Nazi's Getting Busted & Zuckerberg's Bro-ification
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Do you love reading as much as we do? Well, you're in luck because we're launching our first ever Betches Book Club in partnership with Nutella Biscuits because they know the best moments are even sweeter when you share a great snack with your friends. If you're in New York City, come hang out with us IRL at the Betches Book Club.

On October 28th, Aileen, Sammy, and I are hosting a book discussion with author Margot Harrison, where we'll be discussing her brand new novel, The Midnight Club, and snacking on Nutella biscuits. No, I won't be sharing mine because I'm truly obsessed and they're actually my new favorite snack in the world. But don't worry, there's going to be plenty for everyone to share. Head to bit.ly slash book club IRL to grab tickets for you and your friends. That's

bit.ly slash book club IRL for tickets. Grab yours before they sell out. Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm V Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream presented by Betches News. Where we explore the absurdities and oddities of our uniquely American experience. What a week. We are under 30 days until the United States presidential election.

And there's a lot happening. This is a packed week. I'm feeling it. I mean, we've been on the road in various capacities since June, and I really feel like I haven't been home since September. And I had a good cry last night just because I was like tired and needed a snack.

But I... That's helpful and important and therapeutic. It is. I think if you're frustrated and you feel like, oh my God, I can't believe there's still 30 days and oh my God, there's only 30 days, have a good hard cry, have a snack. It really did help me. Well, snack anytime, cry... Always. You know, I too had a cry last night. We are recording this on October 7th and it has been a really solemn day.

It's just quite, I don't know, even calling it an anniversary because it's not really over. And watching the hostages' families speak about this, it's just really heartbreaking. And I feel incredibly emotional about it as we are recording today. I know. I saw when we were going to be recording today, I was like, ugh.

And we have some stuff about this later on that Sammy's going to talk about in more detail about how it was just Jewish New Year and yet New Year, same shit, and what we can do to deal with it. We can just talk about it up top. Sure. I mean, right now, it's midday. But even before, even this past week, the FBI and the DHS had issued joint warnings that there could be violence online.

They called out Iran for having involvement in that. And then I don't know if you saw over the weekend, these protests in London and in Rome are so horrific. Just to call them pro-Palestinian is honestly an insult because they are pro-Hamas and they're beating cops up. And I don't see how any of this helps the average Palestinian in Gaza at

or people in Lebanon. And it's really, it was a very emotional Rosh Hashanah New Year. And it's an emotional day today. And my heart goes out to our Jewish listeners. There were some protests here in New York City also yesterday that Cornel West had showed up to. And now we're introducing the idea of

interfering in the election or trying to sway the election against Kamala Harris simply for attention in many ways. The truth is the only administration that will do anything to try and end the war over there would be a Harris administration. And we know that she has differed from Biden on strategy, but she's the vice president. They don't set policies or agendas. I do think that she might be afforded

the luxury or whatever we want to call it to stand a little stronger against Netanyahu in some ways and ensure that what's going on in their elections aren't driving the continued unrest in that space. Well, they're not having elections. That's kind of the problem. Right.

So it's a really difficult time, and I think it's difficult to watch so many people who I think have a good heart when it comes to wanting to see humanity worldwide get swept up into some of the subsects of the Free Palestine Movement that have become infected by Iranian propaganda to the point that we are seeing things like people siding with the Iranian regime.

And other Iranian creators who have been leaders in the Free Palestine Movement and educating on what's going on in the Arab world are saying like, you guys, these are the people that killed Masa Amini. You can't start to align with them. And social media is turning on those creators even. It is this constant chase for moral superiority and makes people short-term followers.

Absolutely. I think one of the hardest things about this is parsing out who is a bad actor across the board and who is sort of an unwitting, I don't want to say pawn, but who is a bad actor across the board.

you know, acting in a way that is aligned with bad actors without necessarily being fully aware of the full picture. And I think you see this, you see this kind of on all the dimensions of it. And that's why I thought Kamala Harris's answer on 60 Minutes about Netanyahu and the Israelis was so good when she was asked about

you know, her alliance with Netanyahu and the, how much leverage they have. And she basically said, you know, the more important question is whether the Israeli people and the American people are allied. And the answer is that they are. And I thought that that really got at

a point that goes under the radar. And part of the reason for that is because there are bad actors who seek to bury that distinction. And this is not a simple situation, despite

what people might want you to think. I mean, we know that one-third of people get their news from TikTok and two-thirds of people get their opinion from the comments. This was updated research from Pew and the Poinier Institute. And

What is happening is these comment sections are getting absolutely just littered with bot opinions. I can tell when it's happening in my comments and I fix my keywords to ensure that that doesn't poison the well in many ways of what the actual opinion of people are because I'm all for accountability, but I'm not for having the bots influence your opinion to start another round of hate.

And it started last week where no matter what video I was posting, it was almost like, again, it was just coming through. Why are you listening to this Zionist? Which is now, of course, being used as a slur, but it was a video about climate change. It had nothing to do with the subject. But these are calculated attacks.

And we have to be a little bit more social media literate when it comes to parsing out what is a real comment, what is just there to sow divisiveness, what is there to try and make you not trust the trustworthy people that you had found on social media. They do this with the major media and now they do it with social media news influencers as well. So we're just got to stay looking out for each other.

Yeah. And I will say, I know maybe we've sort of discussed this. We have discussed this a little bit for my next kind of long explainer is that maybe it feels obvious to us, but there is a hybrid war. There's a hybrid war going on being waged against the United States, including on our election. And it's against the whole West, including those protests that you see in London and in Rome that are pro-Hamas.

including all of these bots that are saying that Kamala Harris went on call her daddy instead of dealing with Hurricane Helene. We'll get to that in short later in this episode. And a lot of it is coming from the lack of regulation, which is a choice on these social media platforms. You have a multi-front war being waged on Americans and our consciousness on this election. And

So tell me if you think it's time that I finally make that video. I think it's a good time for it. I mean, we talk a lot about preservation also, and I know it's going to take a lot out of you to do that. So as long as you feel in a good place to move forward with it, then I think it's a good time to talk about it.

Like I have said to you over the last year, it was like a year ago when I was like, Sammy, people are calling me a Zionist. Like it's a slur online. What's a Zionist? Like I didn't even, I was so out of touch with what these terms and the history of this all meant. And you've had to like really catch me up for me to even begin to understand why in the history of using that term as a slur. And then you found that article from the seventies where, I mean, that could have been written today. It's this, like we said, new Jewish new year, same old shit.

I posted it on my Instagram feed on – at Sammy is my account. I'm sure many of you know that. And it was – it's – I don't know. I just can't escape this feeling of like, oh my God, this is just inescapable as a Jewish person. And the complexity of this identity is really weighing on me. Not to –

self-victimize or anything. Well, I mean, and it doesn't help that I'm like not super up on these things and you're my Jewish guide to the world. And so I'm like, Sammy, this horrible thing is happening. How are you feeling? Okay, now please explain it to me in detail because I don't understand it, right? And I want to make sure I do. Yeah.

I think you could have way worse people as your Jewish guides to the world. You're a very good guide, but I mean, it's the emotional labor that you've put onto like not just experiencing this, but having to kind of shepherd everybody else through catching them up on it while we're all swimming in just troves of misinformation and hate and redirection. I'll be honest. I think that that actually helps me process it so that, because also like this isn't my first experience.

Yeah.

So I had that processing. My grandparents were in Auschwitz, not my dad's parents were in Auschwitz. It's just this feeling I'm so acquainted with and this helps me process it. I need to make sense of it. Freud would say that I do a lot of intellectualization or maybe sublimation. I don't know. But it does help me to talk about it

Kind of like therapy a little bit. Yeah. And also it makes me feel actually more comfortable that I can speak so openly with you because there's sort of this feeling that I know a lot of Jews have, like everyone hates us. We have no friends who are not also Jews. And so thank you for giving me a space where I feel like, oh, I can trust you. I know you'd hide me.

I would. Well, it's the Romani side of me. I mean, we're going to be in there together, Sammy. Let's be real. They're rounding up the gays, the gypsies, the Jews. We're all, it's all like, and I can't believe it's happening again. And it's happening here in America because when I think about the sacrifices that my grandmother's family made, my mother's mother made to escape Albania and fascism and all of the heat and things that we were experiencing there, trafficking, just horrible, horribleness. And that we're just two generations off

from potentially fighting it and here in what was supposed to be the safe place. What was the place that they gave up everything to come to because it would never happen to us here. We would be able to build new culture here. We would never be a victim of what they did in Europe. We were going to be smarter and younger and more agile. And I think it is just really interesting and difficult, but also to your point in some way comforting that we do find that

the people who are helpers. We do find other people who are hurt by the same things as us. And that is oftentimes the best way to develop a strategy to survival. You don't need to look for a hero. You need to look for a comrade. You need to look for somebody else who you can join with to fight all of these horrible things that are happening.

And we do have some good news. Not the communist comrade. Not the communist comrade. The buddy. You got to find a battle buddy. Well, a buddy, a pal. You know I say, you know, Romani, I don't know, seems like someone may have changed their papers or converted because they had to. Yeah. Just the chance is very high when you're talking about that region of Europe. So, you know, natural sympathies.

Well, and the term pal is a Romani word. I don't know if you know that. Yeah, it means brother. And that's how we address everybody. It's like, hey, pal. It's like a hey, brother. Hey, family member. So yeah. Look at that. See, we had to find a pal. Here we are. And now we have them. And well, here's the thing. We are not yet at that point.

I mean, there are so many terrible things that have happened, hate crimes that have happened in America, but we are not yet at that point that we're talking about that our ancestors have gotten to. And this is the chance that we're staring down the barrel of, no pun intended, to change this course where we don't have to go in this direction anymore.

and reactivate some of these traumas, although it's pretty activated already. But that's, for me at least, what this election and any of my activism is really about.

I also want to add that this speaks to someone who we're going to be interviewing later in the week, Paola Ramos, who has written an amazing book called Defectors, where she speaks about white supremacy in the Latino community and why basically an increasing percentage of Latinos are connecting with Trump and with the far right wing. And I think that there is...

a certain familiarity in everything that I was reading. And she talks a lot about how trauma leads people to be attracted to a strong man. And I just felt it's so relevant. And I'm very excited for us to interview her later in the week. I am too. Well, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we've got a little shot in Florida for the white supremacists. Stick around. It does get better.

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Welcome back, friends. Sammy, are you ready for a little schadenfreude? Always. That's the German word for happiness we feel at the misfortune of others. And I thought it was the perfect word, also my favorite word from a musical, to describe something that just happened. Yes. Obviously. Obviously. Absolutely.

So few things make me happier than seeing white supremacist Nazis rounded up and put in prison, which is exactly what happened last week when the Department of Justice busted 68 American Nazis in the San Fernando Valley of California.

Now, the burn is twofold here. One, white cops arresting white supremacists who thought the law would be on their side because they're both white. That is chef's kiss. That will prove to you that their ideas of white supremacy are so incredibly deeply flawed. And I just like to imagine the moment where they were like, I thought we were on the same side. And the cops were like, no.

Get in the back. Why would that ever happen? No, the race wars aren't real. And if they were, you wouldn't win them as a white supremacist because being an American Nazi is a special kind of traitorous and stupid and no one is going to choose you. Like y'all's grandpappies were the ones that went to fight the Nazis and now you're going to act like this? For shame. For shame.

Oh, yeah. I mean, the race wars are invented by people who invented the great replacement theory, which comes from the protocols of the elders of Zion. Look at that. Nonsense. Right back here. We're right back at the same, you know, Tucker Carlson's favorite protocols. So the second part of the story that I took joy in was the name of the white supremacist terrorist cell that they busted.

They went by the name the Peckerwoods. It's okay. You can laugh. It's always, like we said last week, it always comes down to something weird and sexual. It always. So Peckerwoods is the name that they gave themselves. It did originate as a prison slang term for Caucasian inmates. And yes, it means exactly what you think.

Now, these guys are wildly dangerous and deranged. They've committed a litany of crimes and just absolutely terrorized the San Fernando Valley. They tattoo on themselves SFV, which you would think maybe stands for San Fernando Valley. Nope. It also means searching for victims. So these are deranged, deranged, sick criminals, okay? Like not taking anything away from the horrors that they inflicted on this area. Yeah, they're-

There is this whole thing where it's like the hyper-masculinity comes around like a horseshoe that it's so not masculine. No. It's just so pathetic. They're also responsible for a hand gesture. They invented this hand gesture that you've seen some Republican politicians do. It's that sign where they put their fingers up like this to make a W and then they go like that to make a P. That was them? They came up with the white power sign. That's a

That's theirs. And that has spread far beyond the Peckerwoods and their issues. So they got hit with the 76 count federal grand jury indictment that alleged they engaged in years long patterns of racketeering activity that included trafficking of drugs, including fentanyl, illegal firearms possession and COVID-19 benefits loan fraud. Speaking of the fentanyl, this speaks to a tactic that we see across the board.

which is people creating the problem that they then weaponize on the internet. So where do you think they're getting this fentanyl? Not from good actors. They're getting it from bad actors. And then those same bad actors or people who are proxies of theirs or allied with them are then on the internet making people –

aware and afraid this problem that they have just created or exacerbated. Every accusation that comes from them is an admission. And that's why it's a hybrid war. Yep.

So the Peckerwoods, turns out, are the ones that are predominantly bringing in the fentanyl through whatever means and not the migrants seeking asylum from political violence that the U.S. perpetuated by destabilizing places like Venezuela. Okay. Turns out it's not the women with babies strapped to their backs swimming through razor wire for the chance to work and become an American that are doing the drug smuggling. It is the white supremacist gangs who call themselves Peckerwoods.

Now, during this investigation, law enforcement seized large quantities of illegal firearms and dozens of pounds of fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin. All the favorites were there. This is all according to the indictment. Now, Sammy, who are you picturing as I'm telling the story? Who do you think the leaders were of the Peckerwoods? What visuals come to mind?

They have swastika. They're muscly men with swastika tattoos and motorcycles. That is true.

But their leader was an American lady Nazi. Okay, so this I thought was very interesting as well. At the top of the ticket was a white woman. Her name was Trish, which tracks. Trish? Trish. She's the head of the gang? Trish is the head of the Peckerwoods. She's 62, and they called her the SFV Mama. Now, I am all for women's rights and women's wrongs, but babes, this is not the way. I was shocked.

And it wasn't as rare as I thought. So the DOJ has been busting up these hate groups. And it was just last month that they busted the so-called Terrorgram Collective, which was a transnational terrorist group. They charged them with- Transnational. See? That's Kamala Harris's favorite type of people to prosecute. And they charged this group, this Terrorgram Collective, with 15 counts of soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support for terrorists.

that was also led by a woman. Now she had a bunch of dudes down ballot, I guess I would call it for their structure that she was directing, but this is not, I'm not making excuses for them because I think everybody has choices that they make. But I have always said that life is very difficult for men 13 to 25 because that's when you're just like demanded to be a man, but not really taught what that truly can mean.

And they fall to the Manosphere and the Broverse and all that stuff, get red-pilled on 4chan, but also can become victims of these sort of Black Widow women who make them feel included, maybe give them that motherly affirmation that they could be missing. And so when we think about our young men, we can't just think about trying to save them from the Maniverse, but also from...

Anybody who seeks to tell them what it is to be a man and tells them that that means violence. Are you suggesting like a honeypot situation or just like an emotionally manipulative situation?

sort of situation? I think it's both in this case. I think we will find out, but I think there are lots of ways in which I have seen in at least these last two examples of the women who were leading these white supremacist organizations that there was a certain level of power that they exploited in having these men act as their soldiers. And

And whether that was sex-based or not, I don't know. But I think there's a lot of emotional manipulation that happens in addition to keep them feeling so loyal and like they are doing the right thing. Because the thing we see a lot in radicalization, especially of men, is their protective instinct being triggered, but for the wrong victim. And you see this with MAGA, right? The immigrants are the problem. Trans children are the problem. You have to protect

America and our families and our girls from these villains. And in fact, like they are aligning themselves with the bad people. That's a great way of putting it. And that is such a true explanation of what is happening in that sort of situation.

So, I mean, we're busting up these poor white supremacist hate groups. I don't mean poor as in like poor them. I mean like literally low-income white supremacist hate groups. And it's great. We should be doing that. But I'm going to need Merrick Garland to get on bringing a case forward to investigate the election interference, FEC violations, and whatever else is going on with the richest man in the world, Mr. Elon Musk, and his dark MAGA new-like thing he's doing. I don't see how any of this is –

It's not. I mean, so Elon leads a super PAC and PACs and campaigns can't cross over. So we know that he's broke campaign finance laws. We know he has violated FEC protections.

And he's just – I don't even think he's doing it on purpose. I think he's just not talented or smart enough to know the shit he's doing is downright election interference and illegal. But unless we hold him accountable – and I don't mean the Merrick Garland style, let's build a case for a year and then make him accountable. I'm talking like now. I happen to disagree with you that he doesn't know what he's doing. I think he knows exactly what he's doing and he weaponizes an image of

seeming like a silly little man when it's convenient, when in reality he knows exactly what he's doing. He knows that giving Donald Trump all that free media on X is an FEC violation likely. He knows that spreading disinformation and allowing his platform to spread disinformation while hindering, for example, the dossier about J.D. Vance, having that taken down,

and he also knows that his pack set up

fake voter registration websites. He then fed to people on Twitter. And then when people who lived in swing states would put in their zip code, it would take them to a fake voter registration website. But the people who lived not in swing states would be sent to their real voter registration website. He knows that that was happening because it was his own PAC and his own company that was perpetuating that scam. So he knows exactly what he's doing. How do we not interfere?

How do we not interfere now? I know this idea of like, we don't want to look political, but like, we also can't let this happen. We would have to have a, we would have to ask someone at the DOJ. Maybe we should submit a question. I'm going to be in DC tomorrow. I'm going to ask. Yeah.

In my time with Kirby, I'll be like, hey, can we maybe, I don't know, arrest Elon Musk? I don't know. He's definitely not going to say yes to that. But it really... I know. I just have so many questions because I'm also wondering. I'm getting a ton of questions and guys, I just don't have the answer for this yet.

As to these GoFundMes that Trump has set up to allegedly help hurricane victims, why is a billionaire like Trump setting up GoFundMes and then there is no actual charity listed? What are you doing? There's so much weird money stuff. It's always a grift. It's been a grift from the beginning.

There's just no limits to it. And I think the human brain can't compute that there are no limits to the corruption here. It will only get worse if he's allowed. Until he is stopped, it will continue to get worse. And it's not just the people like Musk who are now endorsing a candidate.

I've been really surprised to see what's going on with Mark Zuckerberg lately. I mean, the broification of Mark Zuckerberg is a thing, and he was in the news, this time for refusing to endorse a political candidate while making clear that he's got a favorite in the race. Zuckerberg said a few months ago that he doesn't want politics on Meta and that the algorithm would be suppressing political and news posts. They had basically changed everyone's setting to automatically suppress

select an option so that you wouldn't be fed political content. If you wanted to be fed that, you had to go in and change the setting. At one point, even if you would change the setting, it had reset again. However, there is still a ton of political content if you go on Facebook, even if you go on the Instagram explore page. And not only that, but there's nothing that stops bots from

from attacking all of these pages. If you go live, there's so many bots. I'll get followed by dozens at a time. There's also a ton of lifestyle content that is, I guess you'd call it tradwife content or sort of questionable medical advice that leads you into the anti-vax world.

or, you know, really not credible sciences, I guess you could call them.

Yeah, they're still allowing RFK Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Greene to post about the benefits of raw milk, which is the craziest thing to me on Facebook. And then there's all the AI. Boomers just sharing AI-generated images of Donald Trump walking through the storms, carrying children and pets, Jesus appearing in front of Trump. And they're allowed to just share freely all this AI propaganda art, mostly to their followers that reaffirm with thousands of likes that

these boomers reposts and whatnot. And it's not just boomers, because I think there's plenty of boomers who don't fall victim to this. We're talking about probably not listeners of this show, but maybe some of your neighbors or parents, which are either so deeply into Fox News and they don't care. They decided that they just want to live in the world of what could be true. And when they go to the internet, they enjoy seeing what they see. But he's not taking any of that down. And

And then I was like, there has to be more to this than just Zuckerberg giving up, right? So it turns out this journalist, Alejandra Caraballo, last month tweeted that Meta had hired a former Project 2025 staffer and former Ron DeSantis chief of staff as its director of public policy for the South. Now, this coincides with the decline in moderation of anti-LGBTQ hate on Meta while limiting the reach of LGBTQ accounts.

This guy who had bragged about getting this job at Facebook has since deactivated and deleted his LinkedIn and is very much trying to hide the fact that he is working at Meta, which to me may be even more scary. Right. Well, maybe something had occurred that maybe he had gotten threats or attacked.

I understand why he wouldn't want people to know because we're talking about it right here. He doesn't want people to know that Meta is unfairly favoring Trump and allowing a lot of this propaganda to come through. So,

So this guy, Dustin Carmack, served as the chief of staff to the director of national intelligence starting in 2020 and left basically when Trump left office. Since being exposed for getting this job at Meta, he's deleted his LinkedIn and they have deleted all the information off his page at the Heritage Foundation. So they've made it very difficult to research things he's contributed to, including the chapters he contributed to in Project 2025. That I would be curious to see.

I'm sure somebody can, I'm sure someone can find that. That has to be archived. Well, the Wayback Machine has delivered, and now we know that this guy is anti-China and was likely behind some of Trump's new talking points about putting a 20% tariff on Chinese goods.

He's also very anti-TikTok. And while Trump has said he's not going to ban TikTok to keep getting that sweet, sweet money from Jeffrey, yes, if he were to get into the administration, it seems that he could be influenced to ban TikTok. I think that may be why he was hired. He also reportedly wrote the code on how they would analyze data to root out folks that had been, quote, unloyal to Trump and punish them.

This is a very dangerous guy they've got working at Facebook with access to all of the Facebook data, you would assume. So I'm going to file this under things to watch because much of the story is shrouded in mystery. And again, it's like one of these things we're like right in the middle of it. But it should be noted that Zuck has picked up on some of the Theo Bro theocracy learnings based on that Curtis Yarvin guy, the one that influenced J.D. Vance that we continue to talk about.

For a great breakdown on Curtis Yarvin and his influence on folks like J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and now seemingly Zuckerberg, check out the Behind the Bastards podcast episode on him. It is incredible. It is scary. Curtis Yarvin has convinced these guys that because they're tech savvy, they are inherently better than everyone else and that the United States should be broken up into tiny monarchies that are run by tech giants instead of a national democracy.

So the idea is like Zuckerberg could maybe take all of California and Hawaii and he would be the prince monarch of that area. And then he would negotiate trade with JD Vance, who would own the Midwest territory and everything. The scariest thing about Curtis Yarvin is he thinks anybody who can't contribute is

to the greater expansion of tech, this is what he said, that they should either be imprisoned and programmed or they should be killed and we should come up with a way to accelerate the process of mass decomposition so that we could extract fossil fuels from the bones of people he considers not useful. That is so disturbing. That's dark as fuck.

There's the people we hear about who are the front of things, and then there are the...

if you want to call it that, of some very, very, very dystopian stuff. The fact that J.D. Vance is a, you know, apostle of this man is very concerning because we could look at like from the human experience of like Trump and what's going on. But that second layer, that shadow layer is very, very dark. That's what I think was so scary about the VP debate and why it was such a long-term problem is that J.D. Vance seemed too eminently reasonable for the ideologies that he actually believes were

including Curtis Yarvin, who also was really influential, or Peter Thiel. We've done an episode about this. It's a few weeks, months back now on the trifecta that's trying to, that's competing in a sense to rule America. And it also ties into this plan for these freedom cities, where people will be able to establish their own fiefdoms as long as they are aligned with

their ideologies of white supremacist technocracy where women do not have the right to vote. And pretty much anyone who they don't deem worthy won't have the right to vote. Well, they talk about the importance of preserving white females for reproduction and protecting white children. So I mean, a lot of the stuff, which is, this is what I think why they hate the trans people so much,

is because if trans people can prove and validate the idea that gender is a spectrum or that gender isn't this type binary traditional roles aren't required to live a successful, happy life, then, you know, the women's are going to start to get some ideas. And they just, it all comes back to the, this idea of technocrats enslaving women to, to,

be essentially broodmares for white supremacy. And it is so dystopian and gross and weird. And I think we just need to keep putting light on it. It's hard to talk about though, because to accuse somebody of something so crazy makes you look crazy.

And it's like, no, it's written. You only got to show the sources. That's what we got to do. I don't know how J.D. Vance is going to factor into this with his interracial marriage, but apparently they've got it figured out somehow. Clarence Thomas has been living with that contradiction for quite a while. So anyway, let's take a break and then we will close out with our Americant.

Welcome back, friends. It is time for what is quickly my favorite segment, the Americant, where we get to just like rant about something that is just so annoying. You know what I mean? There's like, ugh. Get it together. I, for one, cannot believe that the weather has become – the building blocks of small talk has now become the source of our conflagration. Hurricane Helene.

really, really tragic. It is Katrina level devastation in North Carolina and parts of Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina. Certain rural areas have been hit really, really hard. And these are places that were 300 miles inland were not prepared for such a surge. So can't hide from climate change.

There are new rivers. I mean, that's the thing. Like, I've got a lot of friends out in Nashville who own restaurants. And I was like, what can I do to help? And they were like, do you have access to a bulldozer? There is nothing but to level...

certain areas and try to rebuild them. There's no amount of money you can send me that's going to fix this house. There's no amount of money that's going to rebuild and fix up the restaurant. We're going to have to completely level what existed because there are new river patterns that were developed on account of this hurricane. It literally changed the course of some rivers that now go straight through like my friend Annie Salon.

Where the salon was in Asheville can no longer be there because there's a river there now. We may be getting an American Venice. We might. It is so disturbing. And then on top of it, the quickness that the hurricane of lies came out was next level. And again, this goes back to the hybrid warfare of it all. This is not organic that people are –

spreading all this disinformation, although Elon Musk, for one, has been supporting the spread of disinformation both through his platform and through his own words. But let's start by saying that the government is already taking steps to combat misinformation and disinformation. It is not possible for us to address every piece of information, every rumor that is spread.

But FEMA has set up a website where you can actually fact check some of these rumors that you've heard reported. We're going to put the website link in the show notes so that you can check it out yourself. It's a little bit long to read, but I did think that that was a really good proactive response.

But we still want to address some of the common lies that we're seeing and what's actually true. Shall we begin? Let's do it. All right. FEMA money was used for migrants. False. These are entirely separate budgets, and that is a completely fabricated statement. It also started coming out before there was even a response to

because the storm was still kind of going. Even Mike Johnson admitted on Fox News that these budgets are entirely different. The next lie was that people can only get $750 in assistance total, but we're sending millions to Ukraine and to Israel.

First of all, all the money is allocated and budgeted by Congress. So you can't take money from one bucket and move it to the other without an act of Congress. That's just straight up how the civics works. And secondly, that's not true. There is a piece of legislation from a long time ago that allowed, it used to be 700, now it's 750, so that the day that something strikes, the government can get money into your account because what you need when disaster strikes you first is cash. Then you need longstanding rebuilding options.

So the $750 is like every single thing in your fridge just went bad and you have to buy some food. You don't have access to diapers or maybe you need to get a hotel or whatever the case may be. That $750 cash is just to immediately survive for a period of time to try and make sure people don't starve or whatever straight off. And then they were complaining, well, you have to apply online to get the $750. Well, if we properly funded FEMA –

Then, yeah, we could have dropped rescue workers down there who could have with a pen and paper been taking people's names. But y'all didn't want to fund FEMA. The Republicans didn't want to fund it. Trump actually thought we should completely get rid of the FEMA department and the states should handle it. Can you imagine if Ron DeSantis was in charge of allocating funds? Right. And also that $750 is not a cap.

The Biden administration has designated dozens of counties as major disaster areas, meaning that they can then apply for federal assistance, which will be even larger numbers. And it will definitely be dependent on the type of damage that's

Speaking of funding for disaster relief, people are also saying that Biden should convene Congress to get them funds immediately.

And they are rightfully citing that Amendment 2, Section 3 of the Constitution gives the president the ability to convene Congress. But the context of that and the application of that goes a little bit further than folks are giving it credit for. Like anything in government, just because it says it like that doesn't mean there's not a huge bureaucratic process behind it.

This process of the president being able to convene Congress is used for State of the Union. It is when the president says, I'm calling the State of the Union and he tells the Speaker of the House to convene Congress for the State of the Union, or he tells the Speaker of the House we need to convene Congress so I can declare war or declare the end of war. This is the only times that these have been used because it is the Speaker of the House's job to convene Congress. And the president can't do shit until the Speaker of the House is convinced. And I did a TikTok on this.

But for those of you who want to be able to fight this misinformation, Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution allows the president to convene Congress. From there, his request goes to the Department of Justice. The Solicitor General draws up a yes, the president should convene Congress. It's worth all of the cost and inconvenience to bring Congress back to Washington, D.C. when they're adjourned.

And this is why that document goes to the Speaker of the House, who then says, you know what? I totally agree. Thank you. Check, check, check. Checks and balances. And then the Speaker of the House convenes Congress. Mike Johnson has said he will not convene Congress and wants to wait until after the election, which doesn't help people who are in dire straits right now. But what's working for the Republicans is being able to say Biden's not doing anything when it is actually, again, the Republicans obstructing

the movements of our government. As usual. So here we are. So now you know. Same thing with immigration. Now you know. As we know, it's very similar to what happened with the immigration bill.

So they are counting on the idea that the American public is not educated mostly because they have also decimated the Department of Education in so many ways. And like Trump said, I love an uneducated person. You are not uneducated. Share this with every single person you know. They also are relying on the assistance of these online disinformation campaigns. And that's the next thing.

Which brings us to perhaps our most stupid rumor, which is that Kamala Harris went on Call Her Daddy instead of dealing with the hurricane and going to help hurricane victims. What actually happened is that she had canceled the initially scheduled recording, which was supposed to be on Monday in Las Vegas.

So that she could go deal with the hurricane and she rescheduled for later in the week. And as we know, she did go meet with hurricane victims. And she also was in Washington meeting with FEMA officials. So she's been very involved, which brings us to what the government response actually has been so far, because we've just been telling you what it's not.

Up to this point, FEMA has already provided $110 million in federal aid. That's in the past week alone. There are 700 FEMA staff members on the ground, plus 1,200 search and rescue personnel just in North Carolina alone.

In addition to that, there are 1,500 active duty army troops. There were 1,000 sent last week. And then over the weekend, Biden approved the deployment of 500 more. There's also, like we had said earlier, major disaster declarations in dozens of counties. So residents can apply for federal assistance.

And while this is a really hard cleanup, no matter what happens, we even had Republican North Carolina Senator acknowledging that the state had what it need. And he called out the disinformation and people who are trying to weaponize this as a divisive issue. He said the last thing that the victims of Haleen need right now is political posturing, finger pointing, or conspiracy theories that only hurt the response effort.

That is the Republican senator of North Carolina who has said that the federal government has been responsive, and that has been the overwhelming response from officials on the ground. Let's bring back the civics for another second. Biden doesn't actually get to decide what the states do in terms of supporting hurricane recovery. He only gets to approve requests, and he has approved every single request for every single dollar, National Guard member, federal

Food, water, they're using mules and drones and helicopters to drop aid to people. There is not one request that's come from a governor, red state, blue state, whatever you want to call them, that Biden hasn't immediately activated on. So folks who are like, well, he could just write an executive order and do this and that. No, he can't, babes. That's a dictator.

And we don't live under a dictatorship. He can only approve requests that comes in from the governors. Well, that is what they want. They think they want it until they realize that those people – Marsha Blackburn and Rick Scott are two senators, one from Tennessee, one from Florida. Both voted to defund FEMA. Both are asking the government right now for aid and giving themselves credit for the aid that Biden has approved from their governors. And not for nothing –

There was reporting last week from former senior Trump officials about how he had handled disaster responses, and they had said that he withheld aid from places or tried to withhold aid from places that he perceived as not being politically loyal to him. So, for example, in 2018, when there were the wildfires in California, he initially refused to unlock FEMA aid, which Joe Biden has –

not done. And again, it's not that he could just call up the aid. He had to get a request and he was going to deny that request until he, because he thought that California was all liberal and they don't like him in California. But then he learned that there were more Trump voters in Orange County than in the entire state of Iowa. So he decided to say yes to the aid requests. Yeah.

That happened on at least two other occasions, according to these sources. So that is the kind of situation you could be finding yourself in if you vote for Donald Trump. And that was in the first term. That's when he was still thinking he might have to earn a second term. The man has said, you'll only have to vote one more time and you'll never have to vote again. He ain't going to be trying to earn any votes in the second term. He's going to be working on the dictatorship and overturning all of our institutions. Right.

Speaking of institutions, just to end with the last thing here, there was some news that came in as we started recording that the Supreme Court is letting a lower court decision that bans emergency abortions

stand. We had Amanda Zyrowski on. She is one of the 20 women who was from the state of Texas suing, saying that Texas abortion bans were not allowing women to get emergency medical care as they're supposed to. The Supreme Court has now decided that they're going to let that stand, which keeps women in Texas and in states with these abortion bans in great danger. Something that's kind of

unusual right now and we don't have the answer to is there were no publicly noted dissents to this decision. So I'm wondering like,

What happened? Why there are no liberal justice dissents to this decision? The Biden administration had asked the justices to throw out the lower court order, arguing that hospitals have to perform abortions in emergency situations under federal law, but the Supreme Court is saying no. Well, this news broke just before the episode, so I have a feeling we will have more analysis, but we didn't want to leave you without that information because it is a big deal. And here's the thing, when it comes to

People saying, oh, they support exceptions. Donald Trump supports exceptions. The Republicans support exceptions. Actually, they don't. In theory, they may think that they support exceptions. But when it comes down to a woman who is having a miscarriage, who is facing the fact of the matter of an exception, and whether they will be receiving the required medical care,

The answer is no. And you see that courts, who it shouldn't be at their mercy anyway, have refused to clarify what that means. So doctors will continue to exist and function in fear of being prosecuted for doing their jobs. And women will continue to suffer the health and –

in some cases, fatal consequences. So I got to vote for Kamala Harris and for blue all down the ballot. And I do mean all down your ballot. There is an 80% of Democrats who vote for the president do not fill out their full ballot. This is new information I just learned from Vote Save America, and it shocked me. And it's because Democrats are much more likely to not want to vote for somebody if they don't truly know a lot about them. And sometimes you get in there and you're like, I have no idea who this sheriff is. I don't know.

So you can go to votesaveamerica.com and it'll show you your ballot so you can research people because, guys, we cannot have an 80% fall off in the down ballot. That's how you see things like a Democratic governor, a Democratic president, but then like Republican state senators and state legislature. It's because of that down ballot fall off. For Republicans, it's only 37. Republicans are much more likely to just click red all the way down. That definitely does say something about the two parties. Yeah.

Not sure what. I'll let you do that. Ethics and integrity be damned. Just vote blue all the way down, guys. Please. I promise you they're going to be okay. Let's hope. Let's hope. So that's it for us for this week. As always, checking on the social media. This is a fast-moving world that we're in right now. I do have an awful lot of hope for this election. I have an awful lot of hope for the community that we've built, even through these really difficult times.

you know, they'll never be able to take that away from us. So we're going to keep trying. Absolutely. Until next time, I'm Vida Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream. American Fever Dream is produced and edited by Samantha Gatzik. Social media by Candice Monega and Bridget Schwartz. Be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Betches News and follow me, Sammy Sage at Sammy and V at Under the Desk News. And of course, send us your emails to AmericanFeverDream at Betches.com.

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