch of people moving towards an area you want to stop them from. You distract them by an explosion, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And it's distracting.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It's also, and this is, you know, one of the frustrating elements about this is that ICE has Been using a whole bunch of these to blow down people's doors, and it's really horrible.

[Robert Evans]

These are problems. It's problems that they're buying all this.

[Mia Wong]

And no one is talking about it because everyone's focused on this.

[Robert Evans]

When James put up their initial research just on bluesky and Twitter, I shared it and people were like, like, it's still a problem. They've got that they're getting all. Buying all these new weapons. Do you not care about. Yes, I care about that. You're not talking about that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we care about the.

[Robert Evans]

Talking about a fantasy.

[James Stout]

And, like, it is bad that Ice has flashbangs and pepper spray. Right. I have personally broadcast, like, you can go back only a few months and hear Ice flashbangs on this podcast, like, recorded by me in person. We know they fucking have them because they were throwing them at me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I've lost count of how many have hit me directly.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, we've got at least 75% fucking federal government flashbang impact, you know, Like, I want to take a second, I guess, to talk about incentives here, because this really pisses me off. And I think that the way we build trust in the media is through openness. And I think that we do that better than most, and I'm going to try and do that here. Just so you know, none of us make any extra money if more people download this podcast, at least not directly.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

We do not have a direct incentive to make fantastical claims that will lead to people downloading our podcast and being afraid. That is not true for people who have these substick outlets. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, I mean, let me clarify. We do have a direct financial interest in there being traffic. Right? Because that is. That's how we make our money. Right. Like, and that's how we justify getting raises and stuff. So, like, everyone in media, if more people listen to our stuff, like, we do have a financial interest in that. We're not checking week to week to see if we're getting. If what we're doing is bringing us in more direct money. Right. Like, that's just not the way our thing works.

[James Stout]

Yeah. When people are on their own, they're doing these subsecart. There is a very real incentive to do that.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

We also have a team here. We fact check each other.

[Robert Evans]

We do our best. We up sometimes.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, we fuck up sometimes. But we're honest about it when we do.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

We acknowledge it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We acknowledge when James makes mistakes.

[James Stout]

Thank you, guys.

[Robert Evans]

You're the least mistake person here.

[James Stout]

I'm just Being an ass, extremely careful about that shit. Well, I've stood on my fucking pedestal enough about this. But it's bad, right, that things that ICE are buying, that ICE is really buying, are semi automatic ars, more clocks, a lot of soft body armor, red dot sights quote unquote, crowd control munitions. Right. It's the sort of spending you'd see from a special forces unit that are very not special police agency. Right. Like they're just spending like they have an open checkbook.

[Robert Evans]

ICE is continuing to buy the same weapons with which they have been hurting people the entirety almost of the 21st century. And they're hurting more people now and will be hurting even more people in the future because they will have even more money. And that, that's bad. And you don't like, what would they even do with a guided missile?

[James Stout]

Yeah, that doesn't make sense on the face of it. It's 61 grand.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

The fuck do you think you're getting for 61 grand from a company in Quantico?

[Robert Evans]

Have you tried buying guided missiles in this economy?

[Andrew Sage]

People?

[James Stout]

It's just ludicrous, man.

[Robert Evans]

What the fuck?

[James Stout]

They think they're going like tomahawk, I don't know, like a strawberry picking facility.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, it's ludicrous.

[James Stout]

It's fucking ridiculous. A chemical weapon, I mean you could.

[Robert Evans]

Talk about substack and they're being fucked up things about the company. But like, honestly I think that, I don't think it's overstated, but I think people focus on that to the extent of like. Well, yeah, which, which, which of them aren't? Yeah. What, where is the non Nazi social media company that has any kind of reach, you know? Yeah, yeah, but that's really not even the point I, I care to make what I, what I will say the problem here is not even just that like when people are working for an audience like that, where week to week, however many people are donating and whatnot, kind of can incentivize you to follow certain rabbit holes and push certain things. I think one of the bigger problems is that what you have is a generation of very of the most talented and successful journalists in terms of their skill at like writing and their ability to build an audience that follows them. Those people have all moved to a platform where they by default don't have an editor.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And like every journalist worth their salt. I've had my fights and frustrations with editors at a variety of publications and sometimes they're annoying and sometimes editors suck. And sometimes publications a big part of what they're doing is just trying to water down your shit. But that's not the only thing editors do. A major thing editors do is point out, hey, I get that you're really into this, and I get that you find this compelling, but as an objective observer, I'm seeing this hole, in this hole, in this hole. And you need to, for example, call these people and make sure that this, because it doesn't look like this is actually a guided missile. It looks like somebody just fucked up, putting in a code.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We need to check on this so we can state it to a point of certainty. That's what an editor should be doing, Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Even if they're responsible journalists. Like, I wouldn't have submitted that piece to an editor without having checked that first. Like, sure, it took me five minutes to call them. I should add that the PSCs in question for grenades and warheads are one digit different. Right. Again. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Which is what happened here.

[James Stout]

It certainly looks that way. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And again, this is why part of how responsible journalism is supposed to work is that you never have just one eye on a story, because every journalist will inevitably miss things if you're doing that right. That's why you are supposed to. The idea is to have multiple eyes on a thing so that, oh, hey, it looks like you skipped over this. Or, hey, it just occurred to me, I have this question that is not being answered. And you make a couple of phone calls, throw in another sentence, and then that's a thing that we're answering, a thing we're accounting for. And if you don't have that, the work isn't as good.

[James Stout]

Yeah, no, look, I'm not saying there are not things to be afraid of. There are.

[Robert Evans]

No one's saying.

[James Stout]

Yeah, but I want people to be afraid of the right things. Like, they're not gonna. Halabja people.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't think we're really gonna be safe until there's an iron dome over every Home Depot garrison.

[Robert Evans]

I've been saying that for years. But that's also because I would like to start a limited missile war against the Home Depot Corporation. But I've been taking Lowe's money for years.

[James Stout]

Yeah. On behalf of Lowe's. Yeah. I'm on Team Ace Hardware, so I'll see you on the battlefield, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

At least we don't have any Harbor Freight people here.

[James Stout]

I'm actually a massive harbour freight guy.

[Garrison Davis]

He just says, have Harbor Freight 5.

[James Stout]

He's, like, literally behind me.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, the nice thing about Harbor Freight is buying one thing and then returning it exactly 11 months after buying it once you've broken it and just having a perpetual.

[James Stout]

Whatever. Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Everything that I bought from Harbor Freight has started smoking.

[Robert Evans]

Everything breaks that you buy from Harbor Freight, but the return policy is amazing. Yeah.

[James Stout]

The question is, will it break before or after you've used it enough to justify buying something more expensive?

[Robert Evans]

And the answer is yes.

[Garrison Davis]

James, can you do a product and service code ad break, ad pivot based on your investigation here? And Adam, you can keep this in. You can show them how the sauce is made here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

It's just in terms of honesty. Here we go. Okay.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[James Stout]

Give me a second here. Got to think of something good. You fucked it. I was just going to do talking products and services and you ruined it. Garrison, if you are in the market for a distraction, advice, guided warhead or chemical weapon, let's hope that you get an advert for one of those in this commercial break.

[Robert Evans]

That's right, people.

[James Stout]

Welcome back to the arena. Iranian regime. I hope you got what you wanted.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, this podcast is the only podcast entirely supported by the Ayatollah. And yeah, praise him.

[Garrison Davis]

The CIA and the Ayatollah have finally united.

[James Stout]

Clasping hands. Memo for Robert Evans. Legally speaking, that is a joke. We are not funded by the Iranian regime. We're all monarchists.

[Robert Evans]

Speak for yourself there, James.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's talk about the national. Let's talk about the National Guard.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, sure.

[Garrison Davis]

On Monday, this past Monday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in favor of the Trump administration halting a court order denying the federalization and deployment of the Oregon National Guard. They had two to one ruling on a three panel hearing with two Trump appointed judges. They called Trump's plan to deploy troops to the ice Building in Portland a quote unquote measured response. Now there is a second TRO preventing out of state National Guard from deploying to Portland, and this appears to still be in effect, but its fate is unknown. The Justice Department has requested the original judge suspend the order, though the Ninth Circuit itself is considering whether a larger panel should rehear this entire case. Currently, there is no immediate plans for Oregon National Guard to be deployed, but they. They do now have the go ahead. But this is still a developing situation. But that's an important update there. Let's Talk about the 250 Celebration Trio.

[James Stout]

Sing Happy Birthday.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Garrison Davis]

Happy birthday to the Marines.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. Happy birthday to the Marine Corps. I hope today you guys get to eat a lot of crayons.

[James Stout]

They'll have a cake which is shaped like a Giant crayon.

[Mia Wong]

No, it just is made out of giant crayon.

[Garrison Davis]

And we all remove our Totenkov tattoos. That's going to be the. The Marine party.

[Robert Evans]

Get. Get rid of those Scout sniper tattoos.

[Garrison Davis]

But no, there was the Marines 250th celebration with JD Vance last week where they did play Helldiver 2 music. During the celebration.

[Mia Wong]

I want to wish you all a happy birthday and separate Fidelis.

[James Stout]

I'm still not clear what Helldiver is.

[Garrison Davis]

Helldivers is a satirical video game that satirizes a fascist military that fights for quote unquote, democracy against other so called fascists.

[Mia Wong]

Sorry, Managed democracy. Very important.

[Garrison Davis]

It's true. It's true.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Managed.

[Garrison Davis]

You may have heard of it from the news headlines such as Charlie Kirk shot. But yeah, it's basically like playing Starship Troopers music over the Marine Corps celebration party. That's kind of the caliber we're operating in here.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Thank you for bringing that to my generational understanding.

[Garrison Davis]

There you go.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I appreciate it. Talking to the Marine Corps 250th birthday on Saturday. A 155 shell. So 155 millimeter howitzer shell prematurely detonated over the 5 freeway outside of Camp Pendleton. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Nut stuff. Crazy shit.

[James Stout]

Damaging a cop car that was assigned to J.D. vance's security detail.

[Robert Evans]

It was literally as soon as they started talking about how Trump wanted to shoot a missile into fucking Camp Pendleton. And like immediately. Yeah, they fuck up and blow up a car attached to fucking the Vice President's security detail. Amazing stuff.

[James Stout]

They did a dress rehearsal on Friday in which they managed not to detonate any shells over to five. Gavin Newsom decided to shut the fry on Saturday.

[Robert Evans]

Probably a good call.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he might be complaining about things shaking. I just. If you're like. If you're. If you're not familiar with the layout there, I would say that in most places as you go. Camp Pendleton is a large area that is used by the Marine Corps for training. It has artillery ranges within it.

[Robert Evans]

The five is the big highway in California. It's the highway that goes the whole length of the state.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You would call it the i5 if you weren't from here and then we would know that you weren't from here. But we call it the Five. There's less than a mile of, of land to the west of the 5. Right. So shooting over the 5 like you're pretty much shooting from the beach or near the beach as opposed to the whole rest of Camp Pendleton. Right. Where they have artillery ranges. But they wanted to do it over to five. I think they were doing some kind of simulated landing drill. Not quite sure what the landing drill they were doing, but this.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Resulted in the damage done to a CHP car and really fucked up traffic in probably the entirety of Southern California.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

For most of last Saturday.

[Mia Wong]

I do just want to mention here that there is historical precedent in the United States for us accidentally killing the Secretary of State because a gun they were firing on a pleasure cruise, on a boat. On a Navy. Navy boat blew up. So the 1840s. But we did kill the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of State.

[Garrison Davis]

If any Secretary of War could pull this off, it would be Pete.

[Robert Evans]

I. I believe in him.

[Garrison Davis]

There is a decent chance he will throw one of those axes straight into J.D. vance's leg.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about his accident. Yeah, yeah, Vance, of course, A former Marine.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, yeah, Vance, is it? Wait, yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally forgot.

[James Stout]

Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps. I believe he was a PAO.

[Garrison Davis]

Damn.

[James Stout]

Public Affairs. Yeah. I want to address DHS's claims about deportation numbers. DHS has been throwing out some really big numbers for deportation, claiming over half a million removed and 1.6 million, quote, unquote, self deported. These are inflated numbers. These include things like people turned away at airports and Coast Guard interdictions.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

They are not removals of people from the interior of the United States who are residing here. They're like if someone, maybe if someone came with a visa and was turned around the airport, they're including that as a deportation. Right. DHS has stopped publishing a lot of the data that we previously got under this administration. So we don't have a lot of hard numbers. But the 1.6 million number, this comes from CIS, right? The center for Immigration Studies. We've talked about them before. This is a Tanton funded, quote, unquote think tank, which the SPLC has adjudicated as a hate group group. The CIS data. DHS has been like, sharing this since it came out, but it also seems to be weighing very heavily into whatever algorithm Musk has put into GROK recently. If you look for mentions on X, the Everything website of the 1.6 million number, nearly all of them are GROK repeating it. God, I don't know if they straight up just said like, yeah, the CIS is your source for information when they were programming it to be less woke up, but slightly more woke than when it called itself Mecha Hitler, but it seems to be. The CIS seems to be heavily weighed in the GROK algorithm these days. Which I thought was interesting.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, they did get that GROK contract approved a few months ago.

[James Stout]

I think the DHS didn't get the number from grok. I think they got it from cis. But nonetheless, the reason that that number is still in the zeitgeist, I think is partially because Grok keeps repeating it.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, you know, it is Groktober, as I've been saying.

[James Stout]

Garrison, we have fucking spoken about this. It is not croctober. Angry.

[Garrison Davis]

The other thing I do want to mention on, I guess not deportations, but the Department of State has announced a series of people who have had their visas revoked for posts surrounding the death of Charlie Kirk. The State Department Twitter account posted a whole thread on X the Everything app listing various sentences and sentiments that resulted in visas being revoked. Quote, charlie Kirk was a son of a bitch and he died by his own rules. Visa revoked. When fascists die, Democrats don't complain. Visa revoked. It's from a German national, Brazilian national said that, quote, Charlie Kirk was the reason for a Nazi rally where they marched in homage to him and that Kirk died too late. Visa revoked. There's like four other of these of people making statements of that nature.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. I think people get the idea.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Following Kirk's death, Rubio did announce he would be looking for visa holders who made statements following Kirk's death. And he has followed through on that promise. In some other Charlie Kirk news, a few weeks ago, Turning Point USA officially announced that they would be producing an alternative halftime show.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, my God.

[Garrison Davis]

After it was announced that the Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny would be performing at the 2026 Super Bowl. The TPUSA show will be called a quote, all American halftime show celebrating faith, family and freedom. The website has a submission form where it asks which genres should be featured during the show. The options include, quote, anything in English, Americana, classic rock, country, hip hop, pop, and worship.

[Robert Evans]

I love anything in English as a genre.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. When I go to Spotify, that's what I put in.

[Robert Evans]

The crowd's gonna riot when someone does Hotel California.

[Garrison Davis]

We can really push anything in English, frankly. We could go to some pretty crazy places.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. I don't think they've really considered the breadth of that genre.

[Robert Evans]

You know, I will say how they could get me back on board is in if, in addition to a separate halftime show, they had a separate super bowl in which Ben Shapiro faces off alone against the Philadelphia Eagles.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, that would be so fun.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. I would let Ben Shapiro bring some friends.

[Mia Wong]

No, no, I want to see Jalen Hurts physically pick up Ben Shapiro and see how far he can pass him. Because I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure at.

[Robert Evans]

Least, at least 60 yards.

[Mia Wong]

That guy like, that guy benches. That guy could like, like bench a small motor vehicle like benches Shapiro.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. More details and performers will be announced later, including how this will be broadcast, will be streamed online. Are they going to try to make a TV deal with someone like, you know, Fox, you know, unclear how this will be broadcast, but it is something they're going to go through on. Last thing we should probably talk about before the break or I don't know, maybe, maybe we could combine this with the section you wanted to talk about, Robert, on the infiltrations. But right after our executive disorder episode from two weeks ago, literally like, like hours after, on October 8th, right wing influencers gathered at the White House to discuss with Trump and cabinet members their theories and harrowing stories of antifa at this big antifa round table. Yeah, I'm going to play a short clip like a few seconds from Jack Posobic.

[Robert Evans]

Get in there.

[Garrison Davis]

Noted far right extremist and poster Jack.

[Robert Evans]

Posobec certainly noted poster.

[Mia Wong]

The Pizzagate guy.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Antifa is real.

[Andrew Sage]

Antifa has been around in various iterations.

[Mia Wong]

For almost 100 years, in some instances going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.

[Garrison Davis]

Huh. I wonder why it went back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.

[James Stout]

Yeah. What else was happening at that time in Germany?

[Garrison Davis]

It's very interesting you say that, Jack. Very interesting.

[Robert Evans]

Jack.

[Garrison Davis]

What other opinions do you have on Weimar Republic, Jack?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, so this is worrisome, right? The fact that these idiots are getting to speak this close to power about their theory, which is basically that everyone they don't like or who has said anything they don't like is part of a terrorist organization and should be put in prison or executed. Like that's the gist of what all of the people at that roundtable believe.

[Garrison Davis]

A whole bunch of like you know, post millennial people. Andy Ngo, that, that whole, that whole like genre of like you know, right.

[James Stout]

Wing antifa journalist, pseudo journalistic.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, Everyone I don't like equals terrorists. Yes. So that's really worrisome. And I just, I kind of wanted to make a note here to. Of people that as a result of stuff like this, in case you somehow have not been aware of this, we're going to be seeing a massive ramp up in, you know, not just attempts at prosecution, but at attempts to like infiltrate and get gotcha footage and audio of different left wing and anarchist groups that are going to be used as pretexts for like further crackdowns. I would say it's just a time to be aware of that and be aware of the fact that anytime you are speaking or at a public event where other people are speaking, you should assume that that's being recorded and that people will be pulling out the worst parts they can from it and trying to use that to destroy people's lives. And I bring that up because there's been a couple of that just really broke today, some potentially pretty high profile examples of this. One of them is that at a panel for Firestorm Books, they had a speaker, a guy named Eric King, who was convicted of a firebombing. He's a left wing activist. He spent almost 10 years in prison, had a horrific time in prison, I mean, just abused by the system in some of the worst ways possible and is finally out. And Eric did a talk at Firestorm Books and he made basically his statement that, that activists need to hurt them where it counts, saying we can force them to shut the fuck up when it hurts their wallet enough or you can find other ways to hurt them. Now that's not saying anything inherently illegal. Again, he starts it by saying we can force them to shut up when it hurts their wallet enough. That's talking about like boycotts and stuff. Yeah, but the phrase other ways to hurt them is vague enough that it's pretty easy for these guys to cut stuff out. And I'm looking at a post by quote unquote, investigated analyst for the Manhattan Institute, Stu Smith, who's framing this as known antifa Firebomber Cole for escalation. And again, that's not necessarily an accurate look at what Eric was saying. But it's easy to pull stuff out like this from something like what. What appears to have been a fairly open zoom call that, you know, is not hard for someone to get into and record and pull something out of to try and make the case that someone like Eric should be back in prison or that Firestorm Books is a party, you know, providing material support to an extremist organization. And what I'm not trying to do is say like, and so people should not talk and gather in public because they're going to be doing this. But you need to be aware that anything said at something like this that's in any way open, and even if you try to make it kind of more closed than this, they will try to get people in. This is something that is increasingly going to happen. And so people just need to be. You can't you can't just kind of hope that. But they're not paying attention. You have to be aware of the fact that they're out there and they're going to be trying to infiltrate any sort of thing like this they can to get pretexts for further crackdowns. And another recent example of this, frontlines TP USA, which is turning point USA's. I mean, it's their version of the actual Frontline journalism show, but they did an investigation where they went undercover to the Oakland and Seattle anarchist book fairs. Right. And again, there's nothing wrong with doing those book fairs. I'm sure what they're doing here is pulling whatever quotes they could grab from people that sound bad out of context and using them to try to make the case that, again, these are violent extremist events that need to be cracked down on. And I will reiterate, I'm not saying don't do book fairs. I'm not saying don't show up at events like this. I'm saying if you show up, be aware that stuff like this is going to be happening, that there are going to be people recording that they're going to be people trying to find what they can to destroy people who are at these events. And that that's something that needs to be in your threat model. Right. In terms of how you dress when you go there, how visible you are, and what you're willing to say around people. Right. Among other things. I guess what I'm saying is there's some jokes you shouldn't be making in public at events like this unless you want there to be a high risk. Risk of it coming back to bite you in the ass.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think that's. That's perfectly reasonable.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

During the Antifa roundtable panel, this guy named Seamus Bruner.

[James Stout]

Seamus.

[Garrison Davis]

Seamus. It says Seamus, guys.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus.

[Garrison Davis]

It says Seamus.

[Robert Evans]

That. That is.

[James Stout]

It sure.

[Robert Evans]

Does it?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Gary.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Gary, we're gonna have to stop you right there. That's. That's a Seamus.

[Garrison Davis]

It says Seamus. The Director of research at the Government Accountability Institute discussed his theory of how a network of NGOs are funding Antifa. This is. This is a longer clip, but I think it's important to look at how they are approaching this, like how they are approaching this Antifa as an organization.

[Mia Wong]

This is not just a story about violence and chaos, as you alluded to, Mr. President. This is a money story. And. And at the Government Accountability Institute, my colleague and I, Peter Schweitzer and I, and our team, we followed the money and we followed it to the top of what we call the protest industrial complex, Riot Inc. And we found a network of NGOs. It's not just the Soros network, the Open Society network, it's other funding networks, the Arabella funding network, the Tides funding network, Neville Roy Singham and his, his network, Foreign cash. And it's also big left wing funders. Some of them are not citizens of this country. Mr. Hans Jorg vis of Switzerland. They're pouring money into this entire ecosystem. And so I want to share three money facts with you about what we call Riot Inc. Number one, like, like any corporation, Riot Inc. Has many divisions. It doesn't just have the antifa boots on the ground division, it has PR divisions, it has marketing division divisions. It has a very well funded legal division to get these boots on the ground back on the streets as quickly as possible. But it does have those investors that I mentioned. Number two, we have identified dozens of radical organizations. Not just the decentralized antifa organizations, but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than $100 million from the riot Inc. Investors. These would be the lawyer groups, these would be the groups that advocate for calling good honest Americans fascists, et cetera. And then three, I think the most shocking thing is that we have found that more than $100 million in U.S. taxpayer funding has flowed into these funding networks, including at least $4 million to these very groups themselves, not just antifa types. But there was an event in Atlanta called Stop cop City. Over 60 rioters were charged with domestic terrorism. These groups received money for that from both the, the billionaire class as well as taxpayer monies.

[Garrison Davis]

Unclear what he's talking about in terms of taxpayer money going to the 60 RICO defendants in Atlanta. What, but the structure he's talking about how, how this Riot Inc. Includes not just like antifa as in, you know, people wearing black hoodies on the streets at a protest, but like, you know, legal support organizations, even like, like research organizations that you know, advocate calling, you know, good honest Americans fascists. Right? This, this could refer to groups like Media Matters or like Southern Poverty Law center who do like research into extremist organizations. They could be framing the people like that as a part of this, this whole ecosystem. And that's, that's where they could be looking at for sources of money and funding and like tracking where that money goes is, is in groups like that. Not obviously, you know, your average black clad antifa protester is not, it's not receiving payment for their presence at these, at these events. But this guy went on to claim that quote, unquote, Riot Inc. Funding Network also supports decentralized crowdfunding platforms which fund organizations like the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association. After he went on this like three minute long speech, Trump asked him and other attendees that if they knew anything about like antifa members, funders or the organizational structure to hand over that information to Pam Bondi or Cash Patel. And Trump reiterated this multiple times during the roundtable, asking these, you know, know, policy guys or quote, unquote, independent journalists to hand over their information to the authorities. Here's one version of him making this request.

[James Stout]

Do you know the name of any of the funders?

[Eric Meza]

Do you know the names?

[James Stout]

Because if you do, I'd like you.

[Eric Meza]

To give them to Cash or Pam.

[James Stout]

Absolutely. Christie.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, we'll do.

[Eric Meza]

As soon as you can.

[Mia Wong]

That's all of you.

[James Stout]

Because you probably know the names after a certain period of time you tend to find out.

[Eric Meza]

But these are people that do not.

[James Stout]

Have good intention for the country and that's treasonous probably.

[Eric Meza]

So if you could, if you very important, if you could do that, that would be great.

[James Stout]

Nobody would know better than you. You'll figure it out.

[Robert Evans]

Share man.

[James Stout]

Cool.

[Garrison Davis]

During this roundtable, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, reiterated how antifa should be treated like an organized criminal gang and that law enforcement are going to quote, unquote, take the same approach as it does handling foreign drug cartels. It's a side note, the United States.

[James Stout]

Has maybe that's what those guided missiles.

[Garrison Davis]

Repeatedly lodged missiles at what it claims are boats associated with foreign drug cartels.

[James Stout]

I'll just say we have an episode next week about the ongoing drone campaign in the Caribbean.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of funders, here's some of ours.

[James Stout]

For the Central Intelligence Agency.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, we are back.

[James Stout]

Great. So nice to hear from the products and services that support this show.

[Garrison Davis]

Brought to you by supporting Safari Land, your one stop shop. God, I wish we had. No, I don't actually. Safariland is some post ironic memeing that I should, I should curtail. Svarlight is in fact bad.

[James Stout]

I will admit they do make very nice. Very nice bulletproof plate. I will say talking of things that are very nice, this is a very nice song that I like to listen to in my free time. Sorry, you don't like it?

[Garrison Davis]

It's tariff talk. We're back baby.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So literally within 12 hours I think of the release at night of our last episode of this show, we got the resumption of the trade force. So specifically Trump has Announced effectively the full scale resumption of the trade war with China. This started kind of out of nowhere with the Trump administration doing something that I think they didn't think was very provocative because I don't quite think they understood the magnitude of what they were doing. This basically started with the Trump administration massively increasing export restrictions to China by changing the rules of what companies are covered by what's called the entity list, which is a list of companies that American companies are not allowed to sell goods and services to. The administration moved this to include any company that is 50% or more owned by a company on the export list. We've discussed on the show before that a significant part of the structure of Chinese corporate conglomerates are held together by a bunch of different companies having partial ownership by the same holding companies, which is what sort of binds companies and conglomerates together and integrates them into the management structure of the conglomerates. This is how Chinese state owned enterprises work. Being state owned enterprise literally means that you are partly or completely owned by a holding company run by sasak, which is the state Owned Asset Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, because every name of the CCP is like that. So this shift to anything that's 50% or more owned by a company on this list is actually a massive export restriction. And the Chinese government took this as, okay, we're starting the trade war again. So very quickly. There's a whole bunch of tit for tat things that we're not going to track the order of because it kind of don't matter. But on October 10, Trump made a Twitter post where he said that he was going to implement a 100% tariff and also a software restriction thing we'll talk about later. Those are supposed to go into effect on the first. He's also been talking in the last week about bringing tariffs up to 150%. We don't have any kind of formal executive order on that. This was to some extent in response to China implementing massive restrictions on the export of rare earth metals. These are crucial to basically any kind of advanced manufacturing, industrial manufacturing applications, everything from chips to electric cars to jet fighters. These are set to take effect on December 1st. I'm going to read this from the New York Times to get an understanding of how large these moves are. China refines 99% of the world's dysprosium, a kind of rare earth metal that is used in chips to preserve magnetic stability even when they become hot. In the last few years, Nvidia and other Semiconductor manufacturers have changed the materials used in electricity management devices called capacitors, which is a really funny way to describe a capacitor, by the way, but on chips to make them more heat resistant. The capacitors are made from ultra pure dysprosium, which is extremely difficult to refine. A single refinery in Wuxi near Shanghai produces the entire world's supply. So per the New York Times, these export restrictions include any good that is produced with these rare earth metals and require foreign companies operating in China, like for example, Samsung or any of the sort of South Korean or Taiwanese chip manufacturers to acquire export licenses to sell them to any other country. That's not China. That is a absolutely massive restriction on export goods. And also, again, a whole bunch of critical minerals that both the American military apparatus relies on and the American tech apparatus relies on. AI chips need a whole bunch of these things. So, you know, in the middle of this process, the US also started charging Chinese built ships for docking at US ports, which China retaliated by imposing docking fees for American ships. I'm going to again read from the New York Times here. The new rules are the most stringent for Chinese shipping companies, which for the most part cannot avoid the levies. Hsbc, an investment bank, estimated that Costco, not that Costco, different one, a large Chinese shipping line, could pay $1.5 billion in fees next year, which the bank said could reduce Costco's operating earnings by nearly 3/4 in 2026. Again, it's worth, it's worth noting that these shipping, these shipping companies are the backbone of global trade. They also, their margins are not very good. And a significant number of them basically only didn't go under Dream Lock during the lockdowns because they effectively lied on their loan applications and were just sort of putting in their revenue as if the lockdowns weren't happening. So this is all very, very fragile infrastructure that is being, you know, attacked. And these, these port fees are already in effect.

[Garrison Davis]

Me doing gay cruising on my European trip. Yeah, I like global trade. All right, I continue.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God. Okay, so we also got a report today. This is, this is Wednesday the 22nd, this is being reported. So who fucking knows what will, what will be happening by the time this episode comes out. But on Wednesday we got a report from Reuters about the other, one of the other options the Trump administration is considering for these massive sort of trade attacks on China. So I said earlier when I Talked about the 100% tariff, Trump also mentioned a software export ban. So per Reuters, what's being considered here. And again, we have very, very few concrete details about this. This hasn't been formally announced. My guess is that it's being leaked to Reuters by the administration, but I just don't know. But what they're considering, basically, is a version of the sanctions that effectively Biden applied to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, which restricts the export of any product made with US Software. This would be probably the most significant development of the entire trade war. And so these are all incredibly significant escalations. A bunch of this stuff is set to go into effect on November 1, which is very, very soon. Now, in theory, Trump and Xi Jinping are supposed to meet at the meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in South Korea, but there's been no formal announcements of their meeting. Trump said he was going to go to China early next year, but that's again next year. The American 100% tariff again November 1st. The Chinese export restrictions on rare earth metals again December 1st.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

The other issue here is that the actual event starts on October 31, and the first tariffs are supposed to go into effect the next day.

[Garrison Davis]

Very spooky. Very spooky indeed.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And so Trump. Trump is mad also about China refusing to buy American soybeans story we've been covering.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And, you know, he's complaining about the rare earth metal stuff, and he's complaining about. He's still yelling about fentanyl, but it's also worth mentioning. One of the fascinating things is Trump is continuing to piss off even more parts of his base with this stuff. So soybean farmers, which is, again, a huge portion of American farmers, are really mad at him. He's also pissing off cattle ranchers. So both the soybean farmers and the cattle ranchers are mad at Trump for giving a bunch of money to Argentina and not giving them a bunch of money and cutting off their axe. The Chinese market markets because Argentina, again, is selling a whole bunch of stuff to China. One of the things that they sell to China is beef, because Argentina is a major beef exporter. So they're all really mad at him for giving Argentina a giant bailout in order to try to save their failing economy under their unhinged anarcho capitalist president, who has annihilated the economy even more than it was before. And then Trump's response to the cattle ranchers being mad at him was telling them to lower their prices, which means they're even more mad at him. So he is systematically alienating 2 of what should be his most important basis of support. And the cattle industry has been a base Republican support for. I mean, since time immemorial, effectively. The lumber and vanity tariffs that we mentioned last week have taken effect now. There's been no rollback of them. And finally, I want to close on a story that we're going to be covering more on Monday, which is the continuing escalation of a sort of conflict between Colombia and the US after the US Murdered a boat full of what appear to be Colombian fishermen. Yes. Colombia has recalled its ambassador and the US has said that it is going to eliminate all foreign aid and impose a tariff the size of which they haven't given a consistent number for. And this is, you know, very much could look like a pretty massive reorientation of American policy around Colombia, which has traditionally been an American ally. We've ran death squads out of there for a very, very long time. Yeah. And that has been the lightning round, rapid fire trade war coverage because. Oh, boy.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yay. We've, we've, we've tariff talked.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, before we close, I do want to talk a little bit about one of the news stories this week about a US Political figures being like Nazism. No, not the main candidate and no, not that other Republican staffer who had a swastika in his cubicle. The Politico story that reported leaked messages from the New York Young Republican Telegram chat, which already tells you that it's going to be problematic the fact that they have a telegram chat.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But Politico reported that this chat contained messages about putting political opponents in gas chambers, loving Hitler, as well as plenty of anti Semitism, talking about raping their enemies, and hundreds of uses of homophobic and racist slurs. The chair of the New York State Young Republicans, Bobby Walker, allegedly called rape epic and wrote in the chat, quote, if we ever had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked, unquote. New York Republican Elise Stefanik first denounced this chat after the report, though later called the Politico piece a quote, unquote, hit job. The Matt Walsh side of the online right condemned those who leaked the chats, neglecting to discuss the substance of the chat itself. While Vance largely dismissed the affair, writing on X the everything app, quote, I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence, unquote. Vance falsely referred to this as a college group chat when key members were as old as 40 years old. A day later, while guesting on the Charlie Kirk Show, JD Vance continued to push back on the seriousness of this story and play defense by repeatedly referring to the grown men involved who are in their 20s and 40s as kids and young boys, somehow they got their.

[Mia Wong]

Hands on something like 28,000 messages in some group chat. Group chat of I think 12 people that nobody's ever heard of. But they decided to just publish every single thing in this chat, whatever they found that they thought was the most salacious. And I think 10 years ago there would have been a very different response to it. But people are starting to learn from this. And the vice versa, President, is one of the reasons why, I'm sorry, focus on the real issues. Don't focus what, on what kids say in group chats. But there's another angle to this that I just have to be honest about. I mean, I'm like an old guy at this point. I'm 41 years old, I have three kids. You know, I grew up in a different world, right? Where not most of what I. The stupid things that I did when I was a teenager and a young adult, they're not on the Internet. Like I'm going to tell my kids, especially my boys, don't put things on the Internet. Like, be careful with what you post.

[James Stout]

If you put something in a group.

[Mia Wong]

Chat, assume that some scumbag is going.

[James Stout]

To leak it in an effort to.

[Mia Wong]

Try to cause you harm or cause your family harm. But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that's what kids do. And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is caused to ruin their lives. And at some point we're all going to have to say, enough of this bs. We're not going to allow the worst moment in a 21 year old's group chat to ruin a kid's life for the rest of time. That's just not okay. Like, we live in a digital world. This stuff is now etched in stone online. We're all going to have to say, you know what? No, no, no, we're not doing this. We're not canceling kids because they do something stupid in a group chat. And if I have to be the person who carries that message forward, I'm fine with it. Right?

[Garrison Davis]

Once again, most of these guys are like in their 30s. These guys are adults. The New York Young Republicans is not a whole bunch of kids. These are young in terms, in like political, in political years. Because everyone who runs the country is quasi geriatric, self proclaimed theocratic fascist. Matt Walsh said, quote, the right doesn't stick together. That's our biggest problem by far. Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dogpiles, disavow, attack their allies. I said a few weeks ago that we all need to band together in the wake of Charlie's death. And the answer I got back from a lot of people on the right was basically no. Well, okay then guys, we'll just lose. Instead, the left will keep up the united front and defend their guys no matter what. Well, we keep throwing each other to the wolves at every opportunity. Great plan, unquote. Shapiro did beef a bit with Walsh on one of their daily wire group podcasts regarding the substance of these chats. Shapiro did seem more concerned at the growing anti Semitic and Nazi fascistic element of the Republican Party, whereas Walsh is. Does not care about that at all.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a problem for him.

[Garrison Davis]

Not a problem for self proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh. Yeah, so that's, that's one side of this whole political story that I wanted to talk about. You should just read the political piece. I'm sure lots of people have. It got pretty popular a few days ago, but I find the, the sort of, I mean I would have called it like the dissident right reaction, but when you have the Vice president as like, yep, the guy leading the charge on this type of stuff, it's not really dissident. Like there is a large number of Republicans who are condemning the contents of this chat, but you do have the Vice president of the country playing defense for it and for the people involved.

[Mia Wong]

And I think this is actually a very important thing about what the structure of the Republican Party is right now, which is these kind of low level staffers, right, the young Republican people. And these are a bunch of people who are also making White House policy. Stephen Miller is the guy who's doing a whole bunch of the sort of ethnic cleansing, deportation policy right now. Are just Nazis. They're just Nazis. And every time one of these group chats comes out, it looks like this. And that's a really significant factor in why American politics looks like this, which is that like the, the people who are entering the Republican Party right now who are like their sort of youth wing, quote unquote, are these people. And we're seeing their policies get enacted and it fucking sucks.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, it's often baked in this like post ironic, like, like joking way where, you know, obviously the Nazis, some people in these circles will say, you know, obviously the Nazis themselves are bad. But we're using this as Like a memetic signifier.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

For, like, nationalism and for all of these things. Now, there is a fair number of people who just will straight up defend the Nazis. Absolutely. But I think it's. It's. It goes beyond, like. Like this. This isn't German national Socialism. Like, it goes. It goes. Yeah, it goes beyond to, like. Like, they're using Nazism as a meme for their political project. And memes get used a lot in these types of safe spaces where people can joke around. So you see that very clearly here. But you also see it on, like, the DHS Twitter account.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

You use the. You see the same kind of, like, post ironic stuff. Like, a few weeks ago, they were fucking moon man posting. You can Google that one if you want to. We don't have time to explain, but that's a very old, like a Internet Nazi dog whistle.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And, you know, we.

[James Stout]

I've.

[Garrison Davis]

I've talked a decent bit about my feelings on, like, focusing a lot on, like, the DHS Twitter dog whistles.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But. But yeah, it is. It is in invoking of this stuff for this, like, mimetic, like, archetypal context that they surround themselves in.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And then, you know, doing the actual thing, which is going out and rounding up a whole bunch of.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Doing these ice rides.

[Mia Wong]

No white people.

[Garrison Davis]

And, like, the ice recruiting ads are like, the clearest example of using this type of memetic imagery for their actual political project and then to enact the thing physically. And it's very clear there because there's very little disconnect. It's an immediate transference.

[James Stout]

Yeah. This is a very straight line.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. James, do you want to close us up on the great state of Alaska?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Talking about something not so great in Alaska, but we normally do a fundraiser at the end. So I wanted to put this here for those of you who are not aware, because this has really got not enough coverage, in my opinion. A massive storm, in fact, the remnants of a typhoon slammed into the west coast of Alaska, leaving more than a thousand people without shelter along the Yukon Koskokwim River. These are Alaska Native villages, and their inhabitants are now climate refugees at the very start of winter, right in the coldest place in the United States. These villages are very remote. I spent some time earlier this year in Alaska Native village. Not here in. In the interior, just in the Gwicheon Territories. But these guys are really only accessible by small planes or by boats, which will make their recovery even harder. Right. They're people who have lived by the ocean or by the river for as long as people have lived in the Americas tens of thousands of years. Right. A few months ago, the Trump EPA canceled a $20 million grant for flood protection which would have covered Kipnook. One of these villages, Kipnook, now functionally doesn't exist. Houses were torn off their foundations. There are multiple videos of people's whole houses floating away. It's not just an instance of neglect or even a single house failure here. It's an example of decades of ignoring the voices of indigenous people, especially Alaska Natives, when they tell us that the climate crisis is real and that it's already here. Right. When the media looks at climate change, they tend to want to look at data they can measure in terms of numbers, right, According to the model of Western science. But I would argue that the experience of indigenous people who have lived on the land for as long as human beings have lived anywhere on this continent and have watched the changes and seen this disaster unfold, should be a warning to all of us that the climate crisis is already here. I reached out to some Alaska native friends to ask where to donate and they shared a page which will be in the show notes for the show. So if you're able to help, I think that's a very important thing to do. Recovery for these people with this federal government, with being as remote as they are, will be horrifically difficult. Right now, many of them are living in Anchorage. Right. Like I say, they're going into the winter and then they don't have a place to live. It's a. It's an unmitigated disaster. So if you're able to help, I think it would be very much appreciated. Before I go, I will say that if you would like to email us, you can use our ProtonMail address. Cool Zone Tips ProtonMail. If you send from a Proton mail address and it's encrypted from one end to the other end.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Eric Meza]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Dana Al Kurd]

It could Happen here is a production.

[Mia Wong]

Of Cool Zone Media.

[Dana Al Kurd]

For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out.

[Maggie Freeling]

On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Now find sources for.

[Mia Wong]

It could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

[Maggie Freeling]

Thanks for listening. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming [e-mail] Dominate every match.

[Dana Al Kurd]

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[James Stout]

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[Maggie Freeling]

Lenovo.

[James Stout]

This is Jim.

[Mia Wong]

Hello. Jim started advertising with iHeartRadio way back in April and now I have customers out the door.

[Robert Evans]

And this is Sarah. Hi.

[Mia Wong]

She started putting a portion of her marketing dollars in podcasting back in June.

[Maggie Freeling]

Business is booming.

[James Stout]

That's why I'm working on a Saturday.

[Mia Wong]

Want to be like Jim and Sarah?

[Robert Evans]

It's easy.

[Mia Wong]

All you have to do is own or manage a business and reach out to iHeart. Get started today at 844-844-IHeart or iheartadvertising.com hello America's Sweetheart. Johnny Knoxville here. I want to tell you about my new true crime podcast, Hillbilly Heist from Smartless Media, Campside Media and big money players. It's a wild tale about a gang of high functioning nitwits who somehow pulled off America's third largest cash heist.

[Robert Evans]

Kind of like Robin Hood, except for.

[Eric Meza]

The part where he steals from the.

[Mia Wong]

Rich and gives to the poor.

[James Stout]

I'm not that generous.

[Mia Wong]

It's a damn near inspiring true story for anyone out there who's ever shot for the moon, then just totally muffed up the landing. They stole $17 million and had not bought a ticket to help him escape.

[James Stout]

So we're sitting like, oh God, what do we do?

[Andrew Sage]

What do we do?

[James Stout]

That was dumb. People, do not follow my example.

[Mia Wong]

Listen to Crimeless Hillbilly Heist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Maggie Freeling]

The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[James Stout]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

[Maggie Freeling]

Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[James Stout]

This is an iHeart podcast.