It Could Happen Here Weekly 153
02:58:18 Share

Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right, bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

you have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

Toyota has been building a legacy of excellence for years. From developing hybrid technology to upping the standards of safety and efficiency, Toyota is always innovating, always making progress. And with a superior lineup of in-stock SUVs, including the Adventure Ready RAV4 and capable, affordable Corolla Cross, you can experience the legacy of Toyota for yourself. Visit buyatoyota.com, the official website for deals, to find out more. Toyota, let's go places.

Chase Freedom Unlimited rewards all that you are with cash back on every purchase. We built a life together collecting vintage items that connect us to the Black community and our vibrant heritage. This is Kiana Stewart. And I'm Jana Handy. We're partners in life and in business. With Freedom Unlimited, adding antiques to our collection is even more rewarding. How do you cash back? Learn more at chase.com slash freedom to be. Chase, make more of what's yours. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offer

subject to change. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. As Cybersecurity Awareness Month wraps up, remember that threats don't stop. Outdated software can leave you vulnerable to cyber attacks, making it easy for criminals to exploit security flaws. Norton 360 has you covered with multiple layers of protection designed to keep you safe online. The software updater feature ensures your programs are always current. With Norton 360, you get robust, year-round protection against today's sophisticated threats.

Don't wait. Get up to 58% off your first year at Norton.com slash secure. One in three women and one in four men experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. And nearly half of survivors delay leaving because they can't bring their pets with them. Purina started the Purple Leash Project to help eliminate one of the many barriers domestic abuse survivors face. A lack of pet

friendly domestic violence shelters. Through the Purple Leash Project, Purina is helping to create more pet friendly domestic violence shelters across the country so abuse survivors and their pets can escape and heal together. Visit Purina.com slash purple to get involved.

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.

Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, things falling apart. And today, the thing that is falling apart is InfoWars. Now, this is not a new situation. InfoWars has been falling apart for like half a decade now. But we are reaching certainly a point in that process. And to talk about that point, I am bringing on really the only two people you can bring on if you want an expert opinion on Alex Jones.

Dan and Jordan of Knowledge Fight. Dan, Jordan, welcome to the program. Hello. Thank you for having us. Hello. You can bring us on to tell you things that every other expert in the world will say are wrong. Yeah. It's nice to know that we are once again at that point where shit is looking that bad for Alex. Yep. That it's relevant for us to... Yeah. Yeah.

Start doing your media tours. Yeah, I mean, hey, we'll we're I'm enjoying this because I know we're going to see you next year to have the same conversation. And I was flashing back to earlier times we've talked. We've probably been like, hey, things are looking bad for Alex. Oh, yeah. My fingers are crossed that he gets a bad batch of supplements and goes on like not a sad murdering spree, but like a cannibal spree.

Like he eats three or four people. And then the news, like you guys, you guys are on fucking CNN talking about, well, actually Alex has been discussing eating people for quite some time. Sure. This is really, this is really a long story for him. Really? Anyone should have seen this coming. The writing was on the wall. This is some of the least surprising cannibalism in media history. Yeah.

It turns out this supplement, it didn't make him a cannibal. It just brought out that cannibal that was already there. Yeah, that's what the iodine does. First, before we get into it, you know, elephant in the room, by which I mean, Dan, you look like you're ready to lead the Union Army in a series of Civil War battles. That's a compliment to your facial hair. So by elephant, you mean the tusks. Yes. Yeah.

Well, thank you very much. I'm learning to accept compliments, but I've got a ridiculous handlebar situation that I did as a joke. I got this as a joke to go to undercover to a Tucker Carlson event. That's an incredible decision. And then the positive feedback's been too much for me to handle. It's good.

Well, I mean, this is really changing things for me because prior to seeing this, Jordan would have been my go-to if I needed someone to help me burn Atlanta. But now, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Could be either of you. There's a lot of Civil War jokes, a lot of hitting home runs in the 70s. Sure, sure. It's okay. I have a whole subreddit full of people that just Photoshop my face onto pictures of Rasputin, so...

it's what happens. Speaking of Rasputin, he was psychic. And so was Alex, according to Alex. Yeah. Yeah. Where do you where do you guys want to start here? Because like, obviously, the big news right now is all of InfoWars is up for auction, including apparently Alex's Twitter. It sounds like we'll probably be part of

the deal, although I guess that's a little unclear right now. He's trying to fight that inclusion of the Twitter handle in his bankruptcy estate, but

I think almost anybody could make a pretty solid argument that it's company property. Yeah. He uses it to broadcast his show. He takes calls on it for his show from Twitter spaces. So like, yeah, he's probably going to lose that fight and it's probably going to be part of the auction. Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, him not having it makes it valueless. So it's worthless. Yeah. So if I were going to auction it, it would be worth $0. Yeah.

But if I were going to give it to Alex, it would be worth to him millions upon millions of dollars. And that's the issue here. Yeah, it does kind of seem and I listen to Alex primarily through you. But it does seem like from what I'm hearing your show, he's kind of more concerned about the Twitter account than the multimillion dollar studio space. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which actually is kind of funny because I think it belies a lack of confidence. Yeah. Because I think if he loses real Alex Jones on Twitter, he could have realer Alex Jones. Yep. It doesn't seem like that would be a problem for him, actually. Do you think you can't

gather this audience back together? I think that's the problem. He's worried he can't get it back. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and specifically him, like Elon would tell people to follow him. There'd be a bunch of people with huge accounts saying this is the new Alex. You know, like, I really don't think it would be much more than a speed bump. Actually, unfortunately, these aren't your friends. No, I can't trust Elon fucking Musk to help you out. Yeah.

I do think that there's an abandonment fear possibly or some, some sort of lack of confidence that like, if this speed bump does hit, I won't be able to rebuild. Oh no. And it makes sense. Yeah. I think it's delusional. I think he's totally fine. Start a hundred new Twitter accounts. You can get a million followers on all of them. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, he's delusional about just about everything. So it makes sense that in this case, he would be delusional in the wrong direction. That's true. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, how does this seem to be going? My big concern when I'm when I'm thinking about it is like, well, there's probably someone rich out there, some like rich asshole, you know, think tank funding oil billionaire that would consider it chump change to buy all this shit up and just give it back to Alex. But my understanding is that that's not actually like a thing you could do in these kind of situations, although I'm not not an expert on it.

Oh, I think you can. Yeah. The trustee has the ability to, to even say like, if there is, if there was like a bid that was from, uh, whomever you want to say, like out of nowhere, George Soros, if you like fucking William Regneri, the fifth or whichever Regneri we're on now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

$10 billion more money than God could imagine. But the trustee wanted it to stay in right wing billionaire hands. He could give it to somebody who bid $6 million for it or five. I don't, I don't think that that's actually accurate fully. And I also don't think that the trustee is beholden to Alex in any way. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that there is that level of control that is not just like, it's going to the highest bidder. As I understand it,

The trustees control in terms of that is more about a minimum bid. Like if there were higher bids, it would be very difficult to rationalize not taking them. If they are from people who have the actual money. Sure. Aren't, I guess, involved with terrorism or something. Unless there is a concrete reason not to accept it. I would be surprised. Yeah.

If they didn't accept Soros, if he made a bid. I mean, I would be too, but also currently we are on surprise number seven and a half thousand. That's true. If not more. Yeah. So that would be the least surprising thing if it was a surprising thing. Yeah, I guess so. I think we're all agreed. Alex isn't going to just shut up and ride into the sunset. He's physically incapable of doing that. Like he would literally, literally explode like a soda with Mentos dropped into it. If that were to happen. Yeah. But also, uh,

There's a massive judgment on him, right? So my understanding is that any money beyond whatever a court decides would be necessary for him to maintain existence. Although I understand there's also ways you can fuck around with that, too. What do you guys know about...

Like what kind of limitations the court has placed on Alex for the future after after all of his shit gets sold out from underneath him? Well, I don't know about like specific details, but because his judgment was deemed to be like malicious and intentional. Yeah. The amount that he owes personally is not dischargeable by bankruptcy. Yeah.

So he's in chapter seven bankruptcy now personally. And so he's liquidating all of the assets. So he has to sell off the company, which is how we get to the auction in the first place.

And so he will sell off these assets to go towards the payment of these people, but that's not going to erase the debts and set things even. So in theory, he could be hounded for the rest of his life. Sure. He could have wages garnished, have some oversight of his finances in theory. Yeah. To the amount that that's exercised. I'm not sure how much it will be, but yeah,

Yeah. That's going to be hanging over him for the rest of his life. Yeah. Or, I mean, if I was him and, uh, based on how things are going for him so far and the direction things are taking, then, uh, once this is handled, then he's going to move all of his money to Alex Jones store.com. And then once they catch him there, he's going to move all of his money to Alex Jones store.com too. Uh, and then once they catch him there, he's going to move his stuff to Alex Jones.com three. Uh,

Until eventually everybody gets so fucking tired that they're like, fine, either we're no longer going to come after you or we'll settle for fucking nothing. Yeah, because him and his lawyers explained that even as part of their legal strategy early on, which is that you exhaust people with delays and to the point where someone's just willing to settle because you're such a pain in the ass. Yeah. And that's just kind of his...

mode of operation. Yeah. And every time people have been like, well, clearly you can't continue to be a pain in the ass this way anymore. It won't be allowed. It has instead been allowed. So,

So you can do it. It's fun. I don't want to get like in the way of people's, you know, celebrating the downfall of Alex Jones, but it does kind of seem like nothing realistically is going to stop him from being rich and being able to talk to an audience of people who are dangerously devoted to his shit. Like none of this is actually going to

I'm sure it's unpleasant and stressful, right? But it's not going to stop him. Right. It's just not possible. Yeah. This is why you get other experts, because I do want to get in the way of people enjoying the quote unquote info on his outfall. I'm just talking about like when I'm when I'm watching people celebrate on Twitter, like you can't correct everybody. It's like whenever whenever there's like disinfo about Alex Jones that people listen to your show. No, like it.

there was a period of time where I would correct people about that or really literally anything else. And I've, I've increasingly gotten to the point where like, everyone's wrong about almost everything they say on the internet. And there's really no point in correcting anybody about it anymore. Like what, what am I going to do? How is this going to help? Yeah. I see people like posting videos of Alex crying and like changing the context of what it is for, for some posts. And it's like, ah, you guys are just,

Yeah, I know it's not worth the energy to correct here. Yeah. To your point, though, Jordan does want to stop people from celebrating and ruining everyone's fun. I'm in the middle. OK, I would like people to be a little half the time. Do people to be a little bit more realistic about their expectations? People being like celebrating prematurely, like you're just going to have to deal with the hangover of this. That is.

there's a pretty decent chance somebody aligned with Alex is going to buy the company and then all of it is going to get just given back to him. And it's equally likely that Alex,

Someone, you know, like a Soros or whatever, does end up buying it. InfoWars is destroyed. And Alex's revenue streams remain intact because his dad runs his supplement company now. That's outside of the bankruptcy. He shifted all of his merch over to this Alex Jones store dot com that's run by somebody else. So, like, all the meaningful ways that he can make money are now protected and he can just start selling.

Alex Jones fuck around hour or whatever, and have these people be sponsors. And, you know, it'll feel fun that InfoWars is gone or someone else bought it or whatever. But like, you know, like you're saying, Robert, it doesn't, it doesn't really address the issue and nothing is, nothing's really gained. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of been a massive waste of everybody's time, but, but a lot of lawyers are going to make a lot of money. So that's good.

It does seem, if I'm going out of my way to kind of look at what are the most positive results of this, like if... I mean, it does look like he's probably going to lose control of all of the shit that they have to film InfoWars, right? Sure. That won't stop them from filming and doing videos, but maybe they'll look like crap and...

And maybe that will have an impact on like the degree of credence people give them, you know, like maybe the fact that Infowars has a nice studio isn't 0% of like why their shit gets taken seriously by people. I don't think it's most of why, but it's not nothing either. Otherwise, like they wouldn't be doing it. Like, I do think that that is, although I don't know, maybe that was in a different era is when that mattered.

I think it's also psychologically important for him. Yeah, that might be the most of it. He wants to think he's doing a real show and without the trappings of a fake CNN studio, it's harder to pretend that you're not just reading Twitter headlines and then getting mad about them.

But I do feel like this idea that it's a waste of time and everything has been a waste of time, I just want to give a little bit of voice to the fact that it may feel like a waste of time and nothing has been achieved. But if you listen to the perspective of some of the plaintiffs and some of the families, the ability to face him in court and reclaim some of the power that he had over memories and the power and the pain...

You know, that isn't something that is quantifiable in terms of the money or, you know, all of his feet dragging. But it is something that matters. And I don't want to pretend that that hasn't been achieved. Agreed. As much as it's not the catharsis of him getting arrested or losing all of his money or whatever that.

Yeah. No, I mean, I just, I think we all needed to understand clearly from the beginning what this was and that would have altered kind of the way that this is perceived. Like if we had all known from the jump, like if all the lawyers and everybody and all the media had gotten together and been like, listen, this is going to be a moral victory.

And it's going to be good to have this like in public to have this airing for all of us to see and for the families to have. I think we would have been fine with that. The problem was all the rest of the stuff was a waste of everybody's time.

Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. No, that makes sense to me. Yeah. I think if we had just had this could all been banged out in a day. Really? Yeah. Like we get everybody in court. Everybody gets to say their piece and then we're done. And Alex gets to remain rich. It's basically the same thing. All right. Well, we're going to keep talking on this. And I'm going to ask you guys for an update on how Alex is handling the election, too. But first, Alex.

Let's all handle some ads. And we're back. You know, this is one thing. Sorry. I got to stop you. I can't believe you're running an ad for Dr. Jones Naturals. That's just really different. Very different naturals, though. Very different naturals. Not we are. We are using that in the porn sense. My Alex Jones deep fake pornography website is off the ground for $70 a month. You too can have a subscription.

Dr. Jones, big natural. Alex Jones shrunk natural. Yeah. Dr. Jones, big natural. Take too many supplements. You're going to have some real shrunk naturals.

Honestly, most of what I do is just take clips from The Graduate and put him in as the male lead. I don't know why. I don't know why. You gotta give people what they want. Anyway, we made $40 million last month. Shit. Damn. We're in the wrong business. We should have stopped with this whole no ads thing. So I want to talk a little bit about how Alex has been handling the election because...

You know, one of the things that's always interesting to me is how his sense about whether or not everyone's doomed to be, you know, murdered by the New World Order and have their corpse disposed of by a robot is...

is not related at all to like how conservatism is doing, how his party, his picked candidates are doing. It's a pure his own personal vibes because right now is not a terrible time if you're a fascist in the United States. There's a real good chance they're going to have a runaway win here in the next couple of weeks.

but Alex is at least based on the most recent episode of knowledge, but I've listened to more or less on the, everything is fucked and we're all doomed. The new world order is going to eat you all thing. I think it's just because he's got the auction team coming by his office.

Well, spoiler alert in the next episode, he has had a euphoria moment because he's realized that they're going to win. They've already won. They've already won. You're way too far behind. Now, tomorrow, of course, they will be losing and we're all going to die. He's a rapid cycling kind of guy. But the day after that, we're going to win. Yeah.

I think that we've even talked about this before, this dynamic of your enemy has to be super strong and then super defeatable and super weak. All of that must exist simultaneously or else his game doesn't really work as well. Yeah.

So that energy is going to keep going until the election. And also, it makes sense. I mean, I can't imagine the idea of a bunch of professional people coming into my home or place of business and just like cataloging things, just taking individual pictures. The amount of stress and nervous energy that that would provide. Like, I'd be like, hey, I don't know if I needed to clean that. I don't know.

She would be getting real. Yeah. I just like cleaning up my dad's place after he died was like this whole thing of all of these are items that have meaning to our family. And I would be okay burning them all in a fire in a pit right now. Like I'm just, I'm done. I'm done.

So I can't imagine like the sense of fucking I would have an Alex, especially if I had Alex Jones money. Like he really it's just more evidence that there's a deep sickness involved in all this with him. Like he can't stop himself. Yes. Go fish or something, bro. Like go on a nice fishing trip. What are you doing sitting in your office watching your life get picked apart? What a miserable place.

off. It's crazy. Fishing's not going to stop the devil, and that is really, you know... Fishing is actually how the devil gets out. Every water is a portal to the fifth dimension of hell, which is actually the lower fifth. There's a higher fifth dimension where good demons, I mean angels, come out of, but then the lower fifth dimension comes up through the pond, and that's where catfish come from. This is not an Alex theory, but it plausibly could be. Yeah, I feel like that wasn't far off. No. Yeah.

So how are we, how are we doing with Alex in terms of like one thing I've noticed and maybe I have a, you can tell me if you agree with my kind of interpretation here is that he seems to be at a little bit of a lower ebb in terms of getting invited on and talking with like much more popular creators. I haven't seen like last year, I felt like I saw him on a lot of stuff.

And this year, I don't know if it's just that he's not, you know, as sexy as he was to them last year, but I'm just not seeing him out as much as I kind of expected to in an election. And I'm wondering if that's your interpretation, too, or if I'm just kind of you think I'm off. I think it's 50 50, because I think that there is something to that. Like he was on he's been on more fun stuff before in the past.

And it's been a little bit limited this year, but he was just on Tucker's live show in Pennsylvania, which is about as big as anything he's done, probably. At least it feels pretty big. Yeah, it wasn't the two drunk sports guys podcast. No, Flagrant 2. Flagrant 2. That might have been a few years ago, too. Yeah. My memory is terrible. He hasn't been back on Rogan. Yeah. You know, there's some big gaps in terms of where he feels like he should be appearing, but...

You know, if you look at the luminaries that were on that Tucker Carlson tour, like him being included in that list of people is pretty, you know, that's rarefied air. I mean, unfortunately, I guess it is in a way. You got RFK Jr. Yeah. You got Vivek.

They're consequential people, which is the most disappointing part is that these are the dregs of humanity. And yet they are very consequential people that we should be paying attention. It's absolutely infuriating that, yeah, I have to care about especially fucking Vivek. Yeah, because I ran into him at the fucking RNC and he was being surrounded by a cloud of guys who all looked like Nick Fuentes. Like the only reason I didn't assume one of them was Nick Fuentes is that any one of them could have been Nick Fuentes.

And I had to fight this urge. Do you ever seen those like old man comics where like a guy will be fighting a hundred shrews and like beating one of them to death with the others? I had to fight off the urge to pick up one Fuentes by the legs and just start swinging him. Just start swinging.

You are my weapon. So like, where do you where do you see Alex a year from now? Right. Like, do you have any kind of expectation for where he's going to be? Because like at some point his dad has to die, which I understand is a pretty important part right now of how he's able to keep money flowing. Well, to his operation, the face of the judgment. Right. His dad and his.

brother-in-law both run the Dr. Jones Naturals. So even if old David Jones kicks the bucket, his brother is still going to be there. So I think Alex is fine, but he almost killed his dad with COVID. Yeah, I am surprised Dr. Jones lived through that, given Alex's... It's like a gorilla sitting on his chest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it is a little bit of a testament to how insane and how the best torture for Alex is just...

being cursed with being Alex is like, if I was in this scenario where I plausibly have a reason to never touch or talk about money again, and yet still make the almost exact same amount of it, that would be perfect. That's just taking a job away from me. Hmm.

Right now, it's my dad's problem to look at the sales numbers. I don't have to go anywhere. He's not a good ad man. He doesn't do a good read. Alex is the face guy. Dr. Jones handles the business. That means that Alex doesn't have to do both. It makes perfect sense. To your question, though, like

I really do feel like right now we're in the most chaotic possible moment. Right. Because you have these two things that could go any direction that are happening around the same time. Like you have the election and then you also have the auction. Right. And if Trump wins or loses.

There's a lot of different possibilities of how his path might go. And if someone who he's aligned with ends up buying the company or not, that's another, like the world would be very different in terms of the choices that he has in front of him. Yeah. But I think it'll be bad. I think he'll be unhappy that I think no matter what, I think it'll be pretty miserable. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just because of him. He's just a real, a miserable piece of shit. Yeah.

Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about his B cast and how they might do, because, again, I don't see a world in which Alex gives up what he's doing, but I do see a world in which he can no longer pay Owen Schroyer. Yeah.

And that's, that's the true. That's the true goal. And that could be a real win. Oh, it's not making what a heartbreaking amount of money. I'm sure more further into the six figures that Owen Schroeder ought to be further than we'll ever be. I wonder what the deal with him would be though. Like he went to jail for Alex. God, he sure did. He sure did. He did time. Yeah.

Like, what could he tell if he was off the payroll? Or how much do you pay to keep him on the payroll because he's the kind of guy who went to jail for you? I mean, if you look at a... I mean, David Knight's not going to jail for you, but if that's a comparable exit for personal popularity, I don't think Owen's got much of a shot. Yeah. I think he can be tossed into the ocean. But I think Chase Geyser is more of a B player than Owen at this point. We just have a personal... Yeah, that's true. We just...

Chase Geyser is a new character who's popped up in the later seasons of the show. Yeah. And he's really brought a new, he's brought a lot of late season juice to it that I think we needed. Yeah. Yeah. It's better than no one though. That's for sure. Yeah. See, I was going to say, it's like when Frazier brought on all those British people, but speaking of British people, our sponsors might be British. We don't check. And we're back.

Okay, guys. So I guess kind of closing stuff out. What do you think this year have been the big pieces of Alex misinformation that you've seen people spreading online? Like what's kind of been your biggest, I'm guessing this is going to be a Jordan heavy question, but like stuff about Alex or stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stuff about Alex that's like specifically what kind of stuff have you heard like people in media saying about Alex this year that has pissed you off the most?

I mean, the funny part of this question is that I've actually left the internet about as much as possible because of the rage that I feel at this very situation. A wise move. Yeah. So I honestly, I think...

I think the big thing for me personally is just the, if we are going to talk about Alex's auction, then to me, what we're talking about is how much money the families are going to receive. That's, that's to me in my head of, if we're going to talk money, then what we should talk about is the end point. How much do the families get? And even if this auction just goes gangbusters,

The families are going to get so, so little of whatever happens because they're the last in line before you pay. Like, Norm Pattis is going to make more money at the end of all of this process than any of the family members. That's just...

that's just probably true. I would say if not guaranteed true at this point, unless of course, Mark Cuban or somebody, a billionaire shows up and showers them with money. But for the most part, it's, it's like the end goals should be the family. Yeah. They should be first, but that's the wrong thing. They're the last. So it's very annoying. It's very frustrating. Yeah. That is especially given that like, that's the whole reason for the suit. Like that's the whole reason.

But I mean, obviously the system is not conducted to benefit families who are suffering. That's not who makes the rules. That's not who operates the system, the system. Yeah. Okay. We don't need to rant about that. It is a bummer. Dan, what about you? I mean, maybe it's recency bias and stuff, but like, I do think that the conversation around the auction is missing a little bit of the point, whether it be in terms of,

you know, what the sale is like you were bringing up Jordan or like people thinking that there is a solution to the problem that Alex represents. Like this isn't going to be like a ding dong, the witch is dead type moment. You're going to, you're going to have, you know, his new thing funded by the companies that he's been building up to avoid the bankruptcy and

or you're going to have somebody who's with him, but that buys it. InfoWars is going to be the same problem on November 14th or whatever, as it was the day before. And I think that, I think that people are getting themselves maybe a little bit up for a disappointment. Yeah. And I think that we've seen that a couple of times, like with the, um, Alex said the, uh,

night where he claimed that security guards were trying to shut him down. Yeah. You know, people got excited about like, this is it. Yep. And I think maybe...

Maybe I'm jaded, too, because of years of doing this. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost never it. I mean, I want to say this and I want people to recognize that this is true. In regards to this scenario, you are never going to come. You're never going to come. It's never going to happen. You're going to be perpetually close and then you're not going to make it and then you're going to come back.

That's how it is. If you're into edging, Alex is the guy to follow. Yeah, it's perfect. No, I think that that's actually really good advice. Like if you just as a layman are hearing people talk about Alex Jones on social media or like seeing some sort of like opinion column or whatever in some, you know, left-winger liberal rag, and you want to know like how credible is this?

I guess the first question to ask is, are they predicting a massive change to Alex and what he actually does? Because if so, probably nothing has got... Unless it's like an article that he's been diagnosed with a disease, nothing's probably going to change, right? At some point, he's going to die. I'm not being mean. I wouldn't believe that article.

article they're lying well you fake that illness with dr marbles to get out of the deposition thing so like he you know fuck even that yeah i think i i look at it slightly differently and that is that i i do predict that there will be a massive change we just don't know what it'll be sure like there'll be something he's got to do something because his content is really

and a bit uninteresting in the Trump sense. Yeah. And I do, I think that there is a change that'll be needed if he wants to maintain whatever he's doing. But yeah,

I mean, anybody who has an idea of what it is is wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine that predicting anything in the next 60 days is going to be a ridiculous proposition. If you had predicted a new hurricane fucking two weeks ago, people would have thought you were crazy. Yeah. Well, I think that's all I had to ask guys. Anything you wanted to plug or bring up before we close out? Um,

I know just, uh, we, we exist. We have a show. Check out knowledge fight. It's my favorite podcast. It's the only, only reasonable way to keep up with Alex Jones and a whole network of other con men and grifters. Uh,

who kind of latch onto him like that fish that lives on the underside of a shark. A remora. Except for Alex, Alex is also a remora, a remora, right? So it's just like a, it's like a, just a series of smaller and smaller ones each sucking each other off.

Yeah, that sounds about right. And Alex is latched onto the side of a cruise ship toilet. He sees the remora on the cruise ship toilet. Yeah. You've now turned this into a human centipede situation. I have, I have. I don't know why. Again, again, it's all, this is all viral marketing for Dr. Jones's big naturals. Yeah.

Now we've figured out an appropriate punishment for defamation of character. Human centipede. Yeah. I've been saying that for years. Years. Yeah. I feel like, and I do have to point this out. Sure. That is both cruel and very unusual. It is.

perhaps the most unusual thing you could imagine, really. I hate to say, but it would take, like, some of these people three months to have several thousand people convinced that human centipeding is like a mental health hack. Like, it's like getting rid of seed oils, you know? That's how you accelerate muscle development. Right. Yeah, yeah. Ancient cavemen were always eating each other's shit. Yeah.

You know what? You've also made a very good point. This whole thing, if you want to stop Alex, Alex is a symptom. Alex is a symptom of the larger problem. You need to regulate supplements. FDA-approved supplements will get rid of most of these guys. Every podcast episode we can. We are pushing the line. In my dream, if I accomplish one thing in my life, it would be getting this to become widely agreed upon by liberals and the left.

regulate supplements, allow direct sales of cars to consumers and ban MLMs and prosecute people criminally for trying to operate them. Do that. And you fix a lot of other problems. I would do something about precious metals businesses too. I would throw that. Hey now, hey now, Mike Lindell's given us some gold money. So you just wait, wait right there till he runs out, Dan. Okay.

Pillow sales are illegal. Also, I should throw that on the pile. Pillows are illegal. Makes your neck weak. Yep. All right, everybody. Listen to Knowledge Fight. Thank you, Dan and Jordan, as always. We'll be back tomorrow with some other episode of this podcast that we do every day. Bye.

Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right, bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. No way.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

I shook up the world!

James Brown said, say it loud. And the kid said, I'm black and I'm proud. Black boxing stars and black music royalty together in the heart of Zaire, Africa. Three days of music and then the boxing event. What was going on in the world at the time made this fight as important that anything else is going on on the planet. My grandfather laid on the ropes and let George Foreman basically just punch himself out.

Welcome to Rumble, the story of a world in transformation. The 60s and prior to that, you couldn't call a person black. And how we arrived at this peak moment. I don't have to be what you want me to be. We all came from the continent of Africa. Listen to Rumble, Ali, Foreman, and the Soul of 74 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.

And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison. This is a little special episode today. I'm joined by Alex from Corvallis Antifa and Hank, who's using a pseudonym for personal safety, from the Left Coast Right Watch team. Hello to you both and thank you so much for joining me. Hey, what's happening? Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having us. Good to be here.

So today we're going to be talking about this group called White Lives Matter. I guess originally...

White Lives Matter was like a slogan and like a very, very loose group from like 2015, or at least it kind of started in 2015 as a reaction to the growing Black Lives Matter movement. I know I definitely saw this phrase propagated via like memes, flyers, billboards, and other forms of propaganda as a way to like seed white nationalist rhetoric to the then like

growing and burgeoning alt-right. Yeah. So, um, there was a formation that was kind of like an NSM splinter formation that happened in reaction to the initial, uh, like Black Lives Matter protests in 2015. The White Lives Matter that we're talking about today is a different formation entirely that utilizes sort of the same slogan. Yeah. Uh,

They are a group that started in like 2021 and have been organizing primarily on Telegram and have grown really rapidly across the country in the years since. Yeah, it's like we can see the early use of this phrase spread by, you mentioned the National Socialist Movement, along with a few other kind of collections of neo-Nazis, the Aryan Resistance Society and the Aryan Nationalist Alliance.

But then things kind of like died down. It was just a, it was like a slogan you could see at rallies, but it wasn't, it wasn't anything like too prominent, honestly. But then we had this big second wave in 2021 with telegram channels promoting a white lives matter March or a series of marches to be held across the country on like April 11th. This batch of rallies were mostly a failure in part due to the efforts of anti-fascists who worked to sabotage the planning of these rallies ahead of time.

Of the rallies that did eventually take place, really only a handful of white supremacists showed up and most were outnumbered by anti-fascist counter-demonstrators.

So then after this initial event with this big batch of channels on Telegram, which is this encrypted messaging platform based out of Russia, it's not very good. Don't use it unless you're trying to infiltrate a Nazi group. But after these failed rallies, White Lives Matter kind of turned into yet another one of these networks for white supremacists and neo-Nazis that advocate, quote unquote, pro-white activism online.

typically this includes like putting up white nationalist, like stickers around neighborhoods, uh, hanging large banners with fascist rhetoric or Nazi imagery flyering and just spreading propaganda online with, with the occasional like in-person rally. I think you can see kind of, um,

The peak of like the White Lives Matter slogan, at least, was when it was propagated to the degree that Kanye West wore it on a T-shirt during his little Nazi era back in 2022. And I think now you see White Lives Matter as like a network. It overlaps and crosses over a lot with like similar groups like the GDL. That's the Goyim Defense League.

as well as the National Socialist Club and Patriot Front to some degree. I guess one thing that I wanted to talk about is that, and this is mentioned in the Corvallis and Tifa article on the Oregon chapter of White Lives Matter, is like this idea of hiding your power level, which,

We used to talk about it a little bit more. I think in some ways, a whole bunch of Nazis kind of blew their cover back around 2020. But now you see kind of more attempts to try to seed a white nationalist rhetoric into other kind of right-wing spaces to push them farther along that radicalization pathway. And I

I would like to have a discussion at least a little bit about how White Lives Matter specifically tries to hide their power level, kind of disguise the level of overt fascism that they're really proposing by employing this quote-unquote pro-white rhetoric.

Yeah, so White Lives Matter as a national organization is extremely, like, conscious of what they would describe as, like, their optics. They are very intent on, like, radicalizing who they perceive to be everyday white people into sort of fascist politics. And in their national level manuals and the...

that they provide to the leaders of statewide organizations. They specifically talk about stuff like not displaying Nazi flags or using like neo-Nazi rhetoric, despite that being what they believe. But their sort of goal is to use more innocuous styles of sloganeering, like, you know, the phrase like white lives matter and protect white babies, stuff like that as ways to kind of open the door to get people to

who become interested in a more overtly national socialist politic that they can radicalize people to, who join their group. And you see a lot of groups like active clubs, Patriot Front, other sort of white nationalist formations using the national WLM org as sort of a way to recruit to their own organizations with this sort of more innocuous, subtle style of propaganda. Yeah.

Yeah, and like one other thing that's pointed out in the Corvallis and Tifa article is like they don't just do agitprop. Like they're not just a group that is composed of only doing stickering. There's been multiple instances when their online propaganda as well as their like in-person stickering escalates to real to like real violence.

Last year, a 28-year-old from New Jersey attacked an anti-racism concert at a church. He yelled, White Lives Matter at attendees, threw smoke bombs at the church, and then tried to bear spray the crowd. I think inadvertently, bear spraying himself.

which he then recorded the video talking about and posted online. Later in AR-15 and high capacity magazines were found in his home alongside White Lives Matter propaganda. And later that year, a 20 year old male associated with White Lives Matter fire bombed a church in Ohio. And the church was picked as a target because it plans to host two drag events. After being arrested, police found six firearms and dozens of loaded magazines alongside Nazi paraphernalia.

This guy also wrote a manifesto defending his actions and specifically stating that he was happy about it because people online were proud of him.

And like, you can even go back to the White Lives Matter rallies back in 2021, especially the one in Huntington Beach, which saw a degree of physical violence. It's important not just not to just write these groups off as being like, oh, they only do banner drops. Oh, they only do stickers. Because not only is like propaganda a really important part of growing the number of them out there, but they also do real world violence. It's also important to talk about like the ways that WLM is organizationally connected to like

more like scary elements of the neo-Nazi right. Recently, Left Coast Right Watch published proof that Matthew Allison, who was one of the leaders of the Terror Ground Collective, who was recently arrested, was responsible for some of the national WLM propaganda that they published, which is

quite concerning. So, you know, even these groups that are more movementarian in nature and are trying to appeal to, you know, you know, more quote unquote normie white people are like directly in bed with people who are like associated with mass shooters and like terrorists. Yep. Specifically try to like groom people into becoming mass shooters. Yes. I mean, and like, that's why I think specifically with both these guys who, who did physical violence, um,

You can see violence as like an escalatory thing for the person who's like doing it, right? You start off with throwing a Molotov cocktail and then later you might do a mass shooting. It's like a testing ground. You can see the same thing with, you know, Bear Macing and Anti-Racism Concert. The fact that both these guys, specifically the one in Ohio, had like

a lot of guns. We're in America. There's a lot of guns around, but having that many guns and loaded magazines in Ohio as a 20-year-old with all that Nazi paraphernalia, that is what a Nazi mass shooter's bedroom looks like. And these are not isolated incidents. I guess let's take a bit of a break and we will come back to talk about specifically the Oregon chapter of White Lives Matter and what they've been getting up to the past few months.

All right. So after Corvallis Antifa leaked like chat logs from the Oregon White Lives Matter group back in 2021, the chapter went dormant and then it restarted earlier this year. I guess, Alex, can you walk us through kind of the rebirth of White Lives Matter Oregon? Yeah. So the way that WLM works as a national organization is there's like a series of groups that all kind of are extant. Like there are groups extant.

And then people would apply to be with the national org to be a leader of a state group. So back when WLM initially began as a thing in 2021, our group was running the Oregon chapter and exposed several people who tried to join that group. And then after that, interest in that organization became...

It stopped existing for several years. Then earlier this year, we noticed that somebody had taken over the chapter and had started engaging in some stickering and some propaganda. So we were like, well, you know, we may as well join this group and see what's up. So we...

infiltrated the organization, gathered information about the membership, and published that information online in order to warn the communities that these guys inhabit about their activities. The group, you know, was doing stuff that was not, like, extremely intense. Like, they were doing stickers. They did two banner drops, or three banner drops successfully, rather. But in their chat, we also found that they were talking a lot about, like,

military training and escalating. And, you know, even though this group kind of like seemed very low key and was like not doing anything, you know, super scary, like the stuff they're talking about is concerning and they're getting organized and they're getting to know each other. So we put a kibosh on that. So,

So it looks like, according to your research, the new leader is this guy named Cruz Dean Walters. Yeah. Yeah. So Cruz is a Marine kind of washout who lives in McMinnville, Oregon, until very recently was living a double life. He was living with his mom and his fiancee, neither of whom knew about his racist beliefs and now knew. He was a highly incompetent leader who, you know,

really had a tremendous number of security flaws in his organization, you know, as is evidenced by the fact that we were able to, you know, infiltrate and destroy it in a matter of just a few months. But, you know, it is worth noting that like the group grew from just a handful of people to, you know, doing banner drops with like, you know, six or seven folks in just a couple, you know, a couple of short months. So like,

Even though these groups can kind of be benign, if there winds up being somebody who is like particularly passionate behind the channel, like they can transform into something less benign very, very quickly. And that's something we want to impart to other anti-fascists across the country is there are all these channels and they might be seeming kind of like...

benign now, but they can turn to something very malignant very quickly. I wanted to ask specifically about Cruz's radicalization. It's written in your piece that he was radicalized in part by the GDL, the Going Defense League, and participated in the city council death squads, as reported by our own Molly Conger. And then just seemingly, like,

just getting bored of just calling into city council meetings to yell slurs, he then like cooed the organization. So I'm curious if he ever wrote about or talked about his background with the GDL and his like apparent boredom at their particular style of like white supremacist activism. Yeah. So he, I think, was just kind of like sitting on the internet as like a fucking, you know, dorky, lonely, sad little man. And

And, you know, got into the GDL. For those who have the fortune of not knowing, the GDL is sort of this network of like really grotesque, highly cringy, racist Twitch streamers. Not on Twitch anymore, but like, you know, there's streamers nonetheless. They've been banned from Twitch, but... Yeah. But yeah, so they have this program called the City Council Death Squad where they will like

into, like, your local city council meeting and just, like, yell slurs at the bleaker municipal employees that have to sit and watch. They did one in Corvallis, and, like, watching the footage was just, like, watching, like, these, like,

grown men acting like children, like, you know, hollering at, like, random, like, city councilor 23 or whatever. It's really, like, pathetic. So, and I think, you know, Cruz kind of saw that, and many do, you know, the GDL is just a tremendously fucking pathetic organization. And he was like,

kind of decided that he wanted to get more involved and he chose to get involved with WLM as opposed to like another neo-Nazi formation because WLM is like a really, really easy entry point and has a very like, you know, kind of base politic. It's not like, you know, Patriot Front or an active club where there are, you know, membership requirements and you have to engage in certain amounts of organizing activity or whatever. It's just very,

easy for your lazy Nazi to engage with. Yeah, absolutely. It definitely feels like the lazy person's option who doesn't want to go through the work of being vetted by actual larger organizations. Yeah, and he took over the chapter from an even lazier Nazi named Christian Coates, who lives in Portland, Oregon, who is like this

Old school bonehead from the 2000s who has some hate crime charges from attempting to and failing to assault some Black teens in 2007. So Christian had, in the interceding years between us destroying the initial iteration of WLM, taken it over and basically done zilch with it. He posts one photo on the channel ever.

But then he got taken over by this dude, Cruz, who grew the organization from like just a few people to, you know, being a reasonable street presence in a short number of months.

Obviously at the expense of including an anti-fascist infiltrator and also just a true coterie of scumbags and idiots in the group. Yeah, one of the other guys that you've identified is, I don't know how to say his last name, but Casey, I want to say Knutson? Oh yeah, Casey Knutson. Who, after being kicked out of both the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, made his own group in 2022, the Rose City Nationalists, which is kind of the laughingstock of all

white supremacist groups in the PNW. And the group has largely fallen apart after being just extensively investigated and exposed by local anti-fascists, almost to a comical extent. Yeah, ourselves, Rose City Antifa, and the Stumptown Research Collective have been kind of going through and just ripping apart RCN. And RCN is at this point more or less just Casey in this

fella named jaron huber who is an absolute like freak he's got a bunch of tattoos all over his face he uh was arrested for kicking a puppy nearly to death and beating up his grandfather um just real scumbag jesus christ yeah they all have like domestic violence charges and you know are just yes just real nightmare folks the funniest thing about rose city nationalists is they got in this uh conflict with the proud boys at

I believe it was in Oregon City where they got just absolutely washed by some drunken Proud Boys on the street.

Not because of ideological issues, but just because they have interpersonal issues between Casey and the Portland chapter of the Proud Boys. They are truly just a laughingstock and are just like, I hate to use the term, but kind of like law cows at this point. No, I mean, and one thing that you do document is just how many of these guys are domestic abusers. And this is not uncommon for these types of fellows. Yeah.

but also Cruz, uh, like both admitted to stealing a gun and also abusing his wife and threatening other family with firearms. And this is like a trend across so many of, of the people exposed in these articles is the extent to which they're all in viewed and like spousal abuse, child abuse. It's, it just, it's, it's one of the very consistent factors. Yeah. Misogyny is, you know, one of the very, very core parts of neo-Nazism and white nationalism. And, uh,

Yeah, there's a really, really horrible section of text in our article where Cruz discusses like

physically hitting his fiance and then threatening his brother with a firearm. And yeah, it's really, really common that these people have domestic abuse charges. Multiple people in WLM Oregon have histories of domestic abuse, including Jaron Huber and Casey Knudsen, who are the two other members. And yeah, it's just anytime you look at a Nazi group, there's a dude who beats his wife in it, like kind of bar none. As long as we've been doing this work, we've been seeing it.

I'd like to talk now about the second in command of White Lives Matter Oregon, this small business owner in Coos Bay named Michael Witt Gatenbein, who usually just goes by Witt. Now, Witt has been a part of the White Lives Matter Oregon banner drops and is also responsible for a lot of the stickering that gets done as he leaves stickers across the truck stop bathrooms up and down the coast.

Now Witt's kind of a fascinating fellow to me. He has shockingly bad OPSEC, kind of one of the worst examples I've ever seen. His very easily recognized custom flatbed truck can be seen at banner drops in August and it even appears in their own like propaganda videos for another banner drop in September. He like talked about his just like utter disregard for OPSEC.

In one of the audio archives that you have hosted on Left Goes Right Watch, what else can you tell us about Witt's background here? Yeah, so Witt is a Nazi. And I believe his mother is actually, you know, he said at one point his mother was like, quote, awakened to the truth about the Jews or something like that. So he seems to come from, at the very least, an anti-Semitic family, but he himself is certainly Jewish.

a nazi and and i think he has believed he can operate with impunity in kuzbe so i think it's less that he has bad opsec and more believes he seems to think of himself as living in a world where it's okay to be a nazi sure we can talk a little bit more about that but yeah he he runs a company called wit industries which he's claimed to

does business from Mexico to Russia. He works in the marine and maritime industry within the Port of Coos Bay and Coos County. We know that he's gotten about a quarter million dollars in public contracts, primarily from the Port of Coos Bay, but also the Port of Umpqua, the city of North Bend, Coos County, South Coast Education Service District. That's just what we've found so far. It can be pretty difficult to find, you know, even though this is public

money, it can still be sort of a pretty difficult process to get public records and things like that. But, you know, we know that the port of Coos Bay alone has awarded him like two hundred nineteen thousand dollars in contracts for work ranging from hydraulics repairs and replacements on vessels and the bridge. He's also painted the state dredge and the trailer and things like that.

You mentioned him using his work vehicle. So he has stated, and this is from information we have from the Corvallis Antifa infiltration, he stated that part of his goal is to build a white supremacist hub in Coos Bay. He wants to get guys elected to mayor and city council and things like that. And he actually was...

using White Lives Matter to recruit guys to come and work for him. He was recruiting a guy named Landon Calhoun, who is also an alleged pedophile, and we go into that in the Left Coast Right Watch article. But if he got this alleged pedophile, Landon, to come and work for him, they met in White Lives Matter, and he said, hey, come work for an all-white organization where we can come and build the movement together. And

And as far as we know, it does appear that Landon has moved there. He was planning to move there in this fall, and we believe he's currently there. Yeah, I like to kind of go by some of these points one by one, because he's certainly a worrying figure. The fact that he's using his income, which is largely derived of government contracts, to specifically...

like fund white supremacist activity in the PNW and like use his own company resources to grow the number of far right extremists in Coos Bay. Specifically his plans of like having them eventually like occupy positions of local government. It's a degree of like long-term planning that isn't always present in

in some of these types of guys. Plans are one thing, but when you actually have a business that you are hiring people to move to this town to actually build this plan up, it shows the degree of chutzpah, I guess, on his part that he's actually doing this. It kind of reminds me of the Rise Above Movement's tree trimming business, but that was just to pay bills. They had no plans to

slowly actually just like take over a small town. There's a lot of these businesses that are run by Nazis that primarily hire other Nazis. But the degree to which that Michael Witt is able to operate without much oversight and just get all of this money from local government is certainly worrying. I know he's stated that one of his employees prints out all of his White Lives Matter stickers and has gotten help from employees to do one banner drop outside of Roseburg.

and has a history of hiring far-right people, conspiracy theorists, and like monetarily supporting them to like help them continue their own far-right activism.

Yeah, and you mentioned his employees that were printing the stickers for him. That was before he hired Landon. So, yeah, he already has guys that are doing this. And the port, I think it's important to point out that the port of Coos Bay, its public body, the commissioners are elected by the governor and they're confirmed by the Oregon Senate. Yeah, the Oregon Senate, I believe it is. So this is a state body that is giving...

state funding to this nazi and i think that's really important to me it's also like just to give people a little bit of the the geography um because it's a small town but actually geographically takes quite a while to like drive from north bend to coos bay and wit lives right over by the charleston marina and we know he's pretty in bed with the

There was a big Oregon Department of Transportation grant at a state level that the port had written that would have been one of the people making money. He was written officially into this grant.

grant for it was a 3.5 million dollar grant that was written into right so they're like his friends you know like they're like yeah they're writing him into these grants wit's office is over there on ocean view boulevard which is right next to the confederated tribes of kuzlo or umkar and sayusla indians tribal housing office and right next to one of their casinos and just to give folks the terrain of where he's living um and kind of operating to yeah

Hello, Garrison from the future. Just cutting in to say something that Hank said, but I got a little bit garbled in the voice modulation. So I just want to state it a little bit more clearly here. There's some other events that can help contextualize what Witt is doing in Coos Bay. Because currently in Coos County, there's this sort of intense far right power grab that is slowly happening.

Some people might know of this radio host named Rob Taylor. He's said to be one of the guys who coordinated the breaching of the Oregon Capitol in late December, which was basically a test run for January 6th. And he's hosted people with the far-right group Patriot Prayer. He has an old Gab account, which was essentially like Nazi Twitter before Twitter just became Nazi Twitter under Elon Musk. So this guy is very comfortable and associates with extremely far-right people, as well as

engaged in a level of activism in Oregon, at least. So that's Rob Taylor, the radio guy. There's this other person named Rod Taylor, who's a Coos County commissioner, who actually was a January 6th insurrectionist. He was arrested at the Capitol on J6.

Now, Michael Witt to Gatenbein has also previously employed this guy named Matt Wilbanks, who's a buddy of Rob Taylor. He runs this blog called The Daily Resistor and also one of the Coos County neighborhood watch groups in the Empire District of Coos Bay, which is a

which is mostly just focused on like doxing and harassing homeless people. And these guys are also part of various mega groups like Citizens Restoring Liberty. And Witt himself is a part of this network. He has attended Citizens Restoring Liberty events. He's also an admin on a Telegram channel called the Oregon Patriot Alliance, which is like this mega patriots organizing channel on Telegram.

Nominally, these megatypes typically say that they are not for Nazis, they are against Nazis, they are against pedophiles, and yet they are associating with Witt here, who employs a pedophile and is a Nazi. But one other thing that Hank said that I want to reiterate is that Kuspe is also a contested space.

Although there is this intense far-right power grab happening, there's also a whole bunch of other much more positive activism. Hank pointed to the tribal communities fighting for indigenous sovereignty, as well as environmentalist groups calling BS on the port's greenwashing of all their projects.

So it's not just that like everyone's Nazis now in Coos Bay. Yes, WIT is a Nazi and people should be concerned about that, but it is a contested space home to a diverse group of people who are also fighting for good things. We're now going to have an ad break and then return to talk more about White Lives Matter Oregon.

Okay, we are back. And Alex, you said you wanted to add something on this point about Coos Bay being a contested space? Yeah, I think one thing that is important to just like throw onto what Hank is saying about Coos Bay as a contested space is like,

it's not entirely unheard of for neo-Nazis to kind of try to do these projects of like moving a bunch of people to certain, usually rural areas to, you know, try to take them over, you know, most notably like leaf North Dakota where Craig Cobb tried to take over. But well,

What I think has been shown really repeatedly is that these projects have failed because the communities that live there, you know, even if they're rural communities, even if they're small towns, don't have it and are willing to fight back. And that's what we're really hoping to see from folks on the Oregon South Coast being willing to push back against this sort of thing like was done in Leith and, you know, forcing these people out of the institutions they're trying to inhabit.

Yeah, and especially with someone like Michael here, because he's hiring people who advocate going much farther than White Lives Matter to actually engage in paramilitary training, hiring someone who is like,

not just accused of being a pedophile, but has admitted to Michael that his family hates him because of an allegation that he's touched someone and that Michael himself witnessed this guy, Calhoun, being quote-unquote hands-on with an eight-year-old girl while they were meeting together in Coos Bay. There's that side of it. And then you have him posting on Telegram about wanting the day of the rope to come faster, kind of like an old Nazi slogan about racial lynchings and furthering racial conflict.

as well as like sharing instructions from the Meme Waffen telegram channel about how to make Molotov cocktails. I believe we've talked about Meme Waffen on the show before. So he's like doing all of this type of stuff that's like so much more obviously objectionable

While also trying to like make like space for himself within like the mega community, right? Being the admin of this Oregon Patriots Alliance Telegram channel, which is like also an attempt just like further the radicalization of these like mega centric members by like inundating them with more explicit kind of fascistic propaganda, but on like a slower level.

And then there are multi-million and multi-billion dollar government projects to improve the port that WIT is expected to receive funds from. And I feel like this is something that's pretty objectionable and it should be easy to stop, but it requires attention and it requires a degree of public pressure to make sure that the government, both state and federal, are not giving funds to an explicit neo-Nazi who hires alleged pedophiles to fund right-wing activism across the Pacific Northwest.

Yeah, totally. And I think it's important to point out too, like, you know, Coos Bay is in this process. They have the intermodal port of Coos Bay, which is like a $2.3 billion project where they want to become like, you know, they want to be as big of a port as Oakland, California or whatever. And, you know, one of the things, I mean, my understanding from talking to folks in Coos Bay is that it's just greenwashed water.

capitalism that will be destructive to the environment. It won't actually bring the community the kind of... People are like, what about bike lanes? There's community infrastructure people want in Coos Bay and dredging the port is not that. And I think there's also...

like a couple of examples of that is it'll destroy eelgrass, which is a really important marine habitat and also source of storage carbon. It'll destroy indigenous cultural resources or impact those spaces. And, you know, we haven't seen the exact financials yet for what this project will be, but it's a $2.3 billion project that involves dredging, you know, which is sort of deepening and widening the

the port and the channels. And we know that Witt has gotten money, for example, to work on the state dredge and do work on it. So I think it's very possible that Witt would be, until the port takes a stand and says, hey, we're not funding this Nazi who uses his work truck to do Nazi stuff. I think people should be really concerned about this port money going back to help build a Nazi community that he's trying to build there. Yeah.

Yeah, and to your previous point, the fact that he's able to be so flagrant about his white supremacist beliefs, the way that he doesn't feel like he needs to care about OPSEC because he has a job that's irreplaceable. He provides a service to this community that he feels like no one else can do. Therefore, he is

secure in that like you you can't allow them that level of comfortability and that's something that has to be like opposed due to both like public pressure and research that like you have done as well as the uh crucial work from corvallis antifa yeah you know i think just to add to like like groups like the oregon oregon's bay area which is like a popular facebook group has been doing a really great job like raising just talking about with and what's going on i think

Largely, we really haven't seen much response from the Port of Coos Bay or the governor who's confirming these commissioners. Largely, the institutions of power are not yet responding. And so I think that's something that both local folks in Coos Bay could be pressuring and also at a statewide level, right? This is state funding and the Port of Coos Bay development has federal funding too. But I think those are places where...

Where there could really be a lot more pressure being applied, and I think a lot more people should be talking about all of this, as well as we mentioned earlier, you know, what claims to have...

our reputation and work and contracts all up and down the entire west coast so certainly if there are listeners in here in oakland or alaska or washington or wherever you might be who know the name whit gate and vine or whit industries and you want to send in a tip to cordialis antifa or whatever left coast right watch we would be really happy to hear what you know about this guy because we know he's we know he's working in in other communities which but we

we would love details or any tips folks may have. Yeah, would either of you like to kind of add anything else before we close out and point people towards both your work and where to send information to? Yeah, I guess the thing that I would just close out with is WLM is not just an Oregon problem, it's a national problem. I know this podcast reaches folks all across the country. If you are somebody who

is Antifa curious or is interested in making a difference in your community. It's a group with really terrible security culture, and it might be worth taking a gander at. And then, you know, God, it feels so silly to do a podcast plug, but please check out our work at cvantifa.noblogs.org. We're also on Twitter at cvaginstfash and Instagram at

see the Antifa. And, you know, we have lots of articles exposing neo-Nazis in Oregon and across the country. And you might just find somebody in your community who sucks. Hank? Yeah, I'll just add, you know, if you want to see the, of course, the Left Coast Right Watch article gives a really deep dive on WIP and also information for public use has posted, like, the financials. So if you really want to, like, get into the numbers, it's worth looking there. And yeah, just to reiterate, I mean, I think

and so many other places are really contested spaces and i think these nazis want us to believe that they're in charge and that they're powerful and they have this idea that they can operate with impunity and it's really not true like we've seen small and rural towns take down nazis all over this country and i think that will continue and i think that yeah like what townships

tactics and ways people might do that from place to place can look different, but I just encourage folks to dig into your local Nazis and get together and figure out how to mess them up. It's a good way to have fun with your friends, and we can do it. We need to be doing it. There just shouldn't be

state money going to help a Nazi build a white supremacist utopia. I mean, that's the history of this country, right? That's the history of colonization. That's the history of Oregon specifically. So yeah, it's time to do something else. Yeah. And Antifa isn't just for you big city folk. Those of us that live in rural communities can and should be involved in these struggles. And it is something that like,

is not just something that happens in Portland. People in rural Oregon are doing anti-fascism and will continue to do it and will continue to win. Thank you both so much. I will leave links to your orgs and your articles in the description below. Thank you for listening. And yeah, if you are Antifa curious, give it a shot. It is indeed fun.

Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right. Bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

you have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. No way.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

I shook up the world!

James Brown said, say it loud. And the kid said, I'm black and I'm proud. Black boxing stars and black music royalty together in the heart of Zaire, Africa. Three days of music and then the boxing event. What was going on in the world at the time made this fight as important that anything else is going on on the planet. My grandfather laid on the ropes and let George Foreman basically just punch himself out.

Welcome to Rumble, the story of a world in transformation. The 60s and prior to that, you couldn't call a person black. And how we arrived at this peak moment. I don't have to be what you want me to be. We all came from the continent of Africa. Listen to Rumble, Ali, Foreman, and the Soul of 74 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.

What?

Brett, my Cavanaughs. I'm Robert Evans, and this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. With me today is Sophie Lichterman and Mia Wong. We're going to be talking about a guy who is near and dear to my heart because the second to the last conversation I ever had with my mom was about Brett Cavanaugh. Mia?

What are we going to learn today? Oh, boy. Oh, my God. Have you done the what's breading my Kavanaugh before? I'm certain I haven't. Why would I have? I don't know. It felt oddly familiar. So if he has, somebody let me know. Thank you. Yeah. Tell us the good and the bad. Yeah. We already know the ugly. Yeah. I'm body shaming Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker. That's right, motherfucker.

The worst consequences he's ever going to suffer are this bad news cycle and me saying something that's not legally defamatory. And if he wants to fucking prove it, he can sue me over it. He has a sweet gig for life. Yeah. He's set. He's set, bro. Yeah. Yeah. He sucks so bad that even like, you know...

Midwest dads hate him. So at least there's that. Yeah, he's really rancid. And so I think the place to start with this actually is not with Kavanaugh, but with Trump. Because what we're talking about today is a thing that we kind of knew was true, but didn't know the extent of until now. Which is that the supposed FBI investigation into everything that Brett Kavanaugh did was terrible.

like fake and deliberately fucked by Trump specifically, like Trump specifically told them to just like not do the investigation. And so they didn't do the investigation and nothing happened.

This is sort of how he got confirmed. And I think the interesting thing about this, partially it's because I hate Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah, he sucks. The worst guy. A real dick. Yeah, but I think the other thing about him is like, I feel like everyone has forgotten what it was like to live under Trump. I agree. Because there was just so much shit happening all...

all the time. Like every single, every single day was like a new one of these things. And I want to go back to what like one week of Trump was like, because every single fucking week was like this. And it was the most miserable thing. So who, who is Brett Kavanaugh? He's one of the nine assholes who get to decide whether we all have rights for people who've sort of forgotten his background. So he's like an old, old, like nineties era, kind of like prehistoric,

protege of the 90s Republican ghouls. He's like one of the people who helps Ken Starr do the like Monica Lewinsky trial. Like he's a he's involved in a whole bunch of sort of like Republican rat fucking operations. He's also and I think this one's actually important to remember as you go up to the election. Kavanaugh was part of the legal team that helped Bush do the original stop the steal in 2000. He sure did. Just like straight up stole the election in Florida. So love that these guys keep getting jobs as opposed to I don't know

getting the punishment for treason. And he's only 59 years old. Yeah. He's so young for that job. We have like 40 more years of him. If you ever wanted like a clear reason why we shouldn't do things like the death penalty for treason, it's because when people commit treason, nothing happens to them. And when people, I don't know, agitate for Puerto Rican independence, they get executed. Like that's, that's, that's what happens with those laws. I just, I,

bad. Avoid laws existing. Yeah, and especially avoid all of your laws being dictated by a bunch of fucking serial predators. Yeah. And this gets us to... So Kavanaugh's appointment was very, very close. The Republicans at the time, they controlled the Senate, but they had a 52-48 margin

And a lot of those kind of marginal senators were like, there were, there was, there was a more realistic chance of it not happening than typically. Yeah. But they still fucked it in the end. Oh yeah. A hundred percent.

Of course. But, you know, the reason why it was close is, as I think most people probably remember, Kavanaugh is a serial sexual predator. He has sexually assaulted so many fucking people. People saw him do it. There were times when he was the only fucking person there who did it. There were times we did it in crowds. He definitely 100% did it. And if he wants to fucking sue me about it, like,

I'll see you in court, motherfucker. And while we're here, Clarence Thomas, also a Predator. Thank you. We're going to get to that. Clarence Thomas, let's be clear here. Like, if we're doing an Olympics of Predators, Clarence Thomas is up in the number one spot. Brett Kavanaugh is down in place three. You know, Thomas is...

is a much more, I don't know, expansive predator. Yeah. There was some belief at the time in, this is sort of like every single article about this, like talks about how this is peak B2, but it is sort of important that like this, it was a real possibility that he was going to go down in flames. Yeah. It has happened before. It can happen again.

And it was a real issue for him. It was a real issue for him in large part because Christine Blasey Ford, who's a psychology professor, just like testified under oath in one of the most like fucking harrowing things I've ever seen on the floor of the Senate. Horrific. Yeah. The thing that stuck with me was like he was laughing while he did it. It's just like this guy is a fucking monster. I mean...

One of the things that you do have to take into account is that like the media infrastructure that whirled up to defend Brett Kavanaugh to ensure that this didn't take him down existed in part because about a third of right wing media, like about a third of that whole infrastructure system exists because of the Clarence Thomas hearings. Yeah, like that and Nixon's resignation being forced online.

are kind of the two inciting incidents of modern conservative media. Those were the things that made them really commit to the idea that we have to build a completely separate ecosystem of facts. Because if we let reality in at all, our guys, who are all sex predators and criminals, will never be able to win or stay in office. Yeah.

Yeah, and also, I mean, it's worth noting, too, that, like, Roger Ailes, who is, like, one of the people responsible for building all this infrastructure, was also himself just a serial predator on a, like, frankly incomprehensible scale. Yes. And so all these people are also just defending themselves because they also are all fucking their own, sometimes miniature Kavanaugh, sometimes worse Kavanaughs. Uh-huh.

And into this sort of breach, right? Like, so this is a real PR crisis to Republicans. This is going even worse for them than the last time that they fucking did this, which was, as we've alluded to, when they got Clarence Thomas on and when Joe Biden...

like personally helped railroad Anita Hill to make sure that when she would get fucked when she tried to testify against Clarence Thomas. So that's great. Incredible stuff. There was a point in our nation's history where that was actually like a political problem for Joe Biden. We're fucking no longer there anymore. And into this breach steps,

supposed to be an FBI investigation. Yeah, ostensibly. Yeah. So I'm going to read from a recently released report. There's going to be I'm going to quote from this report a lot because this is this is the sort of new information that we have. Where can people see the report? It will be in the description. If you just like search Sheldon Whitehouse report, you should be able to find it. There'll be a link in the notes. Yeah, we'll link it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like it's like 30 pages. It's actually not 30 pages, more like 20 pages because like a bunch of the murder citations. So it's a pretty easy read. I'm going to read some of it. And also, I do want to point out the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee member who wrote this thing is named Sheldon Whitehouse. Incredible name. Incredible. That is a great name.

Where does that come from? That can't be a real name. That can't be a name that existed. That can't be a name that existed before the White House, right? Like it has to have at some point been named after the White House, right? I mean, why else would you have that name? Well, it could just be that this family historically lived in a White House for 700 years. You'd have to be in a White House for a long ass time to get that last name. Yeah.

So here's from the report. Quote, after hearing the testimony by Ford and Kavanaugh, the Judiciary Committee agreed to request the FBI conduct a supplemental background investigation, quote, limited to current credible allegations against Kavanaugh before the full Senate voted on his confirmation. And so there's an important detail here that wasn't clear to anyone at the time because fucking no one knows how the minutia of FBI investigations work. But this was not actually...

A full FBI investigation. This is this is something called a like supplemental background investigation. And we'll get into what exactly that is in a second. But it's not like a real FBI investigation. And this investigation does what it was supposed to do, which was, you know, clear Kavanaugh's name enough Republican senators to be able to vote for him without immediately getting destroyed politically.

What it didn't do was like actually conduct an investigation. Right. Trump very famously at this time, it says that the investigation had, quote, free reign and it unbelievably did not. Bull fucking shit. Yeah. He just lied about this. Like, yep. Yeah. The administration directly ran the investigation, killed it, and then used its political power and the FBI itself to, you know, illegitimately railroad a serial predator right at the Supreme Court to take away everyone's rights to get an abortion.

And then after that, they stonewalled the investigation for six years. So this is how that sort of process worked. I'm going to quote from that report again. Third...

Although the Trump administration and the FBI assured the Senate that the FBI's investigation was being conducted, quote, by the book, they failed to disclose that there was actually no quote unquote book at all. The FBI produced no written records for supplemental background investigation, saying it was merely acting as the, quote, agent for the White House in such matters. But which White House was it? Sheldon White House or what's his name?

No, unfortunately, White House bad. The one with the president. Oh, the bad White House. Yeah. By the way, I was I was trying to debunk his last name. He comes from the longest line of nepotism of people that held. I was like, I was like, oh, they must have gotten named that back when, like the fact that they had a house at all was noteworthy. Yeah. These people have paint.

It literally kept going. I was like, okay, one level. Okay, two levels. Okay, three levels. Okay, four levels. Okay, when does it end? And then I got bored.

And the funny part about this, again, is that like this is the good guy in this story. Oh, I know. Nepo baby, like like corruption guy, junior senator of Rhode Island. Yeah. OK. Yeah. And I want to kind of focus in on on this statement in and of itself, because this is just like an absolutely hideous statement.

A view of just like the hideous power of, of the, the unitary executive, just do whatever the fuck it wants. Like, what do you mean that the FBI produced no written protocols for, for how they're supposed to do supplemental background investigations? What do you mean that they were quote acting as an agent for the white house? Like that's,

Bat shit! Why do your security services literally directly answer to one guy who could just tell them to do whatever the fuck he wants? That's insane. That is a fucking... That is a deranged political system. And yet, this is... You know, this is the system that's supposed to be doing this stuff. Which is also very funny because...

White House is like not really trying to get into a feud with the FBI. So there's a lot of kind of like a sculpatory stuff with the FBI. But like also everything the FBI does in this is such a fiasco that it's very clearly like also very much their fault. I'm going to read another quote from this. This is from a bit later in the report. Fourth, the FBI's tip line was not used to facilitate the FBI supplemental background investigation into the allegations against Kavanaugh.

On instructions from the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came through the FBI's tip line. Instead, all tips related to Kavanaugh were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information, which is...

Again, absolutely nuts. Insane. And like, yes. So this is this is the kind of thing that like should be serious crime, right? Like, yeah, that you go you get locked up for forever. Like this is a forever crime. Yeah. It seems much more serious than robbing a bank to try and fund the Puerto Rican independence movement.

Yeah, it's not clear to me whether this would have been a giant scandal for a normal administration just because the American presidency has so much power. But it should have been like this was just like a thing that would happen every week under Trump was like he would just do shit like this. Do you know also what you should do shit like? I don't know. That was not my best pivot. No, no. But but do do shit like. Yeah. Like like these products and services that support the podcast.

And we are back. We've gotten to the point where, again, the FBI's tip line is not actually being used in the investigation. They're sending it all to the White House. The report found that so the FBI like and I talked about this public at the time. They talked to 10 people who they said had like direct knowledge of the situation. But again, they only talked to 10 people.

And there is a whole bunch of people who had very relevant evidence about a lot of important stuff in this. So one of the claims that's going on here is that Kavanaugh was just wasted all the time. And this is like every single person you talk to who knew Kavanaugh in college and isn't directly employed by the Republican Party was like, oh yeah, this guy was wasted all the time. And this became a big part of the trial. And there were a whole bunch of people who tried to go to the FBI to be like, hey, he did this. And they just would not

talk to them. People who tried to come forward, like they wouldn't talk to people who sent them information to the tip line. They just like didn't talk to them at all. I'm going to read from the thing again. According to a quote, executive summary of the FBI supplemental background investigation issued by the Judiciary Committee majority, the majority of that time was Republican majority. So that's why it's fucked.

These people were, quote, all witnesses with potential firsthand knowledge of the allegations. The FBI did not, however, interview Ford or Kavanaugh, the witnesses potentially with the most firsthand knowledge, nor did it speak to other potentially corroborating witnesses who had not witnessed the events firsthand. Nevertheless, the Judiciary Committee's Republicans' executive summary concluded that

that the, quote, supplemental background investigation confirms there was no cooperation of allegations made by Dr. Ford or Ms. Ramirez. Oof. So, they didn't talk to either Kavanaugh or Ford, the two people who the thing was about. Well, I mean, you know, why would you need to do that, right? Like... Wait, I,

What the fuck? This is so insane. The other part of this is that so the FBI's initial background check didn't turn up any of this. And so the supplemental thing is being done in place of like the normal background check because the normal background check was also done like shit. So they never figured out any of this incredibly obvious stuff about him. And meanwhile, like the supplemental one, they're just they just kept being like, oh, well, we don't actually like need to talk to the people who this is about for incredibly nebulous reasons.

And the other part of this that's going on is that like while this process is happening, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are trying to figure out how this process works. And Trump just like refuses to talk to any of them. And the FBI refuses to fucking send any of them. People are fighting out like we know that there's no specific process for this like supplemental investigation thing.

Um, because like their staffers found it out from a YouTube video. Jesus. Like they did not find this out from the FBI. It was like this guy said it or staffers were like watching YouTube videos to figure out how this investigation was supposed to work. So, and it turns out we had known at the time that the FBI was doing some kind of shady stuff.

But what we know now is that so Ford and her lawyers repeatedly tried to talk to the FBI and they were just never able to do so. Right. The FBI completely stonewalled them. And it turns out that they stonewalled them because Trump specifically ordered the FBI not to talk to her or Kavanaugh. What? What? Which is absolutely insane. Yeah. I love the law. Yeah.

It turns out this is the part of this is the most insane. Everyone thought that the FBI was doing a normal FBI investigation. Right. And part of what's going on here is that the media is just these like absolute credulous idiots. Right. Because every single day the media is reporting that like Trump is allowing an open investigation because like somehow, again, this is this is like two years into him being in office. Right. None of these people have figured out that every single thing he says is a lie.

They're all like, oh, yeah, Trump keeps saying that these people can talk to whoever they want and they can investigate whoever they want. And this gets to the point where the FBI is calling the White House every day because they'll be reading the news reports that say we can talk to anyone. And they'll be like, hey, you told us we can't talk to these people. And they'll be like, no, no, actually, you still can't talk to these people. And it turns out that what's happening is just like, quote unquote, supplemental investigation. It's not an FBI investigation. They can only do things that are like, quote unquote, directed by the president.

So they can only talk to the people who the president tells them to talk to. And they can't look at evidence that the president doesn't tell them to look at. And so what ends up happening is that like, you know, there's initially like four people that they're supposed to be talking to, right?

And, you know, they keep getting these like press things that are like, oh, hey, this is a full this is an open investigation. You can like do whatever you want. And eventually they put in like six more people. It's like they talk to 10 total people. But because this is an investigation that is not being run by the FBI, really, it's being it's being directly ran by Trump himself, which he's lying about. Because of that, they fucking never talk to anyone. And then also, again, as we talked about, right, that that tip on this set up a bunch of people who tried to talk to the FBI, who the FBI wouldn't talk to.

were like told, okay, go submit stuff to this tip line. And the FBI later admits that the tip line was like never real. Sure. Have a nice fake tip line. Yeah. They never used any of the investigation. They sent it all to Trump. Yeah. And the reason they did it was that they were sick of people calling their regular tip line. So they set up a specific tip line so they could just have all the stuff that they would never listen to. And instead just sent to the White House so they could do, I guess, like oppo research bullshit on it. So this is just

Straight up a sham. There's no actual investigation going on. The media people at the time should have been able to figure out that obviously this thing was bullshit, right? But nobody looked into it except for this one guy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And so this report comes back and goes like, yeah, we did no research. We talked to like 10 people and we didn't like ask them anything and we didn't use any of the research that we had. And we have cleared this guy as this is happening, right? The Judiciary Committee Democrats are like trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

And this begins a six-year process of Senator Whitehouse just fighting a war with the actual Whitehouse and the FBI and the DOJ to try to figure out what the fuck just happened. And the interesting part of this also is that, so obviously the Trump administration was never going to talk to them, right? Right. Which is, in and of itself, incredibly disturbing that, like, the Senate Judiciary Committee, who in theory is one of the organizations that's supposed to be doing oversight of the FBI, would send requests to the FBI for information. The FBI would just tell them to fuck off. Yeah.

But the interesting part is they kept doing this under Biden. So Biden's FBI was also doing this. I love the degree to which fucking liberals like have concluded politically, at least that they have to be as like vociferously pro law enforcement as they can. And all cops ever do is say, we are just waiting for the chance to kill you. Like, yeah, it's great. Cool. Good stuff. I'm going to read a line from this. It's so insane.

When the senators followed up, they faced the challenge of aligning FBI, DOJ and White House equities. So they sent like requests for for the emails between Trump and the FBI, right, to figure out whether Trump was doing the thing he was doing, which was like directly running the investigation himself.

The FBI claimed it could not answer without authorization from the DOJ and the White House. The DOJ directed the senators' inquiries to the White House and the FBI, and the White House referred the senators back to the agencies. So they're doing this, like, they're doing the circular road around thing you get from your insurance company where they tell you to talk to three people and every single one of them tells you to talk to the other one. But again, this is the Biden DOJ, the Biden FBI, and the Biden administration all doing this. The FBI finally provides documents about, like,

their contact with Trump for the investigation. They finally provide the documents in November of 2023. This investigation started in late 2018. It took half a decade, almost half of which was under the Biden administration. And also Senator Whitehouse literally threatening to torpedo a nomination for the DOJ's office of legal counsel. Like he had to threaten the department of justice.

In order to get them to send the documents that proved that Trump colluded to stop the Kavanaugh investigation. Which, even just from, like, a political standpoint, from the Democrats, right? Why the fuck would you not want that in the open? I mean, I guess unless you're Joe Biden, you don't want everyone remembering, like, all the shit you did to Anita Hill. But, like, this is literally free political ammunition of your opponent, like, abusing the political process. And...

It still took a Democratic senator just directly threatening the DOJ of a Democratic administration to get this out. I just like it also took so many years. Like, yeah, Kavanaugh has has been able to take away and fuck up our rights since what, 2018, 2019. Yeah. And the damage he's done.

permanent. Yeah. He will be around in office, very likely for most of the rest of our lives. Yeah. Like I said earlier, he's only 59 years old. Yeah, he could have another 30 years there at least. Yeah, and if this stuff had been known, he absolutely would not have gotten nominated, right? There were two unbelievably close votes to get him appointed, right? There was a first vote where the Republicans straight up bypassed the filibuster and still almost lost. And

It turns out that, okay, the actual final vote ended up being 50 to 48 with two abstentions. And one of the abstentions was because this guy was going to his daughter's wedding or something. But the other abstention was Lisa Murawski, who's the senator from Alaska, who's like the most sort of liberal Republican senators. And she does like a coward present vote so it can happen. And if she had voted no, and if Joe Manchin hadn't fucking crossed party lines to get him in office...

Which I think also people just forget about Joe Manchin, that he is also like individually, specifically the guy who got fucking Kavanaugh appointed. This would have failed. And the only reason that it didn't fail and that this guy was able to fucking destroy Roe v. Wade is that Trump just straight up ran a fake FBI investigation and lied to everyone about it and fucking railroaded the nomination through.

That's fucking Kavanaugh. And I think I think I think the closing here again is like every single week of Trump is just like this. Yeah. Right. Like every single day has some bullshit like this. It just like fucks everyone for the rest of their lives. Yeah. And it's deeply grim that

he could take power again and we could get back to like the stuff he was doing at the end of his administration, where he was just like having protesters killed with federal marshals. Like, yeah, that's the scary thing about it, right? Is there's not any kind of like functional resistance to this, right? The left has no power, has no serious organizing capacity in the United States. And,

can't get on the same page about anything that matters. Whereas liberals, when they have four years of control of the federal government, cannot adequately prosecute an attempt to overthrow the government and murder them. Yeah. So I don't know. You know, make sure you got clean water, folks. Check on that garden. I don't know what to tell you. It's just so bleak because like I said earlier,

Everything is so permanent. Yeah. You know what I mean? It just lasts so fucking long. Yeah. It lasts so long. And like, and like, we, we don't even know the damage that Kavanaugh is going to do to our society because of Trump. And it's also just terrifying that, you know, Trump was able to manipulate the system in this way. And that's so many people were silenced. And now, uh,

Our rights are gone. Yeah. Or our rights are going to be taken away. We have no idea what else is going to be taken. Yep. We have no idea what else is going to get fucked up. We have ideas. We have ideas. Again, the problem is that... The root of the problem is that liberals...

work tirelessly in this country to stop the left from gaining any power. And the left works tirelessly to stop itself from having any kind of influence by having no capacity to organize or compromise with people who do not agree with whatever their little brand of leftism is, right? Whereas conservatives are willing to work together with other conservatives they hate for 40 straight years in order to get us to the position that we're in. That's what happened, is they had

message discipline, they had organizing discipline, and they successfully pushed their madness into the mainstream in such a way that now the Democratic Party, in a lot of ways, is expending a huge amount of its efforts on moving in the direction of that madness, especially as regards immigration. Look at where we've moved on immigration from 2016 to 2024, right? That is the result of disciplined power building.

building, as opposed to what liberals and the left do, which is fight with each other and fight amongst each other and engage in a mix of like craven power politics and worshiping various con artists. And the right worships con artists, too. They just actually get power out of the deal.

Yeah. And just like this, the other terrifying thing about this story is that it's not fucking everywhere. It's not everywhere. Ten years ago, this would be the scandal of all scandals. And it's barely barely a headline. No, because no one's going to do anything about it. It's like it's like Elon Musk paying people a million dollars a day to vote in Pennsylvania. Yeah.

Like, yeah, that should be illegal. Like you can you can at least make a strong case based on existing laws. But that is election interference, the kind of which that can land you in prison. Everyone knows nothing's going to happen to him. Yeah, it's going to happen to him if Kamala wins. Right. If the Dems have a blowout and wind up with both houses of Congress, nothing is going to happen to Elon Musk. It's yeah. Again, just like we have no idea how how long this is going to go on and how much worse it could get. Yeah.

And, uh, yeah, I have some ideas, but I podcasted about those back in 2019. Sophie.

I was there. I was quite literally there. But yeah. So thanks, Mia. That was a bummer. Thank you, Mia. No, this was good. This is solid and a bummer. Again, I started this by saying my second to the last conversation I had in person with my mom was about Kavanaugh. It was her almost screaming at me because of how unfair what the Democrats did to Brett Kavanaugh was because of the good man that they...

and she felt the same way about Clarence Thomas, right? That like these guys were the victims of media assassination attempts. She felt the same way about Bill Cosby, by the way. Anyway, whatever. I don't need to yell about my mom.

I've yelled about enough this episode. Tomorrow's episode will be more fun, I promise. We're going to yell about why the econ double prize is fake and read some of the dumbest things you've ever seen in your life. Hell yeah. There we go. There we go. Back to the good stuff. Back to the good stuff. Yeah, Mia's been deeply excited to do this episode. So look out for that one. And I don't know, touch grass and pet a dog if it wants you to. Yeah. Bye. Bye.

Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right. Bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

you have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. No. No.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

I shook up the world!

James Brown said, say it loud. And the kid said, I'm black and I'm proud. Black boxing stars and black music royalty together in the heart of Zaire, Africa. Three days of music and then the boxing event. What was going on in the world at the time made this fight as important that anything else is going on on the planet. My grandfather laid on the ropes and let George Foreman basically just punch himself out.

Welcome to Rumble, the story of a world in transformation. The 60s and prior to that, you couldn't call a person black. And how we arrived at this peak moment. I don't have to be what you want me to be. We all came from the continent of Africa. Listen to Rumble, Ali, Foreman, and the Soul of 74 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.

and she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Nobel Prize! Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about Nobel Prizes, I guess. I'm your host, Vialog. With me is James. Hi, I'm excited to hear about the Dynamite Guy prizes.

Yeah, so as people I think are aware, the man who invented dynamite established a bunch of prizes to be like the pinnacle of human achievement, right, every year. He decided on a bunch of judges. And, you know, and this year in the Nobel Prize in Physics, right, Nobel Prize in Physics went to two guys who did a whole bunch of the sort of fundamental basic work on what became machine learning algorithms. And as annoying as modern AI is, like machine

Machine learning algorithms has fundamentally changed the way that science works. It changed astronomy. I've used it. I use new astronomy like there's all this, you know, it has fundamentally changed the way that humanity functions.

Yeah, it's an important discovery. Yeah. And, you know, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to a group of people who discovered micro RNA, which is like a different type of RNA that fundamentally changed the way that we understand how gene regulation works.

This is like a fundamental path breaking thing in biology. They got the, they got the fucking medicine Nobel prize for the Nobel prize in economics went to, uh, three guys who discovered that institutions affect prosperity. Huge groundbreaking shit. It's like economists don't discover shit. They just, they just say shit. And then other economists are like, yeah, cool. This. Okay. So,

when I was originally planning this episode, this is going to be an episode about the fake Nobel Prize, which is the economics Nobel Prize. If you've talked about on the show before, but it's worth saying again, this is not a real Nobel Prize. Like this is not one of the prizes that was established by Alfred Nobel. This was a thing established by the Swedish central bank as a way to push neoliberal economics, classical economics. And every year they're always very stupid is

It's the thing right and and my plan for this episode cuz I started seeing stuff about this Nobel Prize and I was looking at this and I was like this is the this is the one of the dumbest ones they've had since they gave out one in the 2000s for realizing that people could simply not make a trade like I was like, okay. I'm gonna go read all of these papers right we're to come back We're gonna have a detailed analysis of it and I'm reading these papers and it's like it's nothing and

These three economists are there from what's called institutional economics these are supposed to be the smart ones right these are these are the economists that like the neoclassical economists have to bring in like the normal neoclassical comments have to bring in because their models don't work right and the thing and the thing that makes them like quote-unquote smart is that they understand the institutions exist and they know how to use really really basic game theory models and

And this makes them, like, the cutting edge, the absolute elite cutting edge of bourgeois economics. They're on the front lines. What have these people discovered? What do these people win this prize for, right? Okay, the thing that they won this prize for, like, the initial thing, and there's a couple of stuff that we'll get to in a second, but, like, the big thing that they figured out is through a series of thunderously stupid regression analyses, they discovered something amazing.

I don't even know how to frame the magnitude of this discovery, but it took them a shit ton of math and like a bunch of like tabulations of mortality data to discover that in some places European colonial powers form settler colonies and in some places they established colonial rule that wasn't based on settler colonies and that these were different.

This is what they won the Nobel Prize for. They did a bunch of regression analyses and were like, holy shit. In some places, the Europeans did settler colonies and in some places they didn't. And it had to do with like disease and a level of resistance from the indigenous population. They won a Nobel Prize in economics for this. Are you fucking kidding me?

Also, also a paper that you could write for my history 110 class at a community college. OK, so the discourse about this, right? The Marxist economist Sharam Azar pointed out that like these fundamental observations were made by another guy we've talked about on this show, the renegade Marxist economist Paul Baran. And that's a good point, but also interesting.

When I was thinking about how to do this episode, right? This isn't a thing like with like Donald Harris, like we talked about Kamala Harris's dad's book, right? And that's, that's a book where there's, there's like ideas in it, right? Right. You can go through it and you can watch him developing ideas.

You can't do that with this because these people are not developing ideas. They have discovered the most obvious things. Yeah. They have read a single book about history and they have attempted to use a bunch of regression analyses to prove things that like you can just read a

Wikipedia article and discover about the course of colonization. Yeah, yeah And then you can go back and do a bunch of regression analyses to prove something that everyone already knew Yeah, and the place that I got to about this was I have this joke about Maoism Where all the things that people get from Maoism are things that you should have learned in elementary school One of the most common things you get from Maoists is like you have to read no investigation. No right to speak and like my friend

Okay, if you needed Mao Zedong to tell you that you needed to research something before you talked about it, what the fuck happened in your life? What went wrong with your life? What went wrong with your education? What has gone wrong with the way you think about the world that you needed Mao Zedong to tell you this? Yes.

And this is what most Nobel Prizes in economics are, and this is the most that it has ever been. So basically their argument is that like...

This is also an argument that Paul Baran makes, is that like, okay, depending on whether you're dealing with a settler colony or a sort of like India-style administrative colony, I guess. I'm blanking on a technical term for it. I guess like an extractive colony where you're more about extracting labor and raw materials and settling. Yeah, that changes the kinds of institutions that are set up. And like, okay, you can, if you want to, credit...

Paul Baran for the discovery that like settler colonies and like extractive colonies have different legal institutions and they function differently and that has had long range economic implications.

like stretching into the future. But like, this is something again that you can, you can just, you can find in a history book and immediately understand. And these people have tried to do this. They're trying to like track the difference in why we're like some colonies more prosperous later than other colonies. Right. They're, they're trying to track this process through a whole bunch of incredibly sketchy regression analyses and weird assumptions about what income is. They're trying to track like,

Why was it that, like, China and Turkey were, like, rich in the 1500s, but they ceased to be rich after that? Oh, sick! They're doing a fucking Jared Diamond. Yeah, they're doing a West and the Rest. Yeah, yeah. It's Wanderer Jared Diamond bullshit. Except, you know, with China, standard of living in Europe, if you actually go back to the historical record and aren't doing their, like, stupid, weird, like, using population density as an index for stuff where they start bringing Malthus into it...

If you don't do that and you look at like the actual like historical record like the average like quality of life in China like is not eclipsed by Europe until like the mid 1800s. Yeah. Like you know so like this is all this is all like very even then like.

life expectancy in the mid-1800s didn't take, it took decades to go up after the Industrial Revolution, right? Yeah, this is sort of drawing to what they're trying to do here, is that, like, a lot of this is directly just a product of colonialism, right? And they sort of acknowledge that colonialism existed and that it was, like, extractive, but their job is to take the basic insights of history and depoliticize it, right? We are going to get to later. One of the things they win this prize for is depoliticizing revolution. Yeah.

turning revolution into like a Nash equilibrium game theory thing. Oh, God. Which is unbelievable. It's incredible. Yeah. These are the kind of people who I have to deal with on a daily basis on listservs. Like, these are the economists emailing the entire listserv with their unique insight into something that we all knew 30 years... Like, the all-faculty email list is plagued by this kind of individual. Yeah. And, like, this is a thing where...

So they're absolutely convinced that like, like the 100% convinced that the thing that leads to economic prosperity is like the safeguarding of individual property rights. And like...

I will give them a little tiny bit of credit where they're like, well, yeah, so direct colonial institutions were extractive and they're bad because they infringe on property rights. And that's mildly better than most of these people. Yeah. These are, these are, these are, again, these are the most advanced bourgeois economists, right? They're not, they're not like pro Rhodesia and neoclassical guys. Right. They do. They do have a line where they say, we're not going to say where the colonialism is good or bad. And I think that's been misinterpreted a little bit because like in their work, they're pretty clear that it's,

They're just trying not to make a moral judgment because God forbid. Yeah, well, they're saying it's extractive and they think that extraction is bad because it's inefficient. But basically the thing is they think that if you set up regimes that safeguard private property, this will make people richer. But I want to read a quote from one of the papers they wrote.

Quote, in comparatively poor and less dense populated regions where Europeans could easily settle, it was in the colonizers' interest to introduce inclusive economic institutions that helped to boost prosperity for the majority in the long run. No! No! Fuck me! Like, they then go on to say how, like, yeah, but Britain built the railways in India. Like...

And, like, this is one of these things, right? Because what's happening here, you know, and this is something that economists love to do, is, like, economists love to go into other fields and attempt to colonize them, right? Yes. Like, what they're doing here is they've gone into, like, this field of history. Yeah. And they're attempting to sort of colonize them, right? Many such cases, yeah. And...

You know, they're looking at this stuff, right? And you've got things like this where it's like, no, like the economic institutions that were set up in like settler colonies were not designed to introduce inclusive economic institutions to like help boost the prosperity for the majority in the long run. Like that was the result of social struggle. Yeah. But they, for some reason, basically think that social struggle started in like the 1880s.

Yeah. The Nobel, like, committee, the, like, Econ, fake Econ Nobel committee, like, releases, like, a giant statement. Like, there's, like, press summaries. They have, like, a slightly more detailed one. They have, like, the Econ-y one. And I want to read this from, so the part of what they're doing, right, you're talking about, like, the work that was inspired by this, by the understanding that, like, the different institutions change economic outcomes. Quote,

Banerjee and Ivor 2005 examined the legacy of British land institutions in India that gave cultivators in certain regions proprietary rights, including their productivity was higher in these regions post-independence. Ginnioli and Rainier and Michaelopolis and Papaianu...

the impact of differences in political centralization along ethnic groups during pre-colonial times. None documented the long-run negative impacts of the slave trade.

Dell 2010, by the way, non-paper in 2008. So we'll go back to that in a second. Dell 2010 investigated the long-run effects of the so-called META system in operation between 1573 and 1812 in Bolivia and Peru where men were forced to work in mines. Within the boundaries of META, household consumption was 25% lower in 2021 than just outside the boundaries. So...

What they have discovered here, again, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, they discovered that slavery had long-run negative economic impacts on the places where there was slavery. Jesus Christ. Thanks for trying, guys. This is the shit that they gave these people a Nobel Prize for inspiring. What?

This is insane. You're right. Economists do just love to tourist in someone else's discipline and like fucking have the most basic insight possible. All of these are things that would be like an interesting undergraduate paper, right? Like insane that these people are getting Nobel Prizes for this. It's not insane. It's economics, but same difference, I guess.

Alright, so speaking of economics, we need to go to ads. Yeah, because there will be a long-term detrimental consequence for us if we don't. But when we come back, there's some more unreal bullshit. We are back. Okay, so speaking of undergrad bullshit, one of the big things in their initial paper where they did the whole, oh my god, they discovered that there's a difference between settler colonies and extractive colonies. One of the big things in that paper was they spent a whole bunch of time looking into was the economic difference in these countries because of the climate?

Which, now, for those of you who are students of history, right? The thing you will remember is that this was like the most advanced race science theory of the early 1800s. Yes. And these people are like, the economists are finally getting around to busting this in like 2004. Have they ever looked at skull measurements? Because I feel like we're heading down that path. It's so bad.

Incredible. That was actually a whole thing in Fascist Japan where they had all the... I can't remember if I ever talked about this in the episodes that I did on Bastards episodes, but they had this whole thing where...

They had, like, racial categorizations and, like, biological characteristics of, like, the races, and they would use them to, like, determine allocated efficiency of which slaves you should use to do what. Oh, cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. It was great. And by great, I mean, like, holy fucking shit. It's so bad. They just missed their time, Mia. Those people could kick the shit out of a Nobel Prize in, like, 2025 if they came back with that stuff. Yeah, I get, like...

You know, I mean, one of the things we were talking about, right, is like you were mentioning, is like these are like such obvious insights. And I remember, so I went to the University of Chicago, right? And that means that I fucking know all of these fucking ghouls. Like I met all the people who are going to become these econ dipshits. Yeah, you're at ground zero for that shit. One of the things that's funny is that like...

Like, this is like a particular thing of the University of Chicago. Econ people's like, they all think they can do math and they can't, right? They suck at it. But one of the things I was following was like, so a bunch of my friends are math majors and math majors can like actually do math. Like they could do the kind of math that's like,

There's no there aren't like numbers involved like it's like they're doing like field theory or some shit or like they're doing a kind of math that when someone tries to explain it to you they have to start like making diagrams of like the faces of cubes and then like explaining how there's like 32 dimensional edges or whatever and there's always this joke from the math professors where they'd be mad because like they'd look at the accountable price and they'd be like this person made like

an incredibly minor optimization to a trading algorithm that's like incredibly obvious to anyone who even sort of knows math and they gave them a double price for this. And this is that before history. Yeah. So the other thing that, that they discovered, right. Oh God. I, I, I'm trying to find the least depressing way to put this. They, they discovered that there are revolutions and,

And they discovered that, like, there are different interest groups at a revolution who have different interests. And, like, legitimately, one of the things that they won this prize for is a paper where they discovered that giving people, like, the franchise, like, giving people the ability to vote and setting up the welfare state was something that was done by elites to stop revolutions. Yeah.

Again, yeah. They have all these mathematical models that look very impressive until you realize they're just incredibly stupid game theory bullshit to determine whether or not a country will do a revolution. And their model for it basically is... And they've discovered some genuinely impressive insights for a 16-year-old who wants to go into political science. They discovered that, for example, elites have economic interests.

And that those economic interests are different from masses. But because they're economists, the only way they can conceptualize this is in terms of tax rates. So they make the argument, and this is not a joke. I am being serious about this. I read this fucking footnote. They make the argument that the overthrow of Salvador Allende was about elite tax rates. Oh, that one is fucking like, Jesus wept.

And it's so funny too. And this is like one of the biggest, most obvious problems with their models, right? And this is from all the way back to like their whole thing about like how the institutions that were set up by colonialists being different affected like the long-term trajectory of these countries. They treat...

This entire process because like this is one of the things that they've discovered is that there are revolutions of counter-revolutions Because they read a Wikipedia article about like right-wing coups in Latin America And they discovered that elites can do anti-democratic coups because they don't want their taxes to be too high That's the only reason they do it Yeah, but but their discovery of this right that that right-wingers do anti-democratic coups to like preserve their wealth and political power right? Yeah, but

Never at any point in their process does it seem to have occurred to them that elites are not purely single national figures and that there are, in fact, multinational elites. And in fact, there's something called the Central Intelligence Agency that does, in fact, hope these people do good. And this is like the fundamental core of this, right? It's like these models talk about sort of like elite extraction, right? But it's all framed through...

the language of sort of like either like taxes or like rent basically like like they're making like land rent or like they're fighting over a surplus right okay but what they're trying to do is depoliticize how this actually works because the thing they're trying to present is that all extraction happens through the state right yeah like the the state is the tool that elites use and now if you think about this for five seconds we're like well no obviously like there's an exploitation in like

the workplace that's actually in these right wing military dictatorships that's actually like the primary place where extraction happens where you shoot all the union organizers and then you fucking force all the peasants to work in the fields and shoot them if they don't right but what they're doing is attempting to sort of depoliticize

the duplicities entire process. This is what I'm talking about. Like they are the most advanced bourgeois economists and being the most advanced bourgeois economists, they have finally figured out that the whole, they call it modernization theory. That's not really what modernization theory is, but they're economists. They're fucking stupid. They don't know anything. You can't judge them for not actually knowing what modernization theory is, but they finally discovered that the old line about how economic development inevitably brought democracy was wrong. Yeah.

Again, huge insight here. Yeah, but this brings them into the world of democratic transitions. Now, after we come back from these ad breaks, I am going to read you the most thunderously stupid line I've ever read in a paper in my entire life, and that is fucking saying something given how many econ papers I've read. Yeah, you've been in the trenches. Okay. Oh, God. Let me read this line. This is a quote.

From the econ the econ double prizes site in their 2006 book this the two two of the three economists made an ambitious attempt to provide quote the first systematic formal analysis of the creation and consolidation of democracy the first the first

This is very funny. This is fucking insane. This is like an entire field of international relations and political science. This is shit. No.

Not, no, just like, there are literally multiple disciplines where this is an entire field of study. Yeah. Right? Like, I have read it, like, obviously, this is an entire branch of political science, this is an entire branch of international relations, this is an entire branch of sociology, there's like, there's like an anthropological school, kind of,

that that's about this. There are interdisciplinary fucking institutes that exist for this reason. Like, this is shit that I studied from people who wrote books about it in the 1950s. Like, this is like, like, like, you, the funny thing is they are, they literally quote people who are writing about this from the 1840s.

Like, people have been studying this for fucking as long as there has been democracy. People have been studying this shit. Yeah, yeah. Their econ thing that they always use, like, oh, nobody ever did formal analysis before. It's like, have you ever fucking read? Yeah, have you read a poli sci paper? I understand. I, too, dropped my public

policy major the moment I realized that public policy was just fucking econ with the lines on the graph relayable. Yeah. Have you ever fucking read one of these papers? Like you, you actually have a chance of understanding them because they are,

You know, okay, I can't bet you mean to political science. They are about 150 times more advanced than the econ papers on this subject, but that's still not like a very high level of advancement, right? But like, still, they're like, they have formal models of this. They've done all the stupid math bullshit. The sociologists have done all the fucking number crunching. Like, okay, okay. Here's another quote for this.

The authors start the paper by showing that democratic transitions are precipitated by falls in GDP per capita. They discovered this in 2019. I was having Twitter arguments, like arguments again with like 16 year olds on Twitter in like 2016 about what the relationship between revolutions and declining and raising living standards were like, this was Twitter discourse, right? This is a,

Seven years after the Arab Spring. 2019! Insane. They discovered this. Yeah. Do they do formal analyses of the Arab Spring, famously the first and only democratic transition that's ever happened? No. That's like too recent for them. All their stuff is what they call the second wave of democratic transitions, which is not the second wave at all. They're just such idiots. They're talking about the pro-democracy movements in the 80s.

in Latin America and East Asia. Great, yeah. Which they also are just thunderously wrong about all of the time. Yeah, I was going to say, I can't wait to hear what they have to say about those. I'm literally not even going to talk about it because it's nothing. It's just like

I'm just looking up a very insightful paper that Ali Khadiva wrote, who I've interviewed several times for different things. It's called Stick, Stones and Molotovs Cocktails. Oh, that rules. It is a fantastic analysis of democratic transitions. It's about the strategic use of violence against property and the correlation it has between successful democratic transition movements. It's a good paper. Read that. Yeah. Yeah.

There's a lot of great analysis. We'll put that in the notes here. There's a lot of great analysis of this. But what they're trying to do is they're trying to build this model where they're looking at basically bargaining between the masses and elites to decide whether to do a revolution or a counter-revolution. And they're trying to build a game theory model based on the elites and give or take concessions and when they don't grant concessions and whether people believe they're going to grant concessions. The other thing that's also very stupid about this, right, is that like

The thing that they're interested in is why or why not people believe that neoliberal economic reforms are going to work. And a lot of democratic transitions are also about like responsibility

resistance to that shit. Yeah. Like the revolution in Sudan, for example. It is a pro-democracy movement, but it is also in large part a reaction to IMF and post-structural reforms that these people all think are good and will cause long-term prosperity. And a lot of the democratic traditions they're talking about, for example, again, Pinochet, right? That was... Obviously, the pro-democracy reformers did more neoliberalism, but a big part of the reason that stuff worked was because

Pinochet ran the economy into the graduating neoliberal economic bullshit. Yeah. Right. Which is what he was there to do. Yeah, but like,

I want to close in on two things. One, I want to read this line from talking about the advances in their papers. This is again from the Equitable Prize thing. Quote, in the earlier models, the probability that the masses are successful when they stage a revolution is always one. But this is a strong assumption that does not reflect real world events very well. They published a paper!

about how people make a decision to do a revolution. This was peer-reviewed in an economics journal. It's one of the papers that is cited in the fucking Nobel Prize they gave them, where they assumed that revolutions always succeed. Nobel Prize! And the second paper was the one they realized, holy shit, that's not true. But my mouth, isn't it? This is the kind of assumption that these absolute fucking morons make all of the time. All of the fucking...

This is why they had to bring in the institutional economists in the first place to bring this shit in, right? Because, like, their basic models of how humans work were, like, every single human, like, sits down and calculates a fucking utility curve to figure out whether they're going to brush their hair in the morning. It was obviously not true. That's why they had to bring in game theory in the first place, right? They make stupid assumptions like this literally all the time.

And again, this is one of the ones they're making in one of the papers that was cited in here as the reason they want to know what price and economics. Yeah. I want to read this Molotov cocktails paper out to everyone. Here's a fun little sentence.

Incredible.

Thank you. We love to see it. Great stuff. We love this. That's a pretty normal thing from, like, I guess you would call it the center-left of democratic transition studies stuff, right? Yeah. It's a sociology paper. Yeah. That's like a pretty normal, it's like a good life, a good paper. This is from one of the books written by people who won the Economics Nobel Prize. Quote,

Chapter six explains why several European countries have managed to build broadly participatory societies with capable but still shackled states. Our answer focuses on the factors that led much of Europe towards the corridor during the early Middle Ages as Germanic tribes, especially the Franks, came to invade lands dominated by the Western Roman Empire after its collapse. We argue with the marriage of bottom-up participatory institutions and

norms of Germanic tribes and the centralizing bureaucratic and legal traditions of the Roman Empire forged a unique balance of power between the state and society enabling the rise of the Shackled Land. Fucking German. Oh, God. Fuck me. Sorry, this is so depressing. I spent 10 years getting a PhD in history and they've just given these people a Nobel Prize for like Jordan Peterson shit. Fuck.

They have discovered These people have discovered The concept of history And they've read like Four Wikipedia articles And they've used those Wikipedia articles to start doing Regression analyses And this is what they won a Nobel Prize For A fake Nobel Prize Like again Like I mean

thinking about like you know in physics what you have to do to win a Nobel Prize is you have to make a prediction about the fundamental nature of the universe that can only be tested by building a fucking machine that can measure a vibration of gravitational waves which is a has people to measure a ripple in the fabric of space-time that is smaller than the diameter of the fucking nucleus of an atom that

That is what you have to do to win the Nobel Prize in physics. What you have to do to win the Nobel Prize in economics is realize that institutions affect prosperity. Jesus Christ.

I just cannot. This has been the vibes EconDuel Prize episode. I don't know. I hope this made your day slightly better because, holy shit, this is the fakest prize in the entire world. Shout out to the economists. I guess I'm eagerly awaiting you discovering some other shit from my 101 class.

Feel free to sign up at any time if you want to get a Nobel fucking prize in economics, I guess. All right. Well, this has been Ikinapin here. We'll return. Yeah, next time they give the economists the prize for tying their shoes or something.

Football fans, picture this. You bet on your favorite player to score the first touchdown, and he throws an awesome block so his teammate can score instead. If this happens, BetMGM wants to give you another chance at the end zone. With BetMGM's second chance promotion, you'll get your stake back if your first touchdown scorer scores second instead.

That's right. Bet on any pro football player to score the first touchdown of the game. If you're right, you win. If your players score second, you get your stake back in cash. Everyone knows the most exciting part of football is the score. With BetMGM's Second Chance promotion,

you have a chance to keep the fun going after the first player crosses the goal line. Place a first touchdown score wager today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only. Existing customer offer. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards vary. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Nocturnum.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia.

I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, fam. I'm Simone Boyce. I'm Danielle Robay. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, the daily podcast from Hello Sunshine that is guaranteed to light up your day. Every weekday, we bring you conversations with the culture makers who inspire us. Like our recent episode with dancer, actor, host of Dancing with the Stars, and now novelist, Julianne Hough.

I feel really whole. I feel like the last few years I've really unraveled a lot, which is part of what this book is about. And I really feel so content, which is a word that used to scare the crap out of me. And I love that word now. Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is It Could Happen Here. Today, I'm your host, Garrison Davis. And there sure has been a lot happening this past year. I am kind of feeling emotionally exhausted and just numb in general. It's a different feeling from the political desensitization that my job usually provides me. I'm frankly still recovering from attending the DNC, even more so than the RNC.

At the RNC, I knew I was going to be walking through the pits of hell, and despite the immense evil on display, the sideshow conspiracy theory freak nature of the event made it almost absurdly amusing. But the DNC kind of broke me.

Between the infighting among Palestine protesters and the insistence from the official organizers, TM, to oppose any course of action that would actually disrupt the event or apply pressure to attendees and instead just use the Palestine protests to promote their little socialist newspapers and political orgs.

Meanwhile, inside the actual event, I was surrounded by some of the richest, most powerful people I had ever been around. And just watching them maintain their, like, Kamala is brat party atmosphere at all costs, and purposely blind themselves to the atrocities happening around the world, especially Gaza, was a deeply unsettling experience.

Like, these are supposed to be the, if not the good guys, at least the better guys or the less openly fascist guys. And like, among the American right wing's unprecedented focus and organized attack on trans rights, this was the first DNC since 2012 to not feature a trans speaker, and trans people were never directly mentioned during the convention's primetime speaking slots.

And now with the election ramping up and the Southeast still recovering from two devastating hurricanes, Israel escalating tensions with Iran, and with the backing of the United States, continuing strikes in Lebanon and Palestine, I am just feeling more lost and discombobulated than I have been in years. So to cheer myself up,

I decided to go to a Charlie Kirk and Vivek Ramaswamy rally at Georgia State University. Now, to some, that may sound just completely batshit, or perhaps some form of bizarre self-harm. But look, I've been covering far-right rallies and writing about these weird conservative influencers for years now. It's almost second nature to me. Going to these events can feel paradoxically relaxing,

Even though it may trigger some stress, my body just kind of subconsciously knows what to do in environments like this. The RNC was so easy. It's like an autopilot just takes over. And so I thought going to this Turning Point USA event might help reset my brain by giving myself a simple task that I know I can excel at.

But before we get into all that, first, for those more fortunate than I, here's some background on Charlie Kirk, also known as the far-right podcaster with the smallest face. As a teenager, back in 2012, Charles J. Kirk co-founded an organization for campus conservatives called Turning Point USA, a

And then in 2019, he founded a sister organization called Turning Point Action, which focuses on elections and conservative political advocacy. Though initially more aligned with the so-called alt-right rather than the alt-right, Kirk has slowly moved farther and farther to the right during the past 10 years. And by 2020, he embraced election fraud, COVID-19, and vaccine conspiracy theories.

Also during 2020, he started his own podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, which is now somehow ranked as the number seven podcast for news in Apple Podcasts. So that's not good.

At this point, Charlie has kind of taken the place of, if not surpassed, the role that was previously occupied by Stephen Crowder before his fall from grace stemming from his breakup with Ben Shapiro and the allegations of abusing his ex-wife. Through the Turning Point Action organization, Kirk is more tied in with the actual mechanisms of the Republican Party than even the Daily Wire is.

Just this past Wednesday, Turning Point Action hosted a rally for Trump in Duluth, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. Trump spoke at this event, and Tucker Carlson made a very fascist speech advocating to refuse the results of the election if Trump loses, and likening Trump to a quote-unquote daddy figure needing to punish the country for being a quote-unquote bad girl the past four years.

It's a huge indictment against Americans' deeply Freudian politics. Now, the event that I attended on October 21st was a part of Charlie Kirk's You're Being Brainwashed tour, where Kirk and friends travel from swing state to swing state to debate college students on camera about why Trump is the better candidate.

Charlie's focus on debating unprepared college students shows how he has kind of picked up the baton from Steven Crowder and his old Change My Mind videos.

But this year specifically, Charlie's version of this college debate content creation strategy is more in line with this overall strategy to inflate Kirk's political influence leading up to the election so that he can get more directly involved in the GOP's get-out-the-vote campaign in key swing states.

As a part of this strategy, Kirk has been on a bit of a media blitz the past few months to promote himself. Some listeners may have seen the viral video featuring Charlie Kirk debating 25 quote-unquote woke college students for over 90 minutes. This video from the YouTube channel Jubilee has over 20 million views. And like, just as an aside...

Jubilee is just so deeply evil. This company claims to advocate for like empathy and human connection while turning life and death political issues into fucking game show segments for YouTube ad revenue, often pitting media trained conservative activists against just random clueless liberals. I hate this company. They are so bad. But I digress.

Now, I actually attended a Turning Point USA event on the GSU campus last year. It was a smaller event that was ostensibly about defending the Cop City training facility in Atlanta. Though, halfway through the event, it just stopped being about Cop City, and it just turned into an ad for Turning Point USA and this other political organization started by Candace Owens called BLEGZIT, which stands for the, quote,

Black exit from the victimhood mentality, unquote. This was one of the most racist events I've ever been to. The main speaker, in his best metrosexual attire, blamed black people for creating situations that result in police murders, said that the real problem is that black kids are never taught accountability, and that in the MLK days, people only ever advocated for more police training.

He also claimed that rap music is causing a spike in violent crime and ranted against Jay-Z and Beyonce and closed by saying that we need to support more conservative rappers and singers. It was really bad.

But on the plus side, I went undercover to this event, and when talking with the Turning Point USA officials, I convinced them that I was actually a student at a different, nearby university, and I reserved the right to start a fake TPUSA chapter in that school. So hopefully that will never happen, since I'm the one who's supposed to be doing it.

For the brainwashed tour event this past Monday, I dressed like an unfashionable campus conservative and donned my Reagan movie baseball cap acquired at the RNC welcome party and arrived at campus an hour early to scope out the terrain.

They didn't announce the exact location for the event ahead of time, so for about half an hour I just walked around GSU with the fucking Ronald Reagan hat looking for like a TPUSA booth. Now luckily I spotted some people with red mega hats that I tailed to the nearby Hurt Park, where it was immediately evident that this would be a much bigger event than the Cop City one I attended a year prior.

In the middle of the park was a big table with microphones to set up for questions and debate. And on either side, there were booths with turning point stickers, buttons, flyers, a pocket constitution, and sign-up sheets to get involved in their political advocacy programs. I took home a big button that read, Republicans are hotter...

And I got another, what I would call a brat-style button, but brown instead of green, that reads, hi, period. Stop being a socialist, period. Thanks, period. Not good. Not good.

But I watched the crowd grow from like 20 people to, I would say, around 200. You know, it got kind of fluid, but yeah, around 200, 250 maybe. A small majority were students, or at least young, and appeared to be equally made up of liberals and conservatives, with the rest of the crowd mostly made up of conservatives from all ages who came to campus just to see Charlie Kirk.

As the event was about to begin, TPUSA staff moved all of the older quote-unquote non-college students out of frame of the cameras to make the video seem more focused on liberal college students. And after waiting in the surprisingly warm October sun for over an hour,

Charles J. Kirk finally arrived 30 minutes late from the official start time, tossing three mega hats wildly into the crowd, one of which I am now in possession of.

For this leg of the tour, Kirk has been accompanied by the 2024 Republican presidential candidate with the tallest hair, Vivek Ramaswamy, who, by the way, has also won the Cool Zone Media Award for presidential candidate with the most Nick Fuentes-Groiper energy. So there you go. I can't believe I've seen Vivek Ramaswamy like four different times this year. That doesn't feel good.

But do you know what does feel good? That's right. These products and services that support this podcast. Okay, we are back. It's time to finally talk about this fucking rally.

So I'm not going to go over like the whole event play by play because there was over two hours of quote unquote debating that I have neither the time nor the desire to recap. But I will mention some of the overarching topics and common lines of questioning. Even as the first student took the mic,

I knew that this was going to be a rough day. The first person to quote unquote debate, Charlie and Vivek, stated that their quote, primary opposition to Trump is that he's anti-American and anti-patriotic, unquote. They said that they believed that Trump fundamentally undermines American values. And they specifically invoked Trump's rhetoric online about suspending the Constitution and the whole January 6th incident.

Look, I don't think this is a very compelling line of attack, especially in a debate setting. And I just don't believe that patriotism is like an inherently good thing. And I think grifters and con men are pretty darn American.

But Vivek and Kirk responded by talking about how social media censorship in 2020 was a much greater act of anti-Americanism, although later on in the day they defended Elon Musk and his running of Twitter since he's a private citizen and should be allowed to do whatever he wants with his own platform.

This is, of course, ironic amidst reporting from the New York Times that Musk and the Trump team colluded to suppress information damaging to Trump on the platform. Basically exactly what the right was accusing the old Twitter of doing in the last election. But none of that really matters. There's no such thing as hypocrisy. You can never hold anyone account to this sort of thing on the right. Charlie Kirk then just went on to deny that Trump called to suspend the Constitution and

Here's a clip. He never has. You're misquoting him, but let's just look at what he did, not just rhetoric. Nice little quick pivot there from Charles. But yes, technically, Trump didn't say suspend. He actually said terminate, which is like worse. I don't know.

In 2022, Trump posted on Truth Social calling for the quote unquote termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution, unquote, in response to the 2020 election. I don't know how Kirk thinks that saying terminate is better than suspend. Of course, he doesn't. He's just playing this game. It doesn't matter.

Kirk went on to lie about the nature of January 6th and whether Trump literally personally committed the legal act of insurrection, eventually saying that even if Trump did, it would be thrown out under the new presidential immunity ruling by the Supreme Court.

And stating that though Trump didn't actually do a coup, the Democrats did actually do a coup to get Kamala Harris on the ticket. Okay, sure, buddy. Now, part of Kirk's just flagrant January 6th revisionist history was claiming that Ashley Babbitt was

was suddenly killed with no warning as she was retreating from the Capitol. And just none of that is true. That just isn't what happened. The only person to die on January 6th is a Trump supporter killed by one of Nancy Pelosi's bodyguards. Okay, even that part isn't true. Two other Trump supporters died of heart attacks and another died holding a don't tread on me flag after being trampled by fellow rioters.

Now, a student countered Kirk's claim of Babbitt's innocence by confirming that he believes in stand-your-ground laws, that if you're breaking into property, you can be shot. Hold on, but Ashley Babbitt was unarmed. Isn't the whole kind of shtick of the American left, like, don't shoot unarmed people? If I break into your house and I was unarmed, but I was breaking into your house... Was George Floyd, was that a rightful death? Okay, first of all, incredible deflection, but oh yes...

As if these two situations are in any way comparable. A black man being pinned down and choked to death for over nine minutes, and a woman leading a mob intent on killing U.S. politicians right up to the last line of defense protecting said politicians as they try to evacuate the Capitol. Kirk tried to make this same gross George Floyd comparison like an hour later, again to booze from the audience.

Later in the day, a second student hit the Charlie Kirk debate chair debating on whether Trump is anti-American and mentioned Trump's recent comments talking about a quote unquote enemy within.

some enemy inside the United States that poses a far bigger threat than foreign enemies. Vivek claimed that Trump was referring to people who shot at Trump, and Kirk claimed that it was a reference to drug cartels. So Donald Trump is talking about the enemy within. He's talking about the cartels that are here that are poisoning our streets with drugs, that are bringing illegal guns into the country. That is the enemy within. Yet we say Russia is the enemy. Russia has never attacked the United States of America. Curious Russia comment there, certainly. But

Like, for this enemy within thing, we know that's just not true. Trump has specifically named multiple Democrats as the enemy within. It's not about cartels. It's not about people shooting him. There's just nonstop lying coming from Kirk and Vivek. And none of the students are, like, equipped or researched enough to call them out on it.

Another common topic of debate was war and the insistence that Trump didn't start any new wars, unlike Biden and Harris, who have personally started wars, I guess, with Kirk crediting Biden for starting the Russia-Ukraine war by financing the Ukrainian defensive, as well as roping in Harris by saying that she was, quote, "...in charge of the Russia-Ukrainian war before it happened," unquote.

which really doesn't make much sense as a sentence. Vivek later added that Kamala Harris was personally in charge of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which again, just isn't true. Vivek is parroting a failed attempt by Republican lawmakers from last September to invent some way to blame Harris for the Afghanistan withdrawal now that she is the presidential nominee.

Harris is only mentioned three times in the 3,288 pages of interview transcripts from the Foreign Affairs Committee's investigation of the withdrawal.

But by far, Charlie and Vivek's main focus on the topic of war is just defending Russia. Donald Trump's going to negotiate an end to that war that's reasonable. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have created that war and escalated that over the last three years. Trump did not really end any wars in his first term. In fact, he increased U.S. troop levels in 2017 and raised the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan from drone strikes by 330 percent, according to Brown University.

Still, Vivek tried to frame Trump as the much more principled anti-war candidate. Which candidate was there a major war in the Middle East? Was there a major war in the Middle East under Donald Trump? There were multiple arms deal packages to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, and the U.S. increased its involvement in the Syrian civil war under Trump. But to Vivek's earlier point...

I really don't see a way Trump would end the war in Ukraine that isn't just giving more territory over to Russia. But to Charlie Kirk, that might not be such a bad thing, since he seems to be kind of fond of Russia. You know who is the enemy? China is the enemy. And Russia.

Well, Russia's not the enemy, exactly. How many of your friends have died because of Russians? Here's another soundbite from Vivek. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, along with some Republican help, I'm going to admit, is sending more money to escalate that war that otherwise would have resolved itself if we had just negotiated peace back in 2022. Resolve itself? Sounds a lot like Vivek just means that Russia would have just seized territory.

And like later on, the VEC argued that Ukraine just shouldn't be getting any NATO protection at all. So the U.S. actually made a commitment back in 1990 to say that NATO would expand not one inch past East Germany. Hmm. I wonder what may have been different geopolitically in 1990 in relation to Russia, the VEC said.

I wonder if anything has happened since 1990 that might affect certain Slavic territories, Vivek. I wonder. Oh my God. Now, the topic discussed probably the most during this event was immigration. Even the liberal college students seem to believe that an influx of immigration was the biggest problem currently facing the United States.

Kirk claimed that Kamala Harris let 10 million new quote unquote illegal immigrants into the country. And like, no, the total population of undocumented immigrants in this country has fluctuated between 10 to 12 million over the course of the past 20 years.

Though, like J.D. Vance, Kirk considers most immigrants illegal regardless of their actual status. Kirk claimed that the quote-unquote 9 million immigrants seeking asylum that have come into this country under Biden are all illegal because they are quote, cartel-sponsored fraudulent asylum claims, unquote.

Kirk said that these false asylum seekers pay cartels $10,000 to be smuggled into the United States. They're all illegal because they're, we know, it's actually, we know it to be true. It's not the question. They're defrauding the American immigration system is what they're doing. When pressed for proof on this, Kirk just stumbled and Vivek took over and later just plugged his new movie about illegal immigration. Yes, I mean, so for example, what is the asylum claim if you're coming from

from North Korea. Wow, wow, very, very convincing stuff happening. Vivek argued that most immigrants lie about seeking asylum in order to enter the country. And since that's illegal, that makes them more likely to commit other crimes once in the United States. So right now, our immigration system literally selects for the people who are most willing to lie to the U.S. government to get in.

And that's why it's no surprise that the people whose first act of entering the country breaks the law often continue to break the law while they're already here. I don't think that's racist or xenophobic. I think it's a fact based on who we're actually selecting to come into the country. In actuality, immigrants and especially undocumented or quote unquote illegal immigrants are

are far less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens. Most research puts it between 40 to 60% less likely, at least according to Stanford, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the Cato Institute, all famously liberal organizations.

One thing that Kirk kept trying to do is pander his nationalism towards the racially diverse audience of Atlanta students. The people in this audience, which is a very diverse audience, specifically Black Americans, should be incensed that they're being replaced by foreigners. Black Americans are now being put

aside so that a bunch of foreigners can come, undercut wages and fill your city. The black community, which you obviously both care a lot about, is actually not being prioritized. Instead, people from the third world are coming in and black America is getting put last, which seems to be a common theme over the last 60 years when Democrats are in control.

Well, OK. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. Thank you. The worst part is that this seems to work. The audience seemed to resonate with this grossly fascistic framing, seemingly unable to recognize what Kirk was doing. And at this point, I was just like fucking losing it.

Vivek said that if you don't know English, you shouldn't be allowed in the United States. And like, no one cared. No one pushed back on that. A pro Kamala person repeated false migrant crime wave rhetoric in her question about the Venezuelan refugee crisis.

That student said that 300,000 Venezuelan refugees came to the United States in 2023. And Kirk then claimed that 3 million more would arrive if Kamala is elected, along with 20 million more immigrants. Kirk promised that if Trump's elected, any immigrant, whether legal, undocumented, or a refugee, just any immigrant who commits a crime like a DUI will be immediately deported.

And unfortunately, when pressed to defend or even just openly express their own personal views on whatever the topic of debate was, multiple students just completely backed down, saying that they would rather, quote unquote, stay out of the political realm. Or in another instance...

What are you doing? You're trying to debate about access to abortion or if all immigrants should be rounded up and deported, but you don't want to get, quote unquote, too political? What are you talking about? I'm sorry you couldn't get a fast dunk on Charlie Kirk, but come on. But perhaps the most disheartening moment was when Charlie Kirk was challenged on his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.

Someone asked why Charlie thinks that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. Kirk started by saying that even if some of the original intent was good, it's now being used for bad things, like allowing men in women's locker rooms to the complete shock of the questionnaire. Kirk and Vivek then went on to explain why we should repeal the Civil Rights Act. The fanfare...

that the Civil Rights Act is met with, it's almost like the new Constitution. We talk about the Civil Rights Act more than the Constitution. It is cited more than the Constitution. We almost had a new American founding in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act. So let me share a couple of hard facts with you, which is that

Turns out that you're much more likely to end up in prison, you're much more likely to end up in poverty, you're much more likely not to graduate from high school if you grow up in a single parent household versus a dual parent household. Today, you're talking about upwards of 60% of black kids born into single parent households rather than dual parent. What number do you think that was in the 1950s before the Great Society? Probably like...

It was even less, 20%. 20% back then. So then we look at what the results have been of this entire agenda. Put the Civil Rights Act, put the LBJ Great Society. Black Americans are worse off today, even economically in terms of mobility, than they were back then in the name of laws that were passed to supposedly advance black interests. Oh, God. Do you know what that can actually be attributed to?

It's the massive increase in policing and the carceral justice system that was specifically intensified as a conservative reaction to black people gaining more civil rights in society. - The Civil Rights Act has nine different titles in it, and you have this leviathan that was created, and something that most black Americans don't support is men and female sports. Would you agree? - Can you say that again? - Men playing in female sports. - Oh, hell no. - Yeah, I know. No, no, for sure, right?

Believe it or not, the Civil Rights Act is now being used to keep men playing in women's sports. So the Civil Rights Act was used to help black America originally. Totally get that. But now the way it was written is that any claim of identification...

So someone says, I'm a woman, therefore I can compete in your volleyball team. They come in with a civil rights claim. And so what we're saying is, no, no, no, it should be specified to racial, not gender, all that other stuff. And there were all these other provisions as well. How sad is it that this kid was convinced that the fucking Civil Rights Act is bad through transphobia?

It's so fucking predatory what Kirk is doing here. This was so fucking gross to watch in person. As the day went on, things just started to get more and more kooky. A whole batch of libertarian, Austrian-trained economists went back and forth with Charles and Vivek on tariffs, free markets, and the validity of the economic philosophy of Friedrich Hayek.

This fucking dude with a little mustache who ostensibly got up to debate Kirk on abortion said that, quote, I think my generation has started to abuse the option of abortion, unquote. Like, why the fuck are you up there debating him then? Jesus Christ. And then what I would call, quote,

Generously, a himbo in a white dudes for Harris shirt said that Kamala's greatest accomplishment is being an idol after debating Kirk about FEMA money being spent on illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, Kirk just continued to spew COVID-19 conspiracy theories to very little pushback. They were wrong about everything. They were wrong about six feet to solar spread. They were wrong about the vaccine, safe and effective. They were wrong about whether the Earth revolves around the sun. What are you talking about? Oh, my God. One student just got so fed up with Kirk's

endless rambling about topics unrelated to their question and decided to walk away, which then, of course, Kirk claimed as a rhetorical victory. Hunter Biden laptop misinformation. Where did the virus come from? Bio labs. No, it's exactly fine. It's OK. Go to your ethics class.

I was losing it and frankly just shocked at how little pushback Charles and Vivek were receiving for what I saw as very clear lies and manipulative debate tactics. The majority of people clearly did not think too hard about the question they were going to ask or let alone research the topic of debate beforehand.

I saw people in line to ask a question using chat GPT to generate questions to ask using a prompt about how to debate Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point USA event.

Like, what the fuck is going on? Now, I fundamentally refuse to participate in quote-unquote debates like this for reasons that I will soon get into. So I just started taking notes of all the things Charlie was lying about. And I was right at the very front of the crowd. So whenever TPUSA publishes the video, Charlie Kirk destroying silly liberal college students...

You should be able to see me pretty clearly in the background in my fucking Ronald Reagan hat, just furiously scribbling down notes.

Though I would recommend watching with an ad blocker not to give Kirk extra money. The whole event was a pretty pathetic affair. By my count, there were only eight liberal-leaning challengers who questioned Kirk, compared to 13 conservative-leaning questionnaires who entered a friendly discussion with Kirk.

Out of all the liberal debaters, two backed down because they didn't want to get too political, and three others appeared to be at least somewhat swayed by Kirk and Vivek.

Now, like, I can't entirely blame these students, right? Like, this setting is not a real debate. Kirk holds all of the power. He does this for a living. And he fucking brought a friend with him to help. It's two of them versus what? It's Kirk and Vivek. There's a reason he prefers debating college students rather than working professionals. Maybe.

Most students are not prepared to effectively counter Kirk's claims and don't have enough general knowledge on current events to call him out on every one of his many lies. And even if they do catch him on something, Kirk will try to project authority to sway the uneducated audience into believing that he is correct. Just because teens are chronically online doesn't mean that they have better media literacy, critical thinking, or know how to determine the validity of information.

A 2024 survey by News Literacy America found that only 50% of teens could identify that an article labeled as branded content on a news site was in fact an advertisement. Barely over half of teens could accurately identify an op-ed with the word commentary in the headline as an opinion piece.

44% claimed that a company's own press release was more credible than an independent news report on the same subject. And 34% of teens incorrectly labeled a random picture of damaged traffic lights as quote-unquote strong evidence supporting a viral false claim that hot July temperatures had melted traffic lights.

These teens surveyed said that local TV news and TikTok were the most trustworthy sources of information. And 35% of teens said that professional journalists are more biased than social media content creators. Meanwhile, 45% said that journalists are just as biased as these TikTok influencers. Let's do a test right now. Try to see if you can determine that these following clips are in fact advertisements.

Okay, we are back. Now, this was technically my first time seeing this format of conservative YouTube debate in person. The videos that get published online later get heavily edited down. And while I was going at it in my notepad, I started to recognize the repeating patterns that Kirk and Vivek employed to gain dominance in almost every single debate matchup.

So now I'm going to talk about some of these common tactics used by Kirk. When Kirk or Vivek wants to end a particular line of questioning or move on to the next person, they'll just restate their own opinions as fact and then end that debate, leaving the impression that they won. They can just stop whenever they feel like they have made the final point that gives them victory.

Here's Vivek. The number one human attribute that our legal immigration system selects for isn't who's smart, isn't who's going to work hard, isn't who loves the country. It's are you willing to lie to the U.S. government or not? If you are, you get in. If not, you don't. That's the way it works. Thank you so much. Thank you. And here's another example from Kirk. Black Americans are treated far worse than illegals in this country.

and we have violated our social contract to our own citizens. And I just want you to think about that. Okay. Is that if you break into America, you get a flight to the city of your choosing, you get taxpayer-funded luxury hotels, you get a taxpayer-funded phone, taxpayer-funded food stamps, whereas many Americans are struggling to even make ends meet. So thank you so much for coming. What a convenient way to say a bunch of bullshit without having to back any of it up.

Now, of course, welfare programs like food stamps and even assistance to get access to smartphones, since they basically are now a requirement of everyday life,

Those programs do exist, right? Those are important programs. But those free flights to any city, that's actually a reference to New York City's reticketing program, which offers one-way bus or plane tickets out of the city. This program was actually started because the governor of Texas sent 40,000 immigrants to New York against their will.

And those quote-unquote luxury hotels are actually a small part of an emergency housing program that utilizes some converted hotels, as well as airport motels, and even office buildings as temporary shelter for immigrants. But I'm sure Kirk would rather these people just be homeless living on the street. I'm sure he wouldn't find ways to complain about that, too.

A very common Kirk tactic to avoid answering a question is just to simply flip it around and ask the students a different question that might eventually be related to the student's original question, but not necessarily. Let me ask you just one more question. Can men give birth? Can men give birth? Yeah. If they're transgender? Cue the audience's shocked response.

These people probably don't even know if this refers to a transgender woman or a transgender man. Whatever. For another example, here's how Vivek responded to a question about voter fraud allegations. Do you think Donald Trump committed a coup against the U.S. government? This was part of Kirk's response to a question about U.S. aid to Israel. What is your strong opinion about the civil war happening in the Central African Republic? For another example, a student asked Kirk...

What should be done about hate crimes against Venezuelan immigrants in cities like Chicago? So these are all just classic red herrings. Here's another. Also, simply not what a genocide is.

Now, sometimes the students can catch what Kirk is doing with red herrings and deflections. But even when drilled down on the original line of questioning, Kirk will try hard to pivot away whenever the momentum is not going in his favor. You guys are super focused on technical things that we could talk about forever. Let me just ask a question. Uh-huh.

I asked you, what is Kamala Harris's greatest accomplishment? Can you tell me what that would be? Perhaps the most common tactic Charlie Kirk employs to maintain control over the interaction is instead of just stating his opinion, Kirk will throw a question back to his opponent with the intent of getting them to say something that's in support of Kirk's own argument.

Alternatively, Kirk will ask a question that the student probably doesn't know, like some specific stat, but something that Kirk already has a prepared answer for, so that he can throw off his opponent, make them question their own ability to debate, and make himself seem smarter.

Here's a short compilation. If there was a policy that made markets more free but hurt your country, would you support it? Do you believe that FDR was right in partnering with Joseph Stalin to defeat Hitler? Yeah, so I guess two questions with tariffs. How do you avoid a tariff? Let's ask another moral question then. Is it ever okay to do something evil after an evil act? Under abortion, do you carve out a new morality?

Is there like a different kind of morality that we apply only to abortion? At what point does it get human rights? Let me ask you just a question. Do you know which nation is the biggest supplier of the US military today? You could probably guess it. Is your phone paid for by US taxpayers? Let me ask you, did you have a vacation this summer in a luxury hotel paid for by taxpayers? Ten people are murdered in Chicago.

Out of those 10, how many of those cases will be solved on average, do you think? Okay, so you said he wanted to suspend the Constitution. Did he do that when he was president? His argumentative style looks pretty goofy when it's all broken down into its respective parts. Now, to circle back to my stance of just never engaging with these bad faith debate spectacles, lastly, I'll show you what happens when you quote-unquote do well against someone like Charlie Kirk.

I think the only time Kirk was really thrown off was during one of the very last matchups, with a student asking about Kirk's support of military aid to Israel, despite his alleged anti-war stance and his call for the U.S. to pause all foreign aid until the southern border is secured.

Like usual, Kirk first tried to deflect by using red herrings and turn questions back on the student. Let me ask you just a first principle question. Do you think the Jewish people have a moral right to their ancestral ground? Absolutely not. Religions do not have any sort of right to ancestral ground. Kirk then failed to accuse the student of anti-Semitism. Kirk then tried to trick the student into saying that Hamas is more morally good than Israel.

But the student saw what Kirk was trying to do with his bizarre moralistic framing. Do you think that Israel, as it's currently constituted, is morally equivalent with Hamas? The student, quite wisely, did not answer Kirk's precariously worded yes or no question, and instead reframed the question in their own words, and only then stated their opinion that both Hamas and the IDF's actions can be constituted as evil.

Still, Kirk wouldn't relent. So which one is better? Which one is good or evil? Which one is better? His nonsensical framing was once again rejected.

But then Kirk accused the student of being propagandized and then asked if they had personally been to Israel to assess the situation. And this is when everything fell apart. Let me tell you this, that you know that there's Arabs serving in the Knesset. You know that. Yes, I know that the Arabs in Israel, which is exactly why your point of Jews saying I don't like Jews because I don't like Israel makes absolutely no sense. I'm just going to I'm going to go back to this because I think it's so interesting, though.

which is that I believe that the Jewish people do have a right to their ancestral homes. Well, first of all, you believe that they should be leveling buildings because that's their ancestral home. I'm not defending every decision they made. Well, that's exactly what they're doing. You're interrupting. I'm going to ask you the next question because you're not arguing with me. Not much to debate because I believe that Israel should exist in its current form. You do not. Thank you very much.

Okay, last couple. The moral confusion on the Israel topic, it's hard to clear up in a day like this. Again, these aren't real debates. If the conversation goes any way other than how Kirk wants it to go, he has complete control of the environment and can move on to a more desirable opponent. Because beyond convincing any gullible people that might happen to be in the crowd, the

The real reason Kirk does events like this is to make content. It's YouTube bait. These debate videos rack up thousands and sometimes millions of views on YouTube and TikTok.

And every single person that participates, as if these are real debates, is directly helping Charlie Kirk make money and grow his brand. This TPUSA brainwash tour will continue into November, and I'm sure Charlie Kirk will keep doing events like this in the years to come, regardless of who wins the election. So what's the options to counter something like this? I'm of three minds.

My default response to stuff like this is usually just to ignore. Don't give these attention hounds what they're looking for. Don't try to debate. Don't try to own a Charlie Kirk with facts and logic. There's no real benefit from engaging with him and his ilk on their own terms.

But there will always be at least a few college students who think they can get one up on Charlie Kirk. So, since these events are going to continue to happen, even if my friends and I withhold our participation...

The second option is just to simply confuse. This is what I call the Skibbity Biden strategy, one which I deployed against the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell, in front of the Israeli consulate as he tried to suck up as much attention as possible during the DNC. Hey, Mike, Skibbity Biden. What's up? Skibbity Biden. Skibbity Biden what?

This was probably my favorite moment of the DNC. This strategy of complete confusion doesn't just deny the subject what they want, if you're the MyPillow guy, attention from reporters, or in the case of Charlie Kirk, an unfair debate against a non-media trained college freshman. But the skibbity Biden strategy also eats up their time, prohibiting others from being able to engage on the terms decided upon by Turning Point USA.

The more time you spend spewing your near-unintelligible gibberish about how Warhammer connects to US foreign policy, or explaining your made-up conspiracy theory about how the Hak'tu'a girl is a CIA asset, all of that is less time for some 19-year-old to challenge Kirk on his abortion views. And annoying Charlie Kirk is just a fun bonus. Now that I think about it, this is essentially the Patton Oswalt filibuster tactic.

Now, obviously, Kirk has control of the mic and probably won't let you ramble on about gibberish for too long. So this strategy becomes more successful if you can get a whole team lined up in front of the microphone. Now, finally, the last option is disruption through force, preferably in a way that limits the possibility of creating an on-camera spectacle that can be utilized by TPUSA.

This has typically not been a common tactic used to counter turning point events on campus, but it may be time to reconsider. Forceful disruptions were often utilized when figures like Milo Yiannopoulos toured college campuses back in 2016 to 2018, and more recently against campus events featuring Daily Wire employees like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh.

Historically, this strategy has not been applied to Charlie Kirk, as he's been viewed as less radical than some of these other figures. But I just don't think that's true anymore. Kirk is spreading and normalizing hardcore xenophobic and nationalist rhetoric across college campuses with little to no resistance, not to mention his complete embrace of conspiracy theories and use of transphobia to undermine civil rights.

There's many ways to disrupt events like this through forceful means. Sound disruption, visual disruption, physical disruption. Planning an alternate event to take place at the same time and place. Big banners with Charles's tiny face carefully placed in view of the debate cameras.

Creative opportunities abound, but it requires people to be actively monitoring when and where these events take place, and actually plan a counter-demo ahead of time, and that just doesn't seem to be happening at the moment. And so, I thought going to this event would help reboot my brain, cheer myself up, and amuse me with Charlie's childish display of debate kid politics.

But it just left me more sad watching hapless kids fall prey to Kirk's transparent scheme, just feeling like I had no way to stop the train wreck. But it doesn't have to be this way. With a few friends and a little preparation, there is an alternative. And hey, it could happen here. Well, that's my recap on this fucking Charlie Kirk rally.

Oh, and heads up, next week there's going to be no Spooky Week episodes for the first time in four years. Sorry, the world has just gotten too spooky this year. Between the election and hurricanes and the genocide in Gaza and everything else happening, the world's just too spooky. I'm really just not feeling Halloween-pilled as I usually am anymore.

hopefully things will get better soon but in lieu of spooky week we actually have a special series from james on the darien gap so you have that to look forward to next week goodbye everyone see you on the other side

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

We all have that friend who wakes up early to go get everyone McDonald's breakfast while the rest of us sleep in. This is your sign to thank them. And if you're that friend, this is us saying thank you. Just a friendly reminder that right now, get any size iced coffee before 11 a.m. for just 99 cents. And a satisfying sausage McMuffin with egg is just $2.79. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer or combo meal. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, fam. I'm Simone Boyce. I'm Danielle Robay. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, the podcast from Hello Sunshine that's guaranteed to light up your day. Check out our recent episode with Grammy Award-winning rapper Eve on motherhood and the music industry. No, it's a great, amazing, beautiful thing. There's moms in all industries, very high-stress industries that have kids all across this world. Why can't it be music as well?

Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon-wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez-Rejon. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back. And this season, we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Saying that the most popular cocktail is the margarita, followed by the mojito from Cuba, and the piña colada from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.