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- [00:01]
A
Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in.
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B
Let's get started.
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C
Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
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A
You what?
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C
Yeah.
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B
Great price.
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C
I even have seven days to love it or return it.
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A
So there's no.
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C
No, no Buyer's remorse. More like Buyers rejoice.
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A
I guess I'll let myself out.
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B
Congratulations.
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A
I mean it.
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Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com.
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A
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention. Then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Hello everyone, my name is Matthew Rebsky. This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on Bluesky. The podcast is on Instagram and threads. And as always, you can support our Patreon. We very much appreciate it. You can also find me personally on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. This brief is called Red Scare Rising and it analyzes the conspiratorial logic of accelerating red scarism in the Trump administration along with some thoughts about its psychology and affect. Back in September, Trump signed NSPM 7. You might remember it. This is the memorandum called Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence and it redirected the FBI's 200 odd Joint Terrorism Task Forces, DOJ prosecutors and IRS Criminal Investigation Units toward left wing political violence and its findings financing. Most ominously, it opened the door to designating domestic political groups as terrorist organizations. And this followed another executive order that had designated Antifa specifically as a domestic terrorist organization. You know, regardless of the fact that it's not really an organization for a legal category that doesn't exist, these orders have led to escalating consequences as recently with eight defendants in the so called North Texas Antifa cell tied to a 242025 confrontation at the Prairie Land Detention center, being convicted and sentenced for decades in prison for as little as moving anti fascist magazines from one house to another. Now, fast forward 10 months and we have Secretary of State Marco Rubio, hosting the July 16 ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism conference, also dubbed the Antifa Summit, which drew representatives from more than 65 countries to Washington, including one representative. We don't know who it was, but they came from my home country here of Canada. Here is Rubio's thesis statement.
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D
For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot. A blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It's treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction. A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system, that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system, a bomb planted by a neo Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is but a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well, that's just merely a tragic excess of idealism.
- [05:07]
A
Now, in reality, what's really gone on for far too long is this shameless lying about the sources and causes of political violence over the past 30 years. As we'll see, Rubio has a point in if we're still talking about 1971, the year he's born in Miami. But you know, there are many studies that expose his confusion. Here I'll look at three new America's terrorism in America after 911 is an ongoing tracker of post 911 domestic terrorism deaths. Far left violence killed one person since 2001, according to this tracker, versus 137 from far right terrorism and and 121 from jihadist extremism. And then we have a report from the center for Strategic and International Studies. It's called Left Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States, and it analyzes 750 attacks or plots from 1994 to 2025. Right wing incidents made up 57% versus 25% left wing incidents. They found 112 right wing linked deaths over the past decade vers as 13 left linked deaths which is a factor of nine to one. Now CSIS is also saying that 2025 is quote on pace to be the left's most violent year in more than three decades. But Just Security, which is a nonprofit daily online law and policy journal launched in 2013 based at NYU School of Law's Rice center on Law and Security, published a direct rebuttal arguing the report has quote, fatal analytical flaws built on just five incidents over seven months that they give outsized predictive weight to. Even the ultra Zionist ADL isn't that afraid of the left with their ongoing Murder and Extremism in the United States study which tracks extremist related murders over the last decade, right wing extremism caused 75% of such killings versus 4% attributed to the left wing. 2022 to 2024 saw zero left wing attributed murders with all extremist killings traced to right wing perpetra. Now right wing pundits will whine that these are garbage studies, but none of them has come up with a competing data set that shows left wing violence comes anywhere close to right wing violence. So the arguments are around categorization and framing but not the general ratios. And they fail to mention that one major limitation of these studies is that they exclude state violence. So when the time comes, these models won't even look at the murders committed by ICE for example, which are incidents of right wing political violence. But cry bullying about leftist violence is a traditional fascist tactic for consolidating power. It goes way back in February of 1933. The Nazis blamed a lone wolf Dutch ex communist for the Reichstag arson and that led to them suspending civil liberties and mass arresting Communist party members. That led to the Enabling act in March which granted Hitler dictatorial power over parliament. And Mussolini was doing the same stuff on the day of the ministerial. The State Department also announced a new visa inadmissibility statute that bars foreign nationals who let's get this language clear. Finance recruit for or otherwise support left wing extremist terrorist groups from entering the us. Now notice how broad Finance recruit for or otherwise support is. This is about as broad as the language they're using to describe the thought crimes of antifa in NSPM 7. And just as a reminder, here's what they're targeting as far left or antifa in NSPM 7. Consider again just how undefined these terms anti Americanism anti capitalism, anti Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race and gender, hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality. Those are the terms that is the discourse that they're using, that they're employing. And of course it's growing in this amorphous, undefined blob. Four days after the ministerial, the State Department published a 100 page report called Cuba, the Capital of 21st Century Communism which painted the country which has been immiserated by decades of blockade and is now suffering constant power outages and supply shortages as an anchor point of the current American far left. Now I'll turn to that document a little bit later, but for now I'll just note that in the style of an old school black list, the report names 70 plus Americans across multiple tiers. Convicted spies, asylum fugitives, aging radicals, active nonprofits, elected officials and wedding guests, which, you know, collapses wildly different people and relationships into a fictional network to create the impression of a broad political cultural threat. On 23 July, the government started taking Cuba related action not via the State Department or the Department of Justice, but through the GOP led House Ways and Means Committee which issued subpoenas to three media platforms that report on human affairs from a sympathetic point of view. So this is breakthrough news. The People's Forum and Tri Continental. The Institute for Social Research and the subpoena has demanded internal communications and financial records by August 7th. Now all three of these media platforms focus substantial coverage resources on the plight of Cuba. Breakthrough news. Hosts have reported from the island repeatedly. The platform secured the first ever US interview with the Castro's successor Miguel Diazcanel. The People's Forum co director Manolo de los Santos has a decade plus relationship with Havana. He organized the Let Cuba Live campaign and Nuestra America aid convoy. Just this past March he hosted Cuba's Foreign minister in person in New York. De los Santos is also a researcher for the Tri Continental Institute for Social Research. And I want you to put a pin in that name because it'll be relevant in a bit. These are the surface details and on their own they are as incoherent and contradictory as anything that emerges from a fascist machine. And as such, they might not fly on their own without the burning rage and disgust that anchored the meeting itself and underlined that according to the Trump administration, socialism and communism are not political and economic systems primarily they are moral and spiritual pathologies. Here's Marco Rubio again.
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This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been Driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti capitalists or anti imperialists or communists or anarchist or Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same. It's always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice, liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world.
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A
And here's Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
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The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with the perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy. And they covet and they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress and to inflict pain and suffering. It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who were assembled. To be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They're all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that? Why? You look at two photographs and you see a normal American street, you see an antifa protest. Why do the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.
- [14:41]
A
You know, between these two guys, we might need a new term to describe an inverted spiritual bypassing which uses like very emotional frameworks to misdirect or distort responses to empirical realities like wealth inequality and imperial aggression. Because for both of them, the, the disqualifying feature of the leftist is that they are morally disgusting and spiritually degenerate to an existential Self hating degree. And I think there are shades of Milton in all of this too, where Lucifer's jagged light is burning on the oil of jealousy. Now, of the two speeches, Miller's went the farthest off the rails into that fever dream you just heard a bit of about deformed protesters and by juxtaposing them against his idealized normie family. And you know, if we know that antifa gatherings are driven by young people, we know that in this moment he's in fascist dad territory. And what he's doing in this patriarchal rage fantasy is expressing hatred for children who can't be controlled. From clothing choices to political ideals to self perceptions about gender. Miller's not going to rest until he sees that all the young people are as dolls modeled after himself, reflecting back to him his own compliance, validating his anxiety and never having thoughts that test the boun boundaries of authority. But if we rise back up to the surface level of political discourse, the most notable distortion in Miller's account is his explicit dismissal of inequality as the driving concern of leftist politics.
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B
This is so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation, although they're incredibly important. It's about normal, healthy ordered living and the violent leftists. For these deep seated reasons, going back to the earliest wisdom taught to us in the Bible about coveting. And I'm not talking about rich versus poor, I'm talking about a much deeper kind of coveting. Coveting people who are morally superior, who are superior in the simple truthful way they live their lives.
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A
It does not matter to Miller that there is no leftism without a clinical, meticulous, mathematical explanation for how capitalism must create and accelerate inequality. That took Marx decades of poring over ledger sheets in the British Museum as he wrote three quarters of a million words on commodity fetishism, surplus value, exploitation of labor, capital accumulation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and capitalism's inherent crisis reflex. He was a passionate thinker and you can imagine he was driven by envy all you want. But what he did was to work out the math of exploitation and chaos he said it would eventually cause. Now Rubio and Miller are not pulling this envy resentment accusation against economic egalitarianism out of the ether. It belongs to a long history of making poor people demanding rights appear insane. The tendency has its psychological and philosophical roots in Nietzsche's on the Genealogy of Morals from 1887, in which he described a kind of slave morality where the resentment of the weakness was recast as virtue. In 1912, Max Shaler wrote a book called Ressentiment, in which he politicized Nietzsche's largely psychological framework to pathologize modest humanitarian efforts towards social welfare. And here's how he describes. It's a self poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects, which as such are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract and spite. So Shaler argues that once suppressed, one's resentful feelings curdle into value delusions, and that rather than admit powerless powerlessness, the ressentiment driven person inverts the hierarchy of values so that the qualities it cannot attain, like strength and wealth and beauty, come to be despised as bad. And its own qualities, weakness, poverty, meekness, are recast as virtues. Then in 1966, Helmut Schoch's Envy, A Theory of Social Behavior, argued that socialist projects and even the egalitarian impulse in democratic societies are forms of institutionalized envy. And then, in a 1971 essay called the Age of Envy, Ayn Rand Today we live in the age of Envy. Envy is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless. It is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify. Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion, and therefore it serves as a semi human cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it, even to themselves. Mankind has lived with it, has observed its manifestations, and to various extents has been ravaged by it for countless centuries, yet has failed to grasp its meaning and to rebel against its exponents. Today that emotion is the leitmotif, the sense of life of our culture. It is all around us, we are drowning in it. It is almost explicitly confessed by its more brazen opponents. Yet men continue to evade its existence and are peculiarly afraid to name it, as primitive people were once afraid to pronounce the name of the devil. That emotion, hatred of the good for being the good. Now, is there any evidence at all that some people hate good people because they are good? Actually, the established psychology says pretty much the opposite. Relative deprivation theory dates back to the studies of American soldiers in World War II about their feelings about promotion, getting promotions, not getting promotions. And the theory has now decades of empirical support, and it explains protest, grievance and you know, support for redistribution as products of perceived injustice. In comparison, I have less than I deserve, given what's fair, not as some kind of free floating hostility toward goodness or success as such. A 2026 study in personality and Social Psychology Bulletin tested the politics of envy story and they found that whatever studies that seemed to show a link between envy and support for socialism always failed to control for meritocracy beliefs. Subject had not been asked whether they believe that wealth is actually earned. And so what actually predicts support for redistribution is the belief that extreme wealth isn't earned through merit. So this is a judgment about fairness. It's not a hostile emotion about the wealthy person's existence that rises up out of some kind of original sin. So Gad Saad who recently published Suicidal Empathy Can Eat his Heart out because there's a whole intellectual project going back over a century that works tirelessly to turn empathy into a delusion. So turning now to that report, it's called Cuba, the capital of 21st century communism, which is less of an intelligence analysis than a justification for escalating domestic repression and likely military action against the island. The first question I think, unfortunately we all have to ask about any document like this in these days, coming from an administration like this, is it AI written? And I'm asking because Dr. Charisse Burdon Steli alluded to this possibility in an interview on bad faith. And as I read through the document, I did find some potential signs. So a bunch of constructions like it was not X, it was Y. Rule of three lists single sentence, dramatic paragraph breaks like it was a revolution against Western civilization itself. So there's a kind of stylistic uniformity across the hundred pages as well. It's a huge multi topic document and that kind of continuity uniformity is something that I think LLMs do reliably better than multi author government reports. And then there's just the matter of scope. Like 70 plus named individuals and organizations, they're cross referenced across seven decades. Footnotes. It's all written for a deadline. It's the type of thing that would typically require large dedicated research staff. And we, we know that since 2025 under Rubio, about 3,000 domestic State Department employees have been cut. This is 18% of the workforce with 300 offices eliminated or consolidated, including offices that were focused on countering extremism, human rights and democracy promotion. But who the heck knows really? I bring it up because we know that AI has completely overtaken intellectual labor in the government, but also because the actual subject matter here is completely devo of original thinking. It is a moderately accurate history that's mobilized for propaganda slop. Whatever its provenance, its a hundred pages are an argument which has elements of truth in it, that Cuba has spent 67 years covertly exporting revolution, espionage and ideology into American political life from the 1960s New Left radicalism through Black power Latin American guerrilla networks. And this is where it goes off the rails. However, it also includes today's dsa, Code Pink and National Lawyers Guild workers. It names, As I said, 70 plus Americans, spanning convicted spies to wedding guests as though they're some sort of one undifferentiated lumpen network. There is a chapter on espionage that documents real cases of Cuban intelligence infiltration in the 1970s. But by and large, the report conflates ideology for material causation. And this is what I'll focus on. It frames Cuba's weakness as concealed danger. Now this report, as with the conference that preceded it, relies heavily on the trope of the scapegoat in two versions that share the same paradox of disgusting weakness and ominous strength. So Cuba as the external threat in this model, and American leftists as the internal threat. So the report presents a reasonable account of Cuba's role in Third Worldism, resistance to US imperialism. And that's hinged on reports on Havana's 1966 TRI Continental Conference, if you remember that term from before, which gathered representatives of anti imperialist movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. So Fidel Castro chaired the conference, and there were speeches from Salvador Allende, the future president of Chile, Amilcar Cabral, the independence leader of Guinea Bissau, Chetty Jagan, the Guyanese independence leader, and later President Nguyen Van Thien, who was the representative of South Vietnam's Viet Cong at the time. So if this iteration of red scarism is a conspiracy theory, here is its kernel of truth. Because more than a half a century ago, there really was organizational and militant energy that swirled and coalesced and plotted over coffee and cigars and rum in Havana. But as of mid-2026, to think that Cuba influences, let alone commands, world affairs is absurd. U.S. sanctions first levied in 1960 in the aftermath of the 1959 revolution, and the nationalization of U.S. owned assets have now reached a kind of terminal impact. Cuba has suffered at least five nationwide grid collapses this year alone, so it's also nine since late 2024. The generating capacity of roughly 935 megawatts is running against demand of 3,100. A near total US oil blockade, which was imposed after Venezuela's Maduro was removed from power and Mexico halted shipments under US pressure. This has cut oil imports to a trickle of Russian tankers that cover seven to 10 days of consumption per quarter. Nearly a million Cubans depend on trucked water because 84% of pumping equipment requires electricity that just isn't there. And the UN is warning of a deepening humanitarian emergency as these impacts pile up. Now, how does Rubio square this circle? How does he make this immiserated country mighty? This is what he says in the document, or this is what the AI says, or his department AI prompters or whatever. But this is from the text. Cuba's assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself, waged in part via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the west to turn against their own inheritance. And that is the campaign Castro launched in 1959. And it is the campaign his heirs are waging still. And in the institutions of the modern American Left, in its universities and its non profits, its street movements and its media, that campaign has enjoyed a success its founders could scarcely have imagined. The regime's method was never primarily premised on kinetic warfare. Although it was not above utilizing violence and terror when it suited its interests, it was subtler and far more dangerous to attack the United States not from without, but from within. To turn Americans into instruments of their own nation's undoing. To mistake Cuba's poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive and parasitic. And it has proven remarkably durable, outlasting the Soviet empire that helped build it and grafting itself onto every new enemy of the United States that has arisen since. Today it serves as the connective tissue of a broader anti American coalition, as a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders. In Violence and the Sacred and the Scapegoat, Rene Girard describes the sacrificial victim as necessarily dual, vulnerable enough to be eliminated without real resistance, yet imagined as possessing an almost supernatural capacity to contaminate or destroy the community, the monstrous double which is simultaneously subhuman and superhuman. And Girard also describes the precondition for scapegoating as a or a collapse of the ordinary distinctions that keep a society legible, which are resolved by the community's unanimous but false conviction. That one offender caused the entire problem. And this collapse of ordinary distinctions is what we see in the most chilling section of Rubio's document, Chapter 7 of this report titled Front Groups and fellow Travelers. So this is where we get 70 plus names rolling like balls in the bingo Tumblr. Convicted spies, dead fugitives, aging radicals, wedding guests, as I said, all lumped into a single network. And I sorted out some tiers in descending order of relevance. In the first group we have the actual Cuban spies of the WASP network. This includes Fernando Gonzalez Lort, who was convicted in 1998, followed by Anna Belen Montes in 2022, Walter Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers in 2010, and Victor Manuel Rocha, who pled guilty in 2024 after roughly four decades of spying. So those are real spies. But then when we get to tier two, we've got dead people, deceased radicals from the 60s through the early 80s. So Eldridge Cleaver, who fled to Cuba in 68. William Lee Brent, who hijacked a plane there in 69. Huey Newton followed in 1974, but he, he came back to face trial in 1977. Charlie Hill hijacked a plane in 71. Sherry Dalton was indicted in 1981 over the Brinks robbery. Assata Shakur, who's the most prominent name here, I think, mainly because she recently died, fled in 1984 and remained until her recent death. So that's tier two. Tier three covers the new Left and Black power also now very elderly people or deceased. These are folks who at some point lived in exile in Cuba or who made political visits. Robert Williams, Kwame Ture, Angela Davis, Weather Underground folks. But when the report is not dealing with deep history, things start getting weird, conflated. We've got code pink listed DSA's official Cuba delegations, the People's Forum, the IFCO, Pastors for Peace, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the National Lawyers Guild's Cuba Subcommittee and the national network on Cuba's 60 plus group coalition, and of course the Communist Party of the usa. These are groups that maintain open, legal, self reported institutional ties to Cuba. They send official delegations. There can be fiscal sponsorship, there can be solidarity campaigns, personal relationships with Cuban officials, legal advocacy work that the report treats as equivalent to illegal espionage. Tier 5 gets stranger because LA Mayor Karen Bass makes the cut because she went in the 1970s for a visit. She issued a condolence statement on Castro's death in 2016. Ayanna Pressley tweeted after Shakur's death in 2025, A little eulogy. Maxine Waters wrote a letter to Castro in 1998. And Zora and Mamdani declined to denounce a 2025 DSA tribute to Shakur. The next tier centers on the March 2026 Nuestra America convoy, which delivered between 20 and 35 tons of aid. This is medicine, solar panels, other supplies via 600 plus delegates from more than 33 countries. Now, the organizers did explicitly frame this as breaching Trump's blockade. And so, but, you know, beyond what hotels Hasan Piker stayed in or, you know, had to stay in by government order, beyond anything people say about it being performative, it did deliver real humanitarian impact, which the group also acknowledged as being insufficient to Cuba's needs. So Piker and Christian Smalls are in the dock for being on that convoy. Ilhan Omar is named as well because her daughter Israel was on that trip as well. And then also named in the document are Amy Goodman, Ice Cream, Ben Cohen and Eve Ensler as wedding guests at the wedding of Jody Evans and Neville Roy Singham in Jamaica in 2017. And it does seem that the Moby Dick of this document is Singham, who's 72. He was born in Connecticut. He's the son of a Sri Lankan political scientist named Archibald Singham. And he's been very political from youth. He belonged to the black nationalist Maoist League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He was investigated by the FBI in 1974 as potentially dangerous. He went on to earn a political science degree from Howard University, and then he founded a Chicago consultancy that became ThoughtWorks, which incorporated in 1993 and grew to a global IT firm with Microsoft and Oracle as clients before he sold it for $785 million in 20. This is the same year he married Code Pink's Jody Evans and they relocated to Shanghai. So that's just a 101 on him. I'm sure there's more, but basically it sounds like opposite day tech bro who went in an unexpected direction. And a grand jury in the Southern District of New York was empanelled to investigate Singham in late June of this year. They're examining possible Foreign Agents Registration act violations with which then might impact like a criminal tax probe. Specifically, they're looking at whether money was funneled unlawfully through nonprofits that he controls and whether his 990 tax filings contain false statements. So that's all in process. And from a quick search just before publishing this, it appears that, you know, this dragnet is spreading out and tightening. My feeds are full of activists, not multimillionaires just regular people who are reporting on getting door knocked by the FBI or getting government letters. I think it's shaping up to be a very repressive time. So the lines are being drawn with roots in deep soil. We have a friend of the show, Jamie Rosky, who I've known for over a decade. She's a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild and works closely with its executive director and a board member in offering protesters legal support. The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1937. It has about 9,400 members and over 50 chapters. This is the oldest largest progressive bar association in the country. It helped found the United Auto Workers. It prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg. It represented the Rosenbergs back in the day. The House on UN American activities called the National Lawyers Guild the American Communists legal bulwark and they lost half their membership during the McCarthy period. But they've come out swinging with a statement dated July 23. We will not be silenced in the face of resurgent fascism. We will not be divided. We will not retreat. The more they attack our movement, the more determined we become. As members of the National Lawyers Guild, we pledge to continue to use our legal expertise and platform to expose the crimes of the US Empire, support the Cuba solidarity movement and defend those targeted by the state in the face of this McCarthyite assault. We pledge to continue organizing as the National Lawyers Guild and together with our comrades in other organizations to end the genocidal US blockade of Cuba and all forms of imperialist aggression towards Cuba. We pledge to continue sending delegations to support and learn from the incredible successes of the Cuban revolution, delivering humanitarian aid and amplifying the voices of the Cuban people. We pledge to defend our first Amendment rights against every attempt to criminalize anti imperialist solidarity. It is our right and responsibility as lawyers, legal workers, civil society organizations and individuals in the belly of the beast to challenge this illegal and inhumane policy and uphold domestic and international law in furtherance of justice and people centered human rights. So I'm going to leave the reporting part there and close with a more direct editorial comment. This scattershot naming of disparate groups in this document and the broad stroke defamation of protesters as disgusting, deformed and so on. It has a clear objective which is to chill all possible opposition to fascism. From the conventional and anodyne in people like Karen Bass, to the electorally effective and ambitious but also rule abiding and reformist DSA to Hasan Piker in the influencer class, to my friend Jamie, they are lumping all opposition together with the zeal of medieval crusaders. And to be perfectly frank, it could be anyone next. This is accelerating at a critical time in the Trumpian arc as they stare into the train wreck of the midterms. And this further challenges the anti fascist loyalties in the electoral opposition. So my hope is that everyone to the left of maga, from the center to the progressive Democratic voting bloc that fiercely opposes DSA policies, will make efforts to support and protect DSA members and candidates who will be under this hotter fire before you are, you know, because everyone is now at risk of being caught up in this sweep. And it's possible that ICE will be deployed against political opponents next. Lawyers, legal observers, clerics who show up to care for detainees, journalists who write about this stuff, and people like me who publish books with the word anti fascist on the COVID people who buy books with the word antifascist on the COVID or store audiobook formats of anti fascist books on their phones and get caught up at the border. The big test of any big tent sentiment and commitment to democracy is the question of of who is going to stand in the way of the brown shirts. And I think we need everybody to stand in the way of the brown shirts. Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
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C
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