It Could Happen Here Weekly 208

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Speaker 3 i turned off news altogether

Speaker 5 i hate to say it but i don't trust much of anything

Speaker 6 it's the rage bait

Speaker 7 it feels like it's trying to divide people

Speaker 8 we got clear facts maybe we could calm down a little

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Speaker 12 Let's meet at the facts.

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Speaker 15 Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa. So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

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Speaker 2 High key. Listen to High Key, a bold, joyful, unfiltered culture podcast.
Speaking of crunchy, what did you think of your trainer's run? I was amazing on that show. Sister, were you? I had to be.

Speaker 16 I was amazing. And I was better than you would be if you went.

Speaker 2 This is exactly why Bob is a good drag queen because she won't back down.

Speaker 17 She's not going to go double back on that lie.

Speaker 2 I felt like you came in real hot, real strong, and that is just not the game, girl ya.

Speaker 16 I'm going to tell you why you're wrong, and I can't wait to do this.

Speaker 2 Please.

Speaker 2 Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 Coolzone Media. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where in the wake of Mom Domi's victory, we are reviving the old 2016 slogan, eat your pheasants, drink your wine, your days are numbered, bourgeois swine.

Speaker 2 I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Garrison Davis

Speaker 2 unhappy

Speaker 2 well this is actually the new mandatory greeting in new york as we read uh yester yesterday yeah

Speaker 2 instead of saying hi on the subway or just trying to avoid each other we have to we have to all recite this now it's pretty crazy FDR used to call the U.S.

Speaker 2 the 48 states the Soviet Seattle and I haven't I haven't quite figured out what the version of that for

Speaker 2 New York is yet but no no the New York City nationalism it really is a thing Yeah

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 even if the country falls I think I think New York will remain as a remain as a city-state beacon. Yeah, see

Speaker 2 unfortunately I'm having to temper my sort of Chicago-in like this is a tier two Chinese city like

Speaker 2 stuff for this and I'm also having to temper my like reflexive

Speaker 2 Not even reflexive my my my incredibly well thought out and detailed thoughts on electoralism and so so so today today if I have to cover electoralism positively, we're doing this in sports format.

Speaker 2 We are looking at what's been going on with the reaction to Mondani's win. We are fully, we are fully doing winners and losers.

Speaker 2 It's going to be great. We're going to have a good time.
I mean, I'm still traumatized from the World Series, so I don't really appreciate the sports framing. I actually,

Speaker 2 World Series Game 7, I was watching it at a

Speaker 2 and then I had to go across town to a different bar because I knew Zoron was doing the little gay bar hop on the same night as the World Series finale. So I missed the last 30 minutes.

Speaker 2 I had to leave during the ninth inning when the Blue Jays were still ahead. Oh, no.
And then, and then in transport, the Dodgers tie. They did two extra innings and then won.
And it was devastating.

Speaker 2 And then I saw Bob Dotti dancing at a gay club like 10 minutes later. It was

Speaker 2 outrageous. You're welcome, welcome to being a Seattle Mariners fan.
This is

Speaker 2 what

Speaker 2 all the time for us. Every single time.
I'm well aware. No, of course.

Speaker 2 What I'm not cheering for the Jay is usually usually I'm cheering for the Mariners. So I know.

Speaker 2 Well, and again, the only way to survive this is to become a truly transcendent, true Mariners fan, where you are not in this for winning and losing.

Speaker 2 You are in this for the fact that we had a guy whose name was Big Dumper because his ass was big as fuck and he hit 60 home runs.

Speaker 2 And that's what you're in this game for. Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 We're going to turn this around. We're going to turn this around.
We're going to actually start with winners with, I think the most serious thing that we're going to do today.

Speaker 2 Not a high bar.

Speaker 2 Yeah, not a high bar. But I think in the words of the great John Boyce, this moment belongs.

Speaker 2 to her and that's Lindsay Bolin, who was the first woman to accuse Cuomo of sexual harassment, who is one of the bravest women I've ever seen. And she's having a great time.
That's good.

Speaker 2 There's a bunch of pictures of her going around that she's posting. She's so happy.
It rocks. She's, yeah, she's just, she's just having a great time.

Speaker 2 And this is, this is like a dual-pronged moment, right? One-pronged is just seeing Andrew Cuomo get completely humiliated for the second time in a row. Yes.

Speaker 2 And then the whole, the whole, you know, like prospective hope of what a Mamdani mayoral occupation could

Speaker 2 mean. It's like a whole separate thing than just watching Cuomo get absolutely decimated, right?

Speaker 2 If there was someone who was only half as good as Mamdani who destroyed Cuomo, it would still be fun to laugh at Cuomo.

Speaker 2 The fact that it's Mamdani is just a little bit of an extra extra icing on top, I guess. Yeah, and I want to read...

Speaker 2 a quote from her that she gave. This was from before,

Speaker 2 as best I can tell, since the actual win, she's just been like partying and hasn't really been giving like

Speaker 2 I think she went on democracy now but like she had this great line from this this piece in the Independent uh that was titled We Will Beat These Monsters and this this is from this this is from the original primary win I hope every woman who has ever faced an abuser like Cuomo knows she doesn't have to be ashamed.

Speaker 2 She doesn't have to hide because we will beat these monsters. New Yorker said no more to Andrew Cuomo and that is just remarkable.
And this shit rocks. This rocks.
Fuck him.

Speaker 2 Especially Cuomo, who ran his campaign on being like, it's dangerous to be a woman on the subway. And we're like, why? Because you're going to be on it? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 his whole like law and order, New York is a dangerous, scary place to live because there's predators out there. It was like a main part of his campaign.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, four years ago, he resigned because he was a predator. Yeah, 11, 11 women came forward.

Speaker 2 Like, that's remarkable. It's astounding.
And, you know, this is, hopefully, this is, this is the beginning of many, many, many defeats that these fucking people will have over the coming years.

Speaker 2 Hopefully the last defeat for Cuobo, but for others of his ill.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, these users.

Speaker 2 There are many, many people who hold a whole variety of offices. And sometimes they're just like your boss or someone you work with.
Or someone, yeah.

Speaker 2 And fuck them. We're going to beat them all.
This rocks. So that's winner number one.
Winner Winner number two, people with childs.

Speaker 2 People with childs. Wow.
People with childs. Look, I agree.
I got so little sleep last night.

Speaker 2 I have no excuse. I was up being extremely gay at like four in the morning.

Speaker 2 I'm really tired.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 people with children getting getting free child care, a thing that is in fact really good.

Speaker 2 Free child care would be pretty cool. And And it's one of the few things on the Momdani platform that like the governor herself is pretty, pretty set on helping to achieve.

Speaker 2 And, you know, there's Spike Lee, who's having a great time, partying, is just, just, just, just loving it. It's great.
It's great. That's good.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Renters, also good.
Yeah, people who live in rent stabilized apartments getting not their rent increased. And also there being more rent-controlled housing built.
Good, good things, good things.

Speaker 2 People who buy food,

Speaker 2 when I say people who buy food, right, you would think that's all people.

Speaker 2 Most of the people who we are going to be talking about on this list, those motherfuckers have not set foot in a grocery store in a decade.

Speaker 2 There really truly is a class divided between people who buy food and people who do not ever buy their own food.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like around if you make around $200,000 a year based on the time that you spend procuring your own groceries people argue that it's more efficient for you to order or have people bring food to you and not and not do any of that work yourself yeah and and you know so so we we we have that we have

Speaker 2 you know i i i think that there's there's a sort of macro point you can make here about you know, the ties between affordability and the sort of politics of affordability and the ways in which there are a bunch of people who would affect, and then there is the top 5% of the U.S.

Speaker 2 who do 50% of the country's consumer spending, who this is not going to affect because they do 50% of their consumer spending on bullshit.

Speaker 2 And also,

Speaker 2 I'm going to declare myself a winner because I fucking hate Modi.

Speaker 2 And Zoron called Modi a war criminal and specifically talked about his mass killings of Muslims in Gujarat, which is the first time I've ever seen a major American politician talk about that.

Speaker 2 And fuck him. He's the butcher of Gujarat.
Eat shit. Yeah,

Speaker 2 this is a kind of short winners section because, you know, I could list like people in New York City, like, who aren't really rich.

Speaker 2 Harrison Davis.

Speaker 2 Right? Like, you know, but this is mostly a losers episode. This is mostly a,

Speaker 2 oh my fucking God, the right is doing a crash out.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 oh boy, there is some great stuff. So I want to start the losers with Laura Ingram, who I, the chevron on her show.

Speaker 2 Who? Who? Who? Laura Ingram. Wow.
Fox News host. Evil.

Speaker 2 She's still on Fox News, huh? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Her Fox News thing,

Speaker 2 the chevron on it, was by winning the Democrats are actually losing, which is the most.

Speaker 2 God, I hope so.

Speaker 2 From your mouth to God's ears, Laura.

Speaker 2 It's so good.

Speaker 2 It's the most.

Speaker 2 There's there's a whole genre of this if if i wanted to i literally could have just pulled things that were like the democrats are winning by actually losing like there's like ross douthett who's like the sort of make work hire like he's one of the old school make work hire new york times columnists who's like a very very weird catholic who used to advocate catholics like taking the Benedict option and going into the woods and not interacting with society, which please, Ross Douthet, and you're ill.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's not very Catholic. Please do that.

Speaker 2 If you want to go argue theology with Ross Douth it, go fucking.

Speaker 2 Go do this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but like, you know, Douth it in the New York Times immediately is like, Mom Domini's victory is less significant than you think. And it's like, ah, yes, we are, we are getting owed.

Speaker 2 We are not owned. We are not owned, et cetera, et cetera.
Slowly turning into a corncob. Pumping the copium straight into my veins.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's truly amazing stuff.

Speaker 2 I think it in the just pure cope vein is, did you, did you see the Mike Cernovich post about this? No, no,

Speaker 2 oh my god, okay, so I'm I'm not gonna,

Speaker 2 how do I say this?

Speaker 2 I'm not gonna so he's quote tweeting a video that's just like it's like a five-minute video of like the Zetio, whatever, live stream of the after party, and it's just Cernovich is just going, this is a rowdy masculine environment.

Speaker 2 You can feel the energy as the Heritage Foundation is putting members through a struggle session and demanding a DEI dean, dean, the left is winning. True, true.
And then, like,

Speaker 2 that is happening right now. We'll be doing a piece on the heritage struggle sessions probably later this week.
Yeah, yeah. And that's the, that's the, do we accept the overt neo-Nazi or not

Speaker 2 conflict? Which they are very divided on.

Speaker 2 Which is not a great sign, gotta say, gotta say, don't, don't love that. But

Speaker 2 in another just incredible, like, I'm not mad thing, Cernovich, like, Cernovich posts that and then quote tweets his own tweet and says, if you didn't know anything about politics, you would say, this is the side I want to be on.

Speaker 2 Conservative ink is joyless. It's the house of scolding nags.
It offers young men nothing beyond moralizing and hypocritical lecture.

Speaker 2 This is probably also following the fallout of the Fuentes Tucker interview and the like sectarian right. Yep, yep, yep.

Speaker 2 It's not really infighting necessarily, but like

Speaker 2 these debates on

Speaker 2 Fuentes' place within the Conservative Party and this argument against what, I guess, like right-wing cancel culture that you have people like Vance and like Matt Walsh talk about how like we should not be canceling people like Tucker or these young GOP staffers who are white supremacists for saying things that are offensive because we need to have a united front against the left.

Speaker 2 versus this whole other reaction from like Shapiro and you have heritage is caught in the middle of this and there's like senators and Mike Johnson who are

Speaker 2 trying to like keep this like legitimate, like anti-Semitic, but like also like anti-Israel, but through anti-Semitism, like this anti-Semitic section of the right, like led by Fuentes, like keep it quarantined, which is increasingly breaking quarantine.

Speaker 2 So they're looking at how the right has devolved into this fighting and then seeing the election of Zoron and being like, oh, the grass is greener on that side, I guess, which is really odd.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

Speaker 2 it's so funny because it's just like literally just all of the shit they've been saying about the left forever.

Speaker 2 They're just suddenly like, oh my god, they won't part some of the right is like maybe, maybe not literally the neo-nazi.

Speaker 2 And now they're like, oh, it's actually, it's actually the right that is the house of scolding nags who offer young men nothing beyond moralizing and hypocritical lecture, which is, it's just amazing.

Speaker 2 It's, I don't know, I,

Speaker 2 it's so funny.

Speaker 2 They're just losing it.

Speaker 2 Insofar as there is a kind of important thing here, it's that like in a moment where, you know, the sort of ruling party is becoming increasingly unpopular, they're also fracturing from the inside to the extent where like their like worst nightmare just got elected as the mayor of New York.

Speaker 2 And instead of like, rallying, they're doing this shit.

Speaker 2 Very funny. There's been a few governor reactions.
I'm going going to pull from the Guardian here.

Speaker 2 Greg Abbott tweeted, join me in a moment of silence for New York City. Thoughts and prayers.
Abbott's been losing it over this election. It's so funny.
It's very good.

Speaker 2 Rick Scott, who's the senator of Florida,

Speaker 2 The Guardian. Florida has welcomed those fleeing communist and socialist regimes for decades, wrote Senator Rick Scott of Florida.
Tonight is no different.

Speaker 2 Florida will welcome all freedom-loving New Yorkers. It's funny because that's very different from Abbott's promise of trying to tariff people who flee from New York to Texas.

Speaker 2 Abbott's like, oh shit, hold on. Maybe I can cash in on all of this money.

Speaker 2 We're going to get to whether people are actually fleeing New York in a later segment. Spoiler alert.

Speaker 2 Not yet. But, come on, there is still time.

Speaker 2 If we want people to flee New York, we're just going to have to do it ourselves.

Speaker 2 Speaking of doing it ourselves, this podcast

Speaker 2 we do it, but also the products and services support the show do it.

Speaker 2 We cannot, in fact, do it ourselves.

Speaker 2 No, not yet.

Speaker 2 We have to, at this point, have the assistance of the capitalist advertising industry. So, enjoy, enjoy that.

Speaker 2 We are back.

Speaker 2 So let's turn to Elon Musk, who is...

Speaker 2 I mean, I guess for Elon Musk, he is kind of having a normal one.

Speaker 2 He is doing a bunch of his normal posts about how, like, Western civilization is doomed unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized. Suicidal empathy.
It's so bad.

Speaker 2 There's a very, very funny segment that I'm not going to play just because,

Speaker 2 I do not believe in exposing our dear listeners to having to listen to Elon Musk try to talk because

Speaker 2 of him on Joe Rogan where Joe Rogan's like, okay, why did you call Mom Donnie a swindler? And it's just a minute straight of Elon Musk going,

Speaker 2 he has nothing. He can't even complete a full sentence.

Speaker 2 He at one point says that, you know, swindlers will always say what the audience wants to hear. And that's the only thing he's, he, that's the only complete thought that he gives.

Speaker 2 The rest of his sentence or attempts at making a sentence is just saying the word um like five times and then saying that, well, you know, Zoron is actually quite charismatic.

Speaker 2 His brain is so cooked. It's so good.
It's and I say this as someone who stammers a significant amount. This is, this is just, there's nothing going on in his brain.

Speaker 2 This is closer to Head Empty No Thoughts. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Head empty no thoughts derogatory, which a derogatory comma bad.

Speaker 2 Always derogatory, always, always derogatory.

Speaker 2 Oh, God.

Speaker 2 So there's then this sort of mix of like the world is falling with this also kind of, oh my God, he won. And also this is a very attractive charismatic dude.

Speaker 2 It is kind of breaking these people's brains. that there's just like a hot guy who beat the shit out of them.

Speaker 2 There's like, there's there's like definitely sort of like psychosexual politics going on here. You can see it in a book.
100%

Speaker 2 shit these people are posting. No, absolutely.
Freud would have a heyday.

Speaker 2 Adorna would have a heyday writing about the psychosexual aspect of the anti-Zoron and obviously some of the pro-Zoron people as well. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, this is a...

Speaker 2 Great things are happening in politics. Even Trump has had to defend his looks as being better than Mr.
Momdani.

Speaker 2 Which objectively objectively not true. Very funny.
Saying he's quote unquote much better looking.

Speaker 2 So funny.

Speaker 2 But then you also have this weird thing that some people on the left are doing.

Speaker 2 This is largely a Twitter thing, but this does seep out into real world conversations, which I've heard is thirsting after Zoron's wife. Oh, yeah, I see Levi's.
And comparing.

Speaker 2 And comparing Zoron's wife to like, like, Melania or something. And like in a whole bunch of really weird ways.
Jesus Christ, that's really weird.

Speaker 2 Don't do that. Look how, like, beautiful and aristocratic Zoron's wife is

Speaker 2 versus

Speaker 2 former porn star Melania Trump. And you're like, come on.
Country built on misogyny, guys.

Speaker 2 What are you doing, guys?

Speaker 2 Misogyny. You're doing misogyny.
It's bad. Simply don't do that.
But we do love the 27-year-old Zoomer, New York First Lady. Yeah, she fucking rocks.
Good for her. Good for her.
Check out her art.

Speaker 2 I want to turn a little bit to Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who said the Democrats in New York have chosen a true extremist and Marxist, and the consequences will be felt across our entire nation.

Speaker 2 He also said that Badami's policies are defunding the police, seizing private property, and massive tax increases, which I fucking wish.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 that does all sound kind of cool,

Speaker 2 but that is absolutely not what Zoron's current state of politics are.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it's also funny because this is the same reaction they've had to every single Democrat who's been elected in the past 20 years. Totally.

Speaker 2 The right has so much just sort of weird projection shit.

Speaker 2 And I feel like

Speaker 2 they've been doing this whole like, oh my God, you all called us fascist. And now we're all fascist.

Speaker 2 And it's like, no, you, you called Barack Obama, who was like the most neoliberal Democrat they've ever put in office, maybe second only to Bill Clinton, maybe

Speaker 2 like, you called him a communist, and now it's like, okay, this guy's a democratic socialist, and you're just saying, like, oh, this time, now, this time it's communism. It's just like, okay, really?

Speaker 2 No, the boy who cried wolf thing that the right does all the time, it depowers their own rhetorical tactics. Yep, yep, yep.
And you see this in a few ways.

Speaker 2 I think you've seen this in part with like the trans mass shooter thing.

Speaker 2 And certainly they've been doing this thing around communism or socialism for a while to the point where you can have the mayor of New York proudly call himself a socialist, a democratic socialist, and gets elected with record numbers.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 one of the things that he's going to be dealing with, obviously, is the financial clash. We're going to get to some more weird reactions, but there's a very funny NPR quote that I'm going to read.

Speaker 2 I'm always going to read this quote.

Speaker 2 I think it's the stages of grief, said Karen Wilde, who runs the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group that represents more than 300 large employers.

Speaker 2 Which is very funny.

Speaker 2 They're fully in their acceptance negotiation phase of this. Yeah.
I mean, I think they might not be letting on the degree to which they have been in this process for a while.

Speaker 2 There was like a final push among like Bloomberg, who privately met with Mamdani like months ago, and they like developed like a kind of like truce, which Bloomberg broke in the week before the election when he suddenly funneled millions of dollars into Islamophobic ads and like 9-11 ads.

Speaker 2 But there was a lot of meetings happening between Mamdani and people who would make up his future administration and the business class, which have happened since he won the primary in June.

Speaker 2 And this sort of negotiating and bargaining has been going on for quite a while.

Speaker 2 And I think the acceptance now is really the final, I mean, these steps aren't necessarily always like sequential, but I think we are rapidly approaching the acceptance phase across the city. And

Speaker 2 people are actually looking at like realistically and what

Speaker 2 the negotiating side of enacting these things is going to look like, including the financial people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that said, Ken Griffin, not happy at all. No, they're not happy.
No, yeah.

Speaker 2 This is from Business Insider. For the people of New York, I pray that the policies Mondame uses to govern and lead New York are different than the talking points he used to win the Mayor race.

Speaker 2 The people in New York deserve better. I do want to, I did cut out the part in the middle there for the Business insider where he said this Wednesday at the American Business Forum in Miami.

Speaker 2 Some motherfuckers not even in New York. Like

Speaker 2 for this to say this. Very funny.
Hell yeah. Very funny.

Speaker 2 In this sort of like crash out spectrum, the little people who are like having the absolute worst time are a bunch of Israeli politicians who are very mad about this. Shocking.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to go off the Washington Post here.

Speaker 2 Israel's far-right Minister of Security, Ben Gavir, said Wednesday that Mamdami's win would be, quote, remembered eternally as the moment when anti-Semitism overcame common sense.

Speaker 2 Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Cheekly, in an excoriating statement, accused New York City of, quote, handing his keys over to a Hamas supporter.

Speaker 2 And this is also a giant loss for one Benjamin Netanyahu, who Mamdami has said he will arrest if he sets foot in New York, which rocks. Very funny.
Will this actually happen? I don't know. Hilarious.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, these things just don't work anymore. Like, they, they, yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, I watched an interview with Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, on like Good Morning America, like, like, talking about this and how they're establishing an anti-Semitism monitor to track the Zoron administration.

Speaker 2 And even, like, the hosts of Good Morning America were like, come on, man. Like, that's not, he's not.

Speaker 2 He's not. What are we doing?

Speaker 2 He's not an anti-Semite. Like,

Speaker 2 he's against.

Speaker 2 He's against the genocide in Gaza.

Speaker 2 Like, he's not he's not like a jew hating anti-semite yeah and like they were even getting tired of green blatt's little like shtick and how he was constantly like performing to the camera to try to get people to like i don't report incidents that then they'll add into this into this monitor program so they'll try to blame the mamdani administration for not protecting jews or whatever yeah

Speaker 2 This was on Morning Joe on MSNBC, not Good Morning America. My apologies.

Speaker 2 This is also, you know, if you want to talk about another sort of category of losers, it's like all of the unhinged Islamophobia. Oh, yeah.
Like all of the people spreading that got annihilated. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Just absolutely smashed. And like, and yeah, you know, and it is worth saying, like, yeah, like, this was one of the most racist campaigns I have ever seen that Andrew Cuomo sort of waged.
It was

Speaker 2 just hideous. More racist than Trump versus Kamala by far.
Yeah. Like

Speaker 2 exceptionally so and done by Democrat establishment figures largely. Yep.
Man.

Speaker 2 Just rancid and they got their ass handed to them. And I think that's good.
There's a very, very public level of exceptions for Islamophobia.

Speaker 2 You can just say the most Islamophobic shit anyone's ever heard on TV and it's fine and no one does anything. But also like people don't fucking like that shit.

Speaker 17 It sucks.

Speaker 2 It's awful. And fuck these people.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I think this is sort of the tide turning um and speaking of the tide turning uh bill ackman as as we've talked about on on ed bending the knee saying congrats are on mom domi congrats on the win now you have a big responsibility if i can help new york city just let me know what i can do very good so to sort of close out this like the loser section um i want to turn there's a great piece in defector

Speaker 2 about the people who who who threatened to leave New York City if Mom Donnie won. And unfortunately, reached out for comment, none of them were actually leaving.
It's really sad.

Speaker 2 No, because people don't want to leave the city. It's a good city, which is the whole point of Zoron's campaign was about how much the city is cool and rocks.

Speaker 2 And Cuvo's campaign was about how much it's bad and scary. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 unfortunately, tragically, this does mean that you are going to have to have Dave Portney and this whole fucking

Speaker 2 crew of Barcelona dipshits still in the city. So good luck.
I hope you expropriate them.

Speaker 2 I hope they have a bad time.

Speaker 2 Now I want to move into my last category, which is the sort of baffling category.

Speaker 2 We got a kind of wild Obama quote, quote, the future looks a little bit brighter.

Speaker 2 It's a reminder that when we come together around strong forward-looking leaders who care about the issues that matter, we can win. It's a very, it's a very silly quote.
I,

Speaker 2 the, the, the odds that Obama personally had

Speaker 2 at least one person on that campaign staff beat Andreen Occupy are very high.

Speaker 2 Like, it's,

Speaker 2 oh, it's really truly this moment of like, brother, you spent so much time trying to make sure this wouldn't happen. And you have failed.

Speaker 2 And now you're in the like, I'm going to do the Obama thing where like, I'm the friend of all the young leaders and I'm going to give them the worst advice you've ever heard in your entire life.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 Still have never gone over Obama personally intervening to make sure the NBA players didn't go on strike during the uprising. Oh, God.

Speaker 2 What are the worst like post-presidential moments I've ever seen? I want to close on Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, who when asked about Mondami said, quote, he's a young man.

Speaker 2 Will he get good at it? Diamond said about Mondami making and implementing good policies. I see a lot of people in big jobs, including big political jobs.
They grow into it. I've seen a lot of people.

Speaker 2 They kind of swell into the job. They get worse.
They, you know, all of it becomes about them. I'm hoping he's the good one, and that will be important for the future in New York, he said.

Speaker 2 True, true and real. No, I mean, like, there is a lot of this slow capitulation, which we're even seeing.

Speaker 2 with private comments from Trump that are being leaked into reporting through the New York Times, where in private Trump has called Mr. Momdani

Speaker 2 a slick and good talker and a talented politician.

Speaker 2 And last Wednesday said that he might, quote, health him a little bit, maybe, unquote, and that he wants New York to succeed, which is, you know, contrary to like previous threats of like pulling back all funding if Momdani gets elected.

Speaker 2 And I think part of part of this reaction is both like how strong Zoron's victory is.

Speaker 2 We all like know that Trump likes winners, but also the fact that Zoron has very quickly tried to establish dominance over the president in some ways,

Speaker 2 but in a way that like someone like Trump kind of respects, with Mamdani positioning himself as a legitimate adversarial figure to Trump. Yeah.
Like right off the bat.

Speaker 2 And there's a little bit of the Trumpian mind that actually kind of appreciates that and thinks it's like cool and impressive.

Speaker 2 During the first Trump administration, there was a whole running theory that if you could get Trump in a room with Hugo Chavez, you could make him a socialist in like an hour, because he really does just repeat the last thing anyone in a room said to him.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we're finally going to test the theory of, can we get a charismatic person in the room with him and make him do stuff he wouldn't normally do? And probably not, but you know.

Speaker 2 I mean, like the biggest thing right now is like the difference in immigration policy, but like Trump's from New York. Trump knows how much New York is a city.
built by and run by immigrants.

Speaker 2 Like he knows that. When Stephen Miller is like orchestrating all of his messaging, it's like like the worst of the worst of the anti-immigrant stuff.

Speaker 2 But I think in terms of Zoron's opposition to Trump primarily being with immigration, I think Trump understands how immigration rests very importantly into the identity of New York.

Speaker 2 And in which, if that's like the main oppositional force, I think Trump similarly is going to understand where Mamdani is coming from in a way. Yeah.
And

Speaker 2 I think we are going to see like a particularly Stephen Miller

Speaker 2 conflict as as this goes on absolutely because this is this is the perfect example of stuff that Miller and people like Matt Walsh and like the great replacement people have been talking about and the other huge batch of reactions that you're seeing from people like Walsh is that this election only went this way because of how many foreigners were allowed to vote in New York yeah if this election was done by true New Yorkers quote unquote yep then Cuomo would have won and looking at the results of this election looking at how many immigrants voted people who have moved to New York in the past 10 years past five years Mamdani did very well with those groups.

Speaker 2 You have a lot of these like far-right anti-immigration people

Speaker 2 pointing towards that as being like, this is what we're trying to defend the country against, or else all of our elections are going to go like this unless we make sure that only white Americans can vote.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then so there's that reaction, Warner Side, and the other, the other reaction from roughly that crowd is women cannot be allowed to vote. Yes, which they also

Speaker 2 believe that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 This analysis obviously has faults, but it's even falling apart in terms of like the young male vote. Yeah, yeah, they got hammered.

Speaker 2 Which the Republicans have, you know, have been very, very excited about how much, you know, young men are voting for the Republican Party, right?

Speaker 2 Young men are all Republican,

Speaker 2 even if young women are all Democrats. And you see in specifically this election where Mom Dunny is up 40% with young men.

Speaker 2 And the divide among men is mostly through age, with older men going for Cuomo and millennials and Gen Z men swinging very strongly towards Mamdani.

Speaker 2 You have all these like democratic think tanks trying to figure out how do we attract a young male vote? How do we do this?

Speaker 2 And you have a guy show you what kind of policies, what kind of messaging works exceedingly well. Yeah.
Which is how people tried so hard to kill that strategy.

Speaker 2 And it was proven twice in a row, first with... the primary and even more so with the general.
And yeah, that will frighten the GOP.

Speaker 2 It'll frighten them seeing that young men will vote for a democratic socialist if they actually have these policies and you have this type of like solid messaging they're not condescending and the candidate embodies like a new generation of change it's very it's very threatening to the gop and and to establishment democrats yeah and like like i've seen steve bannon's out here being like if he loses in the midterms and loses in 2028 i'm going to prison which i from your views to god

Speaker 2 so like

Speaker 2 no, the biggest mistake the Democrats made last time. Well, there's many, many big mistakes, right? Palestine being a huge one.

Speaker 2 But I think a huge mistake they made is not completely destroying Trump and his whole cabinet's ability to exist in public life.

Speaker 2 Like, Trump should have been immediately imprisoned for trying to overthrow the government and basically sent into a hole.

Speaker 2 And after that Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, it should have been taken out as a national security threat.

Speaker 2 Like, Democrats cannot, cannot play this, like they go low, we go high game anymore.

Speaker 2 If we're going to get out of this, and it's probably not going to be the Democrats who do this, but like, are our Nurembergers going to have to make the original Nuremberg look like paperclip?

Speaker 2 Like, well, that's what the original Nuremberg was. The original Nuremberg also sucked.

Speaker 2 I see this and that.

Speaker 2 Art Nuremberg to Nuremberg harder. I see.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I see. We're actually doing it.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 I really like Jacob Geller's video on Nuremberg. And

Speaker 2 it it is a nice emotional place to fall back on in times of torment. But I don't think we're going to Nuremberg ourselves out of this one.

Speaker 2 And unfortunately, I don't have a very strong, solid alternative at the moment. But at the very least, Trump should have been treated much, much harsher after January 6th.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we could leave it as for now, Nuremberg.

Speaker 2 Towards an ascendant, Nuremberg.

Speaker 2 Well, this has been a good happen here.

Speaker 2 A rare upbeat episode where all of our enemies are having a very bad time. Yeah, and they're also mad about Lina Khan on the transition team.
Oh, yeah. Very funny.
They're so very mad. Very mad.

Speaker 2 Go to transition 2025 to learn more about Soron's Smirald transition team. A fantastic URL.
Really, really, really going for it. It's Transition 2025.

Speaker 2 Stealing trans power. True, real.

Speaker 2 You go, girl.

Speaker 2 I give Zoron the pass. You can say it.
Zora and Bob Dobby estrogen. No, no, no.
He's fine as he is. We're transiting the cover.
He's actually a good-looking man. He doesn't need it.

Speaker 2 He's actually, he's actually figured it out, I think.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 we're ending here.

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Speaker 3 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 5 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 6 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 7 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 8 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 11 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 12 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 13 Let's move forward from there.

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Speaker 17 Hello, everyone, and welcome to If Could Happen here, a podcast where I have just been attacked for my identity as a British person by my colleague Garrison Davis. Hi, Gare.

Speaker 2 It's going to happen again.

Speaker 17 Really? I never.

Speaker 2 This podcast is not a safe space.

Speaker 17 Not for British people, sadly. Many, many such places for us,

Speaker 17 including Britain, which is a country which is not doing so well right now.

Speaker 17 Although Britain is still very safe.

Speaker 2 I don't want to talk about Britain today.

Speaker 17 I do, incidentally, I guess, because I grew up in a country that has virtually no fucking public land.

Speaker 2 I mean, enclosure of the

Speaker 2 commons,

Speaker 2 actually.

Speaker 2 Kind of topical.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it is. That is a question that actually, so earlier this year in September, I was staying with Kwichin people who are indigenous to the northern Alaskan interior, Arctic and sub-Arctic.

Speaker 17 And one of them was like, hey, how did you guys get so dislocated from your lands? One of my friends who I was talking to, and it was a really interesting question for me, right?

Speaker 17 Because they have lived on that same land for as long as human beings have existed in the Americas, like 25,000 years, something like that. Like the answer is the enclosure of the commons, right?

Speaker 17 The answer is like proto-capitalism is what removed folks like me from the land

Speaker 17 and identifying it in a way that those people identify with the land. But in the United States, we do have a little bit, or quite a lot actually, of public land, right?

Speaker 17 Various different types of public land, various different land protections that anyone can go to, right? You don't have to be an American or a citizen.

Speaker 17 Anyone can go to public lands and enjoy them.

Speaker 17 Unfortunately, Utah Senator quote-unquote based Mike Lee is once again attempting to weaken protections on wilderness, which will render some of the small parts of the USA that have not been fundamentally damaged by capitalism permanently and irrevocably changed.

Speaker 17 Are you familiar with Mike Lee?

Speaker 2 Yeah. He's the senator from Utah.

Speaker 17 The senator from Utah, yep.

Speaker 2 And he's based, as you have said. Yes, he's based, right?

Speaker 2 He's a hashtag poster. He's a poster.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 2 He operates twitter account which some might deem as offensive and tweets about current current events in a very uh provocative way yeah

Speaker 2 usually in line with some kind of partisan sentiment yeah that's pretty fair specifically following the assassination of melissa hortman and her husband made a series of of of tweets that were, I guess, kind of insensitive, if not actually,

Speaker 2 if not laying blame at the governor of Minnesota in a kind of ironic, joking way where you have plausible deniability, but in general, handled that situation very grossly.

Speaker 2 And I think that that's what most people might know his tweets for. But he's very active.
He's tweets about

Speaker 2 many a thing.

Speaker 17 Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 17 if he thinks it, he posts it. But yeah, yeah, most people will know him as a guy who made the extremely poor taste posts following those murders.

Speaker 2 Nightmare on walls, the streets. Yeah.

Speaker 17 Just not a thing to be posting when some people have been murdered.

Speaker 2 I think, in general, when people are murdered, I think we as humans should post less.

Speaker 17 Yeah, yeah, right. If somebody has died,

Speaker 17 like, just don't post.

Speaker 17 You know, it may be nice to say this is terrible, send your condolences or whatever, but realistically, their family aren't looking on twitter.com to see who's sending their condolences.

Speaker 17 But they sure as fuck will find out if you try and make a funny about it. So just don't.

Speaker 2 Just resist the urge to post another urge that mike lee sadly have is i don't like this at all yeah

Speaker 17 well yeah i don't like that we're talking about mike lee's urges okay it's in the broadcastable space mike lee has the urge to sell off public land he has tried twice this year we spoke about this a little bit on ed right we talked about it in the context of the big beautiful bill or the one big beautiful bill act yeah he did did try that like half a year ago

Speaker 17 yes he did well garrison i regret to inform you that mike lee is back somehow mike lee has returned yeah and this time uh he has got a new thing uh so last time if you remember he he talked about selling off the public land to make affordable housing Sure, sure, yeah.

Speaker 2 Not going to look into this any further.

Speaker 17 That was exactly what he was relying on.

Speaker 17 That no one gave a shit about the millions of acres that we all get access to, and they would just trust him on that one.

Speaker 2 Based Mike Lee and his abundance agenda. Yeah,

Speaker 2 exactly.

Speaker 17 It's him and Zoran shaking hands when it comes to affordable housing, but something they care about very much. I'm sure something that Mike Lee has campaigned on for years.

Speaker 17 He did not stick landing on that because people read the proposal.

Speaker 17 uh and they noticed that it was going to do nothing for housing affordability whatsoever if it did create any housing at all it was going to be like super rich people's Mercmans.

Speaker 17 You know, this was not going to

Speaker 17 do anything to move the needle on affordable housing in the U.S. This time, he has found a cause which receives even less scrutiny.
Can you guess what it is, Garrison?

Speaker 2 For why we need to sell the public lands? Yes.

Speaker 2 I'm trying to not just look ahead on your script.

Speaker 17 Yeah, there is a document in front of you which has the answer.

Speaker 17 So close your eyes.

Speaker 17 I feel like there's like two or three things in the US where everyone just seems to turn a blind eye to like.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 is it for like, is it for like developing land for like oil, data centers?

Speaker 17 Well, that probably is what's happening, but he's smart enough not to say that, right?

Speaker 2 Super gold magikarp,

Speaker 2 as in the as in the film Eddington.

Speaker 2 I mean, I would guess the data centers, but that's, I could be wrong.

Speaker 17 It's border security.

Speaker 2 Oh, great.

Speaker 17 Right. You could have said anti-terrorism and probably got there too, but no,

Speaker 17 it is securing our southern, well, all our borders, actually.

Speaker 2 Southern border, northern border,

Speaker 17 eastern and western maritime borders. Obviously, they're there

Speaker 17 looking to prevent any more people coming in from Canada.

Speaker 2 Utah's not a border state.

Speaker 17 That is correct.

Speaker 2 Stay borders because you

Speaker 2 i saw

Speaker 2 i saw you go to search something i literally pulled up a map of the united states i was like i don't think utah is a border maybe i'm misremembering but utah is not a border state isn't yeah you're absolutely not a border state

Speaker 17 in fact not a border state it is above arizona which is a border state yeah uh so that that is perhaps what's going on here

Speaker 17 mike lee has found a way to sell off public lands without selling off utah public lands or in this case not really sell off but destroy and degrade in a way which is very clearly going to lead to commercial exploitation, right?

Speaker 17 What Lee proposes, what Lee's bill has a bunch of co-sponsors. I believe the only border state senator co-sponsoring it is Ted Cruz.

Speaker 2 That makes sense.

Speaker 17 Big public lands respector.

Speaker 17 But Lee's bill would allow the Department of Homeland Security to, quote, inventory illegal roads and trails on public land within 100 miles of the border and then convert them into navigable roads.

Speaker 17 That is the part that makes no sense, right? Like when you look at Lee's statements,

Speaker 17 and I will read one of Lee's statements here. So, this is a statement on the Senate Energy Committee

Speaker 17 webpage where they talk about the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Speaker 17 Here's a quote from Mike Lee explaining his bill.

Speaker 17 Quote, Biden's open border chaos is destroying America's crown jewels. I'm going to pause here to note that.

Speaker 17 According to my watch, we're at November 7th, 2025.

Speaker 2 Well, your watch is rough.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we are.

Speaker 17 We're once again asking the most important question of our time.

Speaker 2 Who was president? Who is? He used the present tense.

Speaker 17 It's not even like talking about 2020 and pretending that Trump wasn't president.

Speaker 2 He's doing it right now.

Speaker 2 SERTER POLICIES ARE DERYING OUR natural lands.

Speaker 17 Yeah, like we're a year after the election.

Speaker 17 You've had time to come to terms with this. You can't just keep pointing at Joe Biden.

Speaker 17 But apparently, I guess you can.

Speaker 2 They're going to keep doing that for three more years until there's a new guy.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 17 So let's go on with Chairman Lee. He's chairman of this Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, right?

Speaker 17 Families who want to enjoy a safe hike or camp out are instead finding trash piles, burned landscapes, and trails closed because rangers are stuck cleaning up the fallout.

Speaker 17 Cartels are exploiting the disorder, using these lands as cover for their operations.

Speaker 17 This bill gives land managers and border agents tools to restore order and protect these places for the people they were meant to serve.

Speaker 17 He's doing the thing where he says one thing and then his bill does something completely different.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 17 What he is saying is on the face of it somewhat ridiculous, but what he's claiming he's going to do is protect these lands, lands, right?

Speaker 17 What the bill allows them to do is to find roads that are not permitted and turn them into navigable roads.

Speaker 2 So just actually paved roads. Yes.
In the protected wildlife.

Speaker 17 Yeah, well, crucially, in wilderness areas, right? So the 1964 Wilderness Act

Speaker 17 does not allow for there to be any mechanized access.

Speaker 17 Lee's bill proposes not just to amend the Wilderness Act for within 100 miles of the border, but to amend it entirely to allow for the construction of roads.

Speaker 2 So that they can police the public lands better? That's what he's saying. Yeah, right.

Speaker 17 Well, he's one of his claims is for search and rescue, that there are already exemptions that allow for mechanized search and rescue access, right? Like

Speaker 17 things like helicopters, right?

Speaker 2 Helicopters.

Speaker 17 Yeah, if you get even like you get like motorized gurneys you can use for SAR, things like that, right? Like

Speaker 17 even ATVs, right? There's a threat to human life.

Speaker 2 A Toyota Tacoma. Yeah.

Speaker 17 I mean, you'd struggle in most wilderness lands with a Tacoma,

Speaker 17 but yeah, you could you could give it a college try, but it's ludicrous. He hasn't even made an effort to join the dots, you know.

Speaker 17 It also calls for fire mitigation by clearing fuels and building fire breaks and includes a provision that would, quote, address invasive or non-native species in the wilderness area.

Speaker 17 Yeah, like, what are you going to go in there and round up?

Speaker 2 Because everyone's planting and spreading invasive species.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, of course, there are invasive species, right?

Speaker 17 Like, if you go to parts of where I live, you'll see mustard, which is not an indigenous species, because the climate's changing and people move around the world.

Speaker 17 And, like, lots and lots of animals that weren't here 20,000 years ago are here now.

Speaker 2 I mean, you can make an argument for managing these areas. I don't think he's coming at this from an environmental conservation standpoint.
Yeah.

Speaker 17 I don't know what the non-native species thing is about, other than just like nativism for plants. Like, I genuinely can't work it out.
Uh, if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Speaker 17 Uh, it also attempts to inventory damage done to public lands by migrants. Uh, like, like, what wildfires are caused by migrants? How many national parks are trashed by migrants?

Speaker 2 Oh, my God. Yeah, as opposed to the American citizens who treat these areas like dog shit.
Yeah, and then the park rangers who simply just don't do their jobs because they're too lazy.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and like the literally thousands of people a year who fucking drag their refrigerator or television onto public land and execute it by firing squad. Yeah, like maybe make a bill about that.

Speaker 17 I mean, you want to do something nice for public land. I want to give a definition of wilderness from Howard.
I think it's Zanisser.

Speaker 17 I've only ever read his name, but the Wilderness Society, who more or less wrote the act.

Speaker 17 It defines wilderness as, quote, a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

Speaker 17 I don't actually really like that definition. I like wilderness, but I'm not a big fan of the idea of like quote-unquote untouched wilderness, right? Like

Speaker 17 every bit of what is now the United States is a place where indigenous people have been living and surviving for tens of thousands of years, long before it was the United States.

Speaker 2 It's not untouched.

Speaker 17 It's just not fucked by extractive capitalism in a way that a lot of our land has been in the last 200 years.

Speaker 2 There could be a touching without a fucking, is what you're saying.

Speaker 17 I saw this mischievous look come on their face, and I didn't know which direction they were going to take it.

Speaker 2 But I didn't expect that one.

Speaker 2 Now, this is podcasting.

Speaker 17 Yeah, wow, yeah. We've just left the newsreel.
Let's do an advertising break, Disney, so we can't come back from that.

Speaker 17 All right, we've returned. I've de-scandalized myself.
Lee is currently making his claims, right, that

Speaker 17 this will somehow make the border safer and make people on public lands safer.

Speaker 2 This is such the thinnest justification that you're throwing in. Like, this is so, I severely doubt he sincerely even believes this.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, the border patrol have access to all these lands, right? Like, I see, I think, the Hakumba Wilderness, the state wilderness. I see Border Patrol in there all the time.

Speaker 2 I can see there's many reasons for why a Republican might be interested in, like, building road infrastructure in these places.

Speaker 2 And border security, frankly, is insulting that he's even trying to use that as a zeitgeist justification.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's fucking ludicrous. Like, the Trump administration is speedrunning extractive capitalism on our public lands, right? Just yesterday when we're recording, we're recording on Friday.

Speaker 17 Joe Biden is president, as you all remember, Friday, 7th November, 2025. The Trump administration nominated, okay, I've outed myself.

Speaker 17 I'm not a Biden truther.

Speaker 17 The Trump administration nominated Steve Pierce to lead the Bureau of Land Management. Pierce is a former New Mexico congressman who has supported drilling and fracking on federal land.

Speaker 17 He's also a serial loser in congressional and state races in New Mexico. I think he lost a Senate and a gubernatorial race, and he has voted to shrink existing public lands.

Speaker 17 The Trump admin did this before, right?

Speaker 17 Like people will probably, if they're engaged in public land advocacy, they will remember the attempts to save the Bears Ears National Monument from oil exploitation, right? Which again is in Utah.

Speaker 17 Utah is,

Speaker 17 for whatever reason, Utah is a hotbed of anti-public anti-public lands settlement.

Speaker 17 Amusingly, the previous nominee for the leadership of the BLM had to be removed when emails condemning Trump's response to January 6th came to light.

Speaker 17 She, I guess, failed the loyalty test. Trump has also put Doug Bergham at the head of the Department of the Interior, right? Are you familiar with Bergham's shtick guess?

Speaker 2 His name sounds incredibly familiar.

Speaker 17 Yeah, he was governor, I believe, in North Dakota.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 17 Yeah, like he did this pivot on like culture war issues where he had previously been not opposed to abortion, for example.

Speaker 17 And he just like took a massive swing to the right in order to kind of align with the MAGA position over time. So he's now leading the Department of the Interior.

Speaker 17 I wrote about this on my little newsletter that I write because when he was nominated, he received a letter of support from the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, a bunch of outdoor brands, notably REI,

Speaker 17 was one of the brands that supported his nomination. Bergam is another big oil and gas guy, right? He's a guy who has talked about the need for energy exploitation on public land.

Speaker 17 I have a whole scripted series that I'm working on about specifically drilling in the Arctic refuge. But this goes far, far beyond that, right?

Speaker 17 This could potentially affect every piece of public land, every national park, every national monument in the United States.

Speaker 2 Drill, baby, drill.

Speaker 17 Yes. Drill, baby, drill is pretty much our approach to public land these days.
Amusingly, REI was shamed into rescinding their support of Bergham.

Speaker 2 Good for them.

Speaker 17 But yeah, yeah, one of the few instances where people probably posted their way to a change in

Speaker 17 some kind of policy, I guess, even if it was only REI policy. I want to talk a little bit about how we got to this idea of public land and

Speaker 17 the sort of way that it's sometimes referred to, and in a way I would prefer we talked about it, I guess. The idea we have right now is that there are various tiers of public land, right?

Speaker 17 There's Bureau of Land Management land, which is often the least protected. We have national parks, we have national monuments, we have national forests, and we have wilderness, right?

Speaker 17 Wilderness being among the most protected. The problem with this approach is that ecosystems don't necessarily respect property lines, right? So let's take, for example, the Gwichin in Alaska, right?

Speaker 17 They have hundreds of thousands of acres of their own, but their traditional way of life and indeed like their existence depends on the existence of the porcupine caribou herd.

Speaker 17 The porcupine caribou herd makes the longest migration of any land mammal on earth and it carves on the coastal plain.

Speaker 17 The coastal plain, the Gwichin way of saying it would be, I have heard this said a lot of times. My sincere apologies if I don't get it right, like I'm trying my best.

Speaker 17 It means a sacred place where life begins. It's a very sacred place.
Gwichin don't go there themselves because it's a sacred place, but it is not in their land.

Speaker 17 It is part of the Arctic refuge, a place where the Trump administration is selling. oil and gas leases, right? So if the caribou can't carve, then it doesn't matter.

Speaker 17 It still matters that the Gwich would have all this land, but they won't have their caribou, right?

Speaker 17 Because the herd will be so disrupted by oil and gas drilling where it's carving that it will then disrupt that whole landscape, right?

Speaker 17 Without caribou, that landscape would be fundamentally different.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 17 right now,

Speaker 2 the way we

Speaker 17 talk about public lands, I think we talk about them like in terms of

Speaker 17 leisure.

Speaker 17 right like often they're seen as having a value like i guess it's a classic example would be, you maybe don't remember this gag, Patagonia ran an advertising campaign called The Places We Play in the last Trump administration.

Speaker 17 That's not it, right? Like, that is not cool.

Speaker 17 I think if we only see wilderness as a place where like folks go outside to do send the gnar on climbing routes and uh and fucking shred some mountain bike trails, bro, then we fundamentally like miss the value of it, right?

Speaker 17 Yeah, this goes back a long, long time. Uh, for instance, if we look in like back in 1929, specifically with the protection of the Arctic refuge, we can see this piece that Bob Marshall wrote.

Speaker 17 Bob Marshall was a forester at the time. He's kind of

Speaker 17 important in this creating this idea of like wilderness or wilderness protections.

Speaker 17 He talked about the quote-unquote emotional values of the frontier being preserved in the wilderness, which again, I think.

Speaker 17 kind of tells us a lot a lot of what's going on here.

Speaker 2 It's a very, very Theodore Roosevelt brained approach to conservation.

Speaker 36 Yeah, right.

Speaker 17 Like we can go out there and we can all pretend to be like the guys who participated in the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America, I guess.

Speaker 17 Like he also, he considered using the definition a tract of solitude and savageness, which again, like it says a lot about like it is removing the people from the land, right?

Speaker 17 Like both literally and in our conception of it. And I don't think we should do that, right?

Speaker 17 When we talk about wilderness, we need to talk about it hand in hand with the indigenous people of this country and their traditional management practices, which allowed this place to be unspoiled until folks started to exploit it in the last couple of hundred years.

Speaker 17 So, let's take an ad break. Hopefully, we get something for like fracking or some other petrochemical industry, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 17 We are back, and we are talking about Senator Mike Lee again. Garrison, would you like to guess which industries have emerged on the top of Senator Mike Lee's donor list when I

Speaker 17 cruise onto Open Secrets?

Speaker 2 Is it fracking and drilling?

Speaker 17 It's actually real estate.

Speaker 17 He's got a ton of money from real estate, about $665,000.

Speaker 17 $665,000 is not that much money when you consider the millions of acres of public lands, which would be completely and permanently altered by this, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he really should be asking for a lot more money to sell off the public.

Speaker 17 Secure the bag

Speaker 17 if you're going to do this.

Speaker 2 It's grossly undervalued. Yeah,

Speaker 17 I always look at campaign donations and I kind of expect them to be in the billions or trillions when like

Speaker 17 you're looking at just this massive and permanent change in government policy.

Speaker 2 It's that easy, folks. Yeah,

Speaker 17 which is is why we are launching a crowdfunding campaign to buy back all the public lands.

Speaker 17 No one should own them. We should not be buying them back, but they should be protected.
It's kind of remarkable how many of our public lands this would impact, right?

Speaker 17 Within 100 miles of the border, that gives us two-thirds of the United States population. The general

Speaker 17 definition that DHS has operated with also includes all of the Great Lakes as quote-unquote international waterways.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 that takes in a good chunk of the Midwest, right?

Speaker 17 It would then go 100 miles from the shore of any of the Great Lakes. I've seen this reported on very poorly or not at all, right? A lot of the people

Speaker 17 who are better at talking about public lands are like the hunting, fishing, like hook and bullet media. They will talk about it more

Speaker 17 in my

Speaker 17 experience than like the straight outdoor media, right? Which is where I've made my career, at least somewhat for the last 15 years, they will also go harder for it.

Speaker 17 Like, like it's generally a more conservative world, but like they

Speaker 17 will

Speaker 17 go after politicians who sell public lands.

Speaker 17 But I think if you're incapable of understanding that, like the border as a zone of exception, the border as a zone without constitutional rights is a problem, and this selling of the public lands is part of that problem, then like it's very hard to have a complete analysis of this.

Speaker 17 So I've seen a lot of analysis without any,

Speaker 17 seemingly where the writers don't understand that the United States operates this hundred-mile border enforcement zone, right? And that you, as a U.S.

Speaker 17 citizen or as a non-citizen, have fewer rights within that enforcement zone. I have seen a lot of analysis, which doesn't take into account this weird assessing of migrant damage to public land.

Speaker 17 Like, in what world is that a useful allocation of government resources? Like, there are places, right, where,

Speaker 17 like, if I think about the places where the Biden administration did outdoor detention, that landscape was damaged because people had fires to stay warm.

Speaker 17 And that fire causes scarring, right, in our desert landscapes. Yeah, that landscape is damaged.
Like, how are you going to, what are you going to do?

Speaker 17 There were like a thousand people a day coming through at one point. Are you going to find them all and charge them all for like misdemeanor California fire?

Speaker 17 It also, there's a tiny provision of this bill that I found that suggests that migrants cannot be housed on federal public land unless they are housed in a detention center.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Yeah, great. Thanks.

Speaker 17 That was kind of the case before. Like, you couldn't really just be like, well, I mean, the Biden administration did just say, right, you all camp here and we'll come get you in a week.

Speaker 17 But there wasn't really a legal precedent for that. They just went ahead and did it.
I guess what I want to end up with is like, I'm obviously very passionate about this.

Speaker 17 I guess I'm kind of a public land super user.

Speaker 2 You do be camping.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I do. I am, yeah, I am a camping guy.
If there's one thing that defines me, it's

Speaker 17 going camping. I try and sleep outside at least once a month.
But yeah, most of my happiest memories in life are like moving under my own power through the mountains. That is when I'm happiest.

Speaker 17 That is how I deal with my shit.

Speaker 17 That is what I do with myself after every single one of the traumatic work trips that you

Speaker 17 that you seem to love listening to, Raylink.

Speaker 17 That is how I cope with the fact that my job is to turn trauma into stuff to go in between chamba casino ads. So, yeah, I love public lands, but you should too.

Speaker 17 Even if you don't recreate on public lands, right? Sentence of public lands are called America's best idea.

Speaker 17 I don't like that because inherent in having public lands is a removal of them from indigenous people, right? And Indigenous people losing their sovereignty over those lands.

Speaker 17 But as things that the state has done with land goes, protecting it for future generations is one of the good ones, right? Like there are some truly special places.

Speaker 17 The vastness of the western United States is why I live here. I cycled across the United States in 2010 and I was just blown away by like...

Speaker 17 the scale of the landscapes without significant human damage. That's still something I'm blown away by.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 17 You know, 15 years later, I spend as much time as I can. And not just like national parks.
I think a lot of people, if they've visited public land, will associate it with national parks.

Speaker 17 I'd really encourage you to hit up national forests, wilderness lands, like places where there is not a line or a ticket kiosk. You can have a really special wilderness experience there.

Speaker 17 But even if you don't want to, if that doesn't appeal to you, if it's not something that you feel like physically or otherwise comfortable doing, the fact that it will be there for future generations, the fact that, like, there is potential to return this land to the indigenous people of North America without giant fucking mine scars and roads cut through it right now, is something that we should fight for.

Speaker 17 And, like, public lands, it's one of those things where, like, I have conversations with dudes who do not agree with me politically at all, like, people who definitely voted for Donald Trump, who are also furious about this shit.

Speaker 17 And if you can help people see that this is part of a bigger problem, like if this can be a place where we can build a coalition, that is a good thing.

Speaker 17 And it's one of those things that, like, to take action, you can just live out and go on the internet and write to your senator, call your representative.

Speaker 17 Like, you can do these things, which are so easy, low risk. And like, it's a sort of engagement that, like, neoliberal bipartisan politics wants you to have, right? It's not hard.

Speaker 17 Um, but in this instance, you can do something really good by doing that. So I would encourage you to do that.

Speaker 17 Mike Lee's bill is currently in committee, I believe, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee,

Speaker 17 TBD, whether it gets out of there. But he has tried twice, like since the summer, to significantly destroy this incredible thing that we all have access to in the United States.

Speaker 17 He will continue to try.

Speaker 17 This is clearly something that

Speaker 17 he has an agenda for. So like, I would really encourage people to keep an eye out.
We will keep reporting on it. Anything else you want to talk about? Public land scare?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's a different approach to dealing with protected wilderness land.

Speaker 2 Prop one to amend the state constitution just passed in New York.

Speaker 2 But basically, what happened 100 years ago, they were building this Olympic sports complex in violation of the wilderness

Speaker 2 protection, like state act or part of the constitution yeah and to deal with that i'm not sure why it's taken taken this long but to deal with this they have just days ago uh voted to amend the constitution to set aside two thousand five hundred acres of mountain land nearby but not on this complex and to turn that into protected land to then continue the operation and like maintenance of the sports complex.

Speaker 2 The proposition was worded a bit weird,

Speaker 2 but I think in effect, this just results in there being in

Speaker 2 the end more public land or more protected land specifically. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the complex that already exists can then continue to function because the land's already, it was already used. Yeah, right.

Speaker 17 Like they sort of built it and then asked permission, like, I guess, 100 years later or almost 100 years later.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Like land swaps happen.

Speaker 17 And sometimes you'll see people being like, oh, this is public land being sold off. Like sometimes land swaps are very menial, right?

Speaker 17 Like if there's a little parcel of national forest land or like it could be it's a piece that like is next to a school and the school needs a playing field and they'll

Speaker 17 things like that. Land swaps do happen.

Speaker 17 And as long as we're not like losing acreage to oil and gas or to like McMansion building, you know, I think we can be flexible.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, if anything, this will set aside thousands of acres of land to not have that happen to it in the mountains of like the Adirondacks, right?

Speaker 17 Yes.

Speaker 2 And then this complex can now continue to get maintained. I think if this didn't pass, they would like restrictions would fall upon the capacity of this complex to continue operating.

Speaker 17 That's dumb because you have a place which is like, it's not going back, right? Like once you've built stuff.

Speaker 2 You should use it. The damage has been done.
You should use it here and then protect more land. Exactly.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And luckily, this thing barely passed.

Speaker 2 It was pretty close, I think, around 52% yes. Most of the votes for no did come from people, I think, living in New York City.
I think mostly because of the way the proposition was worded.

Speaker 2 It was worded in an odd way because it made it sound like you're sacrificing currently protected land that this complex is on.

Speaker 2 So I think people who are approaching this from like kind of an ecological standpoint, a conservation standpoint,

Speaker 2 like misunderstood or had or had some like

Speaker 17 differing view on like the value of of of protecting the current land that the complex is on right versus establishing thousands of acres of more lands to be protected nearby right yeah i mean initiatives and propositions are often written in a particularly bizarre way and it's a uh it's not like like the california uh prop 50 was like two lines this is several paragraphs of uh so i can i can see how it would have been confusing to people but yeah like this also happens at a state level all the time right like states have public lands too.

Speaker 17 You'll see like a patchwork of state and federal and private land, especially like in some national forests in the West, right?

Speaker 17 But that's something that especially in Republican-run states now, people should be very aware of in their own states is that like the GOP didn't used to be massively anti-public lands.

Speaker 17 This is a new thing for them, right? They always felt like they needed their, I guess, maybe that they needed their like hunting, fishing, shooting crowd.

Speaker 2 No, but environmentalism is now woke-ified, right? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 This is like a post-algore thing of now. The conservatives associate a lot of this language with like climate change algorisms and it has this woke element.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's very strange. Like, it's funny.

Speaker 17 I'll often when I'm out and about, you know, like exploring in the backcountry, I'll run into guys who are out there, like, they're either hunting or like looking for places to hunt, I think.

Speaker 17 We'll be like, oh, yeah, well, there aren't as many of the turkeys or the deer or the whatever as there used to be.

Speaker 17 But then it's very hard for people who now can't say climate change is real to find a way of like having permission to say what they want to say because they've seen it with their own eyes. Yeah.

Speaker 17 But also, yeah, they don't want to say it.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, I did an episode about this after the RNC because I talked with

Speaker 2 this like Republican conservation group

Speaker 2 about how they're trying to bring back, like, put the conservative back in conservation or whatever.

Speaker 17 Jesus. Yeah.

Speaker 17 Yeah. I think generally, generally, the idea of them conserving anything is pretty much off the table at this point.

Speaker 17 But yeah, people getting out in public land will, you will understand climate change. You spend long enough going to the same spot and

Speaker 17 you're going to see what that means. So it has a lot of benefits.
Go outside this weekend. Go camping.
It's great desert season right now. If you're within range of a desert,

Speaker 17 go camping in the desert. Look at the stars, go find a dark sky area,

Speaker 17 if that's your thing. Was it REI who had the like, don't go shopping on Black Friday, go outside? I don't know.
You don't remember this? It's okay.

Speaker 2 This is just shit.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 I am pro-gazing at the flickering lights of civilization.

Speaker 17 Garrison. No one wants to see the fucking flickering lights of civilization.

Speaker 2 I do. I do.

Speaker 17 I don't. I want to see the stars.
I camped in Chaco Canyon earlier this year. Banger for National Park.
That's my

Speaker 17 final tip for you.

Speaker 17 The Great House at Chaco Canyon was the largest building constructed in the United States until 1880.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 17 Yeah, yeah. It is vast.

Speaker 17 It is one of the least visited parks in the system because you have to go like 17 miles down a dirt road.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 incredible.

Speaker 17 that these are the ancestral Puebloans, right? Like the people who are the ancestors of the Pueblo tribes today. But

Speaker 17 it's an amazing place to go check out you should all go not at once there's not enough space for all of you i mean i'm just i'm just scrolling through mike lee's twitter account now oh yeah you got any bangers uh

Speaker 17 not really not really not really i mean he's he's whining about zoron and posting a lot about charlie kirk and that's mostly it see where he doesn't even talk about this stuff because no one likes it He got hammered by a bunch of like very right-wing rancher types on Twitter last time he tried to do this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, makes sense.

Speaker 17 I think he knows better. Because a lot of people, you can also graze cattle on public land, right?

Speaker 17 There's been a whole standoff about this. Long time listeners will remember the

Speaker 17 Bundy situation. But yeah, linked to it.
I guess he's also pissed those people off now. I just went to search for the news coverage of this.
The only thing we can find is a Washington Examiner. So

Speaker 17 it's just us and them. God, the video, the autoplayers on the Washington Examiner page is petrifying.

Speaker 2 The true bastions of journalism. Us and the Washington Examiner.

Speaker 17 Horseshoes theory come to life.

Speaker 2 God.

Speaker 17 All right.

Speaker 17 Go outside this week/slash weekend. Fuck it.
Don't go to work. Go outside.
Go outside tomorrow. Bye.

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Speaker 3 I turned off news altogether.

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Speaker 37 Hello everyone, this is Dana Al-Kurd for It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 37 I'm a professor and analyst of Palestinian and Air Politics and today we're joined by Ahmad Moore, who is the 2025 Foundation for Middle East Peace Fellow.

Speaker 37 He's also an author, an activist, just very, very involved in the Palestinian space and on the question of Palestinian liberation.

Speaker 37 So I've invited Ahmed today to discuss with us what we can understand about pro-Palestine organizing in the past two years in comparison to prior to October 7th, 2023, and think kind of analytically about where we can go from here.

Speaker 37 We're recording this on November 5th, 2025. We had a very interesting night last night where Zohran Mamdani was named the mayor of New York City.

Speaker 37 and a lot of think pieces since about how this means nothing and actually means everything and the pro-Palestine movement is

Speaker 37 winning. it's it's really not winning enough etc etc so um

Speaker 37 yeah we're in an interesting moment in American politics I think the Palestine question is obviously very very relevant so yeah Ahmed welcome to the podcast thank you Donna huge pleasure to be here all right so maybe we can start with um kind of a an introduction to yourself you can tell us about your experience as an activist as an organizer sure yes as a researcher yeah so I was born in in Razen Palestine in Gaza in uh Rafah

Speaker 38 and um my family moved here when I was a kid and became naturalized. So American citizen when I was 10 years old.
So that was in the mid-90s. And,

Speaker 38 you know, went to college right after 9-11. And like lots of people, was galvanized around that experience.
I think there was a period I was a journalist both in Beirut and in Cairo.

Speaker 38 And often you would meet American journalists roughly of my generation.

Speaker 38 And all of them would indicate that, you know, I became engaged around the Middle East because of 9-11.

Speaker 38 I think 9-11 was, for our generation, a big learning opportunity for people.

Speaker 38 The global war on terror, the war in Iraq galvanized a lot of the left.

Speaker 38 And I'm thinking now of moveon.org. And so this is really the environment that I grew up in.
Today, I mostly

Speaker 38 work with The Guardian, with The Nation, mostly right about Palestine, Israel, and American foreign policy. And as you mentioned, I'm a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace,

Speaker 38 where I host a podcast, Occupied Thoughts, where we spend a lot of time thinking through policy matters related to Palestine.

Speaker 38 I have ideas about how things have changed, but that's just a quick introduction to me and my work.

Speaker 37 No, thank you.

Speaker 37 We're approximately the same age. I won't tell you exactly

Speaker 37 how often. But yeah, I just am reflecting so much these days on how much the war on terror was a formative moment politically for our generation and its interaction with the Palestinian issue.

Speaker 37 I think that's starting to really be understood more widely. I think maybe it was more fringe or like a very select kind of understanding of the left would have that kind of analysis.
For sure.

Speaker 38 I mean, just to put a fine point on it, I mean, that was the, I would say, generational awareness that we've been lied to.

Speaker 2 We've been lied to by Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, all of that cohort, those people.

Speaker 38 You can see how that's rebounded today in Maine with Graham Plattner, somebody who fought two or three tours

Speaker 38 and then subsequently

Speaker 38 worked as a mercenary with Blackwater, was radicalized, I would say, through that experience when he was watching these happy-go-lucky diplomats swimming in pools in a diplomatic compound when just outside a savage war was being waged or an insurgency.

Speaker 38 So I would say that, you know, Palestine is so deeply interwoven. Palestine has a long history of having been lied to for people here in the United States domestically.

Speaker 38 That came to a head around the Iraq War. We were lied into that war.
And I think

Speaker 38 you saw the way that the Biden administration, particularly, stuck with the playbook and alienated huge numbers of voters in 2024.

Speaker 38 So Palestine is kind of indispensable to understanding how our elites in the United States have been captured by special interests, by corporatist interests.

Speaker 38 And we're beginning to see that, I think, rebound in meaningful ways. And of course, congratulations to Zoran Mamdani, done a wonderful job.
He ran an extraordinary campaign.

Speaker 38 I question, though, whether the campaign could have been successful without the awakening that occurred through two years of genocide.

Speaker 38 And what I mean by that specifically is so many of the taboos that had been enforced around identity, around good politics in America, were dispensed with because those taboos were employed to suppress opposition to genocide.

Speaker 37 Yeah, no, I think you're right on the money, on that. I mean, in some ways, the MAGA movement and Donald Trump also capitalized on the lies of the war on terror, too.

Speaker 37 I mean, despite the incoherence of the MAGA movement, like that was part of, you know, a rebuke of the neocons.

Speaker 37 But of course, the left is, especially after two years of unspeakable genocide, I think it has led led to just an articulation of how much the American foreign policy in the Middle East is, you mentioned boomerang.

Speaker 37 That's an imperial boomerang that is impacting American politics. It's also highlighted how much the elite and public opinion is bifurcated on this.
Palestine has become an issue of democracy.

Speaker 37 I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that's what I would say.

Speaker 2 No, I think that's correct.

Speaker 38 I agree with that. I mean, so Palestine went from being specifically Palestine from being a niche issue when I was in college.

Speaker 38 Post-colonial studies majors knew about Palestine and could integrate Palestine into an understanding of life in America, to being really part of the American story today.

Speaker 38 And I think it's apt to describe it that way.

Speaker 38 The experience of watching a genocide unfold for two years has been radicalizing for many, but it's also been enlightening in that the first question was, why is this happening?

Speaker 38 The second question is, why can't we stop it? Okay, Israel is an independent country.

Speaker 2 We can't control them. Fine.

Speaker 38 Why are we still supporting this? And then ultimately, you end up going down that rabbit hole and arriving at what is this Israel lobby? What is this special interest?

Speaker 38 And so I think the degree of complicity, the way in which the Biden administration blew so much smoke, the way in which both sides of the aisle engaged in genocide and cheered the genocide, really, has

Speaker 38 caused the Palestine issue to become deeply interwoven with the experience of being American today. And I don't think that's an overstatement.

Speaker 38 And I think concretely it means that you need an answer to the question, well, if you can't stand up to

Speaker 38 genocide, if you can't stand up for defenseless children in Palestine, and if you're going to lie to me about it, why would I expect you to stand up for anything meaningful as it relates to my standard of living?

Speaker 38 Say I'm a working class person. And so it's become this litmus test, at least on the left.

Speaker 38 And I think you're seeing a similar dynamic play out on the right on the right, but for totally different reasons.

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 38 And it's been extraordinary to behold because I think so many of us who've been in this issue for so long,

Speaker 38 we've been marking our progress in incrementalist terms. And then suddenly things have broken wide open and the world is changing very, very quickly.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 37 From my vantage point in American academia, I mean, they might have had personal feelings about Israel-Palestine. They may have had sympathies, but so few people would ever

Speaker 2 talk

Speaker 37 about the erasure of Palestine in the academy or the impact of censorship and attacks on academic freedom.

Speaker 37 But now, because the Palestinian issue is being used as this cudgel to attack higher education, like you're just a normal Joe Schmo, like math professor, you're going to have to care and you do.

Speaker 37 And we're seeing this very much with the mobilization of the American Association of University Professors. That is not a Middle East specific organization whatsoever, but they are.

Speaker 37 They recognize the linkages between these issues.

Speaker 37 So in the ways that Palestine is interwoven with, but also has impacted so many of our current realities and the policies that we're facing by the Trump administration and the Biden administration before them.

Speaker 37 Yeah, I think it's very clear to a lot of people.

Speaker 37 So that actually brings me to one of the main questions that I wanted to ask you is, aside from kind of this increased awareness and the taboos that have been broken around the discussion of Palestine and its integration in American foreign policy and American domestic policy, what are some other ways that you think since the genocide began that pro-Palestine organizing has changed?

Speaker 38 So the biggest thing I've seen is that the analytical frame has changed.

Speaker 38 We used to talk about foreign policy adventurism, wars for oil, those kinds of things.

Speaker 38 Now I think the analysis is very correctly focused on empire, the way in which resources domestically, the real working class effort to build a life in the United States is subsumed by wars of really imperial overreach.

Speaker 38 The whole idea of empire for me was an antiquated one. I didn't think it had a whole lot of relevance today, but I think I and many others who may have thought in that way missed the point.

Speaker 38 The reality is that empire is intact.

Speaker 38 I think that awareness that our efforts domestically are deeply, deeply intertwined with what's happening, what we're doing elsewhere, is important and it's emergent. It's new.

Speaker 38 When I was in graduate school, you would hear people talk about how they're engaged with domestic policy or people talk about their interest in foreign policy.

Speaker 38 And I was mostly interested in foreign policy. But today, to try to draw that differentiation is really meaningless.
And again, you see that in the race in New York. Mamdani did run on affordability.

Speaker 38 He ran on a domestic policy program.

Speaker 38 But equally, 38%, I think, of voters were heavily motivated by his foreign policy interests and his foreign policy perspectives, which, again, from a policy point of view, he can't really impact, but nonetheless are supported by this idea that our taxes, what we do domestically, is having a huge impact everywhere else in the world and that American empire is sprawling and a challenge for people domestically as well.

Speaker 38 From a pure activist point of view, you know, I used to have

Speaker 38 a real belief in electoral politics. That was shaken deeply through the DNC, through the grassroots effort to be heard.

Speaker 37 Uncommitted. Yeah.

Speaker 38 The uncommitted movement, precisely.

Speaker 38 We'll see where things go. I mean, the truth is that, you know, the person who was just elected in Jersey is a typical, I believe, APAC Democrat, Mike Sherrill.

Speaker 38 My perspective domestically is that we need to be aggressive. We need to be forceful in calling for a total reconstitution of the Democratic Party, no half measures.

Speaker 38 And I think Zoran Mandani did a good job of illustrating what that could look like.

Speaker 37 Yeah, I mean, there's always a tension in this very money-captured system that we have that at certain level, it doesn't really matter liberal or Republican, they are captured.

Speaker 37 But I think what the New York City race has demonstrated is like that can only go so far.

Speaker 37 You still need some public support, which is why, of course, they're going after gerrymandering and all of that. But yeah, it's an uphill battle.

Speaker 37 But I think if this democracy is to exist, we are in a better footing than we were, you know, on this discussion.

Speaker 37 I'm also wondering what you think of this characterization, which is that I think before this genocide,

Speaker 37 and I don't mean to create this binary, but it has been a very transformative event.

Speaker 37 Before this genocide, I think a lot of Palestinian American organizing and spaces discussed the issue of Palestine in a rights-based approach way.

Speaker 37 So about human rights, about ending apartheid, about extending rights. And I think the framing for that has also changed.

Speaker 37 It is really a critique of settler colonialism and the legitimacy of these nation states.

Speaker 37 First of all, what do you think of that characterization on my end?

Speaker 37 But also, what do you think of the tension then that poses for the Palestinian national liberation movement that still wants a state?

Speaker 38 Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 38 Again, the analytic frame has shifted.

Speaker 38 We've gone from a contested conversation around 1967, the June War, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt, Jerusalem as well from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and a small sliver of land from Lebanon.

Speaker 38 to 1948. That's what we talk about now, and that's correct.

Speaker 38 And I think for many Palestinians or Palestinian Americans, that has always been the starting point of the conversation.

Speaker 38 But now we have the political legitimacy to to say, wait a second, this whole state was founded upon separate and unequal, on Jewish supremacy,

Speaker 38 on a point of view that we reject as Americans and we should reject everywhere in the world. And so I think that that's the first meaningful change that I've seen when we talk about Palestine.

Speaker 38 And then, of course, settler colonialism is built into that analysis. Things get a little bit different when you zoom out.
Let me just talk about domestic.

Speaker 38 I think that that when you talk to people on the left the universalist argument everybody's created equal is very very powerful and resonant and it's the one that i believe in but what's happening on the right as well is an america first argument and the word protectorate comes up repeatedly why are we investing so much in a protectorate tucker carlson powerfully i think for his audience, and this is probably the most influential commentator in the United States today, but powerfully, you know, said that this country has half the size, half the economy economy of the state of Connecticut.

Speaker 38 Why have we invested so much political capital, so much money in something which is so immaterial, especially when it pays a big negative dividend in lots of different ways?

Speaker 38 So the nativist argument is meeting the universalist argument, but the core analysis around settled colonialism, around the lack of legitimacy, for a supremacist state gives rise to both of those arguments.

Speaker 17 It acts as the substrate, I would say.

Speaker 38 Palestinians who want to see a Palestinian state now you're going back to Palestine, I don't know what that means today.

Speaker 38 I've heard perspectives that, you know, availing ourselves of statehood as a legal construct will mean that you can now access legal frameworks to pursue justice in the courts wherever they may exist.

Speaker 38 I hope that's true. Let's see if it works out.
I think there are people who are trying to take Israeli men, dual nationals who participated in the genocide to court in France, I think, by using

Speaker 38 some of the laws that exist between recognized states and non-states, or maybe the UK. Let's see if rubber meets road there.

Speaker 2 I support those tactics.

Speaker 38 But practically, when you're talking about Palestinian liberation, I don't believe that a state which has been colonized out of existence, and you kind of have to look at a map to see what I mean here, but the West Bank is thoroughly colonized.

Speaker 38 Gaza is still occupied by the Israelis and will likely be slowly ethnically cleansed over time and not rebuilt.

Speaker 38 I fail to see how a state, a legal construct, is going to yield real benefits for the people on the ground now in Palestine.

Speaker 37 I agree 100%. And I think that the continuation of this framework, the statehood framework that a lot of our kind of political elites in the Palestinian landscape continue to use, and a lot of these

Speaker 37 countries in the global north use also to bypass the work that actually needs to be done after after a genocide.

Speaker 37 It's certainly a distraction in my view, but it also speaks to the renewal that needs to happen within Palestinian politics and within the PLO.

Speaker 2 But that's a bigger matter.

Speaker 37 My next question was going to be on the Palestinian American diaspora. In what ways do you think the Palestinian American diaspora is alike with people in historic Palestine, with other diasporas?

Speaker 37 And in what ways do you think that they're unique?

Speaker 38 That's a hard question for me to answer. I think the diaspora and the way that I've interacted with people is diverse.

Speaker 38 What people have in common is a common reference point, the Nakba.

Speaker 38 They have a common understanding around the legitimacy of Israel as an ethno-state, which takes Jewish supremacy as its point of departure. But it's a very diverse diaspora.

Speaker 38 I mean, our first Palestinian American in Congress is Justin Amash, who is

Speaker 2 on the right. That's right.

Speaker 37 I always forget about him. Yeah.

Speaker 38 I mean, he had relatives who were murdered in Geza at a church in northern Gezed, which dates back to, I think, the 11th century. So we're a diverse diaspora.

Speaker 38 I think the Palestinian diaspora in the United States is integrated. It's educated.
That's the passport for lots of Palestinians around the world. It's how you get out.
It's how you build a life.

Speaker 38 We have a very high literacy rate in Palestine, exceeds 99.5%.

Speaker 38 But I think where the diaspora hasn't, at least in the United States, done as effective a job, and this is kind of the natural trajectory, I think, of diaspora communities generally.

Speaker 38 I don't know that we're as aggressive and organized as we could be.

Speaker 38 And I want to emphasize the word aggressive, the idea that we can go out and compete at all levels of government, that we can go out and assert our understanding of history backed by facts.

Speaker 38 We should be doing more of that, especially when you look kind of across the board when it comes to people who are doing well in medicine or in business, you know, where there's been a real career risk for speaking out and for being assertive.

Speaker 38 We can do more now. And we should use the leverage gained through two years of genocide, the most expensive access to leverage I can imagine, to push much harder politically.

Speaker 37 Yeah, that's a very good point. I'm also wondering how well you think the Palestinian organizing groups and spaces, how well integrated are they into other activist issue areas?

Speaker 38 Yeah, I think this is where when I was in college, I didn't know the word intersectionality.

Speaker 38 That wasn't a concept that really was one that people thought about, you know, you would host an event and you would invite your friends, some of whom would be in the black students group, some some of whom would be in the queer students' group, and just regular left groups.

Speaker 38 But today, I'd say that activists have a much more complete sense of how you almost have a social quilt and a compression on one part of it will impact everything else that's related to it.

Speaker 38 And we're all interrelated in that way. I'd say that the most potent discussions around Palestine are coming from left organizing groups, not exactly Palestinian organizing groups.

Speaker 38 I think if I could offer gentle criticism of Palestine organizers, there's been too much, and you saw this with uncommitted, too much effort to ingratiate yourselves to the existing power apparatus to ask for a seat at the table when

Speaker 38 it's somebody like Zaran Mamdani, again, who demanded a seat at the table through an unrelenting focus on the issues, achieved access to a platform. that nobody wanted to cede.

Speaker 38 And I don't think that following the rules exactly or being friendly about accessing platforms within the Democratic Party is going to yield a huge benefit to Palestinian Americans or people here.

Speaker 38 I'd say the most principled organizing is the organizing that's going to win. And today that comes from non-Palestinian groups.
And I'm okay with that.

Speaker 38 I don't really think it matters if the best argument is coming from somebody whose family comes from South Asia through Uganda or somebody whose family emerges from, you know, the

Speaker 38 Balato refugee camp. That doesn't really matter to me.
I think just to focus on the principles is the most important thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right, right. I think we're definitely seeing more of an acceptance of that.

Speaker 37 I agree with the limitations that you referenced.

Speaker 37 I also sometimes do reflect on how matched the discussion is in the United States with the discussion in historic Palestine and what activists can do to kind of bridge some gaps that might emerge.

Speaker 37 But of course, understanding that we do exist in a different political reality and we obviously will develop different views as a result of that.

Speaker 38 I agree. And look, I mean, nobody needs to be apologetic about inhabiting a different reality.

Speaker 38 You know, we don't need to defer to a leadership which is divided in Palestine, a PLO that won't talk to itself.

Speaker 2 And there are structural reasons for that, right?

Speaker 38 I mean, the Israelis and the Americans have done a very effective job in splintering Palestinian leadership. And I think we need to think extremely locally.

Speaker 38 There are issues that matter to my community in West Philadelphia, bigger, you know, bigger issues across Pennsylvania that impact my life, that impact my life as a father of three little girls.

Speaker 38 So I think being a member of a community and focusing again relentlessly on the principles and the facts that we've known all along is critical to pushing the conversation on Palestine forward.

Speaker 38 And practically today, for me, that means an arms embargo. It means sanctions.
It means a cultural boycott. And it means those things unapologetically.

Speaker 38 Again, those are principled positions that I can take as an American citizen, a citizen of a country which has underwritten genocide, has underwritten apartheid for decades.

Speaker 37 Yep, I think I agree with that analysis. As the author, which we didn't mention at the beginning, as the author, one of the co-authors of After Zionism with Anthony Lewinstein,

Speaker 37 I'm going to pose a difficult question for you.

Speaker 2 No, I'm just joking.

Speaker 37 Not that you have to answer it fully, but where do you think we go from here? Where do you think the pro-Palestine movement goes from here?

Speaker 37 And if you can reflect in your answer on where we've stalled as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 38 So I used to believe in one state for everybody with equal rights. Today, I think the writing is on the wall for the Palestinians in Palestine.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is proceeding.

Speaker 2 The fact that the Ghaza has been utterly destroyed, utterly destroyed.

Speaker 38 There are no universities, no schools, no really functioning hospitals. The basic infrastructure required for the maintenance of life doesn't exist there anymore.
That's part of why it's a genocide.

Speaker 38 We've got to take that reality into account. The Palestinians in Ghaza, the Palestinians in Palestine generally have the right to pursue life.
They have a right to an education.

Speaker 38 They have a right to self-actualization. And many of them, when they can, they're going to leave.
That's the ethnic cleansing program. That's the idea behind the mass destruction of Palestine.

Speaker 38 The Israelis have succeeded in that regard, I would say. We need to be mindful of that.
We need to be aware of that.

Speaker 38 So what I think will happen ultimately is that you'll end up with some rump community of Palestinians in Palestine who are eventually, when an arms embargo is enacted, and I hope it's within our lifetimes, when the sanctions are enacted, when Israel is forced to become a normal country with equal rights for all, will continue to exist in that space.

Speaker 38 I don't know, you know, I can't predict, nobody can really predict with certainty what's going to happen, but the kinds of pressure required to cause Israel to become a de-radicalized normal society will take time to produce.

Speaker 38 And in the interim, the writing is on the wall for the Palestinians in Palestine. And I think that's the saddest, for me, part of all of this.

Speaker 38 The continuity of Palestinian life in Palestine is not guaranteed. You know,

Speaker 38 the overwhelming force of the state exists in one place, and that's in Israel.

Speaker 37 Yeah, that's why I, when a lot of people talk positively about the developments of the the past two years, of course, you want to feel hope.

Speaker 37 You want to highlight how the discussion has changed here in America, how politics is moving forward. You want to have some pathway.
But we never were able to prevent that genocide.

Speaker 37 Nothing we did in any avenue. All of us have different positionalities, engaged with different actors.

Speaker 2 None of it.

Speaker 37 actually stopped that. And that is a very hard pill to swallow.

Speaker 37 I hope, I've always been hoping, that at least that will allow us to get to the place of self-reflection about what radical solutions look like in the aftermath of this kind of disaster.

Speaker 37 And yeah, I hope that

Speaker 37 that's where we go from here on my end. Yeah, thank you so much, Ahmad.
This has been a really enriching discussion.

Speaker 37 And I think that the listeners will benefit from this

Speaker 37 overarching view of pro-Palestine activism and

Speaker 37 its intersections with everything we're seeing unfold. So thank you so much again.

Speaker 38 Thank you, Donna. It's been a huge pleasure.

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Speaker 3 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 5 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 6 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 7 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 8 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 11 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 12 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 13 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 10 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 2 Two weeks ago, four days before Halloween, former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson hosted the 27-year-old white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes on Tucker's popular internet show.

Speaker 2 Two weeks later, this interview has over 6 million views on YouTube, over half a million on Rumble,

Speaker 2 and 18 million alleged views on X the Everything app, with over 100,000 likes and 20,000 retweets.

Speaker 2 Plus, the unknown number of views from podcasting platforms like Apple or Spotify, on which Tucker Carlson's show also airs.

Speaker 2 This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 2 Throughout the almost entirely friendly two-hour interview, Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson discussed Nick's libertarian origin story, his conversion to Trump's bombastic style of populism, getting a show on the right-side broadcast network as a teenager after a viral college debate, how the Daily Wire initially befriended, then tried to quash, his early political career, and how that pushed Nick to adopt a far-right adversarial stance against mainstream conservatism and the gatekeepers of the conservative establishment, which Nick identified as the quote-unquote Zionist Jews like Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, and Dennis Prager.

Speaker 2 Here's Nick and Tucker.

Speaker 40 It was these the guys that were really controlling the media apparatus that seemed to me to be the biggest impediment.

Speaker 2 Fox?

Speaker 39 Fox is not a Jewish business, though.

Speaker 2 Well, Rupert Murdoch is an ally of Netanyahu, so he's aligned. Yeah.

Speaker 40 And he owns the whole News Corp empire.

Speaker 2 So, and yeah, he's certainly a part of it also.

Speaker 39 I mean, Dave Rubin, though, does he matter?

Speaker 2 No, no, not really. Right.
I mean, Dave Rubin is like, I don't know. Do people watch Dave Rubin?

Speaker 38 They did back then.

Speaker 40 I mean, because you got to consider they were kind of like the ascendant new media, you know?

Speaker 42 They represented the next big thing.

Speaker 39 I mean, and Ben Shapiro seems irrelevant to me now.

Speaker 2 Now, but back then, for the first time. No, I guess that's true.

Speaker 39 So maybe you won.

Speaker 2 Oh, certainly. Tucker tried to advise Fuentes to focus more of his ire on Israel's influence on American politics.
as a foreign policy issue and not quote-unquote blood guilt based on ethnicity.

Speaker 2 While Fuentes defended the necessity of his rhetoric against what he called the quote-unquote unique issue of quote-unquote organized Jewry that promotes a form of identity politics linking Israel to quote Jewishness as an ethnicity, identity and religion unquote.

Speaker 2 which makes most culturally Jewish people incompatible with America-first patriotism.

Speaker 2 This is basic dual loyalty anti-Semitism, which Nick continued to outline by framing Jewish people as a historically stateless people that resist assimilation and put their own interests above those of whichever non-Jewish majority country they currently reside, a tension which the existence of Israel now heightens.

Speaker 40 No other country has a strong identity like that. This religious blood and soil conviction, this history of being in the diaspora, stateless, wandering, persecuted,

Speaker 42 and in particular,

Speaker 40 the historic animosity between the Jewish people and the Europeans. They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the temple.

Speaker 40 That's why Eric Weinstein goes to the Arch of Titus and gives it the finger and takes a picture.

Speaker 40 We don't think like that as Americans and white people. We don't think about the Roman Empire in 2,000 years ago.
They do.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Americans and Christians would never think about Czechs notes. The Roman Empire or the events of 2,000 years ago.
Sure, Nick.

Speaker 2 Obviously, to many people listening to this show, Fuentes has been a known anti-Semitic streamer troll for nearly 10 years. And Tucker himself knows this.

Speaker 2 The main pushback Tucker gave Nick was on why Nick attacked other figures on the far right who were possible allies of the America First Movement and America First Foreign Policy, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.E.

Speaker 2 Vance, Joe Kent, and Tucker himself. Why attack them?

Speaker 43 Well, in short, they attacked me first.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but like, who cares? Well, let's take Joe Kent. I mean, you attack me constantly.

Speaker 2 Tucker also advocated framing that does not allow what he believes to be popular America first ideas, like opposition to foreign influence and dual citizenship, to get subverted by leaning into accusations of hate and racial prejudice, which during the interview, Fuentes nominally agreed with.

Speaker 39 Some of them, I'm sorry to be a conspiracy nut.

Speaker 39 I really try not to be a conspiracy nut because it's embarrassing, you know, but after January 6th and just finding out the number of FBI personnel in the crowd, it's like, and I've just seen this, David Duke is a great example.

Speaker 2 Some of these are the. Charlottesville rally

Speaker 2 had a bunch of feds there being like, we're white supremacists. We hate the blacks.
You know, using the N-word, whatever. You know, it's like, that's not real.

Speaker 39 Like, there is some of that going on, don't you think?

Speaker 40 I think that, um, I think that there's a lot of sincere people for sure.

Speaker 2 I are. I completely agree.

Speaker 40 You know, and they're just numbskulls.

Speaker 2 For some reason, Nick neglected to mention that he, in fact, was at Charlottesville, and the backlash to the Unite the Right rally forced him to drop out of college and propelled his streaming career.

Speaker 2 Throughout this whole interview, it mostly felt like Tucker was trying to act as a mentor figure to Fuentes, advising him to let go of past beefs and providing a sort of clean slate to allow Nick to present his political views in a more streamlined manner, as simply anti-Israel as an extension of America first.

Speaker 2 During the interview, Tucker himself explained his motives for inviting Fuentes on the show.

Speaker 39 Do you hope that people who want to learn what's happening and who you are will watch the whole thing?

Speaker 39 It's probably a naive hope that it won't be reduced to whatever you're saying something naughty and me laughing and see they're both Nazis. I mean, you know, that's going to happen, of course.

Speaker 39 But I'm willing to take that risk because I just think it's important to know you're clearly ascendant. You're enormously talented.

Speaker 2 You're more talented than I am, for sure, as a talker.

Speaker 39 So, and they've, you know, there have been a lot of attempts to silence you and it hasn't worked. So my calculation, I'll just be as blunt as I can be.
It's like,

Speaker 39 do I want to have Fuentes on? Everybody's going to be like, you, but you're a Nazi just like Fuentes.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 But then I'm like, I don't think Fuentes is going away.

Speaker 39 Ben Shapiro tried to like strangle him in the crib in college

Speaker 39 and now he's bigger than ever. So it probably would just be worth hearing what Nick Fuentes thinks.
I just want to be transparent about my motives here.

Speaker 2 And I think Tucker is right in calling Fuentes ascendant. We'll talk more about that at the end of this episode.

Speaker 2 For the last 30 minutes of this interview, the two discussed pornography, alcohol, and drugs as ruining America's young men through reality distortion, and I had a whole segment on Nick Fuentes explaining to a confused Tucker Carlson the concept of internet pornography, which unfortunately I had to cut for time.

Speaker 2 But if there's enough demand for this on Blue Sky or Reddit, maybe I can make a bonus episode next week.

Speaker 2 Rather than focusing on the substance of this interview and Tucker's motivation, a lot of mainstream reporting has just highlighted a few controversial sound bites, like an offhand semi-troll comment about how Fuentes admires Stalin.

Speaker 2 But this interview did send shockwaves through the American conservative ecosystem, of which Fuentes was always held at a very

Speaker 2 long arm's length away. In the immediate wake of the interview, references to Tucker were curiously removed from the Heritage Foundation's donor page in partnership with the Tucker Carlson Network.

Speaker 2 On October 30th, Heritage President Kevin Roberts released a video defending Tucker, captioned, There has been speculation that Heritage is distancing itself from Tucker Carlson over the past 24 hours.

Speaker 2 I want to put that to rest right now.

Speaker 44 Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.

Speaker 44 The Heritage Foundation didn't become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians.

Speaker 40 And we won't start doing that now.

Speaker 44 We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda.

Speaker 44 That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.

Speaker 44 Their attempt to cancel him will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.

Speaker 44 I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer either.
When we disagree with a person's thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate.

Speaker 44 And we have seen success in this approach, as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the left.

Speaker 2 Roberts primarily framed this as an issue of cancellation and included some pretty sketchy lines in that video.

Speaker 2 Roberts also said that heritage doesn't, quote, take direction from members or donors, unquote. This video was polarizing to say the least.

Speaker 2 Nick Fuentes fans, who are called groipers, and America First Nationalists rejoiced and claimed victory, while many GOP establishment figures, Jewish Republicans, and many Heritage employees were left bamboozled.

Speaker 2 The New York Post published internal heritage group chats, with staff members writing that this was, quote, the most embarrassed I've ever been to be a heritage employee. It's not close.

Speaker 2 And, quote, I'm disgusted by this and don't understand how this premeditated and orchestrated response could come out of one of the biggest think tanks in the world. Unquote.

Speaker 2 More texts read, quote, saying we can't cancel someone is safe space awokeism,

Speaker 2 and quote, if we are labeled on the same side as Nick Fuentes, then we deserve to lose.

Speaker 2 Talking with some of the interns, I think that there is a growing number of them who actually agree with Fuentes' views.

Speaker 2 Now, beyond employee dissent, sources close to Heritage told the New York Post that the think tank has been quote-unquote hemorrhaging evangelical Christian and Jewish donors.

Speaker 2 David Bernstein, the author of Woke Antisemitism and a former member of the task force at Heritage called Project Esther, a national strategy to combat antisemitism, told the New York Post on November 3rd that he had resigned from his position over Kevin Roberts' remarks, citing the language of a venomous coalition aligned against Tucker.

Speaker 2 To quote Jewish Insider, quote, Rabbi Yaakov Menkin, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told Jewish Insider that Roberts' message, quote, was the most tone-deaf in both its content and timing that I've ever heard from a major Washington organization on any political side, unquote.

Speaker 2 Mencken resigned from Heritage's Project Esther, the group's anti-Semitism initiative, last week in response to Robert's video message defending Carlson.

Speaker 2 Along with Mencken and Coalition for Jewish Voices, several other groups have also publicly disaffiliated from Heritage's anti-Semitism task force, including the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Young Jewish Conservatives.

Speaker 2 ⁇

Speaker 2 On Halloween, Heritage President Kevin Roberts made a post summarizing a small sampling of Fuentes's most racist, anti-Semitic, and pro-Hitler views and said, quote, our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place.

Speaker 2 Join us, not to cancel, but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident, as I am, that our best ideas at the heart of Western civilization will prevail.

Speaker 2 For those, especially young men, who are enticed by Fuentes and his acolytes online, there is a better way.

Speaker 2 Roberts has repeatedly said that attempting to cancel Fuentes would only grow his audience.

Speaker 2 As opposed to whatever Roberts is doing by playing footsies with Tucker and Fuentes, resulting in multiple news stories a day, name-dropping Fuentes and massively raising his public profile.

Speaker 46 It would not invite him to a heritage event or to my show, but the point is we have to find other avenues to engage the ridiculous ideas that he's saying rather than, as many people have called for online, that you can just shun him, that you can just ignore him, and that the problem goes away.

Speaker 46 My motivation for posting that video yesterday, especially looking ahead towards 2026 and 2028, is that we have to engage those issues if we want to build a movement.

Speaker 46 I understand that particularly for our Jewish friends who ought to be upset about Twintess's comments about anti-Semitism, that he's just anathema. I agree with that as well.

Speaker 46 But if we're going to actually correct the scourge of anti-Semitism, we've got to go convince those unfortunately millions of young men men who find that appealing.

Speaker 46 I do believe that they're convincible. I believe that people like you, hopefully people like us at Heritage, and even people like Tucker, might be able to play a role in that.

Speaker 2 Following backlash to Kevin Roberts' initial statement, Roberts chief of staff, Ryan Newhouse, resigned from Heritage after being reassigned as a senior advisor in housing policy, a position source has told New York Post was the quote-unquote Siberia of Heritage.

Speaker 2 Before resigning, Newhouse reposted messages defending Roberts' Robert's video, including a post advocating that quote-unquote virtue-signaling employees at the Heritage Foundation should resign if they're so outraged by Robert's statement.

Speaker 2 During Halloween weekend, lawyer Mark Goldfetter resigned from the Heritage-affiliated National Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, writing on an XThe Everything app, I cannot serve under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating.

Speaker 2 On November 1st, Princeton University professor Robert P.

Speaker 2 George, member of the Heritage Board of Trustees, who allegedly has been attempting to oust Roberts as the head of the foundation in the wake of this controversy, posted on X The Everything app: quote, American conservatism today faces a challenge.

Speaker 2 That challenge comes from those who reject our commitment to inherent and equal human dignity.

Speaker 2 They are seeking acceptance in the conservative movement and its institutions, and they do so with the ultimate objective of transforming them by undermining that commitment.

Speaker 2 I cannot accept the idea that we have no enemies to the right. The white supremacists, anti-Semites, the eugenicists, bigots must not be welcome into our movement or treated as normal or acceptable.

Speaker 2 Unquote. You sure about that, Robert P.
George? This conservative commitment to inherent and equal human dignity? You sure about that? You sure about that?

Speaker 2 Surely the American conservatives aren't restricting people's health care and pushing them off food stamps and kidnapping and uprooting families and sending them to far-off countries.

Speaker 2 Seems like all those things would breach this commitment to inherent and equal human dignity.

Speaker 2 I never thought the leopards would eat my face, Saab's Heritage Board of Trustees member who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

Speaker 2 We'll be right back after these ads.

Speaker 2 The conservative infighting intensified when, on November 3rd, Monday morning, Ben Shapiro released a 40-minute video captioned: No to the groipers, no to cowards like a Tucker Carlson who normalize their trash, no to those who champion them, no to demoralization, no to bigotry and anti-meritocratic horseshit, no to anti-Americanism, no.

Speaker 16 That fragmentation is being caused purposefully by a splinter faction of people led by a young man named Nick Fuentes. They call themselves the Groupers.
They are white supremacists.

Speaker 16 They hate women, Jews, Hindus, many types of Christians, brown people of a wide variety of backgrounds, blacks, America's foreign policy, and America's Constitution. They admire Hitler and Stalin.

Speaker 16 And that splinter faction is now being facilitated and normalized within the mainstream Republican Party.

Speaker 16 The main agents in that normalization is Tucker Carlson, who is an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor, and a terrible friend.

Speaker 16 And Tucker Carlson last week was aided, abetted, celebrated for normalizing Nazism within the Republican Party by the mainstay organization of the traditional right, the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 2 Shapiro then had to preface his comments by saying, quote, this is not about free speech or cancellation, and quote, Criticisms of bad speech is in fact just a form of free speech, unquote, and went on this lengthy diatribe to explain how what he's doing isn't cancellation, which Ben defined as banning people from social media and publishing platforms, what would be more accurately described as deplatforming as opposed to like social cancellation, which is not something that Ben is calling for.

Speaker 2 Ben is not calling for deplatforming.

Speaker 16 It is not cancellation to draw moral lines between viewpoints. In fact, we used to call that one of the key aspects of conservatism.

Speaker 16 It is not cancellation to refuse to signal boost Hitler's supporters like Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 16 It is not cancellation to criticize Tucker Carlson for rhetorically fluffing Nick Fuentes and other anti-American crackpots.

Speaker 16 It's not cancellation if you urge others to stop promoting those who rhetorically fluff Nazi apologists. Those are all elements of free speech.

Speaker 16 And anyone who says differently is lying to you and lying for the most cynical reasons to misdirect from their own defense of those Nazi apologists and their promoters.

Speaker 16 The issue here isn't that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last last week. He has every right to do that, of course.

Speaker 16 The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Flantes, and that the Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance.

Speaker 16 Those who criticize both Tucker and Heritage aren't canceling, they are quite properly drawing a moral line.

Speaker 16 Now, from Tucker Carlson's interview, you might have gathered that Flintes has some borderline views on race, a peculiar obsession with what he calls organized Jewry, and a rather sad relationship with the female sex.

Speaker 16 But probably you came away thinking that for the most part, Fuentes lives on the radical edge of normality.

Speaker 16 You think that if you watched the interview, because Tucker Carlson decided that it was important not only to host Fuentes, but to smooth over his views, water them down, and make them far more palatable to a normal audience.

Speaker 2 Ben proceeded to do a 10-minute Nick Fuentes clip show, playing a select collection of some of the most offensive things Nick has said to Camera, and then blamed the left for creating the conditions that let this hatred emerge, framing Fuentes as the dialectical inverse of the hyper-woke id poll left.

Speaker 16 And there's no doubt that Nick Fuentes has a lot of play these days.

Speaker 16 That's because the left, by moving into a politics of anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-male identitarianism, created its bizarro mirror image, a white pseudo-Christian incel identitarian movement dedicated to destroying the institutions of this country and replacing Americanism with something else.

Speaker 16 Nick Fuentes' philosophy is not fully formed. It's an incoherent stew of malignity.

Speaker 2 The left did not create Nick Fuentes. He is the direct product of the right-wing content ecosystem that Shapiro himself trailblazed.

Speaker 2 It's been Shapiro, but taken even further with post-ironic Gen Z brain rot.

Speaker 2 Even if Fuentes himself has been banned from many of the big tent conservative events, His ideas still festered, spread under the radar, and influenced the further radicalization of other right-wing commentators so that they could better compete with Fuentes.

Speaker 2 Tucker himself was a part of this.

Speaker 2 The 2019 quote-unquote Grouper War, in which Nick Fuentes deployed his fans to disrupt turning point USA QA events with leading questions, pressured Charlie Kirk to adopt viewpoints further and further to the right, specifically on race and immigration.

Speaker 2 And now the white great replacement is basically a mainstream conservative viewpoint. And Fuentes played a huge part in that.
This is in fact your problem, Ben.

Speaker 2 For the rest of this 40-minute video, Shapiro directed his attention to Tucker Carlson, criticizing his defense of Russia and multipolar views, Tucker's pro-dictator comments, populist criticism of Trump, and sort of dodgy anti-Israel statements.

Speaker 2 Shapiro highlighted comments Tucker made during the Fuentes interview, where he lampooned high-profile Republicans and neocons who have been quote-unquote seized by the pro-Israel quote-unquote brain virus, with Tucker claiming that he dislikes Christian Zionists, quote, more than anybody, unquote, because it's Christian heresy.

Speaker 2 Shapiro described the function of Tucker's current online platform as a safe space to bring on conspiracy theorists, fringe figures, alternative historians, and those just outside the Overton window to then, quote-unquote, gloss them, as Shapiro says.

Speaker 2 It's not about building a radicalization pipeline out of the mainstream, but bringing the actual radical ideas to the mainstream.

Speaker 16 Tucker Carlson acts as an ideological launderer for other people's evils.

Speaker 16 Tucker Carlson says many inflammatory things, always buying back just enough of it to appear as though he's not saying what he's clearly saying. He's a master of gaslighting.

Speaker 16 Tucker Carlson, for for example, would never say out loud what Nick Fuentes does. He wouldn't say the things many of his guests say.
And so instead, he acts as an ideological launderer.

Speaker 16 He takes other people's hideous ideas, he softens them, he treats them with love and care, and then he provides them with a massive signal boost.

Speaker 16 He isn't merely talking to people in good faith, of course. He's promoting certain people and ideas and attacking others.
This is how Tucker Carlson's ideological laundering works.

Speaker 16 You bring your dirty, ugly ideologies to Tucker Carlson's rhetorical car wash.

Speaker 16 He mixes it with some of the vestigial respect Americans have for him from his Fox News days, and voila, hideous ideas suddenly become mainstream.

Speaker 16 And then, of course, Tucker denies he said anything controversial at all. He was just asking questions.
He was just interviewing people. You don't want him to cancel people, do you?

Speaker 2 Ben continued to complain about Tucker platforming Candace Owens and her increasingly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Speaker 2 Except, remember, it was your company that gave Candace a huge platform after she left Turning Point and Prague or U. Is she also a consequence of the woke left like Fuentes is?

Speaker 2 Shapiro, the call is coming from inside your own company.

Speaker 2 To further demonstrate how much of this stuff is downstream from Shapiro, it's actually because of Candace that Fuentes even went on Tucker's show at all.

Speaker 2 Candace had Fuentes on her show a few months prior. And when she went on Tucker's show, she told him how great Fuentes is and argued in his defense.

Speaker 2 As for Heritage, Ben acknowledged his long-standing positive relationship with the Heritage Foundation, working with him since he was just 17 years old, and recently had Kevin Roberts on his show to promote Roberts' latest book.

Speaker 16 Which is why what Kevin Roberts did last week is tragic and awful. He put out a statement that Heritage Foundation didn't just stand by Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 16 Kevin instead said openly and repeatedly that Tucker Carlson can do nothing ever that will sever his relationship with the conservative movement.

Speaker 16 He said that after and in defense of Tucker's glossing of Hitler defender Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 16 And he added that only members of the globalist class, direct quote, a venomous coalition, direct quote, subject to the dictates of someone else's agenda, direct quote, oppose Heritage's ongoing relationship with Tucker Carlson, which means that according to Kevin Roberts, apparently, anyone opposing the ongoing mainstreaming of Tucker Carlson is acting on behalf of a foreign power.

Speaker 16 Kevin's statement is a betrayal of the Heritage Foundation's history and principles, which is presumably why both Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes loved it.

Speaker 2 Shapiro still expressed the need for an organization like Heritage that focuses on ideas over personal loyalty to grifters and expressed hope that Heritage could recover from this controversy and speak out against the quote-unquote moral rot that threatens our future.

Speaker 2 But if not, conservatives may need to look for leadership elsewhere. And the cause of this moral rot? Political horseshoe theory that is destroying both parties.
With the GOP being eaten by radicals.

Speaker 16 Like the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is being eaten by its radicals. Many in the political class are too cowardly to stand up.

Speaker 16 Apparently, they're willing to play footsie with Groupers and Hug Tucker Carlson out of fear of somehow losing support. They've been bamboozled by the lies of the X algorithm and the TikTok metrics.

Speaker 16 The left followed its radicals to electoral hell. Apparently, many on the right wish to do the same.
Forget the morality then for just a moment. Let's be pragmatic.
Here is the thing.

Speaker 16 Americans hate Nick Fuentes' philosophy. They think it's trash.
Republicans, by the polling, think it's trash. Independents think it's trash.
Democrats think it's trash. And here's the other thing.

Speaker 16 Americans hate Tucker Carlson's laundered anti-Americanism. Republicans think it's trash.
Independents think it's trash. Democrats think it's trash.

Speaker 16 Americans are not pro-segregation, pro-rape, anti-woman, pro-child marriage, anti-black, anti-Jew, anti-Indian, anti-Latino, anti-Constitution, pro-Hitler nutjobs like Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 2 You might want to tell that to, I don't know, Stephen Miller, Ben, and like maybe half your employees.

Speaker 2 Here's Matt Walsh's own description for his most recent Daily Wire podcast episode, quote, Somali tribal conflict has made its way into multiple American states.

Speaker 2 A man is arrested for shouting, F the Jews, at Dave Portnoy. Meanwhile, Antifa riots with no consequence.
White liberal radio host kisses Jasmine Crockett's feet. Unquote.

Speaker 2 Ben, the call is coming from inside the Daily Wire house.

Speaker 16 If Republicans decide to cower before the likes of neo-Nazis and their propagandizers, they deserve to lose. And they will lose.
Neo-Nazis and their propagandizers are not Republicans.

Speaker 16 They are not America first. They are not MAGA.
They sure as hell aren't conservative.

Speaker 2 These people aren't to my right.

Speaker 16 They are not attached in any way to the fundamental principles of conservatism.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry, Ben, but they are. They are in the MAGA White House.
They are on TV, on Fox News. They're getting more views than you are on TikTok and fucking Rumble.

Speaker 2 Many have either worked for you or still work for you. And you've been completely fine with all of that, as long as they've been sufficiently pro-Israel.

Speaker 2 Here's a Ben Shapiro tweet from September 17th, 2015.

Speaker 2 Ann Coulter tweets, Read Jews? Awful, nonsensical. Ann Coulter is also super pro-Israel and has always been, so I won't lose sleep.

Speaker 2 I never thought the leopards would eat my face, sobs conservative podcaster who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

Speaker 2 The same day Shapiro released this 40-minute video, Matt Walsh posted, quote, Pat Buchanan didn't just have good ideas. He was right about almost everything.

Speaker 2 He's the most vindicated political figure of our lifetime. Unquote.
If you want a fun little 10-minute side quest, Google Pat Buchanan Nazi, Pat Buchanan Anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 Every few months, these right-wing ghouls get a harsh reminder of the world that they have conjured into being.

Speaker 2 Remember the H-1B visa debacle earlier this year with Elon Musk and Ramaswamy upset that all of their racist fans don't want to bring in immigrant workers after Elon funded a campaign about how immigrants are stealing Americans' jobs?

Speaker 2 As writer John Gans put it, quote, the GOP civil war is between the vanilla fascists and the National Socialists, unquote.

Speaker 2 At the Republican Jewish Coalition 40th Anniversary Summit, Congressman Randy Fine proudly announced that he canceled an upcoming event with Heritage.

Speaker 50 I was supposed to do an event with Heritage next week. I think on Wednesday.
They don't know what I'm about to tell you. Right now we're canceling it.

Speaker 50 They will have no future in my office and I will be calling on all of my colleagues on the Republican side to do the same.

Speaker 50 If those who support Tucker Tucker Carlson want to see a venomous coalition, all they need to do is go look in the mirror.

Speaker 2 During that same speech, he boasted about this.

Speaker 50 I've called for Zoran Mandami to be deported.

Speaker 46 The only thing I want to see him running for is his gate at JFK on the deportation flight to Uganda.

Speaker 2 First they came for the communists, Randy.

Speaker 2 I never thought the leopards would eat my face, sobs a Florida congressman with Twitter pronouns listed as Hebrew slash hammer, who's a member of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

Speaker 2 During the opening to the Republican Jewish Coalition event, Ted Cruz addressed this moment of fracture within the establishment right as a quote-unquote time of choosing.

Speaker 2 and said that in the past six months, he's quote, seen more anti-Semitism on the right than I had in my entire life.

Speaker 2 This is a poison, and I believe we are facing an existential crisis in our party and our country. Unquote.
Cruz later shared a free press article on his comments.

Speaker 2 The CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, told Jewish Insider that he is, quote, appalled, offended, and disgusted that Kevin Roberts and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and that there would be a, quote, reassessment of our relationship with heritage in light of this, unquote.

Speaker 2 On November 3rd, Missouri Senator and J6 supporter Josh Hawley denounced Fuentes' rhetoric as anti-Semitic, telling Jewish Insider, quote, that's not who we are as Republicans, as conservatives.

Speaker 2 The question for us as conservatives is, are those views going to define who we are? I think we need to say no, as a conservative, but also as a Christian.

Speaker 2 There is no place for anti-Semitic hatred, tropes, any of that stuff. Do we really want to be a part of what we've seen happen on college campuses? Unquote.

Speaker 2 Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the co-chair of the Senate Anti-Semitism Task Force, told a Jewish Insider that he was, quote, a little surprised that Heritage jumped out in support of Carlson and Nick Fuentes to say, hey, we want them in our camp.

Speaker 2 After the statements that were made, Heritage could have just sat back and not said anything, but instead they chose to jump out on their side. I don't get that.
Unquote.

Speaker 2 Like Ben Shapiro and Josh Hawley, James Lankford related this to a perceived bipartisan crisis. Quote, the left has seen an implosion of their party based on anti-Semitism rising in their party.

Speaker 2 I don't want to see the same thing happen on the right. What I've tried to be very clear on is that the new right is now quoting an old wrong, unquote.

Speaker 2 Senator Rick Scott of Florida basically said the same thing, quote, the Democrat Party, we already have a party that's for anti-Semitism and is against Israel.

Speaker 2 The Republican Party is going to stand for Israel and we're going to stand against anti-Semitism. I don't think there's any question, unquote, as if the Democrat Party is against Israel.

Speaker 2 And it's astonishing to watch all of these senators cope with the results of years of watering down accusations of anti-Semitism to simply reflect any criticism of Israel as they're now facing a massive resurgence of genuine anti-Semitism from known anti-Semitic actors on the right.

Speaker 2 Turns out it's way easier to police campus anti-genocide protests than deal with the anti-Semitism spread on the massive platforms of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson. But not all senators are worried.

Speaker 2 Lindsey Graham, while speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition, was less worried about Tucker, Fuentes, and the future of the party.

Speaker 48 So I just want to say I feel good about the Republican Party. I feel good about where we're going as a nation.
We're killing all the right people, we're cutting your taxes.

Speaker 48 Trump is my favorite president. We've run out of bombs.
We didn't run out of bombs in World War II.

Speaker 48 So to those who worry about these stupid interviews and far-off places, don't worry.

Speaker 51 The Republican Party has figured it out when it comes to Israel.

Speaker 2 We're killing all the right people here at the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. Surely the leopards will never eat my or my friends' faces.

Speaker 2 On the night of November 3rd, Heritage President Kevin Roberts gave a speech at Hillsdale College on anti-Semitism and cancel culture.

Speaker 2 He first talked for two minutes about why he and Heritage will continue to oppose cancellation and the importance of loyalty toward friends, and defended his previous statement by reiterating that if you have a problem with someone's quote content, issues, or ideas, then by all means, go debate them, unquote.

Speaker 2 But then he admitted that his mistake, which was made, quote unquote, with the best intentions, was focusing on the legitimate problem of cancellation over other problems like anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 The Roberts then immediately justified his rhetoric as an attempt to reach out to the quote-unquote several million young men on the quote-unquote far fringes of the right who are increasingly anti-Semitic.

Speaker 45 And our motivation at Heritage for making that statement was to begin appealing even more than we have to those largely disaffected young men who are looking for belonging and identity by following the wrong people.

Speaker 2 This pseudo-apology continues to frame this primarily as an issue of cancellation. Who is asking to cancel Tucker?

Speaker 2 Roberts acts as if there is nothing in between a lifelong endorsement and total cancellation.

Speaker 2 After Roberts' comments at Hillsdale College, another member of the Heritage Antisemitism Task Force, attorney Ian Spear, announced that he was leaving Heritage and posted a statement calling Roberts' Hillsdale College speech a, quote, strategic non-apology that doubles down on loyalty to Tucker Carlson, muses about welcoming groipers and the groiper curious into the movement, and continues to gaslight everyone about cancellation when that clearly isn't the issue, unquote.

Speaker 2 That same day, Tuesday, November 4th, Chris Demuth, a Heritage Distinguished Fellow, also confirmed his resignation.

Speaker 2 And an email leaked from the co-chairs of the Heritage-affiliated National Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, sent to task force members with a list of demands to Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

Speaker 2 Demands including that he delete his initial video, apologize to Jews and Christians who, quote, believe that Israel has a special role to play both biblically and politically, unquote, a demand to condemn but not cancel Tucker Carlson's anti-Semitic content and statements, and host Shabbat dinners for the Heritage interns and junior staff.

Speaker 2 To quote directly from this leaked email addressing Roberts, quote, you pointed out repeatedly that we face a challenge in reaching disenfranchised young men who are caught in the spells of Nick Fuentes and others.

Speaker 2 To address this issue specifically, we recommend hiring a visiting fellow, one who shares mainstream conservative views on Israel, Jews, and Christian Zionists, who would help identify strategies and tools to win Gen Z and beyond.

Speaker 2 It is clear that there is an internal battle within the conservative movement over who is to be included.

Speaker 2 The division between no enemy to the right versus a moral conservatism demands our attention, a conference that provides some guidelines to the movement on how to best keep unity without needing to include the worst among us, unquote.

Speaker 2 Two days later, the National Task Force decided to break ties with the Heritage Foundation, writing in an email that it was, quote, important for us to continue the work of the task force outside the Heritage Foundation for a season, unquote.

Speaker 2 Writing that this whole incident, quote, exposed a serious problem within the conservative movement, unquote. It's been like this for a long time.

Speaker 2 They've just been so focused on campus activists protesting the Palestinian genocide that they've missed the festering anti-Semitism spreading across the right.

Speaker 2 Quote, the National Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism will also now expand our work to fight the rising scourge of anti-Semitism on the right, beyond our previous work combating the pro-Hamas movement on the left, unquote.

Speaker 2 On November 18th, the task force will be hosting a conference in Washington on, quote, exposing and countering extremism and anti-Semitism on the right, in partnership with the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel.

Speaker 2 It could happen here, we'll return after these messages.

Speaker 2 At this point, Heritage went into complete damage control.

Speaker 2 Roberts apologized during a Heritage All-Hands meeting last Wednesday, November 5th, quote, I made a mistake and I let you down, and I let down this institution, period, full stop, stop. ⁇

Speaker 2 Roberts claimed that it was the since resigned chief of staff, Ryan Newhouse, who wrote the script for Roberts' initial video entirely himself and lied about the script being approved by a handful of colleagues.

Speaker 2 Roberts called the use of the phrase a venomous coalition a quote-unquote terrible choice of words.

Speaker 2 The Washington Free Beacon reported that Roberts said he was willing to resign but felt a quote-unquote moral obligation to repair the situation and had told the Heritage Foundation Board of Directors, quote, I made the mess, let me clean it up, unquote.

Speaker 2 During the all-hands meeting, Roberts explained that the video came to be because Heritage was under pressure to make a statement that Carlson was, quote, no longer part of the conservative movement, unquote.

Speaker 2 Later in this meeting, Roberts acknowledged that there could be a, quote, limiting principle to no cancellation.

Speaker 2 Longtime Heritage Research Fellow Robert Rector went on a tirade against Tucker and Fuentes, likening Tucker's show to stepping into a lunatic asylum, and advocated for a return of right-wing cancellation.

Speaker 47 Because if you don't have boundaries on who you regard inside the movement, the movement will destroy itself and it will create a PR nightmare for everybody in it.

Speaker 2 And the boundaries that he set forth, William Buckley,

Speaker 47 in early 1960s, were twofold. You You have to expunge all anti-Semitism, all of it, but that's just part of it from the conservative movement.
The other is you have to expel the lunatics, okay?

Speaker 47 The lunatics who think that Eisenhower was a communist, okay? And a whole bunch of, and we have them back now, okay?

Speaker 47 They are both here back just the way they were in 1959.

Speaker 47 And we have to go back and set the general parameters. You You say, oh, we don't cancel.
We do cancel. Did we cancel David Duke?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 47 You don't even know who David Duke was, probably most of you.

Speaker 2 I had to say, you know?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 47 Did we cancel the John Bird Society?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 47 Okay.

Speaker 47 Because they were harmful, because if they're in your movement, you look like clowns.

Speaker 2 This highlights so much of my frustration around this whole controversy with all of these conservatives at the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party trying to say that obviously the leopards who are eating people's faces aren't actually conservatives, despite them being a part of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

Speaker 2 Bircherism has achieved a near-total capture of the modern-day Republican Party, especially under Trump.

Speaker 2 You can't remove the John Birch society element from the modern-day Republican Party without the whole party collapsing. They won.
That's what the party is now. That's what Heritage's Project 2025 is.

Speaker 2 Kevin Roberts responded to Rector's tirade by continuing to advocate that Heritage should attempt to bring some of Fuentes' audience into the conservative fold.

Speaker 40 But if there's a segment of that audience who might be with us and they really are not Nazis and anti-Semites, then maybe we can eventually bring them into the fold.

Speaker 2 I think we have to think that way. None of these people can be allowed to distance themselves from the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

Speaker 2 To quote a write-up from the right-wing RAG National Review, quote, the Heritage staff meeting exposed something of a generational divide within Heritage, as one staffer who claimed to represent the perspective of the Foundation's younger employees said that she did not have a problem with Roberts' initial defense of Carlson and wanted to make sure that the viewpoints of her generation, who she said were generally more critical of Israel, would still be welcome at Heritage.

Speaker 2 ⁇ Unquote.

Speaker 2 The Heritage Tucker Fuentes debacle has come at a time where the right was already in the middle of a debate over how to handle infighting, conservative anti-cancel culture, and the newly adopted principle of no enemies to the right after years of suffering from liberal-led deplatforming campaigns during the quote-unquote woke era.

Speaker 2 This debate really came to a head last month after the young Republican pro-Hitler racist group chat scandal dropped, which was subsequently brushed off by people like Matt Walsh Walsh and Vice President J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance, who dismissed the texts, telling people who are concerned about it to quote-unquote grow up, while referring to the chat as a college group chat, calling the members kids and young boys, when the group chat in question was made up of men in their 30s.

Speaker 52 Don't put things on the internet, like be careful with what you post.

Speaker 52 If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.

Speaker 52 But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes.
Like that's what kids do.

Speaker 52 And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke, is caused to ruin their lives.

Speaker 52 And at some point, we're all going to have to say, enough of this BS. We're not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old's group chat to ruin a kid's life for the rest of time.

Speaker 52 That's just not okay. Like, we live in a digital world.
This stuff is now etched in stone online. We're all going to have to say, you know what? No, no, no.
We're not doing this.

Speaker 52 We're not canceling kids because they do something stupid in a group chat. And if I have to be the person who carries that message forward, I'm fine with it.

Speaker 2 To quote Matt Walsh, quote, I said a few weeks ago that we all need to band together in the wake of Charlie's death. And the answer I got back from a lot of people on the right was basically, no.

Speaker 2 Well, okay, then, guys, we'll just lose instead. The left will keep the united front and defend their guys no matter what, while we keep throwing each other to the wolves at every opportunity.

Speaker 2 Great plan. The left actually wants me dead, like specifically and personally.
They're the reason why I need security at my house, why I worry for my children's safety.

Speaker 2 We've had to make major changes to the way we live our daily lives to account for this danger. So when I say that I want to stop the infighting and unite against this threat, that's the context.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry if the squabbles among right-wingers just kind of pale in comparison for me. If you have the luxury to care more about that, I envy you.
I truly do.

Speaker 2 Last week, Megan Kelly interviewed Tucker and Shapiro across a two-day event where she asked both about the possibility of uniting the right.

Speaker 37 Is there any way that you and Ben Shapiro can actually find your way to detente?

Speaker 2 I'm not against Ben Shapiro.

Speaker 53 He did like a 40-minute thing yesterday calling me dangerous and all this stuff.

Speaker 2 It's like I didn't watch it because why?

Speaker 2 But I got a lot of texts about it and it's like I'm not mad.

Speaker 53 I don't think Ben Shapiro is driving a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 2 I don't consider him like the world's greatest force for evil. I don't feel that way at all.

Speaker 39 I don't actually think about him ever. So I don't want to have a war with Ben Shapiro.

Speaker 53 I don't know if does he really think that me doing an interview in which I explain that anti-Semitism is wrong to one of the lead purveyors of anti-Semitism, that that somehow makes me a Nazi?

Speaker 2 Like, what is the argument here?

Speaker 37 I'm gonna ask him tomorrow night.

Speaker 2 No, but I don't even understand what the argument is.

Speaker 2 All I know is that the right, and I've been on the right since before Ben was born, is acting like the left in such an amazingly precise way that I'm like, what the hell is going on?

Speaker 16 I agree with Tucker that the right is in fact acting like the left by, again, massaging its radicals in the name of some sort of faux unity.

Speaker 17 That does not sound détente.

Speaker 17 Because

Speaker 16 again, I'm not, again, trying to turn this personal is a mistake.

Speaker 37 I know, but can it happen?

Speaker 2 During the fallout of the Tucker Fuentes interview, far-right influencer Mike Cernovich said, quote, there's a lot of bad faith going on, so this is for those few of you perplexed about the reluctance of MAGA people to ever disavow anyone.

Speaker 2 We are old, and we know it never stops. They will always demand more.
Hence, we draw a hard line. It's It's not our job to be internet cops, unquote.

Speaker 2 After trailblazing this rhetoric for the new right, now, Walsh, and Vance find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

Speaker 2 Walsh, due to his employer, Ben Shapiro, and Vance, because of his future political prospects.

Speaker 2 In the midst of the Fuentes controversy, Walsh posted, quote, We have a very short window of time where we control Congress and the White House, and we have the power to push our agenda forward.

Speaker 2 We're going to waste this window fighting with each other. We're going to squander everything.
I'm furious, honestly. Unquote.

Speaker 42 I have just about had it with Matt Walsh.

Speaker 40 Matt, you work for this fucking guy.

Speaker 49 Whose side are you on already?

Speaker 42 Cut the shit.

Speaker 41 Matt Walsh, every day on his show, he goes on Twitter and his show and says, this is all just gossip and drama. It ain't gossip and drama.
This is the war.

Speaker 43 Might not be the one you wanted, but this is the one that's going on.

Speaker 41 So Wallace wants to recuse himself from this and say, hey, man, I just care about America.

Speaker 42 Hey, fucker, it's happening in America right now.

Speaker 41 Tucker's an American last I checked.

Speaker 43 This is going on here.

Speaker 41 We didn't make anti-Semitism the wedge issue. They did.
We didn't make fighting Israel's wars the wedge issue.

Speaker 42 They did.

Speaker 41 And Wallace wants to get on Twitter and say, I just don't want to talk about it. I just want to keep taking a paycheck from the worst of the worst, Shapiro.

Speaker 41 You got to pick a side, and nobody can let him get away with this. As long as you're America first, you need to be in his reply saying, no, Matt,

Speaker 41 you work for Ben Shapiro, cuck.

Speaker 2 Vance's only statement about this debacle reads, quote, the infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens, particularly young Americans, being able to afford a decent life.

Speaker 2 I care about immigration and our sovereignty, and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about these things too, let's work together.
Unquote.

Speaker 2 Compare that to Mike Pence sharing an article critical of Fuentes by the Wall Street Journal editorial board titled The Rights New Anti-Semites.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Nick Fuentes is bragging that he has Vance caught in his groiper squeeze, threatening to send Groupers to 2028 primary states to disrupt Vance's campaign, much like the Grouper war of 2019, targeting TP USA.

Speaker 41 He's getting squeezed

Speaker 41 because the Groipers are on the one hand saying, hey, listen, fat boy, we want America first.

Speaker 49 You want to run for president?

Speaker 41 We want to hear you say America first.

Speaker 41 And on the other side, he's got his donors, and they're saying they're horrible anti-Semites. You have to disavow them.
You have to forcefully condemn them.

Speaker 49 Condemn Tucker. Condemn the Groipers.

Speaker 41 Now, Advance condemns the Groipers.

Speaker 40 We are deploying to Iowa.

Speaker 43 Raise your right hand.

Speaker 40 I swear I'm going to move to Iowa.

Speaker 41 And New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and one primary after the next.

Speaker 42 And we will go to every town hall.

Speaker 41 We will go to every meet and greet where there's four or five people. And we will be there.

Speaker 40 And we'll do it for free.

Speaker 2 Nick has since laid out a more clear three-year strategy for his fans to shape the upcoming presidential primary and infiltrate the next Republican White House.

Speaker 2 In some ways, I think Ted Cruz is right. This has been a time of choosing.
The only problem is that the choice has already been made.

Speaker 2 The Fuentes interview is already Tucker Carlson's fourth most popular video ever, just two weeks after its release. Fuentes' quote tweet of Shapiro's takedown video ratioed Shapiro by 120,000 likes.

Speaker 2 Fuentes' last 10 live streams have had an average viewership of over 800,000 people on Rumble, beating Shapiro's average YouTube view count by hundreds of thousands.

Speaker 2 The New York Times has put out seven pieces on Fuentes, both articles and opinion, since the Tucker interview, plus other related news stories about Heritage and Tucker, which obviously mention Fuentes.

Speaker 2 Other outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post have followed suit.

Speaker 2 CNN did a five-minute and 30-second segment on the fallout of the Heritage Tucker-Fuentes situation and what it means for the future of the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 CNN has since done more segments on the issue, including one with Ben Shapiro. Multiple Fuentes segments have also aired on MSNBC.
Here's a sampling.

Speaker 54 For once, Donald Trump has remained silent on an issue, as well as J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance, who is reportedly personally close to Carlson.

Speaker 54 It also has opened up an uncomfortable discussion for the GOP about what place people like Nick Fuentes have within the MAGA movement.

Speaker 54 And now to the brewing war within MAGA over the future of the American conservative movement.

Speaker 54 It comes as far-right influencer Nick Fuentes recently recorded a cordial interview at the invitation of Tucker Carlson that more than 5 million people have viewed.

Speaker 54 The latest op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by our next guest is highlighting this growing division.

Speaker 54 Contributing writer Matt Lewis contends that some Trump loyalists are now objecting to MAGA's, quote, white power element. Matt joins us now.
He's an author, columnist, and conservative writer.

Speaker 54 Matt, the fact that we're even talking about a quote-unquote white power element is, I think, concerning on its face.

Speaker 54 But this is also something that's persisted within MAGA over the course of the last 10 years.

Speaker 54 I mean, I remember covering when Trump himself had dinner with Nick Fuentes at the invitation of Kanye West just a few years ago, November 2022 at Mar-a-Lago. Why was this not a conversation then?

Speaker 54 And what's changed now?

Speaker 55 Look, yeah, I think you're totally right. I mean, part of it is that Donald Trump has actually been a really good friend to Israel.

Speaker 2 I never thought the leopards would eat my face, sobs a conservative columnist who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

Speaker 2 Even calling Fuentes a quote-unquote white power figure shows how outdated and out of touch the talking heads and many journalists are. It's not the 80s anymore.

Speaker 2 White power, what are you talking about?

Speaker 2 That's not what Fuentes is doing. If you can't recognize that, you shouldn't be talking about it.
These talking heads are completely ill-equipped to understand Gen Z politics or the lack thereof.

Speaker 2 We saw this in the reporting on Tyler Robinson and the past few mass killing fandom school shooters. Here's MSNBC again.

Speaker 55 According to some sources at the Heritage Foundation, a lot of their interns, something like 40 to 50% or something,

Speaker 55 agree with Fuentes,

Speaker 55 which is really stunning if you were around the conservative movement, let's say in the George W. Bush era.

Speaker 2 The fucking George W. Bush era.
Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 Nick Fuentes' politically vulgar obscenity is exactly what pushes his clips into people's social media feeds, cutting through the dry neoconservative boomer slop of older Republican content creators.

Speaker 2 As Trump 2.0 continues and MAGA becomes the establishment again, it's not going to be cool to listen to Benny Johnson, whoever's hosting the new Charlie Kirk show, or Ben Shapiro, to the extent to which listening to any of those is even still cool or countercultural.

Speaker 2 Fuentes doesn't have this same problem.

Speaker 2 He can ride the cultural vibe shift of the 2024 election and still appeal to the reactionary tendencies of some young men, but is outside enough to continue benefiting from the Gen Z thirst for anti-establishment populism.

Speaker 2 At the end of last month, there was a short article in The Atlantic titled, The Firewall Against Nick Fuentes is Crumbling. The white supremacist influencer is entering the MAGA mainstream.

Speaker 2 And yeah, that's correct. The attacked agreement against talking about, covering, or platforming Nick has slowly fallen apart the past few months.

Speaker 2 Google Trends graphs of search popularity has Nick Fuentes high above Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, or Candace Owens.

Speaker 2 And considering Nick's newfound fame, he isn't trying to slow down or moderate his views to appeal to a bigger audience, and he doesn't need to. The audience is coming to him.

Speaker 2 To explain why his audience is growing so much, it's not that he's gotten less ideologically dogmatic as of recent, it's that the Zoomer world has caught up to the anti-ideology behind Nick Fuentes, the void of animosity that animates Fuentes, which is underneath his gesturing to relics of tradition and culture to offer a North Star through the grievance-inspired nihilism he actually embodies.

Speaker 2 Nick Fuentes is a meme. His clips spread like a meme.
His Groiper movement is named after a meme. And Nick is ready, willing, and able to seize the spotlight he has been gifted.

Speaker 2 To Nick, this controversy demonstrates that the prestigious Heritage Foundation is territory ripe for Groiper infiltration.

Speaker 41 What this signifies is that Heritage, the accreditation institution, the brain, the

Speaker 41 priestly class that promulgates the Republican dogma, if that institution says that Groiperism is up for debate, it's on the table, it's not canceled, we should talk about the ideas.

Speaker 42 And we should defend the people that defend the Groupers or talk to the Groipers.

Speaker 41 It signifies that one, that place is a safe harbor, as I said before.

Speaker 42 So a Groiper could go to work at Heritage and maybe feel welcome and comfortable and he won't be fired.

Speaker 41 And you might have a Groiper at Heritage who is going to be writing a policy paper about, who knows, foreign policy, education, immigration.

Speaker 41 They might be considered like an expert and maybe they'll go on to be a legislative director for a senator

Speaker 42 And they might be writing laws for the U.S.

Speaker 41 government. It's conceivable.

Speaker 41 If the president of Heritage says Tucker is in the Big Tent, then that means that Tucker and Nick Fuentes' sympathizers are allowed to be employed at Heritage.

Speaker 41 And thus, they might be in the position to determine the dogma.

Speaker 40 They can write the doctrine.

Speaker 2 Conservative writer Rob Dreer has claimed, based on DC contacts and talking with Gen Z staffers, quote, between 30 to 40 percent of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes, unquote, writing that this is emblematic of a generation, quote, willing to revel in transgressions such as they tear down the pillars of civilization, just for the fun of seeing those who have been gatekept away breaching containment.

Speaker 2 The Groiper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.
Unquote.

Speaker 2 After the young Republican racist group chat story dropped, Nick Fuentes said on his show, quote, Groipers are all over the government, and everyone knows that. There's groipers at Harvard.

Speaker 2 There's gripers in all the Ivy League schools. I talked to all of them.
There's groipers in government. There's groipers in every department, every agency.
Uncle.

Speaker 2 And there's no reason to believe Nick is exaggerating. This is something he has advocated his followers do for years.

Speaker 2 And stories like the Young Republican pro-Hitler group chat are evidence of this. Nick Fuentes is mainstream now.
Nick Fuentes is a legitimate part of the mainstream conservative movement.

Speaker 2 Even if he doesn't become the quote-unquote successor to his longtime nemesis, Charlie Kirk, Fuentes is already on course to be the main figure to have gained the most from Kirk's death and emerged advantageous.

Speaker 2 This has been It Could Happen Here. See you on the other side.

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Speaker 3 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 5 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 6 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 7 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 8 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 11 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 12 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 11 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 10 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we are covering the week of November 5th to November 13th.

Speaker 2 That's how I feel about the week. Yeah.
That's how you feel. Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Well, the shutdown is now over, the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

Speaker 2 Last weekend, eight Democratic senators caved on the shutdown, approving a deal to reopen the government without extending the existing Obamacare subsidies, gaining only a promise.

Speaker 2 to have a Senate floor vote on healthcare tax credits sometime in December, with no indication given that this vote would pass the chamber and no commitment from Speaker Mike Johnson that he would hold a vote in the House.

Speaker 2 None of the Democratic senators that sided with the Republicans are up for re-election in 2026.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think that suggests pretty clearly that this was orchestrated and staged by the Democratic Party as a whole.

Speaker 2 You don't have, oh, we picked eight specific people who you can't vote against in the next cycle. Yeah.
That, yeah, it's very clearly just stage managing.

Speaker 2 specifically with the schumer being somewhat in charge of the senate the democrats who likely would have been the person orchestrating this who himself did not vote for this deal was able to personally vote against it despite likely being the one orchestrating this entire deal yeah two of the senators who signed on are retiring at the end of their term But even if we can't get health care through this shutdown bill, you know what these Democrats did, did able to

Speaker 2 squeeze in there. Well, I don't know if the Democrats squeezed it in there, but it is in there.
That's a Delta 8 hemp THC ban, which is included

Speaker 2 in the Senate funding bill. Absolutely awful.

Speaker 17 Yeah, of course they did.

Speaker 2 Boy, howdy. And the hemp industry has gotten angry about this.

Speaker 2 They're planning to fight it in 2026. I guess we'll all see because it takes a while to take effect.
But yeah, that is,

Speaker 2 there's a lot of hemp farms in Kentucky that are pissed off right now. Yep.

Speaker 2 So we can't get health care, but at least we also can't get hemped THC. So

Speaker 2 what if there wasn't bread or circuses? What would happen then? Wow.

Speaker 17 We would vote for the Democrats, Mia, because they're the least bad options. I think that's how that goes, right?

Speaker 17 I've been on Blue Sky a few times this week. I think I've got it pretty drilled in.

Speaker 2 Catherine Cortez Maestro of Nevada, Dick Derman of Illinois, Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Angus King of Maine,

Speaker 2 No King's protest member just dropped, Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada, and Gene Shaheen of New Hampshire.

Speaker 2 Speaking of the Senate and the Oversight Committee, This whole Jeffrey Epstein thing doesn't seem to be going away, does it? Man.

Speaker 2 Like you, I was a skeptic about like, could there be anything in there that's actually going to hurt Trump if he hasn't been hurt so far by everything that is out there? And I don't know.

Speaker 2 I guess I'm still a little bit of a skeptic, but it's increasingly hard to be because, like, how much,

Speaker 2 how could it be worse than this? Yeah, there's something that isn't this.

Speaker 2 How could it be worse than Donald Trump was at Jeffrey Epstein's mansion and walked into a glass door because he was so busy oggling children.

Speaker 17 Yeah, the fact that this is what they release to distract you from the stuff they don't want to release

Speaker 2 from the Democrats, to be fair. Well, both.

Speaker 2 This was the emails they were able to subpoena from Jeffrey Epstein's estate as a part of the oversight investigation into the federal government's investigation of the Epstein files.

Speaker 2 And yesterday, the Oversight Committee released this batch of files.

Speaker 2 related to the Epstein investigation, mostly of note, a series of emails from about 2011 to 2019, including one from Epstein written to Maxwell from 2011, quote, I want you to realize that the dog that hasn't barked is Trump.

Speaker 2 Victim,

Speaker 2 redacted, name victim, spent hours at my house with him. He has never once been mentioned.
Police chief, ETC, I'm 75% there, unquote.

Speaker 2 In a short email exchange from December of 2018, an unknown individual sent Jeffrey Epstein this message, quote, it will all blow over.

Speaker 2 They're They're really just trying to take down Trump and doing whatever they can to do that. With Epstein replying, yes, thicks.
Thanks. It's wild because I am the one able to take him down.

Speaker 2 Whatever could he mean by that? Yeah.

Speaker 17 Who knows?

Speaker 2 There's no way to tell. There's absolutely no way to tell.

Speaker 17 If you are currently in high school English class and people tell you you will not be able to make billions of dollars if you are unable to use grammar or punctuation or capital letters correctly.

Speaker 17 That appears not to have been an impediment to Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 2 Jeffrey Epstein's typing style is fascinating. It's awful.

Speaker 17 Well, it's extremely distinctive, which I suppose is a valuable thing in itself.

Speaker 2 No, it's fascinating. But, I mean,

Speaker 2 there's a lot of different emails of note. A 2019 email from Epstein to Michael Wolf, quote, victim, Mar-a-Lago, redacted.
Trump said he asked me to resign. Never a member ever.

Speaker 2 Of course, he knew about the girls as he asked Ghelane to stop. Unquote.

Speaker 2 Which, by the way, the way that I've been seeing that quote passed around is just that he knew about the girls part, which makes it a little bit technically ambiguous as to what he's talking about.

Speaker 2 But the second part being as he asked Ghislaine to stop, oh, that's as blatant as it could possibly be, right? What Epstein is saying there is really clear.

Speaker 2 The main thing that's clear from this exchange is, at the very least, the extent to which Trump was very aware of

Speaker 2 Epstein's activities.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, in which everyone was

Speaker 2 not just fucking Donald Trump, but like the Obama White House's chief legal counsel from 2011 to 2014, right? Who he messaged with regularly and seems to have been flirting with him, right?

Speaker 2 She seems to have been into him. And they're all just kind of casually, or he is with them, casually joking about like being a pedophile.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's emails from Steve Bannon here, who he's just chatting with. Like, he emails Peter Teal at one point.

Speaker 2 The Steve Bannon exchange is from 2019 from Jeffrey Epstein, yeah, talking about a recent uh, like state visit message: Prince Andrew and Trump today, too funny.

Speaker 2 Another reply from Epstein. Recall, Prince Andrew's accuser came out of Mar-a-Lago?

Speaker 2 And response from Bannon. Can't believe nobody's making you the connective tissue.

Speaker 2 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 Wilde,

Speaker 2 wildly blatant stuff. In exchange from 2015 from Michael Wolf to Jeffrey Epstein.
I hear CNN is planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you, either on air or in Scrum afterwards.

Speaker 2 Epstein replied, if you were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be? And Wolf responded to that, quote, I think you should let him hang himself.

Speaker 2 If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you.

Speaker 2 Or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.

Speaker 2 Of course, it is possible that when asked, he'll say Jeffrey's a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.

Speaker 17 Imagine putting that in writing to a Gmail address.

Speaker 2 Gmail is fast. It is a fascinating choice by F-Steam.
Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Also, the fact that every goddamn one of these messages ends with sent on my iPad is

Speaker 2 just constantly amusing. Sent on my iPhone is to a lot of these.
Yeah. They're always like two extra spaces between sentences.

Speaker 2 Like you can tell they're old people typing on iPads a lot of the time with their fucking clumsy ass fingers. Yeah, it's beautiful.
It's beautiful.

Speaker 17 Tech size is huge.

Speaker 2 Some really disturbing exchanges from Epstein and a man named Landon Thomas Jr.

Speaker 2 with Epstein saying, wouldn't you like a photo of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen? Sure, bro. Hawaiian tropical girl, Lauren Petrella.

Speaker 2 Epstein then sent a link displaying an image of a woman, quote, my 20-year-old girlfriend in 93, that after two years, I gave to Donald, unquote.

Speaker 2 One thing I want to note here is that Landon Thomas Jr. Yeah, baby.
Long, long time journalist at the New York Times, and he's just handed this. Financial journalist.

Speaker 2 So he couldn't do anything with it.

Speaker 2 He could do nothing with it, obviously. He's a financial journalist.

Speaker 2 He can't report on what financier Jeffrey Epstein tells him about Donald Trump walking into a glass door because he was oggling naked children at Jeffrey Epstein's mansion.

Speaker 2 That's a thing that Jeffrey joked about to him, and the New York Times never printed.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 In 2016, they had this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. There's a tendency, and I understand why to get sort of burned out on this, right? To be like, oh my God, it's more Epstein news, but we should be furious about this.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 This was, you know, what we have here. And this isn't even the stuff they're trying to hide, right? This isn't the Epstein files.

Speaker 2 This is just the emails that the Oversight Committee has been able to get, right? And it suggests very plainly that we are ruled by a group of pedophiles.

Speaker 2 And I refuse to call them a cabal because cabal implies that they work in the shadows. They were not.
The entire ruling class knew this was going on openly. And they're joking about it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 They don't care. Yeah.
They think it's funny. There's this exchange from 2017.
between Jeffrey and an unknown individual where Jeffrey says, you are welcome at my house

Speaker 2 and more private. The person responds, very well.
Just send me the address again and the code to the door so I can get to the second floor. And send me the day and time.
Thanks.

Speaker 2 Jeffrey said, 10 p.m., should I bring special cake from New York? The unknown individual responded, yes.

Speaker 2 And then, once they arrived, they sent the message, quote, I'm at the door, but I will wait for my time. I don't want to come early to find Trump in your house.
Two laughing emojis. 2017.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And the reason they're doing this, right?

Speaker 2 The reason they're just, they're so blatant about this, the reason they all think it's so funny, the reason they're just doing this over completely unencrypted email in a way that like someone, someone planning a completely legal protest where you stand outside of a building with signs, right?

Speaker 2 Would not plan it like this. The reason they're doing this is that

Speaker 2 These people and men like them have been ruling this country for 500 years in an uninterrupted line from Columbus's fucking crew through on Hispaniola through Jefferson and Sally Hemmings like to Epstein.

Speaker 2 It is an uninterrupted line. They think that they are completely invincible and that no one will ever challenge them.
And, you know, maybe, maybe they're fucking right.

Speaker 2 Like for all of the sort of moaning and complaining about woke censorship and Me Too and cancel culture, these people never shut the fuck up. Ever.
At any point.

Speaker 2 All of these people are running around to their fucking Epstein conferences taking a bunch of money to talk about eugenics.

Speaker 2 Well, and that's, I mean, there's a, there was some fun stuff about that in here, too, because he was emailing with Lawrence Krauss, less eugenics and more hatred of women. Where

Speaker 2 there were very funny emails where Krauss was being like, you know, I made a comment in a speech that half of all the IQ in the world comes from women, but they're more than half the population.

Speaker 2 Like a lot of just like casual, it's a really interesting insight into how people at kind of the highest levels of finance and government and just wealth in general

Speaker 2 and in media in like communicated with each other during this period of time. I'm sure it's different now

Speaker 2 because people are even less good at writing.

Speaker 2 But yeah, it's a useful, it's a snapshot that we don't get anywhere else of like this chunk of the, I mean, talking about that fucker at the New York Times, who, by the way, was shit canned in 2019 for soliciting donations from Jeffrey Epstein and not informing them of his personal relationship.

Speaker 2 But again, the Times never published anything based on their conversations.

Speaker 2 It's the same group of people who have been telling us every issue that

Speaker 2 might tangently be connected to transitioning is newsworthy. And it's incredibly newsworthy if this official at a college might have plagiarized once in their childhood, but or in their youth.

Speaker 2 But like it's not newsworthy at all to talk about the possible future president walking face first into a glass door because he's staring at naked children in a pedophiles mansion.

Speaker 2 This is the period. This is the period where

Speaker 2 they were running stories about the food at Grinnell College. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you can, and, you know, and there's another, I think, part of this too, where if you look through these things, you can find these people all complaining about me too. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You can, you can find these people all doing their sort of like, oh, these are all the same people who do all of the like, oh, like we're the bold truth tellers, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2 We're being censored by like cancer culture. I want to take a stab at the question that these, that you're actually not allowed to ask.

Speaker 2 You know, and what I say you're not allowed to ask is these people don't want you to ask.

Speaker 2 All the fucking hedge fund managers, the CEOs, all the senators, all the presidents, every one of these fucking files does not want you to ask the simple question, why do we have a ruling class?

Speaker 2 Like, we gave them 500 years of running this continent. And do you know what they produced? Again, if 500 years of like uninterrupted pedophiles, right?

Speaker 2 We are on year 500 of this from like Columbus to Jefferson to Epstein Trump, right? So why do we have this?

Speaker 2 That's just not how people, people, no one's going to a store or to the politics store or heading out to vote and voting for another year of the pedophile ruling class.

Speaker 2 People don't really think, people don't tend to think about it that way. And in part they don't because the ruling strata of the United States has not portrayed itself in the same unbroken way, right?

Speaker 2 Like it very much makes an effort not to

Speaker 2 in public. And there's an extent to which it is.
It's certainly different than like the old aristocracy of the British and the landed gentry that ruled the British Empire.

Speaker 2 It's not exactly the same, but it is like the same kind of people.

Speaker 2 And in a lot of cases, the same families that continue to control large amounts of wealth and inherit political power.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's another fucking Kennedy who seems like a nice kid getting into politics just as we speak, right? I I don't know.

Speaker 2 I feel like we'll have a dedicated episode on more of the Epstein stuff.

Speaker 2 And there's an extent to which I keep thinking about that like bitten community where it's like, no one's on the other side of this issue that's listening to this podcast.

Speaker 2 Everybody's very angry about the pedophilia. Everybody's very angry about all of this stuff.
And I have mostly been interpreting it through just like laughing.

Speaker 2 over the last day or two, which is bad because it's like really bad stuff. You shouldn't just do that at it.
But like, what else? What other reactions?

Speaker 2 Like, you can pick and choose whatever you do. I think to your point, Mia, however you react to this, it's not going to change anything.
Right.

Speaker 2 Like, so far it hasn't. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, but I mean, okay, I don't think that's completely true. You can watch how just like pissed off and scared these people were about, like, about Mew Too, right?

Speaker 2 And like, you can, you can go listen to Bannon a couple of weeks ago talking about how if they lose the election, like we're all going to prison. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 Like these people are like concerned about even like Me Too, which was a fairly milqueto, like it wasn't like a particularly radical feminist movement, right? No.

Speaker 2 And these people were losing their fucking minds about it.

Speaker 2 And, you know, like we, we have the potential to organize feminist movements that can actually do things about this shit. Like we are capable of building new feminist movements.

Speaker 2 We did one not that long ago that was a big part of this administration collapsing the first time.

Speaker 2 And we can do it again. I'm not saying there's no point in fighting them.
I'm just saying like your reaction the moment to the Epstein leaks doesn't matter as much as is this going to

Speaker 2 is this going to cause any kind of like

Speaker 2 long-term resistance to the administration? Is this going to and maybe it will but like I guess that the thing that I'm curious about is like what

Speaker 2 what is what are what are we doing to try and make this matter right because like that's that's where I am.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but the answer to the question, is this going to matter, is also something that every single one of us decides, right?

Speaker 2 Because if we all just do nothing, then, yeah, nothing, nothing will happen, right?

Speaker 2 If we go mobilize and we go do things to resist these people and we intensify the things we're already doing, if we start doing new things, if we start doing new sort of feminist insurgencies, right?

Speaker 2 Then things can change. But

Speaker 2 if we don't, they're not going to, and we're just going to have another 500 years of these pedophiles ruling everything. Yeah, I I mean,

Speaker 2 I think that it's probably more a matter of like, this is likely to shift more people away from the GOP,

Speaker 2 at least in the immediate future. I don't think in the long term, I don't know that you don't build a coalition off of this because the DIMS certainly aren't trying to.

Speaker 2 You at least get this like wider awareness of where the real problem was. But I just don't know.

Speaker 2 I think it's going to be utilized electorally by some Republicans to eventually decouple the party from Trump Yes.

Speaker 2 After this becomes more and more evident, and they're looking for a way to get themselves out of becoming the Trump party and turning on him specifically through this issue will probably be one of the methods in which they do that.

Speaker 2 And you see that

Speaker 2 with some people, even like Margaret Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobert. Yeah.
Rod Dreher is writing about some stuff adjacent to this, right?

Speaker 2 These are the guys who think Vance needs to lead the party away from Trump. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they're already viewing Trump as a sort of lame duck presidency in so much as that he's kind of failed to do a whole bunch of stuff, especially on the economy in the past year.

Speaker 2 The midterms are about to get up and running. That's going to take up a whole bunch of energy.

Speaker 2 Everyone expects the Dems to do very well in the midterms and then prevent the Trump administration in the final two years from getting much of anything done through blocking things in Congress.

Speaker 2 And that's what a lot of people on the far right. are like taking this situation as.

Speaker 2 As basically January to now was the second Trump administration. This is the most that they're going to get done.
And now it's kind of all downhill from here.

Speaker 2 And they're looking far beyond Trump now. Yes.

Speaker 17 I want to tack back to the times real quickly before we move past this.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 17 Gareth, some of those emails you read, if I'm not mistaken, were like in December of 2018, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The 2018 ones are

Speaker 2 Epstein saying,

Speaker 2 I am the one able to take him down. That one's from 2018.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 17 So let's talk about, I mean, the week before the midterms and a week after midterms in terms of Times front page stories, right?

Speaker 17 The week before the midterms, 2018, the Times ran 12 stories on the quote-unquote migrant caravan on the front page. It ran 24 stories.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, I remember that.

Speaker 17 The week after, it ran five.

Speaker 17 The migrant caravan continued to grow as more people. I was physically present in Tijuana as the caravan was arriving and I continued to be present for the rest of that year.

Speaker 17 The caravan continued to grow. More people continued to come, right?

Speaker 2 This is it.

Speaker 17 A choice was made not to cover the Epstein stuff that Robert spoke about, right?

Speaker 17 A choice was also made at that time to really like this caravan was not huge, it was large, but it wasn't a hugely remarkable number of migrants.

Speaker 17 And it occupied 12 front page stories during that one week before the election, right?

Speaker 17 I don't know how else I can say this. Like they're literally saying, look over there.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I guess that's part of my part of my fear, Gare, is I think that is accurate as to how things are going to play out and that the Dims will have a good midterm and probably probably pretty good results in the 2020.

Speaker 2 That's less clear to me, you know, because in part, if the Dims have a really good 2026 and then things continue to get worse, maybe we'll blame the party. I don't know

Speaker 2 who's going to show up on the, you know, after Trump. That, that's all a little unclear.
But what worries me is that in the mix of all that, we're going to get away from,

Speaker 2 and I think this is almost inevitable, actual accountability for these people. Like, I don't foresee there being strong punishment.

Speaker 2 I foresee foresee things moving forward, possibly in a way where they get quite a bit better, but not where I don't see the likelihood of these people getting punished.

Speaker 2 And I don't know that somebody running in 2028 on a platform of we're going to hang these people in the street would win, but I think it's worth a shot.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's, it's pretty far off. I really know.
Yeah, I'm not sure how much this will still be relevant by then.

Speaker 2 I mean, after Mike Johnson, for seven weeks, delayed the swearing in of Arizona Representative Adelita Grajalva, she was finally sworn in yesterday on Wednesday and became the 218th required signature on the discharge petition to force a floor vote for the full release of the Epstein files.

Speaker 2 Johnson says this vote will happen next week.

Speaker 2 During this process, Trump held an emergency meeting in the Situation Room with Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Cash Patel to convince Lauren Bobbert to take her name off the petition, which would then result in it not being complete and forcing the vote.

Speaker 2 They are certainly in a panic over this. The whole White House team is.

Speaker 2 This morning, Thursday, Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt put out an amazing post on X the Everything app, quote, if not for the Jeffrey Epstein story, CNN would be forced to talk about how Chuck Schumer and the Democrats got shellacked by President Trump and Republicans in the government shutdown fight.

Speaker 2 It's clear this is another Democrat and mainstream media hoax fueled by fake outrage to distract from the president's wins. Republicans don't be fooled.

Speaker 2 President Trump will remain focused on making America affordable again. If not for the Jeffrey Epstein story.

Speaker 2 If it was

Speaker 2 not. If not, aren't we all saying that? If the president wasn't a pedophile, then everyone would love him.

Speaker 2 If not for the child molestation, he'd be allowed to live in this neighborhood.

Speaker 2 Someone want to mention the Megan Kelly thing in terms of, yeah, in terms of Republicans reacting to this and trying to find a way to sort through.

Speaker 2 And some of them are manufacturing consent, like Megan Kelly here. And others, I think, are quite ready to just throw Trump to the wolves, frankly.
Yeah, there's a...

Speaker 2 So Megan Kelly, I'm not going to play the clip from you all because having to listen to Megan Kelly is I've listened to four hours of Megan Kelly this week, Mia. Yeah, let's know more.
But

Speaker 2 she has this whole line about how she knows someone who's close to the case and has all the details. And that person thinks that

Speaker 2 her exact quote is, I think there's a difference, a difference between a 15-year-old and a five-year-old.

Speaker 2 I mean, she literally is talking about how, oh, he was into the, he wasn't into four or five-year-olds.

Speaker 2 He's talking about, she says this, and I quote, barely legal types, and then she says 14 or 15, which

Speaker 2 just pause, pause right there. 14, 15, not legal.

Speaker 2 I think there was a conversation to be had about the extent to which the barely legal, like, just turned 18 shit is to a large extent a product of like American pedophile culture and misogyny.

Speaker 2 But like, those are 14 and 15 year olds.

Speaker 2 And this is the like, you know, this, this is the defense that these people are dragging out for this, which is that, oh, well, he wasn't like literal, like, like five-year-olds.

Speaker 2 So actually, it's like

Speaker 2 they're doing the libertarian thing. It's like he's in the BFIL or whatever the fuck.
I think a lot of this is also the result of the QAnon-brained idea that they're trafficking four-year-olds.

Speaker 2 And no, this is mostly like really young teenagers. That's mostly what these guys are into.
And Megan Kelly specifically was talking about Epstein. They're even really young.
They're

Speaker 2 15 to 17-year-old girls, right? That's the part of the problem: a huge number of

Speaker 2 not just men, but largely men in this country

Speaker 2 don't see 15 to 17-year-old girls as children, which they are. And

Speaker 2 that's really a problem.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Something of an issue.
It's just

Speaker 2 incredible structural misogyny. That's just, yeah.
And so that's what they're sort of trying to bake all of this stuff as now. And I guess we'll see whether it works or not.
Just because

Speaker 2 I don't think this line from Megan Kelly is going to be very successful on a large scale of

Speaker 2 febophilia.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's going to work.

Speaker 2 Her motivations for this are, I'm sure, not great. Now, you don't know that, Garrison.
And I think in some ways she is pulling from this like a QAnon brained idea, right?

Speaker 2 That these are a whole bunch of like basically infants. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 what else do we want to talk about? Let's talk about January 6th and the terrorisms.

Speaker 2 Sure, I love neither of those things. I, I, I, Garrison, you love terrorism.
I had a fun day. No, I honestly, I had, I had a great January 6th.
That's good. That was a really fun morning for me.

Speaker 2 That was a hoot of a day. Boy, howdy.
When they breached the Capitol doors, great time. Well, Windows first, but yeah.
I think you mean when the FBI breached the Capitol doors.

Speaker 2 Sure. Yes.
So

Speaker 2 this all takes me to the sub stack of a guy named Rod Dreyer. Rod is...

Speaker 2 He wouldn't call himself a fascist, but if you ever bring up, is this specific fascist from history bad? He'd say, well, not compared to the communists they stopped, right?

Speaker 2 That's the kind of conservative conservative that Rod is. He's basically friends with Victor Orban.
He's basically friends with Victor Orban. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Didn't he just write a piece called Are Women Ruining the Workplace?

Speaker 2 He's written several like that. Like, I think he's just like, the piece I'm talking about was one he came out with on November 10th called What I Saw and Heard in Washington.

Speaker 2 And he was at a meeting with Vice President James Darrell Vance.

Speaker 2 Not what is Dolan Vance. Yeah, James Dolan Vance.

Speaker 2 That's a good James Dolan. uh you're a real new yorker now gare are you pissed about the knicks permanently no

Speaker 2 basketball's too masculine for me so he came out with this article about this this meeting that that vance had with victor orbon and some other republican luminaries and for a little bit of context dreer is

Speaker 2 Again, you wouldn't call him an anti-Trumper. You'd call him a guy who thinks that Trump is going to doom the right and doom the right to fascism unless J.D.
Vance can save them.

Speaker 2 He actually has a recent, his most recent column is basically J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance is the only person who can save the the right wing from fascism and he's a weird dude who like reads a lot of hana arendt but absolutely does not understand her but this article of his based on this meeting is useful for a couple couple of reasons one that i'm sure gare and i will talk about in more detail later is drear estimates in here that 30 to 40 percent of the zoomers who are working for the republican party in dc are groipers aka fans of holocaust denier and truk truke yeah is that what is that what what you Ginzi kids are saying for truth garrison yeah that's okay okay that's truth nuke I can't keep I can't keep track of that shit anymore truth nuke great

Speaker 2 truth nuke sure yeah they're all grapers or at least 40% are 30 30 40 and I actually number one he Dreyer he's not someone that I I think just makes up nonsense.

Speaker 2 I think he's like wrong because his brain is bad. But he provides some backup, including interviews and conversations he had for this.

Speaker 2 And this is consistent with other information coming out of the Beltway. I think he's probably pretty close to the accurate number here, right? 34 to 40% seems believable.

Speaker 2 Gare, I think you're more or less in the same area there.

Speaker 17 Garrison is 30% to 40% of Groipe. Yes, that's.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 that's what I meant, James. Thank you for the most charitable reading of my sentence there.

Speaker 2 Now, the thing that I thought was in the other thing that I thought was interesting from this article is because he's trying to talk about why the media, which he sees as an inherently left-wing organization, even though we just talked about all of the carrying water for Jeffrey Epstein while attacking trans people shit that they did.

Speaker 2 It's a right-wing slash liberal organization.

Speaker 2 I would agree. Yeah,

Speaker 2 you have to get over some of his aspects of Frasing. But he's talking about why,

Speaker 2 some of the reasons why he thinks that the institutions in our society, like Zoomers, do not trust them.

Speaker 2 And this is where I think he's on the money, because I think that the reason why so many Ginzi Republicans, like Republican staffers, are groipers is what he gets at, which is that they're having the same problem as the rest of Ginzi.

Speaker 2 They're just approaching it from a fascist standpoint, but they all are starting from the same point, which is I'm fucked. My generation is fucked.
There's no jobs. I'm not going to own a house.

Speaker 2 The climate is screwed. Like, and they're blaming the Jews for it, but they're starting at the same place.
It's school shooter politics, right? School shooter politics. Yes.

Speaker 2 Some people understand this and they decide to do a school shooting. These guys decide to to get jobs in Washington.
Yes. But it's the same psyche behind the mechanism.

Speaker 2 Exactly right. And I'm going to read a quote from Drear's article and then we'll move past him to the primary thing I wanted to talk about here.

Speaker 2 And this is him talking about, you know, why these Zoomers don't trust the system and want to destroy everything.

Speaker 2 The institutions of our society, as they see it, have lied and lied and lied and still lie. They still lie in many ways about race, refusing to be honest about black crime.
They lie about COVID.

Speaker 2 They lied about males and females, and they force the insanity of gender ideology on us all. The military lied about Iraq.
The universities embrace. Is it just the military? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Is it just the military, Rod? The universities embraced and enforced ideologies of lies.

Speaker 2 The Catholic Church lied about sexual abuse and the connection to the prevalence of sexually active gay priests. Exactly.

Speaker 2 Is that the problem? Honeycombing institution. They lied about the benefits of mass migration and diversity.
They lied about Trump and Russia. They sure didn't.

Speaker 2 Political parties and their corporate allies lied about what globalism would mean for ordinary people. The media have lied and they do lie about most things.

Speaker 2 This past weekend, everybody was talking about the new report in Blaze media, alleging that the mysterious January 6th pipe bomber was, in fact, a former Capitol police officer.

Speaker 2 The implications being that the whole event was orchestrated by the deep state to discredit Donald Trump. Maybe mainstream media are busy trying to validate this reporting on their own.

Speaker 2 If the Blaze has this wrong, they're going to be sued into oblivion. And so will all the other media who amplify a false charge.

Speaker 2 I can tell you that no, all I can tell you is that nobody in the MSM are talking about it as I write it, even though it is an explosive story. People were, in fact, talking about it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And in fact, before we could do this episode, The Bulwark, which is, has both a

Speaker 2 website with articles and is a podcast network,

Speaker 2 came up with an article by Will Sommer, who used to write for

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 journalist. Yeah, a good journalist.

Speaker 2 We took a Bellinghat class together. I believe it was the post that he wrote for at the time.
He was like one of the leading QAnon experts for years. Yeah.

Speaker 17 He was doing Daily Beast with me for a while.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Daily Beast is, I think, where I knew him from. And he wrote a really good article called The Blazes, Pipe Bomb Bombshell Appears to Bomb.

Speaker 2 And basically, Dreer says here, well, if the Blaze is wrong, they'll be soon to oblivion. And the short answer is, yeah, I think

Speaker 2 because they absolutely named this lady and the Capitol Police. To make a long story short, if you don't want to read the whole Blaze article.

Speaker 2 You can read the piece on the bulwark. You can read the sections of it.
Or you can type the link to the Blaze article into like archive.org so you don't give them traffic if you want. It's not good.

Speaker 2 It's the entire their entire claims that this particular woman and i am not going to name this woman because i don't think she's the bomber and i don't think she's trying to name people as being a terrorist if you're not sure they were um

Speaker 2 i will say that she's a woman and that she's a capital police officer or at least a four now a former capital police officer who is kind of insinuated by the blaze and has been absolutely taken up by the right-wing media immediately since to be a now she got poached by the cia right and that's taken as like proof that she definitely did this she's she's a security guard at the cia's office

Speaker 2 she's not in the cia i'm sorry guys she's a she's a renta cop for the cia which is let's be fair probably the highest rung of renta cop

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 you know you're taking a step up as a renta cop but she's not she's not out there overthrowing democracies yet

Speaker 2 um i don't know maybe they fast track you once you're a cia security guard added up.

Speaker 2 But so the whole claim that the Blaze is staking the reputation on, because if you're not

Speaker 2 paying attention to like Infowars, well, not reputation, their financial solvency, because Infowars currently owes like a billion and a half dollars for wrongly accusing people of having faked mass shootings and the deaths of their own children.

Speaker 2 their argument that this lady has to be it is based on they have some old footage of her at like the jogging track and there's a couple of clips from the jogging track they showed, but they're claiming that this gate analysis that they did between the Capitol Bomber and this woman is based on footage of her that they are not publishing.

Speaker 2 publicly

Speaker 2 so that you can verify it, but that they say is 94%.

Speaker 2 And they talked to a gate analysis expert and he did a personal gate analysis and he said it had to be more like 98%.

Speaker 2 So that means basically it definitely was her because gate analysis is for sure real and not one of the every kind of forensic science is a lie lie.

Speaker 2 Like gate analysis is not even very good for buying shoes, let alone convicting someone.

Speaker 2 We have peer-reviewed data to show that you shouldn't use your running shoes off gate analysis, let alone fuck it.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, there's many articles about how it may not be the future of the shoe industry.

Speaker 2 You should certainly be hinging your publication survival. I'm getting right that somebody was a bomber, baby.

Speaker 2 This is just the latest attempt by the right to run this whole J6 false flag conspiracy, which is picking up a lot of steam.

Speaker 2 Like a few months ago, the FBI released some information on how many agents they had in the area during January 6th.

Speaker 2 And this led many, many conservative commentators to believe, oh, look, the FBI had just admitted that it was their agents that actually started the riot and was most of the like rowdy, rumbunctious crab members.

Speaker 2 And no, the specific wording on the announcement or statement regarding the presence of agents at J6 was after,

Speaker 2 after

Speaker 2 the insurrection had already started and agents were sent there to keep it under control. That's what it was referring to.
And Cash Patel released a statement days later clarifying this.

Speaker 2 But of course, that doesn't pick up nearly as much traction as the original claims were. So

Speaker 2 this whole gate analysis thing is continuing on this.

Speaker 2 This whole conspiracy theory about how the FBI and the CIA staged all of January 6th to crush Trump and remove him from power.

Speaker 2 And probably warrants of a future episode just on January 6th conspiracy theories that have propagated the past few months. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we probably, I mean, honestly, yes. But, but okay, to continue with this, so gate analysis was half of what their case lay on.

Speaker 2 The other half of the case was interviews with a couple of different people, primarily an FBI whistleblower, a former FBI agent, who made a claim that, like, yeah, we, we, we tied the woman, the, this officer's neighbor to a vehicle that, like, picked up the bomber.

Speaker 2 This is not based on publicly available information. Uh, this is based on the statements made by former FBI agent Kyle Seraphim, who is now a right-wing media personality.
Of course.

Speaker 2 And we're just trusting that this guy who is former FBI agent trying to rebrand himself as an influencer is telling us the truth about all of this stuff that they're not presenting us with.

Speaker 2 This is kind of dressed up as OSINT, but they're not actually providing you with the information. No, there's no actual open source intelligence.

Speaker 2 You can't work back from their, because they're hiding a lot of stuff, right? There's a couple other things that Sommer notes in his article here.

Speaker 2 To make their case against the former Capitol Police officer, Baker, who's the author, and co-author Joseph H.

Speaker 2 Hanneman, focused on a comparison between the officer's gates, some of which was apparently captured in years-old footage of her playing soccer and footage of the pipe bomb suspect from the night of January 5th.

Speaker 2 Instead of using suspect footage released by the FBI, however, the Blaze claims it used footage from another source, the article doesn't name.

Speaker 2 Critically, the Blaze didn't release an actual video comparison or significant details of the gate analysis.

Speaker 2 Instead, it draws on the work of a man the Blaze called a video sleuth, a little-known ex-user named Armitas, whose online profile image is a picture from the 1998 role-playing video game Xenogears.

Speaker 2 Hell yeah. Xeno Gears, great tweaks in that video game.
Yeah, you're not going to get sued into oblivion for this shit, the Blaze. I'm proud of you guys.
I can't believe

Speaker 17 the people who published published Vance Bolter's probably last interview would do this.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Shocking, shocking stuff.

Speaker 2 Now, to be, again, totally fair here, Dreer does not treat this with any sort of critical thought whatsoever, but actually a bunch of the people critiquing this have been on the right. And I...

Speaker 2 Where I partially agree with Dreer is I think it's a mistake that the mainstream media has not dedicated more effort to busting this immediately and to pointing out the weaknesses and stuff like gate analysis immediately out the gate.

Speaker 2 So it does kind of seem like they're ignoring it.

Speaker 2 I think they're largely, I think largely this isn't getting covered because it's so shady and bad and because it's dangerous to spread these kinds of claims about a person. Sure.

Speaker 2 I mean, yeah, it's like, it's like the blaze.

Speaker 2 It's not even Fox News, right?

Speaker 2 There's already law enforcement stationed outside this woman's house because of the number of threats that she's received. Right.

Speaker 2 Like, like, which again, there's she has ample claims for damages here. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So a couple of the people who have have come after one of them is, or after this article, one of them is Julie Kelly, who's a right-wing media figure and is a major like force in the January 6th conspiracy theory world.

Speaker 2 And she is largely attacking the Blaze because she's doing her own investigation into the who did the pipe bombing. Right.
So she's, she's pointed out some very obvious problems.

Speaker 2 Why don't you post that other video you have, right? Why don't you show the evidence of the gate analysis, right?

Speaker 2 So she, she's been attacking this, as has Joe Hoft, who's co-founder of the Gateway Pundit. Hell yeah.
Oh, God.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Great stuff. So there's, there's people on the right talking shit about this stuff.

Speaker 2 It's worth noting that when this initially came out, Glenn Beck spent days beforehand hyping it up and talking about how, like, this is the biggest, I think that he literally called it like the biggest conspiracy in American history, maybe, which is like, Jesus Christ, dream smaller.

Speaker 2 Come on, dude. Yeah, but within like a day of the article actually coming out, the Blaze added an editor's note.

Speaker 2 Which is pretty damning. An earlier version of this story said it appeared the bombing suspect interacted with police.

Speaker 2 After publication, a congressional investigator with access to a camera angle that has not been made public reached out and told Blaze News a person similarly attired to the suspected bomber who comes out of the alley and crosses the street towards the two Capitol police vehicles is not the same person as the hoodie-clad pipe bomb suspect walking down the alley just minutes earlier.

Speaker 2 Amazing. Wouldn't their gate analysis have shown that? Amazing work.

Speaker 2 Wouldn't you have known that if gate analysis was shown? It's almost like you can't rely on gate analysis to identify individuals. Yeah, it's almost like this is all bullshit.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I largely did this just because, fuck you, Rod Dreer.

Speaker 2 I like, we covered this stupid ass story. Will Sommer covered this stupid ass story and we made fun of it.
Thank you, Will. Thank you, the bulwark.
This is what I've got.

Speaker 2 I've done that Drear piece is also crazy and just in surreal. It's surreal because of how much of it is like talking about how we, as in the right, needs to like

Speaker 2 recalibrate how we discuss the, the, the, the reality of like complete Jewish control over our media and how it's fine, actually, because a whole bunch of various like, like, ethnicities excel in various skills, and that's not weird.

Speaker 2 So it's not weird that Jews control all the media. We shouldn't be worried about this.
And how much of that piece feels like it could have been written in like the 1920s? Yes.

Speaker 2 It's, it's, it's a, it's a crazy time time capsule.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 2 Anyway, that's my opinions on the Dreer substack piece. Anti-Semitism versus anti-Semitism.
It's a great time.

Speaker 2 I mean, sure. I mean, you could have a, I would have a slightly more complicated analysis of the piece than just anti-Semitism, because Drew approaches that issue really oddly.

Speaker 2 I don't think he's anti-Semitic, frankly.

Speaker 17 I don't think he thinks he's anti-Semitic.

Speaker 2 I don't think he thinks he is, yeah. But it's like, I think that there's a difference between what he believes about himself and what he's trying to do and what he is doing.
And

Speaker 2 sure, I mean, I mean, even in the way that the article is written, and like a lot of it is, yeah, I mean, attacking a certain type of anti-Semitism on the right.

Speaker 2 Well, you guys know what Rod Dreyer would hate, other than an editor. I think he would actually love some ads.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I hate myself. Oh, God.

Speaker 17 All right, we are back

Speaker 2 and uh

Speaker 17 we're gonna do some very brief immigration stuff uh and then we'll play the song you've all been waiting for and be able to talk to you.

Speaker 2 The

Speaker 17 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

Speaker 17 yeah, thank you, Gare. Uh, it issued a statement this week.
It's about the strongest condemnation you're going to see from this entity of anything in the political realm, right?

Speaker 2 Pope Leo has not been soft on this issue.

Speaker 17 No, yeah, he has,

Speaker 17 and like we saw it like with Bishop Farm in San Diego, right? Like who himself arrived as an what they call an unaccompanied minor, right? A child refugee.

Speaker 17 I'm going to read from the statement, quote, we are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement.

Speaker 17 We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of migrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.

Speaker 17 We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status.

Speaker 17 We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools.

Speaker 17 We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school, and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.

Speaker 2 This isn't a usual

Speaker 17 garrison has got a crucifix,

Speaker 17 I guess. They haven't done this for like 12 years, right? Last time they did it about contraception.
I'm not saying a Catholic Church is an organization that I agree with all the time.

Speaker 17 If it's not, it's one that I disagree with most of the time. But I still think this is important, right? Like, this is an organization which

Speaker 2 has...

Speaker 17 millions of followers in the United States, many, many Catholics around the world.

Speaker 2 A lot of Catholics.

Speaker 17 Yeah, this is an organization which, therefore, we should pay attention to, right?

Speaker 17 And I think it is telling that, yeah, the woke pope has not stopped with this and that it seems like the vast majority of bishops in the United States are on his side.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 it is pretty funny that we have like a never Trumper, nominally conservative woke pope, and the fact that he will not back down on this issue and has actually has a number of statements on this the past few weeks, and not softly worded statements either.

Speaker 2 Catholic priests have also been reasonably good on this issue. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's important, especially because of how much these like weird, like fascist-friendly trads are using Catholicism as like a fashion statement. Yeah.
And J.D. Vance included.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I was going to say, our vice president.

Speaker 2 To have the actual church be like pretty freaked out by that,

Speaker 2 I think is good. It'd be worse if they were leaning into it, which certainly some cardinals like want when they were doing their pope selection.

Speaker 17 But if you look at the votes in this issue, right, like 216 votes in favor, five against and three abstentions.

Speaker 17 So among bishops, which is distinct from cardinals, like this is this is almost universal, right? And yet, given that

Speaker 17 our vice president has made being an adult convert to Catholicism a large part of his personality.

Speaker 17 Embarrassing. Yeah, this is

Speaker 17 like, it is remarkable. It's worth paying attention to.
Also, I think...

Speaker 17 When I talk to migrants, specifically like when I was in the Darien Gap talking to migrants, their faith is massively important to so many of them. Totally.

Speaker 17 And a lot of people, especially coming from South and Central America, will be Catholic.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 17 And that is what propels them through. And so for them to feel that the church has not abandoned them, it is important to them.
Yeah.

Speaker 17 The thing when I speak to people now who are here, the thing that they want more than anything is a priest to come to their hearing, to their meeting. with them.

Speaker 17 Like that is what makes them feel safe. And so I am happy that the church is continuing to try and make them feel safe because.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 What else are you going to do?

Speaker 17 Right. Yeah, we've we're trying everything else and it's not working.
Yeah, I

Speaker 2 defer to what will make the person being victimized feel better in basically all instances. And if it's having a priest along, then I'm glad the priest is there.
Yeah.

Speaker 17 And I am happy that this is something that can make them feel safer because, you know, critical support to the Catholic Church.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Very critical. Yeah.
Well, emphasis on the critical part.

Speaker 2 I think the other thing is worth noting that this same conference also voted to have an official ban on any gender-affirming care at Catholic hospitals, which is like one in seven of all people in the U.S.

Speaker 2 get their care at Catholic hospitals because

Speaker 2 there's a million of them. So critical sleep.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like lots of, they're not.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're not.

Speaker 2 Look,

Speaker 2 they're no Protestants, okay? It does feel bad to have so much Catholic praise on the show. Yeah.
But, you know, I will swallow my Protestant pride here.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I'm neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, but I'm glad this is happening.

Speaker 36 You're British. Yes.

Speaker 17 So you straddle the two.

Speaker 17 Do we do Catholicism without popes?

Speaker 2 I think we should have popes without Catholicism. See, that's interesting, Robert.
That's an interesting idea. That's Discordianism.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, that's kind of the least interesting version. A real kind of non-Catholic, like clerical class.
Anyway, I'm going to put this down in my sci-fi novel folder.

Speaker 2 You know, isn't stockbrokers a forum of, you know, aren't they? Just fade them out.

Speaker 2 Fade them out.

Speaker 17 Adam, just gradually reduce the volume.

Speaker 17 Okay, we're going to go, we're back to immigration.

Speaker 17 We did learn this week that the Department of Homeland Security secretly and illegally kept domestic data on 900 Chicagoland residents under Biden, just in case anyone was wondering what they were doing before people started paying attention to them.

Speaker 17 They also, quote, irrevocably destroyed video from Inside Abroad View, which is the ICE detention facility in Chicagoland.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course they did.

Speaker 2 I'm not shocked by that.

Speaker 17 I will say, like, I would have been shocked if that had happened under a previous administration, put it that way.

Speaker 17 Like, it's not massively out of character for them to be incompetent at storing and this kind of thing.

Speaker 17 And Ken Paxton has attempted to sue Harris County, a place in Texas, for donating to nonprofits that provide legal aid to migrants.

Speaker 2 He

Speaker 17 has some justification to this, which is ludicrous, but I'm just going to name a few of the NGOs here.

Speaker 17 Galveston Houston Immigrant Representation Project, Kids in Needed Defense, Justice for All Immigrants, Baraises,

Speaker 17 and Baker Ripley.

Speaker 17 And this does, I think, show part of the strategies which we saw and we have seen since 2018, right?

Speaker 17 Like you'll remember that lots of NGO volunteers in 2018 were placed on a watch list, as were many journalists for crossing to cover the migrant caravan.

Speaker 17 But this idea

Speaker 17 that the

Speaker 17 NGOs are, quote, aiding and abetting is a phrase you always see, right? Like that somehow people wouldn't come here if it wasn't for NGOs.

Speaker 17 Often this takes on a specific form of blaming one NGO, which is Hias or Hias, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, right?

Speaker 2 And we still give you one guess as to why they blame that one. Yeah.

Speaker 17 It's like repeat guest of the show, anti-Semitism, coming back again,

Speaker 17 which resulted directly in the tree of life shooting, right? Like, this is of that same intellectual family of thought, I guess, is what I will say.

Speaker 17 It's ludicrous people come here because their lives are not livable where they're at. There, that's what I got.
Play the song:

Speaker 2 All right, so there is actually

Speaker 2 a surprising amount of tariff news. All right, the tariff rebate checks.
Are we getting tariff rebate checks?

Speaker 2 I think probably not.

Speaker 2 So what is this? Trump started talking about this on November 8th on True Socials for the QSA Today. He truthed.

Speaker 2 I refuse to call it truthed.

Speaker 2 I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the hundreds of billions of dollars, the hundreds of billions are capitalized for reasons that are baffling, currently being sent to money-sucking insurance companies in order to save the bad health care provided by Obamacare be directly sent to the people so that they can purchase their own health care, their own much better health care.

Speaker 2 And so originally, this was going to be like a $2,000 thing to your health savings account from tariff proceeds or something.

Speaker 2 And then the second time he stopped talking about the health savings account stuff and he was just saying a $2,000 check.

Speaker 2 The USA Today, the piece notes that the Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessett said in ABC News on November 9th, which was Sunday, that Trump's proposed tariff dividend, quote, could come in a lot of forms, adding, it could just be the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president's agenda.

Speaker 2 No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security, deductibility of auto loans, he said. So those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill.

Speaker 2 So he apparently hadn't heard any of this is what it seems like. And then a few days later,

Speaker 2 this was yesterday on Wednesday, the 12th, Caroline Levitt, who's the ghoulish press secretary, said that Trump is, quote, committed to the payments. So who knows?

Speaker 2 You can't call her ghoulish just because she's a 27-year-old woman who looks like that, Mia. That's not cool.
Hey, you know,

Speaker 2 we're not going to do this. But

Speaker 2 she is ghoulish, not because she looks like she's 40 and because she does look kind of like she looks like a ghoul. But like, she isn't.

Speaker 2 No, but like, she also acts like a ghoul constantly, which is the actual thing that she is ghoulish for, right? Every press secretary I've ever seen has made me so mad. Like,

Speaker 2 the job of a press secretary is infuriating.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Remember the sake bombs?

Speaker 2 Well, also, like, they've never been good. They also did used to be more normal than this.
Like, they didn't used to be this unhinged.

Speaker 17 Yeah, the Biden admin didn't bring them back, I feel like the first Trump admin moved him in a certain way.

Speaker 2 The Biden admin people were unhinged, too. It's just

Speaker 2 awful, terrible stuff. Didn't used to be like this.
One of the few things I'll ever say that about. Anyway, as you were saying.
Yeah, so

Speaker 2 she said that Trump is committed to the payments. I, again, I don't think we're going to see this.
Probably not. Definitely don't plan on having an extra $2,000.

Speaker 2 I think he's committed to the payments as much as he is his first or second wife. Yeah, which is not much.

Speaker 2 So the the second the second incredibly important piece of tariff new vis news is the pasta tariffs.

Speaker 2 The Department of Commerce is imposing off

Speaker 2 a 0.7% pasta tariffs on imported Italian pasta.

Speaker 2 Garrison, it's buying the first tariff.

Speaker 2 It's still available. You can still get your Mac.
You know, it's okay.

Speaker 2 As the Guardian points out, most pasta in the U.S. is made in the U.S., so it's not really affected by those.

Speaker 2 I buy

Speaker 2 it.

Speaker 2 Hold on.

Speaker 2 Allow me to finish the sentence, Garrison, and I will address it.

Speaker 17 Pretension tax.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's mostly just gluten, it's mostly gluten-free pasta and also like imported fancy pasta, which is like nice pasta. Well, fancy is a bit of a.

Speaker 2 It's like $2 more, okay?

Speaker 17 The tax on pretension.

Speaker 2 You know, and so this, but this sucks for people who like pasta that's good and also for people who are allergic to gluten or who just are trying to reduce the amount of gluten they're eating for like diabetic reasons etc etc that all really sucks in that same piece

Speaker 2 in that same guardian piece the unbelievably named scott ketchum who is the founder of like an artisanal artisanal

Speaker 2 ketchum's a real last name that's why the pokemon game is evil ketchum's a place tonight

Speaker 2 scott ketchum

Speaker 2 i don't understand why ketchum is funny why is ketchum funny? Did you not play the Pokemon? You two.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 also, it's so close to being ketchup in a thing about

Speaker 2 Italian pasta. Whatever.
Okay. You put ketchup on Italian pasta.
Interesting. No, but do you know who does do this? Chinese hotels in 2009.

Speaker 2 A thing I discovered when they, for some reason, fed us, tried to feed us American food instead of feeding us Chinese food. And

Speaker 2 dear God, awful.

Speaker 2 Zero out of testimony. My favorite thing in any foreign country is when they're like, I know what you want, American food.
You came to Greece to eat at TJI Fridays, didn't you?

Speaker 2 Burger is all over Berlin now.

Speaker 2 Burger's in your sick.

Speaker 2 Burger's not American. Burger is hamburger, right? It is now.

Speaker 17 I feel like you'd be disappointed, Carrison, if you knew how many people in continental Europe are eating pasta and ketchup on a daily basis.

Speaker 2 We used to brown sugar.

Speaker 38 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Europeans are obviously sick. Yeah.

Speaker 17 You've been to Belgium.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's wrong. I have.
Yeah. Yeah, you go.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 locking back in on the pasta. The anarchist cafe was closed.
It was 2 p.m. Those lazy words.
Oh my God.

Speaker 2 Look at the conditions that I have to deal with. Every time I mention inflation, outcome the inflation joke.
Every time I try to finish it, it's about pasta.

Speaker 2 God. Okay.

Speaker 17 Finishing this.

Speaker 2 Scott Ketchum agrees that the benefactors will, quote, take advantage of the news and slightly raise their prices. That's just business, he said.

Speaker 2 So this actually probably will increase pasta prices prices across the board because they'll use this as justification for raising prices canonically how old is ash ketchup i'm trying to work out if this is a sibling since he's like 13 i think he's like

Speaker 2 13 in 1996 he's been like 13 for no but he's been 13 for his entire life like so we think siblings more than parents jeffrey epstein's dream yeah and okay ash ketchin's brother put it in the law oh my god okay okay two more things two more things we got to get through i swear to god okay one 50-year mortgage.

Speaker 2 Trump has become obsessed with the idea of 50-year mortgages.

Speaker 2 Just

Speaker 2 an idea so unhinged. I have

Speaker 2 never seen any Republicans talk about the positive. The mortgage industry is like, don't do this.
This is a bad idea.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to read the full paragraph I had here from CNN, but CNN did a very basic calculation of instead of a 30-year fixed mortgage, a 50-year fixed mortgage. So

Speaker 2 basically their calculation on like a $450,000 house was was that you would save about $300 a month, technically, but over the course of the loan, instead of spending about $550,000 in interest, you would spend a million dollars in interest.

Speaker 2 Fantastic.

Speaker 2 That rules.

Speaker 17 That's how we save money by giving half a million dollars to the bank.

Speaker 2 Well, hey, you're not even talking about the 15-year auto loans.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Everyone who buys IKEA can trust that it will keep working for 15 years. He's going to say,

Speaker 2 aren't lasting 50 years. They're made out of like cardboard, right? Like they're just kind of paid.
They're more than twice the value of the house in interest.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Make America affordable again.
Yeah. Okay.
Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 And then finally, I want to close with what is actually going on with the jobs and inflation numbers for October because I think people are getting a lot of very bad information about this.

Speaker 2 I mean, and it's not their fault. It's, again, because...

Speaker 2 The Democrat shutdown made it impossible to get any reliable data.

Speaker 2 So now we can never have data ever again yeah so okay okay so let's let's let's let's go into like what is it what is actually going on here so on wednesday uh caroline levitt said that we might not ever get october the october jobs and inflation data oops so

Speaker 2 however comma i'm sure those numbers would have been five comma the spirit halloween bump would have been huge comma on thursday

Speaker 2 National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett, who, by the way, is the guy whose whole thing is that he wants to, he wants to impose taxes on holding U.S. bonds, the worst.

Speaker 2 Maybe the only idea I've ever seen. Wow, I don't know if that's worse than a 50-year mortgage.

Speaker 2 Astonishingly bad ideas.

Speaker 2 But he said on Fox News, this is today as day of recording, said on Fox News that we're going to get some of the data, but the data we're supposed to get is very weird.

Speaker 2 Now, so this is the September data we're supposed to get next week, because that was already recorded before

Speaker 2 the government shutdown, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And there is legitimately, even in a sort of not if a normal bureau of labor statistics was trying to get these statistics out it would be a little difficult for them

Speaker 2 however comma we're only getting the jobs added numbers and not the job loss numbers oh wow goodbyes only what a what a great strategy so yeah i'm sure that i'm sure that number is fine i'm sure it's not negative 70 000 jobs or something yeah yeah right and you know and apparently that's because the survey the collected information never went out And I, I mean, it probably didn't because of the shutdown, but also like you could, you could work this out.

Speaker 2 They're just not doing it.

Speaker 2 We talked a few months ago about Trump's attempt to take over the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which with his attempt to install the hideously incompetent Heritage Foundation economist.

Speaker 2 And I use that term very loosely here, E.J. Antony.
And Trump was actually forced to like. pull back on installing this guy as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Speaker 2 So it's being run by the interim head and has been for a long time now.

Speaker 2 But it seems like a there's conflicting information going out and b it does seem like trump has been able to get a decent amount of control over the bureau of labor statistics which is supposed to be a non-partisan body that just releases the data because everyone in the entire capitalist economy requires relies on it and it is possible that this is that that we have already gotten our last unrigged like bureau labor statistics report i mean i can't confirm that they're straight up rigging it and it's also possible that oh well this wasn't the product of that and we are going to to get some of the data.

Speaker 2 Like, we are supposed to get inflation numbers,

Speaker 2 but it's not good. Oops.

Speaker 2 Well, to end on some good

Speaker 2 news, I guess. On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected a call to overturn or hear its previous ruling on legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.

Speaker 2 So this is where, this is where they're, this is where they're drawing the line right now is this.

Speaker 2 I think I did did predict this a few months ago and in which people got a little bit mad at me for saying that i didn't think they were gonna pick this one up another uh w in the gear column but i think it is fairly interesting that this is this is the point in which they're like

Speaker 2 nah nah it's not worth it like this this is more settled to them than even the abortion thing was i think i think some of the general like economic issues shows that there's not a real desire for pushing on this right now based on

Speaker 2 you know gestures broadly at other economy stuff and some of the some of the some of the anti-woke fuel may be may be running out as the as the economic situation becomes more and more dire totally dire right like

Speaker 2 how much longer can the republicans just scream about trans people as they're ruining the economy do you think that's going to still work for them in 2026 maybe not they might be scared that they've put all of their eggs in this whole anti-woke culture basket and now that they're in charge and the country's still getting worse they're like well, I wonder if we can replay that card again or not.

Speaker 2 As a final economy note, I want to note that SoftBank sold all of their shares in NVIDIA. $5 billion of NVIDIA shares.
Don't worry about it. It's part of regular stock rotation.
It's fine.

Speaker 2 These are the biggest rubes who have ever existed. Have gotten rid of all of their

Speaker 2 biggest

Speaker 2 shits.

Speaker 2 These are the WeWork guys.

Speaker 2 These are just gotten rid of their Webster. They're holding the bag for WeWork.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Does that mean that they're getting out too early of AI? Or does it mean that

Speaker 2 they're gun shy enough that they got out just in time? We'll see. You can say.
All right. We reported the news.
Garrison, I'm stealing your line this week. Why?

Speaker 2 We all stole that line from a terrible man. You haven't seen the newsroom.
It's Stolen Valor. Yep.
Great show.

Speaker 2 I would love a new season of the newsroom where he works for some like bullshit like internet news company. He's like, he's like a sub stacker and he has like a home studio.
Oh,

Speaker 2 he does top 10 lists constantly. Yeah.
God, I would love that.

Speaker 2 I would love a new season.

Speaker 17 He's super bigoted, but they don't ever make a direct point of it.

Speaker 2 It just becomes like subtly obvious that, like, oh, wow, this, this is a guy who's bought into some weird conspiracy theories. Sure.

Speaker 2 I was thinking, because I mentioned it came out the same year as True Detective.

Speaker 2 I would like a new season of the newsroom that's a crossover with the first season of True Detective, where we get Woody Harrelson and we get that British lady all in the same room together.

Speaker 2 It'll be great. They would be a nasty combo.
Imagine how much fucked up shit they could get up to. It would be awful.

Speaker 2 It would be awful. Hell yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, we're not even on the air anymore. Oh, no, we're still on the air.
Oh, well, I stopped recording. We reported the news.
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 56 It Could Happen here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 56 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 56 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.

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