It Could Happen Here Weekly 233

Summary

It Could Happen Here Weekly 233 – May 23, 2026

Podcast: It Could Happen Here
Publisher: Cool Zone Media / iHeartPodcasts
Hosts/Contributors: Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, James Stout, Mia Wong, Molly Co

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Episode Overview

This episode is a weekly compilation, drawing from recent episodes of It Could Happen Here. Core topics include the ongoing collapse of US institutions; contemporary threats to democracy, elections, and civil rights; the politics of environmental management (focusing on bison and public lands); the function of media and culture in the new American context; the economics of labor and monopoly power; the cultural and economic ascendance of Japanese anime/manga in the US; domestic terrorism and accelerationism; the escalation of international conflict; and new manifestations of state and corporate corruption.

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1. Election "Integrity" and Voter Suppression (03:00–29:26)

Main Points

• Trump’s Narratives of Election Fraud:
  Trump and allies (ex: Cash Patel) continue to push the narrative of “rigged” elections, both 2020 and 2024, despite Trump winning in 2024.
• Recent Arrests for Voting by Noncitizens (04:55–15:08):
  DOJ charged four legal permanent residents in NJ for registering and/or voting in federal elections and making false statements on naturalization forms.

  “That’s not a statistically significant number when it comes to electoral outcomes... Generally they are decided by several multiples of four.” – James Stout (05:20)

• Pattern of Denaturalization and Voter Suppression:
  DOJ is more aggressively targeting noncitizens/formerly naturalized citizens, with the aim of denaturalization, using minor paperwork missteps as a pretext.
• Federal Overreach on Voter Rolls (15:29–23:06):
  DOJ is pursuing lawsuits against non-cooperating states to obtain complete voter rolls (including SSNs & driver’s license numbers), often to run checks against the flawed DHS SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database.

  “The accuracy rate of the SAVE database is 100%. So I’m sure that’s fine.” – Garrison Davis (20:09)

• Seizure of Voting Materials (23:14–26:27):
  Federal government has seized election records in GA and AZ, aiming to use even minuscule “fraud” as justification for broad suppression, lawsuits, and threats against election officials.
• Statistical Insignificance of Voter Fraud:
  The number of actual fraudulent votes is minuscule, but the machinery of suppression is ramped up for intimidation and chilling effects on all “suspicious” voters.

  “Non-citizens voting is not statistically significant... but this will have a real electoral outcome because it will dissuade people from voting.” – James Stout (28:04) “That motive of intimidation is certainly part of the goal here. And that's written explicitly in some of these executive orders.” – Garrison Davis (28:35)

Key Timestamps

• 03:00 – Introduction and context
• 04:55 – The four New Jersey “alien voter fraud” cases described
• 15:29 – Federal fight for state voter rolls
• 20:09 – Challenges of SAVE database and new citizenship lists
• 23:14 – Ballot/election record seizures, intimidation of officials
• 28:04 – Discussion of real, significant threats to democracy

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2. Buffalo, Bison, and the Politics of American Land (32:45–88:18)

Main Points

• Buffalo Extirpation and the Modern Bison Debate:
  Discussion of the cultural, ecological, and genocidal dimensions of the near-extinction of bison (and Black-Footed Ferrets, etc.), intertwined with Indigenous genocide.
• The “Buffalo Commons” and American Prairie NGO (39:49–66:15):
  American Prairie (AP)—an NGO—has been acquiring public and private land in Montana to create a vast, restored prairie system, reintroducing bison, aiming to rewild landscapes. Efforts face fierce backlash from both the Trump administration and ranchers.

  “Capitalism also played a role...the government was bringing with it killed the majority of the wild buffalo in this country. And that's what's happening again.” – James Stout (74:38)

• Revocation of Bison Grazing Rights (66:15–80:27):
  Trump’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rescinded public grazing permits for bison on the pretense that bison are not “productive” livestock, affecting both NGOs and potentially tribal nations. Move considered a huge threat to conservation and Indigenous interests.

  “Affirmative action for cattle.” – quoting Cheyenne River Sioux tribal chairman’s letter (74:31)

• Critique of Federal Land Governance and Capitalist Priorities:
  The BLM’s new productivity standard essentially means only cattle/maximum exploitation allowed on public lands, threatening both ecological restoration and tribal bison sovereignty.

  “In order, in order to use this land that is supposed to be for, you know, public preservation, you have to be as exploitative and destructive as possible.” – Mia Wong (82:19)

Notable Moments

• 37:39 – Ferrets and prairie dog ecology
• 45:51 – What AP is actually doing (buying, linking lands)
• 54:30 – Local economics, depopulation, and land use
• 74:31 – Tribal response voiced
• 80:27 – “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” gag and critique

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3. Economics: Monopoly, Monopsony, and Ideology (94:50–138:47)

Main Points

• Monopsony Explained:
  The concept of monopsony—a market with a single or dominant buyer (ex: employer)—as central to why wages are low for most Americans.
• History and Suppression of Radical Economics:
  Key figure Joan Robinson pioneered the theories of “imperfect competition” and monopsony but was ostracized from mainstream economics for being a leftist and a woman.

  “Being right doesn't do anything in economics.” – Molly Co (120:06)

• Economics as Ideology, Not Science:
  The field’s reliance on axiomatic assumptions (“everyone is a rational maximizer,” etc.) rather than empirical reality; the purge of heterodox economists.

  “Economics as a field is not a science… it starts with assumptions about how humans work… and projects that assumption onto the world.” – Molly Co (108:05)

• Power, Not Correctness, Drives Policy and Theory:
  Even when neoclassical economists lost major technical debates (“Cambridge Capital Controversy”), they persisted in power through institutional and ideological control.

  “It is about who has power.” – Molly Co (119:36)

• Application to Media and Journalism:
  Monopsony (and monopoly) conditions affect labor and content—including in media, where a few firms decide what “opinions” are allowed, and the only way to get a “good job” is luck or lottery.

Key Timestamps

• 94:50 – Monopsony definition and impacts
• 104:12 – High school econ as anti-communist propaganda
• 120:05 – The “Cambridge Capital Controversy” and economics as ideology
• 135:41 – Even total intellectual defeat does not upend power structure

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4. Pop Culture in Collapse: Anime, Manga, and the US Culture Industry (142:22–177:32)

Main Points

• Anime/Manga’s Domination of US Youth Culture:
  Firsthand report from New York Comic Con reveals dramatic ascendance of Japanese (and Korean) media at expense of Marvel/DC/American pop culture.

  “The Bandai Namco presence was significantly bigger than the Marvel and DC booths combined.” – Garrison Davis (149:42) “In 2025, anime and manga are rapidly growing in the United States, which is why Japanese companies are buying almost half the show floor at New York comic con, whereas 10 years ago they were in a tiny corner of the basement.” – Garrison Davis (176:24)

• Root Causes: Dead Labor, Risk Aversion, and Self-Cannibalization:
  US companies double-down on nostalgia, endlessly recycling old IPs; risk-averse, with little space for new creators.

  “They are increasingly relying on the dead labor of their ubiquitous iconography. Even my beloved Lego Batman is an instance of this.” – Garrison Davis (172:15)

• Japanese Model: New Stories, New Labor, Lower Barriers:
  Manga offers diverse genres, single-author runs with beginnings and ends, and pipelines for new young talent. Also, manga is vastly cheaper to buy than US comics.
• Pop Culture as a Political Battleground:
  US studios contort around “woke”/anti-woke culture war, while anime/manga feel “outside” US politics (though deeply political on Japanese terms).

Notable Quotes and Moments

• 159:38 – Manga vs. US comic sales
• 171:16 – “They don’t want to invest because superhero comics aren’t growing, which just further compounds the problem.”

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5. Domestic Extremism and the “Slop” of Right-Wing Violence (180:07–211:57)

Main Points

• San Diego Islamic Center Shooting (190:45–211:57):
  Detailed coverage of a neo-Nazi accelerationist terrorist attack on a mosque: perpetrators were two teenagers, motivated by memes, hatred, and online radicalization.
• Manifesto as Meme Slop:
  The shooters’ manifesto was mostly cut-and-paste from prior manifestos and meme culture, serving for in-group signaling:

  “The in-group signaling is key…they’re trying to signal to their differing communities of people online.” – Robert Evans (202:30)

• Dangerous Blurring of Fandom and Ideology:
  Their radicalism is as much “fandom” as it is “belief.” The style, platforms, and referentiality echo online pop culture communities.
• Weaponization of Disinformation:
  Right-wing commentators (ex: Elon Musk) quickly attempted to misrepresent the attack as a “trans mass shooting” despite explicit manifesto hatred for LGBTQ people and no evidence.
• Tragic Heroism & Futility:
  The mosque’s security guard and staff died saving others. Despite extensive security measures, nothing could fully prevent the attack.

  “None of this will make your grief more real or your solidarity more complete… There’s no reason to watch it or read the manifesto.” – James Stout (209:01)

Timestamps

• 190:45 – Attack recap
• 198:20 – Manifesto analysis
• 202:30 – In-group signaling and memeification
• 209:30 – Disinformation campaign about shooters

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6. Corruption and Executive Power: Trump’s Lawsuit Against Himself, Judicial Collapse, and the War That Isn’t a War (224:24–243:46)

Main Points

• Trump Sues Himself, Dodges IRS Scrutiny (224:24–229:18):
  Trump administration “settles” a Trump-filed lawsuit against Trump’s own IRS, creating a $1.776 billion (1776!) “victim fund” for supposed “political weaponization.”

  “Again, Julius Caesar didn’t do this shit. Like, what are we doing here?” – Molly Co (227:03) “I would sue myself a lot, I’m gonna be honest…” – Robert Evans (227:43)

• End of Any Illusion of Judicial Independence (229:31–231:47):
  Supreme Court slams door on redistricting, eviscerates VRA provisions, and confirms that the courts will not protect democracy against authoritarian overreach.

  “How do you function ideologically as a person whose job it is to do the law when the Supreme Court has said that… the Constitution… does not actually apply…” – Molly Co (231:03)

• International: Perpetual Conflict in the Gulf (231:47–243:19):
  US-Iran hostilities, minefields, failed negotiations, and expanding Israeli aggression (including attempted installation of Ahmadinejad in Iran!) show the endless, farcical, and devastating cycles of war and foreign intervention.

  “We also found out that Israel low-key invaded Iraq, setting up two bases… and shooting at Iraqi troops and civilians who came near them.” – James Stout (239:31)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Being right doesn't do anything in economics.” — Molly Co (120:05)
• “Affirmative action for cattle.” (on the exclusion of bison for cattle) — Cheyenne River Sioux via James/Mia (74:31)
• “Pop culture is in a recession, trapped in the dead labor of its own IP.” — Garrison Davis (172:15)
• “Genocide’s always been a meme.” — Robert Evans (210:58)
• “Again, Julius Caesar didn’t do this shit. Like, what are we doing here?” — Molly Co (227:03)

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Conclusion

This week’s episode is a bleak but incisive chronicle of collapse:

• American democracy is under coordinated assault, using the spectacle of “fraud” to justify mass suppression;
• Ecological and Indigenous futures are being strangled by both reactionary culture war and raw capitalist logic;
• The cultural industries are unable to innovate, cannibalizing the past as global competitors race ahead;
• The economics profession and the judiciary have been hollowed out into mere tools for power;
• State and movement violence is increasingly driven by meme, slop, and social belonging, with real, deadly consequences;
• The ruling regime displays zero concern for even the appearance of law, corruption, or accountability.

Despite this apocalyptic posture, the episode frequently veers into gallows humor and camaraderie—offering not solutions, but clarity, solidarity, and the hope that by “walking through the burning ruins” together, we might at least keep our eyes open as we try to reach a better world.

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Selected Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:00 — Election fraud narrative and voter suppression
• 39:49 — Bison, ecology, and public lands
• 94:50 — Monopsony and economics as power
• 142:22 — The anime/cultural shift
• 190:45 — Domestic extremism and San Diego shooting
• 224:24 — Trump’s lawsuit against IRS, end of judicial independence
• 231:47 — Iran war news, mines, diplomatic farce

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For more detail, see episode transcript or visit: It Could Happen Here

Transcript

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[Robert Evans]

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

[Garrison Davis]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout. Hello.

[James Stout]

Hi, G. I'm excited to see what's falling apart today.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, that's our elections, which have, as we all know, been rigged for as long as I can remember, which is kind of true considering when I was born circa the year 2000.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah, the, the famous, the great and democratic election of the year 2000 in the United States.

[Garrison Davis]

The flawless election of 2000.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But no, we are going to be talking about Trump's continuing claims that the 2020 election was rigged and his investigation of election fraud in not just the 2020 election, but also the 2024 election, which, if you recall, was not rigged against Trump, considering Trump won that election, including the popular vote.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he won every, every way you could slice that up.

[Garrison Davis]

A sweeping victory.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it was a fat L for the Democrats.

[Garrison Davis]

But a lot of the investigations into election fraud actually do revolve around the 2024 voter rolls, which we will discuss in a bit. But first, let's go back a few weeks on Executive Disorder. I reported that Cash Patel went on to Fox News a few weeks ago and announced that the FBI would soon be making arrests related to Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen with Patel saying it was a conspiracy, end quote. They tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system. We got all the evidence.

[James Stout]

We've got all the evidence.

[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 Blanch. And we are going to be making arrest. And it's coming and I promise you it's coming soon.

[Garrison Davis]

Patel also claimed on Fox News, quote, we have the information to back President Trump's claims about A week and a half later, the DOJ announced, quote, multiple aliens charged with illegally voting in federal elections. It's multiple, James. It's multiple.

[James Stout]

Okay. Yes. What are we looking at? Three.

[Garrison Davis]

No, no. More than three. More than three. It was four.

[James Stout]

It was four. Okay. Just for people who aren't familiar with the scale of the United States. It's. That's not a statistically significant number when it comes to electoral outcomes. Generally they are decided by several multiples of four.

[Garrison Davis]

Usually, yeah. Patel commented, quote, securing our elections from criminal actors here at home and around the world is one of the top priorities for this FBI. Non citizens voting is a federal crime. Period. And while other administrations may have looked the other way in the past, those days are over. We will continue to work around the clock with our interagency partners to ensure those who engage in such conduct will not get away with it. So these arrests took place in New Jersey, and these, quote, unquote, multiple aliens were for permanent residents who registered to vote and cast ballots in at least one federal election before applying for naturalization via the N400.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, the N400 form has a section where it asks if the applicant has ever registered to vote or has voted in a federal, state or local election. Three of the people charged in New Jersey checked no in the box asking if they had voted. The other left the box blank. But when later questioned by an immigration services officer at the USCIS interview, this applicant answered no, that they did not or have not voted.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, interestingly, only two out of the four are actually charged with, quote, voting by an alien in a federal election.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

Three are charged with false statements in relation to naturalization.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And two are charged with procurement of citizenship or naturalization. Unlawfully.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Because I'm guessing the goal here would be to denaturalize them. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

For the people that were naturalized, that. That looks like that will. That will be part of what they do going forward.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I know I've reported on this in ED before, but like, large parts of USCIS have denaturalization targets. Right. In the same way that we've seen deportation targets for ICE and cbp. So, like, that will be the reason that those are the specific charges. Right. That is the easiest way to denaturalize someone. I was going to say the only way, but I think there are technically other ways. But like, the bulk of times you're going to see someone denaturalized, it's because they concealed. Previously it had been that they had concealed some loyalty to a terrorist group. Right. Or Perhaps there are bars for communists and Nazis with capital letters there. I'm not talking about the political affiliation. I'm talking about being a member of a party with a party card there. I'm not talking about the view necessarily.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, that's a whole other tangent. There's back and forth rulings. If you can really denaturalize someone for being a member of a Communist party. Still, it depends what they mean by Communist party. That's kind of like a vague term. But false statements in relation to naturalization, as in allegedly lying on the form by checking a box that conflicts with what the federal government is alleging is a much more clear cut route to denaturalization.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

One of the people charged is a green card holder from Liberia who immigrated as a refugee in 1998 named David Nawili. He's currently 73 years old. He allegedly registered to vote in New Jersey in 2003 and attested he was a US citizen. The complaint claims Noeli voted by mail in the 2020 general election and submitted a provisional ballot in person on November 5, 2024 for that general election next May. It's May 2025. Neweli submitted a N400 claiming he had never voted in the US but admitted to voting twice in the naturalization interview.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

He is charged with voting by an alien in a federal election and false statements.

[James Stout]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

Those are the charges he's facing.

[James Stout]

That's interesting. See, he, like, he seems to have clarified it in the interview, Right?

[Garrison Davis]

Correct.

[James Stout]

I don't quite know how that works,

[Garrison Davis]

but like, yeah, he did admit in the interview that, that he, that he did vote, but they're still charging him with false statements based on the N400.

[James Stout]

That will be interesting to follow because it's. It could be pretty hard to stick the landing on that given that he. I mean, I guess technically what you put on the form is there's no take backs, I guess. But him using the interview to clarify it certainly seems like he's trying to do what is in the spirit of the things asking him to do. Yeah, that would be an interesting one to follow.

[Garrison Davis]

This was also interesting because it shows the investigative capacity of the FBI. This guy admitted to that. Like he admitted to this in the USCIS interview. The FBI did not like crack the case.

[James Stout]

Yeah, like. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, he told, he told the cops he did it.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

When was his USCIS interview?

[Garrison Davis]

I'm not sure when the interview was. He submitted the N400 in May 2025.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

So Trump 2 era could have been in late 2025.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

This was at least within the last year.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, some of those N400 taking forever now.

[Garrison Davis]

Totally.

[James Stout]

It's kind of interesting. But yeah, I'm just wondering to what extent previously. I don't actually know to what extent previously USCIS would like refer people for prosecution.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, that is. That is a good question.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, here it is, Here it is, here it is. August 2025 was when he was interviewed, according to the criminal complaint.

[James Stout]

Relatively fast turnaround. Yeah. I wonder if that's just a part of the country he's in or whether that was because, like they wanted to get him in the office. Right. And then either clarify or detain him because he had voted.

[Garrison Davis]

And then in October, USCIS denied the application due to unlawful acts of voting in the 2020 and 2024 elections and the false statement on the N400.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

We will take an ad break here and then talk about the three other cases after these messages.

[Molly Co]

Foreign.

[Garrison Davis]

We are back. Aydin Koresh, 43 years old, is a green card holder who immigrated from Israel on a B2 visa in 2015. In 2021, Koresh allegedly registered to vote in New Jersey, asserting he was a U. S. Citizen and voted in person in the 2022 midterm election. Koresh later submitted an N400 in 2025 based on his charges. I believe his citizenship was granted because he's charged with voting by an alien in a federal election and procurement of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully. A lot of these criminal complaints are quite short, around seven pages.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

Jacinthic Zoom is a 70 year old green card holder who's lived in the US since 2000 after immigrating from Jamaica. She allegedly registered to vote in 2018 and voted by mail in the 2020 general election. She submitted an N400 in 2021 and was granted citizenship based on what the DOJ is calling false statements. She's charged with two counts of false statements in relation to naturalization.

[James Stout]

Two counts would be, I guess, registering to vote and voting.

[Garrison Davis]

She's oddly enough, one of the ones who's not actually charged with voting in a federal election.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

She's just, she's just charged with two false statements. This is, I think one in the interview and the other on the N400.

[James Stout]

Oh, okay. Yeah, that can make sense to you. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. They didn't charge maybe like, I guess they're like eyes on the prize trying to denaturalize someone.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I mean like A big part of the FBI's messaging in this is, you know, we found people who illegally voted, but half of the people here aren't actually charged with that. And I don't quite know why. Maybe it's theoretically possible those charges could be added later. But at least in the original criminal complaints issued when DOJ made this announcement, Exhume is not actually charged with voting. Even though, even though the criminal complaint says that she did. But it's not, it's not one of the charges.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The normal pattern with federal charges is to have a lot of charges and like most of these federal cases will end in plea bargains. Right. Because the exposure is so high. So yeah, it's interesting that that's not there when normally the pattern is to put as much as you can in front of the person so that you end up with a plea bargain.

[Garrison Davis]

This last guy is also not charged with illegally voting in a federal election. Abena Dunn vig is a 33 year old green card holder who immigrated from India in 2012. He's alleged to have registered to vote in 2016 and subsequently voted in person for the 2016 general election and then by mail in 2020. Vig later submitted an N400 in 2023, but he only faces one charge, procurement of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully. So again, a lot of these charges, even though the criminal complaints allege a lot of the same stuff, the actual charges vary greatly and it's, it is unclear why exactly that is.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Are they different? They're all in New Jersey.

[Garrison Davis]

All New Jersey.

[James Stout]

The same USA attorney. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, it'll be interesting to, to follow those cases as well. Like I know, like I said, that they have some sort of denaturalization targets. So whether they're just focusing their energies on that, it could be the case or it could be something to do with the, the specifics of that crime that I just don't know about. Of voting. We're not a citizen.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. There, there, there could be some prosecutorial reason that they aren't pursuing it in certain cases, but are in others.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And they're all alleged to have voted in federal elections. Right. That's the. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

In, in, in at least one federal election, either presidential general election or midterm general election.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

New Jersey does not have like local election voting for non citizens.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

A few days before Patel announced the imminent arrests on Fox News, the Department of justice sent a letter to the chief election official for Wayne County, Michigan, demanding Wayne county hand over all ballots from the 2024 election. The letter said the DOJ and its civil Rights division is authorized to investigate and prosecute individuals who may have registered to vote or voted in violation of U. S. Law. The letter included three instances of recorded allegations and convictions in Wayne county in quote, unquote, recent years related to voting fraud. This push by the DOJ to get their hands on ballots or voter rolls is part of a much larger pattern.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

In January, during operation Metro surge in Minneapolis, one of the demands from now former Attorney General Pam Bondi during negotiations with governor Tim Walls was for the DOJ to be granted access to the state of Minnesota's voter rolls, quote, to confirm that Minnesota's voter registration practices comply with federal law, unquote. Trump's DOJ has actually sued over 30 states for not complying with requests to gain access to their voter rolls. Cases against Arizona, Massachusetts and Rhode island have been dismissed, as have cases in California, Michigan and Oregon, but the DOJ is appealing those rulings. At least 15 states have complied or said they will comply with requests by handing over voter registration lists, including driver's license and Social Security numbers. These are largely red states like Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming. In a March hearing in the case against Rhode island to gain access to their voter rolls, Eric Neff, the acting chief of the voting section of the Civil Rights division of the DoJ, said that after receiving the voter rolls, quote, our intention is to run this against DHS's SAVE database, unquote. That's the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database. Yeah. Exchange. Don't have. Briefly explain what this database is and how it's used.

[James Stout]

In very basic terms, it is a database. So you have like E Verify Rate will be an example of a DHS database that employers can use to check if somebody is able to accept employment legally in the United States. Right. SAVE is there for government agencies, not individuals, and they should be able to determine whether or not somebody's eligible for certain benefits. Right. There are things called public charge rules. If people want a more in depth explanation of public charge rules, you can scroll all the way back to November 2024, before when I made a podcast about these things. We looked at a number of tools that the Trump administration might use to try and deport and denaturalize people in a podcast episode back then. The problem with these databases is they're not very good. The most obvious and amusing examples of E Verify not being very good are when state agencies hire Cops who DHS claims are not legally able to work in the United States. And then the state agencies point out that they used E verify, which is DHS's own tool for verifying. And, and then everyone gets quiet and wonders like, who screwed up here? Right. Because they have done their obligation. Right. Large employers have to use E Verify. The same is true, I imagine, for save. Right. In that it is not a database which is perfect and so running one against the other. Also, the phrase running here is doing a lot of work. Right. Like, are they going to look for name matches? Are they going to look for Social Security number or driver's license matches? Certain non citizens will have what's called an ITIN on ssn. There are a lot of ways which this could go horribly wrong. There's a reason that these two databases are not normally combined. Not to mention the fact that this provides a really large disincentive for people, a signing up for benefits. Right. Which, which we've already seen just the rhetoric from, from the Trump administration in the campaign provided a disincentive for people accessing benefits, but also for people registering to vote. Right. Like, yeah, people who are of diaspora communities, whether or not they are citizens, will be concerned about this. Like, and that is not a, that is not an unconscious side effect, I'm sure. Right. That is something that they are extremely aware of as they go forward doing this.

[Garrison Davis]

The court raised concerns about SAVE and said that there's been reporting of people being falsely identified as non citizens in SAVE's database. But Eric Neff responded that according to the DHS, the accuracy rate of the SAVE database is 100%. So I'm sure that's fine.

[James Stout]

That's just no database of this skill.

[Garrison Davis]

No, that's just mathematically impossible. Like it's.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

99 and 100% are like vast, vastly different.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's worth noting that like in Trump's, one of his early executive orders, like, like spring of 25, the one about preserving the integrity of American elections, part of what he asked them to do there was to overhaul SAVE and make it like a, a single source citizenship verification.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Database. Which it is not. And it is still not.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, there's, there's, there that, there's that push from the executive order a few months ago to create like state citizenship lists.

[James Stout]

Yeah. They've tried to go a number of ways about this. Right. They also, the fall of last year they integrated SAVE with the, with the passport database. I think most people will be aware that there are millions of American citizens who don't have passports, for instance. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

They've added some other stuff. Right. But the idea here is to create like, this should worry everyone. Right. Like this is a citizenship database that they will then attempt to combine with their biometric databases. I'm sure. And we've seen this with like the, the, the name of the Android app is eluding me. Now. There's an Android app that ICE officers have which is supposed to verify someone's status based on a facial recognition scan.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

We know this doesn't work because there was one, for example, one lady who was scanned twice. Each result returned a different identity.

[Garrison Davis]

Identity.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Neither of which was her. This stuff is extremely dangerous for, for anyone. Right. Like you could be a citizen or a non citizen. The idea that they, they're going to check you against, like the list of legit Americans should really worry people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And unable to pass the SAVE act in Congress. Not to be confused with the same database, though they are slightly related.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But unable to pass that in Congress. Trump signed the executive order last March attempting to force the postal service to not deliver mail in ballots if the voter on the ballot does not appear on this newly created list of pre approved voters using this state citizenship list.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

We'll see if that actually goes through. But that's, that's another example of them, you know, trying to, trying to use state citizenship lists to just crack down on the number of people that are able to vote.

[James Stout]

Yeah. We can all imagine that this will have different impacts across different demographics. Right. And then it's very much not accidental.

[Garrison Davis]

The last thing for the voter rolls. In Fulton County, Georgia, and Maricopa County, Arizona, the federal government has simply seized voting records. In Arizona, the FBI successfully subpoenaed 2020 election records from Maricopa County. And in Georgia, the FBI raided an election warehouse in January after dubiously obtaining a search warrant.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Then on May 6, a federal judge ruled that the federal government can keep the 2020 election materials that were seized in that raid, even if, quote, the seizure in this case was certainly not perfect. Unquote.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Maricopa county is an interesting one. Right. Like, but I think it's part of a grand jury investigation. Yes. Yeah, I can remember at the time. And the 2020 election, like Maricopa County's results being somehow contentious.

[Garrison Davis]

The state senate did their own investigation

[James Stout]

into that, like several entities have. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

The details of that investigation is in part what was the target of the grand jury subpoena.

[James Stout]

Okay. And not so much Maricopa county, but a number of Arizona counties were really important in the results of the 2020 election. Right. There was a massive effort for turnout. I personally know people in indigenous communities who literally traveled for the entire day to vote. The indigenous turnout, especially indigenous women in Arizona, really did make a big difference in the 2020 election.

[Garrison Davis]

And Maricopa county is the like by population, the biggest county.

[James Stout]

Maricopa County's vast. A number of other like Arizona counties like outside of Maricopa were also really pivotal in the 2020 election. It's not surprising to see those ones being like. It wasn't surprising to me at the time to see them being targeted, you know. Yeah. Maricopa is where Phoenix is. Just for people to put it on the map. Famous for having really great law enforcement over the years. Joe arpaio was Marco McKenty sheriff. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, yes. Ah, last from the past.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Not so far from. Isn't he like doing some running for office or something? I thought he was.

[Garrison Davis]

He was, he was for a bit. I have not thought of Joe Arpire for a few years, though.

[James Stout]

What a life to lead. Yeah, it's been a while.

[Mia Wong]

Wow.

[James Stout]

Joe arpaio, born in 1932.

[Molly Co]

That's.

[Garrison Davis]

That's wild.

[James Stout]

Yeah. He can't be even for the United States.

[Garrison Davis]

That's even pushing our character a little.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But no, Trump does continue to. To truth claims about Fulton county on his. On his account if a few nights ago he put out a video of the election board video was edited to appear as if it was implying that there was voter fraud or that the elections were conducted improperly and when that was not what the video is actually, actually showing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But he is truthed a lot after the raid that to watch out for the results of the. Of the Fulton county election raid. And now the federal judge is letting. Letting the feds keep the materials that they seized, even if it was in the judge's own words. Certainly not perfect.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think Fulton county plays a load bearing role in the. In Margot's understanding of the 2020 election. Right. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And Trump's own mind, that's. That is where he got the mug shot taken. Right. Like this is like he is.

[James Stout]

Oh, I've forgotten about that.

[Garrison Davis]

Personal vendetta against Fulton County.

[James Stout]

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Alpine, by the way, did run for mayor of fountain hills in 2024.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh my God.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Just eight years before his hundredth birthday. What a country.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, that's incredible.

[James Stout]

He did. He received a whopping 1527 votes in the primary election. It's a Thousand people who thought the best hope we have is someone who is approaching Sheriff Joe at nearly a century of age. Remarkable.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, with age comes wisdom. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Up to a point.

[Garrison Davis]

That does it for us today at a good half a year. We will keep a lookout for any more, any more arrests by Patel, who claims to have all the evidence he needs, even though the only arrest so far is just a handful of people from New Jersey. And then I think one other person from Pennsylvania.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

It was arrested like in March. Again, because the actual number of voter fraud in this country is. It's minimal according to, according to all investigations we've seen so far. Very low.

[James Stout]

It's statistically insignificant. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, very low to the point where it's statistically insignificant. I think if you're going to be concerned about election rigging, looking at the way that partisan gerrymandering has been completely, completely allowed to go through and gerrymandering over districts that were protected by the Voting Rights Act.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Look at what polling places are. Look at the, like the Electoral College exists to be in between the popular vote and the result of the, of the election right there. There are many things which distort the will of the people. Non citizens voting is not statistically significant in that. Like it's just not. But this will have a real electoral outcome or I guess because it will dissuade people from voting. It will dissuade people who have become US Citizens from voting. It will dissuade people who were born as US Citizens and they could be

[Garrison Davis]

pursuing charges against election officials in some of these states. Yes. Like that is part of trying to seize these, these ballots and voter rolls is not just to charge the possibly four people who may have illegally voted by then. Trying to put some of the blame on election officials themselves. And yet, and that is motive of intimidation is certainly part of the goal here. And that's written explicitly in some of these executive orders threatening charges against U.S. officials for allowing certain mail in votes to be, to be counted.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

When the Trump administration claims that they should not be.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The like nascents of this whole thing is Trump's calls to, to electoral officials in Georgia. Right. Like, like the Fulton county. The whole. Yeah, fine spiral.

[Garrison Davis]

Find those votes.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. That is where it all began.

[Garrison Davis]

So, yeah, we'll, we'll keep up on this as it develops, leading into the midterm election. But bye bye for now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

But early vote often vote.

[Garrison Davis]

Early vote often.

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[James Stout]

hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Very special episode today because I am lucky enough to be joined by Molly Co. Hi, Molly.

[Mia Wong]

Hi, James. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to hear about today's topic.

[James Stout]

Yeah, today's topic is buffalo. If you. If this just came up on your phone without you clicking it. So I guess, like buffalo, when people imagine the Great Plains before European colonization, I think buffalo are the fauna that they particularly imagine being present. Right.

[Mia Wong]

It's such a romantic image. Right. And they're gone now. But they were once so many. Like every time we drive through southwest Virginia, I'm in central Virginia. So when we drive through southwestern Virginia, my husband always brings up this account that he read of someone witnessing the buffalo stampeding through the Cumberland Gap. Like where?

[James Stout]

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Right down in the tip of southwestern Virginia. And just looking at that place and imagining buffalo there, like you have to romanticize it. That's incredible.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's it. One of the coolest, like, American experiences I've ever had. Maybe seven or eight years ago now, I was bike packing in like the Colorado, Wyoming border up there and I was with some friends. We've been like, maybe we're like three or four days in, you know, like where you kind of hit the sweet spot at that point when you like haven't showered for that long and you're just kind of disconnected from the world. That's when it starts to be getting. Molly's making a face.

[Mia Wong]

The sweet spot. You can't see just four days of human stink. It really starts to get good.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's when it gets good because you're just like. That's how long it takes to disconnect. Right. So I'm looking at your phone and like worrying about not smelling good stuff

[Mia Wong]

becoming a beast of the outdoors.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You just return to your feral self. I'd like to return to my feral self as often as possible. But we're like riding. I forget where we're going. At Walden, maybe we're coming off this big plateau, dropping into this big kind of like where it gets kind of more plain. Big, big kind of meadow plain. And we're coming down there and it's a few of us. And these buffalo just come like from the side of us and they're running alongside us, right? And we're riding, going, and we're cooking. Logan. 20, 25 miles an hour, something like that. And these buffalo are just cruising next to us because they're just trying to get like, trying to check out like, what are these weirdos doing? And they're just like, why the. Would you put all your stuff on a bicycle and go ride around like this? And then we're like, oh, it's buffalo. And like for like maybe a mile. They just kind of wanted to keep it Seemed like they just wanted to keep tabs at us as we're going down this dirt road. And then like they were getting really close, right? So they're like kicking up all this dust and you got to feel like you were like almost one of the buffalo. You know, you're like in the herd traversing the plains.

[Mia Wong]

I think you're supposed to keep your distance from them, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah. They went. We didn't have many options.

[Mia Wong]

Not a choice at that point.

[James Stout]

Yeah. When they're like, do not approach. Yeah, they were approaching us. We didn't stop. I was like pretty, pretty keen on not stopping. And Molly is right, they look so pettable, but you're.

[Mia Wong]

They're really not.

[Molly Co]

They're really.

[James Stout]

Despite their fluffy appearance, it's. It's advised like any time in Yellowstone pretty much, especially in these summer months, you will find a video of a tourist approaching a buffalo and regretting that decision. They're pretty big. I've been gored by a bull before and I would like to like keep it to a one goring lifetime.

[Mia Wong]

For me, one is all most people get.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I was pretty. Let me tell you, I thought that one was all I was going to get. I was, I was ready to make my peace with the world. Luckily, I got a second chance. Yeah, people kind of focus on a buffalo, right? They ignore many of the other species that we lost during this intense period of ecological destruction. Right. And I can see why. You can find images of piles of dead buffalo skulls. There's that like really haunting image of the idea of killing animals only for their capes or their tongues. Often this period of genocidal violence is referred to as a buffalo genocide. And I think that encapsulates. Right. Not just the destruction of the buffalo population, but also of the indigenous cultures that relied on that buffalo population and of the ecology that went with it. Obviously when I say destruction, I'm not saying they're gone very much, still here, still present, but the attempt by the government and capitalism to remove those people from their land. But yeah, it is a shame that these other animals don't get a fair shake. Have you ever seen a black footed ferret?

[Mia Wong]

I. When you said there was going to be something about ferrets, I was thinking about it and I realized all domesticated animals were wild animals. And it never occurred to me that a ferret could live outside.

[James Stout]

Oh yeah, A ferret thrives in the outdoors. I really wanted to have ferrets when I was younger. Like, I enjoyed the presence of ferrets, I enjoyed working with ferrets.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, he's kind of cute in a gross way.

[James Stout]

He's not gross. The ferrets are very sweet. Yeah. We had friends with ferrets growing up, so we'd use them to. They use them to catch rabbits in the uk, right? Oh yeah. The reason that these guys struggle to get back on the landscape, it's because they need massive prairie dog towns to feed off.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, do they live in like societies? Do they live like a. Prairie dogs? So do ferrets live in like ferret villages?

[James Stout]

The ferrets predate the prairie dogs.

[Mia Wong]

But do they live in like a village?

[James Stout]

I don't know if they live in like a. I don't know what their social structure is. In Colorado, there's a national black footed ferret center where you can go and see them. I've cycled past it, but I regret not going in. Maybe I'll make a special trip. Reach out if you're with the ferret people.

[Mia Wong]

Sorry I said he looks gross.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Please don't cancel us because the prairie dog towns can collapse, right? Like their populations can collapse pretty easily. They get like infectious diseases. So they need like a massive number of prairie dog towns in order to have a sustainable, genetically diverse ferret population.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, I get it, I get it.

[James Stout]

And because we don't have those, right, because they are not generally amenable to agriculture and then the ecosystem is very different from what it naturally was. That means. I don't know if there are any. There are. Like, they're not extinct genetically, but ecologically in terms of their participation in the ecosystem, I don't think there are any. Very. There are. I think there are some in the Charles Russell Wildlife Refuge, but very few black footed ferrets, which is a shame because they're cool little guys.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, I guess given what we did to the landscape of so much of the country, I'm sure there are other animals that just like their niche is gone.

[James Stout]

Yeah, and that is exactly what I want to talk about today. Right. Like specifically I want to talk about buffalo because of the canceling of some public land grazing leases for buffalo. Before we do that, Molly, we should talk about the, the terminology. Right, the buffalo bison discussion.

[Molly Co]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Because they're not buffalo. They're bison. They're bison. Bison.

[James Stout]

And as we are, what, five minutes into this, someone has already logged on to Reddit. They have opened already.

[Mia Wong]

The thread already exists. It's too late.

[James Stout]

It's already there.

[Mia Wong]

You might as late even address it. It's too late.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we should have moved this to the, to the front of the episode, I guess. If that is you redditing. Please stop. I am aware that scientifically we should call them bison. I don't care. English speaking people have been calling these animals buffaloes since English speaking people came to this continent. They did so because the animals remind them of Cape buffalo. I actually have had a friend gored by a Cape buffalo as well. We're going through most of my goring experience.

[Mia Wong]

You gotta leave these big cow type creatures alone.

[James Stout]

He was ambushed. My goring was entirely my fault. Like, you shouldn't be unkind to animals. And I deserved it. And it was a good learning experience for me. His wasn't. I think it was just a bad overall experience being gored. Wouldn't recommend it.

[Mia Wong]

I'm avoiding it.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you've got this far. You're probably good. I think men in their 20s are probably like peak.

[Mia Wong]

I was gonna say. I think once you hit 30, your, your odds decrease dramatically.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you're out the window. Unless you're working with cattle. Like, my dad got pretty close a couple times when I was a kid. I remember jumping over a fence once, but I think that was more of a professional hazard than like a lifestyle choice. So here's the deal, right? There are many species in the USA which have names similar to species on other continents, but they are not the same. European blackbirds and American blackbirds. Right. Robins would be another example. There is a different sheepshead fish. Almost everywhere I have gone underwater, everyone has a sheep's head. The coolest sheepshead for people wondering is California sheep's head because it undergoes a sex change, making it a pretty cool fish. Also, it gets really cool after it transitions. It gets like these black and red stripes. It's like one of my favorite fish. If you want to be censorious about buffalo names, I would suggest picking one of the many indigenous words that have been used to refer to this animal for far, far longer than buffalo or bison. Also, buffalo is one of the cooler words in the English language.

[Mia Wong]

Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo.

[James Stout]

Yes, exactly. Yes. It is the longest single word sentence because it's a noun and a verb and a proper noun.

[Mia Wong]

Right, Right. Like, so it's. It's buffalo the city, buffalo the animal. Buffalo the verb meaning like what to like, to bully or something to like.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Don't know if you've been around them, but they do do this. They sort of bother, push. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm making, of course, a motion with my neck and shoulders that no one apart from Molly can see. But yeah, they're. They're. They're just kind of aggressive in a sort of pokey and. Yeah, like, it's a good verb. I don't know. Hang around watching buffalo. You'll get it. Yeah, it's a. It's. Buffalo. The proper noun. Buffalo, the noun. Buffalo, the verb. Buffalo, the proper noun. Buffalo, the verb. No, buffalo the noun.

[Mia Wong]

I'm gonna have to diagram this one.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It's basically like bison from upstate New York are bullying other bison from upstate New York.

[James Stout]

Yes. That is the breakdown of the buffalo sentence.

[Mia Wong]

Fun trivia for everybody.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's. We'll do that at the end of the year. We'll quiz you. Why are we talking about buffalo today?

[Mia Wong]

I can't remember.

[James Stout]

I can. Let me tell you. It is because the Bureau of Land Management has canceled grazing rights in seven allotments of public land in Phillips County, Montana, for privately owned bison. And there's been a bunch of reporting on this. Like when this stuff happens, when stuff the Trump administration does with public land, the outdoors, they're. They're like Democrat blue wave fake news. Panic accounts really, really go kind of wild with it. They did with this one. Right. I think people running whatever, like, you know, Occupy Democrats, Pantsuit Nation for Change. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Occupy Democrats.

[Mia Wong]

I forgot about Pantsuit Nation. Wow, that's a real throwback.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I never forget about the Pantsuit Nation. Yeah. They live forever in my mind. What I think, like, the people of that tendency have not realized is that, like, these are not per se, wild buffalo. It's not like these buffalo have individually like, or as a population survived the genocide, been holding out on this land in Phillips county for more than a century. Right. That doesn't Mean that we should be callous about this. We shouldn't. But I just want to explain a little bit more, I guess. There are still thousands of buffalo across the west on federal and private land. Some of them have been grazing on public land with permits for more than four decades. Having them on the landscape is a good thing. Right. We need the genetic diversity, even if they're privately owned.

[Mia Wong]

Right. So it's not just like, I don't know, knowing very little about this. I think a lot of the discourse around these, like, permits for grazing on public land, it's like, well, why should these farmers get to use our public land for their property, for their cattle?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And I don't know enough about that to care about that at all. But in terms of what buffalo do to the grassland, like, just walking around on it and eating it is part of the maintenance of that grassland.

[James Stout]

Yes. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like. Like the. The eradication of the buffalo in the Midwest caused ecological havoc because we need them walking around and shitting on it.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Specifically, what we need is them coming in, eating everything, trampling around, shitting everywhere, and then leaving. Right. Because that is what, like, so many indigenous cultures have these, like, these, like, traditions that the buffalo go away and then we do a tradition and they come back. Right. This happens for a lot of migratory animals. It's not just buffalo. Right. Because it. It gave shape to time in people's lives. That's how they impacted the landscape. Right. They. They didn't stay in one place, they moved through spaces. So, like, if we want to restore this short grass prairie ecosystem, which is, as it turns out, why people are putting buffalo on this particular land, then we need a lot of space to do it, and we need the buffalo to be able to move around. Right. So people who own these particular buffalo, An NGO called American Prairie. Do you heard of American Prairie? Used to be American Prairie Reserve. No. American Prairie Foundation. Okay, great.

[Mia Wong]

Are they the villains or the heroes?

[James Stout]

Neither. I mean, the Trump administration is the villains. Doug Burgum specifically, I guess. Always.

[Mia Wong]

God, I forgot about Doug Burgum.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Fortunately, Doug is now Interior Secretary. Thanks to REI for signing a letter endorsing him. Also, fuck you. American Prairie is interesting, I guess. Like, it's not what I would want, but I don't think it's evil.

[Mia Wong]

Sounds like most NGOs.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it sounds like most of the world as it exists.

[Mia Wong]

Not my preference.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Then how I would do it? American Prairie is a. Is a big ngo. They've been trying for about a quarter of a century. To buy up private land adjacent to public land around Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. So the goal is to create, like, by. By like, bridging these two pieces of public land to create a massive reserve where, like, one of the things with. With bison, specifically. Right. They need a lot of space, and very few bison can cross, like, political boundaries.

[Mia Wong]

They don't have passports.

[James Stout]

They don't. Yeah. This is one of their issues. They're undocumented, you could say. But think about the Yellowstone. People get really mad about the Yellowstone bison leaving the park. This is a big deal. This has been a big deal for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People like what?

[Mia Wong]

Like they're Disney cast members? Like they're not allowed to leave in costume.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly. They have to return.

[Mia Wong]

Take that off.

[James Stout]

Yeah. They take the head off, take the body off and just wear the head.

[Mia Wong]

They can't be walking in the parking lot.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You can't see Mickey Mouse at Fon. So that would really ruin the magic. Yeah. People get mad at them. Right. For a number of reasons.

[Mia Wong]

The buffalo don't know about the park,

[James Stout]

that this is a thing. Right. And buffalo, as it turns out, they love to disrespect a fence, which I respect. I like that about them.

[Mia Wong]

If I had shoulders like that, I would disrespect a fence.

[James Stout]

Yeah. They. So, like, cattle fencing is generally not sufficient for buffalo fencing, but buffalo fencing can be built. It does exist. When people are building it, it's better if they are conscious of other wildlife.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like another of the megafauna. Megafauna that has existed here for Melania but is now in much, much, much lower numbers. Like pronghorn antelope.

[Mia Wong]

Do we have those here?

[James Stout]

Yes. Oh, wow.

[Mia Wong]

I guess I don't really. I've never really been out west. So you guys have beasts out there?

[James Stout]

If you would like us to make a podcast where I take Molly camping. Show me. Yeah, we just look at animals. That would be my ideal job. A podcast where I just talk to someone about an animal every week. Like, we go camping, we see an animal, we talk about it.

[Mia Wong]

I didn't know ferrets lived outside. Like, think of all you could show me.

[James Stout]

Yeah, It'd be amazing. Yeah. God, we could have so much fun if we start with the ferrets. Yeah. Pronghorn are amazing. You've not seen a pronghorn.

[Mia Wong]

I thought they lived in Africa. And what am I thinking of? Like, an ibex?

[James Stout]

Yeah. I mean, ibex does live in Africa. I think some of them live On. Okay, we're gonna.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, man. Everyone's finding out I don't know anything.

[James Stout]

Podcaster version.

[Mia Wong]

I'm googling pronghorn antelope. Yeah, you see them and these are just out there.

[James Stout]

Yeah, they just like, they. They live on the landscape. They actually were massively numerous, like, before the various extinction events.

[Mia Wong]

So it's like a. Like a reindeer that lives in Colorado.

[James Stout]

A reindeer. Reindeer are only reindeer in North America when they're in captivity. They're caribou when they. When they are wild. Picture of a caribou.

[Mia Wong]

We don't really have a lot of, like, wild animals out here.

[James Stout]

Really See that? This is. Well, yeah, because the east coast is much more urbanized. Right.

[Mia Wong]

Like, like every now and again, a baby bear will wander into town and it's like big six.

[James Stout]

Okay. Yeah, I like it when a bear. Bears are another animal I have massive respect for. I love how they don't give a shit. I respect any animal that eats from the trash. Yeah. The pronghorns are actually massive. Like, I think antelocapridae is the genus. And then there are different species. There were tons. Like, we had. We at one point had tiny, like, wiener dog sized antelope.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, like a dik dik.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, like a dik dik. But that's a cool guy, but fast. Oh. So one other thing about pronghorns is they can jump. Like, I've seen them jump.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it looks like a jumping guy.

[James Stout]

Well, they don't like to jump a fence is the thing.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, so then now you have like a. A problem. The buffalo are stuck, but so is the antelope.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Because their speed was always their, like, defense mechanism. Right. They're super. I think cheetahs are the only land animal that's faster and they don't live

[Mia Wong]

in the same environment.

[James Stout]

No. Yeah, I knew that. Different continents. Yeah. Yeah. There is not a North American cheetah.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, at this point you could.

[James Stout]

I think that might have been at one point.

[Mia Wong]

There is.

[James Stout]

I think there might have been at one point like a. Like a prehistoric cheetah. Like, at time they had, like, ground sloths and things. But yeah, when you're building the buffalo fence, you have to allow the pronghorns to go under if you're trying to build an ecological fence.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, I guess. Because they could, like, bend over in a way the buffalo can't.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly. There's just more.

[Mia Wong]

Buffalo's too big.

[James Stout]

Yeah. There's a lot of chunk to a buffalo in a way that it couldn't get under there. Right. So the other reason people don't like buffalo is because of brucellosis. Did you know what brucellosis is?

[Mia Wong]

Is it a buffalo disease?

[James Stout]

Well, it's a disease that buffalo can have. Maybe. You know from the Warren Zevon song. You don't. Okay, this is funny. I'm talking to Molly about really American shit. And me, the British person, I don't

[Mia Wong]

know any of what you're saying.

[James Stout]

Okay. Warren Zevon, a very good famous musician guy, sadly dead.

[Mia Wong]

He has a song about buffalo disease.

[James Stout]

He has a song which, in part, it talks about brucellosis. It says, the cattle will have brucellosis. What a great journey we're going on.

[Mia Wong]

That's the service I provide as the podcast idiot. Because I know nothing.

[James Stout]

You have. You have. You have a very deep, very deep well of knowledge. It just doesn't extend to warranty.

[Mia Wong]

But no listener left behind. Like, there's no one sitting here listening, wishing that something had been explained more. Because I'm making you explain what antelope are and what a Warren Zon is.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. We could go off on a tangent here, because I don't know if this song is about the fact that Sweet Home Alabama is a deeply, deeply hateful song, but it does. That does get mentioned quite a lot. But, yeah, the briselosis.

[Mia Wong]

But I feel like once you're touching a buffalo, you have worse problems than whatever this is. Oh, well, not great.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it depends. It depends who you are.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like, what brucellosis does is generally it infects heifers. So, like young lady cows, it will cause them to abort their first calf.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, that's sad.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's sad also, like, because of the way it's controlled, your herd can get killed out if you have brucellosis.

[Mia Wong]

Oh. Like, it would be contagious to people's. Like, cattle.

[James Stout]

Yes. And that would be very bad.

[Mia Wong]

So, okay, when you say people don't like buffalo because they're worried about brucellosis, they're not worried that they will get brucellosis. They're worried that it will affect their cattle.

[James Stout]

Yes. I do believe people can get brucellosis. I'm not as familiar with that, apparently.

[Mia Wong]

I'm looking here. Apparently, if you do get it, there's a 20% chance that your testicles are going to swell up real bad, so.

[James Stout]

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

[Mia Wong]

I guess that's why they don't want it.

[James Stout]

Yeah, well, that would also be bad. Right. Like big bulb brucellosis, which painful but no.

[Mia Wong]

Okay. So we're talking about the cattle industry. I'm on board.

[Molly Co]

I'm on board.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's the cattle that they're concerned about. They can take or leave the testicular swelling. Like, they're tough.

[Mia Wong]

Why are they touching the buffalo in the first place? They're not okay.

[James Stout]

Yeah, they're not okay. Yeah, It's. It's a buffalo coming out and causing the cattle to get brucellosis. Right. Here's the deal. Elk also can get brucellosis.

[Mia Wong]

I know about elk. We have those.

[James Stout]

Okay. Yeah, you're gonna. Okay. So an elk also travels widely.

[Garrison Davis]

Right?

[James Stout]

An elk, it's not generally an animal that is kept behind high fences. Sometimes there probably are high fence, like, game farms where people pay to go and. And hunt elk.

[Mia Wong]

I think we have some in Virginia.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's. That's kind of gross, in my opinion. I don't like that. But elk also carry brucellosis. Right. So if we're concerned about brucellosis, we also need to be concerned about elk. But it really doesn't get brought up in the elk discussion. It gets brought up in the. In the buffalo discussion. So these are the reasons that. Some of the reasons that people don't like buffalo.

[Mia Wong]

Right, right. Because they carry. They carry a cow disease and they don't like to stay inside the park.

[Molly Co]

Got it.

[James Stout]

Yep, yep. They don't like to stay inside the park. We've talked for a long time, Molly, talking of things that might cause your testicles to swell. Here is some products and services.

[Mia Wong]

Or maybe it'll help.

[James Stout]

Yeah, maybe. Maybe you'll have bought your first calf. Who knows? It's. Roll the dice. All right, we are back. So let's talk about the area where this is happening. Right. This is happening in kind of north and central Montana, around Livingston. Lots of the land in this area has actually dropped below the population density that Turner considered to be evidence of the closure of the frontier when he was developing that thesis. Right. I'm not a big fan of the concept of the frontier. That's another podcast that I'll make one day, but I don't like it.

[Mia Wong]

But there's, like, no people there.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, there are very few people there. In part because cattle farming is hard, in part because it's harder in a globalized economy, in part because of climate change. There's this theory of the Buffalo Commons written by two people called Popper, and they considered this specific area to be a tragedy of the commons, where this beautiful plains ecosystem has been destroyed. And they put forward the idea that the presence of buffalo on the landscape could return it to a sort of short grass prairie commons. This isn't a direct link to the American prairie reserve, but this is kind of what they're trying to do. They're not putting buffalo on the landscape because they are a buffalo organization.

[Mia Wong]

Right. They're. So they're trying to restore the grassland.

[James Stout]

Yes, that's the idea. Because we don't have a prairie national park. Right. When colonization was moving west, as the Department of Homeland Security likes to highlight with its use of that image, Liberty was floating across the plains there. Sorry, let's just put an image in my head. Remember when the Trump administration was getting very aggressive towards Somali people? I guess it still is.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Did you see the AI version of that where it was a Somali woman, like, crossing the plains? No. No. Okay. It was pretty funny. It was one of the.

[Mia Wong]

You're doing a pose like, like, like the mermaid on the front of a ship.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, like, yeah. It was like, this is a Somali promised land. Like they were like, I guess, parodying American rhetor indigenous people and being like,

[Mia Wong]

Somali people can't do Manifest Destiny. I thought we loved that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, it was very funny. It was kind of amusing to see that American rhetoric reflected back. Somali people have incredible hosting abilities that CHS was not ready for. So what the, what the APR is trying to do is use the buffalo here as like a landscape engineer.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like an animal that will help return this area to. I guess natural state is a problematic term, you know, but, but like to

[Mia Wong]

its pre industrial state.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. When we think about, like, why isn't there a Plains National Park? We, we have to consider the role that capitalism plays. Right.

[Mia Wong]

Because no one would go visit that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, well, I think they would. The planes would be beautiful in their, in their way. Right.

[Mia Wong]

But I guess like the, you know, you're thinking of, like, it's the role of the national park to preserve this, this landscape, this ecosystem. Or is it to create a place where people could go and buy things?

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly. Right.

[Mia Wong]

Increasingly it's the latter.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And I think there is a bias towards preserving. Yeah, there's, there's like a scenic vista bias. This is an area where people could ranch cattle. And so like that happened instead, you know, and then we got to a point where like, no one was going to give up their private land to make a massive potential.

[Mia Wong]

Well, they didn't want to in any of the other times either. So the government needs to make you

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think the government could force you back in the day.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, I just can't imagine a new national park ever coming into existence. We just don't have that kind of political will anymore.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I mean, we might get like, the Donald Trump's birthplace national park or like, something similar.

[Mia Wong]

You know, like, we would never get Yellowstone again.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we wouldn't. And, like, part of that is because they violently removed the indigenous people from those places in order to. Right.

[Mia Wong]

I don't want to romanticize that. Like, I live near Shenandoah Valley national park, where people were forced out in a pretty brutal way. That's a big part of the history here. So I don't want to romanticize the creation of the national park. I just mean, like, the government is not going to spend a lot of money on something that's just for everyone to enjoy ever again.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. And they're not, you know, they're not going to say, like, to an extent, we are removing this piece of land from the rapacious capitalism that has destroyed the rest of our natural spaces.

[Mia Wong]

So some. If somebody's going to eat this grass, it's going to be hamburgers.

[James Stout]

We want it to turn into the cheapest meat possible. Also, like, I should point out that, like, land back and national parks are very, very, very different things. I like to kind of illustrate this with the idea that during the Nez Perce War, as the Nez Perce are, like, fighting their way towards the Canadian border, they are having gunfights in Yellowstone national park as tourists are coming to Yellowstone to, like, check out the mountains and see the geysers and stuff.

[Mia Wong]

You know, that's. That's America. That's.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's perfectly America.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like, we'll look at with. Look, we're preserving this for you as we violently remove the indigenous people and

[Mia Wong]

just like, coming to spend your tourism dollars. Never mind that there's a war going on there.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Just being like, just kind of letting

[Mia Wong]

that go past whatever the, the time period equivalent of a visor and a fanny pack was. That was cooking.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Probably. Probably a cigar and I don't know, like, there's trousers to stop past your knee. So you'll hear people saying a lot of shit about the API, the American Prairie Reserve. Right. And so I did what I should do as a responsible journalist, and I pulled their 990s.

[Mia Wong]

That's my favorite thing to do.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Where's the money going? Yeah, well, where's the money coming from?

[James Stout]

Yeah, where's the money Coming from, you'll hear a lot of, like, anti APR stuff. Some of it's from the cattle industry. Right. If you go through that part of Montana, you'll see signs that say, like, save the Cowboys, Stop the American Prairie Reserve.

[Mia Wong]

I think we have a different understanding of what a cowboy is, Me and the sign maker.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right. Well, it is inherently tied, I guess, to cattle. Right. And the idea being that these bison are displacing cattle. It's not a direct contract with cattle. In fact, the APR has, like, 10 times more cattle on its land than it does bison. Like most ranchers, the APR has deeded or private land that they graze on, leasing right to adjacent public land. What the APR is spending its money on, among other things. Among like, some staffing costs, office costs, paying consultants, paying fundraisers.

[Mia Wong]

Gotta pay consultants.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah, they're dropping some coin on consultants is they buy up ranches. The way land ownership works in this area is kind of like a checkerboard. And you've got public land and private land.

[Mia Wong]

So they're trying to make, like, pathways for the bison by buying contiguous plots.

[James Stout]

Yeah. They're not all contiguous, but their goal is to have a large contiguous area in which.

[Mia Wong]

Right. And you just have to buy them when they come up.

[James Stout]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The argument is that they're pushing up land prices. Right. But in reality, this area is depopulating rapidly. It might push up land prices a little bit, but it's not like there's massive bidding wars going on here for each of these ranches.

[Mia Wong]

Right. Because are there new, like, people seeking new cattle ranching opportunities who are trying to move in, who are being prevented from doing that?

[James Stout]

Would it be people trying to, like, either, I guess, if. Yeah. Expand their ranch or if a family's subdividing its ranch or if you didn't inherit your family ranch, I guess, wanted to buy some land. Generally, how it works here is you. You buy a certain part of land, It'll be like, 60, 40, 70, 30, something like that. So you'll buy land, and that will give you the privilege to have, like, first dibs on grazing on the public land that is adjacent to your land. So most of these ranches are checkerboarded. Right. It's not like a big contiguous plot. So not being able to graze a bison on the public land kind of fucks that up in these plots for the American prairie people. Right. And, like, I should say that, like, I have some sympathy for people ranching in this area. Like my family of farmers. Like, it's got to be really fucking hard right now when fuel prices are insanely high to. To be trying to farm on these. Especially the way that like American people farm, have a massive expanses. Right. You have to be be in a vehicle a lot. When I was reading about the brucellosis stuff and it made me think of foot and mouth disease, which happened in the UK when I was a child, I remember how traumatic that was for people having their whole herds killed. Several people who were like within our extended family social circle killed themselves.

[Mia Wong]

That's horrible.

[James Stout]

When they lost all their cattle. Yeah. Like it's really fucked up. Like at least in that part of the world, like you might have, it might have been your great grandfather who started breeding these cattle. Right. Like it's an intergenerational project that joins line through family. So I do understand these people are like deeply tied to this land also not in the same way as indigenous people. I can see that people like, you know, don't want it to change. I understand that. And like consolidation, agriculture, climate change, the way our food ecosystem works, that is an issue we should address if we want to take care of the land. What the government is doing is not how we address that. Sometimes you'll see people saying that the APR is entirely a tax avoidance system for the Mars family.

[Mia Wong]

Like the chocolate people?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, big chocolate. You familiar? The Mars family are rich as fuck. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I didn't know they were involved in the, in the bison industry.

[James Stout]

Well, they, they have donated. I couldn't find an exact figure. Like with the change of nonprofit, like the reporting laws, it's a lot harder now than it used to be.

[Mia Wong]

So they don't own or operate it. They've just made large donations.

[James Stout]

They've made large donations. There's a unit called Mars Vista within the APR which has some private housing on it. But like, I think people are fundamentally misunderstanding how the super wealthy, like these people are worth more than $100 billion. I would highly encourage anyone who thinks that an NGO which is going through like in the tens of millions a year maybe by 2015. So in the first 14 years of this, this project's existence, they donated 20 million. That's not touching the edges.

[Mia Wong]

I'm sure they have a complicated tax shelter system set up for themselves that doesn't involve bison. It involves bank accounts in countries you haven't heard of.

[James Stout]

Yes, exactly. Like the Panama Papers had zero bison in it for a reason. Right. Like you're just being very. It's very sweet if you think that like the way that they're avoiding paying federal taxes is buying lamb to put buffalo on.

[Mia Wong]

Like, all these families have their own whole foundations that are just about moving money around in opaque ways.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

If you're trying to avoid paying taxes, you don't donate to a real charity that's actually doing something complicated with physical animals and land. You have. You have a foundation that does grants for something obscure.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, it's just not. It's just. Just not it. Like, it's just. It's not it. That's not how taxes work. That's not how rich people work. So we talked about brucellosis. We're going to move past brucellosis. I had a diversion on chronic wasting disease and elk feeding, but maybe we'll make that a whole other podcast. So we also talked about this checkerboarding of public land. Right. Lots of these ranching operations that they're buying rely heavily on public land grazing. So in 2022, they applied in 2019, the BLM allowed them to graze bison on seven plots in Phillips County. Right. So that's saying that you can put your bison on this public land, which is adjacent to the private land which you own.

[Mia Wong]

And that's standard practice. Everybody's doing that.

[James Stout]

It depends on the particular plot. Right. So they had to apply to the Bureau of Land Management.

[Mia Wong]

It's, like, pretty common for people to be grazing to get these permits to graze on the public land.

[James Stout]

There have been bison on public land for 40 years. There remain bison on public land across the west to include some tribes graze bison on public land as well as on tribal land.

[Mia Wong]

But, like, the cattle farmers are doing this as well.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah. The cattle farmers are all doing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So that's what I'm saying. Like, if you buy this plot of land, it's, like, kind of common that you would also be grazing on the public land adjacent to it.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's entirely understood. Like. Or not even adjacent to, but sometimes, like, interspersed with. Yeah, like, so if you look at, like, sometimes you'll see, like, a deeded and a leased acreage when you're looking at, like, a land. Like, if you were. If you were interested in buying a ranch. Molly.

[Mia Wong]

So, like, when they. So when they bought this land, it would be reasonable for them to assume that they would be able to use the parcels adjacent and interspersed within it.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Okay.

[James Stout]

Yes. And they would have known that that would have required, in some cases, asking the BLM. Right. Which is what they did. And in 2022, the BLM said go ahead, put your bison on this. On these particular seven plots. Right. So they were amended to include bison. They got an environmental impact study done. You know, they did all the things.

[Mia Wong]

I'm sorry, doing an environmental impact study of the presence of, of a native animal.

[James Stout]

Yeah. On its native range.

[Mia Wong]

What, what would happen if a buffalo lived here?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

We asked 10 government scientists.

[James Stout]

Yeah. We spent thousands of dollars finding out what happens if buffalo lives in buffalo home. Turned out it didn't do massive ecological damage. So BLM said, let the buffalo back. What is interesting about this rule change is the justification the BLM is using and that is the thing that people should be worried about in my opinion. That should be the headline. The headline should be. So the BLM is trying to regulate these leases that have their roots in the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act.

[Mia Wong]

I'm nodding, I'm nodding knowingly.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, the Taylor Grazing Act, a big deal when it comes to like public land in the west and farming. Right. It is trying to regulate these leases to quote, unquote, productive purposes. It doesn't say productive purposes anywhere I can find in the Taylor grazing net. It does use the term, I guess, domestic livestock.

[Mia Wong]

A bison could be a livestock.

[James Stout]

Well, they are a livestock.

[Mia Wong]

I've eaten them.

[James Stout]

Yeah. These bison are vaccinated, they are fenced, they are tagged. They'll be handled. I'm guessing the way that API does it is like a kind of non invasive handling, like trying to keep them not acclimated to human contact per se, but like it's hard to acclimate a

[Mia Wong]

bison to human contact.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You can get like beefalo.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Which is like a, like a hybridized bison.

[Mia Wong]

They sell bison at my Whole Foods. That's livestock.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The APR is not raising them to kill them, to sell them for meat,

[Mia Wong]

but they could if they wanted to. Like, because like I'm not. I don't think the government is ever going to go to a cattle rancher and say you have to kill X number of these or they're no longer livestock.

[James Stout]

Yeah, well that is the question. Right? Like, what if we choose. If you gave me a million dollars today, I would immediately cease making podcasts. I would buy a large plot of land and I would have an ungodly number of rare and endangered domestic livestock species. Right. I' have Jacob sheep. I'd have polycarate sheep with four horns, you know, like Satan looking sheep. I'd be all about it.

[Mia Wong]

And they would remain legally livestock even if you had no intention of eating them.

[James Stout]

Well, that is the question Right. The productive purposes definition could be extremely broad. What if you're doing practices like restorative ranching?

[Mia Wong]

Right. What if the. What if the Bureau of Land Management was concerned with the land being properly managed?

[James Stout]

Well, at a point, I guess the BLM was right, because there was a rule. This is actually kind of funny. It was called the Conservation and Landscape Health rule, and the BLM rescinded that last week. So previously that was one of the considerations for managing land, for managing public land. And I guess we should just briefly say that there is no such thing as government land. Right. It's all native land. And the land which is currently managed by the government is paid for by me and Molly and everyone else. Doug Burgum doesn't own it. It is there for future generations. Right. Like, it's.

[Mia Wong]

Like, what is. What are they going to do with it if they kick the buffalo off of it?

[James Stout]

Cattle would be my guess. The cattle only leases, so they're just

[Mia Wong]

going to lease it to someone else.

[James Stout]

Yeah, but like, I guess some portions of public land in that part of Montana are entirely landlocked by private land. Like, one of the things that APR did that made people like it there is that the APR bought a bunch, bought a ranch, and then opened up a gated road which allowed people to access 50,000 acres of public land that had previously been completely islanded. Right. So, like, right, what their plan is to do, they have to sell these ranches now.

[Mia Wong]

So the government just is saying you can't use this public land anymore in such a way that might negate your ability to use your privately owned land. Because we don't think bison are livestock.

[James Stout]

Yeah, because bison are woke more broadly, like this Conservation and Landscape Health rule with Sinjin is worrying about. Very amusingly, the BLM has forgotten to take down the website that explains the value of the rule. So at the time of recording, the BLM's website still says, quote, the rule recognizes conservation as an essential component of public lands management. On equal footing with other multiple uses of these habitats, Americans rely on public lands to deliver food, energy, clean air and water, wildlife habitat, and places to recreate. The BLM knows the importance of balancing our use of natural resources with protecting public lands and waters. For future generations, the rule will safeguard these lands and waters to protect our way of life. Still a bit cringe, but they've now rescinded that rule. So I guess our way of life is now under threat.

[Mia Wong]

I guess I just don't understand how this is justifiable at all. But I guess that's not really the

[James Stout]

point for a lot of people. Right. Like, it sort of flies under the radar because it's not, you know, like a big Washington thing. I can see how, like, in our major population centers it can be easily to be like, who the fuck cares where the cows in buffalo go?

[Mia Wong]

But I think even aside from. From an ecological argument, which I think is very important. Right. The restoration of these grasslands, this is the government saying, no, we're going to take this public resource away from someone who is rightfully using it and paying to use it, and we're going to sell that right instead to a capitalist concern over a bullshit fake reason.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, not that the APR is not. I suppose it's not really a capitalist concern. It's like a nonprofit.

[Mia Wong]

But there has to be some sort of big cattle lobbying at play here.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think there are elements of the cattle industry which have been opposed to bison, especially, like, due to that, like, departure of bison from the park is really something that for years has been like a point of tension in Yellowstone. It's worth noting, like who. Yeah. Who is for this and who is against it? I guess it is cattle ranchers who are opposed to the grazing of bison out here.

[Mia Wong]

And who specifically is getting those seven specific plots.

[James Stout]

Yeah, well, I think the reason they rescinded those is because they were the seven most recently approved.

[Mia Wong]

Okay.

[James Stout]

Because there are other plots. Like, I think there are tribes in California, for instance, who have applied for. For buffalo grazing on public land. And I should point out that like a tribal cultural herd, a food sovereignty herd is a very different thing to the apr. And I hope that apr. But I know that tribal interests would.

[Mia Wong]

But I guess as far as the government is concerned, it's the same. That the answer is just no.

[James Stout]

I don't know yet. We don't know yet. We don't know if those tribal leases have been approved. What we do know is that, like, this production standard is a serious threat to them. The coalition of large tribes actually wrote a letter opposing this decision. I'll quote from it here. It is offensive and unacceptable that the federal government would still seek to keep buffalo off of these lands. Chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Ryman Lebow wrote, adding that BLM lands are all former buffalo lands. He calls the decision a painful reprise with genocide the federal government attempted to commit against us and our relative buffalo. They also called it affirmative action for cattle, which was kind of funny.

[Mia Wong]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

True.

[James Stout]

Yeah. But yeah, it is true. Like, like, it is like saying they're

[Mia Wong]

doing cow dei yeah, yeah, this is one.

[James Stout]

Our one ungulate is fine and the other one isn't. I want people to be concerned about this because it could be deeply damaging to the attempts of tribes to recover their buffalo population. It could be deeply damaging to our public lands. I guess I want to talk briefly about the buffalo genocide because I think it's something that people have like a grasp of, but not like a maybe an in depth understanding. What I want to briefly say is the government played a massive role in wiping out of most of our buffalo. We ended up with fewer than a thousand head of buffalo. There were times when a tree falling down, a lightning strike, a bad flood could have significantly altered the future of the species because there were so few. Capitalism also played a role, though. The idea that the buffalo hunters were just following orders from the government relies in part on. On books written by former buffalo hunters trying to absolve themselves. I would suggest that we also look at the incentive provided to kill the animals and to not make use of their remains after people did that. Right. Because, like, as much as the government did, like the capitalism that the government was bringing with it killed the. Killed the majority of the wild buffalo in this country. And that is what's happening again, Right. We look at public lands management today. Like, last year I was at Chaco Canyon. Chaco Canyon was the site of the biggest building in what is now the United states until the 1880s. Oh, wow. Chacoan civilization built these massive great houses there. Really, really beautiful, amazing place. One of the less visited units in the national park system. Gorgeous. Amazing. I saw some elk there too.

[Mia Wong]

This is all news to me.

[James Stout]

You gotta go to Chaka. Can you.

[Mia Wong]

We have to. We have to find something we can record. That gets me down to the Southwest.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I. I bet there are some bigots. You know, there are. Because they use appropriate. The Zuni sacred sun symbol in some of their Nazi shit. Because it have. Have we not done enough? Well, apparently not, right? Because there is. There is a campaign to have drilling to, like, delist areas of Chaco Canyon. I also spent time last year in Gwichin homeland with Gwichin people there. What's happening is the Trump administration is trying to grant drilling permits in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Gwich' in people, I should say preferred to use the term Arctic refuge. So I'm gonna try and use that going forward. They don't like anwar, just the acronym. So what that will do, right, Is on the. On the plain there, drilling is the place where the caribou migrates the porcupine caribou herd makes the longest land mammal migration in the world.

[Mia Wong]

So we're just speedrunning the devastation of every cool big animal we have.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, we're going to do drilling in the place where the caribou carve.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And if they don't go there to

[Mia Wong]

carve, then it's over.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And there are so few of these animals left.

[Molly Co]

Right.

[James Stout]

That can cross political boundaries, that can travel their great distances unimpeded by capitalism, largely. That's because the Gwich' in territory is not a reservation. It's like they own it. So they can go off public land onto Gwichin land. And without the caribou, like, the Gwich' in culture cannot be the same as it is. Right. The caribou is sacred to them. Like, their culture and the existence of the caribou, I guess, are tied together. And, like, the same could be said for bison. Right. Like, that is part of the reason that we don't have bison on the plains anymore, because indigenous people and the bison went hand in hand in the genocide of the indigenous peoples. There was also genocide of the buffalo, I guess, and those two things weren't separate or distinct. And I think, like, there's this idea in the American liberal psyche that, like, a bison being on the land constitutes a return. And, like, that's not it. Right. Like, privately owned bison being on the apr is not land back.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, it would restore the grassland to some degree, but that's not. That doesn't have the same cultural impact as returning the land to its natural stewards.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly. And allowing indigenous people to, like, manage the land for future generations in the way that they did for millennia before this massive extinction event, the European colonization.

[Mia Wong]

I hope nobody thinks a privately owned buffalo flock is the same as landback.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I hope not. I really hope not. Like, did you see like, when, like, the fork pet drives were, like, killing some of their buffalo to feed people during the last shutdown?

[Mia Wong]

I do remember that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. There was kind of a strange reaction being like, oh, how sad that they have to. To kill their buffalo.

[Mia Wong]

Like, but that's what the buffalo are for. Yes.

[James Stout]

That is why they.

[Molly Co]

The.

[James Stout]

The buffalo are there. So the sort of culture can exist

[Mia Wong]

and it's not like a sacred cow situation.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

That is the sacred to them, but not in that way.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, it is sacred to them and that it is sustaining to them.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[James Stout]

And, like, that's my understanding at least. And having spent a little bit of time with people who have that relationship to. To other animals. Like that. When I think about, like, which inference in their caribou, like, they will fight as hard as they can to preserve their caribou herd. But that doesn't. That's not like a different thing from them. They also hunt the caribou and eat it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Part of the natural relationship with them is sometimes eating them.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And like, in that way, the culture is sustained by the ongoing presence of the animal. Right.

[Mia Wong]

I guess we just. I don't know, the Western mind, we can only hunt something to extinction. We can't contemplate.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Wanting to coexist with it.

[Mia Wong]

A symbiotic coexistence where we. We eat them sometimes, but we don't want them all to be dead.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Right. We're not just gonna, like, be like, okay, that was fun while it lasted.

[Mia Wong]

Onto the next one.

[James Stout]

Yeah, let's do the next species now. So, like, people should be worried about this. This is not the end of bison on public lands. It's not the end of bison on tribal lands. But this productivity standard should really concern people. BLM is the biggest public lands management agency. Sometimes it gets jokingly called the Bureau of Livestock and Mining, which is pretty much the way it's going. Right, Right.

[Mia Wong]

So is there a legal definition being used here? Like something from a statute or something from a contract? Like, what is this? What is productive use?

[James Stout]

That. So productive use is a standard that they have derived from the term domestic livestock in the Taylor Grazing Act.

[Mia Wong]

And then how is domestic livestock legally defined? Any domesticated animal.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Well, they are claiming that it is domestic livestock if it is productive.

[Mia Wong]

But this is circular. Right. So productive use means livestock, and livestock have to be productive. But what is productive? It's livestock. Livestock is productive.

[James Stout]

Well, there has to be, like, a cash exchange. I guess they're saying, like, it has to be raised. Raised for sale.

[Mia Wong]

But then, like, how exactly are we measuring that? Does it have to be profitable?

[James Stout]

Does it have to be extracting the maximum, like, output out of that given area of land?

[Mia Wong]

Do you have to be exporting something? Like, do you have to have a government con? Like, what is the threshold here for what's productive?

[James Stout]

Yeah. APR has given bison meat to food banks before, so apparently that doesn't meet the standard.

[Mia Wong]

Right. So, like, without. Without a hard and fast, like, clear written standard, this is the government just deciding who does or doesn't get to do business with them.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And who. Who does and doesn't have access? There are issues, big issues with grazing cattle on public Land, ecological, social, climate change, animal welfare. There are issues, many of them. But the idea that if you wanted to, let's say if you wanted to raise fewer cattle and do like what they call regenerative ranching to something more sustainable, you couldn't because it's not as productive. It's bonkers. Right. On public land, like on.

[Mia Wong]

Right. So now you lose, you lose your government contract because you tried, you try something, try something new, try something sustainable.

[James Stout]

You tried to be too nice to the land that supposedly belongs to everyone.

[Mia Wong]

So in order, in order to use this land that is supposed to be for, you know, public preservation, you have to be as exploitative and destructive as possible.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

Great.

[Mia Wong]

Thank you. Doug Burgum.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

Cool.

[James Stout]

Are we gonna extend this to like, I'm not as familiar with mining, but you can stake a claim on public land. Right. Lots of most mining claims I'd imagine are staked on public land and you can exploit that claim. Is it now going to be the case that you have to exploit that claim? If we don't have this standard of maintaining the land and that instead is gone now and that the only standard is it has to be as productive

[Mia Wong]

as possible, then how is that land management? This is the Bureau of Land Exploitation.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The BLM is just. And I know the BLM have done this for many center. Because this isn't that this isn't new for the blm but like, but having

[Mia Wong]

officially rescinded their rule on conserving the land.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Then this could be really bad. Right. Like massive chunks of the west are managed by the BLM and like the idea that they're only going to allow it the most productive uses or force the most productive uses. Like this is one of the most, many ways the Trump administration is attacking public lands that people should talk about more.

[Mia Wong]

And again, without adequately defining it, I just feel like this is another vector for just handing out government resources to donors, to allies.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And like without any change in statute. Right. Like this is the, the law that Burgum is reinterpreting here you've got the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act. And then like there's a 1976 law that. And the statutory language is that the BLM should manage the land for multiple use and sustained yield. That is broad. But like we are not going to get this Congress to pass a better one.

[Mia Wong]

No. And if anybody does try to take this to court, the Supreme Court will just say no, you have to strip mine the field.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like your only choice, you have to

[Mia Wong]

frack even whether there's gas there or not, you have to set up fracking.

[James Stout]

You're, like, obliged to do feedlots, even though you can't. Like, it's just like a really concerning area that I think has been approached kind of almost tokenistically in some of the press. Like, this is bad for everyone. Right. If the government is saying you can only ranch this way on public land, that's also bad for ranchers all over the West. I don't think that the way that we restore our land to its custodians and to its natural state is big private parks. Like APR is like a private national park. Right. Like, you can walk through lots of it, you can hunt on it. Like public land. Some places you can camp on it. They have dispersed camping. That's nice. I don't believe in the benevolence of the rich because, like, look how we fucking got here.

[Mia Wong]

Right. But that, that half measure was the best thing we had at this moment. And now it's illegal.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Now it's. And like, I, I'm glad that these rich people are putting buffalo on the landscape because we need more of them. Like, if we're ever going to have truly wild herds, we need that genetic diversity. Right. They've been through horrible genetic bottlenecks in getting up to this half a million number.

[Mia Wong]

Right. It's not like we can just try again later. Let it, let the number drop back down. We'll try again in a hundred years. Like, at some point we've missed the boat.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And as the climate continues to change. Right. We have to think about how land management, food procurement plays a role in our future. And like, this is the opposite of doing that. And I think people ought to be concerned about that. There's not much you can do about it. Like, if these people who weren't elected, like, ruling on things that are not statutory. But it is something that I think people ought to add to their many concerns with the Trump administration.

[Mia Wong]

I guess be more worried.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I don't know. I don't want you to be more worried. I want you to go outside, like, see a buffalo. It would be nice.

[Mia Wong]

No, but at least know that I don't know, the future existence of the world as we know it is being attacked from all sides, even from directions I wasn't aware of.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

There are, there are attack vectors that I just had not considered.

[James Stout]

Yeah. This is a new and exciting way that they're making worse. So. Yeah. I, I hope you enjoyed a little diversion about buffalo next week. I want to talk about bears. I'm on a tear.

[Mia Wong]

The bears I'm excited to learn about because I've seen a bear and I know they live in the United States unlike they do parrots and pronghorns. I guess I was thinking of like Springbok maybe.

[James Stout]

They kind of look like that.

[Mia Wong]

I don't know what else. I've been to a zoo and they have, okay, antelope type animals there. So I just. I don't know. Everything at the zoo must be from far away.

[James Stout]

No, the pronghorn is like, it's. There's a cool zoo. I'm not a big zoo guy.

[Mia Wong]

You gotta make sure it's one of the. One of those ones that, I don't know, it's accredited.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. There's one in Palm Springs where you can see. I've seen big. I've been fortunate enough to see bighorn sheep in their natural habitat. Oh, wow. But for most people, your best chance again to look at a bighorn sheep is if you go to that one in Palm Springs when you see a pronghorn just pronging, you know, like, do they, like. Yeah, they bounce along. They got those giant tendons. Right. A Buffalo can go 35 miles an hour and they're faster than a buffalo.

[Mia Wong]

So, like, I don't want to see a buffalo go 35 miles an hour. I don't want to see that.

[James Stout]

Oh, they can be it. Yeah. It's like seeing a minivan, like doing muscle car shit, you know, like, they can jump. They could. They have this incredible. Buffalo can like jump over stuff. They're actually very nimble despite looking, you know, like a. Like a cinder block.

[Mia Wong]

Well, they're so cute, though. I want to touch one so bad,

[James Stout]

but I don't want to get brucellosis against it. Yeah, brucellosis is going to be a long term issue. It's. Yeah, it's the trampling. There'll be a short term issue for you. So. Yeah. Don't touch buffalo.

[Mia Wong]

Don't touch them.

[James Stout]

Send. Send Molly pictures of your pronghorn encounters. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

If you have seen a wild animal in the United States, let me see it. I didn't know we had those.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Getting Molly's replies with your raccoons in your trash.

[Mia Wong]

Raccoons I know about. I've seen a raccoon.

[James Stout]

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It was in. I was in South Korea many years ago at a theme park that had a zoo in it. I don't know, it was a while ago.

[James Stout]

Perfect.

[Mia Wong]

In the zoo area, there was this huge display, everyone was crowded around. This very cool zoo animal was raccoons.

[James Stout]

Oh, really?

[Mia Wong]

They don't have them?

[James Stout]

Yeah. They play such a cultural role in the American cultural hegemony.

[Mia Wong]

I don't want to see a raccoon, but I guess. Yeah, if you can't see one, that's an intriguing get.

[James Stout]

So, yeah, I remember. I like, my initial engagement with raccoons was through the. The movie Pocahontas, which is a whole other.

[Molly Co]

That.

[James Stout]

So when I first saw raccoon, I wanted to visit it. Right. Because, you know, they have biscuits. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

You thought it was gonna be like a chatty.

[James Stout]

Yeah, Like a little friends. Yeah, it was very aggressive. Be unnecessarily aggressive.

[Garrison Davis]

Not a little friend.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I was approaching a spirit of kindness, I think, like, generally. I also have been victimized by a skunk for several years now, so I think maybe I just.

[Mia Wong]

That's not a friend.

[James Stout]

No, it finds what those ladies on

[Mia Wong]

Tick Tock that have pet ones will tell you. That is not a friend.

[James Stout]

Apparently, they're very nice if they, like, can be encouraged not to. I don't know. I don't think. Don't. Please don't. Capture a skunk and bring it home with you. Like, the skunk wants to live on its own. But, yeah, this one skunk will find me. Every time I'm going through, like, I'll be coming out at night, he's thinking

[Mia Wong]

about you on my head.

[James Stout]

It's like a fucking Exocet missile. I see him coming from, like 200 yards away.

[Mia Wong]

It's that fucking guy again.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he's pissed at me. I'm pissed at him. He turns around, he squares up.

[Mia Wong]

Did you get caught?

[James Stout]

No, no. He'll show his ass to me, and then I'll. I'll just kind of give him a wide berth and think, oh, that was unusual, seeing a skunk do that. And then two weeks later, there he is again.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, he's waiting for you. He does not want you to come back.

[James Stout]

Yeah, no, he doesn't. He. He's also trying to, like, exercise control over the public lands in an aggressive.

[Mia Wong]

He's doing land management and you're not part of it.

[James Stout]

He's. He's returning it to its natural state by keeping European people off the land, which I guess is honestly valid, respectable. He's heard.

[Mia Wong]

He's heard horror stories from his great GR. Grandparents.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I can respect that now. I think of it in that way. But, yeah, I've got some good pictures of the back end of him. Well, after he kept doing it, I thought I may as well photograph and document this tendency. So, yeah, I have them. I'm just going to use them for some kind of greetings card or something, but I haven't yet.

[Mia Wong]

Perfect for the family Christmas card, I think.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I just keep people on their toes. We've rambled enough.

[Mia Wong]

Okay.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Please send us your wildlife pictures. We would love to see them.

[Mia Wong]

And next week, bears.

[James Stout]

Bears, yeah. Money. Before we go, do you want to plug your podcast about people who probably don't engage with animals very much?

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah, you can listen to my show. Weird little guys. I don't think there's been an animal in the show in a while. Although I guess eventually I will get around to those guys that occupied that BLM land.

[James Stout]

But yeah, yeah, that's it.

[Mia Wong]

But it's that kind of show.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I bet they love wolves. I bet they, I bet they like think a lot about wolves even though they don't see them.

[Mia Wong]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a guy who had his username on a Nazi forum was the device of wolf, which is incorrect, German for the white wolf. So yeah, they do love wolves.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah, I could, I could have guessed. Thank you very much, Molly.

[Mia Wong]

Thank you, James.

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[Molly Co]

Welcome to Ikeda here, a podcast where I try to explain economics to you and Molly. I'm your host, via Wong. And thank you, Molly, for agreeing to do this, especially on extremely short notice.

[James Stout]

So I really appreciate it.

[Mia Wong]

I am so excited to struggle to learn.

[Molly Co]

So, okay, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the central thing that this episode is about, nominally, is a concept called monopsony. And it's actually really easy.

[Mia Wong]

No, see, you said that. You said that in the work chat earlier. You said monopsony and I was like, oh man, she's so tired. That's not even a word.

[Molly Co]

Well, okay, this actually gets into the thing, because this is a word that was made up specifically for this concept. Unfortunately, I do also have to do the bad news, which is that to actually understand the history of this, we do have to explain stuff that's legitimately very complicated.

[Mia Wong]

So I'm locked in.

[Molly Co]

Yay. But, okay, okay. Monopsony. The hook of this. This is part of the reason why you get paid like shit is because of monopsony. So I first was interested in writing about this specifically for this show because, weirdly, NPR's Planet Money, like, discovered the concept of monopsony and did a couple of pretty interesting pieces on the history of the concept. And the place that they go with it is they start talking about one of my favorite economists, Joanne Robinson, who is really good, and we're gonna spend most of this episode talking about her. But one of the stories that they tell, this is a very famous story in the circles of economists that I'm around, I guess, is about her sitting down with, like, a British classicist and inventing the term monopsony. So, okay, what. What is. What is monopsony?

[Mia Wong]

It's one. Something mono.

[Molly Co]

You know what a monopoly is? So monopoly is when one seller. Right? So, okay, it's like, yeah, you have. I don't know, you have, like, Google, which is a monopoly on, like, search engines. Right. And, you know, monopoly doesn't necessarily. And what. We'll be getting into this more in a second. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that there's literally only one.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Molly Co]

But, you know, like, the US like, every market you are dealing with in the United States is some kind of monopoly where, you know, sometimes there's like a big three, or sometimes there's like, two, or sometimes there's maybe five, or

[Mia Wong]

sometimes it's quite literal. Like, we only have one power company in Virginia.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, yeah. You know, and sometimes monopolies are deliberately set up by the state. Right. Where sometimes, you know, the state. A state would just be like, yeah, fudge it. There's only one power company here.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, no, it's a private company.

[James Stout]

It's a private company.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. Right. Yeah. But sometimes private companies will be handed monopolies like this.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Molly Co]

Utility companies are a thing where it does kind of make sense, because having two companies setting up rival electrical grids is like, a nightmare. But.

[Mia Wong]

Well, that's why the state should do it, Mia.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, well, it's like. It's like.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

This is the issue, though, right? And this is why monopoly, in theory, is like a thing that economists are not supposed to, like, because Monopoly screws up the sort of like perfect competition between all of these 1 million different companies that's supposed to like make your life good because they're all forced to sell everything at like the lowest possible price because they have to outcompete everyone else and there's like all of this stuff. But then if you have, if you have one monopoly, they can charge you whatever the fuck price they want because there's only one of them. And the alternatives are to eat shit

[Mia Wong]

or like, like Amazon choking out what was, it was 1, 800 diapers. Right. It was a diaper company that offered like affordable mail order diapers and they would undercut them really hard for like a concentrated period of time. So they went out of business and they jacked up the prices on diapers.

[Molly Co]

Yep, yep. This is basically just what the modern tech economy is, is that some company will come in with like a hundred billion dollars worth of tech money. For example, there were a bunch of rideshare wars in India over this where like all these rideshare companies were basically giving people for like really, really low cost rides. I mean, they were obviously still screwing the drivers, but like.

[Mia Wong]

Oh yeah, naturally.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, yeah. And so they were just trying to like edge everyone outside of the market so that they could take control of it and raise the prices and stuff eventually.

[Mia Wong]

I guess it's like, you know, the capitalism enthusiast likes to imagine that the economy is like, you know, Darwinian evolution. Survival of the fittest. Right. We evolve and compete and the best man wins. But actually it's more like intentionally introducing mongooses to the islands of Hawaii.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, that's, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This isn't evolution. You just introduce a giant weasel that ate all the bird eggs.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, right. And it's like, you know, if you look at how capitalism spreads historically, it's, it's not even like capitalism doesn't outproduce other like economic systems usually what it does is like, you know, there's, there's this line in the Communist Manifesto that I think Marx was extremely wrong about, talking about like, like trade is the canon that will bring down Chinese walls. And he's talking about like free trade will like destroy China's trade bears. It's like. Well no, like China's trade barriers were brought down by the Opium Wars. Like the British Navy like sailed in and like besieged the capital. Like, you know, but when people talk about monopolies, they're talking about selling goods. Right, right. And what Dylan Robinson realizes very quickly is that, hold on, this is Also true for employers. Right. If you are trying to find a fucking job. Right. Oh under sort of like the, the, the models of perfect competition that, like neoclassical economics, the economics that like you learned in school, they just normally assume that, oh yeah, you can just switch jobs really easily. So obviously companies have to pay you.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

But in most towns, there's one major employer who kind of sets the bar.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like here it's uva.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. Like it's Walgreens or like Walmart. And like, if you ever had to find a job, like, you understand how this works.

[Mia Wong]

I actually haven't, but I understand in theory.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. Listener, you, you've had to find a job.

[Mia Wong]

You're speaking to the, you're speaking to the only person who's never applied for a job.

[Molly Co]

We've literally never applied for a job.

[Mia Wong]

It's a complicated situation. Yeah, I've never like, oh, wow, good for you.

[Molly Co]

I, I love this for you. This rules for everyone else.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

Like it's really obvious that, you know, there exist conditions where you have monopolies but for like hiring people. So Joan Robinson, like at this meeting with this classicist, coins the term monopsony to be like, okay, there's one seller.

[Mia Wong]

Okay. I'm usually against a neologism, but I understand the need for this word. I'm on board. Yeah, I'm on board with Joanne.

[Molly Co]

It's a good word. She's really cool. Yeah. I should probably mention the caveat here, which is she does do the like classic 1950s communist thing of like going to China and then getting led around on like state sponsored tours and then coming back and assuming you understand what's happening in communist China. And that didn't go great, but you know, a lot. The rest of her work is really good. And, and this is kind of where Planet Money does a really interesting history skip where in their version of the story they go, oh yeah. And then everyone just kind of ignored it until recently. It got picked back up by these economists who were like, wow. We did peer reviewed research and we found out that like, it turns out that, yeah, actually there isn't perfect competition in the labor market and that, yeah, labor markets are controlled by these like monopolies.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, I guess you have to do studies to prove things. You can't just vibe it out. But I would say just the general vibe. Like, I could have told you that. I could have told you that.

[Molly Co]

Molly. Molly. Okay, I have such bad news for you, which is we are going to meet the person in this story whose idea it Was to be like, hey, we should like figure out how the economy works using data.

[Mia Wong]

That was a new concept for them. Yeah, tight.

[Molly Co]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

Was invented by a guy who we're going to get to the story of the invention of.

[Mia Wong]

And it was in like 1987.

[Molly Co]

This is a site. It was like the 30s, 1930s when we invented this.

[Mia Wong]

It was in 2004. They brought math into it.

[Molly Co]

Oh God. One of my absolute favorite stories of all time is like, you know, in like the 90s there was like the craze over chaos theory, which I think the only artifact of that is like the chaos theory guy in Jurassic Park. Butterfly flashes wings and all these things happen. Like chaos theory is like a, it's a, it's a, like a genuinely very interesting math concept. But the thing about chaos theory is that it only applies to things that are third order equations.

[Mia Wong]

A thing. I definitely know what that is.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, we could go off on a tangent on this, but I'm just, I'm just going to tell the econ joke.

[Mia Wong]

No, we don't need to. We don't need to.

[Molly Co]

So everyone, economics immediately was like, oh my God, there's this hot topic. But the problem is it doesn't apply to the economic stuff people are doing in the 90s because they don't use third order equations. They only use second order ones because they're dumb asses. This is like one of the trends of the show is that the people who do mainstream economics are extremely dumb.

[Mia Wong]

And I've always had that feeling. But because I don't understand the economy, it's hard for me to be sure.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, well it's, it's because it's ideologically motivated. Right. You know the reason that you study economics in high school?

[Mia Wong]

Who studies economics in high school? I didn't.

[Molly Co]

Well, there are like economics classes in high school. Right, like that.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Molly Co]

Sorry. When I say studies, like. Yeah, like you had to take an econ class.

[Mia Wong]

I didn't go to a great school.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

The reason there are economics classes in high schools is not to teach people economics. It's specific. It was specifically designed as an anti communist thing to like teach kids how capitalism really works through like again a model where they don't teach you that monopolies exist. And you know, obviously like some of this has been incorporated into more modern stuff like the concept of monopsony, like kind of has entered into the lexicon of like the economics you get taught as like a little tiny baby child, which is not actually economics. It's literally propaganda that's what it was designed to be.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, how fun to get to pretend to be a scientist when you don't do real math and really, you're just a propagandist.

[Molly Co]

Oh, it's so fun. It's so fun. One of the other things, like, if you're ever, like, in university settings and you want to just, like, listen to someone complain about shit for a while, go talk to the math people about the shit people get Nobel Prizes for in economics, where it's like, this is like, shit that, like, a child who studies mathematics could do. Math doesn't even have a Nobel Prize.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Molly Co]

If you want to get, like, a Fields Medal, there's not. Nope.

[Mia Wong]

That's so sad for the math guys.

[Molly Co]

Math doesn't have one. Yeah. And the other thing is, Econ's Nobel Prize is fake, too. This is. This is another thing that's important. It's not. It's not one of the prizes that was set down by Nobel, which are like, the Nobel Prizes. They created their own, and the dynamite

[Mia Wong]

guy knew what he was doing.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, but. But it's like, like, literally, like, the Central bank of Sweden made their own and called it a Nobel, and it's not a real one. It's a fake one.

[Mia Wong]

Wait, so you're saying that if we are confident enough in our assertion, oh,

[Molly Co]

yeah, we can just make a Nobel,

[Mia Wong]

we could tell people that we are Nobel laureates in podcasting.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. I mean, as a huge thing, you also have to have an extraordinarily large amount of money to do to do propaganda for this, because the reason this works is that the Nobel Prize in Economics is also a propaganda effort. Right. And one of the ways you can tell that's a propaganda effort is that they didn't give one to Joanne Robinson, who was one of the most, like, influential economists who has ever lived.

[Mia Wong]

Justice for Joanne, genuinely, like, it's.

[Molly Co]

It's outrageous. Just like, one of the few things even the people who hate her are like, yeah, no, she should have gotten one. Because she's one of the people who invents the idea that competition isn't perfect. Like, she invents imperfect competition where there's, like, monopolies and shit. So this is all, like, stuff that's, like, foundational to, like, everyone's, to some extent, understanding of economics, but most of her ideas are completely ignored. And same, like, monopsony is like, a thing that you put in textbooks. But then when you're trying to, like, you know, you're an economist at, like, not even, like, the fucking Heritage Institute or Heritage foundation or whatever. You're at like a, just like a random economics think tank, right? Like, you don't take nopsony into account when you're like, hey, we can't raise the minimum wage because if we raise the minimum wage then everyone's going to get fired. And it turns out they're like, well, no, that's not true. And the reason that's not true is because if you assume that neoclassical economics is real is that companies aren't hiring people at like the lowest possible wage that like, that they could do without someone going to somewhere else, they're hiring them even lower than that because they can suppress the wages because where the fuck else are you going to work?

[Mia Wong]

Right?

[Molly Co]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

But also, like, people like human behavior is not subject to the rules of mathematics in that straightforward kind of way either.

[Molly Co]

No, it's very dumb. And like, like, because this goes back to something that's important to all of this, which is that like, economics as a field is not, it's not a science. It doesn't come from science. It comes from moral philosophy.

[Mia Wong]

The economy guys, they're always saying stuff. They're just like confidently asserting something and showing me a graph that's just like, does not reflect my lived reality at all. But they're very confident about the graph.

[Molly Co]

No, and that's the thing because, because, because it's originally philosophy.

[Mia Wong]

It's like, no, the, the economy's going great. It's like, not. We're not in my house.

[Molly Co]

No, it's like, it's fucking bullshit. That's a reflection of the fact that economics as a discipline works backwards from the way that a science works, which is economics starts out with assumptions about how humans work. Right. It starts out with the assumption that like, everyone's like a rationally calculating actor who's like, seeking to maximize their own utility.

[Mia Wong]

And I've never met that person.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, it's philosophy.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, actually, no, I love maximizing utility. Don't get me started on maximizing my economic utility.

[Molly Co]

It's literally utilitarianism. Right. It's not something that's derived from, from empirical data.

[James Stout]

It's.

[Molly Co]

It starts with an assumption about how things work and then projects that assumption onto the world.

[Mia Wong]

I don't want to be melodramatic, but I'm having a breakthrough here in my understanding of what economics is. I thought they were just being dumb before suddenly I see it completely differently.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, it's ideologically motivated reason. They have. They have a philosophy. They were attempting to mathematically define, like, project their philosophy onto the world. And it doesn't work very well because it's philosophy. It's not right.

[Mia Wong]

They're trying to prove a conclusion rather than map reality.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, they're going backwards.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

And this is something that we're going to get into in a second. But first, what we're going to get into are the products and services that support this podcast.

[Mia Wong]

Wow. Speaking of the economy.

[Molly Co]

Woo. We are back. So one of the things that's actually interesting about the story of Joanne Robinson is that there's a reason why almost no one. I mean, I don't know, people listening to this podcast have a higher likelihood of knowing who Joanne Robinson is than like, almost any other group of people on earth. But, like, there's a reason why she's not extremely well known by normal people.

[Mia Wong]

I'm going to be so honest with you, Mia. The only economists I know are the ones that Javier Millay named his clone dogs after.

[Molly Co]

That makes sense. Well, like, like you've heard of. You, like you've heard of, like, Adam Smith, right?

[Mia Wong]

That's true. That's not one of the clone dogs.

[Molly Co]

Joanne Robinson is an economist who is important enough that, like, you should know who she is.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but he would not have named one of the clone dogs after her. I think they're, I think they're all bo.

[Molly Co]

No, absolutely not. He, he probably, like, he would chainsaw her. It's bad. But the reason that you don't know who she is and the reason that monopsony kind of like sat in the closet of mainstream economics until people started digging it out recently is because John Robinson is part of a tradition of heterodox economics, which is, it's, you know, the economics that's not the mainstream ones. And all of those people got systematically purged from every academic institution over the span of about 30 by the neoclassical economists because the government doesn't want you

[Mia Wong]

to know their ideas.

[Molly Co]

I mean, like, like, like genuinely what happened was it was like, it was, it was a bunch of these people, like, hired by capitalists in order to do propaganda for them. And they went through and systematically took over and purged all of the country's economics departments.

[Mia Wong]

If what she's saying is the entire framework of your worldview just, like, functionally doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's not a good vibe for them.

[Molly Co]

So let's talk about the kind of tradition that Joan Robinson operates in, because this is actually a story that really, really tangentially, the planet Money people kind of allude to and then never talk about again, even though it's fascinating. So Joan Robinson is. I guess you could call her one of the sort of first people in what you would call the post Keynesian traditional.

[Mia Wong]

Absolutely. I'm always saying that.

[Molly Co]

Do you know who Keynes is?

[Mia Wong]

An economist? Was his name Maynard?

[Molly Co]

Yeah, John Maynard Keynes. His big thing.

[Mia Wong]

He's like.

[Molly Co]

Like, if you remember one thing about Keynes, like, if you need to just be like, you have a flashcard, you need to be like. Someone says Keynes. He's the. I guess like the technical term is like countercyclical spending. But he's. He's the guy who's like, when economy. Bad government should spend money in order to make economy not bad again. That's like the most basic part of

[Mia Wong]

Keynesianism and that's all I need.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, but like, the thing about Keynes is that, like, he wants, like, a nicer version of capitalism, but he is like a capitalist. And so there's a sort of milieu around him that John Robinson is kind of part of, but there's a lot of elements of it and people who Keynes, like, take stuff from. Who are extremely obscure now because, you know, Keynes did a version of it that, like, took the radicalism out. I promised earlier we were going to get to the guy who, like, invented the concept of actually doing scientific studies for macroeconomics.

[Mia Wong]

We've now reached that makes me so mad that the answer to that question isn't the first guy who. Who put math. Who decided that we should do math and economics. Oh, the first guy that did it. The first economist. Right. The guy who invented economics. Right.

[Molly Co]

Economists do a bunch of math. It's just not math. That's.

[Mia Wong]

But like, we should study the currently existing reality.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. The world first. Right.

[Mia Wong]

Like, trying to force reality into this chart that I made. That's awesome.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. And so the guy who was like, hey, what if we observed reality?

[Mia Wong]

Is.

[Molly Co]

His name is Michael Colecki.

[Garrison Davis]

Good for him.

[Mia Wong]

Great job, Michael.

[Molly Co]

He. He rocks. Yeah. He has a long and convoluted history of stuff.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. I'm gonna go ahead and say I don't endorse everything he did. I don't know anything about him, honestly.

[Molly Co]

He kind of rocks. He's so.

[James Stout]

He.

[Molly Co]

Koleki, like, foundationally, is a Marxist. Right. It's not true that he's from this school, but he's the guy from which one of the major schools of Marxist economics is born, which is called the Monopoly Capital School, who are kind of the Marxist version of the people who were like, oh, my God, hold on. Monopoly has gotten so out of hand, we have to change how our economics work. Robinson kind of discovers Kalecki a little bit later in her career. It's sort of like a 40s thing where she's originally writing about imperfect competition and, like, monopsony in, like, the 30s. But Kalecki is one of the people who is responsible for a bunch of these ideas around. Like, him and Robinson are responsible for a bunch of these ideas around, like, okay, yeah. Actually, it turns out that everything we've been talking about, like, the world is. Is composed of monopolies and monopsonies. And everything exists, at best, in. In the state of competition. And this. This becomes kind of its own. Own school. And like, you know, it branches out in a bunch of different ways through the work of some other people who start to look at, like, how is price set? And this is something that we've talked about on this show before. So, like, okay, if you've ever seen the graph that, like, all of the econ people use, where it's like, price is supply and demand. Right.

[Mia Wong]

But is it?

[Molly Co]

Well, okay, so at a certain point, and we've talked about this on the show before, our friends at Strange Matters, the magazine Strange Matters, have written about this a lot. If you, like, ask a person. It's funny, I actually did this by accident with a friend who runs, like, a very, very small business. Well, it's not that small, but, like, runs. Runs like a very, very small business. And I asked her, like, she was. She was talking about, like, okay, how do we figure out how to, like, price something? And I talked to her about it, and she goes, yeah, it's cost plus markup. Right. And the thing about price. Right. Is price is not set by a graph. Like, prices are set by a person in an office who figures out what the price is going to be.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Molly Co]

And the way that they do that is cost plus markup. It's like, how expensive was the item for us to obtain? And then what's the, like, additional price that we need to sell it for in order to both make profit and pay everyone? And this is really obvious to, like, anyone who's done a job that, like, well, yeah, no shit. Of course it's costless markup. In economics, this is considered an extremely radical idea. Right.

[Mia Wong]

I guess, you know, in this. In the supply and demand model, it's just like, whatever people are willing to pay, you just keep increasing the price until demand drops off and then you back off a little.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

In economics that's called like companies being like, price takers. The theory in like normal economics, quote unquote, is that companies, they don't set prices. They take the price from, like, what people are willing to pay. And that's objectively not true.

[Mia Wong]

They're just constantly standing there tweaking the dial.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, just, just on an objective level, what's happening is, is, you know, this, this is what's called like administrative prices. Right? And this is, this is like the basic, like one of the basic revelations of like Keynesian economics is that that price is set by a person who sets it by cost plus markup.

[Mia Wong]

And like, there's, there's a, the precog who floats in a pool of goo and just intuits the prices.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, they like, see the data. It's like. No, no, no, no, no. It's literally just a person. They set the price. It's cost plus markup. There, there's some like, psychology stuff there about like, what kinds of prices will break a consumer's loyalty to like a store.

[Garrison Davis]

Right?

[Molly Co]

Because if you, like, raise the price at a store too much, people will stop shopping at the store. But like that, that's, that's like the way this stuff actually works. And this is one of the big post Keynesian innovations. It's like, hi, we're trying to figure out how price works. So we went and we asked a bunch of people how it works.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, a remarkable choice.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, right. God. But this is an issue for neoclassical economics because the whole, like supply and demand setting price is like the basis of their whole thing and it's the basis of all of their politics. Now at this point, we need to talk about the thing that's legitimately complicated. Before we get into that, we're going to talk about something that's not complicated, which is how to use these products and services.

[Mia Wong]

Wow. We're actually doing the economy right now.

[Molly Co]

We are, We are back. Okay, so we're going to stop doing the economy. And the reason we're going to stop doing the economy is that, you know, when I talked about there being an ideological purge, right. The people at Strange Matters wrote about this economist named Frederick Lee, who was an IWW member and who was one of the sort of, I don't know, like the guy trying to pull the 5,000 different strands of heterodox economics together and he writes a really, really detailed in depth analysis of, at each individual school. How did the neoclassical people come in and purge everyone and then maintain control of it. And one of the. One of the ways you can tell that this isn't about who is correct, it is about who has power is something called the Cambridge Capital Controversy, which I'm gonna assume, Molly, you haven't heard of this?

[Mia Wong]

No, I was just really sort of marveling and turning that phrase over in my mind. It's not about who is correct, it's about who has power. Yeah, I'm gonna store that one away. That's a. That's a good turn of phrase.

[Molly Co]

It's a good way of understanding this, and it's a good way of understanding the central thing of, like, hey, why did everyone kind of ignore monopsony for 80 years? And it turns out that the answer is that being right doesn't do anything in economics.

[Mia Wong]

That's heartbreaking.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, it's bleak. And some of these people are people who have institutional power. So one of the things that Joanne Robinson is most famous for doing is her and her collaborator, Piero Serafa, who's another whole story, who's an extremely wild guy. Seraph is the other person who a bunch of this, like, heterodox economics is based off of. There's a large extent to which heterodox economics means that, like, you think Seraphra was right instead of the Chicago school people and, like, the neoclassical people or Marx, or you're sort of like, fusing the two of them. And he and Joan Robinson are writing out of Cambridge, the one in England. But then there's also a whole bunch of neoclassical economists are at Cambridge, the one in Massachusetts.

[Mia Wong]

They really can't be doing that. Yeah, well, we gotta rename at least one of these.

[Molly Co]

And they fight it out. That's why it's called the Cambridge Capital Controversy. They go to war. Yeah. So, okay, the thing that they're fighting about is extremely convoluted. At some point, Molly, I'm gonna drag you on here, and we're gonna do the actual full version of it. But the short version of it is really funny. And the short version of it is that this is a fight about. Okay, so you have, like, two different kinds of what are called capital goods. So you have, like. I don't know. I think the capital's power one. It's like tools that make ice cream and tools that make airplane. And the question is, how do you figure out how much those tools are worth together?

[Mia Wong]

Well, are you selling ice cream on the airplanes?

[Molly Co]

You know, I. They where you're selling them doesn't have to be really.

[Mia Wong]

I'M just saying, is there synergy at play here, Mia? Like. Well, then I combine.

[Molly Co]

Actually, one of the. Legitimately, the idea that you could use the same equipment to do multiple things is, like, a really serious problem for an enormous number of economic schools. Like, it's, like, real bad. It's like, kind of. It's kind of even bad for, like, the mathematics behind, like, classical Marxist political economy. It's, it's really bad for, like, the neoclassical people. It's not great.

[Mia Wong]

So my new airline, where everyone gets a free ice cream is really throwing a wrench into this.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, well, as, as, as long as. As long as the same machines can either be making ice cream or you can be making airplane and you can't tell which one.

[Mia Wong]

What are they teaching at economy school? What is even happening? So they're arguing about ice cream machines.

[Molly Co]

Well, so, so what, what, what they're. What they're arguing about. Right. Is if you are doing, like, normal neoclassical economics, can you point at, like, factories and go, how much is this worth? And this is a real problem because it turns out that the way the neoclassical economists do this is circular. So, okay, you're trying to figure out how much money a factory is worth. I'm going to quote here from the book Capital is Power, which has a very good explanation of, like, what's happening here. The money value of any capital good, that is the amount investors are willing to pay for it, is the present value of its expected future profits computed by discounting this profit by the prevailing rate of interest. So value equals expected profit divided by rate of interest. So basically what they're saying here is that, like, okay, you're trying to figure out how much money is the factory worth. The amount of money that the factory is worth depends on how much money you make from using the factory to make plane or make ice cream. That's like, basically what that's saying. And then there's a discounting rate because you're making that money in the future.

[Mia Wong]

The problem with all of these principles is it's a perfect blend of stuff that's like, completely obvious, like statements of observed reality.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And then also stuff that somebody just made up based on a feeling that they had. And you can never tell which one you're dealing. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, like, what the factory is worth is based on how much money it can make, obviously.

[Molly Co]

But here, here's the problem. This is one of those, you know, you know, like the Calvin Haas meme where it's like you can divide everything into Two categories. This one, surprisingly, seems like his observed reality is actually bullshit. Because. Because the problem is. All right, so, okay, so in order to find out the value of the factory, you need to know what the profits are going to be.

[Mia Wong]

Well, I thought the value of things. I thought the price of things was set by supply and demand. So the value of the factories, whatever someone's willing to pay for it.

[Molly Co]

Right, but here's the issue, though. Like, that's, like, sort of true.

[Mia Wong]

No, I'm just making a joke that, like, prices and values appear to be disconnected legitimately.

[Molly Co]

That is drilling into the problem with what's happening here, which is that, okay, but how do you know how much money the factory is going to be worth?

[Mia Wong]

So we're saying, like, the factory has an inherent value versus the factory has a price.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So our price is not reflected inherent value.

[Molly Co]

So this is also kind of the core of this issue, right?

[Mia Wong]

Which is like, that money isn't even real.

[Molly Co]

Well, yeah, but it's like, okay, if you want to compare how much two different types of machinery are worth, you need to compare them in terms of money. Because they're making two different things. You have to be able to compare them. But the problem is the moment you start doing that, you then have to go, okay, how much is it worth and how much is it worth in theory is like, it's, It's. It's like marginal utility. Right? So in order to know how much the machine is worth, you have to know how much money it can make. But in order to know how much money it can make, you need to know how much the machine is worth. The issue here, right, is that you're trying to find one price for how much the factory is worth, but you can't find that one price without knowing how much money profit you're getting from using the factory to make the thing. But you could have multiple different levels of profit from that same factory. The problem is, how do you determine, you know, you could make $10 in the factory, but the factory could also make $20. How do you figure out which one of those it is? Because that's what determines the value of the factory, is how much money it makes. So, okay, you turn around to the neoclassical theory of how, of how you figure out what the profit is. But that, that theorem requires you to know the marginal utility of the factory. So it requires you to know how much profit you're going to get from using the tool. Right? You have to know how much the tool is worth in order to figure out how Much the profit is. But then you have to figure out in order to figure out.

[Mia Wong]

So this is why they just make stuff up, because otherwise they get trapped in the infinite loop.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, it's worse than that because the value of the factory depends on, on how much money you're going to make from the ice cream, but how much money you make from the ice cream depends on, like, how expensive it is to have the ice cream machine.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Molly Co]

So they're both set by each other.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Molly Co]

If you only have one of them, you can't calculate the other one. They're both like X and Y. And in order to figure out what one of them is worth, you already have to know the other one.

[Mia Wong]

Right. You need a constant at some point.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

And legitimately. And this is a shit show because it means that you actually can't figure out how much the capital goods are worth in order to move on to stage two of the process where you figure out the profit, because you already need to have the answer to the question you are asking. And so, like, this is an issue bad enough that the, the IMF publishes these, or I think it's. Maybe it's the World bank publishes these, like, giant tables of, like, the value of capital stocks. Right. In a country. Well, they'll go through. And they're trying to produce economic data about, like, a country. And they're like, okay, like, how much are the factories worth? And the people who are trained to produce these books. There's multiple different values that these factories could have depending on how much money they make. And they literally just chose to choose one of them, like at random. They're like, fuck it, pick one.

[Mia Wong]

This is not making me more confident about the economy.

[Molly Co]

No. Well, but, but this, this is a shit show because. Because this is what this fight is about. It's about, like the whole Cambridge Capital controversy is, is like Joanne Robinson going. Hold on. In order, in order to, like, figure out your equation for how price works, you need to know something that you could only figure out by knowing the price already.

[Mia Wong]

But that's why you just feel the price in your heart.

[Molly Co]

Well, yeah, this causes, this causes like a decade of like, fighting about this. All of the, like, famous neoclassical economists actually. Hold on. Can you list Javier's dogs?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Okay, so Milton from Milton Friedman, Murray from Murray Rothbard, and two dogs. One Robert, one Lucas for Robert Lucas Jr. Wow.

[Molly Co]

He actually, I think he actually dodged all of them. I think, I think he meant by not naming someone Paul Samuelson. I think he actually dodged it.

[Mia Wong]

He considers these Dogs to be Conan's offspring. So these are all clones of his dog, Conan. He considers the dogs to be Conan's offspring and thus his own grandsons because he believes the dog is his son.

[Molly Co]

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Mia Wong]

Anyway. Yeah, but that's the only reason I know who any of those people are.

[Molly Co]

Oh, my God. Wait, hold on. Hold on. I'm sorry. I'm not looking at. Which robber is this named after?

[Mia Wong]

Robert Lucas Jr. From the University of Chicago.

[Molly Co]

Oh, he dodged it. It was. It was mostly the other Robert. Robert. Slow. O. Slow. God damn it. I think. I think he actually dodged having any of his dogs be named after the people who got their asses kicked in. I think he managed to do it. So Paul Samuelson is, like, after Milton Friedman and maybe Hayek. He's, like, probably the third most influential neoclassical economist, and he's, like, one of the people at the American Cambridge who are, like, arguing with, like, neoclassical people, and they lose. They just straight up lose this fight because they're wrong. And the consequence of them being wrong is every single thing they've ever written is wrong. Because if. If you can't calculate how much a factory is worth, literally nothing you've ever written functions.

[Mia Wong]

That's so funny.

[Molly Co]

They can't do it.

[Mia Wong]

Did any of them kill themselves? Like you would think?

[Molly Co]

But they. They were just like. Oh, well, we'll just guess, because I

[Mia Wong]

bet, like, a lot of people were, like, at the end of their careers, right? You're, like, 60, 70 years old. You're, like, professor emeritus of macroeconomics at Cambridge or whatever the fuck, and you find out that everything you've ever written was no longer, like, we're all. We all agreed that everything you ever said was wrong. How do you. How do you deal with that?

[Molly Co]

Here's the thing. They just kept writing as if it. As if they didn't lose. Okay, this. This is why I was saying it doesn't matter, because who can.

[Mia Wong]

Who can say who wins or loses? Because it's all fake.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

And so. And so, like, literally. Literally what they did is, is that this stuff. This fight never, like, broke out of, like, academic economist circles. And so no one today has any idea any of this shit happened.

[Mia Wong]

Good. No, because it doesn't mean anything.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, well, I mean, it. It does in the sense that, like, to me, you can demonstrably prove that, like, these people can't tell you how much a factory is worth.

[Mia Wong]

I've read the Wall Street Journal. I know there's no such thing as an economist.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, Part of what's happening here is that, like, the reason we all intuitively do that is because these people win.

[Mia Wong]

Right. So this entire, like, academic field just kind of shrugged and said, it doesn't matter what we're saying. Does it mean anything?

[Molly Co]

Yeah, there were, like, a couple of people who tried to, like, actually work with it, and everyone eventually just stopped paying attention legitimately. The answer for, like, modern economics is just to pretend that it never happened and then go like, oh, well, these people never produced anything of note academically. And it's like. Well, on the one hand, that's, like, not true because the stuff that they did right. Is really good. But also their descendants. Yeah. Didn't get academic positions because you purged them all.

[Garrison Davis]

And this is.

[Molly Co]

This is one of these things where, like, part of the reason that the neoclassical people took over in the first place was because they thought that they were right about this argument of, like, what caused the 70s economic collapse, which had, like, supposedly disproved Keynesianism. But then in this time period, they got just obliterated. Like, they have taken an L the size of which genuinely. I don't know if anyone in an academic field has ever taken a bigger living than these people did in this fight. They got just, like, beaten into pulp, and it just didn't matter.

[Mia Wong]

It's like Naomi Wolf finding out live on air that her entire book was based on a misunderstanding of a term.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, it's. It's like that. Like, except this. This is like every economist, except in this.

[Mia Wong]

Except in this case, they went on to continue to produce work based on that premise.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, you know, but. But this is the part of the story that, like, isn't in the accounts. You know, when Planet Money has to explain, like, why the work of Joan Robinson, like, isn't something that mainstream economists pay attention to.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, full circle. Okay. Yeah, that's where we were going. Yes.

[Molly Co]

It's because, like, Joan Robinson had the temerity to, A, be a woman, B, be a leftist, and C, not be one of these, like, neoclassical freaks, and

[James Stout]

D, she beat them.

[Molly Co]

Like, Joan Robinson is one of the major people in this fight.

[Mia Wong]

I should have had more faith that we were coming back around. I thought we were lost. I was confused. No, I get it now. So when they're writing about, like, it's so crazy that nobody uses this term anymore.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

The underlying truth there is that they are.

[Garrison Davis]

This is why.

[Mia Wong]

Glossing over the fact that the reason this term isn't better known is because the entire field of economics is based on support, suppressing, challenging, Truths.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. And there's one other aspect too, which is the economics is, is, is an example of how this works on like a small scale. Right. But this, this happens on a macro scale with just about everything that you consume, which is there are two models for sort of suppressing how information spreads and how like, you know, how social movements develop where one, you just suppress them or two, you co opt them and you, you do what's called recuperation. And you know, it is interesting, like the, the concept monopsony will appear sometimes like, like in like textbooks, but they'll just be like, oh yeah, this is another thing that can exist and like monopolies can also exist. Let's go back to spending all of our time dealing with like a bunch of stuff that's incredibly fake. And they will strategically like misuse the concept of monopsony in order to deal with it like as a critique. They'll recuperate like the word, but then they won't use any of the political conclusions of it.

[Mia Wong]

That's clever of them. That's clever of them. So that you don't go looking for more about the term because you have it and it's defanged and you don't need to worry about it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

And the thing is the political consequences of it is this is the thing I talked about at the beginning, which is like, yeah, monopsony as a concept is why you get paid. One of the reasons you get paid like shit. And Joan Robinson's conclusion is like, yeah, capitalism is an inherently exploitive economic system.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. That's the logical conclusion there.

[Molly Co]

Right?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but that's not allowed.

[Molly Co]

No. And so, you know, like Robinson's legacy is that part of her work is co opted and recuperated in a way where they teach the tiniest part of it that can't be used to challenge the system. And the part of it where she deals a kind of intellectual death blow to an entire field of economics that in like the history of academia, I don't know if anyone has ever been so decisively defeated intellectually and yet they

[Mia Wong]

just sort of brushed it off and moved on.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Which I feel like that is so damning. Right. That you're just, I mean you've just admitted that everything you've ever said is based on nothing. If you can just disregard this.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. God, I can't find the exact quote. But Samuelson has this line about how like they need to just treat it as an article of faith that this can be done. And they just kept going and it's

[Mia Wong]

just like, so you can't tell me this is a science if you're like, well, it's just based on. You just have to have faith. You just have to believe.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I mean the economy has always been on Tinkerbell rules, right? Like you have to believe or it won't work. You have to clap for her.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. In order for the entire system that these people are paid to propagate. Because this entire school of economics is created by a bunch of right wing billionaires to get them together and in order to push against like both communism and like the Keynesian idea they should pay taxes. This is something also I guess I kind of want to conclude about. This is like, there are a lot of times where you see like a, like a newspaper columnist and they're saying the most unhinged thing you've ever seen. Or like, you know, I'm going to take, I'm going to take a very incendiary example. And you look at like Ezra Klein and Ezra Klein is like being like, oh, you have to like take the ideas of like some random fucking Nazi seriously. And.

[Mia Wong]

No, I don't.

[Molly Co]

No, you don't. But the re. But the reason he's saying this, it does, it's not even about what he believes.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, these people believe nothing.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, this is what they're being paid to say because Klein's job is to, is to act as a way to sell like fascist tech oligarchy to liberals. Like, and this is the same thing with like, you get these newspaper columnists who will like say like the most unhinged shit you've ever seen. And yeah, they're saying that because it's their job to produce this. Right. Like, they're not acting as individual people, they're acting as cutouts and projections of like the people who they've been hired by.

[Mia Wong]

And those people have a monopsony on opinions. Yeah, well, every opinion, every opinion writer is saying the dumbest shit you've ever heard because of monopson.

[Molly Co]

Well, yeah, I mean, but like, literally it's because they can, they can choose who the fuck to hire.

[Dr. Joy]

Right?

[Molly Co]

Like that's the actual reason. And you know, and like, journalism is one of these things where it's like these newspapers have an incredible amount of power because there's like seven fucking newspapers left. And if you want to do journalism, like you're fucked. You either like fall in line and accept them paying you like absolute dogshit, or you go unemployed or you're like one of the very few people who is Able to, like, make a living doing this independently. But like.

[Mia Wong]

Or you're us. We found a way.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. Or. Or like a rich and successful podcaster picks you out and goes, hey, we're gonna pay you to do this, right?

[Mia Wong]

Like, no, but I think. I think about that all the time. That it really. This is such a unicorn job because almost every job in media you do, you. You have to. You have to suck it up and eat the shit and you have to say the dumbest thing anyone's ever heard because that's how you keep your job, and that's not our reality. And I'm so grateful for that.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, I think. I think that's a good place to end, I guess. I don't know. We're going to end on a hopeful note, which is. We got. Well, okay. We're going to end on the cynical note, which is like, the only way to have an even sort of good job in this economy where employment is controlled by employers is to get incredibly luck. Like, be the most lucky person in the entire world.

[James Stout]

World.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. So I don't know if you want to live in a world where you don't have to win the lottery in order to have, like, a pretty well pay in order to. I am so close to hitting the median salary of assist white dude in the U.S. i'm so close. I can see it. I can taste it if you want that.

[Mia Wong]

I love my union podcasting job.

[Molly Co]

You gotta win the lottery or you gotta build a world where that's not how any of this works, which is what you're Robinson would have wanted.

[Mia Wong]

Sorry, Joanne,

[Dr. Joy]

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[James Stout]

And everywhere podcasts are heard warning this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

[Robert Evans]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[James Stout]

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[Garrison Davis]

Nostalgia is a relatively new feeling for me. I'm in my mid-20s and for the first time I'm seeing stuff from when I was a kid come back in style. We are fully in the throes of 2000's nostalgia. I'm talking emo indie sleaze, denim, Y2K, standard definition digital video, and one of my favorites, the bubbly frutiger aero design style that partially inspired Apple's new liquid glass. But now that our cultural nostalgia cycle has caught up to when I was a kid, I'm starting to realize what kinds of things I'm nostalgic about. One of the biggest is 2008's Lego the video game. This game is great. No dialogue, Danny Elfman music, simple classic designs. This game is what introduced me to the gothic art deco world of Gotham City and the dark carnival of Batman characters. Growing up around the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada. This game was my window into the big city with its cathedrals and skyscrapers and likely planted the desire to one day move to New York City. After a 12 year hiatus, the fourth game in the LEGO Batman series comes out today. Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight. A new installment that blends stories from across the Batman films, shows and comics. Featuring classic Lego puzzle gameplay with the movement and combat of the Rocksteady Arkham Games. I actually got to play a demo version of this new Lego Batman game last October when I attended New York Comic Con, the largest pop culture convention on the east coast and the most attended in North America. New York Comic Con is a four day fan fest for everything superheroes, comics, sci fi and fantasy. Held once a year at the Javits Convention center in Manhattan. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Part of my intention in attending New York Comic Con was to gauge how the big media companies and pop culture in general was reacting to the movement against wokeness, which was a large force throughout 2025. One of the first panels I attended was the 10th anniversary panel for the TV show Mr. Robot with creator Sam Esmail and stars Raimi Malek and Christian Slater. Most of the panel was spent reminiscing on the show's production, which was probably what most fans want out of a panel, but Mr. Robot is a relatively political show. To his credit. Ismail discussed the show's origins as an anti capitalist and anti corporate hacker story Inspired by the 2008 recession and the Arab Spring.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

What I took away from that is

[James Stout]

that there was the world felt in crisis. How naive was I back then that that that was what crisis was like.

[Molly Co]

But.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

And, and that these young people in

[James Stout]

not just Egypt but in the entire Middle east was using technology to organize and start a revolution. And that really inspired a lot of

[Molly Co]

what of what the story of Mr.

[James Stout]

Robot and specifically the character of Elliot

[Garrison Davis]

Esmel went on to call the show's imagined dystopia a quote unquote Pleasantville compared to our current political situation.

[Molly Co]

Honestly, I feel like the show we did was not nearly as fucked up as what it would be like today.

[James Stout]

I mean, It's like Pleasantville now. I mean.

[Garrison Davis]

At a panel for the Tina Romero queer zombie movie Queens of the Dead, trans actor Jack Haven referenced then recent and somewhat misleading reporting that the FBI was declaring trans people as terrorists. In another panel, a trans comic artist also mentioned that trans people were being designated as violent extremists. This artist also discussed queer censorship in comics. She had drawn a cover for the DC Comics series of a character called Red Hood, but this cover was never released because the comic series was canceled by D.C. after the writer, also a trans woman, made two posts joking about the death of Charlie Kirk. Meanwhile, one of the CIS guy artists for the hit series Absolute Batman drew art of Absolute Batman snapping the neck of an ice agent literally at New York Comic Con, and this artist continues to draw covers for the series. Speaking of Batman, I also attended an industry panel on Batman animation hosted by directors, character designers and showrunners. James Tucker, creator of Batman the Brave and the Bold and a producer for the show Batman Caped Crusader mentioned having to ignore the anti woke backlash some recent shows received for depicting certain characters as black or gender swapped. Nerd culture has been dealing with this stuff for a while. Gamergate was a contributing factor to the rise of the alt right, and since then pop culture fandom has been one of the main battlegrounds in which the culture war is waged. At New York Comic Con, while hints of the domestic political climate did slip through in brief moments during panels, the prevailing mode of the convention was falling back on comic fantasy as an escape inwards, but not really an escape out. It's like your parents are fighting and rather than leaving the house or trying to intervene, you crawl into your closet and hide with your stuffed animals, video games and comic books, soothing yourself with the comfortable familiar. While walking around the convention floor, I felt like I was a Ghost trapped in 2019. This particular form of nerdy superhero fandom culture was stuck in stasis, living in the undead husk of the mcu. The main thing differentiating New York Comic Con from a pure pre pandemic Avengers Endgame era time capsule was how much it felt like an anime convention. I attended my fair share of comic cons in the 2000 teens, but the volume of anime stuff at New York Comic Con really surprised me. New York Comic Con itself has had a troubled history with anime. Shortly after New York Comic Con was created in 2006, the same company behind the convention also started an Anime Con called New York Anime Festival. But as New York Comic Con rose in popularity, it started to eat away at New York Anime Festival. The two conventions merged in 2010, but that meant that superheroes and anime had to compete for time and space at the convention, and around 2010, superheroes were winning that battle. To quote Anime News Network, New York Anime Festival was, quote, slowly and quite literally shoved into the basement at the Javits center over the years by New York Comic Con management until it ceased to exist altogether. Unquote Come 2012, the New York Anime Festival component was phased out altogether. At the time, anime and manga were not doing so well in the United States, having just suffered a market crash due to a combination of factors related to the Great Recession. The pivot from DVD to digital, the bankruptcy of the Borders Bookstore, the shutdown of the US distributor Bandai Entertainment and manga publisher Tokyo Pop, followed by the 2011 Tokaku earthquake, which disrupted manga and anime production. So it wasn't at all surprising that Western media and the then ascendant superhero genre dominated the New York Comic Con show floor. But now, oh, how the tables have turned. Come 2025, the exhibition booths for major Western pop culture companies were outnumbered and dwarfed in size by Japanese animation, manga and video game booths. This humiliation wasn't isolated to the show floor. Even before entering the exhibition space, huge banners hung in front of the main entrance for anime like My Hero Academia Digimon Gundam and the new Manga Love Bullet. Banner ads for Crunchyroll's new manga reading platform covered the glass walls of the Javits Convention Center. The only banner that rivaled the anime ones in size was for the Anne Rice Gay Vampire show on amc. Once you got to the show floor, the company with the biggest single presence was Japanese entertainment company Bandai Namco. This was by a large margin. The Bandai Namco presence was significantly bigger than the Marvel and DC booths combined. Most, but not all of the Japanese and South Korean companies were concentrated in the middle of the exhibition floor next to the main entrance on the north side. Toei Animation of Dragon Ball and One Piece Fame had their booth booth right at the show floor entrance, and it was bigger than the Nickelodeon, Avatar and Paramount Star Trek booths combined. The Adult Swim and HBO Max booths were even smaller. Combined, they took up significantly less floor space and were less busy than the exhibition booth for the Japanese animation company behind Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen and the Attack on Titan Finale studio Mappa, who had a booth at New York Comic Con for the very first time, anime and manga distributor Crunchyroll had a larger presence on the show floor than the combined presence of publishing giants Scholastic and Penguin Random House. The Crunchyroll booth was also bigger than the one for DC Comics. Manga publisher Viz Media has maintained a large presence on the show floor for the past decade. Viz Media is the largest physical publisher of graphic novels in the United states states with 25% of the market share and is owned by the same company that publishes Shonen Jump, which is the largest physical comic publisher in the world. The biggest global publisher of comics in general is the South Korean digital comic platform Webtoon, who also had a comparatively large exhibition booth, as did Japanese video game companies Konami and Capcom. The video game Ninja Gaiden 4 had a booth to itself, and collectible card game company Bushiroad had a booth rivaling that of card game Wizards of the Coast. Even the sort of third party merch slop that you find at these types of conventions was selling more and more anime stuff than I'd seen in previous years. Looking back at the New York Comic Con 2018 show floor map, Bandai Namco had a much smaller booth, about the same size as Dark Horse Comics. This was less than one quarter of the size of Bandai's show floor presence in 2025. Besides Bandai, the other anime or manga related booths in 2018 were for Dragon Ball, Square Enix and Viz Media. Looking back at the other large booths from 2018 feels like a snapshot from a bygone age. Comedy Central, Rooster Teeth, she Ra, Funko Pop, and the Sci Fi TV Channel. Of these, only Funko still had a booth in 2025, and a much smaller one at that, as the company has suffered a massive drop in sales and what was once a pop culture giant is now in severe financial distress. It Could Happen here.

[James Stout]

We'll return after these messages.

[Garrison Davis]

We now return to It Could Happen Here. Outside the Comic Con environment, I have seen anecdotal evidence of anime's growing popularity. Besides random Instagram Reels or TikTok videos, the most common thing I see people watching while riding the subway is anime. When I was in Berlin last October covering a convention on my way back to the Airbnb, I came across a group of about 50 people cosplaying chainsaw Man. Because that night the Chainsaw man movie released in German theaters, most of the costumes worn at a weekend Halloween party at the Mood Ring nightclub in Brooklyn were from anime. Also, fun fact, mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani made an appearance at this party ahead of the upcoming election. U.S. olympic figure skater and gold medalist Alyssa Liu talked about anime during interviews at the Olympics and was seen carrying around a Chainsaw man plushie. Your top five anime.

[Mia Wong]

Okay, I'm not gonna rank these, like,

[James Stout]

in their exact places, but Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw man, for sure.

[Mia Wong]

A new chapter dropped today, actually. So today's big day.

[James Stout]

Big day.

[Molly Co]

You're a manga reader.

[James Stout]

Yes. Okay.

[Mia Wong]

Sweet.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay. Attack on Titan.

[Commercial Announcer]

Yeah, that one's really good.

[Molly Co]

Was Aaron Justified?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

Okay.

[James Stout]

Madoka Magica and I think honestly, I

[Mia Wong]

could be forgetting some, but Soul Eater.

[James Stout]

Okay, that's a good one.

[Garrison Davis]

All right.

[James Stout]

Appreciate you.

[Molly Co]

Congratulations.

[Garrison Davis]

But does this perceived rise in popularity actually reflect in sales? Well, in September, the Demon Slayer movie Infinity Castle won the US box office with a $70 million opening weekend, eventually earning almost $800 million worldwide, becoming the seventh highest grossing film of 2025 and the highest grossing international film in the United states, surpassing the 25 year record held by Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. In October, the Chainsaw man movie opened number one at at the US Box office, beating the Bruce Springsteen biopic starring Jeremy Allen White, which no one really saw. The Chainsaw man movie grossed almost $200 million worldwide. For the past eight years, Netflix has been heavily investing in anime. Last summer, Netflix claimed that anime is watched by half its global users. In 2025, Netflix users watched almost 9 billion hours of anime, a 10 and a half percent increase from 2024. In fact, the rate of viewership growth for anime on Netflix is 10 times that of all other content on the platform. In January of 2026, Netflix announced a new deal with anime studio Mapa to exclusively stream a slate of original MAPA shows. Polygon and Vox Media pulled over 4,000 people in 2024, and 42% of Gen Z participants in the US said that they watched anime every week. But it's not just anime. Manga exploded in international popularity over the pandemic and continues to outsell American comics domestically. Manga sales have quadrupled in the US since 2020, reaching a yearly market value of about 1.3 billion by 2023. Of the 44.7 million graphic novels sold by American bookstore chains and online sellers, 21.8 million were manga. That's almost 50% of sales. Coming in second place was comics for kids, which made up about 38% of sales, approximately 17 million copies in 2023, which is the year we have the most complete data on 7 out of the 10 top selling comic book authors were Japanese. And this is in the United states. Of the 750 top selling comic books in the US almost 400 were manga. Here's a clip of a PBS News piece from 2024.

[Mia Wong]

Over the last few years, Japanese animation

[Commercial Announcer]

and comic books have seen an ext

[Mia Wong]

explosion of popularity in the United States. We couldn't fill the stores fast enough. Barnes and Noble Senior Director of Books, Shannon DeVito the readers in the space are so voracious. It's a good thing that the series are so long and so beautifully drawn, because not only do they look for 10 other series to read? Once they finish one, they go back

[Garrison Davis]

and reread manga sales in the US quadrupled from 2019 to 2022, with a peak of 28.4 million copies sold. It is now the fourth largest fiction category overall in the United States, behind romance, thrillers and fantasy.

[Mia Wong]

It's one of our top 10 subjects any day. During the pandemic, it was in our top five pretty consistently.

[Garrison Davis]

Meanwhile, shelf space for superhero graphic novels has been reduced at Barnes and Noble the past few years, sometimes to a single shelf to make way for an expanding collection of manga. Manga sales are also rising in the superhero holy of holies direct market comic book stores, where Manga was up 33% in 2025. The main driver of sales for US comic publisher Dark Horse Comics is through licensing manga like Berserk. So what might be causing this? As pop culture has become one of the main battlegrounds of the culture war, maybe anime and manga serve as a safe refuge from the divisive, all consuming politics of the United States. A few months ago we got behind the scenes news about the Andor press tour creator Tony Gilroy admitted in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that Disney requested Gilroy and the cast refrain from using the words fascism and genocide in early promotion of the show to avoid political outrage. When James Gunn described Superman as a quote unquote immigrant, right wing news pundits manufactured a backlash with a Fox News graphic reading Super Woke and Jesse Waters saying you know what it says on his cape. Ms. 13 Former Superman actor Dean Cain also complained about Superman becoming too woke a month before he joined ICE as a part of a publicity stunt. American culture war issues do affect the way our entertainment industry operates, from what projects get greenlit to casting and even corporate mergers. The Trump aligned Ellison family bought Paramount in 2025 and now seek to acquire Warner Brothers. All that considered, it would seem that anime and manga may not get nearly as caught up in our American culture war debate and be relatively safe from both WOKE and anti Woke influence. Though this idea demonstrates the limits of WOKE as an understanding of politics. Because of course Japanese media is in fact very political. Take Gundam, Godzilla, Attack on Titan, films like Love and Pop, Gin Rao or Kyoshi Kurosawa's new movie Cloud. A lot of Japanese media wrestles with their extremely punitive judicial system and the country's relationship with nationalism and the military. Not to mention the growing popularity of media that plays with gender and sexuality like Yaoi and Boys Love or the common presence of gender non conforming characters in works like Jujutsu, Kaisen and Chainsaw Man. And yet there aren't as many angry YouTube videos decrying woke Chainsaw man for having a beautiful non binary twink. America is just largely insulated from Japanese political issues. Last February, Japan's Conservative Party swept a parliamentary snap election, gaining over two thirds control of the lower house, the largest majority since World War II. But both chuds and Woke alike can enjoy anime because it feels outside American politics. And it is true that Japanese creators aren't trying to navigate around a potentially hostile American audience, which means they can do certain things that American companies might find too risky. The vitriolic reactions to the Last Jedi definitely affected Disney's plans for Star wars, which soon prioritized the comparatively safe and sanitized Mandalorian TV show, which has a movie version coming out this week. Most of the non andor Star wars shows are primarily trying to capitalize on nostalgia, whether for the original trilogy, the prequels, or even The Clone Wars TV show from the 2000s Andor was championed and protected by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, but now she's transitioning out of that role. In an exit interview with Deadline, Kathleen Kennedy alluded that going forward, Lucasfilm may not pursue risky projects that break the mold. Quote, you have to be bold and you have to be willing to take risks with people and ideas. Otherwise you are just doing the same thing. Right now. We're in an era where companies are so risk averse and I get it. I hear all the conversations, they've got Wall street to please and I get it. But I also believe that that's what contributes to things disappearing ultimately, unquote. This reliance on nostalgia and this extreme risk aversion has landed us in a pop cultural recession and Japan is ready, willing and able to fill the gap. This is not simply a matter of thing Japan, but rather this points to real differences in the production and distribution process. A lot of manga is read in Japan as popular as it's getting here, we are nowhere close to how much manga is read in Japan. Despite their smaller population, Japan still is the primary producer and consumer of manga, with a market value of almost $4.5 billion a year. Manga that sells really well often gets adapted into an anime, and when that anime airs in the U.S. the show then helps drive sales of the original manga. The top selling manga in the US usually follow whatever is the most successful currently airing anime adaptation. In recent years that's been Chainsaw Man, Spy X Family, Demon Slayer, Berserk and Jujutsu Kaisen this model doesn't really exist in the US. We don't have regularly airing 22 episode seasons of comic book shows anymore, especially any that appeal to a wide age range. The closest comparison is what Amazon prime has done with miniseries like the Boys and Invincible. But even the juggernaut that was the MCU did not meaningfully boost sales of the original Marvel comics. It Could Happen Here. We'll return after these messages. We now return to It Could Happen Here. In an interview last January, Jim Lee, chief Creative Officer and president of DC Comics, talked about why manga is beating Western comics. Quote the stories told in Japanese manga and anime are incredibly powerful. I often find myself wondering what is missing in Western comics and why aren't they able to achieve the same flavor? I think manga has an advantage over American comics, which are mostly about superheroes, and that's where the majority of sales and readers are concentrated. In Japan. It's closer to literature and anyone can read it. And it's not just hero stories. There's a much wider range of genres like stories about cooking and soccer. You can draw stories from that. So I'm very happy that manga has been so successful because it gives me a goal to aim for. The manga market is bigger than our industry, so the question becomes, what can we learn from this? Unquote, Jim Lee is right. But this is only getting at one part of the equation. It's not just that manga has a wide range of genres, but also a constantly growing collection of original characters and new series within familiar genres like Shonen or Boys Action comics. Japan is actually generating new culture, not just recycling the same four IPs over and over again. Something like Chainsaw man has its fair share of Japanese and American inspirations, but importantly, it's not a simple spin off of one of those franchises, but an evolution of the genre. Most manga series have a defined beginning and end, usually written by a single author, as opposed to the perpetual continuity of most Western comics, where opening up an issue feels like jumping into the middle of a story that's been going on for years, passed on from one author to another. This certainly has its own appeal, but it can be challenging for new readers. When people first get into manga or anime and finish a series, there's then this massive backlog of different series, all with unique characters. A collected manga volume is also much cheaper than a DC or Marvel trade paperback, about $10 compared to $20. Part of DC Comics strategy of trying to learn from manga has included the creation of a new line of paperbacks called DC Compact Comics. Regular western comics are significantly taller and wider than manga printed on glossy full color paper about 7 by 11 inches. Whereas manga has cheaper paper, usually in black and white in a more Compact package, usually 5 by 7 and a half inches. DC Compact Comics offers quote unquote new reader friendly stories in a manga sized package at a cheaper price point. But this is only copying the form factor of manga. In 2023, three of the top five selling DC Comics titles were old classics from the late 80s. Watchmen, Sandman and Batman year one. These are the type of comics that DC Combat Comics is reprinting. It's all of these old comics retrofitted into manga sized for 10 bucks and this is helping DC with sales. But it's still a self cannibalizing process. These things can't run forever on nostalgia alone, and if they keep trying to, they're gonna lose to whoever can make new stuff en masse. Which right now is Japan and South Korea with China right around the Corner. Even when D.C. is promoting new stories, they're still relying on the same handful of characters readers. And this has forced them to do a series of confusing continuity resets to attract new readers, though this often has the backfire effect of alienating existing readers and making the whole ordeal seem too complicated to bother investing time and money into. Japan does have their own version of IP recycling, like Pokemon, Dragon Ball and Gundam. But in a long running series like Gundam, new installments are often but completely separate from one another, remixing key concepts in a new canon or premise. Gundam Wing introduced Gundam to most Americans when it aired on Toonami, and that show is entirely distinct from the original Gundam series from 1979. This continuity separation is continued with new installments like Iron Blooded Orphans and Witch from Mercury. Something similar is attempted in the Marvel ultimate universe or DC's Elseworlds, or more comparably, in something like the critically acclaimed Absolute Batman or Absolute Martian Manhunter series. But historically these concepts get roped into multiverse slop and crossover events that feed into the same nostalgia loops and franchise self cannibalization. The risk aversion among US media companies not only restricts what types of stories can be told, but also who is telling them. Even the new darling of DC Comics, Absolute Batman, the groundbreaking series that's redefining the character, is written by a guy who has been writing Batman since Obama's first term. At the New York Comic Con Batman Animation panel, I recognized animators and directors that I've known of since I was a little kid because I watched the bonus features on all of my Batman DVDs. The big announcement at that panel was that they were adapting Nightfall, a comic book run from the 90s, into a multi part animated film series. I also attended panels for Gundam and the Chainsaw man movie, and the Japanese directors on the panels were considerably younger. The Chainsaw man movie director is in his 30s. Likewise Gundam, Iron Blooded Orphan was written and directed by people in their 30s and we used to let young people make cool superhero stuff. Batman, the animated series was made by kids in the 90s. The problem is those kids, now in their mid-60s, are still the only people allowed to make Batman stuff. The manga industry has pipelines for young writers and artists to submit their work and get published because publishers are always looking for new stories, and the huge popularity of digital comics in Japan and South Korea also provides easier opportunities for young creators to get their comics in front of a lot of eyes. Keeping this balance of new stories and old IP is working out pretty well for Japanese capital on a global scale. They are much better at producing cheap, widely available branded merchandise. Pokemon and hello Kitty are the top two highest grossing media franchises in the entire world. Most of that is merchandising revenue. Out of the top 10 highest grossing media franchises, five are Japanese. The others are Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, Disney Princesses and the mcu. American audiences suddenly deciding that Goku rules and Batman drools doesn't cause this state of affairs. Rather the opposite, production and economic conditions determine which characters or franchises are seen as cool and culturally relevant. As the anime and manga industry has seen rapid growth the past few years, there's been discussions within the industry about whether anime should continue to cater to a Japanese audience or try to appeal to the growing international market. In December, the Japanese Prime Minister met with entertainment industry figures to discuss how Japan's media market could expand overseas to enhance their diplomatic power. Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno has argued that anime should not adapt to a growing overseas audience, but that the audience should adapt to uniquely Japanese aspects of anime. The government of Japan has recently announced that they are boosting state investment in the creation of of Japanese media like manga, anime and music and strengthening its global distribution networks. While speaking on a government panel of experts, Hideakiano pointed to labor shortages negatively affecting production studios. But some of the new government efforts may actually do more harm than good for the international market, like AI driven translation tools and assistance in combating online manga piracy. Capital goes through periods of growth and recession while retracting capital pushes living labor out and increasingly relies on dead labor like DC Compact comics. Reprinting the past over and over again. This is the part of the cycle that Western companies have been stuck in the past few years. But the rise of anime itself grew out of the Great Recession. It was the collapse of the DVD market and the rise of Internet piracy that laid the groundwork for early streaming platforms like Crunchyroll, which would play a significant part in pushing anime and manga into the mainstream come the 2020s. According to the Japan Times, overseas sales of Japanese content reached $37.6 billion in 2023, surpassing Japan's semiconductor exports. And if you look at the revenue for Pokemon and hello Kitty compared to Star wars, the MCU and Batman, it makes sense that Japan wants to keep growing their international market. But this commodity warfare is not a matter of east versus west, but a battle between old and new capital. Old capital in Europe and America had early global dominance. Europe fell off, but then came Japan. And now South Korea is growing and is gearing up to steal Japan's lunch money. Last September, Disney announced a new partnership with the South Korean company Webtoon to create a new digital comic platform using the Marvel and Star wars catalog. But Marvel and DC aren't gonna overcome the dominance of Japanese media by just reprinting old comics as webtoons or manga sized packages. That doesn't fix the core issue, which is caused by Western companies not investing in new labor. They are increasingly relying on the dead labor of their ubiquitous iconography. Even my beloved Lego Batman is an instance of this. The game is primarily pulling from plots of old Batman movies with combat ripped from the Arkham games. In the marketing for the game, the different Batman skins literally have a nostalgia meter. Moves like DC Compact Comics is an attempt to to manage the crisis while still not taking risks and investing in living labor. They don't want to invest because superhero comics aren't growing, which just further compounds the problem. Meanwhile, anime and manga are rapidly growing in the United States, which is why Japanese companies are buying almost half the show floor at New York comic con, whereas 10 years ago they were in a tiny corner of the basement.

[Dr. Joy]

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[James Stout]

Morning.

[Garrison Davis]

This product contains nicotine.

[James Stout]

Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Hey there. It's Velo.

[Robert Evans]

So much more soft and comfy. It's like a pillow for your mouth. Ah, that's better. Filo plus, the more comfier Nicotine pouch. Get more now.

[James Stout]

Underage sale prohibited nicotine pouches. Filo plus is a synthetic nicotine product website and offers restricted to age 21/

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

Copyright 2025 MBI the Second World War is the largest event in human history. A 20 part documentary series with Tom Hanks. No part of the globe was untouched, no life unchanged. Experience. The ultimate account of World War II. Every single person had a story. These are the stories that make us who we are. World War II with Tom Hanks premieres Memorial Day at 8. Part of history honors 250 only on the history Channel. Grocery prices are skyrocketing, but true nature meats Texas smoked brisket delivers authentic flavor for under $6 per person. 30 years supplying the finest barbecue joints. Chances are you've already had their brisket. Old school Smoky tenderness. Pre cooked and ready heat in 2 minutes. Pile high for tacos or sandwiches. Restaurant level at home. Exceptional taste, honest value. Visit TrueNatureMeats.com code free meat for 20 off plus free New York strip Texas smoked brisket and Mediterranean chicken with code free [e-mail] I am wearing my women

[James Stout]

want me fish fear me hat.

[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 Robert Evans Mihawang, James Stout and James's hat.

[Robert Evans]

And James's hat.

[James Stout]

What does it say, Garrison?

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, they heard. I think. I think the audience heard.

[James Stout]

We gotta leave that one in. Are we?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Women fear Him.

[James Stout]

Fish want him.

[Robert Evans]

Something along those lines. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Fish want me. It's a whole thing with fish.

[Robert Evans]

Fish fear women. Women want fish. Something like that. I don't know.

[Garrison Davis]

Del Toro made a movie about this.

[James Stout]

Yes, he did.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, he did. Garrison, what happened? Did nothing happen this week? I guess we can all go home. It seems like an uneventful Newsweek, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Nothing happened with the IRS or anything. Shootings overseas, all good. Cuba, fine.

[Molly Co]

Nothing happening in Bolivia.

[Robert Evans]

Nothing happening with very little Bolivia. Raul Castro.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, that does it for. It's Not Happening Here. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, It's Not Happening Here. A podcast brought to you by marijuana

[James Stout]

and sleeping pills. Should we start with some little things and then move on to some big things? Not that little things are unimportant, but we just covering them in less detail now and maybe more detail later.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Former Interior Secretary, now Representative Ryan Zinke is once again attempting to delist brown bears from the Endangered Species Act.

[Robert Evans]

He hates those brown bears.

[James Stout]

He fucking hates them.

[Molly Co]

He does.

[Robert Evans]

They're trying to do the same thing with grizzlies, too. They're a little further behind, but there's a push going right now to, like, grizzly numbers have recovered a lot. They're starting to do bad stuff. We got to start hunting them.

[James Stout]

Yeah, the ground bears and brizzy bears are the same species. They're just. Brown bears would be the term I would use to describe all of the Ursus horribilis, I guess, in North America, like Kodiak brown bear and grizzly bear. But, yes, you're right. The justification that Zinke has given is that populations are getting higher. And he specifically cited a tragedy in which a hiker lost their life in Glacier national park and another attack on two tourists in Yellowstone. Yeah, the Endangered Species act has nothing to do with how dangerous an animal is, nor does population size really play a role in these. It's not like these bears attacked these people because they were hungry because the other bears had outcompeted them for food. Now, one person walked up on a sow with cubs, or that group came across a sow's cubs. And the other one, I think the bear was probably foraging for berries and a person surprised it in some thick timber. A lot of people thought that they would delist the grizzlies, but they didn't straight away in January, and they said, if I haven't. I wrote a whole 2,000 words on this, my newsletter, if you want to learn more about bears. A lot of Bear content. We will also bring you a bear episode in the coming weeks in which I talk to Molly about bears. Because it seems like you like me talking to Molly about animals. Talking of animals, Trump administration has reapproved an exciting way to kill them. The M44 cyanide trap has been reapproved.

[Robert Evans]

Thank God.

[Garrison Davis]

Single issue cyanide bonus.

[Robert Evans]

That's been my one issue for years. Garrison, you know, this I'm all about. Not just this, I'm just in general supportive of anything that increases regular Americans daily access to cyanide, you know, that's why I'm also against clean air regulations. Continue, James.

[James Stout]

I will. I bumped into a few of these. Like maybe you have two. It's not a coyote getter. Coyote getter is a different thing. But what this is is it's like a spring loaded trap. It's a little thing poking out the ground, normally covered in cloth and baited. And it's triggered when something bites and pulls it. So it's designed to then squirt the cyanide up into the mouth of it's normally canines. Right. There's not much else. Yeah, bites and pulls them. These things have killed dozens of pets and livestock.

[Robert Evans]

It's a pretty fucked up kind of trap. Like it's really bad.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's pretty bad. The old ones, they used to use like a.38 special blank. That would really fire the cyanide up.

[Molly Co]

Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

That was a massive fucking issue. That's cool. That was a coyote getter.

[Robert Evans]

See, I just want to put those in my normal.38 and just conceal. Carry a cyanide pistol.

[James Stout]

Everyone dies. Get really close, get really close. See what happens. Unless they attack you from upwind, you know, and then it's just you. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Why don't you open your mouth and get really close to me, you know?

[James Stout]

Yeah, I guess people will maybe be familiar with these from an incident where the 14 year old boy was injured and his dog was killed. This was back in the 2000 and tens. In that case, the M44 was not on the family's property, but it was less than 100 yards from their house. Wow. And they've discontinued using them in Idaho after that. But the BLM as a whole discontinued their use only like late 23, early 24. Trump administration hates every living creature. So it's not really surprising that these are back. Obviously the issue here is livestock. Right. Like they're protecting livestock from canids. Yeah, There are better ways of doing that. We shouldn't be fucking putting cyanide in our public lands.

[Robert Evans]

It's not.

[James Stout]

Sorry. This one gets me kind of annoyed. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Just the general belief that anything that might interfere with a livestock animal justifies, like, widespread genocide of crucial species is really bad.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And also dominant in a lot of the American Western.

[James Stout]

Yes. And like, coyotes are some of the smartest creatures we have. Right. They've resisted all attempts to control their population. They continue to thrive, I believe, in all 50 states. I think there are maybe not in 49. I don't think there are any in Hawaii, but yeah. Incredible animals. Coyote America by Dan Flores. Good book about them. In the Channel Islands, Channel Islands National Park, a fire has already hit over 14,000 acres. It is on Santa Rita. It's threatening a grove of very rare Torrey Pines. Torrey Pines, really? They. We have some here in San Diego and some up there. The initial reporting suggested that the Mariner himself had fired distress flares and those flares had ignited the fire. What the Coast Guard is now saying is he was on like a 52 foot boat by himself. Boat. People mad about me saying boat, not whatever.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know.

[James Stout]

I don't care. The boat had run aground and it was rocking. I'm guessing that rocking either shorted something or cut a fuel line that caused the vessel itself to ignite. And then the vessel igniting caused a fire on the island. And he then fired flares standing within a previously burned area. So the fire had burned past him. He fired flares. Quite why he wasn't able to signal with his radio. Or if he was able to signal with his radio and then the radio got burned. Or other means of communication. Right. Like a personal locator beacon. Epirb? I don't know. All I know is what's been reported so far. But nonetheless, this is really tragic for one of the very few areas in California which has been less ravaged by capital. Moving along to immigration, I have seen evidence that USCIS income is plummeting. And this is because they're processing fewer applications. Right. Then they're moving much, much, much more slowly with actually processing the applications that give people the right to have visas or to permanent residency citizenship. The agency is normally funded by fees, and it seems that it will soon not be funded by fees anymore. So despite all these Doge cuts and efficiency cuts, the agency is going to end up costing taxpayers more money, which is great. Today, United States Marines boarded the motor tanker Celestial, which they, quote, suspected was en route to Iran. Flights from Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan are facing new arrival restrictions due to the outbreak of Ebola in the region. With USAID funding slashed, the US Would have normally led a response to something like this, or at least helped fund it. Now it won't. This means that the outbreak will be bigger and more people will die. Scott Besant has said that the United States will temporarily allow, quote, the most vulnerable nations to access Russian oil selectively and temporarily lifting sanctions. Also, Ukraine has begun using unguided rockets on first person view drones. And this is a pretty serious development for like remote control warfare. They're using them to suppress Russian air defenses, but they released videos of that for the first time this week. Finally, from me, it appears that a large batch of new immigration judges will be starting work. Immigration judges, it's worth noting, are not judges in the sense that we understand the word for other judges in the legal system. They're more like bureaucrats, like Robert.

[Molly Co]

Yes, Robert's more real of a judge.

[James Stout]

They're certainly not reverend judges. Their ranks have been purged by the Trump administration. Right. Since early 2025. I know lots of them have retired or quit or been fired. I can imagine that this new cohort might be more favorable to the Trump administration's immigration goals.

[Molly Co]

So there's been in the past few days a massive intensification of month long protests in Bolivia that has escalated into a general strike. It's also turned into one of the traditional Bolivian protest tactics, which is a series of roadblocks blocking access to the capital. These are largely the result of two kind of different kind of related fights. The first one was an attempt at agricultural reform that would have done a whole bunch of sort of, I guess you'd call it 1994 style Mexican constitution, like neoliberalization of like collectively held indigenous land. And then now the protests have been gaining steam over dire economic situation and neoliberal reforms passed by their right wing president after the MAS effectively imploded during 2024 and 2025, leading to the first right wing president in Bolivia since the early 2000s. And also the re emergence of Carlos Mesa, a guy I literally never thought I would hear about again, but apparently is back somehow after, after getting ousted by like basically effectively these exact same style of mass roadblock protests in 2005. He's now also back for some reason. But yeah, these protests are probably going to continue to escalate. We've reached the miners throwing dynamite phase of oblivion protest, which tends to precede governments collapsing. We will see how this story progresses.

[Garrison Davis]

For our first main story, we'll discuss the Shooting at an Islamic center in San Diego. James, do you want to start us off?

[James Stout]

Yeah. So the. The shooting happened on Monday, 18 May. Three people were killed. We'll go over a little bit about them in a second here. It happened at the Islamic center of San Diego, which is the largest mosque in San Diego County. People might be familiar with the Islamic center of San Diego because of other stories about surveillance on the mosque over the years. In this case, the two shooters were Kane Clark, 17, and Caleb Vasquez, 18. Shortly after the shooting took place, police searched Kane Clark's house. It took them a long time to get a warrant. Normally, they can use an E warrant for these things to get one very quickly, but it, for some reason took several hours. Officers were actually at Clark's house when the shooting began. This was because his mother had called police to report her son was missing in her car in camouflage and had stolen her weapons. She called them two hours before the shooting began. Despite that, they were able to make it to the Islamic center of San Diego, kill three people, then move further down the street and fire at a landscaper who seems to have been largely uninjured or not injured in a serious way. Then they proceeded further down the street before ending their lives. I think one of them shot the other and then shot themselves. I think it's worth noting that, like San Diego has driven itself into debt, spending massive amounts of money, specifically on cops and specifically on surveillance. And neither of them did anything to prevent this. The San Diego Police Department received a call two hours before the shooting to quote Police Chief Scott Wall, quote, she believed her son was suicidal, and she began to share information that several of her weapons were missing, her vehicle was missing. In addition to her son, Wall said she also said her son was with a companion. They were dressed in camo, but it's not consistent with what we would typically see from someone who is suicidal. They tried to use their automated license plate readers, commonly referred to as Flock cameras. Flock actually doesn't provide the hardware in San Diego. Their only lead was a single hit in Fashion Valley, which is several miles away from where the shooting took place. Also further from Clark's house than the site of the shooting was. But Vasquez comes from Chula Vista, which is much further south. There is no way that I can see to get from Fashion Valley to ICSD without passing automated license plate readers. You can't take surface streets and avoid them. I've ridden most of that route. This was the way I used to commute on my bicycle when I was teaching. In the end, that didn't make a difference. They weren't able to get there and prevent the shooting. Not a single officer discharged their firearm. Last month, the San Diego officer did discharge his firearm. And a lady with a ballpoint pen missing several times in a busy street. Let's talk about the three people who were killed here. Yeah. I think they're more important than these.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah, because they undeniably saved any of those kids from getting killed.

[James Stout]

Yeah. In a way that is genuinely laudable and heroic. Yeah. So Amin Abdullah was a security guard at the mosque. I saw it reported he had eight children. He seems to have significantly delayed the shooter by exchanging fire with both of

[Robert Evans]

the shooters and initiating the mosque's lockdown protocol.

[James Stout]

Yes. So he used his radio to initiate the lockdown protocol. The shooters livestreamed the shooting, and I've reviewed some elements of that, and you can see they basically get into the entrance of the mosque and then get holed up there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, because they moved past him and he engaged them.

[James Stout]

Correct.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, because they were attempting to get past him to the kids, and he engaged them, drew them back, and. Yeah, I mean, all of this would have been so much worse if he hadn't done what he did, which cost him his life.

[James Stout]

Yes, exactly. Like, yeah, he engaged them. He continued to draw their fire, like, until, obviously, he passed away. Other two victims, Mansoor Kaziha, known as Abu Aziz, who worked at the mosque for decades. Like, since they broke ground, he was managing the store, like, the. The little gift shop, snack shop. And Nader Al Wad, his wife teaches at the school, and he lives right next door. He actually was at home when the shooting began. And he ran toward the mosque when he heard the shooting. Yeah, and it seems that both of them were in the parking lot directing people away from the mosque and again drawing the attention of the shooter. Right. So that, unfortunately resulted in them both losing their lives. The shooters, as I said, then fled in a white BMW, shot at a landscaper, and then took their own lives. It appears that they met online. Vasquez lives in Chula Vista, like, a good distance away from where the shooting took place. There was a press conference shortly afterwards where the mayor was heckled. Gloria is a pretty unpopular mayor for a number of reasons, making San Diego very unlivable for poor people. He's consistently attacked our unhoused population, I guess, notably in this case because of the presence of a pro Palestinian artist. He boycotted our Pride March. For what it's worth, Gloria himself is gay. City has Had a really bad record of hate crimes. And I think in San Diego, because of this long history of hate crime and bigotry and anti blackness and anti Semitism and Islamophobia and the deep roots they have here, people assumed that these two young people would have come from east county, which is. I think sometimes it's this myth. Right. They're like. Like all bigotry exists kind of east of the 15, and it's fine after that. That is very much not the case. And these two people do not come from that scene. They do not come from that world. There are groups that are white supremacist in east county, without a doubt, many of them. And individuals who. I mean, Metzger was not living that far away. Right. This is not that. Claremont, where Clark lived, is one of the most diverse neighborhoods. I have taught in high schools in Claremont. I taught in the community college there. Tons of my students over the years have been people who attended this mask or they have children who go to the school and the preschool there. So, yeah, this is like, very close to home for me. I guess we should discuss a little of the shooters kind of accelerationist worldview, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The imagery and associated manifesto that leaked online after the shooting.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, just the shortest thing we can say before getting into it is that this is a Christchurch inspired attack. Yes. Motivated by anti. Like anti Islamic Islamophobia. Right, Obviously. But also these shooters were very motivated by anti Semitic beliefs, by incel beliefs, and by general fandom of mass shootings, you know?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. The first inclination we had that this was linked to Neonauti accelerationism was some pictures that were released of the shooter's vehicle where a gas can had an SS sticker on it. Eventually, pictures came out of their weapons which had slogans like race war and hate speech written. Like, literally the words like hate speech written down on the weapon.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

As well as wearing Nazi imagery on tactical clothing.

[Robert Evans]

Garrison will have more to say, and we'll look at more about these shooters. But first, here's some ads.

[James Stout]

And we're back.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, to start off, I pretty much agree with extremism researcher Jared Holt, who's one of the best in the business, that, quote, these kids could not have been any clearer that they cooked their skulls on neo Nazi accelerationist slop. Their manifestos are as sloppy as they are extremist. But they do make clear they sought to be copycats. Unquote. Yeah, that's an entirely, entirely correct.

[James Stout]

Yep, yep.

[Garrison Davis]

Analysis of what happened.

[Robert Evans]

It's one of the laziest manifestos. In some ways, it's very patterned off of the Christchurch shooter's manifesto, which was, you know, say what you will about it, a fairly original work. Like, there's. One of the more notable segments of this is there's chunk where. And they're talking about their beliefs, they talk about the Freemasons, and whichever one of them was writing that portion is like, I don't actually know anything about them, but I know that they're bad, basically. Like, I haven't had time to get into this part of the ideology, which is like, it's very. It's. It's very sloppy, it's very online. It's very much a product of terror gram. You know, like in. In. Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Like the.

[Robert Evans]

The sloppiness is part of the humor I kind of expect for these guys.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Large parts of it were just like, parentheses, unfinished. Yep, yep.

[Robert Evans]

And I think that's part of a bit, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So the manifesto was titled Sons of Tarrant, named after the Christchurch shooter. Yeah. About half of it was written by each of the shooters, and it states that Tarrant was their biggest inspiration. The manifesto shows a deep referential knowledge of Nazi accelerationism, but in a very, like, regurgitated sense. Right. Almost as if you asked ChatGPT to make a neo Nazi acceleration manifesto. I'm not saying they actually did that, but it. That's the sort of, like, vibe that it has.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's very generic.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's slop.

[Garrison Davis]

There's really nothing, like, new at all in there. It's mostly just referential.

[Robert Evans]

And it has that ChatGPT vibe in part because they're just copying these other manifestos that were written by guys who were somewhat more original than them. And they came by it, I think, primarily not even from initially scanning the original documents, but from seeing chopped up pieces of them in these conversations that they're having in these, like, groups that they're in. And so it just kind of inculcates this slop mindset. Like, this is kind of. It's not just the manifesto that slopes. The way these people were radicalized probably was also slop.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. There's this big element of, like, Gen Z irony throughout stuff like this. And you can see that on the shooter's TikTok and their Steam page, which has a whole bunch of, like, anime Nazi edits, little TikTok dances with accelerationist imagery and, like, anime art. The way that these two shooters identified with Nazi accelerationism and mass killers is very close to the way A lot of people just identify with pop culture fandom. The Columbine aspect is also pretty crucial here. And one of the shooters writes about that in the manifesto on their steam. They had a anime Columbine edit.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Trying to understand a shooting like this as just primarily ideologically driven has its limits. Right. That's certainly an aspect of it that's very clear that ideological imagery is front and center. But there's also this copycat aspect and like the saint lineage of these shooters trying to make themselves infamous by associating themselves with these other mass killers. And the in group signaling is what the. The fashion of ideology is resting on.

[James Stout]

Yes. The.

[Robert Evans]

The in group signaling is key because when you just say they're trying to, like, copy, they're copycast, they're trying to copy these other killers, then that makes people think of someone who is kind of purely narcissistically so focused on the outside, on how people see them as a result of their act. But at least equally important is this group of folks that they socialize with in these telegram chats and other communities that they think are cool and that they like and they are trying. That's why the manifesto is the way it is. That's why the Christchurch Manifesto was the way it was. They're trying to signal to their differing communities of people online.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like part of a fandom. It's like the way that we think of pop culture fandom, that that's what this is for a small number of young people online.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And it's like, it go. It's not just even Nazi stuff. Like, I've seen a lot of people making a big deal about the fact that one of the shooters had a profile image of a character, Ashley Graves,

[Garrison Davis]

from the incest video game.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. A video game called the Coffin of Andy and Laylee, which is like a really fucked up incest video game. And she's like. She's like specifically like a really bad evil person. And it's like the comments I've seen are basically like, yeah, I'm not surprised that he would idolize someone who would do this, would, like, idolize a character like that. It's a bit.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, it's a bit like that's.

[Robert Evans]

These are. These are all things that are, like, popular in these weird little chunks of the. Right. Like, it's an encompassing thing. It's not just these people are Nazis or these people want to be famous. And if you're just looking at that, then you're going to be confused by this, like, Very sloppy seeming manifesto, unless you understand. And it's there to make their friends laugh, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, like. And as ideological as this is, it's just as memetic.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Even if the overt Nazi stuff is very strong in this case, and as much as people will focus on the Nazi stuff in a lot of the reporting, we can't overlook this sort of like fandom and like Columbine aspect. You know, crucially, there's two shooters here that's very, very Columbine esque. And that's something they acknowledge in the manifesto. They did live stream the shooting in a discord call. So there were people aware that this shooting was happening since before the shooting started. People to hop on to this call.

[James Stout]

Jesus Christ. They said in their manifesto they were going to wait until they had a good number of people on the call before starting so they could ensure someone recorded it, which indeed someone did.

[Garrison Davis]

Just as a side note here, I've seen a lot of people talk about this as like a, as like a quote, unquote, 764 shooting. All right. 764 refers to a specific group of, or a specific online community that does childlike exploitation. They try to extract and blackmail children into providing child sexual abuse material and sometimes convincing children to also do acts of violence. There is not an explicit 764 connection that I am aware of at this point. Some of the times these communities do overlap to intersect. So I wouldn't be surprised if there is something 764 related that comes out about one of these shooters. Eventually.

[James Stout]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

But this, I think that framing that, that understanding is slightly mistaken. I think people, people jump to that very often. There was obviously the sort of like group element of this shooting. They're streaming it in a discord call. But I think 764 does. Does actually refer to a specific group.

[Mia Wong]

Group.

[Garrison Davis]

It's not just, you know, neo Nazi accelerationist shooters in general. I've seen some people question why a mosque was chosen as the target. If a lot of the manifesto is anti Semitic, if that's. That's kind of like the. The crux of. Of their ideology. They did the Islamic center likely because they wanted to specifically copy Tarrant. Right. That's even down to the clothes that they're wearing. The military fatigues that they're wearing are very similar to what Tarrant wore. The manifestos even around the same length of. As Terrence manifest. Yeah.

[Molly Co]

And I think a vital part of this and when you're looking at this sort of what Seems like things that are incongruent between what they're writing and what they're doing. It's that this is sort of the most advanced stage of the reduction of politics to aesthetics. And it's reached a point where, like, the aesthetic itself is, like, memetically alive.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Molly Co]

In a way that's, you know, in a way that operates independently of, like, what the people who made the ideology were trying to do. And now the aesthetic itself is getting people to just do the things. And so they're doing it for the aesthetic, which is what the politics has been turned into.

[Garrison Davis]

100%.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And, you know, even, like, the selection of video games they have on their Steam profile is designed with this in mind. The incest game, one example, Hearts of Iron 4, is also included on the Steam profile.

[Robert Evans]

God, of course it fucking is.

[Garrison Davis]

But here's the thing.

[Mia Wong]

Here's the thing.

[Garrison Davis]

The shooter unlocked, no achievements.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So they weren't even playing games.

[Robert Evans]

It's about being cool to your butt.

[Garrison Davis]

They weren't even playing the game. But he wanted to include the game on the profile because it references or has been a part of other neo Nazi accelerationists in the past. Similarly, a lot of the anime visual novels included on the profile seem to be unplayed.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It doesn't happen enough. This gets looked at because of how horrifying the actions are as something separate fundamentally from all the other shit that dumb shit young people do to be cool. And it really shouldn't entirely.

[Garrison Davis]

Or just being suicidal. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Or just being suicidal.

[Garrison Davis]

Extremely mentally, like unwell, like under regulated, socially disintegrated.

[Robert Evans]

I think the desperation to fit in anywhere is tied with that sort of thing too. Right. Like the fact that you would lie about the stuff you're interested with in order to put on this image that is more fitting for what you think this community wants to see from you.

[Garrison Davis]

You know, part of the tragedy here is that these people as kids found community in these acceleration spaces that became the primary way they socialize. In a very similar vein as a lot of people socialize online about Star wars or whatever anime is popular on Tick Tock or like those other fandom spaces that are not designed around going into a place of worship or a school and killing tons of people.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I guess I should just say real briefly. The FBI removed 30 firearms from Kane Clark's family home. It seems all the firearms they use, for whatever it's worth, it doesn't make a huge difference, I guess, other than to say that, like, these were all compliant with California Law. California has very strict gun laws. It's very hard in this country to stop people getting the means to kill lots of people.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, that said, it's entirely possible that that is why there weren't more people killed. You know, we really. It's impossible to say that the gun that they were using isn't wildly different from an AR in this kind of situation. But, you know, there's limitations on the amount of ammo in a mag or whatever that may have had some impact. I don't really have. I don't have enough granular detail about all of that. And it's also kind of impossible to say. But, yeah, these were all Cali legal guns.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You see the kid. If I would not suggest watching the video. I don't think anyone needs to watch the video. It's not good for you.

[Garrison Davis]

This is no reason to watch it or read the manifesto.

[James Stout]

There's nothing, no.

[Garrison Davis]

Nothing in there.

[James Stout]

Yeah. None of this will make your grief, you know, more. More real, or is your solidarity more complete? Like, you don't need to. You see the kid up the reload for a while in a video, which is good. I wish someone had shot him when he was doing that.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

One of the last things I want to add, there has been an attempt by some popular right wing figures to try to turn this into another trans shooting.

[Molly Co]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

Specifically Elon Musk.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. Elon Musk has boosted claims.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Completely unfounded.

[James Stout]

False.

[Robert Evans]

Just actually outright false absolute lies admitted by the op.

[Molly Co]

He's just lying.

[Garrison Davis]

False assertions that either one or both of the shooters were transgender.

[Mia Wong]

This is.

[Garrison Davis]

Seems to be primarily using a picture of one of them that has long hair as the sort of quote unquote evidence. They are not trans. Neither of them are trans. They write about hating LGBTQ people in the manifesto. They are not trans. It's not a trans shooting.

[Robert Evans]

No. They write about hating trans people in particular.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

Yeah. But you know, they're just like these people like Elon Musk and all the right wing people doing this, like, they're just overtly doing the Julius Stryker, like, Dare Stormer, like, Jewish crime shit. Like, that's just. That's just all this is at this point.

[James Stout]

It's. Yeah, they.

[Robert Evans]

They don't think it's true any more than, like, we do. They just know that you've got. In this period of time right after something like this happens, if you flood the zone with shit like that, some number of people will never get corrected. That's all this is.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Reality is very malleable in those first few hours.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. I think some of them also think it's funny. Yeah. Like, I think in the same way it signals that you're cool to your friends in the same way that these people did that. Like, it's disgusting.

[Robert Evans]

Wow. It's all the same thing.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

We're doing the meme genocide.

[Robert Evans]

It's arguably, genocide's always been a meme.

[James Stout]

Yeah. The whole thing has been really hard on San Diego community. Right. We have a big fire at Easter Laposta as well. It's getting under control. We will share a fundraiser for the families of the. The three people who unfortunately lost their lives. It's already up a half a million dollars, which is nice to see. But, yeah, it. I know that that mosque specifically has spent so much time on security. I know they've applied for grants. Like, I know they've done everything they can. They have cameras, they had armed security. Like, they. It's really sad that this community felt that this might happen and it happened, you know, that they felt that they weren't safe. I filed some public records requests that will take weeks, months to come back. But if there is more reporting on this to be done, we will do it. Especially, like, this is where I live, this is my community. So, like, I'm going to try my best to find out as much as I can, but, yeah, it's a tragedy right now.

[Garrison Davis]

Before we go on an ad break, I have one more story here. On Tuesday, there was a primary election in Kentucky. Incumbent libertarian Republican Thomas Massie lost the election by 10 points to AIPAC and Trump backed challenger Ed Gallerain. Massie broke with Trump over the release of the Epstein files, though unlike Marjorie Taylor Greene, he did not step down, but continued to serve in Congress, opposing the one big beautiful bill, the war on Iran and aid to Israel. Trump selected Ed Gallerin, a former Navy seal, to run against Massie. And this election became the most expensive primary in House race history.

[James Stout]

Great.

[Garrison Davis]

AIPAC and other pro Israel lobbying groups spent over $9 million to unseat Massey.

[Molly Co]

Jesus.

[Garrison Davis]

And overall ad spending in this primary reached over $33 million.

[James Stout]

Jesus.

[Molly Co]

It's like wide receiver one money.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, it's, it's wild.

[Molly Co]

It's.

[Garrison Davis]

This is, this is crazy for a Kentucky House seat that's going to go to a Republican.

[Robert Evans]

Either way, it's, it's just a Trump's ego thing.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like a Trump Israel thing. Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty wild.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Israel too, obviously. Yes, of course.

[Garrison Davis]

The Pro Israel lobby funded a significant, a significant part of the ad spending here.

[Robert Evans]

Crazy.

[Garrison Davis]

Another interesting factor. Pacs on both sides of this race used AI deep fake ads depicting the opposing candidate. I want to briefly show some of these, not, not the whole ones, just, just very short clips to get like the sense of what, of what the deal is here.

[Molly Co]

Incredible impending sense of dread.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I love it.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

These Trump traders, they can't stand our president and can't help but let it show. Like Woketti Gowron Woke Eddie left the Republican Party after Trump won the GOP nomination in 2016. Take a look for yourself. And when did Woe Getty change his registration back to the gop? After Joe Biden was sworn in. Trump was in the foxhole and book and Gowrine tucked his tail and ran Kentucky fourth pack is responsible for the

[James Stout]

content of this ad.

[Robert Evans]

Oh my God.

[James Stout]

Donald Trump is participating in World War II. They saved this video.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the craziest part of the ad where a deep fake Donald Trump is in the trenches with. With a rifle.

[Molly Co]

It just looks like a Photoshop. It look. It looks like a shitty meme. Photoshop?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, like World War I or 2. It could kind of be either.

[James Stout]

I think they're giving D day. Right? Like you got the tank barriers. Like he's got the Garand.

[Robert Evans]

Got the tank barriers. But that looks that. Is that a garage?

[James Stout]

Yeah, because he fired it twice without running the boat.

[Robert Evans]

Did he?

[Molly Co]

I don't think they know what war that's supposed to be.

[James Stout]

We've put more thought into this than they have already.

[Robert Evans]

His camo doesn't look anyway.

[James Stout]

Whatever. Yeah, true.

[Garrison Davis]

So woke Eddie Gowran ran away as Trump was in the trenches.

[James Stout]

The foxhole. Garrison. The foxhole.

[Garrison Davis]

My apologies.

[Robert Evans]

Under fire.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the pro Maciad. Right? So he's the pro. Macy ads are trying to frame the Trump. The Trump backed candidate as woke Woke Eddie Gowering.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I love it. I love it.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Who abandoned Trump? Meanwhile, the anti Massey ads looked like this.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

Thomas Massey caught in a throttle in Washington.

[James Stout]

No. What is happening?

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

As he voted with the squad against finishing Trump's wall, he voted with them against hiring new border agents.

[Molly Co]

Jesus Christ.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

Is worse than adultery. It's a complete and total betrayal of President Trump and Kentucky conservatives on May 19th. Fire Thomas Massey Maga. Kentucky is responsible for the content of this advertising.

[Robert Evans]

I guess the upside of this is the term throuple's really gone mainstream, huh? They trust people in just like small town Kentucky to know what throuple means.

[Garrison Davis]

So this ad frames Thomas Massie is in a quote unquote throuple with with the squad showing him holding hands.

[Robert Evans]

Also, the squad is more than three

[Garrison Davis]

showing him holding hands with AOC and other other deep faked interactions between AOC and Alon Omar.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Great. Cool stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Wow. The cable news generation really got to be having their minds melted by that shit.

[Garrison Davis]

Lastly, an ongoing story we followed on Ed the past few months is whether Trump will endorse in the Republican Senate runoff in Texas. Early reports indicated that Trump would back incumbent Senator John Cornyn over MAGA hardliner and Texas AG Ken Paxton. But Trump seemed irritated that his intentions were leaked. And following that, Paxton started to make some moves in a bid to win the President's favor. In March, Paxton promised to drop out of the race if the Republican Senate killed the filibuster to pass the voter restriction bill, dubbed the Save America Act. At the time, the bill was Trump's top priority. And this gambit by Paxton seemed to work as later that month he was seen meeting with Trump at Mar a Lago. And then this past Tuesday, Trump endorsed Paxton via Truth on Truth social. Quote, he is a winner in all caps. Ken is a strong supporter of terminating the filibuster in all caps and very importantly, the Save America Act. John Cornyn is a good man and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough. Unquote. This endorsement seemed to catch Senate Republicans off guard, some of whom now worry the seat may be in jeopardy. Republican Majority Leader John Thune is still backing Senator Cornyn. What's going on? Ad break.

[James Stout]

Yeah, That was a lovely song. Or are we about to hear the song? What's the song status?

[Garrison Davis]

We're about to hear the song.

[James Stout]

About to hear the song. Well, I am excited about that.

[Robert Evans]

That must mean it's time to learn about tariffs.

[Molly Co]

By God, there's tariff news again. So let's run through a few pieces of tariff news. We have now, technically speaking, started the tariff refund process. People are starting to get their money back. This is going to be a catastrophe that unfolds over the course of genuinely who knows how long. My, my guess is I don't think this is done by next year. We've also seen a series of negotiations from the Trump administration with a whole bunch of different countries. The US Had a summit with China, where Trump and Xi Jinping met and appear to be trying to wind down the trade war. There is an attempt to reduce tariffs on goods that aren't under the sort of section 301, national security tariffs. There's also been some attempt by the Chinese government to get the US to back off of using the national security powers for more tariffs. The deals on this one are still kind of inconclusive. We're going to see more as, as this unfolds. There's a very good quote that I think is interesting from U.S. trade Rep. Jameson Greer, where in Reuters. Well, this is reported in Reuters was on Fox Business News where he said, quote, it's not really a situation where we go and get China to change the way they govern, the way they manage their economy. Greer told Fox Business News last week. This was about three weeks ago. Now that's all baked into their system. But I think there is a world where we find out where we can optimize trade between China and the US to achieve more balance. So this is effectively a pure back off of everything they've been saying about like all of the, all of the Chinese economy inherently having rigged trade because of government subsidies, etc. Etc. It seems like they're kind of trying to wind this down. I think largely because they have with this war in Iran, they have dropped a second nuke on the economy and they want to make sure that the two bombs they've dropped on the, on their own feet aren't going off at the same time. So in that vein, we've also seen the EU has finally gotten together to approve ish. It's a little complicated, a provisional deal with the administration that the details are also still a little murky on. But the short version seems to be the US imposes a 15% tariff on European goods, while once again, per Reuters, the EU would remove import duties on U.S. industrial goods and grant preferential access to U.S. farm and sea produce. We still don't know exactly what that's going to look like, but those are the, those are the preliminary details after these negotiations were thrown into chaos when Trump was trying to invade Greenland. Yeah, we'll know more about what these deals look like in the weeks to come. Now, the other piece of news we should talk about here is that on Friday on the, on the Friday that you're presumably listening to this on, Kevin Warsh is going to be sworn in as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. This is, has come as part of a deal where in order to get Warsh out of committee, the Justice Department dropped their investigation into former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. It is worth noting though, that Jerome Powell, so Jerome Powell has obviously stepped down as, as the, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Coward that's all I got. I got nothing. My, my brain is too cooked on Federal Reserve to be able to react properly. But, comma, Jerome Powell is not stepping down from the Board of Governors, which he's still on. I think he's still also on the Open market committee. So Warsh has his work cut out for him, we should mention. So who is Kevin Warsh? We've talked about this a little bit before. He is, I would say, more stable and more hinged than the previous candidates Trump has been talking about. He has experienced in the Federal Reserve. However, he's also very, very close to a lot of the tech. Right, particularly Thiel and Andreessen. That is absolutely a cause for alarm that these sort of tech fascists have gotten their guy as the head of the Federal Reserve. However, he has effectively inherited a grenade. So how are things going to be going for him when he. When he takes office in about two days, as we're recording for this, not great. The Yield on the 30 year T Note is at 5.4%, which is the highest it's been since 2007. For people unaware of what high T note yield means, it means things bad for the US Economy. And investors are spooked and kind of panicking. This seems to mostly be investors finally starting to price in. Wait, hold on. This war in Iran is not simply going to end. So he is inheriting a situation that is going to be a mess because these high interest rates means that there's going to have to be sort of Fed interest rate hikes in order to curve inflation. However, Trump wants exactly the opposite of that. So Walsh is immediately caught between a rock and a hard place. The rest of the Federal Reserve Board does not want to slash interest rates right now. And Jerome Powell, who hates him, is still on the board and is still attempting to manage a kind of rear flank resistance to Trump's control over the Fed. So who knows? There's going to be some pretty dramatic clashes, my guess, fairly soon between some combination of Trump Wash and the rest of the Federal Reserve Board. And we will keep you informed.

[James Stout]

Nice.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of money and taxes, giving Trump

[Molly Co]

allies control of massive pools of money.

[Garrison Davis]

And that. And that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Of our tax money. Thank you.

[Garrison Davis]

On Monday, President Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS after he negotiated with the Trump administration.

[Robert Evans]

Nice man.

[Garrison Davis]

To create a 1.8 billion dollar fund to compensate victims of political quote, unquote, weaponization.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The lawsuit Trump levied against Trump's government alleged the IRS failed to prevent a contractor from leaking his tax returns in 2019, when Trump was also president. Part of the settlement. This is wild, right? I have to like.

[Mia Wong]

This is.

[Garrison Davis]

This is wild. You know, a headline.

[James Stout]

It's.

[Robert Evans]

It's very. It's incredible.

[Garrison Davis]

Trump, Trump wins lawsuits against Trump government.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Against Trump's irs.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

You know, technically, they didn't win the lawsuit. It was settled. And part of the settlement is this $1.8 billion fund.

[Robert Evans]

Garrison. $1.776 billion. Come on, come on.

[Garrison Davis]

I was rounding up.

[James Stout]

That's right, baby.

[Molly Co]

I hate this world.

[James Stout]

Yeah. In this case, Garrison is unacceptable to round up because they had something they were going for there. It would be a shame to miss it.

[Robert Evans]

They were cooking. They thought.

[Garrison Davis]

So this fight is for people who believe they are victims of political weaponization by the doj.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Acting AG Todd Blanche said, quote, it is this department's intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again, Unquote. Blanche himself will appoint a five member committee to evaluate weaponization claims submitted by the public. So this is basically a scheme to usurp Congress's power of the purse by literally weaponizing the judicial process. But this story actually gets crazier.

[Molly Co]

Oh, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Another part of Trump's settlement against Trump is that the DOJ has pledged that Trump and his two eldest sons are to be forever exempt from tax audits by the irs.

[James Stout]

This is amazing, man.

[Garrison Davis]

Quote, the United States releases, waives, acquits, and forever discharges each of the plaintiffs from and is hereby forever barred and precluded from prosecuting or pursuing any and all claims. Unquote.

[James Stout]

Incredible.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, a DOJ spokesperson later told the Financial Times that this exemption only applies to existing audits. But that's not really what the document says, and that's not what the Trump administration is saying outside of this one statement from a DOJ spokesperson. So who knows?

[Molly Co]

Again, Julius Caesar didn't do this shit. Like, what are we doing here?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's again, the standard for a long time previously was that, like, the President and VP were audited, like, yearly. Because it's just like what you do, like in a democracy, just because it should be built into the system, that you don't trust that the President isn't corrupt. That's a bad idea.

[Molly Co]

It's.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of corruption. The whole idea of settling a lawsuit yourself against yourself, it's.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Using everyone's money.

[Robert Evans]

I would. I would sue myself a lot. I'm gonna be honest with you, Garrison.

[Molly Co]

I'm gonna be honest.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't like what the I didn't know he could do that.

[James Stout]

I did.

[Molly Co]

I just. This has somehow managed to turn me into a. They made Jimmy Carter up his peanut farm live like.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[Molly Co]

No, that was literally what I was

[James Stout]

like. Bill Clinton. Not the most, not exactly analogous, but like Bill Clinton used to cross the street to use a different phone to avoid transgressing the Hatch Act. Yeah. And now we're here.

[Garrison Davis]

Absurd.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a Bill Clinton fan, but yeah. Come on.

[Robert Evans]

But just, just thinking about the difference in severity between how Monica Gate, which is what it was literally called often at the time, was treated and how the president creating a $1.776 billion slush fund.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

For people who tried to do an insurrection, is being treated like it's, it's insane.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And that's, that's the other thing we should mention. Right. This is going to be mostly used by people who are prosecuted for their involvement in the January 6th insurrection. These funds are not going to be granted to like left wing activists who were, who are being prosecuted by Trump's DOJ for political targeting. Like come.

[Robert Evans]

Although there might be some lawsuits around that. I mean, we'll see. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has said that Democrats are going to fight every element of the self dealing measure. Not only is this another heinously corrupt act by the most corrupt administration in history, it's clearly a violation of the law that prohibits interference by executive branch officials and IRS audits. So we'll see if any of that is successful.

[James Stout]

Good luck.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not against trying, but it's not my odds on bet, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's not to demean the effort. I'm just trying to be reasonable here.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we can dream.

[Garrison Davis]

Back in 2019, when I was in film school, I was interviewing a federal judge.

[Robert Evans]

Wow, Humble brag, huh?

[Garrison Davis]

For some like documentary project. And, and she talked about, you're right, this is in 2019. So Trump won. She talked about how she thinks that it's really going to be the judicial system that saves us from authoritarianism. This, this is, this is our, this is the last line of defense we have against a dictator.

[Molly Co]

Judge thinks their job good.

[James Stout]

Like, like to be fair, I knew

[Robert Evans]

a lot of journalists who were like, the press, the free press will save us

[Molly Co]

back. In reality, like the Supreme Court just like repealed the Voting Rights Act.

[Garrison Davis]

And that's what I was, that's what I'm getting to.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

On Friday, the U.S. supreme Court rejected Democrats emergency appeal in the Virginia redistricting case, leaving the decision by the state Supreme Court to block the new voter approved House map in place. The U.S. supreme Court offered no explanation in their brief one sentence unsigned memo

[Molly Co]

that, that, that might be the shortest shadow docket yet, which is insulting because they were already like one paragraph.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled the new map violated the state constitution via procedural error during the referendum process.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

I often think about the conversation I had with this, with this federal judge in 2019 as all this stuff's been happening. I'm like, I would really love to talk with her again. I should maybe try to track her down and ask because.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, boy.

[James Stout]

Yeah. How do you conceive of yourself now, your role in this?

[Molly Co]

Yeah. How do you function ideologically as a person whose job it is to do the law? When the Supreme Court has said that that Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, when it says that Congress can pass laws to regulate elections does not actually apply to Congress passing a law to regulate elections. Like, what do you do after that? In order. In order to make it so that black people don't get a vote.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, where do you put your ideology now?

[Molly Co]

It's all fake.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Molly Co]

God, I'm extremely angry about this.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, around that time was when, you know, partisan gerrymandering was, like, explicitly allowed by the Supreme Court. I mean, you could. We can track a lot of the stuff to that ruling as well. Right. And this was. I think that was around 2019. Between 2019 and 2021.

[James Stout]

Shall we move on to the war, which is not a war in Iran?

[Garrison Davis]

I believe we shall.

[James Stout]

Okay. Well, we'll start at the start of this week. Just go on, I guess, where the President set a deadline for strikes, about which we found out through a series of AI generated images and then back down from it at the Erg of Allah in the region as talks continue. Meanwhile, Iran has not stopped using drones and missiles to attack Kurdish groups, largely Iranian Kurdish groups in southern Kurdistan.

[Garrison Davis]

Indigenously produced missiles.

[James Stout]

Yes. We're going to talk about indigenous production later.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Okay.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

All right.

[James Stout]

I see what you're doing. Trump on Monday said he would hold off the quote, unquote, scheduled attacks. Meanwhile, Iran has opened an x account using x.com, the Everything website for the Persian Gulf strait authority. A direct contravention of my desire to not make this segment. Twitter review.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the worst episode we've done in a while.

[James Stout]

It is, it's.

[Garrison Davis]

This is.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You know, when they, you know, 28 days later when it opens and all this bad is just like clicking through yeah, that's every week now.

[Garrison Davis]

Every new sentence one of us says, I just.

[James Stout]

My.

[Garrison Davis]

My headache grows a little. A little bit. A little bit bigger.

[Molly Co]

Like longing for the halcyon days. We thought that 2020 was the worst year ever.

[Robert Evans]

People are nostalgic for 2020 now. Folks are getting hopeful about the hantavirus out there.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Please, please, God.

[James Stout]

So, yes, Iran's X account for the pgsa, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority. It's claiming that it has established a controlled maritime zone in the straight hashtag, straight of Hormuz. Hormuzestrait. If you want to get in on that conversation.

[Garrison Davis]

Why would you hashtag it? That? This isn't important.

[James Stout]

You are the Islamic Republic of Iran. What you're doing is creating a hashtag because Donald Trump has bombed you for three months without declaring war yet. Like, what a world. What a time to be alive. Meanwhile, CBS see again every fucking sentence, man.

[Garrison Davis]

Only the best. Only the best.

[Molly Co]

Oh, man, oh, man.

[James Stout]

Every time I see it, full stop, I want to just go and walk into the ocean. If I did, I might eventually float to the Strait of Hormuz, where CBS is reporting that the U.S. has identified 10 naval mines. I spoke to my mind guy. This is the life I lead.

[Robert Evans]

His mind guy, the Supreme Leader of Iran.

[James Stout]

Mind guy. It's gonna be my new bio authority.

[Robert Evans]

You could DM the old Ayatollah on Twitter. It's possible you can get the new one already. There's no way to know. Although the old one never got back to me about whether or not he liked anime. So that remains an unanswered question.

[James Stout]

He would post about Mercury American sports. It's very funny. These are the Maham 3 and 7 mines. So the 7 mines here are the particularly advanced ones. They apparently can absorb some sonar, making them very hard to detect. And they can go off when you're searching for them. Neither of these are contact mines, right? The Muhammad Threes, for example, they're midwater floating, whereas sevens are going to be on the bottom. They can go off using a number of different sensors. Like the Maham IIIs could go off using magnetic or acoustic sensors when a ship is nearby. So you don't even have to directly bump them, which is great. If they have found 10, one assumes that there are actually tons more than that. We are now waiting until something bumps into one.

[Molly Co]

Great.

[James Stout]

For a long time there was like, Schrodinger's mines, right? We now the mines are there. The mines are real. So the cat is out of the box.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, James I seem to recall several weeks ago Donald Trump said Iran's offensive capability has been completely degraded.

[James Stout]

That's correct, yeah. No Navy, no boats. So they must have got these very quickly in the initial hours after the strikes began, I guess. And it just took this long to find them.

[Robert Evans]

Well, sometimes sea turtles lay particularly explosive eggs, but Donald Trump can't be expected to have anticipated that.

[Molly Co]

Well, we've already denied the suicide dolphin program, so we couldn't stop the sea turtles.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Well, these are not suicide dolphins. Right. What if these dolphins intended to live another day?

[Robert Evans]

Homicide dolphins.

[Molly Co]

Yeah, the homicide dolphins.

[James Stout]

That'll be a good band name.

[Robert Evans]

Or like the dolphin from sequest.

[James Stout]

Reach out to me if homicide dolphins is a name, if you're banned, reach

[Robert Evans]

out to me if you like seaQuest.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like a lot of Iranian military technology, these are entirely copied.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

I think there's like Norwegian, Swedish minds and French minds, but that's. Iran does this a lot. Right. It sort of plagiarizes other people's military technology. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like a smart person does.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like the US did, Like everyone does if they see someone else make a good weapon.

[Garrison Davis]

That's how war works.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And the Iranians do it in a more direct way than most. I will say. They don't even pretend. But why, if the world has cut you off with sanctions anyway, what have you got to lose?

[Robert Evans]

What else are you going to do? From my P theft, this isn't like fucking Android copying shit from iPhone's code or whatever. This is just how war works.

[James Stout]

Yeah. What are they going to do? Bomb them? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We never. We didn't sue the USSR for plagiarism when they got a nuke. Like that's not how this works.

[Molly Co]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I'm sure some like French guys are mad about it, but yeah, not going to change.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Let's talk about the reporting from the NYT today that Israel intended to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new leader of Iran. And the way that they intended to do this fucking.

[Robert Evans]

Of course.

[James Stout]

And I think this is particularly telling of the idf. They bombed his house. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That's the only thing they know how to do, James.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it says when you only have a hammer, the world is a nail.

[Robert Evans]

When I read that, it made me think this great comedian, now dead Bill Hicks, had a bit during the Gulf

[Garrison Davis]

War, the first Gulf War, where he

[Robert Evans]

was like talking about the amazing guided missiles the US has that we could fire down chimneys. And he was like, couldn't we theoretically use that technology to shoot food, food into the mouths of hungry people. I thought about that when I read that story.

[James Stout]

Unfortunately, they injured Ahmadinejad.

[Garrison Davis]

No shit.

[James Stout]

Of course they injured again. Yeah. Because it's Israel.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[James Stout]

And, like, there's nothing they love to do more than they kill a ranger, a Muslim person. And so, yeah, spectacularly, they attempted to install Ahmadinejad, a guy who wanted to wipe Israel off the map, into power in Iran.

[Garrison Davis]

This guy was the devil.

[Robert Evans]

If you remember, if you watched the news when he was first president of Iran, this guy was the devil.

[James Stout]

Also a massive pusher of their nuclear program.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like. Yeah, fascinating.

[Molly Co]

Probably the world's most famous hardliner. Maybe he's just. Maybe he's the only guy they knew about.

[Mia Wong]

Like.

[James Stout]

Right. Like, do they have some incredible compromise?

[Robert Evans]

Did they just have no other names?

[Garrison Davis]

This is part of Israel's strategy, though. They want aggression to increase so they have justification to take over the region and, like, crack down, like, even harder. Like, this is. That was part of their strategy with Hamas for years.

[James Stout]

Yeah, sure. But they already have justification. They're already killing a bunch of people in Iran.

[Garrison Davis]

They could try to rope in even more countries, rope in more people. Like, this is like, a scaling issue.

[James Stout]

They are the accelerationists of the. Of the international state. No.

[Molly Co]

Really?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Genuinely? No. We also found out that Israel low key invaded Iraq, setting up two bases in the Iraqi desert and shooting at Iraqi troops and civilians who came near them.

[Garrison Davis]

Cool guys. Israel low key invaded Iraq.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah, that's me. I am here to maintain our youth audience by using the language that they understand.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's good.

[James Stout]

Let's talk about the Senate. On Tuesday, the Senate advanced a resolution, quote, to direct the removal of the United States armed forces from hostilities with or against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress. This is more of a rebuke than anything with a reasonable chance of actually stopping the war. But still significant. Significant because Bill Cassidy crossed party lines after losing his primary election in which Trump campaigned against him.

[Garrison Davis]

Only after losing, though.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Right. Yeah. After this guy has destroyed your whole life, you. You suddenly grow a backbone.

[Robert Evans]

That makes sense.

[James Stout]

He was joined by Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky. While, of course. Do you guys want to guess which festering turd of a Democrat senator crossed the other way?

[Molly Co]

Fetterman.

[James Stout]

Yes. Yeah, of course.

[Robert Evans]

When you said festering, I thought of Fetterman.

[James Stout]

Okay, okay. Well, we can.

[Molly Co]

It's always fettering.

[James Stout]

I mean. Yeah, yeah. They're calling him Festerman in the chat.

[Robert Evans]

Good stuff.

[James Stout]

John Cornyn of Texas. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Thom Tillis of North Carolina didn't vote, which allowed the vote to pass. In practice, even if the resolution passed the House, I guess the president could veto it if he wanted to. It's interesting that they've been gradually peeling off Republicans. Right. Murkowski switched last week, Cassidy this week. I don't think the non voting was as much about this as they just didn't vote at all that day. But Cassidy, we can see why. Right. Collins and Makowski are the ones that they talk about like swinging a lot. Rand Paul is plowing his own lonely furrow as he always has. But it's interesting that they have. They've gradually peeled these people away from the Republican Party. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the United States has carried out a series of strikes against Islamic State targets. They killed Abu Bakr al Manuki, someone who went by several other names. You'll see a lot of other names in presses. He definitely was solidifying a power within the West Africa Province as the Islamic State and definitely becoming globally relevant, especially, you know, post territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, this is the stuff that most of that counterterrorism strategy document was writing about.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And they have been pursuing this into Nigeria for some time. I wrote last Christmas about them winding up for groan strikes. Right. Since then they've stationed troops there. Trump's statement was, as always, somewhat incomprehensible. Trump said he had been hiding in Africa. That man had had obviously lived in Africa his entire life, never left. Trump called him second in command globally. That's not outside the realm of possibility. But it's also not clear. Right. There's not a direct pyramid chart that we can go to. It was a joint US Nigerian operation. We saw overhead videos. Looks to me like it's from a drone. It seems like there was a helicopter component, potentially a ground component as well. The U.S. of course, has had special and conventional forces in Africa for decades, but this is still a remarkable strike for them. It will be maybe the first of many. It seems like they were doing several almost every day this week, judging by the CENTCOM media release page, which I will link in the sources. Well, go ahead and email us. Go on.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[James Stout]

Coolzonetipsoton me.

[Garrison Davis]

Sure, we reported the news arguing Put

[Molly Co]

a trans girl on your couch.

[Garrison Davis]

RIP Stephen Colbert.

[James Stout]

Is he dead? 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.

[James Stout]

Here is a production of Cool Zone

[Mia Wong]

Media for more podcasts from Cool Zone Media. Visit our website coolzone media.com or check

[Garrison Davis]

us out on the the iHeartRadio app,

[Mia Wong]

Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea, the Trump administration and its backers in Congress are messing around with our healthcare. In case you haven't heard, they already passed a law defunding Planned Parenthood that blocks Medicaid patients from getting life saving care like cancer screenings, wellness exams, birth control, STI treatment and more. And now these lawmakers want to shut down health centers by defunding Planned Parenthood permanently. Our communities deserve better. So to learn how you can get involved, Text Update to 22422 this product contains nicotine.

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[Molly Co]

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