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

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where we're bringing Shitty Mayor Monday back to celebrate an incredibly special occasion, which is the unbelievably funny federal indictment of one New York Mayor, Eric Adams. With me to talk about this is Garrison Davis, is James Stout, and we have a New York expert, our fellow trade unionist, Joey Pat, who works on what

but we love an afterlives. Joey, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. Excited to be here. I hope I can provide some insight to New York City and everything that's been happening lately. Yeah.

The Eric Adams news really is kind of the most positive piece of news that we've had the past month. It's been a really bad month. It's keeping me going. I feel like I gotta say, I found out the news of the indictment. I was at a gay bar near me at a queer pool event.

And, like, everybody got the news at the same time. And it was one of the funniest, like, ways to learn that Eric Adams had been in tiny. Yeah, that was, that was the, like,

The most joy I've seen from a group of New Yorkers in a while. What a beauty. Yeah. Okay, so I want to open the floor up to Eric Adams' stories, but first I need to complain about the fact that... So I have long... As a proud Chicagoan who has now fled Chicago for Portland, I have long made fun of New York for being a tier two Chinese city that...

Thinks that it's the greatest city in the world and then I learned they didn't have trash cans which pushed us at like This is not even like a tier 5. This is a level of trash collection that you see in like rural Hubei like what the fuck Britain the United Kingdom where we got rid of trash cans - oh my god, that's not true though because luckily Eric Adams didn't trash can

What is going on? The first American city to ever think of this idea. For context, I am also in a unique position here because I'm from Chicago. And yeah, oftentimes get my friends and family that still live in Chicago confused as to why I live out here. I do love New York. I...

It is a great city to live in, but these are the kind of moments we have where I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't. I can't. I don't know why. I honestly think about this Eric Adams stuff, too, is like the stuff he's so there's going to be a second federal indictment with more people in it. But the first one.

It's kind of brush league shit by Chicago standards. Like, if you compare this to, like, Rob Blagojevich trying to sell off, like, trying to sell Obama's Senate seat, it's like, okay. Yeah. I've been saying New York wants to be Chicago. They're starting a second city here, too. Oh, my God. Oh, no. There have been ads in the subway and every time, it, like, takes away a part of my soul. Like, I'm like, you cannot claim that. That is us. That is us.

It just means there's going to be even more insufferable people. This sucks. A second Second City has hit the towers.

Another great Eric Adams moment. Would Eric Adams hit the towers? No, no, but he had, he had this great interview where he was asked to summarize like what makes New York great in one word. And he gave the answer, uh, New York, which is two words. And then explained it's because it's the only city where you can wake up and have nine 11 happen and also open up a small business. Um,

One of the funniest Eric Adams moments I've ever seen. Until he was indicted. Which is now the new funniest Eric Adams moment. Which we should probably get to because this is not a short indictment. Wait, are we doing our Eric Adams favorite moments yet? Because I have a favorite. We got to run that first. I've already done mine.

Yeah. Do you want to hit us with yours, Jerry? Mine's definitely the ongoing saga of just whether or not he's a vegan and the fact that he repeatedly claims he's a vegan and thinks that I didn't know this. Yeah, he's a vegan. He talks a lot about how he's a vegan and all the health benefits and how it's

He has a lot of weird beliefs about health and stuff that have come out over his mayoral run. But apparently he's not actually a vegan because he's been seen eating chicken on camera. And that weird video of his apartment when he was running that was the Brooklyn apartment that he may or may not live in. There was like...

some sort of meat product in the fridge or something. There's been a whole thing about how like he may be, and he's like admitted that he's like eaten meat sometimes. Like he's like, oh, well, you know, I'll just have like a little nibble. Like it's, it's, it doesn't count. Chicken isn't vegan. What do you mean? He identifies as a vegan. He's like some kind of like, like 16th century Catholic, you know, where they have all these weird exceptions for fish. Right.

He just has to repent and then whatever to confess. And then he gets his card back. That's a good one. That's a good one. Joey's kind of mentioned mine, but the fact that he definitely is from New Jersey, which I think is what allowed him to use a trash can. Like, he definitely does not live in New York. There's no way. My favorite also relates to him not living in New York, which is when Curbed staked out his New York apartment and he came back once.

parked illegally and then caused a traffic jam by parking illegally so bad that he couldn't pull out of the parking. He wasn't in the parking space. He was in someone's driveway. So then he proceeded to drive along the sidewalk. And they like filmed him doing this and he confessed to doing it and was like, it was a terrible mistake. Just an incredible sequence of events. I mean,

Maybe that is like a New York mayor who can't drive. I guess that makes sense. Yet refuses to use mass transit. Oh, God. That's true. That's true. He does hate public transportation. God. You can just send more cops in the subway. That'll fix it. All right. Oh, national God. Let's get into this. Let's get started. Okay. So the things he is being indicted for are effectively. Okay. So he took a bunch of.

Different bribes in different ways. So he took, I guess there's two broad categories of bribes that he took, which is the bribes that are campaign donations that he funneled through straw donors, which is the thing where you like,

There's like limits on how much money you could donate to someone, right? So what you do is you find like 10 people and you give them all $2,000 so they can still donate it, even though it's the money from you. This is unbelievably illegal. And the second type is him just accepting unbelievable amounts of like gifts and stuff from a Turkish airliner.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that you would expect this is a thing that started when he was a mayor. But like, no, he was so he was he was the borough president of Brooklyn for a bunch of years before he became mayor. And this is like as borough president is when he really started doing all of this random weird corruption stuff. He's been doing this for almost like 10 years. Yeah. Yeah.

I kind of love this, too, because the Brooklyn Borough president, it's kind of a fake job. You don't really do anything. And I love the fact that he still managed to find ways to be corrupt in his fake job that he had. It's stunning, because I'm going to start reading from the indictment a bit. By smuggling their contributions to Adams through U.S.-based straw donors, Adams' overseas contributors defeated federal laws that served to prevent foreign influence on U.S. elections.

Wealthy individuals evaded laws designed to limit their power over elected officials by restricting the amount of money one person could donate to a candidate. And businesses circumvented New York City's ban on corporate contributions by funneling their donations to multiple employees, frustrating a law that seeks to reduce corporate power in politics.

Adams increases fundraising by accepting these concealed illegal donations at the cost of giving his secret patients undue influence over him that the law tries to prevent. So this is really funny because so there's three different illegal like things that he's done. So like there's like there's three kinds of campaign contributions you can't do. It's like corporations. One person does like limits on how much an individual person could donate. And you can't get you can't get donations from like people not from the U.S.,

And he managed to both individually and in the same scheme, violate every single one of these laws. It's just genuinely incredible.

I guess I would like to learn more. I mean, at some point, and I'm sure we'll get into it, is how explicit this whole Turkish funding really is. Extremely. They're texting each other about it? Yeah, yeah. I'm sure we'll get to this. It's when they're like, hey, Eric, you're not going to say anything about the Armenian genocide, are you? That totally didn't happen, bro. Don't mention the genocide. Oh, yeah. We'll get to that.

So, Eric Adams, the defendant, also sought and received other improper benefits from some of the same co-conspirators who funded charlatan nations to his campaign. In particular, a senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment, henceforth Turkish official, who facilitated many charlatan nations to Adams, also arranged for Adams and his companions to receive free or discounted travel on Turkey's national airline, quote, the Turkish airline, Turkey.

which is owned in significant part by the Turkish government, to destinations including France, China, Sri Lanka, India, Hungary, and Turkey itself. The Turkish officials and other Turkish nationals further arranged for Adams and his companions to receive, among other things, free rooms at opulent hotels, free meals at high-end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment while in Turkey.

So this is all very, very explicit. He's got wanderlust, you know? He was supposed to be like a travel blogger, like girly, like doing TikToks and, you know.

Unfortunately, he had to become mayor. Born to vlog, forced to mayor. Starting to do the job he wants to. Yeah, it's very tragic. Okay, so actually the first thing, Turkish influence thing that he did, I actually, this is weirdly the one part of this I don't have a problem with. One of the big things he was trying to get was, there's a giant like new Turkish consulate building that they opened kind of recently. Yeah.

And a big part of this was getting permission to open the Turkish consulate without a fire inspection so that Erdogan could visit for the opening of the consulate. And look, okay, we already can't fly to Turkey because of our public support for the Kurdish movement. So I'm just going to say this. I am entirely okay with this. I don't give a shit if they don't do fire inspections. I'm okay with Erdogan being in a non-fire safe building. Yeah.

Yeah, like, fuck him. Like, if the guy who burned 150 people alive in Cincinnati wants to fucking burn to death in his own consulate, then let him. Like, I... J.D. Whiteley don't give a shit about this. He did threaten the job of, like, the New York Fire Department's fire inspector, which kind of sucks, but, like...

If Erdőr wants to burn to death in his death trap, let him do that. This is one of the text conversations that was... I don't know if leaked is the right word, but yeah, because they were like, there was something they said to you where they were like, we've done a lot for you. Now it's time for you to do something for the Republic of Turkey. Yeah, yeah. We'll get to that. This is... It's clown shit. I was like...

After Eric Adams, a defendant, first traveled to Turkey in 2015, the Turkish official introduced Adams to Turkish Airlines general manager in New York City area. In 2016 and twice in 2017, again, this is all before he was mayor, Adams solicited and accepted free and heavily discounted luxury air travel from Turkish Airlines as part of Turkish officials' efforts to gain influence over Adams on three separate trips. Basically, like, he's getting first-class tickets from all of these people,

It's so much money worth of stuff. These tickets are like thousands of dollars. The exact total of all of the gifts he took from Turkish Airlines is like 130,000 something dollars. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So like, anytime I read a paragraph of this, just assume that in between like

Whatever paragraph I'm reading and the stuff I didn't read before it, he's taken another $10,000 of free first class rides to Turkish Airlines. It is a blessing in disguise, I will say, that I will never see Eric Adams on a flight because I cannot fly with Turkish Airlines. That's true.

There's a very funny line about this. Because the Turkish airline provided free travel benefits worth tens of thousands of dollars to Eric Adams, the defendants, he flew the Turkish airline even when doing so was otherwise inconvenient. Yeah, this is fucking great. For example, dream the July and August 2017 trip.

Adam's partner was surprised to learn that Adams was in Turkey when she had understood him to be flying from New York to France. Adams responded in a text message, quote, transferring here. You know, first stop is always in Istanbul spelled very wrong and lowercase I. So true. So true, brother. When Adam's partner later inquired about planning a trip to Easter Island, Chile, Adams...

Adams repeatedly asked her whether Turkish Airlines could be used for their flights, requesting her to call Turkish Airlines to confirm they did not have routes between New York and Chile. Why would Turkish Airlines have a flight from New York to Chile?

Oh my God. It's part of the greater Ottoman Empire. You know, I would take bribes from Air Canada, but I'm also not running for mayor. Well, you could run for borough president. That's true. That's true. Start small. I could become elected the mayor of South Fulton. That is very doable. Similarly, lots of the mayors of South Fulton have had very odd kind of controversies. So what I'm saying is South Fulton is basically Georgia's version of...

of New York. New York is the South Fulton of America. Yeah. Have you, have you guys seen a video clip of him? Every city he goes to, he says like, New York is this city of America. It's crazy. It's crazy. Istanbul of America. It really is.

So this is all very funny, but this is all happening. All of the tens of thousands of dollars at this point of money that he's taking from Turkey is all happening in a period where Turkey is butchering Kurds across the Middle East. Like his first trip there, and this is all again well before his mayor, while he's like Brooklyn borough president, is four months before the firebombing of that city that I talked about where they were again, they burned 150 civilians alive in a fucking building. If I'm remembering correctly, I'm pretty sure they kill, I'm pretty sure they burn the city council alive. That's just the stuff

In Turkey, and like we have covered extensively on this show, Turkey's like drone warfare program. There's the whole thing of it has been long suspected that the Turkish government was aiding ISIS through the period because they were like using basically using them as a proxy to fight like Kurdish freedom movement forces in Syria. I think you could definitely say that like former ISIS fighters are now fighting for the Turkish against the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan. Yeah.

I've said that before anyway. The Kurds will tell you that former ISIS fighters... I know David Graeber, the anthropologist who smuggled a bunch of drone parts to Rojava, had a story about how he was talking to people like, yeah, they would pick up ISIS fighters and they would look through their possessions and every single one of them has Turkish passports. They all have Turkish identity. It's like, hmm, I wonder where these people came from. Even like...

I'll just say I have spoken to some people who were part of the fight against ISIS who discovered blank Turkish passports when taking like ISIS buildings and ISIS strongholds. Yeah. So there's there's I mean, just this is a period of even by the standards of Turkey, like unbelievable Turkish violence. This is their their invasion of Syria. And, you know, this is this is the period in which Eric Adams decides that he's going to become a nation to the Turkish state.

And so obviously, like, he lies about this to the government. Because, again, you're not allowed to do this. There's a bunch of very funny schemes that he does, like,

Oh, my God.

In 2017, Adams sent a series of emails to the scheduler directing the scheduler to pay for the free 2017 flights that he and his companions had already taken on the Turkish airline. But the emails provided inconsistent explanations. In some, Adams suggested that the Adams scheduler should pay using Adams' credit card. While in others, Adams claimed to have left...

cash in an envelope for the schedule to send to the Turkish airline. That's how you pay. That's how I pay for all my flights. Cash in an envelope. This is how he's tried to cover up for the fact that he's not paying for these flights. He'll pay like $600 for a $300 ticket. But he's like sending envelopes to his scheduler to hand to the Turkish airline. A man who was a cop doing an absolutely terrible job of covering his own ass.

You know who else is taking bribes from the Turkish government? No. No. No. We cannot. It's not our products and services. It's someone else's products and services. Ours are all fine. We are back. So there's actually another paragraph of that part. For example, on November 25th, 2017, Adam sent an email to the scheduler saying that with respects to the July trip,

Quote, I left you the money for the International Airline in an envelope in your top dress drawer. Please send it to them. So the funny thing about this, right? So he's supposed to have this like cash dead drop to pay for the airline tickets, but he just like never does it because the tickets are free. So he just like stops covering his tracks. Yeah, amazing. And doesn't use signal. Yeah, it's really astounding.

Okay, so what is the Turkish government getting from this? In return for travel benefits, the Turkish official provided or arranged in about 2015 or 2016, Eric Adams, the defendant, granted a political request from the Turkish official. Prior to Adams' 2015 travel to Turkey, which Adams knew and disclosed to one of the monitoring agencies, had been funded by, among other entities, the Turkish consulate, the Turkish airline, and three separate municipalities in Turkey,

Adams maintained a relationship with a Turkish community center in Brooklyn. In or about 2016, the Turkish official told Adams that the community center was affiliated with a Turkish movement that was hostile to Turkey's government and that if Adams wished to continue receiving support from the Turkish government, Adams could no longer associate with the community center. Adams acquiesced. God, I wonder who it was. See, okay, so I

I looked into this. No one that I've seen doing reporting on this seems to know which center this was, but, but this has to be a Gulenist thing. Yeah. So, uh, to people who didn't spend all of their childhood mired in the intricacies of Turkish politics, to Erdogan's, the current ruler of Turkey, Gulen was like one of his old, old allies, uh,

But they had this giant falling out and a huge part of what everyone was doing in the 2010s was like trying to purge all of the Gulenists from everywhere. Like there was this whole scheme running, I think through Michael Flynn, where Turkey was trying to get Trump to like the Gulen's like in like a compound in I think Virginia or something. And, um,

Turkey was trying to get Trump to raid the compound and send him to Turkey, which didn't happen. Yeah, that lines up with the coup, the 2016 coup, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's always been unclear to me exactly how much influence these people have. But the one thing I will say is that I had a classmate in college who was

who was in Turkey for a long time. And their line about it was like, yeah, I don't know how much of this sort of ghoulish deep state shit is true, but also there were like ghoulish people who you could go to who had like all the answers to like state exams. So if you were like willing to get in bed with them, they would just give you all the answers. So like, you know, they weren't not a part of this. And I'm pretty sure what happened here was that

Adams was like cutting off all contact with these people because this this is part of the ghoulish split I'm not a hundred percent sure because there are multiple community centers in Brooklyn in Brooklyn like Turkish media centers in Brooklyn But I'm about 80% sure that's what happens. So that's like one of the first direct influence things Okay, so he's doing the influence paddling stuff, right? He's doing his partially through the airlines and then also he's just taking a bunch of legal fundraising money quote on July 22nd 2018 the same day is this fundraising event and

The Adams staffer and the promoter discussed by text message a possible trip by Adams to Turkey. The promoter stated in part, Fundraising in Turkey is not legal, but I think I can raise money for your campaign off the record. The Adams staffer inquired, How will Adams declare that money? The promoter responded, He won't declare it. Or, We'll make the donation to an American citizen in the U.S., a Turk. I'll give cash to him in Turkey. I'll send it to an American. He will make the donation to you.

The Adam Stafford replied, I think he won't get involved in such games. They might cause a stink later on, but I'll ask anyways. The Adam Stafford then asked, how much do you think would come from you? The promoter responded, max 100K.

The Adam staffer wrote a hundred K. Do you have a chance to transfer that here? We can't do it while Eric is in Turkey to which promoter replied. Let's think after the conversation, the Adam staffer asked Adams, whether the Adam staffer should pursue the unlawful foreign contributions offered by the promoter.

And contrary to the staffers expectations, Adams directed the staffer to pursue the promoter's illegal scheme. That's crazy. I feel like you should know who you're working for well enough to be like, hey, this guy is offering a completely illegal fundraising scheme that we know is illegal. And I don't think my boss will take it. And then the boss turns around to me. He's like, yeah, fuck it. Raise money. Yeah.

It might cause a big stink later on. You don't say. Yeah, yeah. That's wild. To be fair, it did. Yeah. It's so explicit. And I do want to get to some of the other text messages sooner than later because it really just shows how aware everyone involved is over what's going on. Yeah. They're doing crimes. It's literally just, hey, what should I do with the crime money? The illegal crime money, by the way. We mentioned this is illegal. So, yeah.

So partially this is being run through Turkish Airlines, partially this is being run through a Turkish university, and partially this is being run through just a bunch of businessmen, some of whom are Turkish, some of whom aren't. So here's like the next thing I was going to read. Although Adams knew that businessman one was a Turkish national who could not lawfully contribute to U.S. elections, Adams directed the staffer to obtain the illegal contributions offered by businessman one.

Following up on this directive, Adams wrote to the staffer that Business 101 quote is ready to help. I don't want his help to be wasted. So they are just like unbelievably directly being like, yeah, we know this guy can't do this, but we're just going to tell him to send this money anyways. Yeah, it's insane how slapstick they are about this. Yeah. And like, you know, they're kind of trying to cover the tracks. I think this part of it is one of the things that I think like was one of the things that kind of went viral over this.

So Adams is trying to arrange another...

$50,000 contribution from a third Turkish businessman. And in the middle of this, he's saying to his staffer, quote, to be on the safe side, please delete capital P, capital D. Please delete all messages you send me. Adams responded, always do. Now, we know for a fact that a bunch of these messages were simply not deleted. Considering that you just read them. Yeah.

I do also think it was worth noting that some of these efforts certainly started to ramp up around his mayoral campaign because some of these Turkish officials thought that if Adams becomes a more prominent member in politics, if he ever runs for president, if they can gain influence over him from like

pretty early on, that would be really useful for the Turkish government. That is some of like the reasoning behind this like decades long campaign. Like puppet Eric Adams. Maybe the Turkish government had seen Nate Silver's now infamous tweet.

I will be the next. Yeah. I mean, it's all Nate Silver's fault. Many such cases. Yeah. Oh, God. It's Nate Silver who got them to chase us around with drones last last October. He keeps getting more businessmen to donate tens of thousands of dollars. Oh, yeah. It's so funny. It's like repeatedly. He just keeps getting more and more and more. Yeah. And the funniest part is that like by like guy number four, he's doing this with he's like telling the guy how did

do sprawl donations where he's like yeah no you can't donate $10,000 but give $2,000 to each of your employees and they'll do it yeah he's doing like instructions for each of these guys and it's like at a certain point like

Like some of the early airline stuff is yes, illegal and sketchy, but like, you know, it's, it's just getting some nice plane tickets by like 2021. He's just teaching them how to do like super illegal, like campaign fraud. Yeah. Yeah. You've like committed so much that you're just like in too deep. Like you can't like, what's there to do?

Yeah, you know who else is in too deep? It's the products and services who control this podcast. Support that one. Oh, God. Wow. Wow. You're not supposed to say that, man. They're actually ran by the Reagan coin people. They have very little editorial control. You're supposed to delete those tags. Yeah.

There are so many funny ones. He also is taking money from this Uzbek construction guy where he takes a bunch of money that shows up at this New York Uzbek pride event to give a speech because he took money from this construction guy. Did he say New York is the Uzbekistan of America? Yeah.

Honestly, he probably has said that. Yeah, he's probably said Kazakhstan by accident because he always says the wrong country whenever he's giving a speech like that. My favorite moment was the video of him speaking to like the Indian group that he kept saying Pakistan. Oh, God. Oh, dear.

Yeah, I bet that went down like a chocolate tea pot. He did it like twice, too. They corrected him, then he kept doing it. They were like yelling over him, and he said, Stout God. So there's another kind of funny one where he's getting a bunch of money from this university, and he actually returns the money because his campaign is like, his mayoral campaign is over, but he's still going to go to prison for it because he lied to the government about where he got the money, even though he gave it away.

Okay, so I want to start reading some of these texts so we can get into like how explicit the stuff is. On July 22nd, 2021, Adams, the staffer, requested that the airline manager book flights to Istanbul for Adams.

In order to conceal the favorable treatment, the Adam Stafford requested the airline manager charge Adams what would appear to be a real price. Adam Stafford, how much does he owe? Please let them make a call and I will make the payments. Airline manager, it is very expensive because it is last minute. I am working on a discount. Adam Stafford, okay, thank you. Airline manager, I am going to charge $50. Adam Stafford, no.

Airline manager. That wouldn't work, wouldn't it? Adam Stafford. No, dear. $50? What? Quote a proper price. How much should I charge? A smiley face emoji. Adam Stafford. His every step is being watched right now. $1,000 or so. Let it be somewhat real. We don't want them to say that he is flying for free. At the moment, the media's attention is on Eric. Amazing stuff. The smiley face of the tax is really...

throwing me off. It's so good.

So he paid about $1,100 for these round-trip tickets, and he was upgraded to business class. Lucky him. And in actuality, these tickets would, again, be like $15,000. And this is the same type of stuff he was doing eight years ago. Except this time, he actually is paying some money, whereas last time, he did not actually fill up those envelopes with cash. Yeah. But still, he's about $14,000 short. Yeah.

He also has this great one where, like...

The staffer is like, do you have recommendations on where you can go to Turkey? The airline manager. Four seasons, staffer. It's too expensive. Airline manager. Why does he care? He's not going to pay. His name will not be on anything either. Adam staffer. Super. Super. So funny. It's all so good. Super illegal. I want to meet the person who's sending these texts. Yeah. So bad. It's so funny. Why is this like the cadence with which they're speaking in these texts? It's just...

It's insane. It's incredible stuff. There's some great ones. I'm going to read this one. On the day the Adams fundraiser was scheduled to depart Istanbul, Adams created a message thread between himself, the Adams fundraiser, and the airline manager. Quote,

The manager then arranged for the Adams fundraiser, who was otherwise flying on an economy ticket, to have access to not only the Turkish Airlines business lounge, but also an exclusive private suite inside the lounge, complete with a bed and free food.

The Turkish airline manager explained, "This is our suite for VIPs and we want you to feel yourself." Two words, yourself. Sick VIP smiley face emoji. Feel yourself VIP. Yeah. That's what we all want. At another point in the exchange, Adams wrote, quote, "Thanks a million, airline manager. My brother." To which the airline manager responded, "Anytime, brother." Oh, no. Oh, dear. I feel physically unwell.

They just keep doing this. On the day he won the election, like the day after, the airline manager sent the following text message. Brother, congratulations. Adams responded, cannot thank you enough. So true. So true. Woo!

That is good, although it's not as good as kind of the next thing. When in December of 21, he was putting together his mayoral team for policy advisors and his transition team. And he did not have...

people from Turkey on this list. So this air manager said... It's not quite blackmail, but it is certainly bribery saying, hey, maybe you should put me on your senior...

on your senior advisory team. And if you don't, then you're not going to get free tickets anymore. Yeah, I want to read the exact line because it's so funny. The staffer sends the airline manager a list and the airline manager responds, it would suit me well to be lead or senior advisor. Two days later, the airline manager sent a message reiterating, lead, please, PLZ, please. Smiley face emoji. Whoa!

Otherwise seat 52 is empty on the way back. Oh my God. If you don't make me a lead advisor, we're not going to give you free, free airplane tickets anymore.

Oh my god it's so funny Winky face And then I believe he did add Someone onto his team Yep yep Yeah he was added to the infrastructure climate And sustainability committee transition team Jesus Christ The whole sustainability commission is just like a slush There's another thing later where like He's like a secret meeting of like these Turkish Donors and he calls it like a Sustainability transition meeting So no one will know that he's having this meeting

You should read what the airline manager wrote after he was added to the Climate and Sustainability and Infrastructure Committee. Yeah, so on December 2021, a senior Turkish government official sent the airline manager a series of texts noting the airline manager's membership on Adam's Infrastructure, Climate, and Sustainability Committee and sending applause emojis. Oh, no!

The airline manager responded that his membership on the transition committee was in service of Turkey. Quote, thank you, brother. We are doing our best to serve our country adequately. Your support gives us strength here. Thank you. You were always there for us and we're trying to be loyal. It's amazing. Oh, wait, we're trying to be worthy. Yeah, we're trying to be worthy. Yeah, we're trying to be worthy. Yeah, that is so sorry. I'm trying to be worthy of you. Thank you so much for being there. Please. So good. I

I just like want to be worthy of you, Eric Adams. So by this point, I totaled the Turkish airline bribes specifically. All the benefits total $123,000. Which is also just a small fraction of like the total amount of money he received. To be fair, that's probably like the face prices of business class tickets and lounge access, which no one actually pays for. Yeah, yeah.

Because beyond the actual airline stuff, because of the campaign match policy deals, he received in the end $10 million from all of this whole ordeal. Yeah, so the match funding thing basically is there's public matching funds for private donations for mayoral candidates. There's some things you have to go through, but...

In order to get that money right, you have to abide by campaign finance law. And all of these, like, straw donor bribe donations that he's getting are being, are also, I think it's like eight to one or something, like, matching funds are being matched by the government. So he got, like, $10 million of matching funds. He's not only, like, doing, like, campaign fraud by getting this, like, foreign influence amount of money, but he's also, like, stealing from...

From everyone else too by having all of these illegal contributions matched. So in the end, I think he's charged with basically $10 million of fraud.

The other thing is, like, this is how he won the election. Like, he won the election by spending an unbelievable amount of money. And, like, that money was, like, this, like, stuff that he defrauded the government for. And it's ironic that, like, the campaign funding matching is designed to, like, amplify the donations made by regular New Yorkers and not make it all, like, a super PAC game. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Adams thought he'd made an end run around that. And like, I did not realize just because I had been keeping up with like Eric Adams news previous to this. I did not realize how often his house was getting raided by the FBI. Oh, there were so many. There have been so many. This is all just one angle on the like 35. Because there's so much other corruption he was doing. Yeah. This is just the stuff they got.

Specifically around him for but like basically everyone in the circle around him has is like also going to prison like to the point where I was talking about that construction guy that he donated money to. Yeah, that guy also paid off like the guy who's going to become mayor when Adams gets arrested. So like the deputy mayor like also took money from that guy. Amazing. Yeah. So one of the worst parts.

of this. On April 21st, 2022, the Turkish official messaged the Adam Staffer noting that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day was approaching and repeatedly asking the Adam Staffer for assurances that Adams would not make any statements about the Armenian Genocide. Jesus Christ. The Adam Staffer confirmed that Adams did not make a statement about the Armenian Genocide. Adams did not make such a statement. New York, not the Yerevan of America. Yeah. So...

He just straight up took money from the Turkish government to do genocide denial for them. So that's great. That's incredible stuff. To be fair, that is a mainstay of current American politics. Oh, yeah, yeah. It is the best funded of all genocide denials.

Yes. Yes. Well, this Eric Adams guy doesn't seem like, doesn't seem too good. It is just fascinating to me that out of all the cities, New York is just the one city that you cannot have a normal mayor. Just like every single mayor is weird and fucked up in like a different way. Like it's just impossible. Yeah. There was like an onion headline one time that was like the mayor de Blasio. Like, well, well, well, it's not so easy to have a not fucked up mayor.

or something. Yeah, I think the exact line was, well, well, well, not so easy to find a mayor who doesn't suck shit now, huh? Who doesn't suck shit, yeah.

Exactly. The Eric Adams one hits so much harder because he's like the law and order mayor. Like he's like, you know, like former cop, blah, blah, blah. He's the one making New York worse through all of like the fucked up police stuff. Meanwhile, he's just been doing these like major crimes and having his house raided by the FBI like every other month. Also having like his friend's house is raided by the FBI. Was it like a police chief or police commissioner who was just raided? Yeah.

And then the interim police commissioner who they put in after the first one. Yeah.

It's wild stuff. Yeah. We got to talk about his phone password before we finish. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where I want to close on is like before he goes under, like all of his staffers are getting visited by the FBI and a, you can tell they're all cops and are dumb as shit because they all, they all agreed to talk to the FBI and like lied to them. So funny. And then we're trying to like coordinate destroying the messages, which the FBI got all the data from. Um,

On October 6th, 2023, FBI agents executed a search warrant for the electronic devices used by Eric Adams, a defendant. Although Adams was carrying several electronic devices, including two cell phones, he was not carrying his personal cell phone, which is a device he used to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment. When Adams produced his personal cell phone the next day in response to a subpoena, it was locked.

Such as the device required a password to open. Adams claimed that after he learned the investigation into his conduct, he learned about the investigation. He changed the password the day before, uh,

An increase to complexity of his password from four to six digits. Adams had done this, he claimed, to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone. According to Adams, he wished to preserve the contents of his phone due to the investigation. But Adams further claimed he'd forgotten the password he just set and was unable to provide

the FBI with a password that can unlock the phone. Have they tried his birthday? It's the funniest argument. They're like, no, no, no, I changed the password so that the information was safe and wouldn't be deleted. Also, I forgot the password. Okay, so presumably this is encrypted, right? But I cannot... What the fuck is the FBI doing that they can't just break into this phone?

Like, I mean, some phones are hard to break into. Like, it is true. Yeah, the feds have struggled with iPhones for a while. Yes, but this is Eric Adams. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it might be zero, zero, zero, zero. Like, they ought to give it the whole college try, to be honest. Yeah, like, they've got to have some fucking, like, spook from the NSA that they can illegally send this phone over to. Like, I'm sure they've tried Celebrite. I'm sure they've tried a whole bunch of stuff. It just doesn't always work.

Yeah, like, I don't know. It makes me feel wildly better about phone security. Oh, by the way, this is a message about this public safety announcement. If you use a face print or a fingerprint to lock your phone, the cops can just use your face or your fingerprint to unlock it, or they can get it with a warrant. But if it's, like, an actual number...

Like, they can't put a gun to your head and say, open it, which is the way that this would normally sort of work. So, yeah, basic security thing. So, in all, Adams is being charged with simultaneously conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign national. There's a count of wire fraud. There's another count of solicitation of a contribution by foreign national. There's...

subsequently the fourth count is the same as the third count it's it's solicitation of a contribution by foreign national and the fifth count is bribery so he's like probably going down going down he sounds pretty fucked i mean it has been interesting how much the federal government has been cracking down on foreign influence before this election both with like tenant media like a russian foreign influence stuff like this there's been like

some like Jimmy Dore or like orbiters that I know have been getting looked into by the feds for like Russian foreign influence. And this is not a show where we regularly praise the actions of the federal government, but it's always funny to see my enemies having a hard time. And I'm praying for that Jackson Hinkle one, which is one day. Because it's so obvious. It's so obvious that he's absolutely getting paid by some foreign government. Yeah.

I wonder which one. This one is Erdogan versus the FBI, which I'm just like chomping down popcorn and clapping like a seal watching the two most hated rivals fighting each other like, yes, yes, destroy each other. No matter what happens, I'm okay with it. Yeah. Wow. I will repeat my position here at the end of the show that I am prepared to vote for Joe Biden on the condition that he immediately begins trading Eric Adams for Abdullah Ocalan. Okay.

who does not belong in jail, unlike Eric Adams. It's free Ocelan week this week. And so, yeah, he shouldn't be in prison. Let him out. How do you feel about your mayor, Joey? You know, it sounds like he's working on some shit. He's got to figure out if he really wants to. You know, see, this is the thing, too, is it's like,

Do I want to be like, wow, congrats to the FBI on this investigation? No. That being said, it is really funny to see this all go down. I think also just the amount of

that he has done while he's in office, both legally and over the table and under the table. It is kind of funny to see this be the thing that takes him down. Yeah. Another one of my favorite tweets about all this was somebody was like, I'm sure Eric Adams all of a sudden is going to be really pro-prison reform all of a sudden.

God, I hope so. That would be a crazy. It's like an abolitionist arc. I'm getting flashbacks. Prison abolition arts. I'm getting flashbacks to when, uh, when, uh, Oh God, what's his name? Not de Blasio. Uh,

No, the governor. The governor. Oh my God, former governor. Cuomo. Cuomo, like, he was having all of his shit come out and, like, the last thing he did in office was the legalized weed and it was, like, such a, like, last-ditch, like, fine. Here you guys go. Like, you want this. I'm like, are we going to get something like that? Are we going to get... Well, I guess he tried with the trash cans and people rejected that. But it's been...

I hope for the sake of the city that he faces consequences for this and isn't never back in New York politics. But yeah,

I guess we'll see what happens. No, I'm not going to cheer on the FBI, but I am pro cop-on-cop violence. That's true. And that's all this is. That's all this is. So that's fine. I'm pro irony. I'm pro like you're getting got by the same people, your bros. I am interested in what the next New York mayoral election will look like. We're bringing in Lori Lightfoot. Let's

Let's go. And the small possibility that depending how this next election goes, we could have a Trump versus Clinton mayoral race in New York, which I would love to watch. Maybe Hillary Clinton will finally make her film about the Syrian Democratic Forces. She's been promising to make for years.

I want to close on a kind of slightly more serious struggles are connected note, because the thing about Eric Adams is that he was the guy who was brought in black cop, like very specifically brought in and his, his thing was basically to contain the 2020 uprising, right? He was, he was the guy whose thing was, we're bringing in the kind of revolution. We're stomping all of this stuff out. Like all of the sort of like gains of anti-police stuff that you'd made all the sort of

ideological gains have been made. We're going to wipe all that out. And I think it is really significant that the government who is funding him is a Turkish government. Because if you look at the last cycle, right? So Eric Adams is starting to do this in 2014, 2015. What's happening in Turkey in that time is that Turkey had been one of the big sites of huge uprisings in 2013. They have one of the biggest, like, of that cycle of protests. So 2013 is the second...

of the waves from the Occupy 2011 wave, right? There's a big wave in 2011 and then 2013 is the second one. One of the biggest ones is in Turkey and Turkey's eventual solution to this is basically just wholesale slaughter of the Kurdish revolution that was happening.

And, you know, literally in 2014, at the same time, 2014, 2015, at the same time as the Michael Brown uprisings going on, and then Baltimore goes up, right? At the same time that's happening, there's these Kurdish uprisings in Turkey. That's where all the firebombing happens, right? These things are very, very intimately connected. There's a reason why, other than just sort of country's corruption stuff, that these forces are aligned with each other. Because...

The same people behind the American prison state are also the same people who are fucking backing this Turkish exterminationist movement against the Kurds. And we are going to either win our freedom together or we're going to have a thousand more fucking Eric Adamses. Exactly. Yeah, and I mean, I think, like, going back to what I was saying before, like, the craziest thing about all this, and, like, this is definitely something that I've kind of had to, like, step back and be like, all right, like, I obviously am existing within, like,

a specific community. New York is a huge city. It's the largest city in the US. And there's lots of different smaller communities. And I was like, I feel like everybody that I know and everybody I interact with hates Eric Adams, has their own list of reasons why he has done XYZ thing. And whether it's my friends that are teachers or like

work for or just use public libraries that he has, like, really decided to attack and, like, defund for various reasons or, like, friends that have had to deal with, like, the prison system or whatever. Or last year, I had been working on an investigative show that was looking into a lot of the situation at Rikers. And, you know, Rikers is supposed to be closed in 2027. Eric Adams has really tried to push back against that.

Despite the fact that there's a federal investigation into the situation there and it's not like the conditions are not good.

It is an unpopular solution. You know, it's like most New Yorkers agree that there needs to be some other alternative than Rikers and just sending people to like literally an island. That being said, like he won the election. He won his mayoral election. It was sort of like surprising. He was kind of the underdog. There were other candidates that I think people had kind of been expecting to win. And yeah, he was the law and order guy. He was coming in as supposed to be this like alternative to like the 20th.

the 2020 uprising to what was seen as this like chaos. And again, yeah, it's the irony of him getting got by its own system, getting got by the fact that like, he just keeps doing crimes. He loves doing crimes. His favorite thing. And then at the same time, it's like, he's caused all this damage to like individual, like specific programs in the city, specific systems that were really helping people. He has, like,

spread like misinformation about migrants that have been in New York. He has been like, there's just a laundry list of things that he has done that has been like

insanely harmful for like various reasons. And you know what, if this is going to be the thing that's going to get on at the end of the day, this and Sabrina Carpenter, apparently that also, those of you who don't know that the Sabrina Carpenter feather music video apparently was a big part of the Eric Adams indictment from kind of the more local side involving the, the church that she was filming at and the, the,

I'm not sure what his official position is, but like the priest who had kind of allowed her to come in and film. And then it ended up that he was demoted because if you've listened to a Sabrina Carpenter song, you can see why the Catholic Church might not be super excited about that. And then he decided to cooperate with the investigation since the church wasn't super happy with him. This whole thing is just, there's like, there's so many aspects of this that are so crazy. If this is going to be the one that gets him...

Yeah. Yeah. So someone's going to do like a 30 part podcast series about this something. I'm going to listen to every single one of these episodes. And there's going to be so much more stuff that's going to come out. Yeah. Speaking of podcasts, Joey, do you want to plug your work? For sure. Yeah. So I'm right now producing a show called But We Loved, which is on iHeart's network. It's part of our Outspoken network, which is our LGBTQ plus kind of focus shows. And you can find that on Spotify, Apple Music, Spotify.

iHeartMedia app, whatever, all the places. I also previously had worked on a show called Afterlives. If you are interested in learning more about Rikers and particularly some of the policy that Eric Adams himself has worked to either stop from being effective or stop from making the reforms that's supposed to be happening in regards to the whole Rikers situation, you should check out that show. But yeah.

That's where I'm at. You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram at patnotpratt. That's P-A-T-T-N-O-T-P-R-A-T-T.

People got my last name wrong a lot. We'll put that in the description. Yeah. Yeah, Joey, thank you for coming on. And fuck, I hope we all get rid of our fucking bears because Jesus Christ. Oh, God, yeah. Future of the Democratic Party. Lori Lightfoot, Eric Adams. 2028, let's go. Oh, God, yeah. Oh, God. Yay!

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The 2024 presidential election is here. MSNBC has the in-depth coverage and analysis you need. Our reporters are on the ground. Steve Kornacki is at the big board breaking down the races. Rachel Maddow and our Decision 2024 team will provide insight as results come in. And the next day, Morning Joe will give you perspective on what it all means for the future of our country.

Watch coverage of the 2024 presidential election, Tuesday, November 5th on MSNBC. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how people work to put them back together again, because it's the Humpty Dumpty of podcasts. Except Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together in the end because it was a bunch of state actors who were trying. And really, that's not how you usually get things done.

I'm your guest host today, Margaret Kiljoy. And with me as my regular host today is James. Hi, James. Hi, Margaret. Thank you for having me on the podcast that I work for. I'm glad to have you on your podcast. So this episode is about what I learned about prepping by going down to Western North Carolina in the immediate wake of the flooding caused by two storms, one of which was Hurricane Helene. And there's a few things I like an awful lot. One of them is prepping.

Another one of them is Asheville, North Carolina, where I lived longer than I have lived anywhere else in my adult life, which isn't actually saying that much because I lived there for about six years. But it's a decent amount of time. You know a place. Yeah. Before that, I was fully vagabondy.

This is a story about prepping in Asheville, North Carolina. And so I thought I'd bring on another It Could Happen Here prepper, James. Yep. It's me. Someone who has been to Asheville, North Carolina. Oh, yeah. Still lives in San Diego. Yeah. Nice place to go outside. Normally. Okay, but have you ever heard that song, the like, I've been everywhere man song? I've been everywhere. Yes. I don't think I'm allowed to sing things on this podcast. Yeah, yeah. I started liking that song because I was like, yeah, I've been everywhere. Yeah.

That man starts listening where he's been and I'm like, no, I ain't been shit. I ain't never been anywhere in my life. I've not made it. Yeah. Yeah. It is one of the nice things about my job that people, I get to go places and meet people. Yeah.

Yeah, that is fun. So as I assume listeners are aware, about two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene dumped an enormous quantity of water onto the mountains of Western North Carolina, which would have been bad no matter what. But another unnamed storm had already been dropping unconscious, not good amounts of water on the area for a day or so.

The two storms together caused the worst natural disaster in recorded history for the region. The only thing that came close was the 1916 flood, which was again like a regular storm and then I think a coastal tropical storm.

hitting at the same time. So the way to have everything fail is to have two storms at once, in case anyone's curious how to have bad things happen due to storms. Anyway, I drove down in a van full of supplies because my friends were there and they needed the supplies more than my basement did. And because I had enough cash on hand to hit up a bunch of stores to get more stuff to bring to them too. I also drove down there as a journalist, figuring I'd talk to people about mutual aid and about preparedness.

This week on my own podcast, Cool People Did Cool Stuff, I talk about my experiences there, what I saw with an emphasis on the mutual aid side, on the enormous amount of grassroots and informal disaster response. But this is It Could Happen Here, and I wanted to talk about preparedness. I want to talk about what worked and what didn't, what lessons we can draw anywhere we are listening to this from what people experienced there in Asheville, North Carolina, or at least what lessons I was able to pick up on.

And we're going to talk about like stuff and specific things in a second. Oh, good. But first, when I talk about preparedness, which I do a lot, I talk about how I'm interested in both the individual and community as two different types of preparedness. And I had some hypotheses that these were deeply related and reliant on each other, in fact, that you do one better by doing the other better.

But now that I've seen those hypotheses tested, I was right. That's my answer. It's in fact a proven hypothesis. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, I don't want to run more tests, but... We probably will. Yeah, exactly. Because we're doing shit to stop it, aren't we? No, no. We're mostly doing things to make it worse. Cool. Basically...

We need both individual and community preparedness, and we should stop seeing them as opposing forces. There might be no single false dichotomy that has more wrecked our imaginations than the idea that the individual and the community are two opposing forces, that they must be balanced against one another instead of interwoven, instead of allowing what's best about both things to reinforce the other. I would argue the 20th century did us dirty.

The Cold War did us dirty. In the U.S., I grew up presented with the idea that the USSR represented community in that side, and that meant being a cog in the machine, devoid of individuality, enthralled to an authoritarian state.

If I cared about the individual and individual freedom and liberty, I had to accept capitalism and competition and to see myself in a war against everyone else. I don't know how you feel. I don't want to be a cog in a machine. And I also don't want to be in a war against everyone else. Yeah. This is the, uh, this is the sort of false dichotomy that we're presented with. Right. It's like,

I'll tell an anecdote here. When I was writing my dissertation, I would describe my politics as left libertarian. And I would describe the politics of the many different types of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists in Spain similarly, because it accurately describes their perspective, right? And I was forbidden from doing so. Yeah.

under the probably fair enough objection that americans could not comprehend the idea of libertarianism without individualism yeah which is annoying because oh was it rothbard someone consciously stole that word from us you used to not have to say left libertarian because if you said libertarian you meant left libertarian

Yeah, this was the pre-date to Rothbard. It is something I've written about on my Patreon. Oh, okay. But yeah, libertarian began to be used by French anarchists to avoid censorship and persecution of anarchists for being anarchists. Yeah. And then it came to America where, like many things in America, it was stolen from its original creators and custodians and fucking ruined by chuds. Yeah. Which is a shame. Yeah.

But yeah, there is in fact an option where you don't have to pick one or the other. Yeah. What is good for me as an individual is to be able to express the full range of my possibilities, right? And I'm more able to do that in a supportive community than like alone in the woods somewhere, cut off from everyone else, chasing rabbits with a hatchet and dying of easily preventable infections. That's the American dream, Margaret. What are you talking about? Yeah.

I used to joke that I was going to start a YouTube channel called How to Survive Alone in the Woods with a Hatchet Eating Squirrels that You Kill with the aforementioned hatchet. But unfortunately, you died of tetanus before. Yeah, exactly. The existence of society makes me more free. It makes me more capable of doing what I want to do. Yeah.

I really like, I don't remember which old theorist came up with it, but I really like the idea of understanding freedom as a relationship between people, not a like static state. Yeah. It is something that we offer each other and that we like work to maximize with each other. Yeah.

On the other side of things, what's good for communities is not to be rigidly top-down controlled, but instead to allow people free expression, develop new ideas, try new things, to have communities grow organically. We are not actually factory cogs. We do better as a garden. And that's been my working theory. With preparedness, it's been similar.

on one side are these deals these goods and services the ads that interrupt things magnificent thank you thank you i live to do this here's the ads and we're back

On one side, I saw preppers as being kind of a primarily an individualistic bunch of folks obsessed with what I've called the bunker mentality. The hole up in guns and shoot anyone who comes too close mentality. The I've got mine, fuck you mentality. You ever seen on like older prepper Reddit and stuff like that where people like kind of

get sad when they realize they're all planning to shoot each other, all their friends after the apocalypse. Yeah. That like anyone who's able to, who has more than two weeks of food stored is inherently going to kill anyone else. Yeah. Who has more than two. Yeah. It's great when they all come around to that occasionally. Yeah. And they're like, wait, but I like this community I've built. Yeah. They're also their only friends because they've alienated everyone else with their weird obsession of fallout. This is not a good mentality to have.

I would argue it's behind a lot of what's happening on the border right now, actually. I think that the right wing actually does believe in climate change and is not willing to just say it publicly because it doesn't play to their base. But they're like, we've got ours, fuck you, and want to close down the borders as best as they can in the global north. Yeah.

and we'll move the borders as far from your eyesight as possible. That's what I saw in Panama. Oh, yeah. Listeners will know I was in the Darien Gap. But like Panama, without funding, you and me, Margaret, when we pay our taxes, we pay for families to be split up. Hell yeah. Deportations to happen, fences to be built in Panama because that makes it...

Further from our sight and further from our mind, right? That's what liberty means. Yep. Liberty is the ability to interfere in other countries' families. Yep. Domestic politics in other countries by a fire hose of money. I mean, it's funny because it's the same justification. Every now and then you meet the people who genuinely think Russia is allowed to invade Ukraine because...

border security because ukraine's too close to it you're like amazing yeah ukraine bad therefore fuck it why not like it's yeah yeah it's like the monroe doctrine but for russia like this is my hemisphere don't fuck with me yeah burn down your neighbor's house because you're just like nah you're living too close to me don't like it yeah senior yard sign

They've got one of those in this house signs. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Which they've all taken down now because it says no human beings are legal and they no longer believe that. Yeah. Cool. Well, I would argue this is a fundamentally right wing individualistic mentality, whether it's coming from ostensibly leftist tankies or ostensibly center left Democrats or they admit they're right wing individualistic preppers. Yeah.

And this was dominant in prepping circles before around 2020, when an awful lot more people with different ideas came into the space. But the older school preppers focused on individual preparedness or family level, household level preparedness. And they have an awful lot of really good ideas around some of these things, around storing food and water, around maintaining communications, around all sorts of things to help the individual or family during crisis to be prepared. On the other end of things,

There are mutual aid groups and other community organizations that do community preparedness. They build organizational communication and logistical networks. And they're fantastic. And they're overall what's been left out of preparedness conversations. But until more recently, I haven't seen as many of those places, the people who are doing those things, also concern themselves with individual preparedness, you know?

Yeah. I've been operating under the assumption for years that the two can work really well in tandem with each other. If you are self-sufficient, you're in a better place to help others. That was my hypothesis. This is really just the Margaret was right episode of it could happen here.

The victory lap. Yeah. Oh, wait. It's a victory wrap around bodies. I don't like it anymore. Well, it's people who did do these things getting to have not thrived, but did not die. I don't know how to say this. It's a tricky subject. Getting credit for being right and putting in the work. Yeah. And a lot of people were and a lot of people had done that and it showed.

really well in the disaster response in Asheville. Because when I went down to Asheville, one of the things that I asked most of the people I talked to is what they prepared, what they wish they'd prepared, and what lessons they were taking away from all of this about preparedness. And one of my friends is old punk, and he was one of the first old, he's like my age, whatever, might be a few years older than me, I don't know. Mark Margaret crushed by moment of reflection live on podcast. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm jealous because I don't have enough gray hair. They keep falling out of my head. But one of my friends who does have very nice gray hair, old punk is one of the first people who was out on the street cooking food to give away. He told me that he was able to do that because he knew he was fine. By and large, during this particular crisis, every crisis is going to be real different.

If your house wasn't in the actual floodplain, and since it was in the mountains, that was not most houses. Instead, it was like most roads and some houses, you know? Yeah. The big problems you were dealing with was lack of food, lack of water, lack of cell service. And he had plenty of water and food stored. And at one point, someone had even kind of come up to him and been like, are you? No, you're fine, aren't you? And he was like, yeah, no, I'm fine. It's also just being like getting off prepared vibes, I guess.

Yeah, no, I was real proud. Like once I was doing this community defense thing and we were like, oh, we need a flashlight. Does anyone, hey, Margaret, you have a flashlight, right? And I was like, yeah, which one do you want?

Yeah, being the flashlight person. Yeah. It's a huge win the moment you get to deploy that flashlight you've been toting around. Yeah. Well, and that's actually part of my like core argument that I make in the other podcast I recorded today that's going to come out sometime around now is that like people want to help people. Oh, yeah. Like the average pickup truck guy, we even kind of see, I mean, I'm a pickup truck girl, but like we see the average pickup truck guy as the like

Ah, out of my way, limberl. Guns, dogs...

whatever, you know, and I like pickup trucks and guns and dogs. And I also don't really like liberals. But one of the main things you want to make a man with a pickup truck happy, get your car stuck in a ditch. Oh, yeah. There are whole Facebook groups where people love to pull other people out of stupid situations they've got themselves into off road. Yeah. It is fun for them. Yeah. Like because then the fact that you've been doing this thing had a purpose. I carry a flashlight and a knife every single moment of my life.

So when someone needs a flashlight or a knife, I'm like, Oh yeah, I am fucking the, the reincarnation of the goddess. Like no one is better than me.

Yeah, you're the all-powerful light carrier. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. When all other lights go out. For me, it's the moment I get to deploy, like, obviously this has been an audio podcast, but I have a Leatherman that I like to carry around. Yeah. Like, oh, wait, someone needs pliers or wire cutting. You have that capability. Yeah. You're just like... You're a Chad. You're a superhero. You're a mutant, you know? Yeah. And so, yeah, this friend of mine had plenty of water and food stored, and you can usually go a couple of days without communication if you don't have any immediate crises. Yeah.

He told me that what most people did or needed to do was first they needed to make sure to meet their own needs. Like the whole affix your own oxygen mask before helping your seatmate. So it was the people who were the most resilient, the most prepared, who were out driving around in their trucks or cars, whatever, giving away food, or were working to coordinate meetings most immediately.

And the other part of it was that people who had community preparedness skills were also among the first people getting stuff done on the ground. Because mutual aid, it's organic and it's chaotic and it's spontaneous, right? Yeah. But it is organized. It is a developed skill.

about how to organically organize. The more people who are experienced with chaotic decentralized organizing, the better a community was able to weather the immediate aftermath of the storm because people knew how to set up distribution hubs and connect people.

And so basically like a solid church or an anarchist group and your, your rural town was in a much better spot. Yeah, that makes sense. And this is one of the main places in the country where you're going to find entire anarchist groups in random rural small towns. Having been one of those people in one of those small towns, I keep saying I lived in Nashville. I lived in Sandy mush or Sandy mush is, I don't bother saying it because no one knows where it is.

Hell of a name though. I know. It's almost British in its weirdness. I was like too femme for baseball caps back then. And all my landmates wore the camo baseball caps from the local store that says Sandy mush, you know? And I'm really sad that I didn't get one, especially now. Cause now I have one and I'm wearing it now that has the name of the town I live in, but I can't wear it anywhere because it doxes me. Ah,

Ah, yeah. See, that's unfortunate. Yeah. If you had a Sandy Mush one, you'd be... Yeah. Someone send Margaret a baseball cap. Yeah. From Sandy Mush. Yeah. With camera. Yeah. Oh, I probably won't wear it. Otherwise, I'll be real because I still got to be femme. And somehow that is how things work in my subculture. So you need individual preparedness so that you're free enough to help people and you need community preparedness so you know what to do.

And then you also have all of these people with really specialized skills and tools. And these are the kinds of things that I can't say that every prepper needs to go out and do. But like ATVs have been crucial to disaster relief efforts. That doesn't mean that everyone should run out and buy an ATV to keep around in the case of flooding. This is a note for me because I don't quite live on enough land to justify an ATV. And I really want one, but yeah, let's get one of those little ones.

Yeah. You know, the little children ones. I know. I just drive around in a circle. I mostly live in the woods, and so there's just not a lot of... ATVs are great when you've got 12 acres with horses on them, you know? Yeah, you can get a sheepdog on the back. They're very practical for that kind of thing. Yeah. Rifle case. But that said...

A dirt bike friend of mine, who was a quite prepared person, immediately went out and spent days going into hard-to-reach areas to connect with people and bring them supplies. So maybe I can justify a dirt bike. Yeah, yeah. Dirt bike is an e-bike. E-dirt bike. Then you can run it off solar power, don't need gas, store it sideways. Okay, we're going to talk about electronics versus gas later in the episode. I got a whole part about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, good. But first, what we really need for the apocalypse is whatever comes next.

in the ads. That is what will save you in the apocalypse. If it's a podcast, that is the podcast that will give you the secret to surviving the apocalypse. Hopefully it's the Reagan gold coins, which will become the currency as soon as the state collapses. I bet it's gambling. And if you go gamble, you're guaranteed to win. That's how... I think we legally cannot say that. Oh, well then, yeah. I wonder if we can get away with saying don't gamble. It's a bad idea. Yeah, no, I think we absolutely can say that. Okay, great. Don't

gamble, it's a bad idea. And we're back. The overall lesson was that some stuff is and was useful for everyone to have. We're going to talk about some of that stuff. While other certain specialized tools and skill sets only made sense for some people to have. Not everyone needs to know how to repair a chainsaw or even own a chainsaw. But it sure proved to be a handy skill in this particular crisis.

Asheville is easily an image of the climate crisis future. I think you and Robert got into that in the episode you did about this. Yeah, we spoke a little bit about how like...

this is a vision of what's coming for a lot of us. Yeah. I'm basically doing a like, me too. I couldn't be on the call because I was busy. That's what this episode is. No, but we, Robert and I have not been there. My house flooded when I was younger, but we were not there this time. Asheville is not, okay, it is a somewhat remote part of the country in terms of its raw geography. You're not getting into that city without taking steep curving freeways or flying into a regional airport.

But culturally, and because of the level of infrastructure the United States provides, it is not an isolated city. It is a very much a modern and hip city with about, I think, 100,000 people. I think about 80,000 when I left a couple years ago, but it's been growing. Partly because lots of Silicon Valley folks moved there to work remote, much to the sorrow of locals. Like everywhere else, people moved. I know. And then I'm also like,

I work remote and lived... I actually can't throw stones here. Yeah. I have lived here since I didn't work remote. Yeah. Fair enough. I'll take my stone-throwing opportunity.

Asheville is a very climate stable area. All of Appalachia is. And it's nowhere near the coast. There's not a lot of earthquakes. There are far fewer forest fires than there are out west. There were some forest fires that were there one of the years that I lived there, but it didn't impact my life the way it impacts my friends' lives who live out west. Yeah. There are industrial accidents and there's occasional flooding, but no one had any reason to expect anything like this. Except...

that all of us have every reason to expect something like this. Areas hit more regularly by climate disasters have protocols in place for those sorts of things. People in California pay attention to the fires during that fire season. People on the Gulf Coast track the hurricanes. And not that these disasters aren't disastrous, but they're expected. They're part of living where you live. Asheville, what happened there could be any of us at any time.

So what was useful for them for prepping seems like it might be really useful for all of us. And most of that, most of what was useful is the basics. People I talked to were either real happy that they stored water or real sad that they hadn't stored water. With the storm coming, people filled up their bathtubs. One friend cut the downspouts on his house to direct them into trash cans.

And now a week later, they still have water to flush the toilet. Yeah. And you know, if you're like super ahead of it, you've got your little rain collectors all the time. Right. But yeah. Worst case scenario, cut your downspout and throw a trash can there. Yep.

or anything else that's food safe. Yeah. Well, in this case, it's mostly water flushing. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's funny, just as you mentioned this, like I was in a village I stayed in last week, didn't have rainwater electricity, and that's exactly what they did. They had a person I stayed with had like a normal toilet, but they don't have plumbed-in water, so they just collect rainwater and use that every time they want to flush it. Yeah. Every time I've lived off-grid and don't have easy access to running water instead of bucket flushing, I shit in a bucket with sawdust. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I think there's a hole underneath. Oh, interesting. But you have to flush it to get it in. I think this was like a status upgrade to have the physical toilet. Yeah. Yeah, no, that actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Some of the first water distribution centers that came online after the storm in Asheville didn't have water containers. And this is actually still the case as of recording. So people had to bring their own.

One friend only had those big clear water jugs, the kind that you put into like a water cooler and like get refilled at the grocery store, you know? Yeah. And,

These don't have good caps and you can't really bicycle with them while they're full. I've bicycled with one when it was full, but yeah, it's not a fun. This is where you need a long tail cargo bike, the ultimate prepper vehicle. Fair enough. I would argue jerry cans. That's my pitch instead of... Yeah, yeah. You can also get jerry cans. Or like the like big opaque water jugs for storing water.

But yeah, or even bags. What are bags? I like the like MSR drum bags. Okay. I've used those before. Those are pretty robust. I've only seen little ones. So that makes sense that there's big ones too. Yeah. Big ones. Expedition stuff. I would argue that if you're thinking about getting this stuff, opaque water containers with good lids are more useful than the blue clear ones. But if you have access to the blue clear ones and that's what you got, go get them. Yeah. And yeah,

Many people lacked any containers at all. So the water distribution site was not as directly useful as it could have otherwise been. That's tough. One friend during the storm pulled out all the recycling and filled every jug with water and put it in the fridge, which did two things. One, it gave you slightly orange tasting water to drink for a while. And two, it added thermal mass to keep the fridge cool longer. And of course, you know, storing more water always good. Yeah.

For the most part, most water people had access to had a boil advisory on it before it went out completely. Oh, you're a water filter expert. I want to talk to you about this. I was about to fucking dive into that shit. I was ready to go. Okay, hold on. All right. Yeah. Flood water itself is generally, or at least it is in this case, too toxic to use a simple filter or boil at home.

Things like pesticides are incredibly hard to get out of water. Yeah. And lightweight backpacking type filters, which overall are what I recommend for most things like Sawyers and LifeStraws. They don't really cut it as from what I understand. From what I understand, the two methods that can work are the like fairly slow and like intense charcoal filters, activated charcoal filters. And then in-home style reverse osmosis filters, which...

Normally, I don't like, but for this, it seems like they might. Yeah, you have enough power for an RO filter. Yeah. It's a nice touch. Also, if you get one, then your home appliances, if you live in a hard water area, which is a lot of the West, won't get fucked up by the calcification so much. Oh, that makes sense. I use a water softener on my well. Similar approach.

But I like... Reverse osmosis seems like it has some advantages. Maybe I'm... I never liked reverse osmosis because when I first was looking into it, I lived off-grid. And reverse osmosis creates a lot of wastewater. Yeah. And I was just like, all of this water was hard to come by. Fuck that. There are some filters that have an activated charcoal element. Specifically, the pesticide runoff and industrial contaminants is something I have been really worried about in a couple of places I've been for work. Actually, I was...

Somewhat concerned about that on a recent trip, the one in Panama, but it's not so much pesticides. There is human waste and decaying human remains, which is pretty rough. But in Myanmar, that was a big concern before we went there. The MSI Guardian, I think, has an activated charcoal element, and so does the Camelback inline filter. Oh, interesting. Just kind of a small one. Yeah. And what's really cool about that is a lot of them, you can't...

Because the activated charcoal, you can't backflush it in the same way that you can backflush a filter, right? Camelback will sell you just the actual activated charcoal element that you can then replace. I've got a few of them in a cupboard behind me. Yeah, but that would be what to look for if you're... But yeah, don't be just boiling it or just filtering it. And those are for something like a soya. They're great for rainwater, but...

If you're filtering water, you want a fast-flowing, clear, not a turbid or a stagnant water source or an industrially polluted water source, a fast-flowing, clear mountain stream, great. But like turbid, stagnant water with industrial pollutants, not so good. That makes sense. And so if you're listening to this in Asheville or elsewhere, I'm like, I'm trying to think of what I'm like. I'll probably... I have some activated charcoal stuff, but I don't like it as much because I don't like...

I don't like disposable things. I'm like... Yeah. But I... Yeah, things that you can reuse are always better. Yeah, but for certain threat models, especially if you don't have the power for reverse osmosis. Yeah, and it's not that expensive. Yeah. The MSR ones, actually, that's what the US military issues to some of its, like, I guess, more special people. So sometimes they pop up on the surplus market pretty cheap. Okay.

And they have a bomber warranty. You can trash it and they'll replace it. Oh, hell yeah. I like that a lot of outdoors gear is like pretty like they'll stand by their products. Yeah. I would, well, I keep wanting, trying to pitch this story actually, but yeah, like I have an MSR quilt. This is not like an MSR sponsored episode, but I have used that shit on, it's a very small, very light, but like an ultra light quilt. I've used that thing literally on almost every continent in the world. And just,

Just through like it's down and through like my body's greasiness, my inherent oiliness gradually down. Even if you take really good care of it, right? The down gets packed in. Yeah. Had it for probably six years. I was like, fuck it. This isn't working anymore. Let me see if they'll do me a discount on a new one. Put in a warranty claim, send it back. Okay, here's a new one. Just send me one. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. No, I like that more outdoor stuff. I like people who stand by the shit they do.

Yeah, and they also fix stuff, which is cool. I like that. And they will ship you the parts to fix it, which I feel less wasteful when that happens. Yeah. So, with food, this one's real simple.

People were either glad they stockpiled food or they were sad that they hadn't stockpiled food. Yeah, that's an easy one. One friend immediately took about half her stash of freeze-dried foods to distribute out to friends and strangers. Awesome. Most people I talked to did not have any real amount of backup power available to them. On any given street, I would pass only a few houses with generators running, which also, of course, takes gas or propane.

Propane has the advantage of storing indefinitely. It has the disadvantage of being substantially more expensive per kilowatt hour or whatever of power. Yeah. Probably more bulky to store, right? Like per energy unit. Totally. When I was off-grid, I used a dual fuel generator. I actually took it down and I no longer have the generator and gave it to some folks. But I had a gas propane generator and I ran it off of propane because it also is like cleaner on the engines. You have to do less maintenance. Yeah. But

you know, if I needed it all the time, it was a backup to my solar. If I had to run it all the time, I would have used gas because it, yeah. Anyway, I talked with one homeowner with solar on his roof about how he hadn't sprung for the house battery because after all, power in the area never really went out for more than a day at a time, right? Yeah.

I personally delivered two solar generators, which just means like big old lithium batteries with inputs and outputs built in. And those would be my personal primary recommendation for people who want to run lights and charge phones and things like that during power outages for a while. Yeah. While gas or propane generators, more useful for keeping heavy duty appliances going like fridges. Yeah.

I also passed out a couple different like portable or luggable solar panel setups that can charge phones or other devices. And there were some mutual aid folks going around and helping people with their solar setups. But overall, I didn't see as much of it as I expected. I expected to show up and there'd just be like outside the mutual aid stations, a big old foldable solar panel with a power brick. I think fewer people had that than I. So what are you doing? Go buy things. Oh, right. Because money is hard to come by. That's the reason.

Yeah, you can make them yourself, save a little bit that way, but be careful with big blocks of cells and shit. Yeah, and I'm always trying to price out the difference between... I build my own solar setups, but I also just get these solar generators sometimes. Until you're looking at big systems, the price difference is not as dramatic as you want. Yeah, because you're putting in a lot of time. Or even like...

an inverter costs a fair amount of money. And so if you're building a big system, the inverter is like worth the expense, right? But if it's a little system, the little thing that has a built-in inverter, it's gonna be cheaper. Right, yeah. And like the charge controller. Charge controller, yeah. Yeah.

I was recently building one out for like leaving out for migrants or having in the bed of my truck. So when I run into people and they need to charge their phones, they can just do that without a truck being on. And yeah, I ended up shoving a bunch of 12 volt batteries in an ammo can and hooking it up to a bunch of USB ports on the outside of the ammo can and then just bringing them home and charging them rather than doing a charge controller and it's not worth it. No, that makes sense. And honestly, like my van's off-grid setup is,

I have the equipment to run it off my alternator or solar panels on the roof. I just, I have a fuck ton of batteries in my van. So I just plug it in every couple of weeks and it's fine. You know? Yeah. Yeah. You end up doing, I've tried a bunch of the different,

solar panels. I use them when I'm... There's a company called Pale Blue that I used a decent amount. I left it with someone on a work trip because they needed it more than me. They're usually useful, but if you're really trying to run anything big, you need a lot more solar panel, then you're probably going to carry around on your backpack. That's what I think people don't quite recognize is that I used to have a pretty large array of 1,200 watts of

And, you know, I had to go run hundreds of feet of cable to put that in a field and build like a whole structure to hold it and get it to the right angle and things like that. Yeah. And even then, in the winter, I ran the generator. And this is to keep my laptop and a little tiny super efficient fridge going. Right. And some other stuff. Right. But like.

Solar is not space efficient. It's not going to do what you think it does because it's not going to do what it's advertised to do, but it'll keep your cell phone alive. Yeah, which is important. Or if you use a satellite communicator or something, then you keep that charged. Yeah. With gas, one friend usually keeps her car half full of gas, but forgot that week because she'd been driving so much and started the crisis with only an eighth of a tank and was extra stuck. You need to have a gas can if you want to drive out of the city and get as much gas as possible, of course.

You can store gas in a good container for a while, but it goes bad after three to six months. You store gas that way, so you should set an alarm for yourself. This is kind of telling myself. I have gas cans where I was like, oh, I should store some gas. And then I'm like, oh, wait, how long has that one been there? Oh, crap. Now what am I doing with it? Yeah. You have to take it to real specialized places to deal with it. Yeah, it's hard to get rid of it once you let it go bad. And so an empty gas can actually would have done people in Asheville a lot of good.

A full gas can, even better, right? But honestly, full tank of gas in your car, better than a full gas can. Empty gas can allowed people to leave and go get gas because they were not, civilization didn't end. Civilization ended a 90 minute radius, you know? Yeah. So you can set an alarm for yourself if you're going to keep full gas and then you put it in your gas tank and then you go refill it again. And then you get annoyed about doing this and then you stop doing it and then an apocalypse happens and then you're really annoyed that you forgot. Yeah.

Don't ask me how I know. If you have the money to not let your vehicle get below half full, you'll probably be fine. You can get a long way on a tank. Well, it's about when you have the money is an important part. But at the end of the day, it does not cost you more money to keep your gas tank at half full. Right. No, it doesn't. Unless you're driving a long way to get the gas. But you're still driving the same amount. You're just stopping off a little more. Yeah.

Empty gas cans ended up crucial and people who stored them were glad and a lot of them were donated immediately. Volunteers collected gas cans and drove the three hour round trip to fill them up with gas several times a day. You should learn the range of your vehicle. Newer cars will tell you automatically, but if not, it's not super hard to figure out your gas mileage. You have to like look at your mileage when you fill it up and do some division and shit.

And find out the size of your fuel tank and your gas mileage, and you'll know whether or not you have enough gas to reach an area. Especially if you're doing disaster relief, you never want to do disaster relief if you can't get out of the situation yourself, because then you're a fucking asshole, because then you are just actually another person who needs relief. Communications, as this show covered last week, were one of the hardest hit areas of preparedness in this crisis. There were ham radio operators doing stuff

But a lot of my activist and anarchist friends with Baofangs, which are these cheap ham radios, struggled to get them to work well during the storm. Yeah. Due to the mountains, water in the air, lack of repeaters, and frankly, that ham radios are really goddamn complicated. And not everyone has fully up on exactly how it works at that moment. Right? Yeah.

And this has put a fire under them to get better at it. But especially in the mountains, repeaters need to be a part of a radio communications plan. People with satellite phones were some of the only people in communication at the beginning. I was curious about and did not find any information about whether or not the new iPhone satellite texting... I wanted to ask about that. I didn't find anyone who used it. Okay. I found it to be less reliable than...

what I have is Garmin inReach. I pay for it. Yeah. And it works real well. Used it in the Darien Gap. I've used it again. Okay. In every continent apart from Antarctica. So you would say that the iPhone doesn't replace the Garmin inReach in terms of... Well, the iPhone only works in North America. So for me and my model, then absolutely not. Like it didn't work in Panama, Central America, I guess. So yeah. For me, the inReach has been faster. It's also another device that's not your cell phone. Yeah. And like,

you know, the device that you're playing Angry Birds on and then you run out of battery or whatever, you know, like, it's useful to have a device which is only for emergencies, which lasts for two weeks if you charge it up. Yeah. One, I leave mine off. And so... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're getting one for that purpose, I would say that, like, the bigger inReach is better. There's inReach Mini and Mini 2. Again,

Again, I used a Mini for about eight years, I think. I eventually destroyed it and got it warranty replaced with a Mini 2. The bigger one allows you to type on the device. The Mini 2 sending any kind of message without a cell phone to do the input is a real bastard. But

But this, it's just like... Remember when you used to do predictive text and you do like one was ABC, two... Yeah. It's like that. Okay. Yeah, I have the inReach too. And I've only proof of concept of it. I'm often driving around places where I could break that down in the middle of nowhere. Actually, I broke down yesterday about...

Three miles from where I lose cell service in the mountains that I live in. Oh, that could have been rough. I know. I also broke down in an auto mechanic shop. I got real lucky with what was otherwise a real bad situation. If you're getting an inReach Mini, this is my soapbox, don't trust the crappy little carabiner it comes with. Buy a small locking DMM makes a tiny locking carabiner.

It's an important thing to lose it because you didn't want to spend 10 bucks on a carabiner. Would be a bad day. You mentioned this. I'll end up doing this because I trust you because your users more than mine. Mine just is like clipped to my hiking bag, but it hasn't. Yeah. Inherently an unlocking carabiner. You want to be using a locker for something that's like an essential safety. No, that makes sense. Threadlock the little, it uses, I think a Torx or an Allen. Threadlock that bad boy in. Okay. You're good to go.

I know that Starlink doesn't work very well during storms. There's this method of internet called Starlink that's owned by someone who I don't like and wouldn't like me because I'm a trans person. But Starlink is not incredibly reliable during storms. I know that because I live remote and use Starlink. I'm talking on Starlink right now. It does not work great during storms.

But after the storm passed and when cell service was still out, a restaurant with Starlink was where many people first were able to reach their loved ones. That's cool. And so that is a thing to know. It is a fairly reliable service, frankly. Yeah.

Same deal in the Darien, actually. That's how migrants are first able to contact their loved ones and let them know that they're safe. It's an indigenous village where someone has a Starlink. Unless you personally piss off a particular billionaire, in which case he will personally turn it off for you.

Yeah, great. Everyone I talked to had a regular AM, FM, weather, blah, blah, blah radio at home, which is great. People should have radios in their homes. Radio was the main mechanism that the city used to broadcast information about various threats, like evacuations of regions threatened by the destruction of dams or the contamination in the water. However...

How you charge them is, you know, I fortunately had some D batteries in my van to give to someone because... Oh, wow. That's old school. Yeah, no, yeah. Some of my stuff I brought, like, in case someone I knew needed and some stuff I just, like, brought to give away. Yeah, okay. And my, like, stash of batteries was just, like, came with me in case anyone needed, you know? Yeah. You can get wind-up weather radios. I have one. Yeah, no, totally. That's actually... I dislike most all-in-one gadgets for survival. Okay.

But the wind-up radio with the little shitty solar panel is one of the ones that I'm like, no, that's... They're $30 to $50 and they work. Yeah. And you don't need much power to listen to a radio, you know? No, there are whole parts of the world where wind-up weather radios are how people get their information. Yeah, it makes sense. For travel, most people still got around by vehicle, just with limited gas. Though I saw more than the usual number of people walking or biking, pulling trailers or wagons.

As a general rule, consider floodwaters to be impassable and do not attempt to drive through them.

Interestingly, electric cars do better in floods than gas engines because if water gets into the air intake of a gas engine, the engine will stall. And usually it's people with giant pickup trucks who overestimate the capabilities of their vehicles who go out and do this. When I got my truck and I was like, I'm a prepper, I'm going to get those like bull bars or the front cage things or whatever. And then I looked into it.

And I read about it and they just murder people. Yeah. As someone who rides a bicycle a lot, those things do not like. It's already bad that pickup trucks are so gigantic. But if you add one of those things to the front of your car, front of your truck, you're just going to. And you have to think about it. Are you more likely to need to push broken down cars during the end of the world?

or accidentally hit a pedestrian with your vehicle that is taller than a child. Yeah. And I would guess for most people,

including me, I am more likely to accidentally hit a pedestrian. So I ran that through my cost benefit analysis and I do not have one of those things on my truck. Yeah. I could imagine a world is like low, low, low on my list of priorities. Like one day I'm going to get one and I'm going to keep it in my garage. And then it's like, and the world has ended and I'm going to put it on my truck in case I need to push cars out of the way. Yeah. With the 350 miles I can drive my truck before it's useless. Yeah.

Yeah, using all that gas that you stored. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That totally lasts a long time. Anyway, one of the problems with electric vehicles with flooding that I think we're starting to see, I think these videos were from Asheville, but I'm not certain, is that electric vehicles, if they are underwater for long enough, especially with saltwater, this is less of a North Carolina and more of a coastal thing. Yeah. The saltwater can cause fires if it hits the battery long enough. Don't drive through floodwater.

And floods in the mountains are particularly fast moving as compared to like coastal area floods where the water might be still and staying around. Yeah. On the other hand,

Fast moving flood water goes away faster and on its own. Yeah. So yeah, with gravity. Don't cycle through it. I've cycled through a couple of rivers. Once in Iceland, it just picked up the bike from underneath me. And it's not an optimal situation to be swimming down a river, chasing after a bicycle in Iceland. Yeah. I don't want to do that. Yeah. Avoid.

Famously warm place, Iceland. Yeah. Only 100 kilometers from the nearest place I could re-warm myself. It was a great day. Roads were washed away in many places, while many, many more were blocked by downed trees. Improper chainsaw use is one of the leading causes of injuries and disasters. Oh, I bet. Proper use of chainsaws has been absolutely essential. Although there were reports of people who self-rescued with hand saws. Yeah. And...

you know, boss. Yeah. You got time and people and you got a handsaw and there's a tree in your way. You can get through it. Yeah. Don't be like the, uh, the guy, maybe Margaret saw this, didn't there's some like homesteader on, Oh God. X.com who I've started a war with because he's, he's lying. He's not like, I'm,

I'm sorry, this guy's... They don't braid their hair. Both of them have long hair and they don't braid it. I do not believe that they work outside regularly if they don't braid their hair. Yeah, your hair will get caught in shit. And it'll just tangle. It is not worth it. The reason rural people with long hair wear their hair in braids... It's because it keeps it out of the way. Yeah. I would say that if you have a sword, keep it in reasonable condition. The old sword has been kicking around your shed and it's rusty and blunt.

Yeah. Likewise, the old chainsaw. So don't be dragging that out. Yeah. You haven't used it for a while. That said, one of the things I was expecting, but wasn't true, because I brought down a generator that I didn't know if worked, right? And I was like, what a jerk move. Because if I was going down to like, there's like 10 people and I'm like, don't worry, I'm here to rescue you. I've got a generator. I don't know if it works. That's not so great. Yeah. Right. There's 100,000 people who live in Asheville.

There was the Asheville Tool Library and the Western North Carolina Repair Cafe holed up outside the Anarchist Bookstore fixing generators and chainsaws. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Hero shit. And it was great. Of all the various generators people brought, I was like, I don't know if this one works. And they added gas and it worked. And so I was like, I brought the best shitty generator, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, but no sometimes things can be handy if you're knowing how to fix things It's always useful and there are people around with more specialized skills. You don't have to learn to do everything For example Chainsawing is a specialized skill I own a bunch of devices that are scary and dangerous and some of them are Guns and one of them is a table saw yeah, and the chainsaw is the most likely to hurt me. Yeah for sure and I

I've been to a chainsaw class. I'm very glad. Cutting a downed tree is an entirely different skill than cutting a live tree or a standing tree because of the way that tension works. And I cannot teach you this over, well, you might already know it, but don't listen to a podcast to learn how to do it. Go to a class. Yeah. Pay someone to teach you and get the right protective stuff. Like, yeah, absolutely. Proper protective trousers and things. Yeah.

Also never cut up trees woven with power lines without asserting that the power line is dead. As for how to ascertain it, I asked someone who was on a chainsaw crew how to ascertain it and he didn't know. So they just avoid those ones.

Yeah, I mean, man's power is not a joke. Yeah. People have been reaching the more isolated communities out there by hiking, by ATV, by dirt bike, by helicopter, and most famously by a string of pack mules. There are a lot of ways that people have been getting help to people. This doesn't mean you need to go out and buy a helicopter, Mark. No, just get a mule. You don't even need to Google how much a helicopter is, Margaret. I wonder how much a helicopter is. Anyway, and then...

There was one tool and tool set that a lot of my friends have that as of yet has had more or less no use in responding to this crisis. And that is guns. Yes.

I figured it might be. This is interesting for a few reasons. One is that North Carolina is a pretty gun friendly state. It's also a pretty culture war ass state. Yeah. Where I live in West Virginia, people don't, I mean, yeah, you see the Punisher skull every now and then or whatever, but like overall people are like, I don't know, we're all just trying to live, you know? Yeah. In Western North Carolina, you have intense tensions between strong pockets of blue and red, right? And a lot of people on both sides of that are armed.

I have a North Carolina concealed carry permit myself. I'm not anti-gun. But it was not what was wanted or needed. Yeah. If food stays scarce long enough down there, I would expect some people might be doing some out-of-season survival hunting. But I haven't even heard rumors of that yet. Yeah. There have been occasional rumors of robberies and the occasional rumors of Nazi activity in the areas. And I believe both have happened. Yeah.

but there has been nothing widespread. And so far, there hasn't even been a need for community defense organizations. By and large, the culture war is on pause. And I'm grateful. I like getting along with people. Yeah, no, it's much more fun than shooting at them. Yeah, yeah. Like talk about shared interests, like guns instead of...

Yeah, I've had some positive discussions with people who don't probably align with me because we both enjoy old guns.

And it is not to say that firearms are not a useful skill set for different threat models within the apocalypse, but it hasn't proved particularly useful so far in this particular crisis. And I think overall, I would put this as an overrated skill and an overrated tool. Yeah. And definitely an overrated way to spend a shit ton of money. Oh my God. Yeah. No, one magazine of bullets is a movie that you could go see.

At the theater. Yeah. Or like a dinner. And I'm saying this and yeah, I'm looking at like, what's that? One, two, three, four, like maybe 12 ammunition cans full of ammunition. Mainly I buy that because I like to go shoot clay pigeons and targets and stuff and I buy them when it's cheap. But also if you have a gun, you should know how to use it. Otherwise you're dangerous.

Yeah, yeah. Like don't be buying a gun and then loading it and storing it and not knowing how to use it. Then you're a liability. Yeah. But like I also have a bunch of lentils and like just in terms of preparedness, buy the lentils first. Totally. More useful, way more useful in this circumstance. And this circumstance is more likely than most. And one thing almost everyone I talked to was happy about. No one was sad about just this came up.

everyone was happy that they had extra to share. A random woman who showed up to get water at the Anarchist bookstore saw what was happening and turned and told me like, oh, I have a chainsaw I don't really use. Should I bring it here? And the answer is yes. And everyone is happy when we give things to each other. That's the thesis of the other podcast episode I did this week is that when you give stuff to someone, it's good for both of you. You just literally are both happier. Yeah, without a doubt. And like,

I remember when my house flooded, I think I was 17, 18, something like that. My little sister and I were at home. And I remember at first being like, oh no. Back in the day, you know, we had a TV that was relatively flat. It was probably six inches thick still, you know, but we thought it was shit. And then being like, oh no, this TV that was so cool is being destroyed. And then immediately being like, my neighbors are in their 80s and fuck the TV. Yeah. Like,

And we got our neighbors and there was one house in our village that was on a hill. Everyone in our village went to the house on the hill. We had a great time. Yeah. Like we hung out and everyone was so much happier not having to go through that shit alone. Yeah. And they would have been sitting in the house watching all their stuff wash away. Yeah. And we stayed there for a couple of days and then we went home and it was fine. Well,

That's what I got. I thought it was going to be 30 minutes and then I forgot I was going to talk about gear with my friend James where we both separately off Mike often do this for hours at a time. Yeah. And so go out and get yourself three days to three weeks worth of food and water. Slowly build it up. Go out and talk to your neighbors. Figure out who they are.

And it's going to be okay. Main reason it's going to be okay is we all die eventually anyway. But like, it's going to be okay. Yeah. We're going to take care of each other as best we can. Yeah. That's what we do. Got anything you want to plug? I guess this is your podcast. Yeah. I mean, participate in mutual aid anyway, because then you have the structures to help yourself and other people when you need them. Yes. Like,

If things went shit here tomorrow, I could communicate with my border friends because we use ham radios and we could help one another because we already engage in the helping of people and we organize horizontally because we're

it is better and that way it doesn't matter if the person who is quote unquote in charge isn't here because no one's in charge. Yep. Totally. So do anarchism. If you want to support Asheville and the relief efforts there and the surrounding areas financially, there's a million different small organizations that

that could absolutely use your help. But the two that I think we've been shouting out a lot on the show and I can personally vouch for very strongly is Appalachian Medical Solidarity and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. And both of those are volunteer organizations. All the little money, all the money you send is going to buy people stuff. And if you are within a day's drive of Western North Carolina, there might be a hub collecting things. Don't bring them your old sweaters. Bring them stuff that people want. You

You could ask them and they'll tell you. And that's what I got. That's what I got to plug. I will talk to you all some other time on It Could Happen Here.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about ice training death squads, I guess. I'm your host, Theo Wong. I guess, I don't know if formerly or better is the correct word, but sometimes also known as the Ice Must Be Destroyed Girl. So I'm mad about this one, and with me is someone else who's extremely mad about the existence of ice, which is James. Yep, I'm here. I'm mad, as always, I guess. Just

Just another Monday. Yeah, this shit sucks. This does suck, yeah. You know, I had this realization. I get this on Twitter a lot where I've realized that there are people who don't know what ICE is because...

Because they're like, they're not from the US or they're like, yeah. So ISIS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the shortest description of what they are is that they are one of the like four American border Gestapos. Yeah. The number of agencies under DHS is fucking baffling. They're constantly rebranding every time they have a scandal or they kill too many people. But yeah, ICE is kind of their flagship evil program.

Yeah. And they like they do raids on fucking houses. They do raids on businesses. They suck. Like if you vaguely remember, there was a whole bunch of protests in like 2018 over this stuff. And that was mostly anti-ice stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, if someone's getting deported, it's ICE for the most part doing it. They also run detention centers where people go. They work with Jeff Bezos on deporting people. Oh my fucking God. Okay, I just remembered a story. I had a flashback.

to standing in a protest, a very, very large protest in 2018. This is one of the big pro-immigrant rallies. And in this fucking protest, I saw a thing for this group called Heartland Alliance. Now, people who probably don't, outside of Chicago, probably don't know what this is, but the Heartland Alliance runs fucking child prison facilities for ICE. Cool. And they were at this protest against ICE. Yeah.

Fucking, it was the worst. That shit was terrible. You know, this whole thing is all extremely bad. But what we've been learning more details about recently is this program called Citizens Academies, which is run by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations. I didn't think HSI was under ICE. I thought HSI was a different branch of DHS. I might be wrong, but they used to be

under ice as far as i know and then they became hsi okay i might be wrong about that because the stuff that i was reading was saying that they are still part of ice but they might not be it's also possible that it's literally has gone back and forward multiple times in the last like yeah because these bureaucratic things fucking suck um hsi also does like a lot of the times there's some of the people who like do like physically the people on the ground doing a raid will be hsi yeah like

fucking stormtroopers or whatever yeah they do arrests yeah often they appear in like these joint counterterrorism tasks for task forces like when they especially when they're doing stuff with like drugs and that kind of thing yeah these civilian academies are i think really the the only way you could describe them even though this is not how it's being described specifically

really is that they're treating random people to like become death squads yeah it's what's interesting is like the protests that you talked about seem to have been the sort of reason that they started this program right yeah we need to rewind this a little bit because they started in the u.s as a reaction to those protests like specifically as like a pr thing

But the original versions of these programs started in Puerto Rico under Obama. Look, we don't give Obama anything like enough shit, right? Like fucking Obama, just like in terms of killing people, in terms of deporting people, fucked up human being. Yeah. He was the deporter in chief. And like part of, part of what's sort of brutal about, about the Obama administration was like a lot of his support had been from like the huge undocumented movement. It could have like peaked in like 2006, but,

And he comes in on this and then just fucking deport everyone. Yeah. As Democrats do every time. Yeah. We're seeing this again with Biden, right? It's like it's the same sort of process. And under Obama, these programs start. They're specifically, as you're talking about, they're specifically supposed to be these like training programs are supposed to be for community. Well, OK, so this is and this is one of these things was like, this is what they say that it's for.

And given what they're doing, I don't know how much I believe them. What they say that it's for is it's because there's been all of these anti-ICE things like, I mean, there's lots of people who now are like, don't say shit about ICE. Like, AOC hasn't fucking said anything about abolishing ICE in like half a decade, right? And she ran on that. Yeah, of course, yeah. Because of how powerful those social movements were. I mean, there's like, Sheen McEwee or whatever the fuck guy who's

Whose whole thing was abolished ice and then he became A democratic staffer and now he never talks about it again And he's like my absolute mortal Nemesis like I will face At the end of days I will destroy his Fucking traitorous ass Yeah many many many such cases But yeah like and I think probably Peak like

anti-ice sentiment was in the Trump era, right? When people... Yeah, yeah. People started to look at immigration as the way that, like, people of immigrant communities and diaspora see it, right? Which is this thing that tears families apart, that destroys communities, that rips children from their parents. Yeah. And people obviously recognized it was bad. And then...

Biden got in and the Democrats had to do this, like, kind of cover your eyes and turn away thing where they continue to do the same shit. Kids in cages are good now. Yeah. Kids in cages, great. Democratic kids in cages, incredible. What if no cages? What if we just leave them out in the fucking mountains and James's friend have to feed them beans all winter? Yeah, but the thing is, in 2017, 2018, it's not entirely clear that...

the Democrats are going to swing that way? No. And so you get these programs and what's interesting about them, and so a lot of this is coming from that there's a very, very good piece by Mauricio Guerrero in Documented who got a bunch of FOIA documents about this program and what they were actually doing. Yeah. And one of the things that he discovers about this is that it's like...

A lot of rich guys? Mm-hmm. Like, some of them are, like, really rich. It's also, it's a lot of, like, bank employees. Yeah, that was a funny one, wasn't it? I guess, kind of, it got through, like, that little social circle or whatever. Yeah. And, like, there's this sort of feed-in program that sends people into this.

And I actually, I realized I had vaguely known about these, but didn't quite understand how bad it was because we didn't have a bunch of the documents we have now. But this was a big thing in Chicago in 2021 where there was a proposal to open one of these things. It's like these training centers for these fucking people. Oh, yeah. And, you know, 2021 was still in Chicago. There were still like...

There's some protest stuff going on because 2020 hadn't quite faded yet and there was also our cops. We've talked about this a couple times on this show, but shot a fucking 14-year-old. Yeah. Just fucking murdered him in cold blood. And the protests were bad enough that even Lori Lightfoot was like, fuck this. This is Trump ice stuff. We can't let them do it. This was back when these people, the Democrats were sort of pretending that they didn't like all of these federal...

deportation machine things

But the things that we have now are... We have the actual... This is, like, I think one of the probably most valuable part of this whole thing is that we actually have a bunch of the documents now of what they were showing people. Yeah. I'd love to see the fucking FOIA fight for this because I have FOIAed the Department of Homeland Security a lot. And getting... Like, I have a FOIA right now regarding the...

it's cbp1 and the fact that it doesn't work on non-apple phones and that they very clearly know this right like if i know it they know it and i would love to know if that was

from the outset that they knew and they just didn't give a fuck like i would like to see those emails regarding it doesn't work on samsung uh i think i think they got it from a court order okay so they they went to court to get yeah yeah every like people freedom information act is great it only works if you have a lawyer who's prepared to sue over it like that is the especially with dhs you're just not like uh yeah i've i've got stuff so far in 2020

they'll just kick it down can down the road like yeah i'm not gonna get it but yeah kudos to them for doing it yeah it's so hard if you are a first amendment lawyer hit me up yeah

But okay, so the shit that's in this, one of these things, the first page of this is maybe the most deranged chart I have ever seen in anything, which is it is a picture of a naked human body. It's the front and back of it, right? And they've labeled all of the parts of the body by, and they've been, so we only have a black and white version of this, but they've been labeled by how effective it is to hit someone there with a baton.

Yeah. And they're like green in the actual document. They're green, yellow and red, I guess. And then it says like reasoning for the red one. I'll just read it. Highest level of resultant trauma. Injury tends to range from serious to long lasting rather than temporary and may include unconsciousness, serious bodily injury, shock or death. So I guess like it's saying like don't hit them in the red area. No, that's...

That's the thing. That's the thing. They're not saying that. They're just saying these are your options. Yeah. So part of this is supposed to be part of like a force escalation thing. But the point of this is that it is actually like they're trying to explain force escalation. And their thing is that like, yeah, you actually can do this, but you can only do this if you're in like the highest level of force escalation or whatever. Okay. And if any of you have ever been around a cop, you know that those people jump to the highest level of force escalation at like a fucking... Again, we have literally seen an acorn drop.

and it caused people to do this, right? And so what they're teaching these people, this is, I think, genuinely horrifying. It's like, yeah, they are teaching these people the specific technical details of how you fucking maim someone with a baton. Yeah, I'm into reading the force escalation. And they actually did physical training, right? I think they did weapons training. I think they did a bunch of simulation kind of exercises. Yeah.

And then if you scroll down, this is like a PowerPoint for those listening at home. They gave an overview of use of force to include a bunch of Supreme Court cases. I think they're Supreme Court cases. Certainly, yeah, Supreme Court cases about use of force. None of these apply to you as a civilian. Unless you're a sworn law enforcement officer,

I guess I'm not entirely sure like what the use case for civilian baton training is aside from like, well, I mean my guess, and this is the way I've been like sort of looking at this program is that this is a thing partially being designed for PR, but it's partially also being designed to create paramilitaries that if you're in a situation like 2020, but about the border, for example, you suddenly have all of these people that you could just fucking call up because like,

Part of what's going on with this, too, you remember, like, actually, I guess it is funnily enough, like, we are the only two of the four hosts who didn't end up having to deal with fucking Bortac getting deployed in Portland in 2020. But Bortac is Border Patrol's, like, SWAT teams, basically. Yeah.

Yeah, their stated reason is like, oh, so this is so you understand what it's like to be one of these people. How hard it is to be a cop. I think the actual reason, again, is so that you're training a bunch of people who you can just sort of call up and be like, we need a bunch of people to come fucking...

Obliterate a bunch of like protesters or whatever But help them do mass deportations Yeah Which is another thing Because like part of what this is too Is like they're teaching them to do like raids on houses Right and like how to How to like physically fucking deport people So This is yeah like Trump era ICE Which were There were open discussions of how many people can we deport How much will it cost How easy will it be

Yeah. And like right now, like Trump is like his big one of his big things is mass deportations. But I think people don't realize that the only reason that this stuff didn't happen under Trump was that pushback to it was so enormous. Yeah. That like there are Democrats now who are screaming about the border, who in like 2018 were like sanctuary cities. Ice can't do raids here. And sometimes that was true. Sometimes it wasn't. Yeah. But like there was real systemic pushback to this. And I think that's

Like, we're heading to a place where there isn't the kind of reaction to this anymore, where this can get really, really scary really quickly. And these are the kinds of programs that you would need in order to just do actual mass deportations, is that, like, yeah, like, ICE doesn't have enough people. Like, they have a lot of people, but they don't have enough people to deport, like, several million people. You need people like this. And the scale of this program was kind of small, but it's something that can be scaled up, right?

right yeah to train extremely large numbers of people like fairly quickly yeah you know what it reminds me of Mia products and services that support this podcast it does yeah all right I hope you enjoyed this products and services we're back let's go to like the other thing they were fucking doing oh yeah there's more Jesus wept so I want a quote from the article yeah quote

Documents also contain presentations on how to shoot a gun, point at targets, and stand in position to fire. The shooting practices include military-style rifles. Likewise, a training in Atlanta organized drills to shoot at human-like manicures and fires M4 assault rifles employed exclusively by the military. The training also included ISIS guidelines for use of force encompassing deadly force.

One presentation suggests yelling drop the gun as potential cover when employing lethal force against someone. So they're telling, and this is specifically supposed to be a thing like, oh, if you're in plain clothes, like you fucking yell police and yell drop your gun and then you shoot them. And this is how you get away with it. So like they're, they are straight up teaching people how to murder people, like how to get away with murder. That's, that's what's happening here. Yeah.

Yeah. Wild. Yeah. The like the government's offered firearms trading for civilians. That's kind of what the NRA was in the government initiative. But like, yeah, this is not that this is not like, no, I would broadly be in favor of the government funding free gun safety classes for people because I seen some shit with, you know, like that would be one of the useful things. But this is not that.

No, and like the reason those specific classes like don't look like that anymore is because, and I've talked about this in some of the episodes on MLK assassination, is like, well, yeah, when the government taught a bunch of people how to use rifles, those people use those rifles to like fight the cops in the streets, right? Yeah. So now they're all this insane shit that's like teaching people how to get away with murder of their cop. Like, I want to read a PowerPoint slide from that thing because it's the most deranged thing.

thing I've ever seen. Have you read the Graham versus Connor one? Because it's one of the more powerful uses of passive voice I've ever seen. Oh no, I haven't seen that yet. Let me read that while you look for yours. This one is just incredible instance of cop speak. Graham, comma, diabetic, comma, asked friend to drive him to convenience store for juice. Good cop sentences here. Ran in and out of store, comma, officer observed the suspicious activity.

What suspicious activity, dear listener? I don't know. We're left to imagine. Investigative stop made and Graham was handcuffed. By whom? Doesn't say. Weird. Graham received multiple injuries during the encounter with police. Someone gave him the fucking injuries. Was it the cop?

It's just an incredible use of passive voice here throughout. Yeah, there's this great tweet that was like, the US has a passive voice and an active voice and a special exonerative voice that's only used for police shootings. Yeah, it's true. That in Israel gets the exonerative voice. Yeah, Israel's in the greater cop nation. Yeah. Yeah, like also, one of the things that I don't think people understand about the Supreme Court is like...

If you think that, like, Supreme Court rulings about abortions are bad, like, and they are, right? But, like, if you think those things are bad, look up the Supreme Court cases about police use of force. You will get, you will get 9-0 decisions with, like, all of, like, fucking, like, like, fucking Thurgood Marshall will be signing on to, like, a 9-0 thing where he says that cops have the right to just, like, shoot you in the back of the head because if they couldn't shoot you in the back of the head, like, that you, the police couldn't function. It's, it's fucking deranged.

Like the kind of shit they have. Okay. I want to read, I want to read this slide. It's amazing. It's just a giant letters. It says survival. And then there's like bullet points and the bullet points are never give up. Never concede defeat. I will not die this way. I must go home to my family. How you trade is how you will fight.

I'm just imagining the person who I go to at the bank when I need to take out large amounts of cash to go on one of my work trips, learning that I will not die this way. Yeah.

Okay, so that's basically what I have about this program other than the bleak note that on a PR level, these people won, right? They didn't win because of anything they did. They won because the Democrats decided that they fucking hated immigrants and because views of integration are largely driven by party politics or driven by what your party tells you about immigrants. Like, yeah, all the support that had been built in the late 2010s has evaporated and... Yeah, even like...

I did a thing for my Patreon yesterday that just then made me think of this. Like I was trying to just do a sort of listing of Joe Biden's immigration policies, right? From 2021 to present and like 2021, 2022, I was selling stories to NBC, to slate, to the nation, right? About Haitian migration, about title 42, about remain in Mexico, about, uh,

uh, special immigrant visas for Afghans. And after 2022, you don't even get a response to your email. You know, the same shit keeps happening. It's 2023 is the end of title 42, right? It's when we see the beginning of outdoor detention, arguably the most heinous shit that the Biden administration has done. And it's done some pretty heinous shit. I mean, genocide is worse evidently, but on the, on the border, this is the worst. Yeah. But some of its worst domestic policy and, and,

You just can't tell stories. Literally, every time I post about this on Twitter, people will be like, what the fuck? Why didn't I read about this? Because an editor made a choice that they didn't matter, that the people out there in the cold and the wind and the rain didn't matter and that they don't have rights because AOC or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris decided that that was how it was going to be. And apparently, every corporate media outlet just kind of stepped in line and went, yeah, fuck them. We don't care anymore. Yeah. It's pretty bad.

Yeah, they've achieved their stated aim and they're now moving on to their unstated aim, which is mass deportations.

All right, we're back. Everything I know about the program that you were about to talk about comes from you, and that is... Oh, boy. It's not good. All right. So I'm going to read you a small story, Mia, and then we're going to talk about whether or not it's a good idea for the Border Patrol to have programs for children. Okay. I'm going to give a content warning for sexual assault of children. Just in case you don't want to listen to this.

In August of this year, Aaron Mitchell, a former CBP agent, was found guilty of a federal civil rights violation and also kidnapping. On April 25, 2022, in Douglas, Arizona, Mitchell found a 15-year-old girl waiting for school to begin. And for this next part, I'm just going to read directly from the Department of Justice presser.

He introduced himself as a law enforcement officer and asked for her papers. Next, after flashing his police badge and credentials, Mitchell ordered the child into his car and explained that he was taking her to the police station. Instead, Mitchell drove the car miles away from her school, pulled over and restrained her hands and feet with two pairs of handcuffs.

The victim testified that, after being handcuffed, the defendant told her to do everything he said because he didn't want to have to hurt her. I'm not going to describe the next part in detail. He repeatedly sexually assaulted this young woman in his apartment, then returned her to the middle school where he had abducted her and reminded her not to tell anyone. Fortunately, she immediately reported the abduction to her friends, family members, and multiple law enforcement agencies.

During an interview with the police, the defendant exclaimed that the victim had better hope I don't get out of here.

Which is an insane thing to say when you're being interviewed by the police. Yeah. He also Googled several times for how long does it take to smother someone? And he Googled a lot about sexual assault, how to stop someone from screaming. It's some of the darkest shit you're ever going to read yet. Oh my God. This is one of the relatively few instances of a Border Patrol agent actually being convicted of sexual assault.

Sexual assault is a massive fucking problem in the border patrol. And the fact that it's such a big problem and people get away with it is why we get shit that is horrific, like the incident that I've just related to you, right? In 2019, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a ProPublica thing about this Facebook group, which had 9,500 agents in it.

Yep.

Just classic stuff, right? Yeah. Border Patrol has consistently failed to hold its officers to account for rape. If you want to read more about this, Jen Budd, she's been on the show before, is the person to go to about this. I'm also going to include in the show notes links to a story about a Border Patrol agent who was sexually assaulted at the academy, which I know is a thing that is not unique to her. This is a problem. Border Patrol is 95% male.

At this point, they call the women the fierce 5%. It's probably the most gender biased of the federal agencies. Border Patrol agents, by and large, do not do well around women.

This is something I've observed. This is something other volunteers have observed. It's such a masculine agency, I guess, and they just don't encounter women in a professional capacity very often. So I think with this in mind, I want to talk about the Border Patrol Explorers, right? It's a youth program that teaches kids the skills of a patrol agent from as young as 14. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah.

What's really weird, there's been very little coverage. The two places I would send people, these will be in the notes, would be Morley Music, a really good piece in The Nation, and Todd Miller's book, Border Patrol Nation, which is a book that everyone should read, I think. It really details the beginning of how Border Patrol became what it is today. Those are really two of the very few places you'd read about it.

The training that they do is insane. They'll learn firearms drills. They learn to do checkpoints. They learn to make arrests. I'm going to read from an interview from Molly Music's piece.

Fabian explained why his post would practice shooting. Sometimes, and then this is in parentheses, undocumented migrants are not compliant when we find them. He said, they paid all this money to get here to start another life. They're just not going to give up when they see us. Some would fight back. Some would be compliant. Maybe they tried to kill you or threaten you. Sometimes they pick up an element, a rock lying around, anything, and that can be used to kill you.

This is not the stuff that 14 year olds should be reckoning with. Right. Yeah. This is also like, I know people have done the, like connect the border to Palestine thing so much that it's like hackneyed, but like that is straight up. That could be lifted from a press release.

like from the idea yeah yeah about why they shot someone yeah and it's like yeah i mean you shouldn't be teaching anyone this you especially shouldn't be teaching 14 year olds yeah that someone might throw a rock at them and that's a reasonable way to pull out a gun and shoot them yeah like if you back that into your mind at 14 i would argue that makes you very unsuitable to carry a gun in public later in life kids start out by doing this kind of boot camp style uh academy and

And then they pretty much begin doing stuff like drill, PT. They practice conducting vehicle stops and tracking. Border Patrol, on their website, they claim to have more than 700 explorers, spread over 28 posts around the country. It's very hard to find anything about them. It's not something that they talk about a great deal. You have to sort of apply. I looked at how one would apply. This one is San Ysidro, right? You sort of fill out this form and you get some kind of clearance. Yeah.

And then I'm guessing they're checking that people are eligible to be hired by Border Patrol, right? But if there is data on how many of these kids go on to be hired by BP, I haven't found it. But I did find one. I think this is again from Molly Music's piece, one extremely amusing incident. The Douglas, Arizona chapter of the Explorers teamed up with a local high school drama club.

And they had the kids play migrants in roleplay scenarios. Yeah. Jesus Christ! Many of these people will themselves be like first generation or like wild. This country cannot be allowed to continue. Imagine like, what are we doing at school today? Oh, the theater kids are going to get arrested by the border patrol kids.

Jesus Christ. Some of the theater kids got really into character. One of them cried, I guess. Several of them managed to avoid arrest and give the young agents the slip. Yeah, good for them. And then they got told by the agents overseeing the exercise that they'd done it wrong. Is that funny?

Because it outsmarted the junior cops. There's a story. I can't, I can't remember what fucking town it was in like the fifties that the army was running these like infiltration drills where

where they would have a town and they'd talk to people in the town and they'd be like, okay, we're going to unleash a communist subversive agent into the town and then you're going to help the army capture them. And instead what happens is everyone just hid the agent because it was funny. I just had a great time hiding him around and stuff. It kind of reminds me of that. That is the American spirit. It's the people of Douglas, Arizona. We salute you. One of the things I found really interesting in the Molly music piece was this idea of like,

defensive asylum only being for criminals. So it seems like the students learned this very binary immigration law where defensive asylum, which is when you claim asylum as a defense against being deported. Yeah. It's only for people who are criminals versus affirmative asylum is for the people who like really need it or whatever. We fast forward to,

making an affirmative asylum claim is extremely difficult right now. Yeah. You know, I spoke to a hundred people who wanted to come to this country in the Darien. Every single one of those people told me that they wanted to use CBP1, that they wanted to do it the correct way, that they wanted to wait their turn and do an interview. But like every single one of those people is now reckoning with the fact that if they can make CBP1 work on their phone, they will wake eight or nine months in Mexico.

that is not a safe place. If you're a woman on your own, God forbid, if you're a trans woman or a gay person, like aside from like within certain communities, it's not a safe place. I think Mexico is the second highest rate of killings of trans people anywhere in the world. Yeah. I think Brazil is maybe more. Yeah. Brazil, I think is the highest. I don't know if that's like raw numbers because Brazil is a bigger country or if it's like the population. Yeah. My memory is that it's the rate, but I'm not 100% sure. Either way,

that people who are coming to be safe ought not to be in a place where they're in danger. And that is what they face, right? And so undoubtedly some of those people who wanted to come the right way will cross between ports of entry

They will surrender themselves to Border Patrol. And if they get a chance to file for asylum at all, because it's a shout test now, but there are numerous incidents that I've seen described in court cases of people doing what sounds to me like asserting an asylum claim and not having a chance to then make their case. If they do at all, it'll be defensive asylum, right? And these are the people who are like...

textbook asylum places, you know, like I'm a trans person in a place where that might well be punishable by death, de facto, if not de jure, right? I am a political dissident in a country where my political views would be a reason to kill me. I am a woman from Iran who doesn't wear hijab, niqab, whatever, you know, like...

These are like why asylum exists. There are lots of people who deserve our help who are not covered by this little bucket. So we put people in for asylum. But even people who are, who falls like slap in the middle of what your average Midwestern liberal dad would be like, yeah, that's an asylum case. We should help that person. They have to come and they file a defensive asylum. And that's what we're teaching, I guess, these border patrol kids. These are the quote unquote bad guys. Yeah.

And they're not. And yeah, they're doing this over 28 posts. It's just one. I read a terrible account of a young woman who was sexually abused by a cop in a police explorer program.

These explorer programs go all across law enforcement. They are administered by the Boy Scouts of America. They have a serious problem with abuse of young people. A serious problem. And it seems like it's not getting... I mean, it does get some coverage. There's this piece about the agent in Douglas got some coverage, right? The piece about this cop. But like, I mean, look, this country, we still have the Catholic church. Just because people abuse kids doesn't mean they get shut down. But like...

I don't, don't, don't send your kids. I guess you're listening to this. You're quite unlikely to send your kids to be junior cops. But like, I get young people living in small towns on the border who don't have many economic opportunities. I know those towns. I spent a lot of time in those towns and I get the guys who joined border patrol. They have big trucks. They have nice houses, right? It's one of the few areas of economic opportunity. I get that. None of that is worth having your kid abused. And like,

I'm not saying that, of course, all of these programs result in child abuse. They don't. But law enforcement explorer programs absolutely have a problem with child abuse. Yeah. There was a whole thing in the last couple of years about...

this happening in detention facilities in Chicago. Or, I mean, not in detention facilities, things that were supposed to be, like, migrant housing. If that got reported, weirdly, the Chicago press has actually been pretty good on immigration stuff, but it's literally solely because they hate Brandon Johnson, and Brandon Johnson's the one running it. And so because of this, we've actually gotten a bunch of good coverage of it. Yeah, reporting the accident. Yeah. Yeah, many such cases. But yeah, like...

The culture of Border Patrol is not one that you want to be introducing a child to. Yeah, absolutely not. You know, I would really encourage people to read Todd's book, Border Patrol Nation. Like he talks about this use of, they invented a new slur, which...

You know, it's cool. Good for them for expanding the English language, I guess. They call people tonks. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a noise that makes when you hit someone on the head with your torch, your flashlight. Yeah. Yeah, just really great stuff. Some of the worst people who've ever lived. Yeah. Don't volunteer to be a cop. Don't do it for money either. That's what I got for you. Yeah, yeah. I think that's all we've got for today. Yeah. Shit fucking sucks. I don't know. We gave you...

We gave you some less depressing episodes, but... Yeah, now we're back. We've ruined your week. Actually, I can promise tomorrow's episode is going to be a lot brighter for this one. Yeah, come back tomorrow to be less horribly depressed. Yeah, I got nothing good for you coming up for the near future, to be honest. I'm writing my thing about the Darien Gap and having to take little walks outside. Yeah. Yeah, go for a walk.

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The It Can Happen Here podcast. To the four or five of y'all in the subreddit that can't stand my voice and say I'm the most annoying person in the cool zone extended universe, I apologize. My mama used to say, be who you is because who you ain't ain't who you is.

We're going to talk about some things, specifically coffee and how your children will probably never be able to drink the coffee that you have drank because climate change abounds. But before we do, I'm also realizing how many singers in the 80s was singing to teenagers, to children.

You know, the absolute banger of a song. If I could fly, I'd pick you up. I'd take you into the night. Great song, right? And show you love that you never see. Do you know what the first lyric in that song is? She's only 16 years old.

Leave her alone. Unless he wasn't a teenager. Just openly singing. What was we thinking? Freaking Bell Bib DeVoe. Into me, baby. Backstage. Underage. Gotta lick it. I fly. I like to do the wild thing. Oh, you're...

We're just openly singing to kids. Let me get back on topic because not only could it happen here, it is happening here. So you may or may not know me. I am Los Angeles born and raised. I host the politics with prop on the cool zone media team. And I am your resident coffee nerd.

And a lot of that grew out of just a natural passion for coffee, which you will hear me gush about later. But I think I'm going to back into this topic with back that thing up with the story from a few years back. See, a few years back, I had a chance to put out a poetry book called Terraform Building a Livable World. And Terraform also had four musical EP, seven song EPs.

called The Sky, The Soil, The People, and The Possibility. And while I was working on The Soil, I had a chance to partner with one of the, I mean, really it's like, I don't know if there's a better roaster in America called Onyx, believe it or not, in Northwest Arkansas.

And in a collab sort of coffee release we were doing in partnership with Mir, which is a drinkware company I'm also an ambassador for, we had a chance to go to Columbia. And if you've been to South America or anywhere close to the equator, it's, I mean, you're walking into the Avatar, you know, minus the aliens. It's this raw sort of

that us in the Northern hemisphere, it's just colors of green that you just can't imagine that like our, our Pantones have yet to match the type of green in a forest that has to be a certain amount of miles above sea level for it to grow coffee. So we,

we fly into Bogota. We go about an hour and a half outside of the city, which normally when you go to origin, it's like, you have to like take a rickety helicopter or traverse 12 hours into, you know, an African jungle, which is like,

not the most plush riding, but it's just, it's this beautiful South American, you know, Colombian road. And then you go up this, this small sort of windy road. And while it's sunny, beautiful, I don't know what the combination of indigenous African European settlers that just made whatever combination of human and

Made these Colombians so beautiful. But there's not. I mean everyone's beautiful. It is the most off putting. How gorgeous. Every human is. There. Along with this plush green. You come over this hill. And because of the way that this farm. We're going to. Is set inside. In between in a small valley. That's about 4 to 5,000 feet.

feet above sea level, there's this beautiful fog that lays over the top of this just gorgeous, gorgeous rainforest, right? There's grape vineyards. There's a few of those. There's avocados. There's all these just beautiful multi, instead of a monoculture, a monoculture is a farm of just one thing. This is a multi-culture place that

This crew called La Palma El Tuacan. That's who I was with. And all this beauty and vegetation that I'm describing, apparently 12 years ago, was not a thing. This place was the textbook, like cartoonish level example of deforestation where all of this natural beauty was cleared out for cattle raising.

And the land was dead. But you would never guess. You would never guess that this was ever an issue. Because what I'm looking at is Narnia. So this group of local born and raised brothers.

came up with a business plan and started restoring this land. I can't overstate the before and after picture. Like the land was dying. Them with their regenerative, like, you know, farming practices made this a rainforest again that is now growing some of the best coffee on earth. So anyway,

We come in there. It's beautiful. There are no words to express how beautiful this is. I have a song called The Soil is Sacred that I shot the video at that farm. So if you want to just go ahead and peep that to understand that.

This place is not only just a coffee farm, it's also a bike trail adventure place. It's a hotel. You stay in these bungalows that are like up on sticks. And then the shower is outdoors, just covered around bamboo sticks that like keep the thing. And it's got like the, uh,

what we like to call the anti-black shower heads. You know, those are the... I don't know if y'all know this because black people don't always like to wet our hair in the shower. We wash our hair much less than y'all do. But if you got that waterfall shower head, then that means we got to tilt our heads back a little bit or make sure we got a shower cap because I don't know if you know any black women, but you don't wet my hair in the shower. Anyway, but you're showering out there and it's just beautiful. You're in the rainforest. You can hear the animals. It's just...

The gentle breeze is blowing. And then around 1130, the fog kind of clears out. You get to sit down. You're having some breakfast. That's just chopped up papaya and mango that they grew right there. Right. I could see the mango tree. It's right there. And then they'll then they'll fry up some plantain from the plantain tree right there. Scrambling up with some eggs from the chicken that's right there. Right. Just it's.

And as we're talking, as we're moving through this thing, the man that runs it, who, like, I wish I could have his baby. It was just the most gorgeous human I've ever seen. Just flowing, flowing.

Flowing coiffed hair. Speaking English and Spanish. The guy can play seven instruments. At some point while we're cupping coffee. The dude breaks into a bachata. And then some cumbia. And he's just singing these Colombian folklore songs. While flipping over a bucket. And playing drums. It's just like you're in a movie. You're in a movie. And then he casually drops. Yeah we only got 27 more of those. I was like 27 more what? He goes oh.

Yeah. Part of the mission of this farm is if we don't do something, there is 27 harvests left. I was like, of what? He goes of topsoil. Coffee's going to go extinct in 27 years. Sam talk about the possibility of a world without coffee, how we got here and what people are doing to hopefully save the glorious bean.

All right. I feel like coffee is like the perfect analogy, the perfect one to one ratio for the ways for which the global north has treated the global south, specifically black people, but black.

by and large, just, it's the perfect metaphor for the raping and pillaging of resources, including people that has happened across the world. So coffee originates solely from Ethiopia. Okay. So it's already, it's, it's black. This is the early 1500s. Legend is that some sheep farmers saw that their sheep,

Sheeps are going crazy, like just mad, mad energy after they had ate a particular cherry. Because again, coffee is a cherry, which is actually a very delicious cherry, you know, and the bean inside is not the bean. It's the pit or the seed that's inside of the coffee cherry. So yeah, legend is like, that's how it is.

They figured it out. Like, dang, they eat these, uh, these cherries and then they go crazy. Like, I wonder if that's going to give us strength too. And you know, so it's originally discovered in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the only natural place that coffee grows in every other coffee bean across the world was propagated from the Ethiopian one.

It only grows between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn along the equator. That is the only place that it naturally grows. But because of climate change and because of, you know, GMO and genetically modifying and all these different things that we've done with crossbreeding and stuff like, you know, we've been able to grow it in regions that aren't naturally the temperature and elevation that they naturally grow in.

There are many different varietals of what we call, that's what they're called, varietals of this particular cherry or plant. But overall, you can break the species of coffee plant into three types. So you have Typica, which most people don't drink unless like if you have a coffee farm that you actually export from. Like a lot of times the Typica stuff is just the stuff that you keep for yourself. Like most coffee farmers have never actually tasted their best coffee because they're

you ship that off to the rest of the world to make your money. Then there's Robustica, which is like what most of the, um, like instant coffees made from really a lot, a lot of the world actually drinks that, but it's a, it's an acquired taste. Like when you go through South America, like I know when I went to my grandmother-in-law's house, like she, you know, she, she,

boil the water with the canela, the cinnamon sticks and poured instant coffee in there. And like as much of a coffee snob as I am, I'm like, that's the best. That's one of the best cups of coffee I've ever had in my life. You know, people always ask me, what's the, what's the best cup of coffee you ever had? And I'm like, honestly, it's the one in your hand. That's the best cup. I feel like there's like a bell curve.

Where it's like, yeah, you discover it, then you hit this level of snobbity, then you become like a, like a new Christian about it. And you're just like, one of the evangelize and tell everybody. And then you become just like a theological snob. And you're just like, are you putting cream, like full extraction or die? Death over decaf, like you would become that dude. And then you just come over the other end of that hump. And you're just like, dude.

It's just coffee, man. You know? So yeah. So that's Robustica, which like I said, most of the world actually drinks that. And then the specialty level, the one that most of us are used to drinking now is called Arabica. And it's kind of like, it's the top tier based on whatever subjective scale we use to say what is the best drink.

coffee but the fertile band as what we call it around the coffee industry is this band that you know kind of belts around the equator so that's why in central and south america in certain parts of africa and in asia coffee can naturally be grown it takes a particular elevation right and

You can even follow the transatlantic slave trade. You could follow the transatlantic slave trade by following the distribution of coffee, how coffee got to the Americas, transatlantic slave trade. Anyway, there used to be this beef between Ethiopia and Yemen as to like who made coffee first because coffee,

without getting too much into nerdery, I want to stay in the narrative here, but coffee first from Ethiopia went to Yemen. And the argument with the Yemenis is that they were the ones that grounded it and made it into a hot drink. So that's their argument that the Ethiopians didn't do that first. But anybody that really knows it, it's just like, dude, it originates in Africa. I'd be willing to bet too that if you kind of

have developed somewhat of a palette for like a good clean cup of coffee, you would probably feel like Ethiopian beans are the best. And mostly it's just because like, well, that's where it's from. And they have like at least a hundred year headstart in cultivating how to make a bomb bean. As a fun aside,

If you get your hand on a Yemenese bean, it's a flavor profile you've probably never had in your life. That's why if you ever go to a place and they have like a Yemenese geisha, it costs so much because Yemen has been with the Houthis and such like that have been locked into this civil war funded by Yemen.

Saudi Arabia and Iran, you know, let's tie it all together, guys. That's what I'm saying. It's a metaphor for everything. Why coffee can't get exported out of Yemen is because of this civil war. It costs so much to get coffee out of Yemen because of these, you know, wars funded by Western countries. Anyway, so from Yemen, it got to Turkey. You know, this is around the time of like when the Islamic world was

was really the superpower of the planet you know with people like averroes you could do your little history on that and just all of the most beautiful libraries science history algebra math philosophy was all coming from the muslim world and it was through the muslim world that coffee got to europe so at first europe wouldn't drink coffee because they thought it was muslim that

That's what the dirty little brown folks is doing, right? Until it got to Belgium, which is one of the funnest stories to me, again, as coffee remaining this metaphor for the suffering of people of color everywhere. So anyway, remember, Europe is a place for tea, but you know, they got their tea from India. Anyway, so one of the archbishops in Belgium was presented this coffee thing

And because it was brought to Europe by the Muslims, the people there thought they couldn't drink it. So this bishop was like, I don't know. Let me try it. So I don't know. This might be folklore. But he drinks this coffee and he says, now I'm not going to quote him directly. This is the part that I think is folk. This happened. But this is the part that says folklore. He was like, if this is evil, let's baptize it because it's

We can make it for good. He was like, this too delicious to let go of. Why should the devil get all the good drinks? You know what I'm saying? I'm trying to drink good too. We can drink unto the Lord. All things was made for his glory, including this coffee. I

There used to be this argument over which one was better for you, coffee or tea. They even did this test with these prisoners where they gave one of them all coffee and the other one all tea to see who would live longer. And of course, since that is like the least scientific thing you could do possible, you know, even if the guy that coffee live longer, it don't matter because it's not real science anyway.

I personally am very thankful that coffee got to Europe because again, something that was discovered and came from black people for which we're willing to share freely.

Like our music, like our slang, like our style of dress. You're welcome. You know what I'm saying? But don't act like this your house. You could put your flavor on it and we could all enjoy because it was the Scandinavian countries that figured out light roasting and a lot of the nerdery for like the third wave specialty coffee that you that you see now that you're right. That's from Europe. Italy did not discover coffee. Italy did espresso. I'm thankful for that.

But they were only able to do espresso because of the labor of people of color in the global south. You follow my metaphor here? Coffee got to the Americas via the slave trade. But if you can just look at a map, the jungles in Angola and the jungles of Brazil are the same jungle. There's just an ocean in between it. So, of course...

When the Africans got there, they would recognize the soil and be able to grow the same things. Are y'all following me? We're talking about a industry that makes $460 billion globally every year and less than 1% goes back to Africa. Less than 1% actually goes to those that actually grow the product. Are you following me on this metaphor?

Coffee has its own stock market because it's a commodity. It's called the C market. Like it fluctuates like that. You know, when you look on a bag and it says fair trade and direct trade, let me tell you what that means. The price per pound for coffee

coffee per pallet is set at what they call a fair trade price. So there's a coffee commission that sets what is a fair amount for that coffee. So you're supposed to, it's like a fair market value for a house. You know who sets that? Germany. Here's the problem with that. Germany can't grow coffee. How are y'all setting that?

For a farm to be considered organic or meeting specialty coffee. Somebody, a farmer in Kenya. Oh, they die. Got to fly somebody from Germany down to a farm for them to test. They soil to tell them that they saw it was healthy enough to tell these people from Germany. Okay. Grow coffee. You, I, this, this was, so that's fair trade is if Germany says that this price is right. Direct trade.

is when me, the American buyer, goes to the farmer themselves and I ask the farmer, how much is it? I direct traded with them. The farmer tells us. Now, why I partnered with Onyx and all the other people that you see me partnering with, first of all, is because whatever that price is, what Onyx does is they'll pay 30% more. So that's to guarantee, not only is this a price that the farmer said, we're going to pay you even more than that.

There's an understanding of value in the fact that we don't have an industry without you. And sometimes I work at this other crew called Beck's 360, which I'm going to talk about a little later at the end of this. I'm saying these are ways for you to be able to say because everyone should be able to drink coffee. These are ways for which you could say I am not being a part of the problem in these ways. I could be part of the solution.

But yes, a billion dollar industry created on the backs of brown folk controlled by white folks. I'm just saying it's a metaphor. Billion dollar industry. When's the last time you walked into a coffee shop and thought, wow, this is something invented, harvested and nurtured by people of color. No, you don't think that people think Italy. It's such a metaphor. And now because of.

harsh conditions, erosive topsoil, and abusive practices, we only got 27 harvests left. Now let's get to the science and things we can do. All right, let's go to some sort of ad break, right? How do y'all do them at Aikidavon here? Am I supposed to do some sort of like speaking of situation? I don't know. So I think the best way to get into the science of it all is to maybe think about it

through just the supply chain period. For centuries, the coffee plant or even farm have been just local indigenous rainforest living families. It's your grandma. And I know this from my own experience. This is like your grandparents' house. Like you inherit this farm, you know, or you inherit this plot of land and you got a couple of coffee plants in the back. Now, us being, you know, in a neoliberal society,

globally connected, late stage capitalistic society, how do you get that commodity if we're not growing them in the heartland of America? Well, because we can't, number one. We have to create a supply chain and the supply chain is just as industrial as every other thing is. So from the origin, you have a green buyer and the green buyer is essentially the middle person. So that person is

has all the relationships with the farms. So they create these relationships with these farms. Usually, depending on your relationship with that green buyer is you, you take orders from them that sometimes depending on how big or small that green buyer is, some of those are like multi-state, multi-country, like big old corporations that, you know, go across the world and they swoop up and Walmart of it all. And like, just like

buy up all these small farms. Now, some of these places, some of these green buyers own the farms because they bought them from the indigenous populations. And others are like, no, we just have relationships and we pay, like I explained before, fair market value, fair trade. And then...

I, on the other end, like, let's just say I'm, you know, I will use my own company, Terraform. This isn't the process I use, but this is just the supply chain. So I would approach that green buyer. I'd go to their website and say, hey, I want to roast a Kenyan heirloom. That would be the varietal. Like, I want to, that's the type of bean. I want a Kenyan heirloom. And I go, oh, dope. They got it at, I'm,

making up this number, 18 cents a pound. It's not like that. It's much more. But okay, dope. So they get the order on the other end. They see what they got in stock or they got to go to origin, right? So they go to origin, they get the thing. And then some countries make you buy an entire shipping container.

because it's just not worth it if you're in Costa Rica, you're a farmer in Costa Rica. It doesn't make any financial sense to try to ship out just like one burlap bag. Like the cost is too high. So it's like, yo, you gotta buy a pallet or not a pallet, you gotta buy a shipping container, right? So what most small like micro roasters do is...

they buddy up with other people that are like, yo, let's all do this. We'll kind of go in on this shipping container. So you have the farmer, you have the green buyer, and then the green buyer makes the deal with the shipment team. The shipping container gets filled. Then you got to pay the nation's tariff. So then that's where the country comes in. Now, why some coffees cost more than others is

Some of it has to do with the tariffs. It's like Ethiopia charges some like 59% tariff, as they should, because they tired of being raped by white people just like everybody else is. From there, once it hits land...

Us as the roasters, we would go divvy up the funds. We've already paid them. And then you go to your roasting facility. Now, if you a big boy, you got your own roasting facility. But most of the time, you know, a person may have one machine in the back of their coffee shop or if they don't even have that, then they share a facility where they roast a bunch of different roasters roast at that one place.

Once it's roast, it's getting in a bag and into your cup. Now, this is the specialty coffee way. Now, if we talk at Starbucks, Starbucks walks over there and they say, hey, let me buy this city.

And they got their own shipping people and their own situation. And then they roast in like something the size of a mountain. Now, what I'm talking about is third wave coffee. What that means is there's a lot of nerdy stuff. That means it's first wave coffee is like the coffee that your grandpa drank in World War II. It's just, you know, mud. You know what I'm saying? Even the term Americano was because when the American GIs were...

in Europe and they wanted a cup of coffee because in Europe they drank espresso. The Americans was like, this is disgusting. What is this? So they just add water to it. So they called that an Americano because that's the type the Americans like anyway. So that's first wave coffee. Second wave coffee is like Starbucks or the coffee spots in

that like have the ton of serps in the back. And the name of their shop is probably some sort of pun, like in France, the Central Perk, Java Chip. Those are the ones that like the big suburban churches would have their own coffee shops, like Cornonia House,

key brews, just some sort of quality. That's where it's like, you know, that's your triple macchiato, you know, with double pump, all of the sweet frou-frou stuff. That's second wave. And then third wave is what we call specialty coffee. And that's where the big bucks come in because you can sell them at a higher premium. Now for it to be considered specialty coffee on a scale of one to a hundred, you have to grade that bean at an 80 or above.

Now, coffees that are graded in the 90s, unless you've been to Dubai or Qatar, you've never drank it. Those go there because American, we can't afford it. So the farmers don't even show it to them. But the most of the like, if you go to like a good coffee shop, you're drinking about an 83 to 85. But it's not like their whole crop is that most farmers are just small plots.

So what do you do with the rest of it? Well, the rest of it, which is the most of your harvest to make the numbers round, let's just say you have a hundred coffee trees, maybe 10 of them produced an 85, right? So that's 10%. So you've spent all year

fighting drought, fighting climate change, fighting excessive heat, fighting all that only for of your whole plantation, only to get 10% of it to be actually be available to sell. The rest of it, it just goes to the stock market and you just hope and pray that you're able to sell it. But you have that three weeks

to try to make your year's salary. So what happens is since you can only sell 10%, only 10% of it is even available to sell, right? I'm talking specialty coffee. This is where we are now. If in fact, somebody comes in here and pays it and then they only pay fair trade rather than direct trade price, you're getting a price set by Germany

not even enough to pay the little kids that just missed school to be able to pick your farm because that's who actually picks the cherries. It's just day work. Just kids from the farming community that come in there. They try to make a day's wage to pick their things. So what happens is to be able to survive, this is how it is in Honduras, to be able to survive, you

You go get a loan from the government to be able to make your money for the year. And then hopefully off that harvest, you can pay that loan back and make enough for the next year. So you don't have to get a loan. The problem is they're charging these farmers 30 percent interest. So they're locked into this situation that says I can't even afford to even keep my family plot because I'm just staying in debt. So then what do you do?

Government ain't dumb. They'll re-up your loan. So they're like, oh, cool, no problem. We'll just, we'll re-up your loan. So these farmers end up being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and it's adding every year because they could never catch up, which is bonkers considering how much coffee we drink across the world. One would think they would be fine. So, I mean, what's your option? You sell the land or do you just remove the coffee? Just go get some cows.

Sell beef, right? Deforest. I mean, there's money to make there. Or you sell it to a big conglomerate. And what does the big conglomerate do? Burn down all of the forests and create a monoculture, right? And a monoculture are like what you would picture what we do in America for corn or all through the Amazon rainforest. And if you know, obviously you've seen a forest monoculture ain't how earth works, right? The diversity of plants becomes its own fertilizer, right?

But if you don't have that, if you don't have chickens that survive off the avocados and, you know, I'm pulling things out of nowhere. But like the point I'm trying to make is when you create a monoculture, you have to also create a way to sustain that. And the only way to sustain it is destructive. One cup of coffee in this way releases. Was it 80 grams?

I mean, it's like driving half a mile. Like your cup of coffee is a half a mile full of poison. If done the way that most of the bigger names in the industry do it, which is now rising our carbon, right? And if you're going to do that, then that means you need a gang of fertilizer, right? Which is bad for the soil. And then you also need to use way more water than naturally released

required. Matter of fact, according to the UN, one cup of coffee uses 130 liters of water. If you're doing this like monoculture style, right? That looks like farming the way we do it here. One cup of coffee, 130 liters of water, which is a bathtub. That's like a bathtub full of water to create this one cup. So obviously multiply that times

A billion. Not only is this practice like like everything else in this neo-capitalistic world, the demand was so big and the desire to get the most amount of money with the least amount of price is destroying the very thing that makes the product possible.

Now, the rest of the world isn't stupid. We understand that this process is not sustainable, right? We're killing the soil. We're killing the land. Everybody knows that. So the EU passed this law that says if you're going to import any sort of commodity into

including coffee, you have to prove that it didn't come from deforestation, right? So this is them trying to do their best. The only problem is if I'm an indigenous farmer on a small plot, I don't even have access to deforestation. But the only way for me to prove that is, like I said before with the fair trade, I have to fly somebody down. It's on my own dime. It's because the EU doesn't understand regenerative practices because they don't know any indigenous people.

Right. So this is now adding a double burden to the farmers that are actually doing it right, who can't possibly do the volume right.

of the people that are doing it wrong. So the first problem is like, this system is not even financially sustainable. Like I haven't even got to the specifics of the deforestation and all those things that have caused this problem. Now, according to Bloomberg, there's a 2022 study of tropical cash crops included Arabica, as well as avocado and cashew are probably the most vulnerable to climate change because the regions that are suitable for this production continue to shrink because of why heat, it's,

It's too hot, which means that Arabica won't be able to grow, so we'll probably have to start drinking Robustica, right? It's estimated that

In 30 years from now, basically 50% of lands that can grow coffee will not be able to grow coffee anymore. If we don't do anything. 50%. You think they're making fun of you for your $12 cup of coffee is crazy. Now, listen, Nestle reports that there are more than 6,000 cups of Nescafe coffee drank annually.

Every second. Are y'all following me? Every second. That's how much coffee we drink. Now, granted, that coffee is not Arabica. It's Robustica. Robustica is what really most of the rest of the world drinks. It's us, again, being a part of the Northern Hemisphere, being a part of the Global North, that like the pristine, kind of good, shiny type, right? The problem is,

Our insatiable desire to consume things as fast as we can. And I don't want to I'm not blaming the victim here. I'm just saying it's impossible to do. The volume is the argument. How do you do this volume that we all want in this global supply chain and the way for which we've set this up?

How do you do this volume and still keep the price where the price is? And you know what the solution has always been. You just rip off the farmer and destroy the earth. So deforestation giving us too much carbon, which has made the weather erratic, which means that some years the crop is flooded and it doesn't grow right because it's too much rain. Other years it's complete drought and you have to dig even further into the ground to

To try to get the amount of water that had we not raised the temperature 1.5 degrees Celsius, had we done some changes, the earth would be the same. So Brazil is the biggest coffee producer in the world. Right. And this year, this year.

was the worst drought they've had in seven decades with above average temperatures. And one of the biggest producers out there, Associated Press interviewed him, Silvio Almeida and that fool's coffee plantation.

The AP just reported this was expected to harvest 120 sacks of coffee beans, but they only got 100. And then they're quoted saying, given the conditions here in 2025, crop is already affected. He told Associated Press, pointing out that part of his plantation where flower buds have already

already died before blooming. I won't say it's doomed because God can do anything, but based on the situation, it's already compromised. What these people are saying is like next year's crops already dead. This where we are, y'all. Are y'all hearing what I'm saying? He's saying we ain't gonna have no coffee next year. It's already dead.

Y'all remember when Robert read off his little book, you know, the whole started off the whole it can happen here thing. And in one of them places after the Civil War and went down, coffee was something you had to smuggle into the country like a drug. This what he talked about. There ain't gonna be no coffee, y'all.

I was at an event two years ago. It's called the Color of Coffee Collective. It was for black people in the coffee industry. And of course, this is stretched to the whole diaspora. So, you know, Central and South American, just ultimately people of color in the coffee industry connect, you know,

plot, strategize, have some transparency in our supply chains. Because a lot of us in America, in the West scream, you know, pro-black, pro-black, we for the culture, we for the people. And like to put, you know, the faces of our farmers on our bags in, you know, part of the marketing. But most people who are in the coffee industry have never gone to the source. So you don't know

It's highly, you know what I'm saying? You don't, you don't know Tabby who like is actually like growing your coffee. You know what I'm saying? It's just a name on a spreadsheet brought into you from an importer. Right. Anyway. So there was a panel discussion about, about climate change and about ways for which we can do better. So they had a bunch of farmers. I remember it was a farmer from Kenya who gave us these just heaters, just these heat rocks, these bars, these,

during this panel discussion. And after I show you these bars, I'm gonna go for a break and then I'm gonna tell you about people that are doing things better in ways for which we can maybe save our soil so that your kids can possibly enjoy coffee also.

So someone asked, I believe it was a roaster from Puerto Rico was like, hey, so what are some of the ways that you're adapting and hoping to like mitigate climate change? Like, how are y'all dealing with climate change? So he was asking this Kenyan farmer, like, what's he doing for climate change? And his answer was, I mean, you tell me. We're at source. He's like, we're a third world country. We didn't cause climate change.

You did. What are you doing? He's like, we're the ones suffering. And not only are we suffering from the effects of climate change in our own life, because of your greediness, you created the climate change that is causing the problems in the very crop that you're trying to get from us. So because of your problems, this is the way he's explaining it. I now can't grow something that we've grown for hundreds and hundreds of years. And you asking me what I'm doing for about it? No, what are you doing about it?

Ouch. So here's some things that are being done. Next. All right, we're back. Now, the wildest thing about how complicated any of these solutions are, which are, you know,

going to take many, many decades to actually see the difference in the actual topsoil. The most bonkers part is the fact that like the solutions by and large are kind of the same across any world problem. It's mutual aid. It's collective, communal, collaborative work among every part of the supply chain. It's so, in some senses, it's so beautiful that like

really the solution is us. I say that to not grossly oversimplify, but I say that to say that there's hope. So I'm going to introduce you to a couple programs and a couple farms and sort of some things to look for

in your coffee purchasing because you guys want to see the world be better also first thing is farms going back to indigenous practices now two i know personally and one i'm going to tell you about from ecuador this there's a whole documentary on it if you look up on youtube it's called how climate change threatened coffee production by dw documentaries and i mean right like pretty

Pretty on the nose. So a coffee collective in Ecuador called Vailacori. It's their Kichwa language. It means green gold in their indigenous language. And they're doing something very similar to my friends in Honduras.

called Karacha Coffee. Now, what they are are cooperatives on the business side. So I'm so excited. I'm going to get to the business cooperative side after I explain to you the indigenous practices, even though all of these things are related. So what they do is they

Something that's so obvious, which is like, you got to stop doing monocultures. First of all, it makes sense financially because now you're diversifying your commodities. So you have your coffee plants. If you see a coffee plant, coffee plants are pretty short. Like they don't grow taller than six foot normally. So,

since the climate is so hot, what is the natural way to shade them? Well, the natural way to shade them is trees. So if you plant them among trees, the types of trees that, first of all, naturally fertilize the soil, number two, they produce fruit, number three, they produce raw materials, right? So these people have planted trees that are indigenous to the area. So a lot of times in coffee places, like there are certain species of beans that

that really only grow in particular regions. But the only reason they grow in those particular regions is because of the mineral, the way that the minerals are in the ground in that area. So if you can mimic those minerals, if you bring those minerals to this place, you could grow that bean. So technically speaking, if I have the, my minerals, I can be in Costa Rica and grow a Rwandan coffee because it's just the Rwandan soil that

In Costa Rica. And you could still argue that it is. This is some of the future of like if it do ever get so bad. Right. When they grow in coffee in Sacramento, you know, I'm saying in Vancouver, in some sort of building. It's because we just gathered the minerals that we've destroyed and put them in a laboratory.

That's not good for the earth. That's not, that's an invasive, not only invasive species, invasive mineral. So you're completely changing the biosphere of that land just to grow that one crop. That's absurd. The land already does what it needs to do. So what these guys do in Ecuador is the same thing they do in Colombia, in Zipacón, that was the name of the city that they were in. Also what's happening in Honduras is like, you just let the land do what it does. What I learned on one of these farms is like the quickest way to know a place

is not organic is there's no insects. Like if there's no ants, that means the ground's poisonous, right? The ants come out, they eat whatever waste is on the ground, whatever like natural waste is on the ground. They come back in, they go back into the soil. They're irrigating them soils themselves. You don't need lawnmowers if you have chickens, right?

The chickens eat the thing. The shade of the trees keeps the temperature down. It produces fruits like avocado, papaya, like I said before, mangoes, plantains. These trees that naturally grow in this area keep the soil rich and the coffee strong. So you're keeping the temperature down. The land does what it absolutely does. So now you don't need pesticides. You also need less water.

Because when the temperature being shaded and brought down, the water is not evaporating as fast. Whoa. And then the quality of the bean is higher. Now, here's where the indigenous practices move from just the ground to also the community. Rather than having a hundred small farms compete against each other, they just work as a community. So rather than waiting for Johnny European to come down and say, buy my beans, don't buy my beans, buy my beans. They're like, no, buy our beans.

They pull all the beans together, bring all of their crops together. And they say, yeah, maybe I can't produce whatever kilos that this person needs by themselves, but we can produce that. So that way, if there's a farm over here, that's got a smaller crop because maybe, you know, mother-in-law got sick. So they weren't able to work as hard as they can for those beans, or maybe collectively again,

Heat dome was too high. There was too much of a drought. We really couldn't grow that much on our own. Together, though, we could meet this order. You following me? And when that happens, because again, who usually picks the beans are the community's kids. Now,

If we can collectively fill the order right after we cup and we say collectively our coffees are good enough and there's different types of species like, you know, I'm saying like this is a I don't want to get too much into the nerdery, but each each bean in each tree is a particular species. Maybe when we cup, we say, hey, listen, this is the same thing that happened on Doris. It's like, you know, we sit around and we're tasting basically doing a taste test.

different batches of beans. I don't know which farm they came from. I know they're all a part of this collective. But if I say, yo, I want these, then when we pay, since it's not a middleman, it's a community. Now, the main load goes to the particular farm that it

It was ordered from, but the rest of it goes and is spread across the entire community. You following me? Okay, now back to the soil situation. I feel like I'm all over the place, but you have to understand because the problem's all over the place. And a lot of these places are connected. So in Colombia, they kind of did the same thing. So La Palma del Tuacan is the place that everybody comes into. And since every individual farmer does not have connections across the world,

with bringing buyers in and there's no promise that they won't be taken advantage of. And they ain't going to be able to sell, but maybe five, 10% of their crop, the rest of it either goes to the trash or goes to the C market. It's just the open stock market. You just hope somebody buys your beans. It's just no way to live. As I explained before, what La Palma ends up doing is this, is they say, okay, we'll check this out. We'll buy your coffee.

All of it. And not only will we buy your coffee because we know you need soil, we're going to set you up with a business so that not only can you sell your coffee to us, you can also sell your fertilizer to us. And the fertilizer that you're creating, we're going to build that business for you. And how they do this is this thing called biochar. Now, it makes so much sense if you have donkeys and other places that pigs and other animals

animals that have waste, you can make fertilizer. Duh, right? So what they do is this. They have these composts, these big old flat things that they build in front of you. They basically, they build it for you. They went to all the local farms and they were like, we'll build this for you, right? And then we'll buy the product from you. So they build these flatbed things

where you could take all the stuff that you would compost anyway and put it in this flatbed, cover it, and then we're going to give you this stuff called biochar, which is some of the dopest mother nature showing off. So basically, it's made from you heat wood at the highest of temperature with no oxygen. So once it becomes carbon, it doesn't turn to ash. Right?

You know what I mean? It's almost like, you know, when you like after you light a fire, when you hold the charred pieces, like how it crumbles away. This one, because you heat it at the highest temperature without letting oxygen in. So like it doesn't become like a like a red fire. You know what I'm saying? And then you mix that into your compost and it just makes this pristine soil.

So now guess what? These farmers don't have to pay for soil. They don't have to pay for nutrient wrench soil. Matter of fact, they can sell off the excess. Their crops already been sold. So you don't have to go get a loan from the state. You would need that loan to be able to set up your like your washing stations, like how you get the coffee from a cherry to the roast.

or to the green bean is like, it's a long process. It could be very expensive. It's all good. The homies down there will do that for you. We'll put you in this system and we're going to pay you even if your particular crop, your

your particular bean isn't sold because we'll sell it somehow. Like if, if it doesn't sell on the high end, 80% Arabica specialty coffee thing, we'll figure out a way to sell it. You're still getting paid anyway. We're buying your whole crop rather than the 10% that would happen. Like I said before, if your beans aren't as, as good as they're supposed to be, these

These programs buy 100% from these farmers. So these farmers are able to sustain themselves, right? And now you can pass these farms down to your children, right? Because we're doing this collectively. Since we're doing this collectively, especially it's what happens in Honduras, a third of the money goes to the community itself. I've rapped at a school that was built by them selling the coffee like this. There's now a medical clinic. A lot of times these farms,

are hundreds of miles away from the city. You have to get airlifted if something's wrong. And since these are indigenous communities, they're the most forgotten oftentimes in these areas. So purchasing these coffees really at a high price, which is what we're supposed to do,

guarantees that the individual farmer is paid, the community is paid. It's done in a way that's tied much more to the indigenous practices. And now collectively, because we're buying from responsible places that are locally grown, now

Now we can afford to bring the EU people down here to prove that this is not a process of deforestation because they're moving collectively. For real, it's just like fast fashion. It's like that T-shirt only three dollars because a sweatshop. You truly do get what you pay for in a lot of way. And finally, I'm going to tell you where tech is actually helping. And it's.

This program called Bext360. They could use a little help on the marketing, but it's essentially, they're using blockchain, create transparency.

And it's probably the dopest thing I've ever seen. And I saw it from one end of the supply chain to the other. So in this program, these local farmers, right, who had just had these small home plots, who have been running these plots for centuries, this, they grandfather's land, they, you know, they grandmama's land that they got it, who don't have access to American and

worldwide coffee buyers meet up with this collective, right? The Karacha collective. That's one of them that I'm, that I'm specifically talking about. And Karacha signed up with this thing called Bext. And what happens in Bext is if you've ever been to developing countries, not everybody ain't got a smartphone. So in this thing, once the farmer harvests all his beans, washes them and says, Hey, I got these many kilos of this type of bean click. Oh,

opens his Bext app on his smartphone, takes a picture of it and puts the weights and the numbers so that we know everybody and everybody in the supply chain can see this. There's a QR code even on the bag. Once you buy the bag in Sacramento, there's a QR code on it so you could see all this. So the kid from the farm snaps the thing. It goes to the exporter, which who just lives down the street?

It's not like some, you know, multi-conglomerate company from the north. No, this lady lives down the street. She's born and raised here. She opens it up and she says to us who flew in from America to be like, yo, we want to try some coffee. Opens the app and says, hey, this is the farmer. This where it is. This how much he wants. This how much he asked for it. Here's our price. But I'm looking at the app.

That's what he's charging. And then I know she's adding a third of that price because the other third of what she's asking for is literally paying for the hospital that's across the street. So it makes perfect sense to me. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay, cool. I know how much the shipping container costs because I'm seeing it. Of course I got to pay for shipping. What is you talking about? So it's all transparent. It all makes sense. And

And it's all regenerative financially and climate wise. Once we buy it, I can see if she paid the farmer because that's also in the app. So once the farmer gets his money, takes a picture, got the money screenshot received, and then a portion of that money is given in cash so that you could pay the kids that picked your farm. Click. Saw that. That's in the app. Right. Yeah.

As that stuff is shipped across the country or across the ocean, you can put in all of the roasting notes, which are kind of lame if you're not really into stuff like that. And then finally, the sealed bag that

that says, here's one from Denver, Queen City Collective Coffee, right? That, hey, look, this is a Honduras bean that we bought at this price. And then when you pay, it's called a third cost. When you buy the bag, there's an extra dollar added to the cost of the bag. And that extra dollar does not go to the roaster. It goes back to the farmer. You know how I know? Because there's a QR code. You can check it. And the farmer can confirm.

If they got their money, it's transparency. It's us taking care of us.

So obviously, because the world works the way it works, if this continues to be financially viable, here's some of the things we could do. One is we could start drinking more Robustica like everybody else. And it's actually delicious if you could find a good roaster. Entabi is a great roaster. Nguyen Supply, she's amazing. She does cold brew and like Vietnamese coffee. It's Robustica. But then there's other spots across the world.

It's going to cost a little more, but I'm telling you why it costs a little more. Because they come from a multicultural land that uses indigenous practices, that has lowered its carbon footprint, that is direct traded, and has transparency. This is not a list of everybody doing this. These are the list of people that I know personally and people that I've researched. So

In North CAC and South CAC, you got black and white roasters and you got Bridge City roasters. Denver, there's Queen City Collective. Up in Sacramento, there's Old Soul Coffee, Onyx Coffee Lab, Coffee Black. That's there in Memphis. All these people, you can order their coffees online. Don Cava Hall in New York. The transparency is there and is doing its best to make sure that this bean stays on this planet.

So I'll link in the show notes all of the data that I'm pulling this from and ways for which you can connect with like very socially responsible and climate responsible coffee roasters. She's only 16 years old. Boy, I tell you, that's the first lyric in that song.

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High Five Casino is a social casino. No purchase necessary. Board were prohibited. Play responsibly. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details at highthenumber5casino.com. High Five Casino. The 2024 presidential election is here. MSNBC has the in-depth coverage and analysis you need. Our reporters are on the ground. Steve Kornacki is at the big board breaking down the races. Rachel Maddow and our Decision 2024 team will provide inside as results come in.

And the next day, Morning Joe will give you perspective on what it all means for the future of our country. Watch coverage of the 2024 presidential election, Tuesday, November 5th, on MSNBC. It's a good afternoon here. It's the podcast. I didn't write an intro for this because everything, everything incredibly sucks. This is the podcast where bad things happen. I'm your host, Mia, with me is Garrison. Yeah, there's been a lot of bad things the past...

week past year um but the past week and a half it's been pretty bad yeah and one of the things that's been very bad is literally everything israel has been up to like i mean since it was founded but the last three four weeks somehow things have gotten worse which is a sort of unbelievable thing to say about a genocide but it's it's expanding so

Yeah, there is at the end of this one of the most bizarre Trump quotes I've ever seen. So that's why I promised you to stick with this. But oh boy, everything is very, very bad. So we now have, I guess, I don't even know if France is the right way to talk about this. But what we have in Gaza, which is where the main Israeli offensive is going right now, well...

We'll get into that. There's a bunch of stuff in Lebanon, too, where they're pulling troops, too. But in Gaza, everything just continues to get worse, even though—so the Israelis have pulled out some troops from Gaza, but they're also still making another offensive into northern Gaza.

And the thing about the way that the Israelis make offensive in some places is that the thing that the Israelis do is they just immediately start shooting at hospitals. So that's been a big part of what's happening. Something that used to be like controversial and like widely newsworthy a year ago, attacks on hospitals now have become so normalized, desensitized that it doesn't even make headlines, which that's been one of the most indicative factors that,

This has gone about as bad as it could have. I remember a year ago, we were debating whether or not the Israeli military intentionally struck a hospital. And this was a weeks-long debate trying to figure out what exactly happened. And now attacks on hospitals are just complete commonplace. It's like we've just totally lost everything.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, like it's not even just that that the Israelis are deliberately targeting hospitals. It's that the temporary facilities people have been trying to set up because the hospitals are being blown up are also being attacked. Yeah. Which has also been going on for ages. Yeah. Almost a year now, like almost immediately as soon as like humanitarian aid and like and like like impromptu medical tents were set up. Those were also the targets. And this is this is also discontinued.

Yeah, and I think the thing that's bleak about it is that they're blowing up hospitals. But we've reached a point into this where, A, it's not even newsreels, but B, the Israelis don't even...

like attempt to justify it anymore. I mean, if you remember a year ago when they were doing this, there'd be all of this stuff about how, oh, we found Hamas tunnels under the hospitals. There's just none of that anymore. They're just shooting at hospitals. Sometimes they give evacuation orders. That's the other thing that's been happening periodically is the Israelis keep

basically, you know, in places in northern Gaza, they'll be like, everyone has to leave now. And then they'll bomb it and they'll keep bombing it. Part of the thing about covering Gaza, right, is all of the stuff that we're saying is stuff that was a major news story like six months ago and is no longer a major news story because the slaughter has become just sort of so routinized. But, you know, so people are fleeing from northern Gaza into...

what's supposed to be the safe zone in central Gaza, except the Israelis keep shooting at the refugee camps in central Gaza. So it's not actually, there's, there's not actually a place you can be in Gaza where you're not getting bombed. What there is, is some places sometimes are less bombed than other places. And, you know, I think there had been a tiny amount of hope that,

The only conceivable upside about the invasion of Lebanon was that there would be a pull out of troops and we'd see less offensive. But, you know, they've just been escalating bombing campaigns. They're doing some offensive anyways. So, yeah, there's there's there's continuing sort of Israeli attacks into into parts of northern Gaza.

The other big thing, and this is what most of this episode is going to be about, is a new front. After already having this entire thing in Gaza, there was also an invasion of the West Bank, which, again, is... I don't know how to express how insane it is to have a war where you're nominally fighting against Hamas and then invade the West Bank, a place where there isn't Hamas. But they've done that, too. There have been parts of the West Bank, there's been a bunch of Israeli troops, and...

You know, we know they've been fighting in Yemen as much as in Yemen, but also now they've just straight up invaded Lebanon. And this is the sort of chain of events of this was, uh,

I don't know if kicked off is the right word, but it was dramatically accelerated by the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, who is... I think most people are aware that he's the head of Hezbollah and has been the head of Hezbollah since like 1992, which is longer than anyone who's on this episode right now has been alive.

Was this the one who was killed in those apartment carpet bombings? Yeah, yeah. Even still, assassination is a strong word for, or I guess a light word for just bombing. It was like, what, three large apartment complexes? Yeah, they just obliterated a bunch of apartment complexes with something like 80 bunker busters. Yeah.

So this is actually the second time that the Israelis have just straight up killed someone they were supposed to nominally be negotiating with. They killed the head of Hamas, like, in Iran. So...

We talked about on this show the initial wave of attacks on Lebanon, which is the Pager explosions. And the follow-up to the Pager explosions was that they figured out what bunker that Nisrola was in, and they just killed him. This is extremely bad for a lot of reasons, one of which is that

Hezbollah kind of hadn't really been on full war footing until this point. Like they've been doing a bunch of rocket attacks on northern Israel, right? There have been these sort of exchanges of rocket fire across the border, but they hadn't really escalated beyond that. And then the Israelis were like, well, just fuck it. Okay, we want our invasion of Lebanon. And Hezbollah was kind of like, I don't know if like moderating force is quite the right word,

term here, but his policy wasn't that Hezbollah was going to fight a total war against Israel. And the Israelis just fucking murdered him anyways. So we should probably talk about who Nasrallah is. He's not from like the original Hezbollah cadres from the original Lebanese Civil War when it emerges in 82. He's not from that cadre, but he's a pretty old school Hezbollah guy by this point.

He's, you know, he's been in charge of Hezbollah for fucking ever. Like, I am not old enough to remember a time when he was not in charge of Hezbollah because I wasn't born yet.

I don't know, he's one of the people who's seen Hezbollah's sort of expansion and also seen Hezbollah be able to be like the only of the sort of major Lebanese political parties who were in negotiations to end the civil war. He kind of oversaw the process of Hezbollah being like the only armed party like left in Lebanon other than like the regular army, right? He was also very famously...

in charge of Hezbollah's... I don't know how exactly you want it. I don't know. There's a whole bunch of stuff about how the war in 2006 started. But in 2006, Israel made this attempt to sort of, like, do their big anti-Hezbollah push. They invaded Lebanon...

And Israel didn't do very well. They were expecting, and I think what most people were expecting, Hezbollah to fight like a guerrilla army, right? Doing hit-and-run attacks, doing the whole sort of last century of guerrilla hit-and-run campaigns. And they didn't do that. They basically sat there and fought like a conventional army with a bunch of bunker networks. And the Israelis did extremely poorly in that war. And I think this...

It's influenced a lot of the way that people were thinking about how this how this fight was going to work. And it just hasn't. But, you know, the fact that Hezbollah was able to sort of stave off the initial attack and then the Israelis spent like 40 more days doing a bombing campaign and everyone just called it quits was absolutely huge for Hezbollah as a political force.

Unfortunately for them, I guess they burned an unbelievable amount of of that political capital that they'd gotten from being really the first people in a long time to like actually be able to viably claim that they defeated Israel. And I mean, it's obviously like both both sides of that declare victory. But Hezbollah puts up a better fight against the Israelis and like it's like stops their ground advance in a way that like.

was almost unimaginable at that point, even though Hezbollah had sort of fought pretty well between the Lebanese civil war, at least better than most of the other sort of like anti-Israeli factions that weren't a state. And even, I mean, even most of the states that have fought Israel have done extremely poorly. We're going to go to ads. And then when we come back, we're going to talk a bit about how Hezbollah's position weakened and how the Israelis have just sort of decided that this is a moment they can just murder everyone in.

So we are back with more, I guess, very, very short summary of what Hezbollah's been up to over the last about 30 years. So part of the reason that things haven't been going enormously well for Hezbollah is that a lot of their capacity was weakened by the fact that Hezbollah, during the Syrian civil war, threw their entire backing behind Assad.

And this was hideously unpopular for, I think, reasons that are obvious to most people listening, but one of the big ones is it's hideously unpopular in...

Like in Palestine, I forgot who ran the poll, but there's a very famous poll that was showing like the disapproval rating in Palestine of different world leaders. I mean, they didn't pull Netanyahu because obviously like Netanyahu, but the two the two highest ones that weren't Netanyahu were it was like Biden at 80 percent and then slightly higher than Biden was Bashar al-Assad.

Because he is hideously unpopular, partially for a bunch of shit that he did in a very, very large Palestinian refugee camp there that, you know, Hezbollah fucking backed them for. And so Hezbollah spent a lot of the last decade just sort of running around Syria backing the Assad regime. And that, I don't know, Garrison, I don't know.

That doesn't make you popular anywhere other than like extremely weird sections of the American left. Yeah. I mean, I guess some of the American right. When you're backing a guy who is just like, who is doing the thing the Israelis do, like obviously on a smaller scale, but like shooting up like Palestinian refugee camps, he's not going to be enormously popular. Whenever there's a guy who's like seriously maimed your family members. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty easy to dislike him. Yeah. And like,

Whatever things is going on in the story that like we need a fucking 70 part episode to talk about. But Syria occupied a bunch of Lebanon for a long time. And that also like hasn't made him enormously popular in the region. But, you know, Hezbollah's position is that they have like they have the slogan that goes the road to Jerusalem runs to Aleppo.

which is just like, just not how any of this has worked. It's been a complete fiasco. Hezbollah's performance in Syria hasn't been very good. Can you explain what that phrase means? Yeah, yeah. So the point of this basically was that in order to defeat the Zionists through some incredibly murky logic, like the Assad regime had to be kept in power. And this was a sort of a justification that was used by Hezbollah to just send a bunch of troops there to coordinate with

a bunch of other different groups there. And I mean, like, it's a really terrible decision, both on a moral and a strategic level, in the sense that, like, it caused a rift between what are supposed to be the resistance factions in Palestine, and it just killed a bunch of people. And, like, the Iranians are sending... I don't actually know how many people know about this story, but one of the, like...

terrifying things that's happening in this is that there's a bunch of refugees from Afghanistan. You flee to Iran and the Iranians like basically conscript a bunch of these people and send them into Syria with rifles. Um,

So these people are like fighting alongside Hezbollah and Hezbollah, they don't do great because Hezbollah has always been good at fighting like fairly obviously morally justified defensive wars inside of Lebanon. And then they go off and fight basically like a semi-imperial war in in Syria. It's fucking shit show.

And this has been extremely bad for their capacity. And it also really hurt Hezbollah politically because, again, it was also very, very unpopular in Lebanon. And this kind of all leads us to the last few weeks of like terrible shit that's been happening where, yeah, which is the Israelis just fucking launched this hideous bombing campaign against

I mean, just really just all over Lebanon, right? You know, most of the most of the reporting has been about their attacks in the south, but like they've bought the capital, they bought Tripoli, they've killed, I think so far, it's one of these things where the death counts kind of have stopped updating. But in the last few days, it looks like they've killed about 2000 people. It's not enormously clear, but yeah, it's things that things have gotten extremely unbelievably bad. And, um,

This is also really, I think, been a kind of mask off moment for both the U.S. and the Israelis, where all of the things that they've been pretending for the last year, they're just straight up saying that they don't believe anymore. I think that the best indicator of this is there was a White House press conference and Matthew Miller, who's one of the White House spokesperson, answered a question about

Yeah, it was just about the conflict. And he said, quote, yes, we do support Israel launching these incursions to degrade Hezbollah's infrastructure, which like kind of sounds like a standard, like the U.S. support Israel thing. But if you actually read into what that's saying, he's saying the U.S.'s official position is no longer whether to try to get a ceasefire. Right. That's that's what he's saying. This is immediate and active support for the Israelis, not not only not attempting to end the war, but expanding it into Lebanon.

And this is something that hadn't been an explicit war goal for Israel until this point. The line had always been that the point of this was to bring back the hostages. But there's no fucking hostages in Lebanon. There just aren't. That's not how any of this works. And at this point...

All of the sort of pretense is falling away and it just degrading into this pure slaughter. And when we when we come back from this ads, we're going to wrap up with more stuff that mostly sucks. And also Trump's latest thing on this, which is very weird. We are back. So as this has been going on in the past couple of days, Netanyahu posted a I don't even know how to describe it. One of the weirdest videos I've seen since like that insane Kevin Bacon one.

That's just him threatening Lebanon. He says, quote, You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza. He's just straight up threatening Lebanon as Israeli troops are moving across the borders or they choose to occupy cities. He's just straight up saying, quote,

Lebanon needs to just throw out Hezbollah somehow, even though it's just a political party. They need to completely destroy Hezbollah somehow, otherwise Israel is going to do to Lebanon what they've done to Gaza. And that, I don't know, is an unbelievably hideous expansion of the war. Could you give some context for why Israel is making moves into Lebanon? We know they're targeting Hezbollah, but there's also a degree of detachment

territorial dispute over where Israel ends and Lebanon begins. Yeah. That Israel has been kind of like wanting to increase tensions over for a while. And it feels like they're just using the war in Gaza as a cover to also try to claim like territory of Southern Lebanon. Yeah. And I mean, this gets into, so I think there's three kind of reasons that I think that are all

factors for different groups of people, you know, because like different Israeli political factions and different sort of strategic like elements of the military, et cetera, et cetera, are doing things for sometimes overlapping, sometimes different reasons. Like there's the obvious one, which is like, okay, there's a dislike for Hezbollah that's being, that's been funneled because a bunch of people in settlements in Northern Israel have been evacuated because they keep getting bombed. Right. And those people are unbelievably pissed off and they've been pushing for this for a long time. Um,

There's the second one, which is I think the one that liberals use as like the excuse for the entire the entire genocide was wrong. But it is also true that Netanyahu does like personally need this war to keep going because the moment the war stops, he's going to be out of office. He's screwed. Yeah. Yeah. So like that, that's a personal incentive for Netanyahu. There's also another one outside of the political pressure from from the northern settlers and

you know, the general idea has bluffing and then personally, which is like, it's really, so does have always been it's, it's most extreme, like most sort of far right, most genocidal, uh,

like political element, right? But increasingly we're watching them get radicalized even further in real time. And we're watching them become increasingly powerful. And one of the things that those people want is they have this unbelievably deranged thing that, I mean, I guess all nationalist movements eventually get to their greater, whatever your country is thing, but they've entered the greater Israel phase where they're talking about just like, you're talking about Israel as this,

as a state that's supposed to encompass all of Lebanon. I've seen so many different maps encompassing a bunch of parts of Syria. This is also what's influenced their continued attacks in the West Bank, specifically in the past few months, where they're similarly using what's going on in Gaza, hiding behind their own atrocities in Gaza as a cover to try to actually claim more territory in the West Bank, or at least push...

more of like the palestinian people out of their homes to expand the israeli settlements so i think both these are kind of happening for for similar reasons and israel is trying to like just weaponize the actual atrocities that are going on in gaza as like a big shield because those are getting so much more attention trying to get away with this territorial expansion in in other areas not just the strip yeah and i mean also i should say there's a lot of

A lot of the people on the ground are pretty convinced that the Israelis are trying to basically just like completely ethnically cleanse like parts of the strip so they can annex it. And I mean, it's not something that we like have, like we don't have like a document from Israeli high command that says we're going to annex all of this stuff. But it's it's it's something that's very least consistent with everything they've been doing.

And this is also like another sort of one of the cyclical factors here. This is a cyclical factor behind the settlements. We've talked about this back when we did episodes about the West Bank is that these really housing market is such a fucking disaster.

And this is something that, you know, like this kind of real estate speculation shit in the same way that like George Washington was as a real estate speculator was was sort of like motivated to do more tax on on indigenous land in the US. And this sort of like field westward expansion is all these land speculators, you know, moved out and people who couldn't afford like houses in like Tel Aviv or Jerusalem where housing prices are really high moved.

Those people have become this political force to keep pushing this. And this is, you know, fueling the expansion of the Israeli occupation into more and more places. Yeah. So right now where we're at with Lebanon is that 1.2 million people have fled their homes, which is, I mean,

Even if like the Israelis had literally done nothing else in the entire time that this has been happening, right? Forcing 1.2 million people to flee their homes. Is it a unimaginable level of suffering?

And this is, like, just effectively being reported as a footnote in the fact that they've fucking done all of this other shit. And just in the past week and a half, they've killed 1,300 people. Yeah. It's insane. Like, that's more than...

the number of people that were killed in Israel on October 7th. Yeah. That just doesn't matter because of all of the racialized aspects of how Israel's genocide campaign has been able to operate. Like,

You're not going to see memorials in the States for the 1300 people killed in Lebanon the same way that we will for October 7th. Yeah. You might get them on a college campus for the cops destroy it. But like that's. And that's just in one week. It's over. They've done over a thousand airstrikes the past week. They've killed all these people. And that's. Yeah. I don't know what else to say.

Yeah, I'm going to close by on a slightly lighter note from this

One of the... Even by Trump's standards, an extremely weird quote that he gave about Gaza. This is from The Guardian. Quote, asked by Hewitt, which is a guy whose podcast he was on. If Gaza could be transformed into Monaco if properly rebuilt, Trump replied, quote, it could be better than Monaco. It has the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything. It's got...

It's the best, I've said for years I've been there and it's rough, it's a rough place Before all the attacks and back and forth That have happened over the last couple of years He went on, I mean, they have the back of a plant Facing the ocean, you know There was no ocean as far as that was concerned They never took advantage of it You know, as a developer, it could be the most beautiful place The weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate It was so beautiful, it could be the best thing in the Middle East

Yeah, I mean, that's in line with stuff that Kushner's been saying for a long time in how they are hoping to turn Gaza into a part of Israel specifically to do real estate development, to turn it into a resort, to turn it into a golf course. And they're willing to kill tens of thousands of people to do it. And that is the primary driver, at least for them, for Trump's team, for why they're very happy to see Netanyahu just do whatever he wants.

Yeah, and I think there's something else here, too, which is that like a lot of the kind of Marxist analysis of this from like a very certain kind of Marxist has been about how Palestine has been rendered as like surplus population. This is a population that has been kicked out of the circuit of capital accumulation. They're not necessary for capital to reproduce itself to make more capital. And so no one cares if you kill them.

And I think that's wrong. And I think this quote is actually evidence of why they're wrong. Like this, you know, these people think purely in like people like Trump, right? Think purely in terms of economic assets. And there are an unbelievable amount of economic assets like in Palestine that a regime that is like maybe only 30% less like hideously cruel and murderous, like could have turned into viable economic engines. But the Israelis don't want that. They have made a decision like,

Like an actual conscious decision that instead of trying to exploit people for labor, they'd rather just fucking kill them all and try to steal their land. Right? They have decided that this fucking real estate speculation bullshit on a bunch of land that they're taking by just fucking slaughtering all of its inhabitants is more efficient for them than even doing fucking regular capitalism. And that's an absolutely fucking hideous note. And it's the kind of thing that Biden is saying okay to and Trump fucking loves because...

fundamentally like Trump's fucking real estate brand is pro-genocide and Biden doesn't give a shit about stopping them and he's also pro this so yeah the the gears of genocide continue to grind the Israelis are plotting their attack against Iran that they're going to do in response to Iran shooting missiles at them in response to them killing the leader of Hezbollah um

I don't know. By the time this comes out, it's possible that attack will have happened. They're going to do something. It's going to make everything worse. But yeah, until then, this is this has been an update on the genocide in Palestine and the new invasion of Lebanon. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Thanks for listening.

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Hi again. TV's quirkiest crime solver. I'm Elsbeth Tassioni. I work with the police. Is back and ready to go toe-to-toe. Yes. With a cavalcade of guest stars. You have a devious mind. I'm a lawyer. Don't miss a moment of the critically acclaimed hit. Look for anything out of the ordinary. That sounds like fun. Murder should be fun. Obviously murder's not fun. Elsbeth is all new. CBS Thursday, October 17th. Part of CBS Premiere Week and streaming on Paramount+.

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