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- [00:00]
Garrison Davis
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:04]
Mia Wong
Time for a sofa upgrade. Introducing Anabe sofas where designer style meets budget friendly prices. Every anibe sofa is modular allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly. Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anabe is the only machine washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy. Liquids simply slide right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high resilience foam lets you choose between between a sink and feel or a supportive memory foam blend. Plus our pet friendly stain resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price. Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space. Today sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30 day money back guarantee. Get early access to Black Friday now. The biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns. Shop now at washablesofas.com offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.
- [01:06]
Alma Avaye
I turned off news altogether.
- [01:08]
Shireen Sekari
I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.
- [01:13]
Alma Avaye
It's the rage bait.
- [01:15]
Garrison Davis
It feels like it's trying to divide people. If we got clear facts, maybe we can calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the Facts. Let's move forward. Forward from there.
- [01:31]
Mia Wong
NBC News reporting for America.
- [01:36]
Alma Avaye
Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24. 7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes comes to their vet care.
- [02:05]
Mia Wong
This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up.
- [02:12]
Alma Avaye
And running is a top priority.
- [02:14]
Garrison Davis
That's why he chooses Grainger because when.
- [02:17]
Alma Avaye
A drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes.
- [02:19]
Garrison Davis
It easy to find the exact specs.
- [02:21]
Alma Avaye
For the replacement product he needs.
- [02:22]
Mia Wong
And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork.
- [02:27]
Garrison Davis
Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [02:38]
Robert Evans
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.
- [03:04]
Mia Wong
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong. So a week ago, we did some episodes about the election of Zoran Mamdani and a lot of the very funny reactions to it. And, you know, on Executive Disorder, we've talked about what this sort of means for politics. But now I want to do a slightly different kind of episode which is looking at the challenges that Mondo is going to face, attempting to implement his agenda, attempting to stay mayor, just taking him very seriously at his word, in his attempt to, you know, make the cost of living lower and make people's lives better. And there are unfortunately, very significant challenges to this agenda. And those challenges are a mix of structural problems and, I don't know, the President of the United States. Right. We're going to focus on a few of them today. And before we really start this, I think I want to start this to some extent with the conclusion. And the conclusion of this episode is not to say that these things are impossible.
- [04:22]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [04:22]
Mia Wong
And to not say they can't be done, but it's to remind people that the way that actual politics works, electing one person does not immediately make everything better. Right? You can't stop organizing because someone has been elected. And in fact, if you actually want to see the things that you organized to, you know, happen by electing this person, you have to organize even harder once they are in power and mobilize even more to allow the things that you fought for to actually happen. Because there are significant opposition to anything, you know, getting better for anyone in this country. And that opposition is powerful, well funded, well organized, and structural. And also, as we saw with the election of Aldani in the first place, it can be defeated. So we're going to start with the bond market. Now, many of you may be asking b, oh, what, what does the bond market have to do with make buses free? And to do that, we need to talk about funding mechanisms. So most plans in the US for sort of social democratic policy, for how you implement welfare state policies, how you implement policies that make people's lives better, tend to start from the federal government and the national level. Right? And there are very obvious reasons for this. Unlike the federal government, city Governments don't issue their own currency, which means the modern monetary theory, things that you would normally use to fund welfare programs with at a national level don't work. The federal government, again, has control of its own debt and money supply. City governments don't. That means the city governments, if you want to find money to do something, you have to find that from somewhere. And as wonderful as it would be if you could simply do that by just, okay, we raise taxes, and the taxes go to the policy that we want to implement, that's not how the system actually works. The way the system works, if you want to pay for things at a city level, is the bond market. David I. Backer has a very good piece about this, the baffler that I deeply recommend people read. The main thing that's important here for our purposes is that for funding significant portions of anything that you want to do as mayor, you are legally required to go through the bond market. And this means that the city is forced to beg for money from Wall street investment banks and then also pay those same banks exorbitant fees and interest. And a significant amount of money has to go to, as Backer points out, a whole bunch of, you know, lawyers and finance people and consultants and all of these, you know, sort of mafia of finance schools who are standing in between the normal mechanism of you have money and you pay for things, and that's assuming, again, that you even have the money in the first place, which you quite often don't, because cities are very, very often cash strapped. As Backer points out, using these bond mechanisms to pay for programs is legally required. Now, Backer is mostly focused on the structural constraints created by servicing debt, which can consume increasing portions of a city's budget until, you know, there's nothing left. This is sort of what's happened to Detroit to a large extent, and also the bank's direct control over the payment mechanism even when the city government brings in tax money. Right? So even if you raise taxes and you bring in money because you have to go through the bond market, it means that a bunch of that money is going to be funneled into servicing debt and paying interest on debt. But there's also a secondary problem here, which is that in very extreme cases, and I'm not saying we are immediately facing this, but I want to put this on the table as something that if you are attempting to run a social democratic program in a city, you do need to be significantly worried about. The bank's direct control over payment mechanisms means that the banks, you know, the People who buy the bonds that you need to use to get to fund these things. So let's actually take a step back here and explain what a bond is, right? A bond is basically you selling a piece of paper. That is debt. So you go into the market and you sell, sell a bank of bonds and they give you a bunch of money right now. And at the expiration of the bond, you pay that money back plus interest. This is how you have to fund things, because that is what's legally required. And also because cities need a way to get extremely large amounts of money. But this also means that cities that, you know, banks and investors can simply not buy your bonds if they don't like what you're trying to do. And at that point, very little can be done to oppose them. The most dramatic version of this problem came during the New York City bond crisis in 1975 where New York City had to sell a bunch of bonds. It was significantly in debt. And there's a very famous scene in, I think it's in hypernormalization. There's film of these city government officials who are sitting in this room waiting for the banks, people for the banks to show up to buy the bonds. And no one shows up. So suddenly they don't have any money. And then President Ford at the time tells the city to eat shit and die and refuses to buy any of New York City's bonds, refuses to give them any money. And this leaves the city bankrupt, right? It gets to a point where they have fired the teachers. There's no one to collect garbage because they literally don't have money to pay anyone because no one will buy their bonds. And eventually this crisis is sort of mitigated. But the problem is that, you know, the, the task force that was set up to mitigate this right to like, you know, get there to be people buying New York City bonds again. Those people were able to come in and New York City had a functional welfare state, right? Had a sort of mini social democratic welfare state. And in order to reopen the government and have schools and garbage collection again, in order to get that money, the city was required to dismantle it. And, you know, the financial situation of New York is obviously significantly better than it was then, right? And the odds of having this kind of just full on macro scale crisis is not as high as it was then, but because of the fact that this is the legally mandated way that you have to do these payments, and because unlike the federal government, there are constraints on spending that in some ways function like needing foreign exchange currency. You know, you can't just issue this money. You have to get it from somewhere. And because the somewhere is usually the banks, it means that you have to constantly negotiate with the banks and with capital in order to keep the city's lights on. And this is a constant threat that they have sort of, you know, hanging over the head of anyone who wants to be governor. And as Backer points out, you can't even just tax your way out of the problem because payment structures for government projects work out of the bond system. So that money just goes to debt payments. And, you know, one of the other things that Backer points out. And obviously the situation in Chicago is different than the situation in New York, but the Chicago Teachers Union did elect a mayor who was, you know, their guy, right? The Chicago Teachers Union spent a significant amount of money and resources and effort getting their guy elected. And once he came into office, he basically ended up doing the same thing in their negotiations with the teachers union that the previous administrations had done. And the reason that happened, you know, and the reason that you started to see cuts to school services that were not supposed to happen, but did anyways, was because the bond market stepped in and said, this is what's necessary in order to do this. And they have that kind of power. Now, obviously, Chicago was in a worse financial situation than New York is. Mom Domini is significantly further left than Brandon Johnson is. But these are real constraints. And the social democratic solution to this has always been to get money from the federal government. But the federal government won't give money out to the things that is legally required to give money out to right now, because obviously it is run by one Donald Trump. And obviously Trump, in and of himself, is a significant problem to doing this right? There's always a chance that Trump will see something like mean about Mamdani on Fox News and decide to send the National Guard to New York or something. And, you know, he will probably continue immigration raids. He can, you know, just fuck with people's ability to get Medicaid payments, which is a really significant issue. There will continue to be lots of creative and terrible things that the federal government can and will do to this administration that will have to be fought and can be defeated, but will have to be organized and fought against. But for our purposes right now, the big issue here is that you can't get money out of the federal government. So, okay, where are you getting money out of then? And the answer is the state government. Now, do you know what else gets money out of state Governments, probably not these products and services. I don't know. Who knows, who knows? We are back. So, okay, let's talk about the state government now. Again, this is even. Even with a city the size of New York, there still is always significant negotiations in order to do things in the city that requ. The aid of the state level government. And part of the problem here is that the New York State Democratic Party is significantly responsible for the Republicans control of the House, particularly in the 2022 cycle. There's a whole long story here about how a bunch of the, a bunch of the Democrats wanted to form this sort of moderate caucus thing where this sort of independent caucus that would caucus with the Republicans in order to give the Republicans the ability to stop any sort of liberal or left wing thing from happening in the state governments and handed a whole bunch of seats over to the Republic because of it. But just, you know, setting all of that aside, the place that you can get money from would be from the governor's office. Unfortunately, that's a significant problem. So here's Hochul's response to Mamdami's plan to make buses free. Quote, I cannot set forth a plan right now that takes money out of a system that relies on fares of the buses and the subways. But can we find a path to make it more affordable for people who need help? Yes, of course we can. So Hochschul does not want to raise taxes. Any proposal that would involve raising taxes probably has to run through New York City's City Council and thus through her. I'm going to quote this from Spectrum News about Mondami's proposal to expand universal childcare. Hochul said she's also looking at expanding a universal child care program statewide, but the total price tag is $15 billion. Childcare I already committed to, she said. I'm committed to this as a mom, Governor, I get it. But also to do it Statewide, it's about $15 billion, the entire amount of my reserves. Hochschule says she prefers to phase an expansion first within certain age groups in geographically underserved communities. So, okay, what is happening here in a macro sense is that Hochul is trying to slow roll both of these things. She is outright opposed to making buses free. She wants to do weird means testing stuff to it that will make it very difficult to do an extremely annoying bureaucratic layer meant to deny people services that you have to do instead of just having them be free. The childcare thing she probably does want to do, but again, because she is not a Democratic socialist, because she is a regular Democrat. She wants to do it slowly, expanded through a whole bunch of phases and taking a whole bunch of time. And this is a pretty significant problem because, you know, at every step of this, not only are you going to have to be negotiating with the banking system, you're going to have to be negotiating with the statewide Democratic Party. And the statewide Democratic Party is fairly conservative. Hochul is not as conservative. And she can be sort of dragged kicking and screaming into good policies like what happened with congestion pricing. And if something works and is really popular after you do it, she will sign on to it. But it's a significant hurdle that you have to deal with. I want to move from this into a kind of related problem that's a more structural constraint on Rami's time in office, which is that he is now in charge of running a capitalist economy. When you take a position in a capitalist government, it is now your job to make the economy run, and that means maintaining economic growth. But, okay, what does economic growth actually mean in a capitalist economy? It means that corporations make more money than they did the year before. And this is a structural problem for all of us because we all have interests that are diametrically opposed to corporations making more money every year because their profit comes directly from our exploitation. Right. We have fundamentally opposed interests from the corporations and the capitalists and the billionaires. But in order for there to be capitalist economic growth, those people have to keep making more money every year. And obviously, you can make arguments about how redistribution enhances economic growth by creating a larger consumer base, and that's obviously true. We're in a extremely deformed economy right now where, as I keep saying on this show, 50% of all consumer spending is happening from 5% of the population, which is just a completely unsustainable way to run an economy and is also absolutely miserable for every single other person who's in that bottom 95%. And, you know, there are things that you can do to some extent. Right. But at some point, you are going to have to choose between workers and capital. And if you're the mayor of New York City, your job is to make capital more money. And this is a structural constraint that every social democratic government has faced. And it's worth noting that we are not in a world that is surrounded by social democratic governments. And part of the reason why, again, is that they. They need the economy to keep growing and that they're reliant on finance institutions to make money. And the most grim versions of this tend to happen at A sort of national scale. But if you look at morally in Jamaica in the 70s, where you have a democratic socialist who gets elected and is running Jamaica and then has to implement austerity because the country runs out of and the IMF comes in, these things can get really bleak. Now they don't have to, right? Sufficiently well organized populations can force the hand of capital to do things that they don't want to do. Significantly well organized populations can start trying to fundamentally redistribute economic power. But it's difficult. And the difficulty is magnified by the third really massive constraint. And that constraint is the police. One of the other big structural problems that comes with running a state is that it relies on armed men to enforce the laws. And those men, especially in the United States, are at best one step removed from straight up neo Nazis. A lot of them straight up are neo Nazis. The cops are the most consistently right wing group in the entire country. They are a bunch of racist shitheads who exist to perpetuate white supremacy and protect capital. And they're also again, a fundamental organizational unit of the state, right? Without the violence of the police, laws are just suggestions. And if you're going to run a capitalist government, if you're going to run 1 In the US you have to deal with the fact that your power depends on the loyalty of a bunch of Nazis. And these people will riot if you attempt to do oversight of them. They very famously did this in 1992. They had this whole giant riot, right? They had the thing that was supposed to be a protest rally where they all went on strike. And then the cops who were supposed to be policing the protest obviously didn't do anything because again, they're also cops. And in 1992 I did this for a really, really, really minor oversight. Attempted oversight, right? And obviously they actually didn't win that direct fight. But they were able to cause enough of a political shitstorm that they were able to force the last sort of like vaguely social democratic mayor out of power and install like Rudy Giuliani, who is a weird face, melty dipshit, right, who's an incredible tough on crime right winger. And obviously Mamdani has been trying to kind of trying to do his best to negotiate with the police and not to overtly threaten them. But that kind of doesn't matter because they just hate him. Like they think that a Muslim socialist is just inherently an illegitimate person and they think that anyone who's even vaguely liberal is someone who is their enemy and who is their target. And we have seen them take actions to just directly threaten mayors. Fairly recently, right? In 2020, they kidnapped Bill de Blasio's daughter at a protest and then sort of like paraded her mugshot around and posted it everywhere and did this whole big show of how they were holding her. To say it was a thinly veiled threat is a dramatic understatement of how incredibly, incredibly blatant this threat was. Right? They kidnapped the mayor's daughter during a protest movement, and that was Bill de Blasio, who was not some kind of like wild anti police radical, right? And especially now, as sort of fascism is on the march and with the, the backing of the US Federal government, right, the police form a very significant threat to Mondami's ability to do anything, both on a sort of political level. They are going to be constantly, you know, putting out giant press releases about how Mamdani is like, turn the city into an unlivable hellhole and how they can't do their jobs, et cetera, et cetera. And also just in terms of just directly threatening him and trying to influence his policy, they're going to be a real problem. And his ability to prevent them from, for example, smashing in the skulls of pro Palestine protesters, even if he wants to, was going to be very limited because the police have become a kind of semi autonomous fascist force in this country. They have always been a ticking time bomb on status democracy, and that clock is closing in on zero in this sort of moment of ascended fascism. Now, again, I want to close this by saying these are not all the challenges that he's going to face. But, comma, none of this also means that the things that he wants to do to make people's lives better are impossible. Every single one of these problems are problems that you can defeat by organizing, right? You can put enough pressure on capital to prevent them from doing a kind of capital strike or a bond strike to force them to continue to fund things, right? With enough public pressure, you can make a whole lot of things happen. You can make the police, you know, at the very least be acting on a kind of defensive front to where they're not, you know, rioting and trying to run city politics, but are kind of forced by mass popular mobilization and pressure to at the very least not be openly attacking the mayor. You can put massive political pressure on Kathy Hochul to, you know, do things that are good, which, which is how we got. How New York got congestion pricing in the first place, right? Like, that would. That was a result of a massive, like, organizational campaign. That went extremely well. And Hushult, like, tried to sabotage it because she thought it would be unpopular. And eventually it got implemented and it's really popular now, and now she's really in favor of it. So these people can be pushed around, right? They are not invincible. Their victory is not inevitable. They can be defeated and they can be forced to accept that. Oh, wait, hold on. The extremely sensible policies that we want that make our lives better are good and that requires mobilization. But, you know, that's not impossible. We know how to organize. We've been doing it for ages. And it was, you know, what had to happen to make all of this possible in the first place. And so instead of demobilizing now and going, oh, our jobs are done. It's no, no, no, no, no. Our job, our jobs have just begun. But you know, the better organized we are and the more we're able to push this and the more we're able to push all of these people, the better our lives will get. And this election to begin with is a reminder that another world is possible and it could be better than this one. We just have to build it together. Time for a sofa upgrade. Introducing Anabe sofas where designer style meets budget friendly prices. Every Anabe sofa is modular, allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly. Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anabe is the only machine washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy. Liquids simply slide right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high resilience foam lets you choose between a sink in feel or a supportive memory foam blend. Plus our pet friendly stain resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price. Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space. Today sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30 day money back guarantee. Get early access to Black Friday. Now the biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns. Shop now@washablesofas.com Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.
- [27:15]
Alma Avaye
Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24,7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?
- [27:48]
Garrison Davis
Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.
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Alma Avaye
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Garrison Davis
Just think about the universal marketing the number of consumers who hear your message.
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Alma Avaye
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Garrison Davis
Let us show you@iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com or call 844-844 iHeart. One more time, call 844-844-IHEART and get podcasting Working for you.
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Alma Avaye
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Garrison Davis
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- [28:58]
Garrison Davis
Apply now at Post Edu. This is it. Could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, joined by Robert Evans. Last week I released an episode on the ascent of white nationalist live streamer Nick Fuentes and his Griper fans among particularly Young Gen Z Republicans. The episode also tracked the conservative infighting at Heritage foundation and Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire in the aftermath of Tucker Carlson's friendly sit down interview with Nick Fuentes. In the episode I mentioned that I had an extra segment covering the the final section of the interview. Now most coverage of this interview, including my episode last week, focused on like the first two thirds, which ranged from like Nick Fuentes's political background, early beef with Ben Shapiro and his like Nazi esque anti Semitic theories of a quote unquote organized world Jewry corrupting America, which he now lightly couches in anti Israel framing to profit off of the genocide in Palestine. But the last third of the interview changes course to discuss the mechanisms of quote unquote reality distortion which are ruining young men, drugs, alcohol, the Internet, and most importantly pornography. After receiving a universal response demanding the release of the porn cut, I have sat down with Robert here to finally, finally air what no other news platform is brave enough. Brave enough to cover.
- [30:37]
Robert Evans
Yeah, what no what new other news platform can legally cover because they have a duty to their employees to not make them research this stuff.
- [30:45]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. Or like an actual healthy HR department.
- [30:48]
Robert Evans
Yeah. We have not, we have not finished our classes on what we're not allowed to make people do. So so now to be fair, Garrison couldn't be stopped from researching this. There was no, there was no way of stopping you from doing this.
- [31:02]
Garrison Davis
I have a sick drive.
- [31:04]
Robert Evans
You would have started working for someone else if we hadn't let you do this.
- [31:09]
Garrison Davis
No, Sophie. If Sophie told me I wasn't allowed to cover this, I would have quit immediately.
- [31:13]
Robert Evans
Yeah, you'd be working for Wired or someone.
- [31:18]
Garrison Davis
So now I am very pleased to present to you probably 30, 30 minutes of Nick Fuentes explaining to a performatively confused Tucker Carlson the concept of pornography. And I guess if we're going to view, you know, Fuentes and the Grovers as like a serious legitimate threat that's able to sway national political discourse, I think it's also important to cover his weird sexual politics. Just as explaining the weird sexual practices of like you know, the Proud Boys is important for understanding their whole deal as like a neo fascist street gang. The kind of closeted gay incel women issues of the groipers is actually really important, especially for Nick. And let's discuss that. But thankfully we get to start off with the majority, majority of this section which is, which is on pornography. Let's start one of the first clips. What is porn? Exactly? Like describe how available is porn. What is it? Oh my God.
- [32:28]
Mia Wong
Oh man.
- [32:29]
Robert Evans
Because he does ask that like a man who's legitimately never heard of pornography.
- [32:33]
Garrison Davis
He does. He, he later says like obviously he is familiar with the rough concept of porn.
- [32:39]
Robert Evans
Uh huh.
- [32:41]
Garrison Davis
But maybe not, but maybe not. This sort of Internet porn obsession to which Nick refers. Let's, let's skip ahead about a minute where, where Nick kind of closes on his explanation of, of Internet porn specifically. So something that is almost never talked about is that this is a generation that's totally sexually dysfunctional. I think because of pornography and some people are able to cope with it, some people don't have a problem. But I think a lot of people and maybe even a small minority have a serious problem with it. And the problem people sexually dysfunctional. I think that it's impossible for a real woman to compete with the availability and the novelty of pornography. So that is, that is Nick's kind of ending argument at the tail end of his like definition of porn and how porn is affecting specifically American men. A little bit of his incel status is obviously seeping through there. More of it will become increasingly evident throughout, throughout this interview. But this idea of sexual dysfunction, how porn is ruining men's ability to get into relationships is ruining the ability to get into marriages, lasting marriages. And he frames this kind of slightly as the fault of men, but also really as the fault of women. Women aren't able to compet with how much porn there is. The, the, the different categories of porn. How can one woman please a man when a man can go onto the Internet and look up, you know, 50 different niche fetishes that not one woman could provide?
- [34:22]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [34:22]
Garrison Davis
And that's, that's part of his argument at this point.
- [34:26]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And that's always like, been the. Okay, so you've just, you've never had.
- [34:30]
Garrison Davis
A relationship which Nick is open about. At least Nick claims that. Right. It's unclear how true. A lot of Nick's claims are about his like, incel. Vol. Sell, you know, voluntary celibate.
- [34:43]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [34:43]
Garrison Davis
Type deal. But no, Nick. Nick does claim that. And the, the sort of pushback Nick will receive later on in the interview on some of these aspects is actually way stronger than any of the world. Jewry, anti Semitic stuff from earlier in the interview.
- [34:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [34:58]
Garrison Davis
Which Carlson was actually kind of like trying to shape Nick Fuentes's rhetoric to make him like, appeal to a bigger audience, but did not really push back on to the same extent he does on Nick's like, relationship with women. But the, the sexual dysfunction aspect, I think is, is the, is the ending argument for, for Nick here in terms of what actually makes porn bad. He extrapolates on this point in this, in this next section, which I'll play now. Porn is. You could have a hundred different women in one sitting doing anything that whatever, whatever niche or idiosyncratic thing a person might be into, it's there. And so I think that novelty combined with that availability, it makes it so that, you know, when you think about courting a woman, juice isn't worth the squeeze. And so there's like, also a problem of like, erectile dysfunction. People that can't enjoy regular sex because it, it does not compare to the intensity, the novelty and the availability of porn. It's hyper stimulation. And so I think that's sabotaging a lot of normal sexual relationships. It seems like it's making a lot of people gay too.
- [36:15]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [36:15]
Garrison Davis
And trans. You think that's true? 100%.
- [36:18]
Mia Wong
What is that?
- [36:20]
Robert Evans
Oh my God.
- [36:22]
Garrison Davis
What is that? I don't even know where to start there.
- [36:27]
Robert Evans
I mean, like, it's what these people have always believed. Right. That like, that's, that's the there's got to be an explanation, some kind of causal why people like things that, that they're not allowed to admit to liking in public. And it's gotta be the fault of pornography. Right? Or libraries, whatever.
- [36:45]
Garrison Davis
Every time Tucker interjects the beauty of his. Of his little, like, befuddled interjections, what is that, Is that real? Is that true?
- [36:57]
Robert Evans
It's.
- [36:58]
Garrison Davis
It's fantastic. But, but yeah, no, I mean, Nick kind of blames the rise in homosexuality and, and transsexuality on this, like, novelty of pornography and this sexual desensitization. Like, once regular porn doesn't do it for people, they get pushed to more and more extreme categories of which trans porn is somehow particularly effective at like, influencing and, you know, manipulating human behavior. Right. This is like the hypno theory that porn can like, make somebody trans. Yeah, very goofy stuff. Specifically for Nick, considering his curious catboy background and his alleged leak viewership of trans porn, which we might, we might discuss later. I'm going to play it. Play another clip kind of on this note, a shorter one. I think that if you are somebody.
- [37:51]
Alma Avaye
That uses pornography multiple times per day, which many people do actually. Oh, absolutely.
- [37:57]
Garrison Davis
That's a lot of jerking off. That's a huge problem. Yeah, that's a lot of jerking off. Former Fox News anchor Tucker.
- [38:06]
Robert Evans
That's a lot of jerking off.
- [38:07]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, that's a lot of jerking off. I so badly just wanted to cut some of these clips out of like, out of context and just put them in my, my other episode.
- [38:17]
Robert Evans
Tucker only comes once a year and he can only come by wrapp dick inside of two frozen Swanson's meals. He's got to kind of use like, you know how it's got like, there's little divots on the back end. He's got to use that to cushion his penis. It's the only way he can come.
- [38:32]
Garrison Davis
It's very like Oedipal thing with his, you know, family business. This, this sort of like psychosexual drive. Wow. The.
- [38:39]
Robert Evans
The Swanson of it all.
- [38:40]
Garrison Davis
Sure, that makes sense for. Yeah, that makes sense for Tucker. But no, did it says that porn, like, operates kind of like drug tolerance levels which, like, over time, after repetitive use, in order to get high, the user must seek out stronger drugs or dangerously intense doses of which he views trans porn as this like, dangerous dose.
- [39:05]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, because I do love like the, the through line with these people that like both. This is like a sickening degeneracy and also is so appealing that people absolutely cannot help themselves. To it. Like it affects them. Like heroin. It's, it's, it's so inherently attractive.
- [39:23]
Garrison Davis
I mean some of that might be their actual proclivities kind of. Yes, I think so peeking out from under the surface there. Because all of these guys love watching transport. All of these like anti trans people, whether that's Alex Jones or like Nick Fuentes, like obviously they have, they have an interest in that and that's what kind of drives some of their obsession.
- [39:42]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Which is, it's, it's just weird. Like I don't know anyone who talks about any pornography that way. Like, you know, everyone's got whatever it is they're into. Like something that they'll be particularly interested in but no one describes as like, it's just this kind of thing. No one can resist it.
- [39:58]
Garrison Davis
Obviously this sort of like powerful obsessive nature in which these types of right wing freaks like refer to it as.
- [40:06]
Robert Evans
The like actual perverts will say stuff like, no, no, no. I've been shoving things inside my pee hole for the last 27 years and now I can get up to something the width of a Maglite. And I know that's crazy. Like I know no one else does that. That's just a me thing. Oh, someone needs to explain sounding to Tucker Carlson is what I'm, what I'm saying. Like I, if I, if he interviews me, I'm going to walk him through sounding. I'm going to. He's obviously putting together a PowerPoint with photos.
- [40:33]
Garrison Davis
He's obviously, he's obviously open, open to this line of discussion. Are we allowed to have ads on this episode?
- [40:43]
Robert Evans
Yeah, probably not, but let's throw to him anyway.
- [40:56]
Garrison Davis
All right, we are, we are back. Nick Fuentes is going to continue, continue to describe pornography towards a slightly confused Tucker Carlson. Now, now Nick is able to really speak from a sense of authority. As someone who claims to have never had sex. He's able to really speak with authority on this topic, which I will, I will, I'll play this next clip. And there's something too about what it does when you look at it, when you. Because people don't realize that it is a fundamentally different experience. People don't realize being involved in intercourse.
- [41:30]
James Stout
Versus watching other people have intercourse.
- [41:35]
Garrison Davis
And I think that actually does something to you.
- [41:37]
Mia Wong
Tell me, what do you mean?
- [41:40]
Garrison Davis
Sorry, I'm just off there for a sec. People don't realize this amazing observation from alleged virgin incel. Nick Fuentes. He's trying to make this point about like body depersonalization or like disassociation when watching porn. It's like this like out of body experience because you start associating yourself with people on screen, that's eventually what he starts talking about.
- [42:04]
Robert Evans
Right. And.
- [42:05]
Garrison Davis
But he couches this in saying that like people don't realize that this is what. This is, you know, different from actual sex. Which is really funny because Nick is proudly proclaims that he's never had sex before. So he is in no position to argue this point.
- [42:17]
Robert Evans
No. Yeah, that's the other thing. How would you know that it's inherently better than sex?
- [42:22]
Garrison Davis
Like, because he's never had. I think he has to assume that because that's the only information he has. But I love his framing of this as like new novel information that no one else has access to. That no one realizes that watching porn is different from having sex.
- [42:37]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [42:37]
Garrison Davis
Tucker's response is just phenomenal at the end of this because Tucker's like trying. Trying to coax more and more out of him. It's the, really. The only time where he's kind of being a sly interviewer is. Is at this ending porn section. It's not the, it's not the are you a fed Section. It's not the Daily Wire stuff. It's not the anti Semitism stuff. It's. It's specifically the port section. But to explain this like out of body theory that Nick, that Nick has here. Unfortunately Nick gets into trying to explain the Blanchardian theory of transsexuality towards. Towards Tucker Carlson, of which I will only play a certain segment of. Because we don't need to hear that whole thing. But there is a section of this next clip that. Which will get into that as well as take you on kind of a beautiful journey showcasing Tucker's objection to pornography. I think that, you know, for example, I think Steve Saylor has written about this, that there's multiple kinds of transsexuals. And he says that one kind of transsexual is somebody that likes the idea.
- [43:44]
Alma Avaye
Of seeing themselves as a woman.
- [43:46]
Garrison Davis
It's autogynephilia.
- [43:47]
Mia Wong
Yes.
- [43:48]
Garrison Davis
And I think that, you know, one of the theories for that is you. You watch a man having sex with a woman that isn't you so much. You kind of achieve an identity with the woman in like a we toxic way. You almost identify with the woman. And so there's weird things that happen when you're. Yes. Watching that and having such strong emotional and sexual experiences. Interesting, interesting, Nick.
- [44:11]
Robert Evans
Interesting stuff.
- [44:12]
Garrison Davis
Nick, I've always been, I've sensed for a long time having Had a lot of young male employees mention porn as a problem.
- [44:20]
Robert Evans
I mean, the big porn companies give.
- [44:23]
Garrison Davis
Visibility to foreign intel services on the back.
- [44:26]
Robert Evans
What?
- [44:27]
Garrison Davis
So that means people know what you're looking at. There's likely video and audio of you watching. Okay. All right. There is so much I love that Tucker's made objection to pornography. Is it the stuff that Nick's talking about at all? But the idea that it poses a security risk because of foreign intel services?
- [44:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that they're. They're recording everyone masturbating to blackmail every.
- [44:50]
Garrison Davis
Single person on the planet. And I. He couches this in saying that he's, quote, not a huge expert on the topic.
- [44:57]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [44:58]
Garrison Davis
Which is really good. But to go back a little bit, the level of projection Nick is doing here with this identifying as a woman in the, in the porn thing is simply phenomenal. I mean, especially considering the whole, you know, Catboy scandal, which I covered on the show like years ago as I. When I was like a baby. As well as Nick's like, alleged trans porn leak, which I guess I'll. I'll explain here briefly. This was in 2022. Nick allegedly was operating a sock puppet Twitter account when he was banned on Twitter. This, this account shared a clip scrolling through Nick Fuentes, like analytics, like video analytics, like search analytics showing his popularity. And when scrolling through these various tabs, a little section of a tab that, that didn't, did not get into full view, but you get, you saw the bottom of it, which looked a lot like a very specific trans femboy porn video on pornhub. People found the video and after they found the video, you know, this, this, this post with these analytics was like, taken down and, and this account was believed to be operated by Nick Fuentes. Now Nick claims that he obviously was not behind this account, that this was some like, groiper fan who was trying to set him up for scandal by operating an account that appeared to be Nick's account on Twitter, but actually wasn't. I. Robert, I will show you a little bit of this analytics video. We don't need to see the whole thing, but it's like this. Okay, so various, various tabs. Look, look at all these tabs. This. Various.
- [46:36]
Robert Evans
Like, when does Jake Lloyd explore what.
- [46:40]
Garrison Davis
Comparing his popularity towards other. Other like, commentators?
- [46:44]
Robert Evans
I thought he was comparing his popularity to fucking Jake Lloyd from the Phantom Menace.
- [46:48]
Garrison Davis
From the Phantom Menace.
- [46:50]
Robert Evans
You should be beating him, Nick.
- [46:52]
Garrison Davis
But like web traffic analytics, Joe Kent, Google Trends, and then let's see if I can find it. Right. Oh, oh, right here at the top. Yeah, right here at the top. While scrolling through the tabs on the iPhone Safari. Oh, some points there is a, a little, a little porn tab, right?
- [47:11]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [47:12]
Garrison Davis
So this, this turned into a little, a little mini thing with people thinking that they, they secretly stumbled across the. Nick's porn. Porn watching habits of which it would be no surprise.
- [47:21]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [47:22]
Garrison Davis
That he'd be watching trans femboy porn. Especially again considering that he operated a Catboy discord channel on his server. But he has staunchly denied this as, you know, as a based Catholic incel. Obviously. So both Tucker and Nick believe that porn is a big factor affecting the decline of actual sex and marriage among Gen Z. And it's not just a male problem. Nick argues that it has become, quote unquote, so destigmatized for women to participate in porn as well, of which he's mostly referring to only fans. Here's a clip of them discussing only fans. And it is completely casual, you know, because you could say that maybe 10 years ago, even at the heyday of Internet porn, to be in porn you got to be a porn star.
- [48:15]
Alma Avaye
Like that's life and that's your career.
- [48:16]
Garrison Davis
And that's who you are. And it's very shameful. With only fans. It's like, it's like having a tick tock. It's like, here's my link tree, here's my Instagram account, here's my Facebook account, here's my YouTube and here's my only fans. Why would any of this be legal? I think that, well, there's, like you indicated, maybe there's an intelligence benefit to that. Yeah, maybe there's a political benefit to that. I think that. Well, why wouldn't you arrest the people who run something like that?
- [48:47]
Alma Avaye
They should be.
- [48:48]
Garrison Davis
If you had a Christian government or how about just a government that cares about its people? I mean, is Iran a bigger threat or his only fans? Iran's not turning my daughter to prostitution.
- [48:57]
Alma Avaye
That I'm aware of.
- [48:59]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [49:00]
Garrison Davis
Oh my God. Is Iran a bigger threat or is only fans?
- [49:05]
Robert Evans
Yes, yes. That's the real geopolitical question.
- [49:08]
Garrison Davis
The wisest minds. No. What a, what a beautiful mind that is.
- [49:12]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah.
- [49:13]
Garrison Davis
Like even be able to think of this sentence. Is Iran a bigger threat than only fans?
- [49:18]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [49:18]
Garrison Davis
Is like I could never even get myself to a point where, where I conjured that thought in my own head.
- [49:26]
Robert Evans
We have to ban pornography because it's the Iran of masturbation.
- [49:31]
Garrison Davis
It's frankly beautiful. In order to get their minds so, so degraded to even have this thought it's so alien, man. Like, later, Tucker pushes kind of on this point about the need to arrest people who run only fans, while Nick kind of quietly remarks that it's. It's really the women or the quote unquote, body assets who should be arrested. But Tucker is pretty firm on. No, it's really like the facilitators, people hosting the website who are enabling this. But you know, Nick. Nick would be totally fine if women on the platform also get arrested, man. Ah. Again, the insistence that the. A primary objection or like a causal. A causal aspect of why. Why is this allowed? It's for, like, intelligence gathering services is simply beautiful. Do you know what else is beautiful, Robert?
- [50:24]
Robert Evans
The sponsors of this podcast, they.
- [50:27]
Garrison Davis
They are for putting up with this. Yeah. All right, we're back for this final segment.
- [50:42]
Alma Avaye
We will.
- [50:42]
Garrison Davis
We will transcend, end the discussion of porn and. And just talk more about some of Nick's opinions on. On, like, women.
- [50:52]
Robert Evans
Oh, good.
- [50:53]
Garrison Davis
And other factors beyond porn for why, you know, marriage isn't happening. Why. Why aren't people getting married as much anymore? You know, of which both Tucker and Nick think porn is a factor, but there's other factors contributing to this crisis which Nick and Tucker will. Will elucidate. Let's. Let's hear him out. So what are the other factors that prevent. I'm sorry I called you gay, by the way, but I'm always. I think I'm just too old or something. I'm like, what. Why is anyone married? You tell me. Why isn't.
- [51:25]
Alma Avaye
Why aren't people married?
- [51:26]
Garrison Davis
Well, I mean, honestly, it's the women. All right, okay, we solved that problem. Yeah, that's it. I think that does it for us that it could happen here. They got to the bottom of that pretty quickly. Sorry I called you gay, by the way. So. No, now it's time for the wise in Celsius, Nick Fuentes to bestow his wisdom pertaining to relationships and marriage. And in his eyes, the main problem seems to be that not just women, but specifically that women are too liberal. Yeah, really breaking new ground there.
- [52:02]
Robert Evans
Yeah, sure. That's. That's it. That's the problem. Because then they don't. Like all of the Nick Fuentes fans.
- [52:08]
Garrison Davis
The men are extremely conservative. Increasingly, the women are extremely liberal. What are they liberal on what issues? Like, what does that mean, liberal?
- [52:16]
James Stout
Oh, on.
- [52:17]
Alma Avaye
On.
- [52:17]
Garrison Davis
They're very feminist. Like actually extremely feminist.
- [52:21]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [52:22]
Garrison Davis
They don't believe that, do they? I think they do. Really? Absolutely, yes. Believe that gender roles are a construct, that none of this is inborn like.
- [52:31]
Alma Avaye
You'D have to be an idiot to.
- [52:32]
Garrison Davis
Think that they like the idea of it. Tucker's delivery, I wanna, I wanna study it more.
- [52:38]
Robert Evans
I feel like they sketched some of this out before they did this because I feel like they're both leading each other to get out statements that they want to say.
- [52:46]
Garrison Davis
No. Yeah, like it's so crafted here. Like their back and forth exchange is, is so, is so crafted. Every, every inflection they have, they're like giving each other these key points to then extrapolate on.
- [52:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And there's the stuff that's willful, like the, the claims that, well, young men are, are conservative, which is based on like a shift towards Trump that's partly reversed over the last year or so, but that was not the vast majority of Gen Z people. Right. Like, it's, it's. Yeah, young people are willing to like try out different things and swing back and forth, but like, it's not, it's not the way he's framing it. Right. Because that's, that's the most convenient narrative for the right that like all of the young men are pulling towards the right. And so the problem is that women are more progressive. Right?
- [53:34]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. Therefore it has to be liberal women. Yeah.
- [53:37]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [53:38]
Garrison Davis
No, it's, it's a, it's a very, it's a very convenient excuse to explain actually a complex set of economic problems which are preventing people from feeling comfortable enough to actually start a family and, you know, safe enough, economically speaking. Nick goes on to complain about, you know, women lying about wanting equality, wanting to work, when really all they want is a quote, unquote tough chad quote. The whole political system is based around women never being accountable for any of their choices, unquote. This is namely abortion and no fault divorce, which Nick spends a while talking about how that has been a significant contributing factor towards ruining this country. How women can enter marriages and then leave for whatever reason they want, taking half the money, taking half the stuff, etc. Etc. There's another factor that Nick claims is, is contributing to this problem. They have a very high estimation of themselves. I think that people call it Hoeflation. They're. Yes, they're. Their sense of their own looks and sexual value is very inflated. I just had to put the whole flation clip in there.
- [54:45]
Robert Evans
The whole flation? Yes. Tucker Carlson saying Hoeflation is truly a moment for us all.
- [54:50]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, yeah. Again, I really want to just splice some of these sound bits into my other episode at random points. Now, again, Tucker actually pushes back in in some of, like the in between sections here. And I'll play some of that pushback later, but, you know, way more than the rest of the interview. So specifically here, Tucker is actually pushing back on Nick's kind of resigned blame directed towards women and the quote, unquote, legal incentive structures that he says are contributing to this. And Tucker responds by saying, even if some of these complaints are true, as believers in the natural patriarchy, isn't it men's role to take responsibility, lead by example, and to fix this behavior in women through marriage? But I would say that because I hear this all the time, people say, well, the men need to step up and be better and lead the women. Easier said than done. I go on. You know, of course I agree with that. They're at war with the system and, and not even just the system, but also society. So this is, this is the full like joker pilled in sale stuff is that in order to have an actual relationship with women, men have to enter into combat against, quote, unquote, society.
- [56:00]
Robert Evans
Right?
- [56:01]
Garrison Davis
Like this, it's larger, this larger thing that's influencing women and is and is making them, you know, depraved and liberal. And Nick argues that even if you find like a nice trad Christian girl, they're going to be on TikTok, they're going to be on Instagram and they're going to be quote, unquote, talking to other women and through osmosis, they're going to get influenced by this liberal culture and say 10, 15, 20 years down the line, people will change and they may not be so Christian and Trad 20 years into your marriage because of society, huh?
- [56:34]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the argument I expected from him.
- [56:39]
Garrison Davis
He'll extrapolate some of his reasoning here. And I think that women as kind of the ultimate conformists, the ultimate enforcers of like, social norms. I think eventually the pressure from society kind of gets to them and a.
- [56:51]
Alma Avaye
Lot of them will go in.
- [56:52]
Garrison Davis
Depends what kind of husbands they have. I mean, if there's real leadership at home, I don't know a single happily married woman who's liberal. Not one. I know a lot of married women. Here's some of the pushback that Tucker is doing now. But yeah, man, this idea of, you know, women as the ultimate conformists, as the enforcers of social norms. Right. This is like kind of like Longhouse type stuff. And, and Tucker's rebuke of that is that in an actual, you know, marriage with a conservative man, a strong conservative man, all that Behavior will get changed because people will fall into like, their natural biological, patriarchal roles. But Nick still doesn't buy it. Like, he is. He is. He is an incel at heart. He has no way that. That Tucker's kind of push back. It's gonna. It's gonna turn him on. This like, Nick just hates women entirely.
- [57:41]
Robert Evans
It's his whole motivation.
- [57:42]
Garrison Davis
Is that due to some sort of like, fascist homoerotic like aspect? Maybe, but it's. It's probably even more complicated than that. I mean, part of the fascist femboy thing is people who actually aren't even gay, but just hate women so much that they end up being gay because that's like the only mode of connection they can even. Or like physical connection, they can even like, muster themselves to. To like, do. Which I explained in that episode from, you know, a few years ago when I was a baby. But yeah, this is definitely some stuff at play here. And I mean, Nick will always just find new things to complain about in regards to this sort of stuff, like the quote, unquote, epidemic of SIMPs. So, like, maybe the job is to, you know, make a girl happy and like, all this nonsense ends. Yeah, I don't know. I think that that could be a bottomless pit too, because one critique I have of the men is, and you're right about this, they enable this behavior. Well, that's for sure. It's epidemic of simps. Who. And especially with Christians, I've noticed this epidemic of sis.
- [58:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah, the I, that's. That's something else.
- [58:47]
Garrison Davis
Marriage as this bottomless pit. Like it comes.
- [58:50]
Robert Evans
I also love the idea that Tucker's like, well, why. Why aren't men just making women happy? And, you know, the answer there for Tucker is that people like you are not capable of making other people happy. But Nick can't even consider that because the idea of women being happy is. Is deeply offensive to him.
- [59:06]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, no, I mean, Nick says that SIMP culture, or more specifically a backlash to SIMP culture, is why people like Andrew Tate have gotten so popular despite being a quote, unquote Muslim polygamist, because Tate is, quote, putting women in their place, unquote, as opposed to Christian men who are tone policing each other and are worshiping women and worshiping their wives, which Tucker pushes back on a bit by saying that the New Testament commands men to love their wives and that wives respect their husbands. We got only two more clips left, but I think they are very revealing.
- [59:43]
Robert Evans
All right.
- [59:43]
Garrison Davis
As much else needs to be revealed here, I do think I just noticed this, that men who stay unmarried for too long become, like, kind of fragile. There's something about the give and take. There's something about living with. In fact, I think it's the key to life. Someone you don't fully understand that broadens you, that keeps you always thinking, that makes you wiser, more patient, more thoughtful, more self aware, and more flexible. And those are all good qualities. And the absence of that, like, in homosexuality or like men who are single.
- [60:23]
Mia Wong
Too long, they get very rigid.
- [60:25]
Alma Avaye
Have you ever noticed this?
- [60:26]
Garrison Davis
Have you ever noticed this? I like things the way I like them and they just get like, no. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [60:32]
Robert Evans
You don't want that really, because that's who you are. Nick.
- [60:35]
Garrison Davis
I would say that when.
- [60:37]
Alma Avaye
When you say you don't fully understand women.
- [60:40]
Garrison Davis
To me, I feel like women are very simple in terms of. Never lived with one. No, I haven't lived with them, but I mean. All right, let's. Let's cut it down.
- [60:50]
Mia Wong
Oh, man.
- [60:50]
Garrison Davis
Women are really simple. Have you ever lived with one? No.
- [60:54]
Robert Evans
It's really funny up until the. Assuming all gay people are the same bit. Tucker's making a good point, which is that, like, part of what's healthy about relationships is, like, living with someone who's not like you. Right? Yes. Like, that makes us better people.
- [61:09]
Garrison Davis
And he's very clearly trying to, like, like, push Nick's buttons here. Yeah, he knows because Nick's getting called out because, yeah, he's this angry unmarried guy. He's this like, yeah, little, little unhinged freak.
- [61:23]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [61:24]
Garrison Davis
Oh, and yeah, he's like getting. He's absolutely getting called out here. And it's funny that this is the thing out of the, out of the entire interview that, that, that Tucker really tries to harp on.
- [61:34]
Mia Wong
It's.
- [61:35]
Garrison Davis
It's this married thing. Like, he really wants Nick to get married. That's kind of the main thing he's really pushing for by the end of this interview.
- [61:42]
Robert Evans
Yeah, bro, that's gonna happen.
- [61:44]
Garrison Davis
Have you ever lived with one? Well, no, no, of course not. It's wild. I mean, later, Nick tries to argue that, you know, it's. It's really the men who are complicated because men have a, quote, deep connection to math and space. Unquote.
- [62:01]
Mia Wong
Sure.
- [62:01]
Robert Evans
Yeah, man. I love my deep connection to math and space.
- [62:05]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. Robert's so good at math and space.
- [62:08]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that's. It's really my strong suits. Math and space.
- [62:12]
Garrison Davis
Anyone that knows you?
- [62:13]
Robert Evans
I would say every man I know is good at math and space versus.
- [62:18]
Garrison Davis
You know, women just operate on primal Based instincts, of course.
- [62:22]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [62:23]
Garrison Davis
Nick says, quote, men are masters of the universe, women are the universe, which I think is a quote from someone else.
- [62:31]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, yeah. God, yeah. You're a real master of the universe, Nick.
- [62:36]
Garrison Davis
This will be the final clip where Tucker will offer a little bit more pushback towards Nick on some of his views about women and marriage. You got a pretty clear look into into Nick's interiority here as well. So. But anyway, but whatever the point, men and women talk past each other constantly. They don't always know what the other one is saying. And that frustration actually gives way to.
- [63:00]
Mia Wong
Like, great beauty over time.
- [63:02]
Garrison Davis
I would say. I don't know. I, I, I've personally find women very.
- [63:08]
Alma Avaye
Frustrating when they are not expressing.
- [63:11]
Garrison Davis
And I just see that beauty of it. I see the way I look at is like when you look at your favorite TV shows, right. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, it's like the wife is the villain because it's like the main character, if the wife could just get out of the way would be running the show. And that's kind of how I feel like Ayn Rand. I agree with her about this. She said that the wife's role is like hero worship. The guy is the hero.
- [63:38]
Alma Avaye
The guy is supposed to be the.
- [63:40]
Garrison Davis
Entrepreneur, the conqueror, whatever. And the woman is really supposed to support the man's goals and be in his world.
- [63:46]
Alma Avaye
And I've felt that way.
- [63:48]
Garrison Davis
Successful men need is more power, worship more hero worship, more. You're so great when you get that at work.
- [63:55]
Alma Avaye
You don't want that at home.
- [63:57]
Garrison Davis
You become an unbearable asshole.
- [64:00]
Mia Wong
Pray to what destroys every successful man, which is hubris. Like you mistake yourself for God.
- [64:04]
Garrison Davis
You need someone who's not interested in what you do at all, only interested in you. And that's how you become balanced and wise. That's how you know your own limits.
- [64:13]
Robert Evans
That's shockingly good advice from Tucker Carlson. Like that.
- [64:17]
Garrison Davis
This is so beautiful. This is so beautiful. To me, when Tucker Carlson is the voice of reason, it's, it's really, it's really scary.
- [64:27]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [64:28]
Garrison Davis
But no. So clearly is next like closeted gay incel showing here. Well, like, while Tucker pains, pains to explain to Nick why people actually get into relationships.
- [64:41]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [64:42]
Garrison Davis
And Nick just can't do it. He starts talking about the Sopranos and Breaking Bad. That's like the only framework in which he could understand this because he's never had a real relationship. The wife is the villain. I agree with Ayn Rand. Yeah. Famously well adjusted in the relationship department. Ayn Rand. The wife's role is hero worship and Tucker's like, oh my God, no, that's horrible.
- [65:09]
Robert Evans
No, no, that's, that's what ruins people, that destroys people.
- [65:13]
Garrison Davis
It's fascinating. No, yeah, this is, this is a truly fascinating exchange and it's really telling that this is the thing that Tucker pushes back on. Not the anti Semitism, but she like kind of tepidly offered Nick advice on how to change his rhetoric to be more appealing, but did not push back on the substance of it because Tucker is actually just as anti Semitic as Nick is. Yeah, but no, this is, this is the thing that he, that he decided to, to, to do. And yeah, like my initial feeling after watching this whole 2 hour and 18 minute stream is like this whole stream or this whole episode felt like Tucker was kind of trying to be some sort of mentor figure to Nick or saw that Nick might be the future in some way. Like might be whether that's the future of the party or future of like, you know, this sort of like commentating class or style. And kind of wanted to offer a little bit of a guiding light towards someone who I, I think Tucker does see as, you know, having some obvious issues and saying some nasty things, but. And wanting to kind of write that course in a way or provide Nick a bit of a fresh start to restate some of his views on the biggest right wing platform online, which is, which is Tucker's show right now. I guess that's kind of, that's kind of all I have on this women in. In porn section. I guess the last thing before we close there is this question, right, with people in the GOP who are scared about Nick's, Nick's influence, at least in the commentating classroom among like interns. Yeah, but specifically scared of it one because of the, you know, anti Israel stuff. But also if that's going to hurt them electorally. Right. A lot of people couch this and saying, well, you know, these views aren't popular with the electorate. Republicans are never going to win elections if this griper thing takes over. And that leaves us, you know, people who are against, against, you know, the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in kind of a weird spot. Because I don't think we can really do anything to encourage like the groiperification of the gop, like an accelerationist fashion. But we can kind of let it happen. Yeah, we can choose to just let it happen or we can choose to kind of stop it in like the 2017 Antifa, you know, framework of like trying to prevent this stuff from spreading because it will always lead to bad things. And yeah, after doing all this research last week and really continuing to this week too. I mean, Trump just gave a statement in support of Tucker and saying that he should get the word out about Nick Fuentes. I've continued to be looking at this stuff and. Can we even stop it, though, at this point? Right. Like, how much of the antifa project, like, even succeeded considering where we are now politically. Right. But no, there. There certainly is this, like, internal debate in terms of letting this stuff happen versus trying to actively oppose this, like, groper takeover of the gop.
- [67:56]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I mean, I. I don't think there's realistically anything that we can do to influence how popular Nick Fuentes is on the right. Like, if you just start screaming about how bad and dangerous he is, that's going to convince a lot of people. Oh, well, the left hates him. That must mean, you know, he's our guy. Yeah, likewise. I don't know. I don't think it's our place. I think it's our place to make sure people know what Nick actually stands for. That if there's some sort of, like, whitewashing of his character that they attempt to do in order to make this more electorally viable that people are aware of, like, how unhinged this guy is. I don't think the kind of shit Nick is saying here will do well when exposed to the body politic as a whole. Because it's nuts. Nuts. But that said, like, I don't think you can. You're gonna scold your way out of this?
- [68:48]
Garrison Davis
No, no. And I guess part of the education is making sure people have a more full understanding of Nick Fuentes. His views on women and his. Yeah, and his little conversation on pornography. I think that actually is important because all of these guys are weird little incel. Freaks.
- [69:04]
Robert Evans
Yes. And people don't like how weird they are when they're confronted with it.
- [69:08]
Garrison Davis
No.
- [69:09]
Robert Evans
Right. Mostly what they're concerned about is whether or not there are jobs and shit is more or less expensive. They don't want some weirdo telling them that living with women will make them weaker.
- [69:21]
Garrison Davis
No, even. Even Tucker doesn't like that.
- [69:23]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [69:24]
Garrison Davis
Well, I think that does it for us today at it could happen here.
- [69:29]
Robert Evans
Great.
- [69:30]
Garrison Davis
I hope this episode is something.
- [69:32]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I hope it's something too. Good night. Goodbye.
- [69:51]
Mia Wong
Life gets messy.
- [69:52]
Garrison Davis
Spills, stains and kid chaos.
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Mia Wong
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- [70:51]
Alma Avaye
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- [71:24]
Garrison Davis
Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.
- [71:35]
Alma Avaye
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.
- [71:47]
Garrison Davis
Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your.
- [71:52]
Alma Avaye
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.
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Garrison Davis
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- [72:12]
Garrison Davis
Time, call 844-844-IHEART and get podcasting working for you. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right.
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Mia Wong
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- [72:27]
Garrison Davis
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- [72:30]
Mia Wong
To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.
- [72:33]
Garrison Davis
Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day.
- [72:40]
Mia Wong
Yeah, Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [72:44]
Alma Avaye
Payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network fizzy taxes and fees extra see mint.
- [72:50]
Donna Al Kurd
Mobile.Com.
- [72:55]
Mia Wong
Welcome to make it Happen here, a podcast telling you to rage against the dying of the light. I am your host, Mia Wong. And many episodes ago, significantly more tearfully, I talked about how, you know, watching the trans voices in media get fired and disappear felt like watching the stars disappear in the sky. And today I am here to say do not go gently into that good night him rage against the dying of the light. And with me to rage against the dying of the light and talk about some absolute bullshit is Alma Avaye, who is a former staffer at Bon Appetit. And we will be getting into why that's now technically former and the VP of the News Guild of New York. Elma, welcome to the show.
- [73:36]
Alma Avaye
Hey, Mia. Lovely to be here.
- [73:38]
Mia Wong
I wish it was under better circumstances. I feel like everyone I talk to, I go, I wish you wish it was under better circumstances.
- [73:44]
Alma Avaye
But, you know, yeah, circumstances across the board are kind of trash right now.
- [73:48]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, they're really bad.
- [73:50]
Mia Wong
The circumstances. They do be. They do. They do be shit. So these specifically bad circumstances are one. Conde Nast has just obliterated Teen Vogue, which had been one of the few actually very good progressive outlets, also one of the few outlets that would publish trans people regularly. And it's just gone now. And Alma and three of her colleagues were fired for very productive union activity, being like, hey, what the fuck? In way kinder terms than that. I can say this because it's not my ass in the line, but, yeah. Do you want to talk a bit about what happened?
- [74:24]
Alma Avaye
Yeah, totally. I mean, to give the company its caveat, technically, Teen Vogue still exists. It has just been moved under the broader organization of Vogue. They've now said that its coverage areas will include professional development as well as. Well, there were a couple of other things that they highlighted, but certainly the things that they did not highlight include, say, you know, scathing coverage of the Trump administration or coverage of trans youth and trans healthcare bans for teenagers, coverage of, like, young celebrities of color and so on. But, yeah, anyway, I guess to just go back to the start of the timeline. Last Monday, we at the News Guild and at the Conde Nast union, which is the union that represents basically every worker or every journalist and video maker at Conde Nast, except for those in the New Yorker, they are in a separate bargaining unit that we see as linked sibling units. Linked sibling unions. We do most of our organizing together and our contracts are nearly identical. But anyway, we. Yeah, I know Right. Union, siblings. It's adorable. Yeah, we try to stay close, but anyway, we got word last Monday that about two thirds of the staff of Teen Vogue were being laid off, including a friend of mine and I think former guest on your show, actually, Lex McMenamin, who was the politics editor at Teen Vogue, as well as a few of their culture editors. Basically, like, if they were covering, I mean, being a little glib here, but if they were covering, say, trans rights, trans youth, progressive culture in nearly any way, shape or form, they were either laid off or the remaining workers were folded into the larger organization of Vogue. And I think they're still figuring out exactly where they fit into that organization and what youth coverage looks like going forward. So that happened last Monday, which was obviously a massive loss. I sat in on a lot of the Weingarten meetings, going over the exit packages for those employees. A lot of, like, really sad and tearful meetings that day.
- [76:22]
Mia Wong
We should point out this is being recorded on Monday the 10th. Last Monday is Monday, November 3rd. Not sure when this is going to come out, but yeah, just to make the timeline clear here.
- [76:29]
Alma Avaye
Yes, absolutely.
- [76:30]
Mia Wong
That's November 3rd.
- [76:31]
Alma Avaye
Yeah, that was Monday, November 3rd. Yeah. Thank you for the correction. And then two days later at the company, we got a notification that there was another round of layoffs. This one hitting, I believe, folks on the video teams and then people on the, like, copy and fact checking section of the company as well. This was super disruptive. Usually at a company like Conde Nast. Well, the union doesn't have explicit protections for this. And in fact, the company has the right to perform layoffs if they need to for business reasons. Usually when a round of layoffs goes through, there's a period of peace. That comes after that. There will be a reduction in force. We'll figure out, okay, how are we going to keep doing our jobs now that we have fewer staffers? And then if the company needs to reduce the staff again, that will happen like a few months, maybe a year in the future. Two rounds of layoffs in the same week had people really, really scared and really stressed out. Because, I mean, for one, there's just the sense of like, oh, God, a lot of my coworkers are gone. How am I going to be able to keep doing my job? We lost at my magazine, Bon Appetit. We lost our social media media director, the person who was basically running our social accounts. We'd gotten notification from the company that editors were going to be doing their own posting from then on, which is just not how Things have ever worked before. Not really a thing that they're like, you know, my colleagues are brilliant and many of them are brilliant users of social media, but like not really a part of our jobs historically. So we were all pretty confused how we were supposed to actually keep running our magazine. Most of our magazines are already running on pretty reduced staffs in the first place.
- [78:08]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [78:09]
Alma Avaye
So anyway, between that and the kind of obvious political connection that one could draw, or at least that a lot of our members were afraid of, Teen Vogue being this pretty famously radical or at the very least, pretty famously progressive publication, doing some really, really hard hitting journalism. There's a really clear line you can draw between all of the Colbert and Jimmy Kibble, but also the, the CBS stuff with Bari Weiss, this kind of broader right wing shift in media. You can draw, I think, a direct line between all of that and the shuttering or near shuttering of Teen Vogue. So we did a thing that we basically always do when we're facing an issue like this, whether it's a big reduction in force or just some decision from the upper levels of the management that have all of the workers being like, wait, what? What the fuck did you just do? We had a rally in the cafeteria to go over some of the questions that we all have for management. We created a list of questions that we wanted to ask. And I cannot stress how routine this is for us as a union. We went from the cafeteria, which is on the 35th floor of the World Trade center, down to the executive floor, which is directly below it on the 34th floor of the World Trade Center. And we walked over to the executive offices and said, we have some questions for Stan Duncan, who is the head of the people team at Conde Nast, basically one of the people in charge of either making these decisions of staffing and reduction and then of enforcing those decisions as well. We went down to speak with Stan Duncan, ask him some of our questions. Two other HR employees came out and met us in the hallway. We said we'd like to speak to Stan. We were happy to ask them our questions, but they said they wouldn't be particularly good at answering them or they might not have good answers for us. But Stan, they said, was in a meeting at the time. It just so happened that either Stan's meeting ended right then, or maybe he heard people talking in the hallway and decided to come check it out, or maybe there wasn't a meeting, but for whatever reason, Stan happened to come out into the hallway at that time. And so we started trying to ask Him. Our questions, some of those questions included, like, was the closing of Teen Vogue inherently political? But also, how are we going to be able to do our jobs going forward? How are we supposed to, like, keep running these magazines if you're going to keep cutting our jobs? And then also, how are we supposed to keep doing our jobs if we are constantly living in fear of losing them? You know, Stan does not answer any of these questions, of course. Yeah, no, naturally, he tells us we're not allowed to congregate in the hallway. This is not true, of course.
- [80:37]
Mia Wong
We what?
- [80:38]
Alma Avaye
Well, yeah, I mean, one, this is our workplace. We, I think, are allowed to have conversations in the hallway of our workplace. Two, I mean, if he was saying that we weren't allowed to, say, take part in union activities in the workplace. We have a right under section 7 of the NLRA that says we can do that. We also have, like, contract provisions that say the company will not infringe upon our right to organize and demonstrate in the workplace. So that just wasn't true. And in fact, the union, before everything else happened, already filed a grievance about denying our Section 7 rights to organize in the workplace.
- [81:10]
Mia Wong
God.
- [81:10]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [81:10]
Mia Wong
Yep, yep, yep.
- [81:11]
Alma Avaye
So anyway, Stan tries to get us to go back to our desks. He walks across the floor, tells us to follow him. We follow him and keep asking questions. He says that we have to go back and do our jobs. We say we will happily do our jobs if you could just answer our questions. He tells us that we have to go back to our workplaces. We remind him this is our workplace. And anyway, we end up asking him those questions. We follow him back and forth along the hallway. He goes back into his office, closes the door. We all go back to our desks for the rest of the day. I finish up my work and I go home. And then I get notification from the News Guild at 7 that the company has notified them that they are terminating me and three of my colleagues.
- [81:53]
Mia Wong
Jesus Christ.
- [81:54]
Alma Avaye
No severance. No ongoing insurance coverage. My insurance expires at the end of the month.
- [81:59]
Mia Wong
Oh, my God.
- [82:00]
Alma Avaye
No notice. No investigation. Effective immediately. So as of last Wednesday, I am no longer an employee of Conde Nast. I had been working there for five years. I helped start the Conde Nast union. In the time since I joined there, I was one of the most tenured members of my magazine. Actually, people don't generally stick around there for a long time, but at 27 years old, I was a long hauler MIA. And yeah, in the time since then, our union has filed a Second grievance there was the first one over telling us we couldn't congregate. There is now a second one over the retaliatory firings of me and my three colleagues. The company has since put five other people, I believe, on an unpaid leave in like an attempt to discipline more people who took part in the demonstration. It's kind of hard to see rhyme or reason in the people that they decided to discipline. So I was speaking quite a bit during the demonstration, as was one of the other people who was terminated. One person asked one question. That was Jake LaHood at Wired. He asked a question towards the beginning which was, what is your definition of congregate? When they told us we can't congregate in the hallway, which I think is a perfectly valid question. And then one, one person who was terminated actually, as far as I know, didn't speak at all during the demonstration. He was, however, the vice president of the New Yorker union or the vice chair of the New Yorker union and an organizer that the company was very well aware of. And then as for the people who were placed on disciplinary leaves, I mean, I believe some of them actually spoke significantly more than some of the people who were terminated during the demonstration, but were certainly historically, at the very least, less visible and less vocal union organizers. So the trend that we're seeing is that the people who spoke up were either people who had been historically very active in the union, or in Jake's case, somebody who was doing really, really impressive coverage of the Trump administration and like, really, really hard hitting journalism against like, DOGE and like the general, like efforts of the right right now to, you know, I mean, listeners of this podcast know everything that's going on there.
- [84:01]
Mia Wong
Mm. I'm going to say this and I'm going to adopt the preferred language of these professionals, which is to say that and this is the preferred language of management, is that some people are calling this both a return of resegregation and an obvious anti union political purge because it is a bunch of trans people and a bunch of non white people who have been eliminated from Teen Vogue. You know, this is something that you were talking about earlier about drawing the connection between this and cbs. And like, yeah, what did Barry Weiss do when she got into cbs? She fired like every non white person who worked there. Right? Because their overt political plan is resegregation. And you know, in order to do resegregation, you fire all of the people who are non white, you get rid of any trans people and you get, I mean, admittedly it's cbs. It's not like they had, like, a giant, like. Like, you know, it wasn't like, like, a haven of trans politics in the first place. I mean, they had some, like. You know, there's people there who are, like, cool. But, like, it wasn't like, you know, it's.
- [85:09]
Robert Evans
It's. It's not.
- [85:10]
Mia Wong
It wasn't like Teen Vogue, which genuinely had way more trans coverage than, like, any other outlet.
- [85:15]
Alma Avaye
No, totally.
- [85:15]
Mia Wong
Like, and I cannot emphasize enough, like, the extent to which this is the most normal union activity in the entire world, into which this is the most protected category in the entire world. And, you know, obviously, a bunch of the bosses and a bunch of, like, the corporations that are doing this shit, like, don't think the NLRA should exist. And, like, is, like, a legally valid thing, but it's still in force right now. And so. Well, mostly. But, like. Like, for.
- [85:38]
Robert Evans
For this.
- [85:38]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Still enforced. So they're totally.
- [85:40]
Alma Avaye
Yeah.
- [85:40]
Mia Wong
Unbelievably, hideously illegal retaliatory firings that are illegal in, like, so many different ways. It's baffling. Like, it's like you need, like, a second law degree to fight every single law they just broke.
- [85:53]
Alma Avaye
Totally. I mean, the thing that I would point out, too, is, like, like you said, this is an extremely common type of union action across the entire labor movement.
- [86:01]
Mia Wong
Everyone does this.
- [86:02]
Alma Avaye
Everyone marches on the Boss. We also, specifically, as a union, we've marched on the Boss tons of different times. We've marched on Stan multiple times in the past. There was one demonstration where we all marched on Stan during contract bargaining, actually, last year, where we had significantly more people and I will say being much more confrontational. I remember, like, a large crowd booing him in front of, like, the entire executive floor. And I would say protected union speech. And I would say, like, two to three times as many people present watching in a much more, like, loud and activated and energetic forum. We've had marches on other executives. We've had marches on editors in chief in the past. And, I mean, one of the reasons that, like, when I got the news that I was being terminated, I, like, basically went into shock. This felt extremely tame compared to past union actions that we've done. And also, no one has ever been disciplined for taking part in any action like this in the past, let alone terminated. As far as I know, no one's ever been called into a meeting and said, you shouldn't have done that, and we're keeping an eye on you. So this is a massive escalation on the company side in terms of retaliation. And I mean, that's also what we've heard kind of across the board at the News Guild. I've been in close conversations with our president and with other organizers at the Guild who have said, and this is our local union that organizes a bunch of different publications in New York City and kind of in the surrounding area. This is one of the most egregious examples of retaliation that just about anybody I've talked to has seen in our union's history. And there's like pretty, I think, valid concern that like, if a company like Conde Nast is able to get away with this, like other companies within our union are going to like follow suit and like take this as their cue, which is both scary but also has been energizing for a lot of people. We've seen like a lot of folks really excited to like show up and join our fight and get involved in any way that they can. Hell yeah. The other thing that I would point out based on what you were saying is, so Conde Nast has a Queer publication them us, which I think is one of the all time URLs for a queer publication you possibly have.
- [88:05]
Mia Wong
Very funny.
- [88:06]
Alma Avaye
So between them and Teen Vogue, you had a lot of the company's trans staffers. They kind of function as sister publications. They like sit next to each other, they work closely together. Outside of them, as far as I know, I was the only trans woman employed on Editorial Economy Nest and I am certainly the only trans woman in our union, including at them. Actually, all of the trans woman employees there, to my understanding, are not part of the unit. They are in management positions, which yay representation, but also means that I was obviously in this very lonely position, but also this very visible and like clearly very vulnerable position where it's incredibly easy to single somebody like me out. I would also say during our contract fight, we had a lot of back and forth between me and company management about their coverage under the healthcare plan. Namely they excluded facial feminization surgery, which meant that if you were an employee of Conde Nast and you wanted facial feminization surgery, you were either out of luck or had to find a way to raise about $50,000. Based on a lot of estimates that I've seen.
- [89:14]
Mia Wong
If you're really lucky and good and you're going to go to Thailand, you can maybe get it for 30k.
- [89:17]
Alma Avaye
Yeah, right. No, exactly.
- [89:19]
Mia Wong
Which admittedly the Thailand stuff is cool, but like.
- [89:21]
Alma Avaye
No, totally.
- [89:22]
Mia Wong
I mean, it's like that's, it's like it's a lot of fucking money.
- [89:27]
Alma Avaye
Totally.
- [89:28]
Mia Wong
So much shit. It sucks so badly.
- [89:30]
Alma Avaye
Even more if you want to recover in your own home and your own bed. Yeah, actually, and we weren't able to resolve that in the contract. I got FFS this year, and to do it, I had to go on, like, a New York State MarketPL Place Plan.
- [89:41]
Mia Wong
Oh, no. Jesus Christ.
- [89:43]
Alma Avaye
I had both plans active at the same time, but I had to get, like, secondary insurance that cost 700amonth in order to get FFS covered.
- [89:51]
James Stout
Oh, my God.
- [89:52]
Alma Avaye
Yeah. And that still ended up being significantly cheaper.
- [89:55]
Mia Wong
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
- [89:56]
Alma Avaye
I mean, and frankly, like, Conde Nast never covered it.
- [90:00]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [90:01]
Alma Avaye
Who did cover it was, like, lots of my union colleagues who jumped in and, like, created a GoFundMe for me and, like, helped me raise, like, all of the money that I needed to get surgery. And very, very thankful for that. But anyway, point being, the company does not exactly have the best track record when it comes to. And I feel very qualified to say this as the trans woman in the Conde Nast union, the company does not exactly have the best track record in terms of how they have treated us and me specifically around trans issues. So being again, kind of singled out in this way and then being hit with this significant a piece of retaliation, it just feels really telling. And also, I mean, really disappointing, frankly. Like, I've been at CONDE for. Or I. I keep using the present tense. I'd been at CONDE for five years, and, you know, I liked my job. I was really good at my job. I hope that they will reverse course and turn this around. But anyway, it's disappointing. It's disappointing that, like, that. That doesn't really seem to mean anything when the rubber hits the road.
- [90:59]
Mia Wong
Yeah. I think there's two ways you can look at it. One is it's like, oh, yeah, of course the one trans woman in this bargaining unit was, like, the VP of the union. Because, like, yeah, trans femmes do be organizing. We do do this.
- [91:11]
Alma Avaye
Ain't that the truth?
- [91:12]
Mia Wong
But then the second thing, and you were talking about this, like, yeah, the magazines are already understaffed and they're just destroying them, you know, and this is something that I can say, which is, like, this is something we saw from Jeff Bezos, right. When Jeff Bezos sort of, like, took control of the Washington Post and then gradually sort of purged their staff and, like, you know, has this whole thing now about how, oh, we're supposed to be pro free market and pro individual liberties, which does not include trans rights. You know, if you look at what happened to the Washington Post's subscriber count, it's like nothing. It's like the paper is dying. It's effectively just like, it's not, it's not like an actual functional like profit making thing anymore. Like it's just, it's just the sort of propaganda vanity outlet of a billionaire. And that's, you know, that's probably what's going to happen to CBS is that it's going to just get sort of annihilated, stripped down. Because these people don't want a functioning media. They don't give a shit if these things actually work because what they're trying to do right now is accumulate raw, accumulate just raw power and attempt to do raw sort of narrative and media control in order to stay in power. And it's not working because everyone still hates them even though they bought all the newspapers. Everyone is like these people suck. Like, but, but this is something we run into with union stuff all the time, which is like yeah, there are a lot of bosses who would rather their own company be non functional, you know, their workers have any voice in it. And especially now in this political moment in which oh hey look, the fascists are trying to seize control of the media. That becomes increasingly more and more an option of just fuck it. We'll just like get handouts from like the tech fascists forever and in exchange for that we'll publish whatever propaganda garbage they want to spit out.
- [92:50]
Alma Avaye
Yeah, I mean I would also say I am not sure get bout across the entire company, although I believe it was one of the better traffic stories that Conde Nast all year. But one of the most, certainly one of the most trafficked Teen Vogue stories in this past year was out of their politics section. It was the Vivian Wilson Elon Musk's trans daughter cover story. Really, really good, an amazing piece of journalism and also a piece that went like, like super viral and I'm sure made a ton of money for the company. And so one would think, you know, looking at like the trends of the past that if that was going to inform anything like the company would actually say like more politics coverage, like more progressive coverage out of Teen Vogue.
- [93:30]
Mia Wong
Well, and like I remember I don't have the exact numbers on me because I'm a hack and a fraud. But if it wasn't a hack and a fraud, I would have the exact numbers from the coverage of like, like the increase in both revenue generation and in like readership that Teen Vogue underwent once they started doing politics stuff under the First Trump administration and now you're getting rid of that for what are clearly business reasons and are clearly very, very clearly not related to the fact that there is a bunch of. A bunch of political pressure from a bunch of fascists who run the government now.
- [94:02]
Alma Avaye
Yeah, I mean, obviously we don't have like perfect insight into like what's going on behind closed doors at Conde Nast, but I can say that we had a diversity committee meeting with our joint union management diversity committee a week before all of this went down. And they told us that they were paraphrasing here, but management said that they are actively trying to avoid the attention and the ire of the Trump administration, which at the time definitely raised some eyebrows and I think led to the big response last week of, oh, by actively avoid the attention of the Trump administration, you meant just get rid of the parts of the company that are hostile towards it. And I mean kind of too. The good business of progressive coverage. I've covered a lot of beats in my time at Bon Appetit, but there was a period where I was covering the Starbucks Workers United fight pretty closely. A lot of articles about that in my back pocket. Those generally did really well. Actually. One of the first times I faced big right wing backlash online was covering the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light protest, which I used as an opportunity to write about, about the Coors Light boycotts of the west coast queer worker movement and kind of the birth of the gay labor movement. One of my best trafficked of all time stories, I wrote about why the watermelon symbol became such a big kind of rallying cry in Palestine. Organizing over the past few years. Again, massive traffic winner for the company. But every time we get into these meetings with management or every time we hear about the direction that the company is shifting or coverage is shifting, it always seems away from those kind of hot button issues that there's clearly an appetite for stories about and instead towards. Well, whatever it's towards. Yeah.
- [95:39]
Mia Wong
And you can look at this. There's been a whole bunch of. There was a story recently about Dr. Oz pivoting his whole thing into doing a right wing media grift and nobody's watching it. The average episode of it could happen here absolutely annihilates like just like, like orders of magnitude better than like. No, I think it was Dr. Phil. Yeah, it was Dr. Phil who did that. Look, they're like the same guy. Like, wow, that's okay, that's slightly unfair to Dr. Oz. Well, yeah, Dr. Phillip did this. Like, did the right wing Pivot and like, nobody's listening to the show. It's like, no one. This is like one of the most famous people in the United States getting annihilated by like, MIA and the trendy crew. Like, it could happen here.
- [96:17]
Robert Evans
Like.
- [96:20]
Alma Avaye
Oh, wow.
- [96:22]
Mia Wong
You know, and, yeah, like there is this, this like, massive demand for this stuff as, like, people increasingly realize that, oh, yeah, wait, hold on. We're getting. Every single person, like, in the country is like almost individually getting screwed over by the Trump administration. He's like, individually micro targeting every single part of his base and pissing them off. Like, there was the whole farmer soy thing, right? And like, he's like, I guess technically has negotiated soybean sales now, but, like, you know, you can look at like. So he was fighting this whole war with his entire farming base and then he immediately turned around from there and went to fight the cattle ranchers. It's like there's so much appetite for any critique of this because it's so obviously just like malignant and narcissistically violent. And all of these companies that are like, you know, like, like this. This has always been the problem with the free press is that, like, the US does not have a free press. The US Is a capitalist press. And so, you know, you can just buy them or apply enough political pressure and they will fall in line. And that's like, what they're doing here.
- [97:19]
Alma Avaye
So what you're saying is we need a left wing Joe Rogan.
- [97:22]
Mia Wong
I'm going to become the Joker.
- [97:27]
Alma Avaye
No, of course. I mean, I'll also say I became an organizer in the News Guild for a lot of reasons. Right. Bon Appetit was my first job out of college and I was really involved covering the dining workers organizing at my undergrad school. So that was definitely my introduction there. But at the same time, like, when I got into the workplace, I kind of realized that media unions are maybe one of the only things that will keep the media, at least as it currently exists, alive until we can come up with some other model that is more sustainable. Because I look at a company like Conde Nast and you have this very well compensated, very large cast of managers and middle managers. And then you have this massive body of people actually producing the magazines, actually doing the work of the journalism and the culture reporting and the video making and so on and so on. And one of those groups is constantly subject to layoffs. One of those groups is constantly being made to say, work overtime and maybe being told not to bill for as much overtime as they're being made to work. And one of those groups is being extremely well compensated and has seemingly incredible job security.
- [98:39]
Mia Wong
Yeah, like all of the resources are being sucked out by a combination of these venture capitalist dipshits at the top and then all of these fucking middle management bureaucrats who do nothing.
- [98:49]
Alma Avaye
Right. And the thing that slows that down is workers having a say in the media, the people who actually can produce the work, being able to say, and these are the circumstances under which the work is going to be produced. I mean, I think it's no surprise that if you look at a publication like Hellgate or Defector or Aftermath and 404 and all of these worker co ops that are popping up kind of across the media ecosystem, they're worker owns and they have this very kind of flat payment structure where everybody is making around the same amount. Everybody has a say in the way that the workplace functions. And these appear, at least to me, to be some of the most stable media organizations that are out there right now. And all that tells me is that workplace democracy, in the truest sense of the word, workplace democracy as it is earned by worker organizations, unions, worker co ops, whatever they might be, is the thing that's going to keep the media afloat. That is the model that is sustainable in the long run. So I think that's one of the reasons that having a strong and active Conde Nast union, though management probably wouldn't agree, at least explicitly, is one of the things that can keep Conde Nast alive for as long as possible. Again, they would probably loathe to admit this, but an organization like the Conde Nast union can only exist as long as an organization like Conde Nast exists. Their fates are kind of tied to one another.
- [100:09]
Mia Wong
Well, okay, this is, we're doing the incredibly esoteric via Union 3. There's two versions of looking at this one, okay, this is the version where, yeah, the Conde Nast union is structurally dependent on the existence of Conde Nast. And this means that the power of the union is, is based on its ability to bring people back to work. However, comma, there is a second one you could theoretically have.
- [100:30]
Robert Evans
Have.
- [100:31]
Mia Wong
You could theoretically have the Conde Nast union without Conde Nast. We have CNT it, we've taken it over, we're running it now. We are just now the union. And you know, and the thing, the thing I will say about that, and this is, this is always, this has always been the advantage of co ops is that like you are immediately from the ground up, you're going to have a kind of Efficiency advantage. Because there is not an entire middle layer. Like, because obviously, like. Like, there were, like, producers who do a bunch of work. Like my boss Sophie. Like, if we didn't have Sophie, none of this would work, right?
- [101:03]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [101:04]
Mia Wong
There's also a bunch of other people who have the same title who do nothing. And that's not even true. If they did nothing, it would be better. They interfere with everything constantly and get paid an extraordinary large amount of money to make everything work worse. And you don't have to have that entire, like, bureaucratic layer, like, layer of middle management. And this has always been the massive. Just efficiency advantage that you have when workers running their own shit is that you don't have to have those people and the coordination that needs to be done. Okay? You have people doing the coordination. You don't have 15 layers of dipshits whose job it is to run around making your job harder. This has been me talking about the organizational advantages of anarchy. It's great. I'm so sorry.
- [101:46]
Alma Avaye
No, you're fine. I mean, what I will say is it's an interesting thing about Conde Nast and a lot of, I think these media conglomerates. It's just like, you know, other than, like, when I am a member of the Conde Nast union, like, I don't really interact with people who work elsewhere at Conde Nast. I interact with the people at my magazine and, like, the people at Bon Appetit. And I, like, generally get along great. I have a really, really awesome relationship with my manager. I have a lot of admiration for him and what he does. I think he's like, same way that you talk about Sophie. I think he's, like, really great at his job. I have a good relationship with our editor in chief. I have a lot of respect for her as well. We have a really, really solid system going where we are able to make this food magazine every month and able to keep this website online and able to make content that we're all, like, recipes and stories that we're all really, really proud of. And then at the same time, we are kind of subject to this kind of bigger, whatever media machine that's kind of moving around above us and also moving around again with just so little transparency. Going back to the action on Wednesday the 5th, we have tried to have meetings with Stan. Like, the executive that we talked to in the hallway, the executive that we marched on. We have tried to have meetings with him so many times in so many different ways. We have emailed him questions, not gotten responses. We have invited him to Town halls not gotten responses. We invited him to meet with our diversity committee and labor relations got mad at us for CCing him on the email.
- [103:09]
Garrison Davis
God.
- [103:10]
Alma Avaye
Historically, that kind of level of the company has been extremely averse to interacting with its workers, to answering basic questions, which is why when you look at, there's a video out there of the interaction. This is why we have to march on our bosses like this. Because there's literally no other way to get a single answer out of them because they exist on this other floor of the company altogether. So I don't know, it's very frustrating. It's frustrating to exist in this dual system of, well, we have a magazine that we are operating like very effectively on our own, and yet there's this entire thing above it that is making these decisions about how it ought to function and what it ought to be.
- [103:48]
Mia Wong
Doing and who don't know what it does because they're not there. They have absolutely no idea how your production actually functions.
- [103:55]
Alma Avaye
I would be surprised if the man who fired me knew what my job was.
- [104:00]
Mia Wong
Yeah, no, absolutely not. All the old critiques of like the Soviet system were like, oh, there's just this out of touch bureaucrat 300 miles away making production decisions, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, yeah, no, that's actually just like how your job works is some suit in like another building is like, oh, your jobs are all replaceable. Oh, you can, you can do this with like 20% less staff. Oh, I don't even know what you do, but we're firing you because we hate you specifically. Like, it's just terrible way for the world to run.
- [104:40]
Alma Avaye
Yeah, totally. And I mean, we have these models of what successful workplaces can look like. Places with militant unions that actually give workers a say in what their conditions should be and what their conditions are. Places that have gotten rid of the boss altogether. And again, those worker co ops that I listed, there are these functional models of what the future of media can look like. And this is the thing that I say all the time, is the reason that I'm excited about being a member of the News Guild, the reason I got involved in organizing in the first place, is like, I think there is a future of media. I think there is a way that people like you and people like me, people who write and tell stories and are interested in talking to people and getting their stories out there, I think there are sustainable ways that we can do that. And I think the people who know how to do the sustainable future of this thing are the people who are making the product in the first place. We are the ones with vision. We are the ones who know how to make something that can continue to exist sustainably, something that can, like even under the capitalist framework, something that can make money, something that can be profitable. A lot of the great journalists I know are actually very interested in and very, very good at making work that generates quite a bit of revenue. And I don't think that's a particularly bad thing. They know how to do this in a way that is sustainable, in a way that keeps readers excited and engaged and willing to pitch in in their own ways. The problem is that the people who seem to have that know how. The people who make the thing and the people who know how to keep making the thing and the people who are making the decisions aren't the same people. And the way that you fix that divide is by demanding a seat at the table, is by demanding the people who are making those decisions actually do listen to you, and then demanding that they actually follow through on the obligation or the things that they say they're going to do. One of the really frustrating things about my termination is they're saying that I was too aggressive and was harassing the chief people officer. Again, there's a video I think is extremely exonerating.
- [106:29]
Mia Wong
Like, also, oh, wow, the trans woman's being too aggressive.
- [106:32]
Robert Evans
Wow.
- [106:33]
Mia Wong
Wow. Never seen that one.
- [106:34]
James Stout
I know.
- [106:35]
Alma Avaye
Crazy.
- [106:36]
Mia Wong
One day they're gonna develop a second joke.
- [106:38]
Robert Evans
Wow.
- [106:39]
Mia Wong
Any day now.
- [106:41]
Alma Avaye
Oh, I know. Actually one thing. Some like, chud on the Internet who was like, trying to make fun of me said I was wearing a wig. I would like to state for the record, I don't wear a wig. This is my hair. I grew it myself.
- [106:53]
Mia Wong
It should rock.
- [106:54]
Alma Avaye
It's took a while.
- [106:55]
James Stout
Thank you.
- [106:55]
Mia Wong
I agree.
- [106:57]
Alma Avaye
Although one of my friends told me that I have turf bangs the other day, which I really. Actually, it was the day that I got fired. Come to think of it, it's before they knew to be fair.
- [107:09]
Mia Wong
But.
- [107:14]
Alma Avaye
No, I know. Sorry, what was I saying before that?
- [107:19]
Mia Wong
I. The last time I got owned that hard was my mom called me a talking heck. So, you know, it happens sometimes you get absolutely obliterated.
- [107:26]
Alma Avaye
But hey, I love that band. But if the company like actually believed that I was, you know, being too aggressive or like committing, I think the words that they used are like, gross misconduct. Like, I know we have just cause protections in our contract that include like an explicit procedure that you're supposed to go through for gross misconduct. Like if the company was following the contract if they like, like felt the obligation to do so, what should have happened is they shouldn't have let me finish the rest of my workday. Instead I should have been escorted out of the building by security. I should have been placed on a leave. There should have been an investigation with like, time for me and the union to comment and then a decision should have came out. And the entire time that that should have been happening, I should have been paid. And like, if that sounds greedy, okay, the company agreed to it. Like, they didn't have to sign the contract, but they did. But this is another like, concerning trend that we're seeing right now with like, like the gut at NLRB and the kind of shirking of NLRA responsibilities from companies is companies are straight up gaslighting workers about things that are in the contracts that they agreed to. They are pointing to the contract and saying that it says things that it doesn't say or that it doesn't say. Things that are right there for you and clear English right before your eyes. Actually, another time that we tried to talk to Stan this year was. So we are based out of New York, predominantly, we have remote workers across the country, although we were told just about everybody at the company to start coming into the New York offices four days a week. There's a section of our contract that says that under a declared state of emergency, workers can stay home. Well, this summer in New York, listeners may remember we had a really massive, terrible heat wave. Temperatures up in the hundreds every day going into the subway stations. And that week I remember feeling like I was baking during the declared state of emergency, which again, the contract says workers do not have to come into the office. The company said, we don't care, you have to come into the office. Paraphrasing. Those aren't their exact words, but they're not too far off. And again, we said, okay, but the contract says under a declared state of emergency, we don't have to come into the office. And they said, you have to come into the office four days a week, no exceptions. And it is maddening.
- [109:34]
Mia Wong
I mean, yeah, that's life threatening.
- [109:37]
Alma Avaye
Oh, I mean, absolutely. And I will say I've been at the company five years. That makes me a bit of a long hauler. We have people who have been at the company for like 15, 20 years. There are people who are near retirement age who standing on a subway platform. Again, it's New York City. People aren't really in air conditioned cars driving to work. There are people for whom at all ages standing on A subway platform in that kind of heat is a really life threatening and really dangerous thing to demand people do. Which is one of the things that we were thinking about when we fought for that contract language. And one of the things that we were thinking about when we were like nearly ready, in fact, that we were ready to go on strike and disrupt the Met Gala in May of 2024. That is one of the things that we were thinking about when we drafted that. And one of the things we were really excited that the company agreed to give us when we won our contract. And so for them to immediately just say, oh, just kidding. Well, oh, well, now if we file a grievance, it might take months to rectify. Well, just kidding. Those rights that we gave you, they don't exist anymore. Sorry. And again, it is clear, yeah, easy to understand language that they are somehow willing to just say, like the contract doesn't say what it says.
- [110:43]
Mia Wong
It's, it's interesting because I mean, you know, there's like, on the one hand, like, companies have always like, not followed contracts and it's always been like, okay, if you want your contract to do what it says it does, you have to force them to do it. But on the other hand, like, the thing that it reminds me of is like one of the things that happened with the Trump administration when I've been talking about them pissing off their base is there's been a bunch of unions that they've just unilaterally been, this has said, this is national security. We don't recognize your contract anymore. So for example, like, the funny version of it is they did this at the prison guard union, which is hilarious. It's like, yeah, I don't know, you guys, you guys shat in your own bed. Now you have to lie in it. Like, I don't know what to tell you, but like, yeah, but like, you know, the national government has been doing this to a bunch of unions because they've just been going totally, oh, yeah, no, we don't have to follow this contract anymore because national security. And that's the future that all of these people want and that they're like, you know, this is part of what they're fighting for. This is part of that fight, is that they want to fight where union contracts don't exist and they can just do whatever they want to anyone.
- [111:37]
Alma Avaye
I mean, there's also a clear line you can draw from say, the Reagan era and the air traffic controller union strike break. And then the way that from the federal government unions and the way that the federal government treats its unions, that basically the rest of the American labor movement, and rather the management side responses to the American labor movement generally flow.
- [111:57]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah. Is there anything else that you want to make sure that people know?
- [112:02]
Alma Avaye
Well, I mean, in the coming days and weeks, the union is planning a lot to fight back against the company. Hell yeah. That said, one of the things that we know most about media organizations generally is that they are very concerned about public pressure and they are very concerned about public image. This is like a PR obsessed industry, for better and for worse. So we are hoping that readers and fans and followers will keep the pressure up against Conde Nast to show employers like them that we will not stand for this. We have an action network petition up right now that we are going to keep collecting signatures for that we hope to deliver to management soon. Depending on when this comes out. We'll be collecting signatures regardless. And that is also one of the best ways signing onto that. We'll get you updates for other ways that you can support us from the outside. But otherwise, I mean, we've got a lot of fighting to do. We've got a lot of organizing to do. I certainly don't think my days at Conde Nast are over. I expect that however long it takes for the law to shake out, I hope to be reinstated, as do the other three terminated employees. I also am certain that we will be able to win justice for ourselves and the other people who were like illegally retaliatorily disciplined following the action. And I also think that this is nowhere near the last action that Conde Nast upper management should expect. If anything like this is just showing us that if we want our contract to be enforced, if we want the rights that they said that they would give us, we are going to have to keep holding them to account and we are going to have to keep fighting for them.
- [113:36]
Mia Wong
Trying to figure out whether or not I can get away with saying, you have sown the wind and now you'll reap the whirlwind.
- [113:46]
Alma Avaye
Oh, God. You have sewn the Bon Appetit and now you will get the. I can't finish that. I don't know where that goes.
- [113:55]
Mia Wong
Yeah, you've sewed the Bon Appetit. Now you'll get Teen Vogue too.
- [114:00]
Alma Avaye
You have sewn the bond and now you'll get the appetite. That doesn't mean anything. That's on anything.
- [114:07]
Mia Wong
You know, look, it's a struggling time for the whole industry. Yeah. And if people want to find you, do you want to be found a And B if people want to find you, where can they find your work?
- [114:19]
Alma Avaye
Yeah, totally. I plan to keep writing and doing journalism for however long I am allowed to keep doing that. So I'm on basically every website as oodbyalma, including the evil ones, sadly. I also I co edit a literary magazine with my friend Joyce that's called called Picnic Magazine. It's very cool. It's all work by trans contributors. We are predominantly a print first publication. You can find us icnicmag on Instagram. We're also on bluesky. I should have prepared our at but I'm sure I can send that to you afterwards.
- [114:57]
Mia Wong
Yeah, we'll put it in the description.
- [114:59]
Alma Avaye
And yeah, we are available in a few bookstores in big cities across the country. We also have a you can download our PDF in a pay what you want kind of way. We have a second issue coming soon, although turns out making a magazine with just two trans women is really difficult. So yeah, check that out. It's all fiction, criticism and poetry by trans contributors. And yeah, follow me Oodby Alma Online. Yeah, yeah.
- [115:24]
Mia Wong
And if you want actual news that's fit to print, you're gonna have to fight for it.
- [115:29]
Alma Avaye
Amen to that. S.
- [115:43]
Mia Wong
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Garrison Davis
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Alma Avaye
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Alma Avaye
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Mia Wong
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- [118:47]
Donna Al Kurd
Hello everyone. My name is Donna Al Kurd and this is it could happen here. I'm a professor and researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics and a senior non residential student fellow at the Arab Center, Washington. Today we're joined by Shireen Sekari, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book, Men of Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine explores economy, territory, the home, the body. And she's also editor in chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Today I wanted to invite Shireen on to discuss the importance of Palestinian knowledge production and Palestinian spaces for writing, researching, analyzing, et cetera. So yeah, Shirin, thank you so much for coming on.
- [119:33]
Shireen Sekari
Thank you for having me.
- [119:35]
Donna Al Kurd
So let's maybe start with a very basic question. What is the Journal of Palestine Studies? Could you give us kind of an overview?
- [119:41]
Shireen Sekari
Sure. So the Journal of Palestine Studies is the flagship journal of Palestinian studies in the English language. It was established in 1971, so that makes it 54 years old. First, it was part of the then Beirut based and still Beirut based Institute for Palestine Studies and Kuwait University, which sponsored what was understood at the time as an international forum to discuss all aspects of the Palestine question and the Arab Zionist conflict. And really, the people who established it were looking for shaping a space that could discuss these matters freely. And the story of the founders is a really interesting one because they were people like Hisham Sharabi, Walid Khalidi, Burhan Dushani, Fouad Saroof, and Constantine Zrek, who actually was the person who coined the way that we name the Nekba in his book Mana Nakba that he wrote in 1948, in which he coined this term the catastrophe, to think about 1948, which would be our ongoing condition. And I think the way to think about these people in the way that they began the Journal is to think about them as really confronting a landscape of erasure, denial, and urgency and occupying this kind of steady, incessant pain of the original inception of the Nakba. Think about it. In 1971. It was not that long before a decade and a half.
- [121:32]
Donna Al Kurd
Yeah, right.
- [121:33]
Shireen Sekari
And I think what's important about, you know, in the last couple years, people have been kind of making demands about Palestinian studies as part of some of the student movements and the staff and faculty movements. And I think it's really important for people to know that this comes from a much longer tradition of the production of knowledge as a real insistence on existence.
- [122:02]
Donna Al Kurd
Absolutely. Palestinians have been producing knowledge about their state of affairs. You know, just like today, academics in Gaza are producing knowledge. Right. And I am always, like, struck by how just ahead of its time, you know, the Journal of Palestine Studies is like a lot of our understanding of the conflict that are now finally starting to seep into the mainstream were first discussed in these pages. Some of the research findings about the history were first articulated in these pages. And so that kind of knowledge production is just. It is a form of resistance to erasure.
- [122:42]
Shireen Sekari
Absolutely. And just, you know, some of those would be, for example, Plan Dalit, which was the, you know, the plan which would lead to the destruction of 450 to 537 Palestinian villages. And this plan would come to be recognized through the work of Benny Morris as a Israeli historian who had access to Israeli documents. But it's actually was Walid Khalidi who had been evidencing and showing the empirical foundations of Plan Dalit. And it was in the Journal of Palestine Studies that he published those findings.
- [123:24]
Donna Al Kurd
Right.
- [123:24]
Shireen Sekari
So in that case, I think that, again, for people who are really engaging the movement for free Palestine and free Palestinians, we really have to be approaching the political economy of who gets to speak and whose knowledge production is Uplifted as legitimate and worthy. And I think you see a lot of this kind of centering of Israeli voices. And I think we really have to, in this moment, it's urgent to center Palestinian knowledge production.
- [124:02]
Donna Al Kurd
Yeah, there's just so many ways that we witness this all the time, that it's not something worthy of discussion unless an Israeli voice says it. And there's an inherent suspicion about the Palestinian scholar, the Palestinian analyst, the Palestinian knowledge producer of some kind of. Now, of course, the last two years have been a true upheaval. The genocide in Gaza, a tragedy that, honestly, we haven't really absorbed and possibly can't. And we've seen in the last two years a concerted effort to erase Palestinians further from the American academy, but from also scholarship, generally speaking. But before I get into that, I wondered if you could kind of give your impression of what did doing Palestinian studies look like before October 7th? Was it easy? Was it acceptable? I mean, I know the answers, but I'd like you to say them.
- [125:03]
Shireen Sekari
So I think one of the things that's been interesting to observe, and I would date this as happening around Covid, when our colleagues in various disciplines started confronting the reality of their archives closing. So I'm a historian, so I speak from that place. You know, people who study Europe, people who study the United States, kind of confronting that. The. The reality that they might not access archives that they are accustomed to accessing. And in a similar way, facing the kind of targeting and surveillance, the bipartisan targeting and surveillance of academic knowledge production and trying to explain to people this is what we've existed under all along. Now, I think there are similarities across communities of knowledge production. So I think people who work in black studies, who work in indigenous studies, who work in queer studies, gender and sexuality, have also been under the duress of surveillance and targeting. I think for those of us who have been doing Palestinian studies, what does it mean? Especially if you're a Palestinian doing it, but whoever you are, it means you have to show up 10 times more ready than anybody else. It means you have to conduct yourself as if you are always being recorded.
- [126:33]
Donna Al Kurd
Right.
- [126:33]
Shireen Sekari
It means that every single word that you say, you should be able to stand up for in a court of law and all of those kinds of restrictions. Actually, you know, you give us lemons, we're going to make lemonade. Because those restrictions have imposed on us a kind of rigor that is the least that we can do. It also means, I mean, I think for a lot of us, yourself included. Right. I was just. Somebody was Interviewing me yesterday about, oh, have you, have you faced harassment or censorship or so? And I think, at least in my case, I'm. And I'm constantly, you know, experiencing these things and just kind of swallowing it. Right. Do you know what I mean?
- [127:30]
Donna Al Kurd
Yeah, yeah.
- [127:31]
Shireen Sekari
Just getting along with the business of the everyday. So, you know, there was this moment back in 2015, 2016, where for whatever reason, every couple of months, one of the bots of one of these surveillance websites would start highlighting me and insulting me on Twitter, you know, liable, calling me names, going after how I look like, really vulgar, misgendering me, that kind of thing. And I'd come out of my lecture and, you know, I teach big classes, and I'd come out of a big 250 person lecture, which requires so much focus and energy and being present and. And, you know, that adrenaline rush. And I'd look at my phone and I'd have 50 notifications, and it would just be one insult after another. And that's just part of the job.
- [128:32]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [128:33]
Shireen Sekari
And that's just how it's been. Right. Like, you know, from the beginning, at least, of my graduate career. And I. I started grad school, you know, September 11th happened when I was in grad school and I was in New York when it happened. And, you know, we've been under surveillance, we've been named, we've been watched as part of what we do, as you said. And in fact, I got my master's at the center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and they wrote a book back in the 80s about the surveillance, and I think it's called they Dare to Speak.
- [129:10]
Donna Al Kurd
Oh, right, right, yeah.
- [129:11]
Shireen Sekari
These early accounts of the concerted attempts to silence us. And so what I like to remind people is at this moment, you know, you said, oh, they're trying to erase Palestinian scholars. I mean, at least they're trying to erase voices who are putting forward a critical take on Israeli settler colonialism and genocide. And I think what I like to remind people is that there is way more of us now than there's ever been before.
- [129:41]
Donna Al Kurd
Yeah, good point.
- [129:43]
Shireen Sekari
Ten years ago, people like you and me wouldn't have jobs in the academy. It may be in a couple years we won't have jobs, but I don't know, like, I'm not. I don't want to sit on our laurels and think, oh, okay, we've arrived. In any case, the whole concept of arrival and career arrival at this moment has completely changed for me. I don't know how it is for you, but the effect of the Genocide has made it so that the bankruptcy of the institutions we work for, the rapid ways in which they are engaging.
- [130:19]
Donna Al Kurd
With obedience and authoritarianism. Yep.
- [130:21]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [130:22]
Shireen Sekari
It's like what we've worked for our whole careers. It's like, I don't think this makes sense actually. Do you know?
- [130:29]
Donna Al Kurd
Right.
- [130:30]
Shireen Sekari
So I would say it's been like that all along. People even saying to you things like, oh, what do you mean you study Palestine? You know, like, what is that?
- [130:40]
Robert Evans
That.
- [130:40]
Shireen Sekari
Yeah, so, yeah, yeah.
- [130:43]
Donna Al Kurd
I mean, I'm in a different discipline, but certainly it was. I remember as a student hungry for information, I mean, it was rare to find something about the Middle east to be taught, let alone Palestine, the level to which they delegitimized Arab and Palestinian sources or questions of importance to Palestinians and Arabs, normatively speaking, politically speaking, also theoretically speaking, I mean, the amount, I mean, I can tell you so many stories. Like every person who has ever wanted to study Palestine, especially as you said, if you are Palestinian, is discouraged from it and is told not to, is told, this doesn't fit. Is told. You know, I'm in political science. The theories don't account for Palestine. It's just outside of space and time and theory. And you can't account for it. You can't discuss it. And the harassment, the harassment campaigns all of us have been facing, I mean, it takes such a mental and emotional toll. And yet we produce and yet we get tenure, and yet we teach our classes and we're excellent in our teaching and our students love us and want to learn. But as you said, it really has exposed the degree to which these universities, because they have been, well, one, we are in America, but also because they have been so divorced from their actual missions, like how meaningless the space this has now become. But that's like on the harassment and like kind of these kinds of obstacle side. I also think, like people don't recognize like the resources that are needed to teach and study and research Palestine that other people in the academy, other knowledge producers get very easily. And there is so little for people who study Palestine. And of course that impacts what kind of academics are able to do this and, and yeah. How many people we're missing from this discussion. Right. I agree with you. That has been the condition before October 7th. I think now after October 7th, that after they have attempted to use Palestine as kind of a. A cudgel. Yeah. To attack the higher, you know, higher education generally. Like now people are recognizing it maybe more, but that has always definitely been the case. Oh, also, I just wanted to Remind listeners and bring it up. Like, I remember Bari Weiss, who is now the head of cbs. I mean, she made her claim to fame attacking Arab and Palestinian professors in Columbia as an undergrad. And that's seen as totally valid.
- [133:18]
Shireen Sekari
Yeah, no, I mean, I think, you know, Palestine is cultural. And also, you know, I've been saying this for a while. Palestine is paradigm. Right. You know, if you look at the Memdanuin, I think it reveals also kind of what Palestine also stands for, which is the way that both the Democratic and the Republican Party have really no link to the popular realities on the ground.
- [133:49]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [133:49]
Shireen Sekari
And that, in effect, you know, part of the Trump base was really responding to this disparity. Right. This lack of investment in the political system. And I think, you know, that for me was the. I don't have hope in electoral politics. And, you know, I don't want to be cynical or anything, but I think what the Memdeni win shows us is that people are disgruntled and they're sick of the kind of extractive billionaire class doing what they want to do at the expense of the rest of us. And I think the media is really complicit in all of this. Absolutely complicit in the genocide. It's been absolutely complicit since the war on Iraq, since the second war on Iraq, in rendering news as entertainment. You know, and. And it's like you could see the freak out that people had, the media had about Mamdeni right. Across the board. It wasn't just the Fox News. No.
- [135:01]
Donna Al Kurd
New York Times, everybody. Yeah.
- [135:04]
Shireen Sekari
And. And all of the, you know, television media, too. So it's just. I think it's. I think there's also a link to higher education in that way, because I think there has been. In making people stupid.
- [135:17]
Donna Al Kurd
Right. Yes, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's exactly what I was going to say is the Palestinian issue and Palestine studies and research and knowledge production. The fact that there exists the few Palestinians in higher education has been used to attack higher education, but it's not really about Palestine. I mean, it is a little bit about Palestine. Of course these people are anti Palestinian, but. But it's about preventing social mobility. So you're saying, like, there's all this disgruntlement in the public space. Our students are disgruntled, they want to learn. They've been promised something with this college education and even the slight bit of social mobility that has existed as a result of higher education is too much for the Trump administration. It's too much for this right wing. So Palestine is a class issue?
- [136:06]
Garrison Davis
Absolutely.
- [136:07]
Shireen Sekari
No, it absolutely is.
- [136:11]
Garrison Davis
As are all.
- [136:11]
Shireen Sekari
Of the kind of struggles we stand stand in solidarity with. You know, it's like really, it is intersectional and we didn't need Trump to teach us that. But that's the lesson that keeps being delivered time and again. And one of the things that's really struck me, and this has been the case for the last 10 years, 11 years, long before Trump. And I think one of the challenges we face today is not to over determine the Trump administration as the site of all of the catastrophes that we're in today. And one of the things I've noted for the last 14 years is I don't have to teach students that history isn't about things always getting better. That's not a lesson they need to know. They understand that teleology and the fallacy of advancement is a lie. They understand that because they live it. As you say, they're in debt, especially those of us who teach at public universities. Most of our students are indebted. A lot of them have two or three jobs. They are housing insecure, their food insecure. They don't have a clear vision of the future.
- [137:21]
Donna Al Kurd
And if they protest genocide, they're labeled anti Semitic. Their universities crack down on them. They're doxxed. I mean, it's so outrageous. Obviously, I don't need to tell you.
- [137:32]
Shireen Sekari
Their identification with Palestine is also about their own experiences with Greek repression, of course. So I think that's the, that really is the momentum, you know, that we're witnessing. Is. Is that kind of identification?
- [137:47]
Donna Al Kurd
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important for listeners to know some of the contours of what happens has happened after October 7th. And like you said, it's not a Trump thing. It started under Biden about how Palestine has been used in the academy. I mean, as I said earlier, I have done an episode on this, so I will link that. But also, you know, there is now evidence and data around how this issue has been weaponized. So the aaup, the American association of University Professors, alongside the Middle East Studies association, just put out a report on this exact question about how Title 6 investigations. So investigations of alleged discrimination, specifically about anti Semitism and nothing else. First of all, there's been a huge uptick in them and have been used to target these universities. Vast majority of these cases has to do with faculty extramural speech. So, like these faculty members having an opinion about genocide outside the classroom. I mean, honestly, I always remember, I think Edward said, like, being a Palestinian in the academy is like being an outlaw. That's like how it feels. That's how it feels.
- [139:02]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [139:02]
Shireen Sekari
It's fugitive labor for sure. Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the findings has been also, I don't know if it's. 95% of the cases have been shown to be.
- [139:15]
Donna Al Kurd
To be fraudulent.
- [139:15]
Shireen Sekari
Yeah, to be totally fraudulent. So yeah, it's a real policing of speech. It's a real kind of weaponization of the charge of antisemitism. And honestly, sort of one of the things I think that really happens too is that students don't get the tools to, to actually recognize and understand actually existing anti Semitism.
- [139:40]
Donna Al Kurd
Right.
- [139:40]
Shireen Sekari
As it is being rehearsed in like these show trials that we saw in Congress and these, in the rhetoric of many of the, you know, people affiliated with the admin, in the kinds of alliances that even the Israeli state. Right. Has made with various right wing anti Semitic states. So it's like, I think one of the things that. It's kind of like watching a train wreck just hitting one train after another and just being like, what is this absurdity? You know, I myself was accused, accused of being anti Semitic for having a history of antisemitism. So what surprises me is the way that people are allowing and facilitating this to happen, you know, and the way that they're not able to recognize how high the stakes are, what it means to be Palestinian in this moment. You know, when you've been sitting watching for two years, your people being shredded and you're facing the reality of what the stakes are in this moment, which is the annihilation of Palestine and the annihilation of Palestinians, your threshold for shock becomes very high.
- [141:04]
Donna Al Kurd
Yeah.
- [141:06]
Shireen Sekari
And so, I mean, I'm sure it's the same for you. I don't know if like what it's like a constant trauma response, you know.
- [141:15]
Donna Al Kurd
Absolutely.
- [141:15]
Shireen Sekari
Yeah. There my emotional reactions are shut down and I'm in a state of being in the present. Okay, we got through today, hopefully we'll get through tomorrow. I don't, I kind of am prepared for the worst at all times. And you know, it's a condition of vigilance that I think people, when they continue to feed this kind of right wing agenda of making people stupid and eroding even the possibility of higher education, it's the kind of condition that will be much more general, you know.
- [141:54]
Donna Al Kurd
Yeah.
- [141:55]
Shireen Sekari
And all these ICE raids at the same time, you know, it's. I just saw, I haven't been able to listen to it, but a scholar who powerfully is talking about the Mexico Palestine border and the, and the links between ICE and the IDF and the, and the ways to think about these two things together.
- [142:15]
Donna Al Kurd
And please share that with me. I, I haven't seen it. I mean, yeah, as you said, when we take away Palestine from the academy, when we use Palestine to attack the academy, as imperfect as the academy is, it is this larger attempt to take away people's analytical tools and frameworks to understanding their reality, to understanding how their reality intersects with these other things, because they don't want you to be able to solve it. They don't want you to be able to mobilize. And then of course, there's this, as I said, this class dimension of wanting to keep people in their place. There are too many black and brown people in the academy now. We can't have that kind of social mobility. I just want to emphasize for the listeners why it's so important for Palestine to be researched and studied and things like that is self evident. I don't need to explain it, but why is it so important that Palestinians are the ones who do that? I mean, again, it feels self evident, but I'll say it like, Palestinians have agency and they are full human beings and they know best what questions are relevant, and they have a unique perspective on the issue of Palestine as well as other issues. And so not only are you engaging in the erasure of Palestinians when you don't amplify that kind of knowledge production, but you are making scholarship poorer. You are limiting what you know about this issue.
- [143:44]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [143:44]
Donna Al Kurd
So what do you think? You know, kind of broadly speaking, students, scholars, sympathizers, what. What do you think they should do in this moment?
- [143:54]
Shireen Sekari
I want to just go back to the point about why is it important to have sure. Palestinian voices? Because. Because when we say that we're not doing it in an identitarian way.
- [144:04]
Donna Al Kurd
Right, of course, yeah.
- [144:06]
Shireen Sekari
Anybody who wants to study Palestine should study Palestine. In doing so, you should be centering the lessons that Palestinians have offered us first and foremost in this moment, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. And in my own practice at the Journal of Palestine Studies, what I've tried to do in each of the editor's notes is really lift up up all of the testimonies that we've received from Palestinians in Gaza, written and social media and all of these, but also lift up the international voices of Palestinians like yourself and the many, many, many people who are writing and giving us tools to understand and analyze. And the reason that's important is because the main problem that we face, I believe, is the way that certain people are more susceptible to being excluded from the category of the human. Once you exclude people from the category of the human, it's much easier to kill them and make them expendable. And I think our work really, in centering Palestinian voices rejects that logic. Right. Rejects the logic of are we human or not? Are we going to evidence our humanity or not? No, we just tell our stories. And I think that telling of the story changes the angle of vision. If you're looking at what's happening in the Gaza Strip from the perspective of people who are living it, you will see different things than if you're looking at it from, you know, a drone or, you know, a geopolitical land. So that's one thing, I think another thing that's really important is, you know, I mean, Mahmoud Darwish said this actually in an interview in Journal Palestine Studies. He said, you know, the Palestinians are talked about because they're facing Israeli Jews, because the Jewish question is the question of Europe.
- [146:10]
Donna Al Kurd
Oh, that's right. Yeah.
- [146:11]
Shireen Sekari
And I find that one of the things that continues to be an issue until now is that what scholars and thinkers and analysts are adjudicating is the question of Europe and the question of the sustainability of European values and European notions and all of these things. And I'm not interested in that. I want to center the question of Palestine and what kind of other tools that might offer us. So I think in a way linked to what the earlier conversation about a political economy of value of scholars. Right. There's a kind of also here a political economy of concepts. And I believe that we have to really provincialize Europe. We have to provincialize Europe as the means and the ends of all things.
- [147:06]
Donna Al Kurd
It is not generalizable.
- [147:08]
Garrison Davis
No.
- [147:08]
Shireen Sekari
Just ask different questions and look at it from a different perspective.
- [147:12]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [147:13]
Shireen Sekari
In terms of what do I think students and scholars and all of us should do is. It's going to sound strange, but first and foremost, study, study, read, learn. Those are the critical tools that you gain that will allow you to defend yourself in a world that is intent on making you stupid. We all have to reject that. I think that it's a moment where there's a temptation to slide into sensationalism or to slide into circulating, especially on social media and that whole economy. Right. So I think we have to be vigilant. I think we have to be rigorous, and I think we have to study. And I think more than anything else, the lesson I keep coming back. Back to is we have to take care of each other in the communities that we build.
- [148:09]
Donna Al Kurd
Yeah, that's exactly right. I think you begin arming yourself with the tools to understand this moment and think of ways to defend yourself and your community. And you can't do that without being grounded in this knowledge that came before you. So, listeners, please crack open a Journal of Palestine Studies and of course I'll link to all of this in the, in the show notes. Shirin, I could talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for your time. This has been really enriching.
- [148:40]
Shireen Sekari
Thank you so much for having me and for all the work that you do.
- [148:45]
Donna Al Kurd
Thank you so much, listeners. I'm going to also put in the show notes a fundraising campaign for the Journal of Palestine Studies. So if you can, you have the capacity. It's a surefire way to help resist these dynamics. All right, thanks so much. Take care.
- [149:20]
Garrison Davis
This is it could happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling war world and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and Robert Evans. This episode we're covering the week of November 13th to November 19th. The biggest news, I think of this whole week. J.D. vance has been sentenced to two years in prison for threatening Donald Trump. And J.D. vance, this is of course James Donald.
- [149:49]
Robert Evans
Vance Jr. A different J.D.
- [149:51]
Garrison Davis
Vance, a 67 year old man from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
- [149:56]
Robert Evans
Second, J.D. vance has hit the discourse who's also.
- [149:59]
Garrison Davis
Named Donald, which is phenomenal.
- [150:03]
Robert Evans
It's amazing.
- [150:05]
Garrison Davis
Who pleaded guilty to three criminal counts based on the social media posts about killing the president, the vice president, Elon Musk and Trump Jr. Jeez.
- [150:12]
James Stout
Yeah, not a good, not a good Garrison. I, I would quibble that that is a bigger story this week because this is the week of cause that Nicki Minaj addressed the United Nations.
- [150:23]
Robert Evans
This is a week where years happened. Yep.
- [150:26]
James Stout
Nicki Minaj, if readers are familiar with her, it will doubtless be because of her contributions to discourse on her cousin's friend's testicles. But this time she's back and she is talking about the persecution.
- [150:37]
Alma Avaye
That's right, baby.
- [150:38]
James Stout
Yeah. That's what we do here. She's talking about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. Just for listeners who are not aware, Nicki Minaj is from Trinidad. Yeah. Not aware of any particular expertise or insight she has on the topic. But yeah, she did that this week.
- [150:56]
Robert Evans
Yep.
- [150:56]
Garrison Davis
At the United Nations.
- [150:58]
Robert Evans
Do we know how she decided that this was a problem? She needed to get involved with.
- [151:03]
James Stout
She reposted a truth that Donald Trump had made.
- [151:07]
Robert Evans
Not great, not a great start.
- [151:09]
James Stout
I believe they reached out on the basis of that. There's some tremendous statements calling her the greatest female recording artist in history.
- [151:17]
Robert Evans
Death.
- [151:18]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah. Which sets us up nicely for a Nicki Minaj Dolly Parton beef. Yeah, I think I joined on the side of Dolly Parton in that one.
- [151:27]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it would be hard not to.
- [151:28]
James Stout
Yep. So, yeah, I guess she reposted a thing about a truth that led to them reaching out. And she volunteered her time to address the United nations organization set up after World War II to try and prevent genocide.
- [151:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [151:45]
James Stout
Outstanding.
- [151:47]
Garrison Davis
The truth is so beautiful.
- [151:48]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [151:50]
Garrison Davis
Speaking of the truth. The truth coming to light. We're talking about Jeffrey Epstein again, I guess.
- [151:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah. The ongoing revelations based on this guy's post death career has really been one for the books.
- [152:05]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, he really rivals Michael Jackson in more than one way.
- [152:10]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Or Tupac. I would say.
- [152:12]
James Stout
Tupac.
- [152:14]
Robert Evans
No, it was when fucking John McAfee died. There were all these people being like, oh, he's got cause. McAfee had lied and said, I've got an insurance folder that'll come out in the event of my death that'll reveal a bunch of top level secrets. And John McAfee didn't know shit. He was a crazy old drug addict who killed his nephew and then fled to South America or Central America anyway, whatever.
- [152:40]
Garrison Davis
One of the Americas.
- [152:41]
Robert Evans
One of the. He fled to a different America than the one that he came from anyway. But that's actually happening with Jeffrey Epstein. We actually now have a lot of dirt on a lot of people. Larry Summers just left the board of OpenAI because he was revealed as a rampant misogynist and friend of a pedophile sex trafficker. Not a good look.
- [153:00]
Garrison Davis
He's also an album announced that after finishing his current class at Harvard, he will be resigning from Harvard University.
- [153:07]
Robert Evans
Oh, what a loss for Harvard. I don't know how they're going to.
- [153:10]
Garrison Davis
Well, it's. It's the biggest loss since President Gay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [153:14]
Robert Evans
Look, Harvard, if you need someone to teach his class, I'll do it. I don't know what his class is. I don't actually know what. What's. What Larry does, what his expertise is, but I feel like I could do a better job. Yeah, bring me in.
- [153:27]
James Stout
We do know a little bit about what Larry does, and that's. That is the problem.
- [153:30]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah. The sex crimes.
- [153:34]
Garrison Davis
Right after recording Executive Disorder last week. Not the most important, but certainly the oddest email was uncovered as a part of that big documents release. This is an exchange from 2018 between Mark Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein, two brothers. Let's start with Mark. How are you doing? A while back, you mentioned that you were pre diabetic. Has anything changed with that? What is your boy Donald up to now? Jeffrey replies, all good. Bannon with me. Mark replies, ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba. You know, Yeah, I, I, I'm gonna continue the exchange.
- [154:26]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Because.
- [154:30]
Garrison Davis
Jeffrey replies, and I thought I had tourists. Mark replies, you and your boy Donnie can make a remake of the movie get hard sent via tin can and a string.
- [154:45]
Robert Evans
Oh, God.
- [154:46]
Garrison Davis
Jeffrey replied, you mean Donnie T. And Mark replied, I'd rather be in Donnie D's shoes. That's the exchange.
- [154:53]
Robert Evans
Also, what Epstein said was, was cirrus, which is a Yiddish word that means, like, problems. Like, I got, I got problems. I got, I'm all, I'm all up. Which he was. He was not wrong about that look.
- [155:09]
Garrison Davis
Yep. So, Bubba. Many people have speculated that this could be a reference to former President Bill Clinton, whose nickname was Bubba and whose name is Bubba in some of these other emails, or is referred to as Bubba in some of these other emails.
- [155:28]
Robert Evans
Which is something that I've seen surprise a lot of people. If you grew up in the 90s, you were aware that his nickname was Bubba, but he has not been called Bubba in a very long time. When he, like, lost all that weight and went vegan and like, it, it kind of. He stopped seeming like as much of a Bubba Bubba as he did when he was the president the Saturday Night Live made fun of in that great McDonald's sketch. But yeah, anyway. Continue, Gary.
- [155:54]
Garrison Davis
I mean, I don't know how. What else there is to say here. You know, photos have been recirculating Trump. Yes.
- [156:02]
James Stout
Bubba Gump Shrimp.
- [156:03]
Robert Evans
Will the real Bubba please stand up?
- [156:06]
Garrison Davis
Photos have been recirculating of Trump, I would say, groping Bill Clinton's penis. Yeah, yep, yep.
- [156:14]
Robert Evans
There's more there than you'd expect, right?
- [156:17]
Alma Avaye
Yes.
- [156:17]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah.
- [156:18]
Garrison Davis
But Bubba has referred to a few people.
- [156:22]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [156:22]
Garrison Davis
Including other people, like in Epstein's circle, like a girlfriend, models. Yeah, But Bubba was also the name of Ghislaine Maxwell's horse.
- [156:32]
James Stout
Oh, I'm just now hearing this, and that's not.
- [156:35]
Alma Avaye
I'm, I'm sorry.
- [156:36]
Robert Evans
And here's the thing. I, I see the appeal to believing that this is the answer. I simply don't believe Donald Trump ever had that kind of throat gain. I'm sorry. I just Don't. I just don't accept that.
- [156:49]
Garrison Davis
This is by far the funniest possibility that he did like a joke photo shoot where he like pretended to blow a horse.
- [156:58]
Robert Evans
I could see him doing that.
- [157:00]
Garrison Davis
This is really understandable. This is like, this is really doable.
- [157:06]
Robert Evans
Haven't we all been there?
- [157:07]
Garrison Davis
So that is just.
- [157:10]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [157:12]
Garrison Davis
And you know, take this however you will like. Mark Epstein has denied that the bubba referred to in the email is a reference to Bill Clinton while also admitting in this same like interview to News Nation and a statement that like, you know, Jeffrey certainly did have dirt on the President and thought that he was the only one that could sink both candidates career in 2016. Both, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
- [157:35]
Robert Evans
Pretty good chance that's true actually.
- [157:37]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [157:38]
Garrison Davis
But he, he, for what it worth is saying it's not a reference to Clinton. Who, who knows?
- [157:45]
Mia Wong
There's a real sort of, you know, if you want to do the, the sort of pop Marxist lies, there's a real sort of historical unity of the ruling class moment when you, you read these emails and the people in them. It's, it's like, it's Bill Clinton, it's Bill Clinton's like the people around Bill Clinton, it's Ken Starr. And you know, you go back and you look at like, you look at like the actual like impeachment of Bill Clinton. Right. And you realize that every single one of these people are all friends with Jeffrey Epstein and are just kind of hanging out like.
- [158:20]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [158:21]
Mia Wong
On like on the pedophile islands. And it's just.
- [158:23]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [158:24]
Garrison Davis
I mean it's, it's something that like you, you couldn't if like the most.
- [158:28]
Mia Wong
The most sort of on the nose, like I like completely didactic, I'm pounding your head with a hammer like Marxist thing from 1960 where they go, yeah, all of the presidents are hanging out on Pedophile island, like secretly conspiring behind your back and they're taking photos of them like grabbing each other's dicks like you wouldn't believe.
- [158:48]
Robert Evans
But it's like.
- [158:48]
Mia Wong
No, no, no, no. This is just, this is, this is just the historical unity of the ruling class is literally they're all friends with this pedophile.
- [158:56]
Robert Evans
Well, it's just these are all wealthy, powerful people and the only people that they socialize with is each other. You know, the New York Times came up with an out with an article this week that was like the Epstein emails or an insight into an old New York long departed or since departed.
- [159:13]
James Stout
Yeah, that was an incredible headline.
- [159:15]
Robert Evans
And yeah, I mean it was. This was like the transition between all of these people writing each other letters and all of these people just bitching publicly on the Internet openly and losing their minds. Like, the awkward interstitial period was them all emailing each other from their iPads. Right. So to that extent, the New York Times article is. Right. Not the main takeaway from the Jeffrey Epstein emails. I would say probably not worth an article in the Times, but it's not wrong, technically.
- [159:42]
James Stout
Yeah. It's a fascinating thing to choose to cover.
- [159:45]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [159:46]
Garrison Davis
That poor horse.
- [159:48]
Robert Evans
Yeah. It's a little bit like a journalist showing up in Berlin in late 1945 and going through papers in the ruins of the Reichstag and being like, wow, this really reveals a lost Berlin.
- [160:06]
Garrison Davis
I was like, I mean, yeah, that's.
- [160:08]
Mia Wong
Not really the point.
- [160:12]
Garrison Davis
Any other comments on Bubba?
- [160:16]
James Stout
Did anyone ask.
- [160:16]
Robert Evans
Guys.
- [160:17]
James Stout
His brother about the horse?
- [160:18]
Garrison Davis
I don't believe Mark has been asked about the horse.
- [160:22]
Robert Evans
Mark is in a. Not that I have a ton of sympathy for this guy, but just recognizing things objectively. He's in a tough position because his brother was an incredibly famous pedophile sex trafficker, and he is. Is desperately trying not to get disappeared by the regime, or he also knows what will come after the regime. So he doesn't want to set himself up in a way where he gets in trouble from that either. Right. Like, it's a legitimately complicated situation he finds himself in that his brother just kind of left for him. And again, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the man, but I can recognize it because he also said at the same time, he was like, this definitely was not. Not him referring to Donald Trump giving a blowjob to Bill Clinton. He did also say that he. He believed that the Republicans were removing the names of Republicans from the Epstein files before release. Right. So he's. He has been, like, hedging his bets because, again, he's in a lot of danger.
- [161:20]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [161:22]
Garrison Davis
Like a real.
- [161:23]
Robert Evans
This man. This man is in trouble. Yeah.
- [161:29]
James Stout
Yeah. I would not be granting interviews if I was him. I would be.
- [161:32]
Robert Evans
I wouldn't say shit.
- [161:33]
James Stout
Yeah. Like, literally under the ground.
- [161:37]
Alma Avaye
I would.
- [161:37]
Robert Evans
I would, for one thing, not be in a country that extradites. I would. I would never set foot in a country with extradition treaties to the Western world again.
- [161:45]
James Stout
Yeah. The next strike in Venezuela will be Mark Epstein.
- [161:49]
Robert Evans
I would be living in Tehran right now. Like.
- [161:54]
Garrison Davis
Let'S talk about Marjorie Trader Greene.
- [161:57]
James Stout
Sure, why not?
- [161:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah. So Marjorie Taylor Greene is part of the resistance now.
- [162:04]
Garrison Davis
Hashtag, welcome to the resistance.
- [162:06]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Exactly.
- [162:08]
James Stout
It's very like Andor.
- [162:10]
Robert Evans
Sure. It's like that point in Andor where the person who did nothing but help Emperor Palpatine suddenly at the last minute was like, ah, you know what? This guy went a step too far for me.
- [162:20]
Garrison Davis
Or ah, actually I hate Jews too much that no one.
- [162:25]
Robert Evans
I think that's the reality.
- [162:26]
James Stout
I wasn't sure if there was an analog for antisemitism in the works universe.
- [162:30]
Alma Avaye
That I wasn't aware of.
- [162:31]
Robert Evans
Well, you probably don't want to. You don't want to go there.
- [162:34]
James Stout
I've asked the wrong people.
- [162:35]
Mia Wong
We got to stop this right now. They're not paying us enough.
- [162:38]
James Stout
Yeah, I've made a terrible mistake.
- [162:40]
Garrison Davis
Do you have three hours, James?
- [162:41]
Robert Evans
In the early 2000s, George Lucas invented some names that are themselves hate crimes. Just be remembering the names is a hate crime.
- [162:50]
Garrison Davis
Do you want to read about the Troidarians? No, no.
- [162:55]
James Stout
As far as I get into Star wars because bigotry discourse is Jar Jar Binks and after that I leave.
- [163:02]
Garrison Davis
Well, it's from the same movie, but no. So yeah, Marjorie has been more combative against some of the, you know, Trump cultist mega Right. On a few issues. One, she's extended her already evidenced anti Semitism a la Jewish space lasers towards foreign policy in this like America First Nick Fuentesi way of being critical of Israel. You, you see seeds of this because, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, like, attended the Nick Fuentes America first conferences like four years ago. Like this is this, this side of it not a surprising turn for her. Her finally flipping on Trump in terms of the pedophile stuff may be a little bit surprising because she was the original like QAnon candidate.
- [163:45]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [163:46]
Garrison Davis
And QAnon's built on this like, trying to justify in some ways Trump's proximity to Epstein by building this grand narrative.
- [163:53]
Robert Evans
And she made a statement recently that she's no longer all in on the Q stuff. Right. Like she had. She is. This is a pivot for her, but it's a pivot that's pretty consistent with, you know, her anti Semitism.
- [164:04]
Garrison Davis
And it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense with, with the Israel foreign policy stuff. It also makes sense in terms of Trump's made a lot more statements directly addressing this Epstein stuff, which kind of does call into question some of like the Q narratives, which for someone like Marjorie might actually get her to kind of reflect on some of some of like this Trump cultish status that she's had for a while. This has frustrated Trump and, you know, Trump's also been Frustrated with other members like Lauren Bobert and other like Congress people who were pledging to vote in support of the release of the Epstein files. And this pressure was building a lot last week during this like 20,000 a document release and all this new news coverage. And as these. As more and more Republicans began to deflect from Trump over the release of the Epstein files, Trump himself flipped his rhetoric over this past weekend, still calling the debate over the files a Democrat hoax, but truthing that the files should be released because we, quote, unquote, have nothing to hide. And he called on Republicans to vote in favor of the bill to release the Epstein files files, which they did on Tuesday in a 427 to 1 vote with Representative Clay Higgins, the Republican from Louisiana, the only congressman to vote no. Hours later, Chuck Schumer unanimously passed the measure through the Senate. Mike Johnson had previously expected the Senate to amend the bill to, quote, make sure we don't do permanent damage to the political system, unquote. What things have to say after its passage through said it. Johnson seemed quite worried that it went through the upper chambers in its current form. And I want to play this clip here because it's kind of shocking to hear him, hear him freak out.
- [165:57]
Mia Wong
And before we say this, you owe it to yourself as a person to go actually look at this clip and watch his face. It is amazing.
- [166:08]
James Stout
I haven't seen this. I'm excited.
- [166:10]
Garrison Davis
It'll be in the sources below. Any reaction to seeing the bill without adding amendments or changing it?
- [166:17]
Robert Evans
I am. I am deeply disappointed in this outcome. I think I'm told I've been at the state dinner.
- [166:24]
Mia Wong
I don't know. I was just told that Chuck Schumer rushed it to the floor and put it out there preemptively.
- [166:29]
Robert Evans
It needed amendments.
- [166:31]
Mia Wong
I just spoke to the president about that.
- [166:32]
Garrison Davis
We'll see what happens.
- [166:33]
James Stout
So is he.
- [166:34]
Garrison Davis
Do you think he may veto it?
- [166:35]
James Stout
You say you spoke to the president.
- [166:36]
Robert Evans
I'm not saying that.
- [166:37]
Garrison Davis
Is he supportive of it in its current form?
- [166:40]
Robert Evans
We both have concerns about it, so we'll see. I was standing there with the crown prince.
- [166:45]
Mia Wong
We couldn't call.
- [166:45]
Alma Avaye
Are you frustrated in the majority leader?
- [166:48]
Mia Wong
Are you upset with the majority leader?
- [166:51]
Garrison Davis
Cool.
- [166:52]
Robert Evans
Nice.
- [166:53]
Garrison Davis
What a. What a normal. What a normal interaction.
- [166:56]
Mia Wong
That is also worth noting. At the very end of that video, he says, I was eating with the crown prince because he is again walking out of a state dinner with one Muhammad bin Salman.
- [167:06]
James Stout
The.
- [167:09]
Mia Wong
I don't even know list of war crimes here, the Sudanese child soldier exterminator. Et cetera, et cetera.
- [167:18]
Garrison Davis
But no, it's safe to say that both Johnson and President Trump have concerns about the state of the bill. And Johnson seemed a little bit wishy washy on if the President would even sign this or veto this. Now, it's not all bad for the President. I, I, oh, I'm, I'd like to see old Donnie J. Wiggle his way out of this jam. This bill that has passed does allow Attorney General Pam Bondi to withhold or redact portions of the files that could jeopardize active federal investigations and personally determine if information in the files should remain classified to protect national security. Last weekend, Trump ordered Bondi to launch investigations looking into connection between Epstein and prominent Democratic politicians and donors. Here's clip from a Wednesday, November 19th press conference. Attorney General, do you mean that you will provide all the files by 30 days? We will follow the law.
- [168:21]
Shireen Sekari
The law passed both chambers last evening. It has not yet been signed, but, but we will continue to follow the.
- [168:29]
Garrison Davis
Law again while protecting victims, but also providing maximum transparency.
- [168:36]
Alma Avaye
Madam Attorney General, the DOJ statement earlier.
- [168:39]
Mia Wong
This year saying that the files would.
- [168:42]
Garrison Davis
Not release mentioned the fact that the review of the documents and the evidence.
- [168:47]
Mia Wong
Did not suggest that any additional investigation.
- [168:51]
Alma Avaye
Of third parties was warranted.
- [168:53]
Garrison Davis
What changed since then that you launched this investigation?
- [168:57]
Shireen Sekari
Information that has come for information.
- [169:02]
Robert Evans
That.
- [169:03]
Shireen Sekari
New information, additional information.
- [169:05]
Alma Avaye
And again, we will continue to follow.
- [169:07]
Garrison Davis
The law to investigate any leads, if there are any victims. We encourage all victims to come forward.
- [169:13]
Shireen Sekari
And we will continue to provide maximum.
- [169:17]
Garrison Davis
Transparency under the law. Very normal, very normal response.
- [169:23]
Robert Evans
Uh huh, yeah. That doesn't sound sketchy.
- [169:26]
Mia Wong
Okay. I, I, I, I have never at any point in the last eight years, 12 years, however long we've been in this hellscape, been a, been a piss tape believer, this looking at these people's faces is the closest I've ever been to being like, no, maybe that shit's real and maybe it's in there because there's clearly something in there that they are just, they're just going through it.
- [169:49]
James Stout
Yeah. This is wild.
- [169:51]
Shireen Sekari
Yeah.
- [169:51]
Garrison Davis
Some of these guys seem a, seem a little bit concerned.
- [169:56]
Robert Evans
Yeah, Yeah. I wonder why.
- [169:58]
Garrison Davis
Surely there's no, I mean, imagine the workload ahead of them. They have to redact so much. They have to get so many of those markers. Imagine how tired their wrists are going to be.
- [170:09]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it's like that feeling when you come back from a reporting trip and you're like, shit, now I have to do the job.
- [170:14]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yes, I'm familiar with that feeling.
- [170:19]
Garrison Davis
Do you Know what we have to do right now? It's pivot to ads. Yes.
- [170:23]
Robert Evans
Yeah, let's. Let's go ahead and do that. And we're back.
- [170:39]
Garrison Davis
Now I would like to take some time to discuss probably the second most important new story of the whole week.
- [170:47]
Alma Avaye
Don't do it.
- [170:47]
Robert Evans
Sure.
- [170:48]
Garrison Davis
Which is totally not a Hail Mary distraction to get away from the Epstein stuff. This is totally legitimate and totally newsworthy. On Monday, November 17, a piece in the prestigious outlet the New York Post opinion section provided earth shattering revelations.
- [171:08]
Robert Evans
Revelations Care.
- [171:09]
Garrison Davis
That's the word. About the attempted Trump assassination. Claiming to have discovered evidence. Evidence that Thomas Crooks the shooter, had two possible accounts on DeviantArt, which.
- [171:25]
Robert Evans
Yeah, this really is the biggest story.
- [171:26]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [171:27]
Garrison Davis
Which the Post, New York Post describes as, quote, one of the biggest online hubs for furry art and the furry community. A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish, unquote, every time. Later reporting in the New York Post claimed that one of these accounts had only shared a single post. Quote, a repost of a towering muscular female bodybuilder and a slight man in his underwear, unquote, and quote, multiple searches for muscular women and female bodybuilders on Crook's supposed YouTube search history.
- [172:06]
Robert Evans
He's a real pervert then. Excellent. Yes.
- [172:09]
Garrison Davis
Beautiful quote. Oh, it's not, it's. Oh, Robert, that's. That's not even the worst part. The furry stuff. Obviously problematic considering our past few furry mass shooters. This may be a trend here. We should look into this. But possibly the most damning piece of information in the New York Post reporting is that Crooks quote, described himself with the pronouns they, them on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest hubs for furry art and the furry community. This became the big thing among the. Right. Another trans shooter. The Trump. The Trump assassin was trans the whole time and we didn't even know the FBI covered up the trans connection. Here it's all coming together. More. More red string on the board. The trans. The trans shooter narrative is. Is growing more and more evident by the day. Right. This, this is the way that this was framed across. Like all of these, all these commentators. Who's the president right now?
- [173:07]
Mia Wong
How is this supposed to work?
- [173:11]
James Stout
At the time they investigated it, Biden would have been president.
- [173:13]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [173:14]
James Stout
Or they began their investigation.
- [173:16]
Garrison Davis
The New York Post did reach out to the current FBI for comment. They did not receive a response. Deep state, the New York Post's reporting. Like in these. In. In These like opinion pieces and I think later an article article that they did did did later include references to quote violently anti Semitic comments and racist remarks about Hispanic immigrants that seems crooks also made including YouTube comments from 2019. Quote this is going to be blatantly racist but I hope Trump has these people the squad murdered.
- [173:50]
Robert Evans
Oh great.
- [173:51]
Garrison Davis
I always believed being patriotic was lining up a bunch of socialist Jews like the ones that booed Trump and blasting their useless brains out with an ar. I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti Trump congresswomen unquote. Obviously the right wing commentators are not talking about this sort of stuff. They're not talking about Crooks actual politics or political shifts during the pandemic where he started getting kind of more Trump critical but but still from a conservative perspective. Instead the story is now to quote libs of TikTok Charlie Kirk Killer Furry Fetish Trump Shooter Furry Fetish Idaho Firefighter Killer Furry Fetish what's going on? Right wing podcaster and disgraced buzzfeed journalist Benny Johnson quote, it has now been confirmed that attempted Trump assassin Thomas Crooks used they them pronouns, had a deep interest in furnies and was exploring gender identity. Add it to the list. This list is then a list of both real and many not real quote unquote trans mass shooters. Another account, DC Drano who was part of the White House photo op team during the initial fake release of the fake Epstein files. Not that the files were fake, but like this fake media presentation around releasing the already released and actually even more redacted versions of already public files. DC Drano was one of these guys who was like paraded around as like a prop holding up these binders of files he posted quote it is now confirmed the deep State tried to cover up that Thomas Crooks was a transgender extremist. He used they them pronouns and then shot President Trump. We need a massive crackdown against violent trans extremism. This sort of stuff is losing steam. This sort of stuff is not spreading around the way that it has been been previously. It's very clear that this is a blatant distraction away from unflattering stories about Trump in terms of the economy and specifically Epstein and all of this. You know, you might be wondering why maybe no other outlets are picking this stuff up. And that could be due to the dubious nature of the New York Post's sourcing on these claims, but also the fact that DeviantArt automatically lists a user's pronouns as they them as the default setting if pronouns are not specified. This is the setting that everyone gets. You have to actively try to change it. There is no indication Thomas Crooks specifically set pronouns today them he is not a transgender extremist. He, like many Gen Z people, is aware of furry art online. This is very common. This is a very common thing thing. But the Post had a few other things they tried to tried to wrap this story around to give it some credibility, including this post from the DeviantArt alleged to belong to Thomas Crooks, which is a picture of someone shooting someone else in the head, which the New York Post calls another artwork appeared to feature a shooting against a backdrop of the trans flag color colors. This is not the trans flag nor the trans flag colors. This is a blue and purple background.
- [177:16]
Mia Wong
What.
- [177:19]
Garrison Davis
Purple is not in the transplant colors. You can maybe argue this is magenta, maybe. But this is not a trans flag. This is not a LGBTQ pride flag. This isn't even the bisexual flag which does use these same colors. This is just like a sky blue and a magenta purple backdrop which they are trying to frame as further evidence of Thomas Crooks transgender ties. But what is kind of interesting is as a part of the social media accounts alleged to be linked to Crooks that have appeared in new reporting from both the New York Post and Tucker Carlson's own news outlet. But as a part of this reporting on Crooks possible online background included a a collection of search results or like search history from April of 2019 to May of 2020, which lines up with stuff that me and Robert have been talking about for a while in that this guy seemed to have the ideology or non ideology of a school shooter. This is the the actual through line across this act of violence. These searches include quote, crazy chemical reactions. Deadliest mass shootings in the world world People attacking pride parades. Cars running over protesters getting away with racism. Best places for a mass shooting. Pulse nightclub. Pulse nightclub. Police body camera Mass shooting. El Paso mass shooting. Trump Civil war Trump church shooting. Video Guns versus protesters. Orlando shooting reaction. Why I'm missing handgun firing an AR15 as fast as possible. Fertilizer bomb. How do you use a tourniquet? How to make Naples Molotov cocktail. How to make Molotov cocktail Mixing gasoline with styrofoam. Mass shooting. Canada, Oklahoma bombing Sniper in Dallas shooting unquote.
- [179:03]
Robert Evans
Man, he was having real trouble hitting with his pistol, huh?
- [179:07]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [179:10]
James Stout
And his rifle, it turns out.
- [179:11]
Robert Evans
Probably choking up too much on the trigger, I'd guess.
- [179:14]
James Stout
Yeah, many such cases. Yeah, but that's a pretty clear theme that you've established there, Gareth.
- [179:19]
Robert Evans
Soon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [179:23]
Garrison Davis
Like, you see this in. In some way being like a. Not necessarily an actual precursor, but in the same vein that some of these, like TCC people later would, you know, start developing these past few years, this just obsession with doing violence, this obsession with mass killings, with bombings, and some of it takes the form of like, you know, what looks like political violence, like the Oklahoma City bombing. But a lot of it is. Is very nihilistic. That's all I have on the explosive reporting from the New York Post.
- [179:55]
Robert Evans
Great, great.
- [179:57]
Garrison Davis
I don't know how to segue from that list of Google searches to tariff Talk, but, you know, what I've been searching for is this music. Sorry.
- [180:22]
Mia Wong
So this is actually a very. This has been a very, very light week on tariff news. It is almost entirely composed of people arguing about whether you're going to get the tariff check, which, no, you're not. You're not going to get a check from the government with tariff money. It's just not happening. So I thought. I thought I'd take a second to pull out and look at some of the macro stuff that's happening in the economy and look at why it feels like a recession, even though there isn't one. And the answer is that you and me and everyone in this room and probably most of the people cystically listening to this podcast, are effectively in a recession. And the reason I can say this is that there's pretty good numbers from the Harvard economist Jason Furman, who points out that if you look at. So, okay, so recession is three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Right? And this is a. Not like a perfect economic indicator. But, you know, as Jason Vernon points out, 92% of GDP growth in the first half of this year is in a category that's called information processing equipment and software. And so, okay, what is that? That is all data center. It's all data center construction. It is 92% of all of our GDP growth.
- [181:48]
Robert Evans
Well, the good news is that, for example, Oracle didn't just make a big deal with OpenAI to provide them with computing resources. And after making this $300 billion deal, has dropped $315 billion in valuation. Like that didn't happen. Obviously, things are good in an AI world. There's not a bunch of people pulling their money out of Nvidia as fast as they can.
- [182:14]
Mia Wong
We're getting to that. Yeah. One of them again, Peter Thiel, pulling his money out right now. Getting all this shit out.
- [182:21]
Robert Evans
Yeah, get your shit out. Fucking Michael Burry is now shorting the AI here.
- [182:27]
Mia Wong
I will say this, the Michael Burry short thing is literally the only thing that I've ran into that actually makes me be like that. Like Michael Burry versus the AI industry is like really truly is the great duel of the stoppable force and the movable object.
- [182:41]
Robert Evans
Yeah, like that's.
- [182:43]
Mia Wong
We're, we're not dealing with like world rending titans here, but you know, but.
- [182:49]
Robert Evans
We are, we are going to get a sequel to the Big Short that's going to really struggle to be entertaining. Because with the Big Short Short, what was fun was these guys realizing how fucked this like system based on like really bad like tranches of debt and how badly it was going to fuck the economy. And with AI, it's just going to be like literally everyone in the world except for the people in media and politics being like this seems like a fucking grift. I don't know, this seems bad. And them all being like, no, no, no, bro, trust me. No, no, no. And then it all goes to shit.
- [183:22]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I'm going to do a full episode about this at some point. There's a really good interview on a, on the Bloomberg podcast called Odd Lots with this guy named Paul Kudrowski who points out that.
- [183:33]
Shireen Sekari
Well a.
- [183:34]
Mia Wong
He has a great line about calling this like the super bubble, basically where it's, it's every single kind of speculative bubble rolled into one. Because all these data centers are being financed with like the, with the equivalent of mortgage backed securities.
- [183:45]
Robert Evans
Yeah, these are, these are subprime loans for tech companies. Companies. Right. Like that's, that's what's financing all of this.
- [183:51]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And then these buildings. Right. It's also, it's also a real estate bubble because all of these data centers are taking a ridiculous amount of real estate. There's a tech bubble. And the single thing that. And again, we're going to do a longer episode about this later. The single thing that's the most unhinged to me about this and it's, you know, even, even excluding the fact that you know, all of these processors that they're using in these data centers burn out after about a year and a half because they're just running them constantly, is that if you look at like the housing collapse in 2008. Right. And you look at what was underlying all of those bad assets, there were houses there.
- [184:28]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [184:29]
Mia Wong
At the end of the day, all of these banks can go in and they can take your house. And that's really bad, obviously. But what is the Underlying asset for all of these tranches of all these tranches of debt, the underlying asset that you're supposed to be taking, you know, that's supposed to be the collateral, is compute power.
- [184:47]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [184:48]
Mia Wong
Now, now.
- [184:52]
James Stout
It seems fine.
- [184:53]
Garrison Davis
This is not a real asset.
- [184:55]
James Stout
It's fine because people can live in the computer power and we all need to live in a computer power. So it's fine.
- [185:03]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Look, the bad news is things are gonna be really bad for a lot of people.
- [185:10]
Mia Wong
Oh yeah.
- [185:10]
Robert Evans
And they already are, probably most people, and they're going to get worse. The good news is once we get past, you know, if this is the way the dot com bubble went, right, once we get past this crash that's brought on by, you know, a mix of greed and insanity and ignorance and lies, then we can finally get to the Internet, changing society in only positive ways, which is what happened after the dot com buck. You know, we got Facebook, we got Google, we got Twitter, we got Instagram, we got all of these great apps that have made our lives nothing but better, you know, so I'm looking forward. How could I forget?
- [185:53]
James Stout
Gitter wouldn't be furries if there wasn't DeviantArt, would there?
- [185:59]
Robert Evans
DeviantArt. Exactly. How would we know who was trying to achieve the President without deviantart and.
- [186:04]
James Stout
What their pronouns were and what their.
- [186:06]
Robert Evans
Pronouns may have been.
- [186:08]
Mia Wong
Well, I do want to make a serious note about this because I've seen a lot of compare people who compare this to the dot com bubble and this is so much worse because the dot com bubble, and you look at the telecom bubble afterwards, right, There were actual assets there, right. You know, like the only way people talk about this is like there was.
- [186:25]
Robert Evans
Pets.Com, but there was real stuff too. Real pets.
- [186:28]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [186:29]
Mia Wong
And you know, when a telecom bubble goes under, right, there's still a whole bunch of like fiber optic networks that they've set up up that you could, you know, people, people with a bunch of money afterwards can come scrape up and there's, there's the material basis something.
- [186:40]
Robert Evans
Here, these data centers, there's, they're not practical. If the. Because. And this is what the reason. Because our colleague Ed Zetron had a big scoop last week that's getting a shitload of attention right now for good reason, which is that inference cost has been raising consistently for OpenAI, which is increasing their, like it's fucking their margins and it's increasing their losses, which is why they keep losing more each quarter. And the idea behind why people thought OpenAI could be a good business is that these inference costs, which is basically the cost that it takes to keep making the models better. Right. That that was going to decline once they hit a certain level that like you're not going to need to. It's super expensive to get the models to a point where they're good. But once they're good then they get to be really cheap. And that's not really true. True. Based on the data that we have. And they were lying about it kind of, you know, they were not in. Not in a way that was legally actionable. They're not a publicly traded company. They were not required to release this to the public. It does seem like they were honest with their investors like Microsoft. Right. They were lying to us. Right. To regular people in order to pretend this was a business that had a lot better of a shot of being successful in the way it needs to be. The problem with AI as a money thing is not that there's no profit in this. It's not that there's no use for any of these tools. There are many uses and there are many potential businesses. It's that none of them equal trillion dollars, which is what it the minimum that they need to be profitable. Right. And these data centers are all based on the bet that. No, no, actually this is a multi trillion dollar industry and we need this much compute. Right.
- [188:23]
Mia Wong
And this is the greatest misallocation of capital in human history. There has never been anything like this.
- [188:28]
Robert Evans
There has never been crazy.
- [188:29]
Mia Wong
This much of the capital on earth poured into nothing because there's, there's not, there's not even physical assets left. Right. The physical assets are burned out graphics.
- [188:39]
Robert Evans
Cards because a lot of these data centers aren't built and they don't last. Yeah, right. That's what we're getting to like yes, they have a building, they have a building you can run power to, but the graphics cards don't last.
- [188:49]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Like, and you know, and at the end of this, right, it's you, you have a bunch of buildings that don't do anything attached to like extremely expensive diesel generators.
- [188:58]
Robert Evans
Raiders.
- [188:59]
Mia Wong
And I am praying the one thing that makes me be like, I hope this goes down quickly is that I am praying that this bubble goes down before they actually start trying to build nuclear like really, truly get off the ground building a bunch of nuclear reactors. Because can you imagine these guys who created a computer that can't win at chess trying to build nuclear reactors.
- [189:20]
Robert Evans
I think we should let them do it.
- [189:21]
Garrison Davis
Agreed.
- [189:22]
James Stout
Fuck it.
- [189:22]
Robert Evans
Why not?
- [189:23]
Mia Wong
I long. Why not long for stalker.
- [189:25]
Robert Evans
No, I mean it's one of the, this is like the point, the point that is meaningful here is that after the dot com bubble you were able to have a massive boom that created a bunch of wealth. It created wealth doing things that were often super bad for society, but it created a shitload of wealth because real infrastructure had been put in place that actually enabled the whole country to get connected. It enabled the birth of like the mobile computing revolution and whatnot, because a lot of groundwork had been laid that was really meaningful, even though a number of the businesses involved in it didn't work out out. And that's really not what we're seeing because it's hard to imagine assuming there's not a multi trillion dollar need for AI, assuming everyone isn't going to do everything for the rest of their lives through AI agents and do all of their thinking through ChatGPT, unless that's the reality we're in. These are not good investments. And the only thing I can compare it to in terms of what you were saying to me about this being like the worst allocation of capital in history, because I've been reading a lot about like the nuclear arms race and it was one of those things where you go from we've dropped tens of thousands of bombs over the course of five years to if we were to accidentally launch these 10 missiles, it would be more explosive power than has ever been detonated in the entire history of human war. Added together up to the present moment. Right. Like that, that is the. Because of, and part of this was enabled by the actual like Internet boom. Right, the one that brought about Web 2.0 and the social media era. Right, right. Like all of that wealth and all of the money that poured into these VCs who'd gotten on board companies like Facebook that had to be created to allow something this irrational because 20 years ago if the technology had been there, there wouldn't have been the money to enable this kind of insanity.
- [191:10]
Mia Wong
Yeah, well, and I think that the last thing, I mean, I guess there's two more things that I want to say about this. One is that this is also part of the cyclical economic crises that we've been been looking at since the 70s, which is that one of the ways you get these bubbles is that there are suddenly these unbelievably massive trillion dollar pool, like trillions of dollars of pools of capital that you're trying to find something to invest in.
- [191:35]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [191:35]
Mia Wong
You have to reproduce it. And this is one of the things that causes, for example, the third world debt crisis in the 70s is all of this capital flows into all of these third world debt things. It eventually. This is one of the things that powers first the Japanese giant housing bubble that they did that caused the Asian market collapse in the 90s and then caused 2008, is that there's all of these pools of capital they have to turn into more capital and they can't do it. And when they can't do it, you get 2008. Right. And they've been able to sort of hang on for about a decade, a decade and a half. Ish. Roughly, because there was so much money coming in from this. From this tech sector. But everyone outside of the tech sector, it sucks. It's bad. This is part of the reason why everything feels unhinged right now. Right. Okay. There's obviously kind of a problem with trying to track employment data just by seeing news of firings, because companies just do firings because it makes their stocks go up, because it makes investors think they're being more efficient, which is nonsense. But it's why it feels like this. It's why you feel broke. And everyone is talking about how the economy is growing and it's like, well, yeah, this really small sector of tiny tech has accumulated an unfathomable amount of wealth and they are getting very, very rich and everyone else is fucked. You know. And when this bubble collapse, when these people take all of the money they got out of tech and have thrown it into the metaverse and AI.
- [193:00]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [193:01]
Mia Wong
When that blows up, it is going to be cataclysmic. And we're getting closer to it.
- [193:06]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah. The only one of them that will be left is Gabe Newell. Sitting on his insane yacht, finally releasing half life.
- [193:17]
Mia Wong
He could probably appoint himself dictator for life after that.
- [193:20]
Robert Evans
Like, yeah, he'll be the only one with money left. What else can we do? All of the money is in Gabe Newell's pockets. The only asset is Steam. We've had it replace the military.
- [193:33]
Mia Wong
Now this is amazingly, the plot of Yu Gi oh, yeah. You think I'm joking?
- [193:39]
Robert Evans
I'm actually, no, I never paid attention to Yu Gi oh.
- [193:43]
Mia Wong
The plot of Yu Gi oh is the card game becomes so profitable that the guy who runs the card game company fights a battle with all the entire military industrial complex and defeats them because he's making more money than they are. So.
- [193:52]
Robert Evans
Okay, great.
- [193:55]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, I guess.
- [193:56]
Alma Avaye
I think that's.
- [193:57]
Robert Evans
That. That sounds better than what we're doing.
- [193:59]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [194:01]
Mia Wong
Okay.
- [194:01]
James Stout
We can't go this far without mentoring Tulip Mania.
- [194:04]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, sure.
- [194:05]
James Stout
The perfect Historical comparison. Right. No one.
- [194:08]
Mia Wong
You can eat a tulip bulb if you really have to.
- [194:11]
James Stout
I think they're poisonous.
- [194:13]
Robert Evans
I don't think you can eat a tulip. Maybe they can.
- [194:16]
Garrison Davis
I don't know. I shouldn't say that.
- [194:18]
Mia Wong
But they're more edible than a graphics card.
- [194:20]
Garrison Davis
Mia is telling every listener to go out and find a tulip bulb and eat it.
- [194:25]
Mia Wong
Putting this on my tombstone.
- [194:26]
James Stout
More edible than a tulip and a graphics card. Do a side by side.
- [194:32]
Robert Evans
Don't do this, don't do that.
- [194:34]
James Stout
If you have a tulip, you can tag Mia on bluesky at I write. Okay. Send her a picture of your face. Post tulip if you've eaten one.
- [194:43]
Alma Avaye
One.
- [194:43]
James Stout
But don't eat one on our account. Talking of other things not to do. Yeah, all right.
- [194:52]
Alma Avaye
It.
- [194:52]
James Stout
Here's an ad for tulips. All right, we're back and I am going to talk about. About a number of things. I guess the first thing I should talk about is the. The sanctions and FTO's designation for various leftist groups in Europe. There are four entities that the State Department has announced. They've already been sanctioned and I believe they'll be added to the FTO list either today or tomorrow as we're recording this. So it will be on the foreign terrorist organization list by the time you hear this on Friday. The four entities are called Antifa OST, AKA Hammerbund, Hammer Gang, the informal Anarchist Federation. That's an Italian group. They use the initials fai. Also the. They use F, R, I. That is not the same as the FAI that you're familiar with from the Spanish Civil War, if that's your thing. And then two Greek groups called Armed Proletarian justice and Revolutionary Primary Class Self Defense.
- [196:08]
Robert Evans
Notes on the names, guys. I guess I shouldn't. But I have notes on the names.
- [196:12]
James Stout
Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, Robert, they're European leftist groups. It's going to be.
- [196:16]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, of course. It's going to be as many syllables as they can possibly have. Yeah, yeah.
- [196:22]
James Stout
It is an Alphabet soup. So a couple of notable things here. The US doesn't seem to have coordinated with the States where these entities exist. For example, the German government, they prosecuted people who they've accused of being members of antifa odds recently. I think it was in September. And they claimed that the threat of violence for them has, quote, decreased significantly. Which is contradicting. Right. The claim that these are. These are violent groups. The State Department, when it talks about antifa. Oz talks about a series of attacks in February of 2023. What's missing from the analysis of February 2023 is what was happening in February 2023. It was an event in Hungary which existed to honor Nazis. I don't mean Nazis like people who have a right wing political ideology. I mean like members of the NSDAP in Germany who fought in World War II at the time when they were doing the Holocaust. The rally included several groups which were already sanctioned by US allies, including Blood and Honor Combat 18. Jesus. Not going to go into an in depth history of either of those groups. They're neo Nazi groups.
- [197:33]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [197:34]
James Stout
The 18 is Adolf Hitler 1 8. These are the people who are, as far as I'm aware, the victims of that February 2023 violence. Right. Notably though, antifa OST was sanctioned by Hungary earlier this year.
- [197:51]
Alma Avaye
Right.
- [197:52]
James Stout
Hungary under Orban fast moving towards extremely right wing. I think what political scientists like to call it an illiberal democracy. Right.
- [198:03]
Garrison Davis
This sucks to hear. I mean with this news I feel like we might need to pull out of Viktor Orban presents Hungary for Comedy, the upcoming Cool Zone headlined comedy festival.
- [198:15]
James Stout
So many of our famous comedian friends have been planning to join us.
- [198:18]
Robert Evans
Yeah, we are doing that show in Riyadh though.
- [198:23]
Alma Avaye
That's still on?
- [198:24]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that's still on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [198:27]
James Stout
The other groups aren't explicitly anti fascist. Right.
- [198:32]
Garrison Davis
Because this is getting framed in support of Trump's like anti antifa crackdown. He's trying to find foreign terrorist organizations linked to antifa. But these other three groups are not explicitly like antifa in name or scope, it seems.
- [198:45]
James Stout
No, exactly. Right. So most of them are anarchist groups.
- [198:48]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [198:48]
James Stout
And just to like delve very briefly in two lines into things, I have literally written a book about about. Anti fascism is a left unity position derived from the Comintern position that it adopted its Congress in 1935. These groups do not call themselves anti fascist. Right. There is a distinction between anarchism and antifascism which can be seen very acutely in the May 1937 events of the Spanish Civil War. But these groups have neither claimed antifascism nor as far as I'm aware, have any of the them killed anyone. I believe that the antifa OST people being prosecuted, one of them is being prosecuted for attempted murder. In other cases they have been responsible for explosions or attempted bombings. Normally to be designated in FTO they would have to be a threat to either US people or the United States as an entity. Right. There doesn't appear to be any evidence that these groups have any ties to anyone in the United States or present Any immediate danger to the United States.
- [199:50]
Robert Evans
States.
- [199:51]
James Stout
I don't quite know where they got these particular groups from.
- [199:54]
Mia Wong
It's so weird. It's a completely baffling list of groups. Like even, even looking at like pre Cannacus groups.
- [200:01]
Robert Evans
I mean, my, my guess is that someone in the Trump administration has a friend in Orban's administration and asked them, hey, who are some antifas? We can go after that. You guys like you. You know, Europe.
- [200:13]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [200:14]
Garrison Davis
The Greek anarchist groups specifically are some of the more interesting inclusions here.
- [200:18]
Mia Wong
They're not the Greek anarchist groups you would expect them to be going after. It's very weird.
- [200:25]
James Stout
Yeah. Like, they're not groups I was familiar with. Like, admittedly, you know, I don't speak Greek. I don't, I don't read Greek. I don't, I don't pay that much attention to that part of the world. But like there are other groups which are more notorious like it. It's very odd that they've come up with the antifa Ost one. I agree, Garrison. I think the lineage is more obvious there that the. The other three. Yeah, I'm not entirely clear on how they got to those event. You know, contact us if you have ideas. The other terrorist designation that happened this week, which is breaking as we record on Wednesday 19th November, is that Greg Abbott has declared CAIR, this Center for American Islamic Relations, and the Muslim Brotherhood as Foreign terrorist organization.
- [201:14]
Garrison Davis
Jesus.
- [201:15]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [201:17]
Mia Wong
Jesus Christ.
- [201:19]
James Stout
Texas doesn't appear to have an FTO list as far as I can tell. What this seems to be is a designation under SB17, which parts passed earlier this year, which relates to property law. It would stop the Muslim Brotherhood or CARE as a national 501C3 renting or buying property in Texas. I'm not sure the Muslim Brotherhood intended to rent or buy property in Texas. Most of SB17 deals with nationals and entities linked to China, Russia and North Korea. It's trying to not have them buy large chunks of Texas, but it also does have this mechanism in it. So just Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni Islamist organization. It has participated in violence, but not for some time. It has its origins in Egypt. It does a lot of social programs. I mean, CARE most people will be familiar with. Right. CARE has already issued a response letter and in their letter they said, quote, your proclamation has no basis in law or fact. You do not have the authority to unilaterally declare any Americans or American institutions terrorist groups, nor is there any basis to level this smear against our organization. It's probably worth noting that there was a DOJ investigation into epic. Not that epic the one you're thinking of probably, but the, this is the El Paso Islamic Center Center. That investigation was closed. Right. But this is not the first time that they have attempted to. This just very clearly Islamophobia out of Texas. Right. Like that is what this is.
- [202:52]
Mia Wong
This is also just an ancient sort of Obama era conspiracy where all of these people were all convinced that Obama was part of the Muslim Brotherhood and that there was this whole network of Muslim Brotherhood operatives that were like running the country. And really sort of, if you squint hard enough, it was like, well, there's a bunch of people from the UAE who are kind of involved in some stuff, but this is like one of their, they're kind of fusing this old school, like old, old school xenomphobic stuff with their like kind of very specific current contemporary targets by sort of running these two together.
- [203:28]
James Stout
Yeah, Mia's right. I think Ted Cruz has tried to, to get the Muslim Brotherhood on the FTO list like several times. Yet there's this old like from like the golden age of right wing conspiracies. Right. Like the, the Bohemian Grove era. There's this idea that, yeah, they're on like a, it's like a 50 or 100 year plan to, to bring the US under Sharia law and like, like it, it's, it's that old. It, it's, it's Boomer stuff. Yes. Combined with now trying to explicitly link them to Hamas. Right. So yeah, that, that is great.
- [203:59]
Garrison Davis
That's not great.
- [204:00]
Alma Avaye
I would disagree, James.
- [204:01]
Garrison Davis
I think that's not great. I'll be brave enough to say it.
- [204:04]
Mia Wong
Don't love it.
- [204:05]
Robert Evans
No.
- [204:05]
James Stout
It is a sinner's salt on the, the First Amendment. Like the, the stuff, the inclusion of.
- [204:11]
Garrison Davis
CARE is, is like, is absolutely outrageous.
- [204:14]
James Stout
Yeah, CARE is a very respectability for.
- [204:16]
Garrison Davis
Like a civil rights focus.
- [204:17]
James Stout
Like liberal civil rights organization.
- [204:19]
Robert Evans
The least threatening organization in the world.
- [204:21]
James Stout
Yeah, no, like, and they have, have advocated for an end to the genocide of people in Palestine, which is a perfectly reasonable and legal thing to advocate for. They have not expressed support for political violence. Yeah, CAIR is like as protected by the First Amendment as things can be in this country. This is bonkers. So, yeah, I guess CAIR is already presumably preparing a court case case.
- [204:50]
Garrison Davis
In other Texas news, a three panel judge in Texas just struck down Texas's newly drawn congressional map in federal court with Trump appointed Judge Jeffrey Brown finding that quote, substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map, unquote. The judge has required Texas use its previous 2021 map map for the upcoming midterm elections. What's really. What's really funny here is that before the elections in November, where the California redistricting measure was up for vote, Newsom specifically removed language in that measure that framed the California redistricting as a triggering event. As in, if the Texas one passes, then the California one can go into effect.
- [205:43]
Robert Evans
Fact.
- [205:43]
Garrison Davis
Newsom specifically removed this.
- [205:45]
James Stout
Yeah. The trigger language wasn't there, which means.
- [205:49]
Garrison Davis
That California now just wiped out five Republican seats and Texas probably won't be able to do anything about it.
- [205:56]
James Stout
That's still a challenge. The California GOP are also trying to challenge. Yes.
- [206:00]
Garrison Davis
And this Texas case is set to be heard before the Supreme Court. There's a few other redistricting measures, I think in Louisiana and in. In North Carolina. A few other states are trying to do this. But there is a possible future in which Texas is not allowed to racially gerrymander and California is able to go forward with their redistricting because it may not have been specifically violating this. Like a racial gerrymandering aspect that Judge Jeffrey Brown found was affecting the Texas maps intentionally.
- [206:36]
James Stout
The GOP claim is that California is, quote, favoring Hispanic voters. That's going good. It's going to be a harder landing to stick. Right. Given that there are Latino people in every square mile of California. Like, it's. Yeah, that's going to be a rougher one for them.
- [206:52]
Garrison Davis
And specifically, the stuff that Judge Brown found is, like, in the way that these districts were redrawn, it was to totally exclude non white voters in some of these districts.
- [207:01]
Alma Avaye
Districts.
- [207:02]
James Stout
All right, one for the train fans in the audience. A section of railway that connects Warsaw to Lublin in southeastern Poland, which then connects onto Ukraine, was destroyed by an explosion earlier this week. Overhead cables further down the track were also damaged. This comes as drone incursions into European airspace continue. Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, called the act sabotage. And it seems extremely likely that he is correct about that. Right. I guess we haven't explicitly covered this on ED very much, but there have been dozens of documented Russian operations in Europe since the expanded invasion of Ukraine that began in 2021. What's concerning to me about this is that Europe is responding to some of these by accusing Russia of trying to, quote, destabilise polities by. By sending migrants there. It's likely true that Russia is messing with migration flows. I mean, it is demonstrably true in some cases. Right. Responding to this by hardening borders, deploying troops to borders is not the solution to that problem. Europe's iron border kills more people than any other border. And hardening that border is only going to kill more people. Like, if you want to be, be the shining city on a hill, right? If you want to be, I think that title is maybe up for grabs. If you want to be the place that stands out as like a safe place for democracy, you don't do that by killing migrants. And so Europe's response to this is extremely disappointing. Right. And I wanted to highlight that because I don't see that in the coverage. Yes, Russia escalating its meddling in Europe is extremely concerning. But like, if we accept that Russia is it is a totalitarian state or going in that direction, then we should also therefore accept that people are going to want to leave that and many other states where they cannot have autonomy, where they cannot live healthy and full lives, and we should welcome them. Talking of people leaving places where they cannot have autonomy and have full and happy lives, let's talk about immigration in the United States. Very quickly. Border Patrol and Gregory Bevino have moved their internal enforcement Eye of Sauron to Charlotte, North Carolina. This seems in large part due to some racists on X.com demanding that they do so. I shouldn't say in large part. I guess in some part there has been video already showing Bovino participating in detentions at a Home Depot car park. I've said two words there, which of course one of my colleagues a smirking giggle at me. Stand by both of them. So yeah, it is in part right, due to Exoc the Everything website being a haven for racism. But I think it's also worth noting, In 2018, Democrat sheriffs in five North Carolina counties ran on the platform of not cooperating with ice. All of these, I believe, were black sheriffs. And ICE pushed back hard, right? Including with a billboard campaign. Last year, the North Carolina Republican state legislature overrode a Veto to pass HB10, which required agencies to cooperate with ICE and honour their detainers. A detainer is basically when ICE is like, hey, you've arrested this person. We want you to hold them for a bit longer so we can come pick them up. For ICE reasons, since then, Meckleburg County Sheriff McFadden has claimed that ICE has failed to collect people on detainment 163 times. So this would be. They would Normally have a 48 hour detainer, right? They'd hold them 48 extra hours. I should come get them when they are held on the detainer, it is still the state that is responsible for them. It is a state that is paying for the cost of incarcerating that person. It is a state that is still incarcerating that person.
- [210:55]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [210:56]
James Stout
This has led, I guess to Republicans claiming that McFadden is ignoring his obligation under HB10. McFadden says he isn't. He is holding them for the duration of detainer, but then releasing them when no one comes to get them.
- [211:08]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [211:09]
James Stout
This has led to like cis, right. The center for Immigration Studies. SPLC has designated it as a hate group. CIS has, has listed Charlotte and Mecklenburg county on its map of quote unquote sanctuary jurisdictions. There's a link to the map if you want to look at it. They actually cite the 2018 policy and don't even mention HB10. So it's unclear to me if they haven't updated this map or if they just believe that nothing has changed because they believe that HP10 is being ignored. I think that might be a lot of the reason why we're seeing this now. Then finally, I want to talk about something local to Southern California. In Temecula, north of San Diego, 17 year old boy was pulled over at gunpoint by a man who was known to locals as an ICE agent. The man does not appear to have been in. In his professional capacity at this time. Neighbors were able to de escalate the situation and get Gerardo Rodriguez, the. The man in question, to stop pointing his gun at the teen. La Taco got video of this. It is wild. The guy is just in the middle of the road with a handgun, pointing it at a truck that's driving down the street. Rodriguez accuses the young man. He's 17 years old. I'm not gonna say his name Right. He's a child. Child of speeding in the neighborhood. Not generally something that warrants throwing a firearm. Rodriguez was detained by the Riverside County Sheriff's Office. I believe he's bonded out now. But this is, this is an interesting development right elsewhere, like in Santa Ana, an agent pulled a gun on a community watch member. Fullerton police on the scene didn't, did not detain the person. They also refused to assist. Right. They just kind of were present. But this is one of the few cases I'm aware of an ICE agent. There was someone else arrested in LA who I believe died. I believe that was a border patrol agent. That person unfortunately passed away of an overdose. But this is one of the first instances I've seen of this. Right. Like a kind of a state federal direct confrontation where this guy appears to have been pseudo claiming that he was acting under his like authority as an ICE agent. That's not entirely clear to me. The young man's parents rushed to the scene with the young man's passport, but by that point, neighbors had already been able to de escalate. So, yeah, I'm gonna keep an eye on this because I think it's interesting.
- [213:34]
Mia Wong
All right.
- [213:35]
James Stout
This week we have a fundraiser from Borderlands Relief Collective. I know they're helping a lot of people who need need a lot of help right now. Some folks whose roofs are really struggling to keep up with the recent rainstorms that we've had in Southern California, they have an Amazon wish list. The URL is too long for me to read out to you, so we will include it in the show notes. If you'd like to help, you can click on that and buy something for someone. Thank you.
- [214:01]
Robert Evans
All right. Well, folks, this has been the news. Good morning by.
- [214:07]
Garrison Davis
We reported the news. We reported the news.
- [214:15]
Robert Evans
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
- [214:21]
Donna Al Kurd
It could Happen Here is a production.
- [214:23]
Mia Wong
Of Cool Zone Media.
- [214:24]
Donna Al Kurd
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for.
- [214:35]
Mia Wong
It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.
- [214:38]
Alma Avaye
Thanks for listening.
- [214:42]
Garrison Davis
This is an I heart podcast.