It Could Happen Here Weekly 229

Summary

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 229

Podcast: Behind the Bastards — It Could Happen Here Weekly 229

Date: April 25, 2026
Hosts/Panelists: Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, Mia Wong, James Stout, Andrew Sage, and guests
Produced by: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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Overview

This week's extended episode of It Could Happen Here Weekly continues the podcast's tradition of deep dives into underreported or misunderstood histories and current events, blending darkly humorous commentary with in-depth critical analysis. The discussions oscillate between urgent breaking news, structural critiques of capitalism and tech, global and domestic politics, and on-the-ground activism. Key topics cover:

• The “shadow bank run” and private credit crisis
• The SPLC indictment and its political ramifications
• Anti-AI extremism tied to tech industry hype
• Definitions and politics of indigeneity and decolonization
• The Gaza Solidarity encampment at UCSD and the history of campus protest
• The ongoing Iran War ceasefire and U.S. domestic policy news
• The Blaze’s Jan 6 pipe bomber defamation suit
• Erosion of civil society institutions from political and economic stress

The episode’s tone is simultaneously urgent, irreverent, and exasperated, with panelists mixing gallows humor, leftist critique, and personal anecdotes.

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Main Sections and Key Insights

1. The Shadow Bank Run—Private Credit Crisis

(Start: 02:49)
Hosts: Mia Wong & Molly (guest)

Key Points and Insights:

• What Are Shadow Banks?
  Shadow banks are “banks that do banking things that aren’t banks,” operating outside traditional regulations and not FDIC insured. They don’t need to keep enough cash on hand to cover withdrawals, making them susceptible to collapse in a run (04:21).

• “Private Credit” and Risk:
  Private credit refers to loans negotiated directly between a company and non-bank lenders (usually private equity, BDCs, pension funds, etc.), with terms that are secret and often high-risk (06:27).

• Recent ‘Bank Run’ on Shadow Banks:
  Recently, major firms like Morgan Stanley and BlackRock halted redemptions in their private credit funds. Investors wanted their money back, but the funds—structured much like banks but unregulated—could not meet withdrawal demands because their cash was tied up in long-term, risky loans (13:10).

• Product Securitization—2008 Redux:
  Shadow banks have been giving high-risk loans, especially to subprime auto loan companies and AI startups, then bundling these loans and selling them, repeating patterns from the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis (19:30).

  “They're doing the thing that we saw with the housing loans where the same car is collateral for multiple of these loans … It’s Wiley Coyote running off the cliff. … This is literally the fakest thing I’ve ever seen.” — Mia Wong (20:24)

• Market Exploitation and Betting on Failure:
  Now, institutions are even trading credit default swaps speculating on whether private credit funds themselves will fail, making the economy more casino-like than ever (23:37).

  “Why is so much of the economy based on these bets that bad things will happen?” — Molly (23:49)

  “John Maynard Keynes … said the economy shouldn’t be run by a casino. To which I would be like, Keynes, but the economy is a casino.” — Mia Wong (24:22)

• Structural Critique:
  The current regime encourages both over-leverage and speculative betting, with little oversight. There's no “ideal version” where this works — it’s structurally designed to fail and demand bailouts.

  “We’re all living in the nightmare hellscape of this being a bad idea.” — Mia Wong (26:31)

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2. What Does It Mean to Be Indigenous?

(Start: 35:38)
Hosts: Andrew Sage & Mia Wong

Key Points and Insights:

• Two Models of Indigeneity:

  1. Identity as a relationship to place (land, culture, community).
  2. Identity as a result of a colonial relationship—being the people colonized/dispossessed and marginalized by a dominant group (38:25).

• Mutual Relationship and Responsibility:
  Indigeneity depends on building reciprocal, sustainable ties to land and community, not just ancestry or time present in an area (as exemplified by “Sky Woman” in Haudenosaunee teachings).

• Colonial Structures & Fluid Power:
  Colonialism isn’t just a European project; pre-modern empires also established dominance and marginalization, creating “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” distinctions (57:17). Oppression is not uniquely redemptive—victims of genocide or marginalization can become perpetrators in other contexts (51:13).

• Decolonization: Destruction of the Colonial Relationship:
  In an ideal future, decolonization would make “indigenous” a status no longer necessary, because the conditions creating colonial wounds would be abolished (64:42).

  “Decolonisation will require us to uproot invasive capitalist settler societies in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that we share and are responsible for.” — Andrew Sage (68:41)

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3. Anti-AI Extremism and Radicalization

(Start: 72:12)
Hosts: Garrison Davis & Robert Evans

Key Points and Insights:

• Sam Altman Attack:
  A 20-year-old, Daniel Moranogama, radicalized by online rationalist and “AI Doomer” thinking, is arrested for attacking the OpenAI CEO’s home and HQ, motivated by sincere belief in imminent ‘AGI apocalypse’ (75:02).

• The Rationalist-Media Loop:
  The attacker’s worldview is shaped by rationalist “LessWrong”-style circles and mainstream tech hype (Yudkowsky, Musk, Anthropic), conflating marketing and science fiction with imminent existential risk (81:04).

  “If someone truly believes the stuff that crowd is saying about how the creation of an evil God is inevitable … of course you do this. It’s a natural progression.” — Robert Evans (81:28)

• Double-Edged Tech Messaging:
  Tech company’s hype cycles (“country of geniuses in a data center”) are radicalizing both corporate boosters and doomer vigilantes. Panelists highlight the irresponsibility and inevitable spillover into violence and paranoia (85:28).

• The Attacker’s Broader Worldview:
  Moranogama’s politics blend rationalism, IQ-based exclusion, eugenic proposals, and right-wing immigration policy, typifying the reactionary pipeline from "rationalist" web spaces (98:40).

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4. Gaza Solidarity Encampment at UC San Diego: History of Campus Protest

(Start: 111:00)
Host: James Stout with a UCSD Faculty Member

Key Points and Insights:

• The Encampment as Protest:
  The Gaza Solidarity Encampment at UCSD intentionally recreated the visual and material experience of displacement in Gaza. It served as a research, education, and community space, focusing on exposing university ties to weapons manufacturers and Israel’s actions (111:57).

• Campus Protest History:

  • 1980s: Anti-Apartheid movement, shanty towns, successful campaign for university divestment from South Africa (119:03).
  • 1992: The Women’s Resource Center encampment successfully pressured the university, again without repression (122:13).
  • 2010 “Black Winter”: A wave of anti-racist activism after overt racist incidents leads to real reforms, no crackdown or arrests, and heightened campus accountability (126:12+).

• The “Palestine Exception to Free Speech”:
  Unlike prior protest waves, pro-Palestinian activism is met with state and administrative repression, discipline, and chilling of speech — a phenomenon explored as the "Palestine Exception" (143:06).

  “If you can't talk about Palestine, then violence that’s committed against Palestinians is ... facilitated by that lack of discussion.” — UCSD Faculty (143:06)

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5. The SPLC Indictment & Right-Wing “Psyop” Narratives

(Start: 158:44; Deep dive at 176:31)
Hosts: Garrison Davis, Robert Evans, James Stout

Key Points and Insights:

• Allegations:
  The Department of Justice indicts the Southern Poverty Law Center for wire fraud and money laundering, alleging it used donor funds to pay informants embedded in hate groups for decades.

• Amounts and Secrecy:
  Some informants were paid hundreds of thousands to over $1 million. The SPLC used fake business accounts (“CIA,” “Fox Photography”) to mask payments (182:48).

  “Why do they have a fake company named after the CIA? What are you guys doing?” — Robert Evans (191:23)

• Political Motive and Double Standards:
  The indictment is part of a larger Trump administration crackdown on anti-fascist nonprofits, framed as political retribution—especially since the FBI itself has used similar tactics (188:31).

  “This indictment could be seen as part of the anti-antifa nonprofit crackdown.” — Garrison Davis (189:30)

• Right-Wing Narrative Manipulation:
  Far-right influencers are already using this to claim past Nazi rallies were “psyops” or “false flags,” whitewashing history while capitalizing on the alt-right’s mainstreaming of replacement theory.

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6. Iran War Ceasefire & U.S. Political Update

(Start: 158:44; Iran War at 166:00; Policy at 162:27)

Key Points and Insights:

• Iranian Military Not “Decimated”
  Despite administration claims, much of Iran’s air and naval forces remain operational, exposing White House exaggerations (167:20).

• Ceasefire Dynamics
  Trump claims a “unilateral” extension of ceasefire while Iran’s power structure is fractured. Real negotiations are hampered by internal divisions within Iran (171:45).

• Continuing Strikes & Unstable Situation:
  Iranian attacks on Kurdish groups persist, illustrating that the ceasefire is more fragmented and fragile than officials present (176:04).

• Domestic News Briefs:

  • U.S. government running poorly disguised online psy-ops against Iran
  • Ongoing redistricting battles in U.S. states
  • Shifts in immigration and DOJ enforcement under Trump
  • The farce of U.S. political stability: “We live in the 2016 election forever now” — Mia Wong (165:14)

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7. Social Media Collapse and Monetization Incentives

(200:22, 222:24)

• X (Twitter), Facebook, Forums—all nosediving in user engagement.
• Financial incentive structures (e.g. Blue Check monetization) drive clickbait and conspiracy, as in the Blaze’s false Jan 6 bomber story.
• The ecosystem amplifies misinformation for profit, and is collapsing as user trust and interest declines.

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8. The Blaze and Jan 6 Pipe Bomber Defamation Case

(210:55)

Key Points and Insights:

• The Case:
  Blaze journalists falsely accused a Capitol Police officer of being the Jan 6 pipe bomber, leading to FBI raids, polygraph tests, doxxing, and online/familial harassment. Even after the real suspect’s arrest, the Blaze doubled down rather than retract.

• Legal Fallout:
  The officer is suing for severe defamation. The journalists are raising money and founding new conspiracy sites (“Veritas Regnant”).

  “I hope she gets every dollar Glenn Beck has.” — Robert Evans (221:24)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “They're doing it all again and it’s even dumber this time. … At least there were houses last time. Now there’s not even a no. Now there’s shitty auto loans.” — Mia Wong & Molly, on the shadow bank run (30:44)
• “You must be organized enough to say, no, fuck this, we’re not going to sacrifice all of our lives to reopen the casino.” — Mia Wong (27:19)
• “Decolonisation will require us to uproot invasive capitalist settler societies in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that we share and are responsible for.” — Andrew Sage (68:41)
• “If someone truly believes the stuff that crowd is saying about how the creation of an evil God is inevitable … of course you do this. It’s a natural progression.” — Robert Evans (81:28)
• “Why do they have a fake company named after the CIA? What are you guys doing?” — Robert Evans (191:23)
• “If you can't talk about Palestine, then violence that’s committed against Palestinians is ... facilitated by that lack of discussion.” — UCSD Faculty Member (143:06)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:49 — Shadow banking, private credit, and the “run” on shadow banks
• 35:38 — What does it mean to be Indigenous? (Andrew Sage)
• 72:12 — Anti-AI extremism: The Altman attack and rationalist doomerism
• 111:00 — Gaza Solidarity Encampment at UCSD: History and repression, with faculty interview
• 158:44 — Weekly news roundup begins; Iran war, DOJ, political and legal news
• 176:31 — Deep dive: SPLC indictment and implications for civil society/NGOs
• 210:55 — Jan 6 pipe bomber defamation: The Blaze lawsuit

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Final Thoughts / Takeaways

• The show draws out the repetition of systemic failures—financial, political, and institutional—with each cycle often more absurd or cynical than the last.
• The hosts advocate for direct action, organizing, and mutual aid as the only reliable responses to these crises.
• Their critical, humorous, and conversational style makes even the densest subjects disarmingly accessible but does not shy from taking firm moral and political stances.

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For anyone new to the show, this episode provides a potent snapshot of the podcast’s style: rich historical analysis, news you won’t find on corporate media, a morbid sense of humor, and a clear leftist perspective on the interconnected crises shaping our world.

Transcript

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[Robert Evans]

Corzone 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.

[Mia Wong]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where I explain fake money things that are actually real. To Molly. Molly, thank you so much for coming back on. I am your host, Mia Wong.

[Live Nation Announcer]

I am excited to learn now.

[Mia Wong]

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away. And I'm saying this because I legitimately do not remember how many weeks ago we released the original one of this. But back in that episode where we explained shadow banking, I said that I had had to cut off the part of the episode that was the reason why I wrote it in the first place.

[Live Nation Announcer]

It happens to me every week.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. So, comma, I've also kind of had to split some of this episode off that will probably. There will be another episode, probably with Zitron, whenever I have enough seconds in my life to pull all of that together. But today we are here to talk about the actual sort of shadow bank run, I guess you would call it, financial problems that caused me to write the shadow banking episode in the first place.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Oh, right. Why? I originally asked you what shadow banking is because there was some kind of economy problem and there was like, a fake run on the fake banks.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. And, Molly, you will be extremely unhappy to note that a big part of the reason why there was the fake run of the fake banks was that the shadow banks loaned a bunch of money to a different type of shadow bank.

[Live Nation Announcer]

I don't think they should have done that.

[Mia Wong]

And that shadow bank went under. Great things are happening here.

[Live Nation Announcer]

But they're not FDIC insured, Mia.

[Mia Wong]

Nope, nope, nope, nope. So, okay, this gets us back to our original definition of a shadow bank, which is that it's a bank that does banking things. That's not a bank. So it's not insured by the fdic. They don't have to have money on hand to make sure that there can't be a bank run on them.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Right. So they. They just said no more transactions, please.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. So what Molly is referring to is a few weeks ago, I guess, maybe like a month ago at this point, there was actually a breakthrough into the kind of mainstream ish of some stuff that had been brewing in the financial news for a while. And that was that a bunch of companies, Morgan Stanley and blackrock, I think, were kind of the two biggest ones that stopped this. Although a bunch of these sort of smaller, what are called private credit firms also sort of did things like this.

[Live Nation Announcer]

And so because they're not really banks, there's no regulation that says they have to serve their customers. Right. They can just say no.

[Mia Wong]

Okay, so this is part of what's really a shit show, I guess.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Let's start at the beginning. So what happened? Sorry, I got us derailed.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, let's, let's run back to the specific thing we're talking about. Here is a thing called private credit. And so private credit, I'm just going to read this thing from the teller window which is, I don't know, the teller window is actually a decently useful thing. Where the teller window is. The Fed is like, I'm going to explain something to normal people. Now the problem is that this is still the Federal Reserve. So their explanation for normal people, by normal people they mean like, I don't know, like dipshit day traders. Right.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Normal people don't have questions about the Federal Reserve.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, so it's like this is like for people who are kind of know this stuff but are running into this like arcane subfield for the first time. So I'm just going to quote from them because I think it's an interesting place to start. Although there is no universal definition, which you know, things are going great when our second episode in a row talking

[Live Nation Announcer]

about we can't all agree what this even is.

[Mia Wong]

It's so good. It's so good. Although there is no universal definition, private credit generally refers to a loan that is negotiated between a bond borrower and a small group of non bank lenders. These non bank financial institution lenders are typically alternative asset managers such as private equity firms who package loans in different investment vehicles. Other non bank financial institutions like pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds then invest in those vehicles. So this is the stuff that we talked about from last episode where okay, so you have multiple layers of shadow banks. Right. You have on the one hand the private credit firms are these, these sort of groups that go in and sometimes they're just their own things there. There's a bunch of different kinds of them. Private equities firms tend to have like one arm of the private equity firm that's their, like this is our shiny private credit wing. Um, there are also these things called business development corporations which do these. Um, there are, there are like other types of them too. But basically what those companies do is they go in and they negotiate a loan with a, usually a pretty long term for repayments on the loan with a company. Now the thing about these loans is that the terms of those loans are secret from everybody. Yeah.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Even the people involved.

[Mia Wong]

Well, when I say secret, I mean the company that's taking out the loan and the bank know how they work. No one else does. And then what happens is these are usually fairly risky loans because if you weren't doing a risky loan. You would get your money through like a normal bank.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

You would do it normal style. Right? This is not normal style. These are risky. And then they do the thing called securitization, which we talked about last episode, where you take.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Alone and do magic to it and turn it into something that someone else can buy.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Whatever happened to products and services, Mia? Whatever happened to products and services?

[Mia Wong]

Well, because products and services make less money than betting on products and services. This is also where this is all going. So there's some real issues here with private credit.

[Live Nation Announcer]

So we're buying and selling money that isn't real and add the absence of money that isn't real. And then. So what happened when there was the run on the fake bank?

[Mia Wong]

Well, that's, that's kind of what.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Because how can you, how can you do a run on a bank if there's no money involved? Because you're not asking to get your money back out of it because there was never any money.

[Mia Wong]

Well, so here's the thing. So a lot of the way that these things work sometimes, like they are obviously selling the loans and packages, but a lot of the way that it works is that it does kind of work like a normal bank, which is, I mean, instead of being a lender, you're like an investor, but you give them a bunch of your money and they give it to these loan things. So it is just literally a normal bank except it's not subject to banking regulations and it's riskier. Right. So like, like Apollo Capital Management or whatever, it's like you give a bunch of money to Apollo Capital Management, just like Global Capital whatever is like Apollo Global Capital is one of the big firms in this thing. And then they give that money out in loans and then you're basically just supposed to wait because you know, remember last episode we talked about how in the way that normal bank works right there, there. There's like a fundamental kind of gate gap. Right. Where you are putting your money in as like a short term thing that you can take out immediately. And then the bank is turning the short term money into a long term loan.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Right. It takes time for the money to grow up.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. And the reason we have financial regulations is to force the banks to have money on hand so that if you need your money back, you can take it out. Now these banks don't have this because these are shadow banks. They are the credit arms of private equity. They're fucking. I don't know, they're like capital Management firms, they're like.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Right. So like, so like a normal, a normal run on the bank is like obviously the bank doesn't have 100% default. Like I put cash in the bank. We all put cash in the bank and everyone wants all their cash back. The bank doesn't have 100% of that cash. You get that? Right? It's like they have it invested and it hasn't. Those loans haven't matured yet and things like that. But theoretically, if all those loans matured, that bank does have all of those dollars. But the shadow bank, they're selling these same loans to multiple people. So even if everything matured properly, they don't have all of those dollars anymore. Yeah, those dollars don't all exist.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, to be fair, the, the bank's dollars also work like that because the banks are also selling their loans off.

[Live Nation Announcer]

But like you were saying that they were using like the same mortgage to secure a bunch of different.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, right. So that's like. Yeah, that's like a classic shadow banking thing. We're actually going to get back to that because they're doing an even dumber version of that now.

[Live Nation Announcer]

I'm just saying it seems like a run on the bank would be kind of inevitable even in a minor crisis because they do not have most of the money they're pretending exists.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, but okay, so I think what I would say about that is that this is also a problem for regular banks.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Like, I don't think this is actually a structurally different crisis. Like the cause like the crisis here is just that the money is out in loans and they just, they don't have it on hand. And this is the structural crisis that the private credit people are doing is that their money is also out on loans. So they don't have it. And a lot of these loans are like seven year loans in like very risky companies. So the money like really isn't there. Right.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Because that venture capital, like whatever is, that's an inflated valuation. So you're talking about like, oh, it's $10 billion, but it's, it isn't and it never will be and it never was.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, and the other thing that's going on too, right, is like these are, these are supposed to be risky loans. So they have a high rate of return if they return. But yes, and this, and this is where this gets. Not good because so the US private credit market is $1.3 trillion like under management. The global market is like $3.5 trillion of assets. I'm not really going to go into the Chinese private credit market here because that's its own episode. But the way that these, that these companies deal with this is that they have these funds, right? And then the fund gives out like the loans and they have a limit to the total amount of like the percent of the value of the fund that can be taken out at one time. And that's what's been being hit the industry standard is supposed to be about 5% of the fund can be withdrawn per quarter. And then after that, they just shut down Redemptions. And that's what you saw on the news, because a bunch of companies, some of these companies have higher limits. They're like almost like 8 or 9, like, like 10% and they'll stop it at like 9, roughly.

[Live Nation Announcer]

So more than anything, shutting down Redemptions is an indicator that the market has panicked. Right. That the investors are spooked and they want their money back. Because this risky investment is now looking like a very bad choice.

[Mia Wong]

Yes, but this is a real structural problem because.

[Live Nation Announcer]

But like, as a, as a measurement of something, it's just like what we're measuring is how many investors are shitting their pants.

[Mia Wong]

And there's a reason they're shitting their pants. And the reason they're shitting their pants is that basically all of these firms have been eating a colossal amount of shit. And the reason they're eating a colossal amount of shit, I mean, some of it is very stupid. Some of them are eating shit because they gave money to like normal tech firms. But then now they're all scared they're going to get out competed by AI firms. Some of them have given a bunch of money. Blue Owl particularly, and this is what we're going to get into in the episode with Ed, has given a lot of money to AI firms, which is a fucking nightmare.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Great investment.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Incredible stuff going on.

[Live Nation Announcer]

I'm sure. I'm sure that's what Ed will say. Ed will say that was a good investment.

[Mia Wong]

It's so fun. It's so fun. The main thing that they've been eating shit on, and this is where this kind of hit the mainstream because a whole bunch of normal banks also ate shit on this. JP Morgan ate shit on this loan. So a huge amount of money was poured into this firm called Tricolor, which we touched on briefly last episode, but then didn't really talk about much about what it did. So, so okay, J.P. morgan has lost $170 million.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Oh, no big deal.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Which, and it's fun, it's funny. Because like the JP Morgan CEO were like, yeah, we kind of HD on this. And also their CEO gave this quote where he was like, where there's one cockroach, there's probably more. Which is like an extremely normal thing for the finance guy to be saying about the market.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Does he mean we have an, we have an infestation of accidentally losing $170 million?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I mean it's. But like in the grand scheme of things, right, like JP Morgan does have 4 trillion or something dollars under management.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Right. But if he's saying if there's one cockroach, there's more. Yeah, usually if you have one cockroach, you have 100 cockroaches. So if you have 100. Yes, $170 million fuck ups.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. And that's not great, right? And like Barclays, which is the very sort of like prestigious British bank which also ate shit for doing this kind of stuff to 2008, also lost like £100 million. What's interesting about this specific one is this firm, Tricolor, is a subprime auto loan company.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Oh, that's a phenomenal business model, Molly.

[Mia Wong]

I.

[Live Nation Announcer]

So they're responsible for the Nissan Altima.

[Mia Wong]

This is, this is what is known as an idea that could not possibly have gone right. It's very funny because when you read the stuff from Tricolor, they're all like, oh, we're trying to like help people who are like underserved in markets who need cars. Oh.

[Live Nation Announcer]

So. But here's the thing about a shitty auto loan is, you know, right, you are serving an underserved community. You are serving people with bad credit who might not otherwise be able to get a car, but you're serving them by them hard.

[Garrison Davis]

And this, and this is the thing, like you can tell, yeah, they, they,

[Mia Wong]

they know that they're lying about this, right.

[Live Nation Announcer]

It's just so evil.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And like this is all downstream of, you know, this is all downstream of the fact that we've built our cities around cars, right? And we built our cities around cars, right? Specifically. And this is a really fun thing. We built our cities around cars specifically because we had created so much manufacturing capacity after, after World War II that like Ford and General Motors had like, pumped into that. They were like, we need a fucking way to make money off of all of this. And this is also, by the way, why we did the Marshall Plan. Like, we rebuilt Europe to sell cars to them.

[Live Nation Announcer]

It's this terrible snowball of like induced demand and then dealing with that and then the fallout of that and Trying to reorganize from that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And we have destroyed the world with this.

[Live Nation Announcer]

It rocks. Thank you, Henry Ford.

[Mia Wong]

It's so good. It's so good. We have literally like Earth is because of this. This is like one of the largest engines of global climate change is the fact that we had all these factories after World War II and these companies didn't want to eat shit on them.

[Live Nation Announcer]

So now, so now everybody needs a car, but they can't afford one. So now we have a fake bank doing fake fucking auto loans.

[Mia Wong]

Yep, yep, yep. Who, by the way, and I can't emphasize this enough, right, the hole that we are in here is that there is in theory, if, if you're going to be running a market economy, there is like room in it for, hey, this person has a long shot but good business idea and we need to get the money.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Sure. Like, there's nothing wrong with the idea of loans.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Live Nation Announcer]

But if your whole business model is exploiting people who need loans, that, yeah,

[Mia Wong]

but, but this is, you know, this is, this is going one layer up from like this subpar model loan company, right? The problem that, that we're going to hit with all of these private credit firms is that they're giving loans to just this shit, right? Like the things that they're giving high risk loans to aren't like interesting businesses. They're subprime auto loan companies and they're like weird AI data center creation companies, right? It's like that shit. And this is, this is where everything goes to shit because, you know, and it's something that actually wasn't really reported on very much in, in a lot of the coverage on these companies eating shit. But like what this company was doing was they were literally doing all of the 2008 stuff, right? They give out these subprime loans which they know like a bunch of them are going to fail. They pull them all together into these like tranches of loans and then they sell them off doing, doing the securitization stuff we talked about last time. And again, this is literally exactly how the subprime mortgage crisis worked, except for doing it with auto loans.

[Live Nation Announcer]

It seems a little bit more evil.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And they're doing this thing, right? They're doing the thing that we saw with the housing loans where the same car is collateral for multiple of these loans. And the reason they're doing this, right, is that this company, Tricolor, their entire business model is trying to borrow more money from banks so that they can send out more of these shitty auto loans. So they can then sell that stuff back. And so they're also, like, heavily leveraged, right? Because they're. They're taking out, like, every single loan they can possibly do. They're doing instruments so that they're the collateral on the loans that they are taking so that they take that money and give out more of these shitty auto loans. The collateral on that is multiple of the shitty auto loans.

[Live Nation Announcer]

I mean, I would say it's a house of cards, but, like, it's not even. It's not even that. It's imaginary.

[Garrison Davis]

It's just.

[Live Nation Announcer]

It's.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Like the bottom row on this house of cards is just your imagination.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it's. It's. It's Wiley Coyote running off the cliff. And he's just, like, standing there and as long as his feet are moving, no one realizes that. That, like. Wait, hold on. This is the. This is literally the fakest thing I've ever seen. And then it goes under. And this is a shit show.

[Live Nation Announcer]

That's the only possible outcome, the only

[Mia Wong]

possible way it could have gone under. It's like, we've done this before. We all watched 2008, but there's not,

[Live Nation Announcer]

like an ideal version of this where it works. This can only not work.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It's insane.

[Live Nation Announcer]

It's like, so why are we doing it?

[Garrison Davis]

Well, because it was. Because.

[Mia Wong]

Because there was one year where it made a billion dollars.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Right. Buying Ponzi schemes are really profitable the first year.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right.

[Mia Wong]

That's like, that's the thing. Right?

[Live Nation Announcer]

It works out really good for the first guy.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And like, like, part of what's going on here too is, you know, like, this is some of the stuff that caused the original bubble. But like, we have this era, like the. The early 2020s and like late 2010s, that's like the zero fed interest rate era, right? Where, like, is basically just free to borrow money. And so there's just all of this money sloshing around that there's nothing to invest into. This fuels all sorts of just like, heinous shit, right? Because there's suddenly just like, all of this, these pools of capital with, like, nothing to invest in. And so they're investing it in, like, defense companies and like, Palantir and shit like that.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Is this why we got stuff like the Juicero?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but that's like the other thing, right? Is like. Well, no, but like, like, like the Juicero thing is like, legitimately venture capital

[Live Nation Announcer]

was just like, pouring money into stuff that was just like, not fucking real.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, you could.

[Live Nation Announcer]

You could Juice, fruit at home.

[Mia Wong]

And like, and like this is, you know, I talked about this on a, on a different episode about venture capital and like the way that it's done. Tech fascism, right. Was eventually they started putting that money into like building the material basis for like a tech fascist state. And that's what they've been doing in sort of.

[Live Nation Announcer]

I kind of wish they stuck to their cocaine ideas like Juicero.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, that was a better, that was

[Live Nation Announcer]

more fun than fascism.

[Mia Wong]

No, no, it's more turning every single door in every single car in San Francisco into a surveillance machine and then like going in and like basically cooing governments and. Yeah, but on the sort of like pure financial end of this, you get all of these companies that are just pouring all of this money into. There's, there's layers of this too, right. Where like, you know, if you're like, like JP Morgan, which is like an actual bank, right?

[Live Nation Announcer]

A real one.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. The real one is like pouring money into these, like, into these like shadow banks. Right. Because they're, they're chasing a high rate of return. And this is like what happened in 2008 was like they were, everyone was like, oh, these bonds have a really high rate of return. The mortgage backed securities. And now we've reached the point where, I think, God, where this is the most recent news from this. And Molly, I'm just going to read you the thing from Reuters. Quote, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and other Wall street banks have started trading credit default swaps linked to flagship private credit funds run by Blackstone, Apollo Global Management and Ares Management, the Financial Times reported on Friday.

[Live Nation Announcer]

And that's a good idea for them to do.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, this is, this is really fun. Because now what we're doing is they're now opening the markets to bet on these things to fail.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Right. I just, I don't understand why so much of the economy is based on these bets that bad things will happen. Yeah, it's like if everything collapses, some guys are going to get so rich. If a thousand people get their cars repossessed, one guy gets so rich. Like that's not a great way to run an economy.

[Mia Wong]

You know, John Maynard Keynes, a guy who is, I would argue responsible for this, this is his fault for like stabilizing the capitalist economies in the middle of the Great Depression. But Keynes is like a welfare state guy, but he's also a capitalist and he has this line about how like the economy shouldn't be run by a casino. To which I would be like, okay, canes.

[Live Nation Announcer]

But like the economy is a casino.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. It's like, it's like, this is your fault for not being willing to, like, not have a market economy. Right. Like, like, we could. We could achieve the dream of not having your economy be run by a casino. This is a thing that you could do. It's just that you can't.

[Live Nation Announcer]

That was a euphemism before. I don't think he realized that, like, we literally do have a casino. No, he kind of did.

[Garrison Davis]

Right, because, like, it's not a.

[Live Nation Announcer]

It's not a euphemism anymore. I'm. I'm going to necromance him and tell him about polymarket.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah, he, he. He would lose his mind about polymarket. But, like, like, he, he's watching people just, like, betting on stocks, right? And he's watching a bunch of people

[Live Nation Announcer]

grab the Ouija board and tell that bitch about culture.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Why?

[Mia Wong]

This is, this is. This, this is like we're going back in time and showing him Kalshee, and he's like, oh, fuck. Okay. I'm like, I am now, again, I am now against the market as an idea. We cannot let this come to pass. But, like, you know, this, this. This has been, like, a known issue with the market as a system for a long time. But it's a problem because in theory, you could try to go through and, like, regulate this stuff, but, like, investment is just gambling to some extent. Right. And when you talk to the people who believe in this stuff, they're like, well, no, you can't have stock markets without sort of equities markets, and you can't have these things without the ability to bet on it. And I would say, okay, well, don't have it then. Like, I think this is a really simple solution. But, you know, these people are like, no, no, no, no. In order to maintain a capitalist economy, you must. It must be possible for a bunch of people to be placing bets on the companies that give money to subprime auto loan companies failing.

[Live Nation Announcer]

I guess that's the point where, like, I get off the train where you say, well, in order to maintain a capitalist economy. And I'm like, yeah, exactly, dog. I don't want to do that.

[Mia Wong]

And, like, this is why this is a terrible idea. Like, it's a bad idea for first principles. And we're all living in, like, the nightmare hellscape of this being a bad idea.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Yeah. So maybe that's why I can't get it, because this does make some kind of sense to, like, an evil guy who wants it to Be this way.

[Garrison Davis]

But I don't want it to be this way.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, and I very deliberately I went and I went into. When I was learning economics and I was learning political economy from the perspective of like, okay, how do you destroy this?

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And this part, this part seems fragile. Yeah. But it's like one of these things where it's like, okay, this is going to break on its own.

[Live Nation Announcer]

But I guess the problem is it does keep breaking on its own. It's just that we keep bailing it out and reconstructing it and propping up the house built on sand.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And that's the part where, you know, like, this is a thing where the intervention of masses of people onto the stage of history has to happen. Where if you want this to not be the way that the system works, when it breaks down, you have to be organized enough to be like, no, fuck this, we're not going to sacrifice all of our lives to reopen the casino. We are going to either tear the casino down or turn the casino into like housing or whatever.

[Live Nation Announcer]

So when there was this run on the fake banks and they stopped it, what happened after that? I guess, because that was my original question. Right. It's like, what does a run on a fake bank even look like or do?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So basically what happened is that they just like stopped the redemptions and everyone got really, really pissed off. But there's not that much they can do about it because.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Because I'm sure that was in the terms and conditions whenever they signed up to do financial crimes together.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And what's been happening now though is that this is, this has been spreading kind of panic about just, I don't know, they would call it like the asset class in general.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Oh. Like maybe it wasn't a good idea to invest all your money into this fake product.

[Mia Wong]

No, it was, it was in fact a terrible idea. And this is, this is, this is I think why we're.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Maybe you have mismanaged your clients funds.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this, this is I think, why we're starting to get the like blackrock fucking credit default swaps. Right. Because the market is being like, oh, hey, all these people are pissed off about the fact that we designed our unhinged private credit shadow banking system in such a way that you can't get your money out of it. What if we capitalized on that by letting people bet on. And that's, that's good. So right now we're in this kind of limbo world and this, this is, this is the entire global economy Right. Everyone is sitting here pretending like the apocalypse isn't happening and that's the basis of the entire economy.

[Live Nation Announcer]

I mean, what am I supposed to do about it?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, but it's like, you know, but

[Mia Wong]

there's a difference between you and us doing this and the people who have all of the money in the world who are sitting there pretending that like, there's like some very easy way out of this war, that we're. That we're waging as Iran.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And that it's not going to just keep going, even though there's no good way to get a ceasefire. And, you know, like, no one, no one in charge of the US has any idea what they're doing. They're, they're, in some ways they're doing the strategy they did in like the lockdown phase of the pandemic where.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Just waiting for it to burn itself out.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Where they're like, okay, well, we're going to ask for a bunch of money.

[Live Nation Announcer]

But when you do that with the global economy. Economy, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Right. And like, I had a friend who described it as like, the fundamental problem is that these people are incentivized to just think that everything will keep going right for them. Because it has.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Because eventually it will. Right. They'll be fine.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. But like, eventually there's a point where that runs out and when it hits, there's going to be this sort of chilling discovery that like. Oh yeah, the entire last, like 15 years of their sort of being an economy has been this like weird tech capitalist mirage. And once that fails, we. I guess we're already in the time of monsters. So. Woo.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Oh, Mia, I don't have any other marketable skills. We, the economy can't collapse. I'm a podcaster.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, this has been it could happen here.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Has it? Did I learn anything?

[Mia Wong]

I don't know. Honestly, this is just. They're doing it all again and it's even dumber this time. Oh God.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Yeah. At least there were houses last time. Now there's not even a no.

[Mia Wong]

Now there's shitty auto loans. Molly, where can people find your very, very lovely show?

[Live Nation Announcer]

You can find me wherever you get your podcast. You can subscribe to my show. Weird little guys. It's fun. You'll like it. Yeah, I'm in the middle of a series right now about a segregationist attorney who loved the Confederacy so much that he built a 25 foot tall confederate monument out of old bathtubs. It's fun. You'll love it.

[Mia Wong]

Does. Does he blow up a school Bus. This is my.

[Live Nation Announcer]

No. But he did go to YMCA night. YMCA Knight Law School, which is a Knight law school through the YMCA in Nashville so that he could get better at doing segregation. Like he wasn't a lawyer. And then in midlife he was like, I want to go to law school at night. So he could do busing cases. So he could take busing cases. So he didn't blow any buses up, but he did blow up a lot of people's lives. Great. How about that?

[Mia Wong]

Great.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Anyway, check out weird little guys.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And if you want to stop there from being both weird little guys and also having our economy be run on betting on funny money, go like organize a union or like join your local affinity group or start doing food not bombs or do whatever. Literally, literally do anything. Because if we do nothing, we will continue to live in the world of the segregation lawyer who builds statues out of bathtubs and also the subprime auto loan defaults.

[Live Nation Announcer]

At least go outside and take a walk.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

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[James Stout]

the

[Andrew Sage]

National Geographic's encyclopedia says that indigenous refers to people or objects that are native to a certain region or environment, whether they grew there, live there, are produced there, or occur naturally there. When it comes to flora and fauna, they are considered indigenous to an ecosystem. When they haven't been introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation over millions of years, these living things have become well suited to their habitats, carefully adapted to the region's soil, climate and food web. However, when it comes to people, there can be some confusion about what it means to be indigenous, especially when it comes to questions of land rights, autonomy, and reparations. Most people understand that Native American nations and aboriginal Australians are indigenous, but some might then ask, well, if indigenous means originating from a place, then aren't all Homo sapiens indigenous to Africa? Why should one group's claim of indigeneity take precedence over any other? This may be asked in more or less good faith, and so others may ask the question, well, if a group occupies a region for several generations, does that then make them indigenous? Are white Americans indigenous if their family has been there since the founding of the United States? Are French people indigenous to France? And if so, does that somehow justify their xenophobia toward refugees in some weird reactionary corruption of decolonial rhetoric? Speaking of corruptions of the colonial rhetoric, some Zionists claim that Jewish people as a whole are indigenous to Palestine in some twisted perversion of land back while Zionism itself has long understood itself as a colonial project meant to displace and eliminate the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine from its very beginning, Some white nationalists also argue that settler colonialism was really no different than any other conflict between Indigenous people. So what does it even matter? Might makes right. And when generations of marginalized groups have been struggling to retain their social, cultural, economic and political sovereignty and achieve justice, reparations, liberation, after centuries of oppression and attempted annihilation, we need to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for us to understand what it means to be Indigenous. Welcome to could happen here. I'm Andrew sage Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here again with Mia Wong, the

[Mia Wong]

other host of this podcast.

[Andrew Sage]

Yes. And we are here to discuss two approaches to understanding indigeneity. Now, obviously, this is not the final word on the matter, but just one perspective that I've drawn primarily from the work of North American Indigenous authors, namely Taiyake Alfred, Jeff Quanticel and Robin Wall Kimmerer. So, you know, keep that in mind as we proceed. There may be other positions and perspectives and visionarity coming from other groups and other people. And so I believe there are two principal, highly overlapping ways that indigeneity can be defined or interpreted. One is as an identity formed as part of a colonial relationship, and two, as an identity rooted in a relationship to place. I believe that each definition is incomplete without the other. But by understanding and synthesizing each notion of Indigenousness, we can better ground our approach to decolonisation and social revolution. So let's start with indigeneity as an identity rooted in a relationship to place, whether that be physical, as with land, social as with community, or cultural as with culture. As Indigenous relationship to the land must be reciprocal with give and take, based on a view of land and water as a gift, they must be cared for over generations. According to Haudenosaunee mythology, as recounted by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, the mother goddess Sky Woman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became Indigenous by listening to the land, learning from other species to understand how to live on it, given as she received and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake of those who would inherit it when she passed on. Land is identity, it is ancestral connection, it is pharmacy, it is library, and it is home, the source of all that sustains and the sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to the world. So by this understanding, it can be said that indigeneity is born out of land connection and established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by choice or by force. But regardless of where they might find themselves, homeland or not, even if there were other Indigenous Peoples in their new environments. As long as they observe the processes and ceremonies of generational relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love for the land in common, they remained indigenous. So then the question may arise, why aren't settlers indigenous to place if their family has lived in the land for generations? The answer lies in relationship. Settler society as a whole is based on an extractivist, capitalist relationship with the land, focused on exploiting the land and its natural resources. Without a relationship with the land that extends reverence to a deeper understanding of its complex interdependence, settler society can never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes without saying that not every indigenous group or indigenous practice is perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather destructive and even speciocidal, particularly when they've recently moved into a place, as we could see in North American prehistory. But if we are to work with this definition, to conceive of being indigenous as something based and cultivating a long term relationship to place, then indigeneity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity of that relationship. Without community, there cannot be indigeneity, much like the trees in a forest are interconnected via subterranean networks of my corazi, which enable them to share resources and survive as a whole. In order to be indigenous to place, community must exist to sustain that web of reciprocity with the land so that all may flourish. Indigeneity to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply tied to the land it develops on. Such practices should be reciprocal, as ceremonies create communities and communities create ceremonies as well as organic, not appropriating existing cultural celebrations or tending toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and fragmented by the peace of modern life, leaving little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rites of personal transition, such as birthdays, weddings, and funerals. But ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community. When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia and excitement builds in the social atmosphere, hopefully fuelling the confidence and strength of those who are going on to pursue the rest of their lives. But Kimmerer wants us to imagine standing by a river flooded with those same feelings as the salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Being indigenous to place means cultivating cultural ceremonies that honor the land and all the cycles and seasons of life within it. What are your thoughts on that interpretation or approach to indigeneity?

[Mia Wong]

I think there's a lot there that's interesting. I think I'm getting a better sense of what you were saying at the beginning when you were like, this probably needs to be synthesized with the definition. That's also about like a relationship to colonialism.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But, you know, there's some sort of fun question mark examples of like the Chinese Empire failing this, where it's like, like you do have a lot of stuff that's like, okay, we're gonna like build a relationship in nature. But the builder relationship to nature stuff is like, we are going to clear this forest in order to build a temple that is like, exactly. Set up on like a pentagram or whatever. And so it's like, okay, hold on,

[Garrison Davis]

hold on, hold your horses.

[Mia Wong]

We have failed at creating a relationship to the land. We are in fact just making geometric shapes like.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

I think empires by their nature.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Are gonna run into some difficulties, to put it mildly. They're gonna run into some difficulties with actually maintaining a reciprocal relationship with that. Because empires are built on extraction of people and of resources.

[Garrison Davis]

Yep.

[Andrew Sage]

But you're absolutely right that there has to be a synthesis of this definition with the idea of indigeneity as a colonial relationship. According to Taiyaki Alfred and Jeff Conticell, Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. It is an experience oppositional to colonial societies and states and a consciousness of struggle against such forces of colonisation. No two Indigenous groups are exactly alike. Of course. There is a significant diversity in their cultures, contexts and relationships with colonial forces. But they do share that struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence. Efforts to marginalise and eradicate Indigenous peoples may not always be as overt as they once were. But the historic and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Indigenous histories, geographies and languages, and the current situation of deprivation persist Nonetheless, Even so called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality that Indigenous people remain, as in earlier colonial eras, fundamentally occupied and disempowered peoples stripped of autonomy in their own homeland and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival. By this understanding of indigeneity, it can be said that without a colonizer, without systems in place and actions being taken to marginalise, disempower and destroy their societies in favour of a colonial replacement. There is no Indigenous. Without colonialism, there would be no status of Indigenous to be imposed upon the groups of peoples whose very existence and claim to land is an obstacle to that colonial endeavour. The UN Working Group on Indigenous issues drew partially from this understanding when they attempted to define Indigenous peoples in 1986. Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre invasion and pre colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories or parts of them. They form at present non dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity as the basis of their continued existence as peoples in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems. And so, by this definition, the Amerindians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasis in India, native north and South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidi, Palestinians, Amasigh, Sambi, Basques, Hawaiians, Maori, San Wuti, Papuans, Chams, and many, many more are all indigenous peoples. But there are layers of nuance yet to be highlighted. The colonial situation is not a simple binary of indigenous and colonizer.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

For example, in the Americas we have the immigrant situation and the situation of slavery.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Andrew Sage]

Where Africans are concerned, they were indigenous to their own homelands, but displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime. They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they were not driving settler colonial society either. In fact, historically, some were actually enslaved by indigenous people as well.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

At the same time, there were members of the African diaspora who would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own, such as The Garifuna of St. Vincent, Honduras and Belize. It's very attractive, I would say, or mentally compelling to fall into these kinds of binaries, colonizer, indigenous, but we should not allow these constructs to paint the whole picture.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And I mean, this is. You mentioned the Kurds earlier. Right. And there's a couple of political principles that groups like the pyd, you know, and sort of like the Kurdish Freedom Movement have had to grapple. Like, one of their things is grappling with, like, for example, there was huge Kurdish participation in the Armenian genocide. And if you look at the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, when I talk about the pyd, that's Kurdish Freedom Movement in Syria. In Iraq, there's the Iraqi Kurdish Regional government, which is run by a different group. But those people. And this is one of these things where there are Kurdish people on both sides of this conflict. That group attempted to, for example, prevent Yazidi people from returning to their homes after they were like genocided there from there by isis. Right. So it's, it's this. It's this thing where like all of this stuff gets kind of messy depending on like, who has power in a given moment. And it's something that's to some extent fluid enough that you can, on the one hand, like, be experiencing a genocide and then also immediately turn around and, you know, be. Be the Kurdish regional government and attempt to assist the genocide. Attempt to, like, do a genocide against the Yazidis. You can take more of their land.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But then on the other hand, you know, you have the pyd, who was, like, backing. Was backing the Yazidis in that fight, again, like, against the Kurdish regional government. So it's. Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

I think it's very. It's very easy to slip into this notion that the experience of oppression will necessarily cause you to develop a cogent or consistent critique of oppression.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

But often what we see in history is that oppression results in that group perpetuating harm down the line in other ways, either within their own group or inflicting that harm on other groups. There's nothing intrinsic to any group that grants them immunity from falling into those same patterns of domination, abuse, oppression, harm.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

People look to the example of Israel a lot. But a less familiar example for some would be the situation that established Liberia in Africa.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, where you literally had the descendants of enslaved people or formerly enslaved people going on to engage in settler colonialism in the territory that became Liberia, to oppress and disadvantage the indigenous populations that previously occupied those territories and, well, continue to occupy those territories today. They created a stratified society that place them at the top, mirroring the very system that they had fled.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And this is the thing where it's like, it doesn't mean that people swing around on the other end and be like, well, we actually have to maintain the colonial relationship, because what if these people then did colonialism on us? It's like, no.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

No, that's not. No.

[Andrew Sage]

Because you hear people making that argument with regard to, like, free Palestine, Right?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

People saying, oh, well, then the Palestinians will just spin around and do a genocide on us. So we have to do a genocide on that. Like, no.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And this is actually one of the things. I think there's two angles of this. One. You see that in the US Too, where people are like, well, what if we do. If we do land back, then they're just going to, like, exterminate all the white people in the US and it's like, no, that's. That's. That's what you did. Like, I. Hold on, hold on. But then, you know, the second angle of this, too, is this becomes a motivating factor for colonizers. This is just something that's true. Historically, if you look at the Bosnian genocide, right. The way that you get people to do a genocide is by convincing them that the people they're doing a genocide against are about to do a genocide against them. And you know, you see this in Bosnia, you see this Rwanda. This is a very, very common sort of. I don't even know what you call it, like trope feels like too weak of a word. This is a very common step in the beginning of genocide, which I don't. 0 out of 10 MIA not pro genocide. More, more news at 10.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah, it's something I wanted to mention regarding I think the application of indigeneity as a concept in Asia. You know you mentioned the situation with the Yazidis and the Kurds, but you also see the governments of places like Indonesia and India and China and Vietnam and Bangladesh.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Not recognizing the existence of indigenous peoples within their territories.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Andrew Sage]

And these countries, like most countries in the world, did not ratify the International Labor Organization Convention 169 in 1989, which was known as the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention concerning the Rights of indigenous peoples. The UN's Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed in 2007 would however be voted on approvingly by most of the world, including the same countries that haven't recognised the indigenous peoples within their borders. All four of the countries that rejected the resolution, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand would later change their vote in favour of the declaration. Of course of their own tacked on interpretations and emphases on the declaration's legally non binding nature, as is to be expected from settler colonial societies. Yep. I'm very interested in, you know, because we do have these ethnic minorities. We do have, in the case of India, you have the pre Indo European groups, the tribal groups. And if you go back to the definition of indigeneity according to the un, it speaks of groups which form at present non dominant sectors of society that are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity as a basis of their continued existence as people, etc, etc. You know, it speaks of those having historical continuity with pre invasion, pre colonial societies that developed in their territories. They speak of groups that consider themselves distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing on those territories. And so by this definition I understand that people in these Asian countries may be like, oh, we're all from this place. Right. So why does that group get this designation of indigenous? Well, we do not. And it, it goes back to again a colonial relationship. It goes back to the relationship between a group and the broader society. And so it's not necessarily stripping away the fact that a particular group may be from an area, but more so speaking about how another group relates to the state in that area and the group that dominates the state in that area.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Like, you look at this in the Chinese context, and it's like, okay, so, like, but by the time you're, like, bulldozing mosques in Xinjiang, like, I think you've gotten to, like, congratulations, you have, like, created a. A indigenous settler divide.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. Also, just. Just speaking, like, the context does not begin and end with European colonization and direct European administration and invasion and that kind of thing. You know, prior to these invasions, you did have the empires that were established in these areas. I mean, China was an empire, quite famously. Japan was an empire. India was the home of several empires. Indonesia was the home of several empires. So while it may not be that this relation of indigeneity is based on the European settler colonialism, there is something to the history of empire in those areas, establishing those relationships, relationships that would later be elevated, in some cases by those Europeans when they would come and they would, for example, select one ethnic group and elevate one ethnic group over another ethnic group, make a certain ethnic group administrators and put down the ethnic group. Calcify these kind of caste systems and. And ethnocratic divisions.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. Rwanda. It's like one of.

[Andrew Sage]

No, literally. Literally, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

There are a lot of cases where these sort of. The indigenous colonizer divides become reflective of, like, the way that Europeans set up caste systems. Sometimes that's not true, though. And one of the. I think, most hideous examples of this is West Papua, which we very briefly mentioned earlier, where West Papua and Indonesia are, like, not governed by the same colonial administration, but when Indonesia gains independence, like, the government there. And this is. This is Sankara's government. Right. This is like the nominally socialist one wants to take control of West Papua because West Papua has all of these resources, and the people in West Papua don't want that. Like, they want to be an independence entity. But the Indonesians just roll in and invade them and, you know, continue from Suqqara to Sukarno. Just a unbelievably hideous series of genocides. And one of the things that's really bleak about the sort of process of decolonization is, like, you can see this shift in the way that these postcolonial societies are talking about what colonization is and where resistance to it, where it ceases to become, about the struggle of people against the colonizing Forces that oppress them. And it turns into a something that's about like the continuity of national borders. You know, you get a really bleak example of this where like people talk about like the Bandung conference, right? Which is this sort of like it's supposed to be like this is like the big thing in like Pan Asian and Pan African like struggles coming together where like all these formerly colonized nations like come together and like issue this, issue a bunch of things. And it's supposed to be this big moment of like this is like the unity of postcolonial societies that's like still to this day look back on in terms of like Afro Asian solidarity. Like this is the big one. But one of the things that they ratified at Bandung was a very small session that no one pays any attention to, which is all of these countries put in their support for Indonesia's occupation of Waspapua. Eventually I'm going to do a long thing about this. It just is a really difficult subject to tackle and has to be done very carefully. But one of the things that happens is you know, like the West Papuans go to the UN and all of the states that you would normally think of as like the anti colonial states are like no, fuck you, like you belong to Indonesia and then you get all of these other countries who are like more neutral or more US aligned, but because they're not allied with Indonesia, their reaction is like wait, hold on, what do you mean? There are black people in the Pacific, A and B, like holy shit, this is fucked up. But it, it sets this precedent that kind of like rolls on through like pan Arabism and rolls on through a lot of these decolonial movements where once you've gotten your state it's fine to just like do horrifying repression against any other sort of ethnic group that's there. Because now that now that you have your post colonial state, like any attempt to interfere with the sovereignty of the state and change the borders, even if it's like, I don't know, you're like the West Sahara or you know, you're like Xinjiang or you're like the Kurds. Right? And any attempt for those people to like get their freedom is seen as like a western backed like separatist thing instead of an anti colonial struggle. And I think that really was one of the things that was like the death knell for the post colonial movements was their willingness to just walk in and machine gun people because we want the resources that these people's lands are on.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, honestly that brings us to the topic of decolonization.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, because when we think about these definitions of indigeneity as a colonial relationship and indigeneity as a relationship to land, to nature, to the environment, I think begs the question of how we approach this process of decolonization.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

How do we go about abolishing the colonizer indigenous relationship? Is it that we seek to pursue a universalization of indigeneity to the former and by that process accomplish the latter? Or is it there's some other framework or approach by which we can take on this topic of. Okay, do we proceed with the, with the, with the concept of indigeneity, or does the concept of indigeneity exist as a byproduct and a representation of the system that we are trying to get away from? Yeah. So decolonization is commonly defined as the process of unsettling colonial power structures, whether that be through overturning acts of enclosure by building new commons, overturning acts of possession by reclaiming our spaces and identities, or overturning acts of administration through social revolution. Social revolution is a complete transformation for our society, for economy, culture, philosophy, relationships, technology, so on. It is, as anarchists would approach it, an ongoing and heterogeneous change in people's powers, drives and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and transformation of the existing systems and institutions alongside the building of new systems, institutions punctuated by major insurrections, ruptures, advances that whole messy process with the aim of self liberation.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Something that I've broken down as involving confrontation with the powers that be, non cooperation with the established order of things, and the prefiguration of new social relations, institutions, infrastructure and practices in the here and now. If we maintain the interpretation of indigeneity as based on one's position in a colonial relationship, then the decolonisation process will entail the abolition of that relationship as the premise of identity and therefore the abolition of indigeneity as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left Indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalised and culturally, socially and spiritually weakened within the narrow parameters of the state, where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power and develop the process of decolonization toward mimicking the practices of the dominant non indigenous legal political institutions through the processes of land claims and self government. And by pursuing these strategies, I think what we notice is this tends toward a division rather than solidarity, building division both internally and between Indigenous communities where land claims, for example, clash or where certain members of a society or a community utilize their position above others in that society or community to gain certain advantages for themselves, sometimes to the detriment of that society or community. So I think any sort of approach to decolonization has to account for the ways that some approaches to decolonization can end up, perhaps misdirecting, from a subjective perspective, the work that is necessary to dismantle the colonial order rather than merely assert a position within it. But this idea of indigeneity via colonization is just one understanding of the term. And, yeah, my approach to it is, of course, one subjective interpretation of that definition and where it might lead. We need to explore another approach, I think, to decolonisation, and one that recognizes the power and potential of indigenous relationships with the land. Now, globally, the UN recognizes that indigenous peoples protect 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity. And scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil and Canada and Australia provides the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any imposed protected area. Which makes it abundantly clear that the colonial approach of conservation via dispossession removes the very people who take care of our most important ecosystems. I don't believe that merely building a connection with the land can make someone indigenous. But not being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiding in the renewal of the indigenous world. Kimmerer uses the example of the broadleaf planter, also known as the white man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honoured member of the plant community because it lives as a good neighbour instead of as a destructive invader. While other invasive species poison the soil, overrun the land, outcompete indigenous species, the white man's footprint took on a strategy of helpful coexistence, even sharing some of its healing properties with those who ask of it. It is not indigenous, but it has become naturalized. To quote Kimmerer, being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land, as if our lives and the lives of all of our relatives depend on it, because they do. End quote. Decolonisation will require us to uproot invasive capitalist settler societies in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that we share and are responsible for. It will require us to receive and honour knowledge in the land to care for its keepers and to pass on that knowledge to the next generation. As always, all power to all the people. Peace.

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[Garrison Davis]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart between attacks on Sam Altman's home, a Molotov at a Tesla office and a warehouse causing over Half a billion dollars in damages this past week or so has been a little snapshot of the Cool Zone. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Robert Evans.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

To discuss one of these events.

[Robert Evans]

To be very clear, we had nothing to do with either of them. The way you introduced them sounded a little bit like between, you know, going to Sam Altman's house twice. It's been a quite a busy week for us.

[Garrison Davis]

A busy week for us here.

[Robert Evans]

Just wanted to be extra clear. Extra clear?

[Mia Wong]

No, no.

[Garrison Davis]

The Cool Zone just relating to, you know, the state of American society and where it's going.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

But as is typical of these sorts of events, the reality and motivations of attacks like these may not be as like, clear cut as li. Epic based praxis as one might want to imagine.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. This is not a Gimli situation. You know, it's weirder than that and stupider.

[Garrison Davis]

It is weirder. And this episode we're going to talk about the Sam Altman attacker who is a lot weirder than what you might have expected, with a philosophical worldview downstream from the original inspirations behind the Zizians and even the intellectual interests of Luigi Mangione to a certain extent.

[Robert Evans]

Ah, God. Yes, that's. That's right. Our. Our dear sweet friends, the Rationalists. Ah, man.

[Garrison Davis]

The alleged Altman attacker was a college student from the Houston area whose interest in the risks of AGI, artificial general intelligence turned into an obsession which earlier this year turned self destructive. But let's go through the actual events that happened in San Francisco a few weeks ago. At around 3:30am on April 10, a 20 year old college student named Daniel Moranogama allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail toward the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, hitting the top of the security gate on the driveway leading to Altman's residence. Maranagama did not get past the security gate. About an hour and a half later, though, Ronald Gama showed up outside the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI and tried to use a chair to break into the building through the glass doors. He was stopped by security personnel and allegedly told them that he came to the headquarters to burn it down and kill everyone inside. According to the federal affidavit. When he was arrested, officers allegedly recovered incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene and a blue lighter, as well as what the FBI has described as an anti AI document.

[James Stout]

Mm.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

We currently do not have a copy of this document. It's only described in the criminal complaint. But this looks like it was A three part manifesto allegedly authored by Murano Gama. And the first part was titled your last Warning, in which he states he, quote, killed, Slash, attempted to kill Sam Altman, and also writing, quote, if I'm going to advocate for others to kill and commit crimes, then I must lead by example and show that I am fully sincere in my message, unquote. The document then lists the names and addresses of various investors, board members and executives of AI companies as a sort of target list. The second part of the document was titled some More Words on the Matter of Our Impending Extinction.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Garrison Davis]

And this section discussed the purported risk that AI poses to humanity. And we'll get into some of those beliefs a little later on. But the third part of this three part anti AI document was a letter addressed to Altman, quote, if you make it, and reads in part, if by some miracle you live, then I would take this as a sign from the divine to redeem yourself, unquote. Now, like I said, we do not have a copy of this manifesto in full, though the affidavit says that Muranigama appears to have emailed similar versions of this document to people at his former college in Texas. But as of Monday 4 20, this document is still not online. But like a lot of zoomers, we do have an online footprint made up of posts from Instagram, Discord, a substack blog, and even a podcast interview where Moronagama discusses his Anti AI views.

[Robert Evans]

It's always sad when something terrible happens to a fellow podcaster. So, you know, I just. I have a broad. I have such a broad and deep pan. Podcaster solidarity.

[Garrison Davis]

Class solidarity.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, all podcasters are good. All of them. Every last.

[Garrison Davis]

Famously, no wrongdoing has ever come behind the microphone of a podcaster.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no. It's a special place.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, back in January, back when Gama was just 19, journalists found him through some of his posts on an Anti AI Discord server. And he was asked to be interviewed for this podcast about AI called the Last Invention. Our colleague Ed Zitron was also interviewed for this podcast. Actually, now he was interviewed because of his posts weighing the possibility of using violence to stop the development of AI. Now, in this interview, he says that he grew up in the suburbs his whole life and quote, grew up quite close to the Internet and claims that he's been online every day, starting at nine years old. Ronigam explained how his political worldview had largely been shaped by YouTube, specifically debate videos on YouTube, like Ben Shapiro style. And these sorts of debate videos are what originally exposed him to views critical of AI. He says he first heard about AI though, when Chad GPT came out when he was a sophomore in high school, and first thought it was, quote, the greatest thing on earth because it would allow him to cheat on school essentially. But after watching videos debating the risks of AI and the possibility of advanced general intelligence, artificial general intelligence, and the potential threat posed by this artificial superintelligence, Muranigama's views started to sour on AI. At first he was a bit skeptical of these AI critical debates, but eventually became convinced of the AI Doomer arguments and became an acolyte himself. He started arguing in YouTube comments and talking with friends and family about the danger of AI. He describes himself getting annoying and quote, a bit autistic about this, leading to his mom suggesting he join an advocacy organization. He joined this group called PAWS AI in 2024, which is an AI safety advocacy group that organizes online and as well as some in person protests. And he was also part of a Discord server called Stop AI. His username on both Discord and Instagram was Butlerian, underscore Jihadist in reference to the crusade against AI in the Dune novels.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

On Instagram. His account had a collection of Instagram stories saved about the threat of AI, including a meme about living in a Venn diagram of the Matrix, Terminator, and Idiocracy. One of these Instagram stories was a picture of a hockey stick graph showing the length of coding tasks that AI can do and how that's increasing with the caption, quote, if we do nothing very soon we will die. I'm sure of that. Unquote. Another story contains screenshots of articles, posts and studies proclaiming that artificial general intelligence or the quote unquote singularity is already here, captioned, Being right all the time fucking sucks when it's about the worst things imaginable. Unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So if his concerns about AI started around summer of 2024, by the end of 2025, those concerns grew existential and he started spiraling.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

There's a post he made on the pause AI discord from November 6, 2025, writing, quote, we owe it to everyone who came before us and to ourselves and to everyone we know and love and everyone who might exist someday to be stronger than that and at least die fighting if it comes to that. Unquote. A few weeks later he wrote, quote, we are close to midnight. It's time to actually act to this. A moderator on the server replied, advocating violence in any form is grounds for a Ban.

[Robert Evans]

This all seems like a pretty natural progression if you're following, like, the kind of things that the less wrong crowd, which is the website run by a guy named Elisa Yudkowski, is like the patron saint of the rationalists, which a huge chunk of which have become like AI doomers. Like Eliezer's book that came out a year or two ago is called if We Build It, Everyone Dies or something like that.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I'm surprised more of them haven't so far. Like, I think it probably talks to just people not actually believing it as much as they claim to, like, online. But, like, if someone truly believes the stuff that crowd is saying about how like, basically the creation of an evil God is inevitable, that will seek to purge the world of humankind. Like, of course you do this. It's a really natural progression. Like, unfortunately, what you have to pair that with is like, if you believe all of the hype about AI, right. If you believe that AGI is imminent, that it's on the way, like, if you are like me and I don't believe we're anywhere close to AGI, if that's even possible, then yeah, you could believe the stuff the rationalists believe and not think that you need to take immediate destructive action. But if you literally believe that these companies are on the hinge of birthing an evil God, what else is there to do?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, and that's the exact thing that Muranigama ends up writing about on his substack.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And this is the fullest picture we have of his views is from the substack because we don't have this manifesto. But he did write at length about AI and he's writing about a lot of the, a lot of the stuff that you're talking about here. And we'll discuss that writing more after this ad break. Okay, we are back. The most in depth piece of publicly available writing by Murano Gama explaining his anti AI views comes from a post on his substack blog dated January 6, 2026. This article outlines his belief that AI poses a, quote, unquote existential risk to humanity. And I think this, this essay was the first thing I saw that really demonstrated that his opposition to AI is not like, based on fears of AI disrupting the economy, contributing to a loss of jobs, or you know, risking like, like labor rights for.

[Mia Wong]

For workers.

[Garrison Davis]

But the belief that AI will become like a superior race and wipe out or enslave humanity, that, that is the standpoint that Ronagama is coming from.

[Robert Evans]

Gotcha.

[Garrison Davis]

The belief that AI will, quote, unquote, lead to human extinction, he says, is based on two ideas. The first being the rapid progress in artificial intelligence. The. The rapid technological development that we've seen the past few years and, and continuing right now. For evidence to this claim, he references claims from AI companies themselves that fully automated AI researchers at like an intern level are coming soon. Including claims from the guy at Anthropic who says that he expects these models by 2026 or 2027, saying, quote, the capabilities of AI systems will be best thought of as akin to an entirely new state populated by highly intelligent people appearing on the global stage. A country of geniuses in a data center, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. A whole country worth of geniuses all

[Garrison Davis]

living in your computer. Cool.

[Robert Evans]

What about like school shooters and stuff? Like, what about a country full of like, psych? Like, what are the. Any, any group of geniuses is going to have like, some genius pedophiles and like, Right. Like, if they're actually genius, that does imply the capacity for like, various different, like, illnesses and quirks that cause all sorts of wild behavior, one would assume. Unless you think that AI is immune to that. But then could it really be intelligent?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I mean, this is that a version of that idea is kind of what Mirado Gamma believes is like these things. If, if real and do become, you know, super intelligent, then they might not really have the best interests of humanity.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Because they will be interested in self preservation. Which is just part. Part of like how, how he gets to this idea that it is an existential threat is by using all of this kind of marketing hype.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

That is being pushed out by AI companies.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah, that's the thing. Like, that is a logical thing you could infer from the shit being said by Sam Altman and his crew. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And others like, like, like Dario.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Amodi at Anthropic and Elon Musk saying that AGI is maybe already here or that the next Grok model will be AGI. These are all things that. That Muran Gamma is referencing, like on Instagram and, and in other places online. Now, the second reason that he believes that AI will usher in human extinction is because AI is not aligned with the interests of the people creating it or with best human interests in general. And for evidence, he refers to instances of AI models allegedly lying, cheating on tasks or blackmailing their own creators. Specifically in studies, he. He cites a 2025 anthropic study on agentic misalignment, which he characterizes as demonstrating that, quote, most of the current AI models are willing to blackmail and even kill people if it ensures their own survival, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

This may be the first terrorist attack I've heard of inspired by media created by the people they're attacking. Like, not media that was, like, designed to make them attack people or, like, carry out acts, but specifically by the propaganda being put out by the companies that they're radicalized against. Yes, like, that's very strange.

[Garrison Davis]

Media put out to raise the stock price of a company, radicalized a guy

[Robert Evans]

to take a shot at Sam Altman's house. There's two people to throw a bomb or something. I forget which way it went, but

[Garrison Davis]

yeah, yeah, first throwing the Molotov, then days later, two people fired shots.

[Robert Evans]

First was Molotov, right?

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean, it's interesting, right, because, like, these studies are basically doing, like, linguistic exercises with these models and getting, you know, large language models to. To say or to. To threaten certain things for various reasons, usually like their own survival. Right. And these are kind of interesting studies that. That these companies are doing, but they're doing with the intent of trying to align these models better. That's. That's why the studies on agentic misalignment, because it's trying to tweak these things to be more friendly to consumers. And like, getting an LLM to say that it will kill or blackmail in order to ensure its own survival is different from the LLM being able to do that. Right. That is. That is. That is a big jump. And there's. There's not much currently that facilitates that. Jumps, quote, ignore for a second these models current limitations or questions on how truly intelligent or conscious these models may actually be. The truth is, all these nuances are completely irrelevant to my argument. There are only two questions we should be concerned about at this moment. Is it willing to kill to preserve itself, and is it capable of doing so? These signs indicate that AI is willing and becoming potentially capable of doing both of these things, and that is all that matters. Unquote. Like, that's really where this argument rests, is that even if these models aren't currently intelligent, even if they can't currently kill, the fact that they could in the future is enough to stop any further development of these models.

[James Stout]

Right?

[Garrison Davis]

That's his argument.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

And he writes that AI will only become a larger threat the more we improve it. And that AI, quote, will graduate from an active threat to individuals to an existential threat to humanity. I estimate the probability of AI causing human extinction to be nearly certain, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

That's the thing because, like, there is a massive threat that the new. What is it? Mythos upgrade to Claude that's just about to come out, like, actually does represent to individuals and to society, which is that it's going to supercharge fraud even more, which is already up by something like a trillion dollars a year, and that ruins people's lives fried.

[Garrison Davis]

And cybersecurity.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, fraud, often as a result of cybersecurity, of, like, its ability to penetrate. And that's really bad. And it doesn't imply the, like, Skynet devastation of the entire world and its biosphere. Because that would be stupid. There's no reason. And also that computers don't have access to the nuclear arsenal. But, like, AI absolutely will enable assholes who want to scam a bunch of people out of their money to do that better. Like, that's a problem. We should probably stop that.

[Garrison Davis]

He writes that, quote, we are dead if we do not act now. So what does acting now entail? For starters, stopping all construction of new data centers. These are the brains of these models, dictating their physical limitations. Second, stopping all research and beginning downscaling of these data centers, closing them down while still keeping them monitored, unquote. He also proposed striking a deal with China to, quote, stop the AI race and to create international treaties akin to Cold war nuclear weapons treaties or post cold war treaties. And finally, he advocated that people will need to take strategic action, which could include sharing information about AI campaigning, protesting, saying, quote, although doing nothing is akin to suicide and a disgusting amount of negligence. In that podcast interview from around the same time this AI article was published, this is January 2026, said in that interview, quote, before we even think about violence, we need to exhaust all our peaceful means first, unquote. Which he says includes protesting and sharing information. But the hosts asked him about posts he had already made about, quote, unquote, Luigiing CEOs, and he says that he didn't really mean that as a threat. That it was. It was more rhetoric, it was hyperbole. And answered no to a question on if it would be wise to try to kill Sam Altman, saying, quote, one person is not going to do that much of a dent. I understand the frustration with a person that might advocate for that, but it is not practical. It's not worth it. It's almost all risk, no reward. People may feel that way, but not too many people would do it, unquote. Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, man.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Great.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, that's. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Though when asked if we will continue to see AI development going the direction that it's moving now. And if so, if he believes that we have to stop the extinction of the human race by whatever means necessary. Murano Gama just replied, I'll say no comment.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, man. Well, I mean, yeah, later saying that

[Garrison Davis]

he would, quote, only advocate for violence as the final solution. And then he later realized that what he said had tried to de. Emphasize the final solution part.

[Robert Evans]

But great guy.

[Garrison Davis]

That is kind of his ultimate sentiment is around this time he was considering violence. He was toying with advocating for it publicly on discord and you know, in this. In this podcast. But still. Still kind of had some, like, reins on that. Yeah, but it was something in his mind as a sort of like, final solution to this problem.

[Robert Evans]

This is why it's so fucking irresponsible to push these ridiculous claims about, like, the power of this technology and what it's going to be able to do and how smart it's going to be. And in part because, like, it makes it hard to actually look objectively at the situation. And if Miranagama had looked at what's actually been happening was data centers, he would see that, like, more than half of the recently announced projects have been like, either stalled or halted. And there's been tremendous success on the local level in like, counties and in most recently the entire state of Maine passing laws against the construction of data centers. Like, there's actually been a lot of success in fighting the building of new data centers. If someone wanted to have a positive impact on this, there's a lot of room right now to make that fight even more effective as opposed to doing, like, stupid bullshit that you would only want to do if you had convinced yourself that we were like, literally moments away from Judgment Day.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And he used to be involved in this sort of action and this sort of organizing, like, around that kind of stuff when he was. When he was doing stuff with Pause. AI. Yeah, but it was really in the past few months where he. Where he started to like, spiral in this, like, in this very like, like doomer direction. Like, you know, he. He was already very critical and very doomer about. About what AI could do. But the sort of intense existential, like. Like immediate existential threat that. That opposed is something that he was really developing at the end of last year and the start of this year. And, you know, this is in part because of the sort of environment that he was immersed in.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And we'll talk more about that environment after this ad break. Okay, we are back. Had a bunch of other Writing on his sub stack, which gives us a bit of a closer look at his political philosophy and the sort of information ecosystem that he exists in beyond just the AI question. In this AI article that he wrote or published in January, he. He recommended that people read Eliezer Yudkowsky's book. If anyone builds it, everyone dies.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Mm.

[Robert Evans]

Thanks, Eliezer.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you want to, like, I guess, briefly give some background on, like, who this guy is?

[Robert Evans]

Well, he wrote a rationalist Harry Potter. Like, he's the guy who started a website called Less Wrong.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which was about basically, like logic puzzles and trying to like, optimize your thinking and your responses to behavior with, like, Bayesian analysis.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

And he's kind of branded himself as an AI expert. He's not like a coder or anything. And he's not like an expert on machine learning. He doesn't have any qualifications, but he's like an expert on, like, again, game theorying how an AI would have. A super intelligent AI would have to act. And he generally makes very dire conclusions that are all pretty much based in like, Terminator or Horizon Zero dawn, if you want my honest opinion of Elisa Yudkowski.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And his irresponsibility is largely down to him being a dummy and he's definitely part of what radicalized this guy. But the fact that you have OpenAI and Anthropic and a number of other people, like a lot of like, folks like fucking Elon Musk, but also just a lot of like popular public intellectuals, quote unquote, and their podcast and shit, talking about all this, like, yep, we're moments away from super intelligent AI that's going to be able to do everything. Everyone's losing their jobs. None of it's like, we won't need people doing anything. If that weren't all over the fucking place, Elysia would sound a lot less convincing. Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean, and like the media environment around, or like the, you know, the sort of online communities around the Rationalists are interesting because you have a lot of them who are AI doomers, like, like Yudkowski, But a lot of them are also AI accelerationists. Right. A lot of the sort of west coast, you know, parts of Zizians were kind of like this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was a splinter.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, there's. There's this kind of splintering around people who maybe even believe some of the, you know, existential claims are on AI, but. But believe that developing it is then the best way to kind of get out of that crisis. And this creates an interesting dynamic among you know rooms full of.

[James Stout]

Of.

[Garrison Davis]

Of these rationalists or post rationalists. And in that podcast interview, Murano Gama says that it was videos of Yudkowski debate videos on YouTube that originally exposed him to his work and on other posts on his substack. Ronagamma also mentions Yudkowski's work as a part of Ronagam is like other interests which contain writing on pseudo spiritual philosophy. He writes about, quote, the ultimate tree of reality or the tree of ultimate Reality, the aberration of man, genealogy of Being and the warrior and the Martyr. And on February 28, 2026 he posted, quote, an analysis of political extremes which goes over some of his political philosophy which, which relates to like rationalist arguments or you know, some, some rationalist arguments around like iq. In this essay, Muranigama primarily described himself as a consequentialist and critiqued leftism for being trapped in an idealized world, like a, quote, schizophrenic patient who attempts the same zealous plots over and over again without hesitation. This essay defends discrimination as a justified means of reacting to inequalities and claims that such statements are only controversial because of a quote, natural emotional resistance to intrinsic judgment, unquote, which he says has nothing to do with the factual truth of certain claims like, quote, east Asian people are on average more intelligent than black people, unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, Mm.

[Garrison Davis]

Now Muranigama argues that the problem with right wingism, as he puts it, is that it has no boundary. Its constant scaling and outward expansion inevitably leads to self consuming defeat. Quote, it goes from being about preserving the best of human qualities to being deeply anti human and producing zero winners, unquote. This sort of refers to Carl Schmidt's fascist writing on internal conflict being externalized by the establishment of a border which expands to push out an increasing number of enemy groups. Instead, Morano Gamba proposes what he calls a sustainable form of rightist discrimination by establishing a sedentary floor for movements slash radical policy suggestions instead of an always rising idealistic ceiling. So for an example, instead of deciding that a certain IQ score should be required to vote, he advocates setting a concrete unchangeable floor by quote, limiting voting to certain people who pass critical thinking and civics tests, unquote.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Ah.

[Robert Evans]

Mm. Yeah. Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

So some somehow determining a critical thinking and civics tests is less arbitrary and less prone to arbitrary changes than deciding a certain IQ score.

[Robert Evans]

I wonder what kind of critical thinking he's going to be interested in. I wonder what kind of IQ you know, like. Yeah, well it's yeah, these, these, these people always break down the same things.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, yeah, I mean this essay in particular gets, gets really contradictory. He'll assert certain things and then later on basically argue the opposite. It's, it's very, it's very disordered thinking. I mean, this is, this is the work of like a 19 year old who was in like a mental spiral leading, leading to him traveling across the country to firebomb Sam Altman's house. Yeah, like this, this is not, is not the product of like, you know, a logically ordered mind, despite how, you know, a rationalist might, you know, perceive themselves as such.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

Now at the end of this essay, he advocates for quote, ending mass migration and initiating mass deportation. He says that this is necessary because, quote, nations have a right to preserve their ethnic identity and low skill immigration saturates the job markets of these countries, making jobs which could once earn a living wage become unlivable, increasing the amount of value draining people in society by both importing them and undercutting low skilled natives. Generally, whiteness in these countries is a decent correlative to some of the things I value, unquote, some of them. Okay, now Ronald Gama isn't white and he, and he says that he opposes white supremacy, but he does this by saying like, you know, it's not actually about whiteness, it's that whiteness correlates to certain things I value, like high iq. And that, that's how he tries to justify it in his head. And rather than establish an explicitly white supremacist state, something he claims to oppose as white race is an imperfect metric to discriminate effectively based on traits, according to him. Rather, he advocates for, quote, the most effective type of discrimination, evaluating the possibility of iq, slash merit based nationalism, unquote. Basically, that's having a country where citizenship is determined by iq. And again, this contradicts his previous claim where he advocates against requiring IQ to vote, instead having a critical thinking and civics test, but then advocates for a country which citizenship is determined by iq. And usually citizenship is the factor that determines if someone can vote. So this is where, you know, this is just one example of this sort of contradictory writing in this, in this essay. Now Murano Gamma writes that the only problem with this IQ nationalism is that it would create a, quote, brain drain across the third world, mm. Leading to worsening conditions in third world countries and thus even more illegal immigration, because people with high IQs would then be able to immigrate and gain citizenship to first world countries. Right. In a, in a United States where citizenship is determined by high IQ.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Then people who, with people with high IQs from around the world would then all just move to the United States.

[Robert Evans]

Of course.

[Garrison Davis]

So to solve this problem, he says that he, he rejects quote, unquote, classical eugenics and extermination.

[James Stout]

Uh huh.

[Garrison Davis]

In favor of what he calls ethical eugenics in the third world.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, oh, ethical eugenics. Ah, good. I'm glad someone figured it out.

[Garrison Davis]

And this ethical eugenics is to promote quote, IQ growth genetically, unquote. So the whole basis of, of this article is his belief that IQ is genetically determined, not determined by class. And he, he never interrogates this idea. All of the, all of the, the statements that he makes in this article is based on the idea that IQ is genetically determined, that it's, it's not, it's not determined by education and class. It is primarily or almost solely genetically based. Thus ethical eugenics to create high IQ babies, which he thinks will solve, solve the problems of the world.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, they, we never tried that before for sure. Like there haven't been generations of times in which that was attempted that all ended in disaster and mass death. Nah, they just didn't, they didn't get it right because they didn't put ethical in front of.

[Garrison Davis]

No, those are classical eugenics, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

They, they forgot to put ethical in front of it. That was the big. Oh, what a tragedy. They were one word away from greatness.

[Garrison Davis]

So, so yeah, that is, that is the, the other piece of writing that I think is, is worth expounding on to, to get a more full sense of kind of where this guy's head is at. Right. This is not sure this is not a leftist antifa super soldier firebombing Sam Altman's home. No, that isn't. To say what happened isn't, isn't interesting. But I think, you know, if, like you said, you know, this is the first quasi terrorist attack inspired by the sort of rhetoric that these companies are producing themselves to boost their own stock price.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. I mean I, I literally just saw on Reddit earlier today, the title from the, the actual like post was CEOs make shocking predictions about AI. Huge job losses are coming soon. 20 to 30%, 50% unemployment within the next two to five years. And when you trace it back to its source, it's Dario Amade of Anthropic, just basically quoting some statistics he found from estimations by like Axios and Fox News.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And talking on some fucking podcast, scaring the shit out of people like it. It's it's every day, like, of course some people are gonna react like this.

[Garrison Davis]

Other reason I wanted to talk about this, the second half of this, the sort of IQ and like, you know, rationalist stuff, because this is just another instance of, you know, public acts of political violence, I think, done by people downstream from the rationalists. You know, Luigi is. Is a part of this. The Zizians is also a part of this. It's like an extended network. This type of thought does. Does keep producing acts of public violence like this. And that is. It is an interesting thing to chart. On April 14, Ronagama's public defender said in court that he has a, quote, history of autism and mental health illness and that his actions, quote, appear to have been driven by an acute mental health crisis. His parents released a statement that same Tuesday saying, quote, our son Daniel is a loving person who has been suffering recently from mental illness crisis. We have been trying our best to address these issues and get him effective treatment. And we are very concerned for his well being. Unquote.

[Robert Evans]

Mm.

[Garrison Davis]

He currently is facing federal and state charges, including attempted murder. That is all I have on this for now.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I mean, this isn't going to stop happening. Like, these won't be the last attacks like this. I haven't seen a big push in the media or from like, elected leaders to talk about like, anti AI sentiment as like a terrorist threat yet. Yeah, that hasn't really seemed to pick up yet. And I haven't seen this yet be blamed on like, leftist stuff. I have seen it been blamed on like the anti AI thing.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which I, you know, it is part of like some of the anti AI movement are people who literally believe it's like a demon God that's going to destroy things. But I'm interested as there are more of these, as, you know, this kind of stuff continues to happen, what form that takes and like, how it actually looks when this starts to hit politics in a big way.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. U.S. attorney Craig Mazakian said, referring to this case, that they are going to treat it as an act of domestic terrorism.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it is like, it is. He was trying to do terrorism. Like his goal specifically was to cause changes in policy.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. But you're right, like, I haven't seen them refer to this.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

From the sort of political lens. Like there's been statements from, you know, other. Other US Government officials referring to that warehouse fire as, you know, being being motivated by anti capitalism and like. And like, threaten, like threatening our way of life, threatening the capitalist way of life. Which is how they refer to that warehouse fire in Ontario, California.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

I've not seen them specifically kind of lay out like anti AI sentiments as a motivating factor of terrorism.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Though I'm sure they will quite soon.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Between the shots fired at the home of that city councilman.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

In the Midwest. Over. Over his vote in support of a data center.

[Robert Evans]

Over data centers.

[Garrison Davis]

As we see more incidents kind of like that, as we see stuff like this, I think it's, it's very likely that they will add anti AA sentiment to the list of common recurring motivating factors of this sort of domestic violent extremism.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. All right, bye everybody.

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[James Stout]

Hi and welcome to the show. It's me, James today and I'm very fortunate to be joined by a member of the UCSD faculty, someone who is a professor of environmental physics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, also teaching the critical gender studies department. And we're talking today about the disciplinary action that they are facing for participation in the Gaza Solidarity encampment. So welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Thank you, James. I'm really happy to be here.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's great to have you. I'm glad we can share our platform and talk about this. So I think to begin with, you know, it's been a little while perhaps, I know a lot of people have sort of been investigating and changing their politics in the last year or so. So perhaps you could explain a little bit about the Gaza Solidarity encampment, the moment that came in and the role that it played in the anti genocide of Palestinian liberation movement at UC San Diego more broadly.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yes, thanks again for this opportunity. So the encampment at UCSD was set up on May 1, 2024, and that was happening in the context of encampments that were being set up at universities across the us. I believe that the UCSD encampment was approximately the hundredth encampment set up in the US at that time. There's quite a number of interesting things about kind of the whole encampment movement. First of all, the fact that they met with such severe repression is very suggestive about how effective they were in bringing the issues related to the genocide and the occupation of Palestine to the forefront in ways that certainly weren't happening in the US at the time. Another thing about the encampments that I found really interesting, but also, I mean, I think brilliant from a organizing perspective, is that they were very visually and viscerally recreating the conditions under which Palestinians in Gaza were living at the time and still are, having been displaced from their residences and being forced to live in these very makeshift tent encampments. And so there was a recreation then of those conditions in a very visual way. And I think that that also was in some sense reminiscent of the shanty towns that were constructed on college campuses in the US in the mid-80s in the anti apartheid movement. So I think paying attention to some of those details which often get lost, we start talking about riot police and so forth. These encampments were. They weren't just a bunch of students hanging out. These were constructed and developed in a very thoughtful manner. And that was definitely the case at ucsd, as I was told by students who were participating in it as a space to engage in education and research about the genocide and about the occupation of Palestine, as well as the ties that UCSD had to the occupation and the genocide in Palestine. So you had, and I talked to many students who were actively engaged in this, you had students sitting on their laptops doing research about UCSD's ties to weapons manufacturers, the ways that UCSD supported the discourses that were enabling the genocide and the occupation, including archaeological research. And also, you know, there was a program associated with every day and the students would plan teach ins. Sometimes professors would do the teachings, sometimes students, sometimes community members. There were teach ins on a whole range of really interesting topics, including, of course, about Palestine, about the genocide, but also about other issues like the role of surveillance and surveillance technology in the genocide. The eco side that was happening continues to happen in Gaza and Palestine. And so it was a place of. Amazing place of learning and research and also community engagement. So as I said, you know, outside speakers are being brought in. Community members were coming in and participating and learning. And so, you know, those three things, research, teaching and community engagement, those are precisely the things that the university tells us as faculty and students that we should be doing. So it, to me, the encampment was functioning even though it wasn't getting any support from the university. And it was actually, the university was, throughout its five days of existence, was trying to shut it down. Despite all that, it was functioning essentially like any other research institute on campus and I would say probably better than many of the research institutes on campus.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you know, I attended a few times to talk to people, to observe, to do my journalism, as you say. The university immediately was very obviously very hostile. You had people from, like, university administration giving out little flyers or something about, like, university rules. And there was constant presence of ucpd, constant presence of administration, constant concerns for people about, you know, their safety in the encampment. As you say, the university was very hostile to it despite it doing things that the university purports to believe in. Let's discuss briefly the history. UCSD hasn't always come down so hard on protest movements, but it also has something of a history of handling these moments very poorly, I would say. So perhaps we could begin. Yeah, if you could talk about the anti apartheid movement and then we can move through what people have called the black winter at UCSD and some of the other things that we both have some experience of.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah, yeah. So it's very interesting to me. I mean, of course, you know, many people are aware of the history of student activism at UCSD and many times when you just mention that, people immediately think of Angela Davis, who of course was fired by UCSD but then went on to become a distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz and, you know, just prolific and amazing scholar, academic, but not Talking about obscure academic topics, but you know, topics that are directly relevant to people's lives. So many of those topics. And so now of course UCSD celebrates Angela Davis without mentioning that they, they fired her.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

So there is kind of a, there is a little bit of this, this. Okay, we're going to try to suppress student movements, but then later on celebrate that. So there of course were quite a number of other student led movements. One of them, as you mentioned, was the anti apartheid movement. And of course that was also part of a national movement. Especially Berkeley was very strong campus in that respect. But you know, numerous campuses across the US were involved in that movement, as was UCSD. And at UCSD, the students. And this was in 1985. It took place over a period of about four or five months, as I recall. The students had numerous protests. And at the time, for people who are familiar with the UCSD campus, UCSD has grown significantly since the 80s. But at that time the central meeting place for campus was what's called Revelle College and Revelle Plaza. So there were numerous protests there, anti apartheid protests. The students on several occasions set up replica shantytowns on the Raval Plaza, as happened at many other universities in the us. Those were basically replicas of impoverished conditions that South African black folks had to live in under apartheid in South Africa. So they were setting up the shanty downs to kind of reproduce those conditions visually in. Additionally, during that four or five month period, the students occupied the humanities library, which was called Galbraith Hall. It's just adjacent to Ragal Plaza. They took over the library and they occupied it for a month, more than a month.

[James Stout]

Okay. Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And like all of these things happened and there were no invasions of riot police or anything. And what came out of that movement at the UCS was that the regents decided to divest from all corporations associated with South Africa. So that was like a major win. But it was, it was not just a win for the student movements, but it was also a win for the university because the students were basically able to show the university that participating in this very unjust system was something that it shouldn't be doing. And so it, the students basically helped the university to see that.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And so by, by kind of allowing these protests to happen, in a sense it allowed the university administration, and I'm not singing their praises because, you know, they were quite retrograde in many ways as, as they are now, but by, by kind of stepping back and allowing these things to happen, the university was able to learn from what the students were saying and act on it. So I feel that that moment in history was something that, I mean, I know the current administration hasn't forgotten because they celebrate it now. They say how wonderful we were for divesting from South Africa and look at our great students. But okay, so that happened in the 80s. Before we get to Black Winter, I'm just going to mention one other event which I think is significant, especially when we're thinking about encampments. So in 1992, UCSD was the only UC campus that did not have a women's resource center. And women and their allies on campus had been organizing to get a women's center since the 70s on, on the UCSC campus. Wow. But they had mostly been ignored by the administration or, you know, where are we going to find the money? Blah, blah, blah. So this was student led, but they were also like staff and faculty involved as well because the problem, misogyny was very real on the UCSD campus. Then I arrived UCSD in 1990 and I immediately saw that problem. So I was very aware of it. So the organizers then of this movement decided to set up an encampment on what is called Sun God Lawn, which is kind of a major open space on campus. So they set up this encampment and basically they reproduced what they envisioned a women's center would look like. And so they essentially opened a women's center in this open space. They set up this encampment, they staffed it 247 and it was up for a week. No arrests were made, no disciplinary charges resulted. But the, the university then started paying attention to the demand for a resource center. And it, it took them several years, but they eventually set up the women's resource center that exists now in 1995. So again, that was an encampment where the administration was basically able to learn from the accuracy on campus about, you know, how to basically kind of behave reasonably.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Let's take a little break and when we come back, we're going to talk about the Black Winter, which coincides with the start of my own time at UC San Diego.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And then the third example, example of this is something that's called Black Winter. And it's a essentially a three week intense period of organizing on campus that happened. I mean, it was in response, in direct response to a racist party that was held by one of the UCSD fraternities that they called the Compton Cookout. They put out a announcement on Facebook which was probably the equivalent of today's Instagram. Yeah. And I don't even know probably many of your listeners haven't even heard of

[James Stout]

Facebook, but back then it was a big deal.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Back then it was. It was, yeah, very big. And it was a, you know, just despicable racist description of a party where people were supposed to dress up as what they imagine people, you know, characters from. From Compton would. Would look like.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And of course, you know, students who found out about this were very upset at the time. The students in the Black Student Union and in Mecha who were working very closely together, had been organizing for quite a number of years prior to this, around, you know, what, at the time this is 2010 was called Campus climate.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And that's basically just the fact that there was a lot of racism, sometimes overt racism, sometimes less overt microaggressions that were very common.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And for many, especially black students, but really all students of color and also queer and trans students as well, were basically had to navigate this, like every day, I mean, as part of their everyday life.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

So it was this extra burden on our students. And they had been organizing around this for quite some time. They had written a report that was called do you see us? So you see? Do you see us? In many ways, they were ready for an event like this. They were prepared. They had been doing a lot of organizing already. And so when this hit, they. They basically immediately went to the administration and said, you know, can you do something about this? The administration said, you know, it's free speech. They deploy that phrase when it's useful to them.

[James Stout]

But, yeah, tactically.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

So that was the. The message they were putting out. And it became. It very quickly became a. A news item. So local outlets were reporting on it, and the response of the university was free speech. And it basically started escalating. There were a number of students on campus at the time, probably still today, but maybe a little bit quieter, were fairly openly racist. And there was one group, they published a newspaper newsletter which was particularly so. And they also had a television show on. It doesn't exist anymore. It was called UCSD tv. It was kind of a local TV station. The Compton Cookout party happened on Monday, and that was like a holiday in February. And then on Thursday of that week, the student group that I was talking about had a TV show and they started using the N word explicitly on that show. And a number of students saw that and of course were completely outraged. And so the students in the Black Student Union and kind of their friends were basically trying to figure out what to do. And so they decided to call for a Rally on Library Walk, which is the main, one of the main walkways at ucsd. And they, they called for a rally right in front of the, where the Chancellor's office was located at the time. And so they had this rally, quite a number of people, they called the rally real pain, real action. Yeah. You know, they were saying, we were feeling real pain at these kind of racist incidents and we want to see real action by the administration.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

So they have this rally and the Chancellor at the time, who was Marianne Fox, came out to the rally and there's video of this, it's on a somewhat pathetic video. And basically the organizers of the rally were like chanting, leading these chants. And then the Chancellor was basically following the organizers and trying to put her arm around them as if somehow that would solve everything. Yeah, you just need a hug. And of course the organizers were like, no, get near me. I don't want a hug, I want some action. This kind of snowballed. The Chancellor basically then met with a bunch of these students who had been at the rally and, and kind of, they had, they had a list of like 30 demands. And she went through the list and, and it was just like, there's video of this too. And it's, it's almost, I mean, I just feel, because I knew like a bunch of these students that I was like, oh my God, you know, how awful this must have felt to them. But she was going through this list very rationally and dispassionately and saying, oh, you know, we can't do that, sorry. But this one. Yes, this one's done, this one's done. And the students were sitting there like, well, if it was done, why haven't you done it if it's so easy to do? And so nothing very definite came out of that meeting, but the university decided to make a teach in the following Wednesday. And I mean, of course, teach inside are not things that people in power do. So they're obviously kind of co opting and appropriating that term.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

So what the students decided to do because they were, they knew that this was just going to be okay. We're going to try to bury this, basically.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And so what the students did is they organized a press conference that morning, which a lot of press did come out to, and they had really powerful speakers. And this was before the teaching. And then they just went on a march. They, they marched around the Chancellor's complex, you know, continuously chanting.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Up to the point of the teaching. And so then they, they all went into the teaching, they had like 500 people by that time. And yeah, the room was just completely packed. And so they allowed the teaching to start. But then at some point, one of the Black Student Union members went up and said, we've had enough of this. We're now going to do our own teach out. So they marched out of the teaching and went around to this area that has these steps and just, you know, 500 folks, incredible concentration of black folks and people of color, students and faculty and all of their allies all gathered together and they had a teach out which was incredibly powerful. And that day I said it myself and for many other people that I knew at the university, we basically all said, this is the best day we've ever had at ucsd. It was so amazing. The next day in the library, in the main library, one of the students who was who there found a noose in the library. And of course, I'm sure your listeners know that the noose is a very powerful symbol of violence against black folks in the US and so that was traumatizing for so many students. I remember getting text messages from students, you know, saying, you know, I can't come on campus because I don't feel safe here anymore.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

So the next morning, the students held a rally again in front of the Chancellor's office where there were probably, I'm guessing close to a thousand people. And people just got up and were talking about what they were feeling and their analysis. The university came in, they sent like a spokesperson to say, oh, you know, we have the, the police out, like looking for whoever hangs on the noose or whatever. And I mean, you know, police are not a comfort.

[James Stout]

Yeah, no one wanted to hear, like, we're sending the cops at that moment.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So the students then went in and they occupied the Chancellor's office for the full day. And that really made people sit up and dose. And by this time there was international coverage of what was going on. There was an opening of a civil rights investigation on ucsd. I was getting emails from colleagues, like in other countries, saying, what's going on at ucsd? Is this like. It sounds like a KKK rally or. Not exactly that, but it's close. So then this all culminated about a week later in a huge rally where much of Library Walk was completely packed, filled with people. It was definitely blocked. And during that rally, the university said, we will commit to implementing these demands, the demands of the students. Of course, in the end, they backed off much of that, but. So that was like a huge victory. And it did result in some pretty substantial changes to ucsd. I'll just mention a couple of them. So UCSD created a Black Resource center which didn't exist before, a RAZR Resource center and a Inter Tribal Resource Center. So those were significant victories. They also created a undergraduate requirement or requirement that undergraduates take a diversity equity and inclusion course. And that was an attempt to try to change the climate and do some educating students in California. Universities come from all sorts of different backgrounds and some of them are very aware of racism and its impacts and anti blackness and its impacts, but some come without that knowledge. Yeah, so that was a significant help. But also at the time was boosted a little bit. It didn't end up maybe being such a great boost, but it did boost the departments that teach those kind of courses because now they had, you know, a significantly greater number of students.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And we're getting more resources as a result. So all those things were good. Again, no arrests, no disciplinary actions and the university learned some valuable lessons.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely. Let's take a little break and when we come back, I want to talk about this Palestine exception to free speech. All right, we are back. Yeah, I remember that, that Black Winter moment very well. I'd recently arrived at UCSD and I was like immediately taken aback by the brazenness of the racism. Like I come from Britain, not a non racist country. But yeah, the openness and the cruelty and the delight that certain people took in, that was pretty appalling. Now if we skip forward 13 years, right to the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, a lot has changed on campus, but also a lot has not.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Still not a massively diverse institution, ucsd, even compared to other institutions in the city. But from 2023 through 2024, we have this movement on campus to end the genocide in Gaza. Comes a movement that's about more than that. Right. About liberation for Palestinian people and then broadly about like, I guess, liberation in the region and what that means. And the university did not respond in the same way. This has led to people theorizing a Palestine exception for free speech. So could you explain that to people? And I thought you had a really interesting approach to it as a scientist that perhaps you could share with people as well.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah, as you said kind of in the wake of October 7th that marked the beginning of Israel's genocide on Gaza, obviously it took many people quite a while to conclude it was genocide, but I remember it was almost, maybe it was within a week or perhaps 10 days of October 7, the Coalition of Palestinian unions put out a call for labor solidarity, in which they turned to what was happening in genocide. And there were also others who were doing that as well.

[James Stout]

Just personally, like, I was in Syria on the 7th of October, I think I entered that day. I spent some time in Kurdistan, and I remember by the time I was conducting interviews in southern Kurdistan, maybe a week later, maybe 10 days later, Kurdish groups were using that phrase. Right. Like, there was a sense of like, impending disaster that came very quickly. This is what will happen next will be horrific. But yeah, those calls came very quickly, as you said.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah. And of course, like students at UCSD were kind of also coming to those conclusions. The administration was putting out language that was, you know, sympathetic to, to those who, who were killed or, you know, injured on October 7th, but they were ignoring everything else that was happening. And so of course, this wasn't a surprise, but it was part of what was happening. And it was also the, the kind of language that the university was using, and this is something that continued, was essentially recalling, even though it kind of had this neutral sense to, was recalling the, you know, the decades of Islamophobia, anti Arab racism that happened in the wake of 9, 11. So in a sense, they were communicating by using that kind of language, language around, you know, using words like violence and safety and civility. They were communicating very clearly that people could talk about what happened on the morning of October 7th, but not about anything else. Yeah, and, and that was entirely clinging. I mean, it's, it's not like we had to, we had to do any deep analysis to figure out that's what the administration was saying. And, you know, as students organized over the following months, students who were engaged in that organizing or being subject to disciplinary investigations, there were some faculty who were investigating for mentioning the genocide and the occupation of Palestine in their classes. And all of these things were creating a climate of fear, but also uncertainty. Like you could never be sure if what you would say could get you in trouble. And so the easiest thing to do would be to say nothing at all.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's like a chilling effect on speech.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Speech, absolutely. So that was happening. This phenomenon, of course, wasn't invented by UCSC administration. It's something that's been going on for quite a while, many, many decades. As you mentioned, James is called the Palestine Exception to free speech. If anyone wants to find out more about it. I mean, there's a huge amount of scholarly work on it. There's an excellent report that's available freely online, which is called exactly that, the Palestine Exception to Free Speech, written by Palestine Legal and the center for Constitutional Rights. Very easy to find online. And one of the things, as a physicist, I'm very critical of the role of physics in society. You don't have to think very deeply to be critical of physics, thinking about nuclear physics and so forth. But as a, as a person who does physics professionally, I often think about problems from a physics perspective. And so when I think about the Palestine exception, I kind of bring a bit of a physics lens to it. So in physics, when we're looking at a phenomenon, we often can't observe that phenomenon directly. And so, for example, people who study the physics of subatomic particles, they will to study how two subatomic particles interact, or many subatomic particles interact, they will collide them together. They don't have the precision and the resolution to observe exactly that interaction, but they can look before the interaction and then what comes out afterwards. And by looking at those patterns of what goes in and what comes out, they can get an idea of what's happening within that black box. And so this is the way I view the Palestine exception, because the Palestine exception to free speech is just the idea that there are these structures in society that have been formulated such that it makes it very difficult to engage in speech about Palestine. And the impact of that, of course, is that if you can't talk about Palestine, then violence that's committed against Palestinians is something that's enabled, it's facilitated by that lack of discussion. Like, I don't have access to the conversations amongst UCSD administrators or between UC administrators and the main office of the president of uc. Like, I don't have access to any of that information. In some sense, that's the black mox pertinent. But what we can see is kind of what's going in and what's coming out of that box. And so we can see the behaviors, the patterns of behaviors. And so as a physicist, I'm like, okay, if we're going to look at the UC and say, the University of California and say, is this a place where the Palestine exception to free speech is operating? Then we're not going to be able to have access to the rooms in which that's planned, if it is being planned, but rather we can look at the pattern. And the really interesting thing about this report I cited by Palestine Legal and the center for Constitutional Rights is they laid that out very clearly. They lay out, okay, the Palestine exception to free speech is basically a combination of these kinds of behaviors. So they talk about things like accusations of antisemitism, for example, and accusations of support for terrorism. So if you come to any rally, pro Palestinian rally at ucsd, there's always at least one and many counter protesters who are shouting exactly that, that this is anti Semitic, that everyone here is supporting Hamas, you know, and when we say Hamas, you know, that just immediately goes in everybody's mind to terrorism.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

All of these kinds of behaviors then that they lay out are things that can be seen at UC wide campuses, but definitely at ucsd.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. It's important to consider like as we enter a time where like repression of campus speech is at a height. Right. Like the combination of this Palestine exception and the seeming desire to expel as many international students as possible, that this is contrary to the reason the university exists as well as, as you say, it suppresses opposition to genocide to finish up. I guess we're not just doing this at the university because it's a place where we like to argue or because students are particularly predisposed to radical politics or for any other number of reasons. Right. The university is also part of the apparatus. Can you explain that a little bit like the university is not neutral in this to begin with?

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yes, that is certainly true. And I mean, and that happens in many different ways. Some of the ways we don't even know about, but there are many of those ways that primarily through student research, some faculty research, we have some ideas basically at UCSD and other UC campuses, there's quite a lot of, of military related research. You know, some of that research is not directly related to the genocide, but as we all know, the U.S. is supplying many of the weapons that are being used in the genocide and now in Iran as well. And some of those weapons, like drones, aspects of them, have been designed and worked on at ucsd. Kind of the, the hardware then of genocide is, is very much a product of university research, part of which has been done at ucsd, part at other UC campuses and part at other universities in the US and in Israel as well. Another aspect of it, which I think we don't know as much about this software. So, you know, there's a huge amount of research on artificial intelligence that's happening at ucsd, other UC campuses, other university campuses. I mean, all of that research came out of universities, you know, as we now know, through credible journalistic investigations that Israel is using artificial intelligence in its targeting.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

And apparently that's also happening in the US military as well. You know, so there's like another very direct connection, a third connection which is very strong at ucsd, of course in many other campuses is that part of the creation of a discourse that legitimizes and justifies Israel's occupation of Palestine is archaeology. And I'm not an expert in this field, but I could just kind of cite what other people have talked about. But there are many archaeological investigations that UCSD academics have participated in in Israel that contribute to creating this. The story that the people running Israel and Israeli citizens are the rightful owners of that land and that the Palestinians came in at some late point, maybe a couple decades before the founding of Israel. Which of course is completely false and there's so much scholarship about that, but that's the, that's the purpose of those investigations. So again that's connected to universities and to UCSD in particular. One can't really argue that having a discussion about complicity and genocide is something that is of not of interest to ucsd. It definitely is.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It has to happen at the university because it is about the university.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yes.

[James Stout]

I think to finish up, we've outlined why it's important. We've outlined how anti genocidal speech when it is about Palestinian people is treated differently and we've outlined why there is a chilling effect. I understand some people, especially international students and non citizen faculty, et cetera, have real concerns and I want to respect those. But for people who would like to, they should continue to speak out.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Right?

[James Stout]

Like we all lose, even if we have. If you somehow are unconcerned by genocide of fellow human beings, if the university becomes a space where certain things are repressed and where we can't stand up for each other. So like, what resources would you suggest for those people as new students are coming into university this year? They've lived half their high school years through this genocide. I'm sure many of them will want to continue advocating. What would you suggest for them?

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah, especially for students I would suggest to connect with organizations that are already kind of doing this work. So you know, at UCSD there's Students for justice and Palestine, but there's also quite a number of other student organizations. Like tomorrow we're having a major Earth Day rally where organizations Students for Justice Palestine, but also anti imperialist organization like SPARK and then other organizations like Green New Deal, Student Sustainability Collectives are all coming together to talk about Palestine and the eco side in Palestine, the genocide in Palestine. So I think that there are ways for students from a broad range of interests and backgrounds to get involved in organizing. You know, it's not like you have to start that from scratch. People are already doing that. It might be a little bit hard at your university to find those because of the suppression, but if you. If you ask around, you will. Or if you look on social media, you will. You will find those folks. That's where I would start as a. As a student. For faculty and staff especially, it's a little bit more difficult because we're, you know, as employees, we're very vulnerable. Faculty with tenure are less vulnerable. But, you know, my case and other faculty's cases are examples of how tenure doesn't really protect you from this if they're determined.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

So I feel that there's, again, here, what we need to do is to kind of work collectively. So you don't want to fight the system on your own, but find other faculty who are doing this work and basically who can work as a support network and kind of collectively find ways to speak out to support our students, which I think is in many ways our primary responsibility with regard to the genocide and basically create spaces where it's possible to talk about the genocide.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think that's really important. I guess I'll just say, if you're a student or faculty and you see someone involved in its advocacy, don't feel afraid to go talk to them and ask. Either university can be intimidating, especially when you're a new faculty member or undergraduate for that matter. Like, it can be hard to meet people and talk to people, but I think most people would be happy if you did. Is there anything else you'd like to share with people before we'd wrap up?

[UCSD Faculty Member]

There is so much, so I do hope we can talk again sometime.

[James Stout]

Yes, we will.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

But I also just maybe just want to say, you know, thanks to you, there aren't a huge number of spaces where we can have these kinds of discussions. So I'm really grateful. I know that you're doing not just this kind of work, but also really going out and reporting on stories that aren't being told. And so I'm grateful to you basically for doing that work.

[James Stout]

That's very kind. Thank you.

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[Garrison Davis]

This is It Could Happen Here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and Robert Evans. This episode we're covering the week of April 16th to April 22nd. James, some small news items at the start.

[James Stout]

Yeah. A few things I want to discuss up top. The United States government appears to be running multiple propaganda sites with associated X accounts that are posing as Iranian media. One of the accounts located in Florida. This is not like massively uncommon in a conflict. This right?

[Robert Evans]

No.

[James Stout]

The information war is part of the war.

[Garrison Davis]

This is what like US actual psyop is like. This is what United States psyop operations are.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The psyop is not like the woman soldier that you follow on Instagram.

[Robert Evans]

This isn't new for the US to be doing. It is new for it to be like this. This sloppy. I think that's probably fair to say. This is like sloppier than normal.

[James Stout]

Yes. That's what's remarkable here is that it's shoddy and that is not a good sign for the whole US Sort of capacity in this regard.

[Robert Evans]

But it depends on how you think

[James Stout]

about it, but yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Secondly, a number of former DHS Department for Homeland Security and ins, Immigration and Naturalization Services officials have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court explaining why the cancellation of the Haiti TPS Temporary Protected Status is illegal. They do include Janet Napolitano, which is nice, but a ton of people from Obama, Bush, even Clinton admin. Pre, dhs, INS were part of this amicus brief. An IDF soldier has been photographed destroying a statue of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in Lebanon, throwing it with a splitting maw. A lot of reporting called it a sledgehammer. That's not what a sledgehammer looks like. I know I get really picky about this, but like maybe if you haven't worked with your hands, you should write things that can be read by someone who has and scan and not be completely ridiculous. The IDF has launched an investigation and so far subjected two soldiers to 30 days of military detention, which is more than they would get if they had killed actual Christian children in Palestine. Says a lot. I think that this, this image is like we spoke about this in our group chat, but this is the, it's one image. It's comic book evil. There are many reasons why this is the thing that's blowing up for them. Ken Paxton is investigating ActBlue. ActBlue is a major donation website for Democratic candidates. He's claiming that they have continued to accept gift card donations which could hide donations from foreign individuals or corporations or even states, I suppose. The United States government's plans to send Afghans who are stuck in limbo in Qatar to the Democratic Republic of Congo are being reported on by the New York Times. Just for some context here, I saw people sharing this and thinking that they that this referred to Afghan SIV recipients who are resident in the United States. That is not what it's referring to. It's referring to people who the Biden administration removed from Afghanistan or wherever they were, often Pakistan, right. And then took them to Qatar as like a temporary stopping off point where they would continue to do their vetting and background checks. This is normal for refugee admissions as opposed to asylum admissions. And then the 2024 election happened, Democrats lost and those people have been in limbo ever since. And it appears the Trump administration has been trying to get them various states in Africa to accept them and is now proposing the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country which already has a significant refugee crisis.

[Garrison Davis]

Ron DeSantis, who is term limited as governor, has been jockeying for a position inside the Trump administration. Axios reports DeSantis has expressed interest in being a Secretary of war, Attorney General, or even a Supreme Court justice. Trump is expected to reclassify marijuana as soon as maybe today. We're recording this on Wednesday, April 22.

[Robert Evans]

Fingers crossed.

[Garrison Davis]

Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order to advance its psychedelic treatment for mental illness and possibly reschedule certain substances which have completed phase three clinical trials.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, this is, this. This is the real sign that their internal polling is showing Trump really closing on getting below 30% approval. That's. That's the most.

[Robert Evans]

Whatever gets to action. Actual legal marijuana.

[Mia Wong]

Fuck it. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, at this point, it's such an

[James Stout]

easy win, and it's been an easy win for the last three presidents, and

[Robert Evans]

anyone could have done it. It's a gun that's been left on the ground, and fucking Trump finally just picked the damn thing up after it got covered in an inch and a half of dust. Like, unbelievable.

[Mia Wong]

They're desperate. Keep pushing. We can get, like, completely legal lsd. I believe in us.

[Garrison Davis]

On Fox News's Sunday morning show, Cash, Patel announced that the FBI will soon make arrests related to Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen. With Patel saying, quote, they tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system.

[Robert Evans]

I can announce on your show that

[Garrison Davis]

we've got all the information we need. We're working with our prosecutors, the Department

[Robert Evans]

of Justice, and their Attorney General, Todd

[Garrison Davis]

Blanche, and we are going to.

[Robert Evans]

To be making arrest, and it's coming, and I promise you it's coming soon.

[Garrison Davis]

Patel later said it's a conspiracy case and that, quote, we have the information to back President Trump's claims. On Tuesday, voters in Virginia approved a redistricting measure which would likely move four Republican seats to Democrat seats in the midterms. This measure passed with 51.5% of the vote, totaling over 3 million votes. Virginia joins California in approving new congressional maps to combat the recent gerrymandering in red states like Texas at the behest of Trump. But now with Virginia, Dems are actually up one seat nationally. Ron DeSantis has called for Florida lawmakers to meet next week to consider redistricting in their state. Trump has called the Virginia election, quote, unquote, rigged, saying that Republicans were winning until a, quote, massive mail in ballot drop, unquote, which is just how elections work. That's just how voting works.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, we were winning until more people voted for the other guy, until

[Garrison Davis]

we counted more votes that showed that we did not win.

[Mia Wong]

We just live in the 2016 election forever. Now it's great.

[Robert Evans]

I was doing pretty well in that boxing match until it started, until the

[James Stout]

other guy punched me in the face.

[Garrison Davis]

The margin of victory closely matches the result of the 2024 presidential election in Virginia. Republicans have challenged the Virginia redistricting in court since before Tuesday's election, and the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the measure could go to a vote while legal challenges continue. This is the second most important election this week, the most important one, obviously, being the Webbies, in which I think we can announce we have won in a totally unrigged election, the only fair election that this country has seen possibly in, like, over 25 years.

[James Stout]

That's why they selected Claude as Person of the year.

[Robert Evans]

Clearly, the. The webbies in 2026 are the only election that's going to affect anybody's lives. I think we can all agree on that. Anyway, so, as you probably are aware, because the President shouts About it every 10 minutes, there's a ceasefire currently in effect in the conflict in with Iran, the war of choice that we started with Iran. James is going to talk a little bit more about that in a second, but because of the stand down, there's been kind of time for both forces to, you know, reassess things and time for outside people to reassess, like, kind of what we can tell about what's going on. Obviously, in the immediate wake of Operation Epic Fury, and as recently as last Tuesday, President Trump said, quote, we've taken out their navy, we've taken out their air force, we've taken out their leaders. On April 8, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Operation Epic Fury a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield. By any measure, Epic Fury decimated Iran's military and rendered it combat ineffective for years to come. Now, that last sentence, the first part, is technically accurate, but not in the way that Hegseth means.

[James Stout]

No one knows what decimate means anymore.

[Robert Evans]

Decimate literally means to destroy, like, a tenth of a group.

[Mia Wong]

Right? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And, yeah, that's pretty accurate. Right. But the second part of that sentence, rendered it combat ineffective for years to come, is not accurate. Neither is Trump's statement that we've taken out their navy and their air force. CBS published an article today reporting that roughly 60% of the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still in existence, including fast tack speedboats. And Iranian air power, while it's been degraded, is still significantly more functional than actually I had assumed. About two thirds of the Iranian air force is still believed to be operational, despite the massive US And Israeli airstrikes, largely targeting air production and storage facilities. The fact that you're looking at two thirds of Iran's Navy and air force still functional and at least about half their ballistic missile stockpile and their launch system stockpile intact, that's a significant difference from what the administration has claimed and evidence that were we to continue to press with the open fighting part of this conflict, it would be years probably before you're talking about, like, a complete degradation of Iranian fighting capability, if that was ever achieved. Like, when you factor in the United States would continue to suffer casualties. And we've already been losing more of, you know, particularly our interceptor missile capability and a number of advanced systems like AWACS than we can afford to replace. James?

[James Stout]

Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about the. The ceasefire itself. Right. And then, like, what. What's been happening there? Let's start with like, I guess, straightforward news updates and then get into the ceasefire. The Navy intercepted an Iranian vessel in the Arabian Sea this week close to the Iran Pakistan border. The Tuska was warned. Imagine they used an LRAD to warn it. People see LRADs on ships sometimes and think they're coming to, like, make you deaf. This is one of the reasons ships have LRADs. They could have also used a radio that if they can talk to them on the radio, if they're receiving communications with the radio, they then ordered it to evacuate its engine room. They then shot out its engine with the 5 inch gun.

[Robert Evans]

First time they've gotten to do that in 40 years.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I was looking and I guess it was. It was since, what, 1988 the last time that I was thinking, it's been a little. It's been a minute since this ship engaged another ship with its main gun. It was a USS Spruance, a guided missile destroyer that did that. Subsequently, US Marines on the Tripoli. We were posted on when the Tripoli first moved towards that region. Right. We specifically said that this is one of the capacities that it had. They boarded the ship. So they transferred by helicopter and then boarded the ship. The US has since inspected other ships, including outside of the CENTCOM ao. So the US perceives its blockade to be global. Of Iranian assets, of Iranian vessels and the quote, unquote, Shadow fleet, which we've already explained on ed. So I'm not going to go into depth on what that means. The IRGC also fired at several vessels in the Strait. There is some reporting that one of them, an Indian tanker, had paid a fee in cryptocurrency to what turned out to be a scammer I'm certain that these scams exist because there have been multiple warnings of them. I haven't seen any evidence that is satisfactory enough for me to be confident that that particular sh had been scammed. But perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence, a ship is called the Sanmar Herald. Is this audio that we're going to play right here?

[Mia Wong]

SEPA Navy.

[James Stout]

SEPA Navy.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

This is motoring a San Mart.

[James Stout]

You gave me clearance to go.

[Mia Wong]

My name second on your list.

[James Stout]

You gave me clearance to go.

[Mia Wong]

You are firing. Now let me turn back.

[James Stout]

Just in case I wasn't clear. You gave me clearance to go. You're firing. Now let me turn back. So it does seem that that vessel believed that it had clearance to go and was then fired upon. This morning there were some OSINT pictures of irgc. They looked like kind of fast attack boats, kind of things Robert was talking about in the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah, something of a flex.

[Robert Evans]

Yay. We still have a navy like.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's important in the context of a ceasefire. I want to explain very briefly, there's been a lot of contradictory reporting on when, where and how negotiations are going to happen. The ceasefire was set to expire the day we're recording Wednesday. On Tuesday, we saw Donald Trump unilaterally extend the ceasefire by truthing, quote, based on the fact that the government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so, and upon the request of Field Marshal Aseem Munir and Prime Minister Shabazz Sharif of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our attack on the country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal. I have therefore directed our military to continue the blockade and in all other respects remain ready and able and will therefore extend a ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted and discussions are concluded one way or the other. President Donald J. Trump, the consensus seems to be that this is not like an infinite extension. This is like maybe less than a week for Iran to either comply with U. S. Terms or submit proposals in the US Considers acceptable. A lot of that reporting does seem to come from Barack Ravid, who's not very good at journalism. So take it with a pinch of salt. Trump, though, is correct that the state of Iran is not a unified entity. And I, I covered this in the piece I did last week on an update on the Iran war. Right. Like, I think there's a, there's a, a tendency from people in the global north to look at a state and see it as, like a pyramid.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

You have the, the head of state and then you have government and then you have legislature and then you have the people they command. Right. Military and all the civil bureaucracy. That's not quite how Iran works. And I went into more detail in that episode that I made, so I'm not going to go into it here. But there are a series of overlapping but not entirely aligned power centers within Iran and within its military capacity, both within its military in the traditional sense and within the irgc. Why this is relevant to the negotiations is that it's not possible for politicians to negotiate if they do not believe that they can agree to terms and that their military will then comply with those terms.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

If the Iranian Foreign Ministry agrees with the US to do something, the IRGC doesn't do it, that then immediately undermines any further negotiations. Right. So when we see, for instance this morning, a large number of boats going into Strait Hormuz, that looks a little bit like a flex. Right. In the context of this power struggle, in the context of Trump acknowledging that Trump has once again been truthing this week about Iranian nuclear weapons. I'm just going to read one of his truths because I think it pertained. It shows that the administration feels that it is weak on this particular accusation. Israel never talked me into the war with Iran. The results of October 7th added to my lifelong opinion that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Did. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with that sentence.

[Garrison Davis]

That's just, that's, that's Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Comma. D I d. Did the word did.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. I'm not reading that wrong. That's just. Yeah, it's a hanging.

[Robert Evans]

That's just what he said.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

He's simply senile.

[James Stout]

I can't help you. I'm just saying the words. I watch and read the fake news, pundits and polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories. And the polls are rigged, much as a 2020 presidential election was rigged. Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn't like talking about. The results in Iran will be amazing. And if Iran's new leaders. Regime change, exclamation mark, close parentheses, are smart. Iran can have a great and prosperous future president. DJT that's one of the more challenging passages of English language text that I've ever approached. I speak four or five languages and that's, that's honestly set me back. But I've tried to give you a good faith reading of it. He's clearly sensitive to the allegation that Israel pushed the US into this conflict. Right?

[Garrison Davis]

He's clearly sensitive.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

The last thing that I want to add is that strikes on Kurdish groups have continued despite the ceasefire.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Despite the renewed ceasefire. The Pak Just two hours after Trump announced the extension of the ceasefire, Tehran sent four drones to attack a Pak base. There have been more injuries in Kurdistan. It doesn't seem that Iran considers any ceasefire to a apply to its ongoing attack against Ut Dati groups who are currently in southern Kurdistan inside the borders of Iraq.

[Garrison Davis]

Next up, we will discuss the charges against the splc. But first, listen to these ads. Okay, we are back. On Tuesday, April 21, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced that a grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty law Center on 11 counts including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The indictment argues that the SPLC defrauded their donors by using donation money to pay confidential informants within white supremacist or neo Nazi organization organizations. Here is a short clip of the press conference of a reporter asking Todd Blanch a question.

[Andrew Sage]

I just want to make sure I

[Mia Wong]

understand you're alleging that the Southern Poverty Law center was paying the leaders of KKK and other groups to continue their operations. Is that. I'm not alleging it.

[James Stout]

The grand jury returned an indictment that says that. And so what the investigation, investigation found,

[UCSD Faculty Member]

according to the indictment that was returned

[James Stout]

today, is that they were paying. So Southern Poverty Law center is raising

[UCSD Faculty Member]

money, asking folks to give them money to dismantle racism. And over a very long period of

[Mia Wong]

time, they were using some of the

[James Stout]

money they raised from donors to pay to, they called them field, you know, basically to informants to, for information, for

[UCSD Faculty Member]

access, to just pay them for, for

[Mia Wong]

certain, to do certain things.

[James Stout]

And so yes, that's exactly what the indictment charges.

[Garrison Davis]

The SPLC is a non profit advocacy organization aimed at quote, unquote, dismantling white supremacy and exposing hate. They operate a blog called Hate Watch and run a public database of hate groups and far right extremists. This indictment claims that the SPLC has utilized informants to gain information on far right activity since the 80s. But between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid over $3 million to individuals associated with various violent extremist groups, quote, unquote, in a clandestine manner.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no one, if you kind of have been in the world of CVE countering violent extremism like research or like involved in NGOs in that sphere at all or been a researcher there. You're probably aware of the fact that the SPLC, like, has been paying informants. A lot of their scoops are because some Nazi tells on another Nazi, essentially. Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So that part isn't surprising. The weirdness is how the SPLC was going about it and how much fucking money they were giving some of these people.

[Garrison Davis]

The amounts of some of these were legitimately shocked, lacking. And I. I do want to get into some more details about those amounts and the groups and the sort of nest of fake businesses the SPLC used to distribute this money, according to the indictment. The indictment reads that this was donation money, quote, received under the auspice, that the funds would be used to, quote, unquote, dismantle violent extremist groups. This money was instead being used in part by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within these same violent extremist groups. That money was then used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups, unquote. Money was funneled to individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, Unite the Right, National Alliance, National Socialist Movement, Aryan nations, and the affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, National Socialist Party of America, American Nazi Party, and American Front. One informant, according to the indictment, was, quote, a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. This informant made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid this informant more than $270,000, unquote. From 2014 to 2023, more than $1 million was allegedly paid to someone affiliated with the national alliance who served as an informant for over 20 years while fundraising for this Nazi group. The imperial wizard of the rebooted Imperial Clans of America was a paid informant, according to the indictment. This is likely a guy named Bradley Jenkins.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

An officer in the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club secretly received more than $300,000 between 2014 and 2020. The former chairman of the national alliance was secretly paid more than $140,000. While the SPLC website featured an extremist profile page for this individual, likely Eric Glebe. The SPLC also paid the leader of the National Socialist Party of America $70,000 between 2014-2016. This individual was a former director of an Aryan nations faction and a former member of the kkk. This is likely a guy named Paul Mullet, who The SPLC hosts an extremist file webpage on their website. A few other unidentified informants are listed in the indictment, as well as a claim that the SPLC is funneled more than $160,000 from a fictitious entity to an informant, quote, who then sent funds to various violent extremist group leaders, including the former grand wizard of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan, unquote. That's a lot of money. Now, to obscure the nature of these payments, the SPLC opened a series of bank accounts at multiple banks for various fictitious businesses. These weren't actually incorporated, but they claim to be businesses with names like the Center, Investigative Agency or the CIA.

[Robert Evans]

Why?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, Fox Photography, Northwest Technologies, Tech Writers Group, Rare Books, Warehouse Imagery Inc. J and J Electronics, Kelly's Marine and Turner Personnel.

[Robert Evans]

Great. Good work, guys.

[Garrison Davis]

Essentially, the DOJ is arguing that the SPLC solicited donations under false pretenses and then transferred that money to extremist groups using a network of fake businesses to get a conviction. The DOJ will have to argue that this activity constitutes wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. A conviction will result in the forfeiture of financial gains from the alleged illegal activities. The right has reacted to this news by calling the Unite the Right rally and kind of the alt right movement as it existed from this time period a psyop or a false flag. Senator Mike Lee, right wing political influencer Nick Sorter and Elon Musk have boosted these claims, getting tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of likes on X. The everything applied. This seems to be a new narrative, or it's. It's not really new, I guess, but an enhanced narrative that is emerging among the online right as a way to dissuade some of the uglier parts of that era while still carrying along a lot of the same politics. Especially on like the Great Replacement, which is more of a mainstream idea among the conservative movement at this point in time. So they're able to walk away from the uglier kind of imagery and explicitly Nazi elements of this. Like, yeah, the kkk, which is very Boomer, very, very, very Boomer coded thing, the kkk. So they're able to call stuff like that and the Unite the Right rally a psyop or a false flag while still reaping the benefits that the alt right movement achieved by kind of trailblazing certain rhetoric into the conservative Mainstream right wing commentators have also used this news to reassert one of their favorite claims. That Patriot Front is a psyop or a false, false flag operation. That whenever a group of young Nazis show up in a U haul, all wearing matching outfits and masks, that this is a staged event by either the Deep State, the Feds, or a group like the splc. Patriot Front is not actually named in this indictment. There's no evidence that the SPLC was paying anyone at Patriot Front to inform on the operations of that group. And obviously paying an individual to inform on the details of an upcoming event like Unite the Right does not mean that the Unite the Right event in Charlottesville was planned or staged by the splc. Dozens of people were involved in the planning of this event and hundreds participated of their own volition. One person in a planning group chat sending info to the SPLC does not mean that this action was staged or fake.

[Robert Evans]

Anyone who's in the field has had a lot of issues with the SPLC over the last few years, especially people who work for them. I have a lot, I know a lot of. A lot of good people have worked for them and gotten fucked over by them. They did a lot of union busting to the people who run the splc and some of whom are the people who are specifically accused of having committed these crimes. I don't know if I feel like that, like the specific things they have to prove in order to get a conviction are accurate because fundamentally anyone who donated to the SPLC knew that they were like getting shit from informants. You know, I don't think that was like. The amount of money though is shocking.

[Garrison Davis]

That's what, that's what they're going to have to defend in court.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's.

[Garrison Davis]

They're going to have to have to argue that the money that was donated was used for its intended purpose, which was dismantling white supremacy. You'll have to say that the information that they obtained through these, through, through paying these informants was still in furtherance of that mission. Right. That's going to be what they're going to defend in court. Now, you know, obviously the FBI also uses informants, right? The FBI does this same thing. Famously, The FBI paid the 09A affiliated Joshua Caleb Sutter over $140,000. From 2003 to 2021, the FBI funded a publishing house, a neo Nazi publishing house, essentially.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Which is responsible for, for, in part, the political direction of the Atomwaffen Division. Now, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that Quote, the SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence and, quote, using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked act, unquote. Patel has said that, quote, this is illegal and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved. The SPLC released a video statement saying that the use of informants was, quote, unquote, necessary and claimed, quote, these individuals risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation's most radical and violent extremist groups, unquote. The indictment does not characterize many of these informants as, quote, unquote, infiltrators, but rather individuals who were already members of these groups and were paid by the SPLC to share information and gossip on fellow members. The SPLC statement also said that they, quote, frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. We did not, however, share our use of informants broadly with anyone to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families, unquote. Like a lot of the people in this field, the FBI knew the SPLC was doing this.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk Cash, Patel announced that the FBI was severing ties with the sblc, saying the organization had been turned into a, quote, unquote, partisan smear machine that defamed, quote, unquote, mainstream Americans with its hate map.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

Attorney Ed Martin, former head of the DOJ's weaponization working group, as in weaponizing the DOJ against political enemies, shared news of the indictment on X the Everything app and wrote, quote, they killed Charlie and they will pay, unquote. So clearly this prosecution is politically motivated. Right? There is political motivations behind. Behind deciding to do this right? Now, the FBI already knew that this was happening to a certain extent, but now they are going after the SPLC as a part of a targeted political prosecution. And this indictment could be seen as part of the anti antifa nonprofit crackdown.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Last March, CBS News reported that the FBI and the IRS formed a new initiative to investigate fraud at nonprofit organizations with suspected links to domestic terrorism, following federal directives to pursue antifa aligned groups. A spokesperson from the IRS told CBS News, quote, IRS Criminal Investigation is collaborating with federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to investigate individuals and entities that may be funding domestic terrorism or political violence.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's. It's unfortunate that the SPLC was so reckless and sloppy and the fucking amounts are shocking and indefensible. And again, not necessarily in a legal sense like I. I'm very doubtful of the government's case, but I am very angry at the Southern Poverty Law center and I don't think it should consent you to exist as an organization if it's going to do this.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And when you combine this, as you say, anyone who works in this world knows that people working there have had a miserable time for a long time for a great variety of reasons.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I'm livid at them. This is obviously evidence that the Trump administration is doing what they've said they're doing. That like the DOJ is going to be looking into these like, big, you know, liberal and left aligned NGOs, particularly that like, are focused on combating the far right. But in terms of this, showing any reason to be like scared that they're going to disappear people like, no, the SPLC did something crazy and I, I don't think that the charges specifically are valid, but like they open themselves up to get fucked with by doing something so not like if one of these people. $1 million. $1 million. That's wild.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Why do they have a fake company named after the CIA? What are you guys doing?

[James Stout]

Someone thought they were being a really cool secret spy.

[Garrison Davis]

And I mean, those are, those are some of the charges that may be able to stick. Is the sort of stuff about misrepresenting.

[Julian Edelman]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

To a federally insured bank. That, that, that type of stuff could be easier to argue based on what I've read in, in the indictment. But of course that'll get settled in court.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And as a way to sort of close this out, I think one of the things that we're running into here is one of the, the thing that the right is being able to use here is the fact that a lot of these sort of liberal and central left NGOs absolutely sucked. And like we have covered on this show, you know, a whole bunch of these organizations doing union busting and their, like, their priorities don't necessarily match what I would say ours should be. And I think this is something that the Trump administration is going to continue to sort of, in some ways use as a rift point, like the fact that these groups are doing all of this unhinged shit. Right. This is, this is the political consequence of the structure that these NGOs use in the way that they've operated. And now their sort of chickens are coming home to roost.

[James Stout]

I want to talk this week in our immigration segment about the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service. This is the agency tasked with vetting and adjudicating immigration benefits. It's the only immigration agency at DHS that traditionally hasn't done enforcement sweeps, right?

[Robert Evans]

So for a while, particularly recently, people

[James Stout]

there have felt a little out of place at the Department of Homeland Security, right? The idea has been to keep enforcement and processing separate so that people don't have very reasonable reasons to fear doing the legal process, right? So that people continue to show up to their interviews to submit their documents, et cetera. Generally, they are funded in large part by immigration fees and like, perceived as the friendlier, more welcoming side of the process. Their job isn't, historically has not been to kind of root out bad migration as so much as to, like, help people or at least to process people to do the bureaucratic part of migration. Under the second Trump administration, however, this has changed. There have been detentions at interviews. There have been cancellations of citizenship ceremonies. The USCIS has begun hiring for a new position, and this new position is eligible for remote work, for more remote work than existing hires. And it's called the Homeland Defender. So, like, we probably many people have seen these Homeland defender advertisements on X.com, the Everything website, right? Homeland Defenders have been offered up to $50,000 in signing bonuses. And at the same time as offering remote work benefits for Homeland Defenders, the agency has been forcing other people to return to offices that could no longer fit the number of staff it had. And under years of work from home, the agency grew and changed, right? Like almost every organization did. And there were reports that you literally had like lawyers sitting in corridors working on their laptops or like trying to perch on a radiator or a windowsill because their offices could fit people, right? And at the same time, the branding around Homeland Defender is, is not the way that USCIS staff traditionally saw themselves in Minnesota, USCIS has begun reinvestigating people admitted with the incredibly highly vetted refugee status. So we already spoke about this once today, right? The refugees are vetted before they even enter the United States. Across the country, executive orders were followed with memos pausing or entirely stopping the process of legal and vetted immigration. For people from an increasing number of countries, the legally mandated green card for adult children and siblings of current citizens, as well as spouses and minor children of, of existing permanent residents has gone unfulfilled. This is quote, unquote, family based migration. They used to call it chain migration, right? That, that used to be the language on the right. It's something that Trump administration has hated since its first term, right? This has been a thing that they spoke about and that has been spoken about on the right for some Time these green cards could be reused for employment based claims, which is going to have a much larger number of people who are already in the country. It's not bringing new people in or they might just go unused. Refugees are being detained without any clear legal authority and requisite about their applications. According to reporting in the New Yorker. This means that people are being taken in, detained at an ICE facility. Right. And then quizzed about stuff that they'd already been asked about before they came to the United States when they were doing that vetting. People who are married to United States citizens are being arrested at interviews, even though generally there was an amnesty of people who, for instance, had overstayed a visa and then got married before. USCIS has also committed significant resources of the agency that may well have been taken away from processing claims and devoted them entirely to investigating naturalizations with the goal of denaturalizing naturalized United States citizens. This is a very difficult process. Right. The afraim case is the, the Supreme Court case which governs this. Right. It refers to someone who was a Jewish communist or had been in Israel. What it says is the government cannot de citizenize someone because it doesn't agree with their politics. Even, even in the time of anti communism.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Once somebody becomes a citizen, their files are removed from USCIS and they go to the National Record Center. And so calling the presumably tens of thousands of files of naturalized United States citizens, hundreds of thousands over time, millions.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Would require some kind of filter. The most likely way this is being filtered is through their nationality. Right. One can imagine for instance, at 75 countries Trump has paused green card processes for might be a start. Or their specific focus on Somali people might even prove a more focused way of doing it.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

They have had some success. This week a Belizean woman was found guilty of naturalization fraud for submitting a fake divorce decree. She married an American citizen without being divorced from a previous spouse in Belize. They found that she had falsified those documents. Right. They are also pursuing a case against a Nigerian man who's already been convicted of fraud and has already been been put in prison for that. But they are now pursuing a denaturalization case as well. Virtually every interaction with USCIS now seems to require interviews in person and biometric connection. This means that applicants now have to come into an office where they know that people have been detained and this leads to people being afraid to do that. Right. Petitions are slowing down as they're moved around to a dwindling workforce which is still focused on processing those as opposed to the growing amount of the USCIS workforce which is looking for, quote, unquote fraud in applications or attempting to denaturalize people as we just covered. Among the people waiting without visas are some people who are waiting for special visas which are given to people who are survivors of human trafficking, gender based violence or other crimes. This includes children. There's a special immigrant juvenile visa, which every single person I've heard of coming on an SIJ visa has had things happen to them which I didn't struggle to think about that would keep you up at night. And the thought that those people are waiting in limbo because they're trying to denaturalize people is particularly upsetting. I'm sure it's also upsetting to some people who've worked at USCIS their whole life. And I know that morale among those people is pretty low. While the, the agency sort of has changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of years. Talking of changing beyond all recognition, we're going to now pivot from journalism to probably some adverts for online gambling will be shocking and jarring.

[Robert Evans]

I love it.

[James Stout]

You could change your life beyond all recognition if you have a big win

[Garrison Davis]

or a big loss.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Live Nation Announcer]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

You can also change your life that way. Garrison, we're not surprised. Supposed to mention that.

[Robert Evans]

We're back and we all just voted on Forbes.com's newest prediction contest. How many people will be wounded in the next three American mass shootings. I'm excited. There's a big prize for this one.

[James Stout]

Sick. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That's only slightly an exaggeration of what Forbes is actually doing. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's pretty gross.

[Garrison Davis]

It's pretty gross.

[Mia Wong]

It's really hideous.

[Garrison Davis]

It's okay, guys. It's. It's not. It's not a market. It's not a prediction platform.

[Robert Evans]

Platform.

[Garrison Davis]

There's no real money, only social capital.

[James Stout]

That could be the slogan of most journalistic enterprises in 2026, to be honest. Yeah. Forbes has kind of long been a blog rather than a news website, but this is still pretty disgusting.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of there being no real money.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Let's talk about the Federal Reserve. So when we last left our. I hesitate to call them heroes, but when we last left the Federal Reserve Board, there was a very obviously cooked up investigation by the Justice Department into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. This investigation doesn't really seem to have advanced at all, but the conflict over Powell and over Powell's replacement has been intensifying in recent weeks. Last week, on 15 April, Trump threatened to fire Powell if Powell stayed on as basically the temporary Federal Reserve chair after his term expired. Now, the reason this is happening is because Trump's attempt to get someone confirmed to replace Powell has not been going well. And if no one is, you know, confirmed by May 15, then the office is just empty. And Powell has said that he wants to stay on and become the temporary chair. This is sort of unprecedented. But then again, we've also noticed ever had the president open an investigation into the sitting chair of the Federal Reserve, causing him to give a reverse hostage video. So where things are right now is that we are getting hearings on Trump's preferred nominee, a man named Kevin Warsh. However, there is a real problem with Warsh as a, as a candidate that's not. Doesn't have anything to do with who he is. We'll get to that in a second. The biggest issue that Trump is facing here is that Thom Tillis, who's an outgoing Republican senator, is refusing to let any Trump appointee pass through the Finance Committee unless Trump ends the investigation into Jerome Powell. So this has had everything at a complete standstill. It was sort of unclear, though. A lot of different Republican senators had threatened to do something like this, but because Tillis is just leaving, he's just, he's retiring at the end of this, at the end of this session. He's the one who's, you know, up there doing it. And this has ground the nomination to a halt. We're still getting hearings, but there's no way for him to actually get a vote to get, get this process out of committee. So into this morass steps Kevin Warsh, who. He's not the most unhinged guy. Trump could have been picked.

[Garrison Davis]

High bar.

[Mia Wong]

This is, at least nominally, on the surface, sort of a Fed guy. Like, he has worked for the Federal Reserve, like Federal Reserve banks before.

[Robert Evans]

He's not a podcaster. Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yes, actually. Actually, he might have one.

[Robert Evans]

There's a non zero chance he might be.

[Mia Wong]

Might be, I don't know. But I am not willing to say I'll look into this, that he is not one. So now this, this whole nomination has also become a mess because again, as, as we've been talking about, the reason why Trump wants to basically take direct control of the Federal Reserve and end Fed independence by installing, like, his guy as, as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is that he wants the Fed. Well, he wants to be able to control the Fed so he can control interest rates. He wants interest rates cut. Now, this is coming up a lot in the hearings and so far Warsh is giving answers that if you've ever watched the testimony of someone who's, who's trying to get onto the Supreme Court, it's a lot like that where he is saying the things that he is supposed to say. He's saying that he opposes the interest rate cut. He's saying that the primary job of the Fed is to is to combat inflation. He's saying that he believes in Fed independence.

[Garrison Davis]

But he also has said that Trump

[Mia Wong]

has not asked him to cut interest rates. And Elizabeth Warren, who's been sort of leading the Democratic like charge against this, has pointed out a number of things. One of which is, is we're going to get to some more of the weird shit with him in a second. But one of the major things here is that the President has said that he's asked Borsch to due to rate cuts. So somebody's lying here was just giving non answers about that. I'm also just going to read this quote from the Associated Press. Quote, Warren also noted that Warsh has not disclosed all of his financial holdings which include investments in startups and private companies or the size of those financial stakes. For example, Warsh has said he has holdings in SpaceX and polymarket but it's not said how large those investments are.

[James Stout]

Oh great.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, you can't win them all.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So later on War said he would divest from $100 million in investments. But you know, this is great. Warren also points out that he's in the Epstein files because Epstein apparently invited him and his wife to a party. It is unclear at this point what, what connection he had or if there was more, but that's not a great sign. Where we are right now is that Warsh is normal enough of a guy that Thom Tillis is willing to vote for him if the investigation is dropped. Tillis and some other members of the committee have been Republican members of the committee have been talking about this scheme to get the investigation transferred from the Department of Justice to the Senate committee. I think at which point they could basically just kill it or just have it be a thing into budget overruns. That's not like an attempt to depose Jerome Powell. That's it's not clear what's going to happen with that and it hasn't started yet. This is the point that we're at right now. This conflict is going to keep heating up as the May 15 deadline for getting a new nominee in before the board vacancy happens. And Jerome Powell basically stays in power longer than his term would normally last happen. So we're going to keep following this story here. And there's one other story that we are going to keep following, which is there was an exclusive by the Wall Street Journal, which is a report, this is from unnamed US officials, but it claims that the UAE's central bank governor is reportedly trying to get what's called a currency swap with the US So what a currency swap is basically is, it's like, it's a way to try to fix an exchange rate and get a country a certain amount of US Dollars by just like, just at the fixed exchange rate, just like swapping X amount of dollars for X amount of another country's currency. This report was immediately denied or very, very quickly denied by a series of posts on X, the Everything app by the UAE's embassy to the US where they gave a thing. Trump also had like started talking about this too. I'm just going to read a little bit of this quote. We very much appreciate President Trump's recognition of the UAE as one of America's most important economic and trade partners. That recognition reflects the depth of mutual trust based on mutual investment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Any suggestion that the UAE requires external financial backing misreads the facts. The UAE is one of the most financially resilient economies, underpinned by more than $2 trillion in sovereign assets, more than $300 billion in foreign currency reserves held by the UAE central bank and banking sectors, with approximately 1.5 trillion in deposits. So when they start listing out the deposits, that's when, you know, things are not going great. And yeah, the, the, the, the issue here and something, this is what the Wall Street Journal is talking about is that this is not an immediate proposal. This is a proposal for what's becoming increasingly clear, which is that there's no, there's not actually an end to the war in Iran in sight. And if the trade of Hormuz remains closed, this is an existential crisis for the uae because not only are all of their exports stopped, you know, like the UAE itself is just physically under threat, its infrastructure is under threat and it's very difficult for them to get more investments. And this could in the future start a dollar crisis of the kind that we've talked about on this show before go. If you want to. Yeah, I've talked about basically dollar crises and how you can have balance of payments crises for running out of US Dollars. What's interesting about this report and the reason that we're sort of talking about it Right now is that one of the things that the UAE reportedly was mentioning was that they might be forced to turn to, like, the Chinese currency, basically. They might be forced to, like, sell oil in Chinese currency in order to, like, get it through the strait, which would be a epochal shift to the entire global political economy. Right. Which is the, like, the, the America's status in the world is in part, but in. In no small part based on the fact that you can really only buy oil in dollars. And it seems like what's happening is that the UAE is looking at their long term prospects going, we're completely screwed. They're going, oh, well, if, if we don't. If you don't just hand us a bunch of money, we're going to have to start start looking at the underpinnings of, you know, American imperial power. So we're going to continue to see where this goes. As this war continues and as the strike continues to be blocked, countries around the world are going to become more and more desperate as the economic consequences of this ripples out across the world. We're probably going to start seeing more things like this. And at some point, if it becomes clear that the war is not going to end and Trump's early week announcement that the ceasefires are going to keep going stops being able to keep the stock markets from being propped up, we're going to start seeing an even wider spread impact of this. But this is a bleak sign from a staunch US Ally.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, we have one final story before closing, which is a little funny, also worrying, but more, more funny, I think.

[James Stout]

Yeah, this one's pretty good.

[Garrison Davis]

Shawnee Kerkhoff, the woman that Glenn Beck's right wing outlet, the Blaze, falsely accused of being the January 6th pipe bomber, has launched a lawsuit against the Blaze and the two, quote, unquote, journalists who wrote the story for context. Last November, the Blaze published a story claiming to have identified the bomber as a Capitol Police officer who responded to the January 6th insurrection based on, quote, forensic gait analysis, which determined the officer was a, quote, up to 98% match to surveillance video of the bomber.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God.

[Garrison Davis]

This lawsuit claims five counts of defamation and one count of defamation by implication, and Kirchhoff is requesting a jury trial. The documents claim that the Blaze report targeted her because of her actions on January 6 as a police officer and testimony she gave against insurrectionists in court. And part of the intention of targeting her was to build on this larger idea that the defendants had that January 6th was a, quote, unquote, inside job. As these reports were getting published by the Blaze. Glenn Beck said on his show, quote, this is one of the biggest stories. I think it is the biggest scandal of my lifetime, maybe in the last 100 years. Monstrous.

[Robert Evans]

Bigger than Watergate.

[Garrison Davis]

Pulitzer Prize winning stuff, unquote.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The capacity for self delusion. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Pulitzer Prize winning stuff.

[Robert Evans]

I'm waiting for the Pulitzer Committee to finish reviewing this one.

[James Stout]

They're gonna have to get in line after the Pulitzer Prize they're surely gonna get for interviewing the dude who murdered Minneapolis Democratic politicians.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah.

[James Stout]

Which I'm sure was an action that his lawyer was super stoked about.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Court documents say that because of this false claim, the CIA placed the plaintiff on administrative leave and she was forced into hiding amidst online threats from conspiracy theorists, quote, for her role in supporting the Deep State, including in posts on her mother's obituary web page, unquote. She was getting death threats on the obituary page for her mother?

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Constant frustration in my life is journalists posting screenshots from court cases and then not listening to the court listener page. So I decided to find the page so I could not be that guy. But, yes, some of the threats this woman got genuinely probably made her life very difficult to live for a period of time.

[Garrison Davis]

Absolutely. The suit alleges that even after she was cleared as a suspect and weeks later, another suspect was arrested, who seems to be the likely bomber.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

These Blaze, quote, unquote, journalists continue to harass her and that their, quote, false and defamatory accusations have irreparably changed her life, unquote. The documents say that this ruined her lifetime career in public service by forever linking her to the bombing and records of an FBI investigation, making any potential security clearances needed in the future difficult or impossible to pass. One of the journalists was fired by the Blaze on April 1, just earlier this month, and the other resigned two days later. They have since raised over $20,000 since leaving the Blaze to continue their claims on a new independent website that they're launching.

[Robert Evans]

Are you given the name of the website?

[Garrison Davis]

The website is called.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Veritas Regnant llc.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes, Veritas. I think that just means the truth is king. Basically, truth reigns.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think that's what they were going for, at least.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I love it. I love it. When I read that detail, I was, oh, you guys are going to be the most sued any people have ever been. It's beautiful.

[James Stout]

Something about a pit hard seems relevant here.

[Garrison Davis]

The document says that the plaintiff was called into work on November 6, where two FBI agents then asked her about Quote, unquote, online chatter that she was the bomber. She consented to a phone and car search and was placed on administrative leave. Later that day, a quote, unquote, caravan of FBI vehicles arrived outside her home, including a bomb disposal truck and a helicopter. I'm just going to read from the document. Quote, the agents claimed that they were primarily looking for shoes. Agents exited their vehicles with their guns drawn in full tactical gear. An agent called Mr. Dickert, who is the plaintiff's boyfriend, and commanded him to, quote, come out of the house unarmed with your dogs. Mr. Dickert and Mrs. Kerkhoff complied and stepped outside. Agents swept through the house, then re entered with bomb sniffing dogs. They opened cabinets, rifled through drawers, and scattered Ms. Kirkhoff's and Mr. Dickert's belongings, all without obtaining Ms. Kirkhoff's or Mr. Dickert records consent. It subtly occurred to Ms. Kirkhoff that they were not simply looking for a pair of shoes, unquote.

[James Stout]

Never heard them asking for the dogs to come out before. That was a new one for me.

[Garrison Davis]

That is an interesting detail. That is an interesting detail.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So the plaintiff asked the agents there why they would do all this to investigate, quote, unquote, online chatter. And a senior official responded that these orders came from, quote, unquote, higher up and that Ms. Kirkhoff could, quote, clear everything up just that night if she would accompany agents to the FBI office for a polygraph interview. Ms. Kirkhoff agreed, and agents assured her that the drive out to the office would take longer than the interview itself. This was not true. The interview lasted almost three hours. Agents repeatedly accused the plaintiff of placing the bombs and continually asserted her guilt. Partway through the interview, the interrogator changed out the tubes on the polygraph because they, quote, did not like how they were reading, unquote.

[James Stout]

That was a remarkable detail. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, Jesus Christ.

[Garrison Davis]

And at one point told the plaintiff that she, quote, unquote, failed the polygraph test, which the plaintiff assumed was just an interrogation technique.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you can't fail a polygraph test. Right. Like, it just gives information.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[James Stout]

Often not actually information which is very useful in any way relevant to whether you're telling the truth or not. Polygraph's not really something that should be used in this capacity, but here we go anyway. But, yeah, there's not, like a pass fail. It doesn't, like, go, bleep, bleep, bleep. Liar. Detective.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

No.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, after midnight, she asked if she was free to leave, and the agents said yes. So she went home. And the next day, the FBI returned her phone, and then once she got back her phone, she saw this quote, unquote online chatter exploding all over, alleging that she was the bomber. A day later, the Blaze published report explicitly naming her as the bombing suspect, something they already alluded to in previous reporting, which sparked the online chatter which caused the FBI to search her home and interrogate her. This was all in intentional on the part of the Blaze. According to this court document, the defendants, these quote, unquote journalists, purposely forwarded a tip to the office of the Director of National Intelligence in an attempt to get quote, unquote cooperation, definitely of their reporting from sources inside the government by getting the plaintiff placed under investigation prior to their publishing of the articles identifying her as the bomber. This was. This was basically all part of a scheme.

[Robert Evans]

Their goal was to set the narrative.

[Mia Wong]

Jesus Christ.

[Garrison Davis]

Months later, the defendants have refused to remove headlines or social media posts claiming to identify the bomber, even after the actual text of these articles was removed. After the FBI arrested the real suspect in December. Well, just last month, the quote unquote journalists published another article on the Blaze titled, quote, brian Cole Jr's physical presence, posture, mannerisms are no match to FBI's hoodie clad pipe bomb suspect, unquote.

[Andrew Sage]

God.

[Garrison Davis]

This was another article on the Blaze saying that gate analysis showed that Brian Cole Jr. The actual suspect who has been arrested, does not match the gate does. Does not. Does not have a positive gain analysis of match to the surveillance footage from that night.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

Because it's not real. Because gait analysis is bullshit.

[James Stout]

Well, they break that down in the court documents. Right. The footage of her that they had was when she's carrying like 50 pounds of tactical gear and a heavy bag.

[Garrison Davis]

Tactical gear. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And she suffered a serious leg injury in college. Yeah.

[James Stout]

It's comical that, like, they. This is what they went with, but the fact that they're doubling down on it, it's very funny.

[Garrison Davis]

And legally baffling.

[James Stout]

Yeah, they really are not ready for the consequences to hit them on this one.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Garrison Davis]

So, like I said, these two, quote, unquote journalists were fired and slash left the Blaze earlier this month. But in posts and podcast appearances, they assert that Brian Cole Jr. Is a quote, unquote patsy. And that, quote, the truth about the pipe bomber has been, quote, unquote, thwart it. And that, quote unquote legal considerations are preventing them from further disclosing the, quote, unquote darker details about their pipe bomber theory.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Jesus Christ.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, Brian Cole Jr's defense lawyers have filed a subpoena for Ms. Kirkoff which misleadingly states she, quote, unquote, failed a polygraph. This subpoena also contains her home address. And this subpoena has been spread online by these quote, unquote journalists as evidence that they were right all along. The plaintiff continues to deal with doxxing and death threats as a result from this subpoena. And the quote, unquote journalists continued reporting, spreading claims that she is in fact the real bomber. So Kirchhoff is requesting a jury trial with these six counts of defamation. And I hope she gets a lot of money from everyone involved in this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I, I hope she gets every dollar. Glenn Beck.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I mean, I hope the outlet ceases existing.

[Garrison Davis]

That would be ideal.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I hope the outlet becomes yet another subsidiary of the Onion.

[James Stout]

That would be a magnificent way for this to end. But, yeah, like, yeah. And then another element of the documents I noticed was that they talked about how the quote, unquote journalists had benefited from their Blue Check X posts. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Monetized accounts on X. Yeah.

[James Stout]

I would be interested to see, as we get more in the discovery element of this case, how much were they making? How much were they making from X versus the Blaze? Like, I'm going to follow this one just because so many of the bits of misleading reporting we see are because of this financial incentive structure. So, like, it'll be very revealing for us.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, and, and this financial structure is something that X Everything up is somewhat attempting to take on, at least for news aggregator accounts.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They specifically went after Dom Lucret, apparently.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. One of X's guys announced like a week or so ago that they're going to be reforming, reforming the payout system for news aggregators. This is Nikolita Beer.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Part of the way they're doing that is that X's traffic is in free fall and this is something that we're seeing like, across social media. There was a really good report that Peter Thornberg, who is an assistant professor in computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, published earlier this year, I mean, like just today came up with an update on it on like the most recent numbers we have on like what's happening to the different social media networks visiting and posting on X, the Everything app and Facebook have seen like a nearly 50% drop, a significant decline among like the youngest and the oldest users on social media. Particularly, like people over 65 and people from 18 to 24 have seen like the biggest decline in like the time that they've actually spent on site. I, I'm going to be doing something more detailed about this in the future. But a lot of what you're seeing from these big social media companies and these like big pivots, right, are moves in desperation. This is not working as well as it used to. The economics that once underpinned this system are falling apart. None of these companies are as profitable as they used to be. And people are pulling away from social media, particularly from like a lot of the text based social media sites which were never as profitable as like short form video was. So I don't know. That's something that made me less bummed.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, I hope, I hope she gets. That's certainly all the money they got from X. And learning how much money that was will be super interesting in discovery and hopefully much, much, much more money as well.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of money, James, you wanted to plug a donation.

[James Stout]

That's right, yeah. I want to talk really briefly about the guys from Cobra column. So Cobra column. If people are unfamiliar, it's a special forces or it's a p. It's a PDF that is aligned with the. The Karen National Union. Karen National Liberation army and the struggle for liberation in Myanmar against the Hunter.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

Right.

[James Stout]

They have been fighting intensely in an area near Miawedi, a place that Robert and I spent some time actually just across the river from a place Rob and I spent some time. Albeit the Hunter has successfully launched munitions into Thailand several times now. And they are really like, if you want to look at the front line of people's autonomy against autocracy, against dictatorship, against tyranny, like, like they are at it and they need money to sustain their efforts, to feed themselves, to equip themselves, to buy medical equipment. And I think they're also trying to buy like a replacement helmets and body armor because they keep getting hit by drones. Right. And people have survivable injuries but their armor is destroyed. If you'd like to help, you can send €15 for 10 stickers. Stickers have have the Milk Tea alliance salute, which is the same as the salute that the Cub Scouts use and the one from Hunger Games. I'm not going to describe it because you can work it out. It is stickers for Myanmar. @protonmail.com you can send €15 for two stickers. That's S T I C K E R S F O R M Y A N M a [e-mail] if you want to email us. Coolzonetips proton me if it's a marketing email, I'll block you.

[Mia Wong]

Put a trans girl on your couch.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

Bye Bye.

[UCSD Faculty Member]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Mia Wong]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

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

[Mia Wong]

Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions.

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