It Could Happen Here Weekly 238

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Whether you're a seasoned NFL fan or new to the game, there's one place to keep up with all of it. The league's newest podcast, The NFL Report, hosted by me, Andrew Siciliano, it is your home for everything football. Breaking news, expert analysis, game picks, and here from your favorite players too. Join me at an all-star cast of experts for everything you need to know from around the league. Get new episodes of The NFL Report, Monday through Friday, all season long. Listen to The NFL Report podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - Cool, so media. - Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. (upbeat music) Welcome to It Could Happen Here on Garrison Davis. This show originally focused on the potentiality of a second American Civil War and the conditions or events that might set one in two motion. And we will return to that topic later this episode. But first, let me introduce my guest, friend of the pod artist and noted live streamer, Bailey Newposter. - I don't like that that's what we're attributing to me nowadays, but that's, you know, that's fine. - That's fair. - Hello everybody. - Thank you for coming back on the show. Let's start our main topic. Last summer, President Trump announced a UFC championship fight at the White House in 2026 as a part of the festivities for America's 250th birthday. The event was initially planned to take place on July 4th, but last October Trump announced it was rescheduled to take place on Flag Day, June 14th, which coincides with his 80th birthday. Come Memorial Day, a giant claw-like canopy was being erected on the South Lawn right in front of the White House. The event officially titled UFC Freedom 250 had a lower capacity than originally envisioned, just 4,000 attendees, far from the 25,000 spectators on the White House grounds that Trump pitched last summer. The 4,000 seats in the miniature stadium arena were invite only. Most tickets went to members of the military, while Trump had 1,000 tickets to give out at his discretion. Though there were 85,000 free tickets to watch the fights on big screens from the ellipse park near the Washington Monument. UFC Freedom 250 was streamed on Paramount Plus and began with Trump and UFC CEO Dana White walking together from the Oval Office to the Octagon, Zach Brown, song of the National Anthem, featuring a military flyover. This was a $60 million production with fireworks, dirt bike tricks, and music by the US Marine Band, which played Trump's favorite song YMCA. Billionaires like David Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg were in attendance along with members of Trump's cabinet and politicians. Before the first fight, USC announcer Bruce Buffer kicked things off in a way that really encapsulated the entire event. And I'll show you this clip here and I'll have the audience listen to the audio. From the south lawn of the White House in Washington, DC. For UFC Freedom 250, presented by Rand Trucks, nothing stops Ram and by crypto.com, the world's leading cryptocurrency platform. It's sponsorships on the White House lawn. Let's go, dude. Crypto shoutouts literally within 30 seconds of like the actual event like starting. Like after the anthem, like when the fight starts, within 30 seconds, we get cryptocurrency ads. And I mean, the stage was covered in logos for red, white, and blue monster energy. Meta Rumble, the far right video streaming platform. Crypto.com, as mentioned, stake gambling and of course, polymarket. UFC fighters were actually paid in the form of a crypto coin called USD1 issued by the Trump family's own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Awesome. Crypto all the way in this event. But UFC Freedom 250 went off largely without a hitch. Save for a stunt pulled by UFC heel, Josh Hookett, after winning his heavyweight match, where he called Michelle Obama a man while being interviewed by Joe Rogan. (laughing) Oh, that's probably one of my favorite conspiracy theories. The Michelle Obama is a man. It's pretty old. People have been writing that for like over a decade. That's a classic. I like the ones that mix it with Michelle Obama is a man and Obama used to be a woman. Those are the ones that I really respect. That's a solid straight T for T relationship there. Yeah. Joe Rogan never addressed this comment for the rest of the night. And the UFC cut out this comment from Hookett from the YouTube upload. And it's been issuing takedown requests across social media. UFC CEO Dana White told Time Magazine that he's quote, "completely against saying nasty and false things about people's families. Everyone knows my position on free speech, but I hate that kind of nonsense," unquote. But according to the FBI, this event could have gone very differently. On the morning of Tuesday, June 16th, the DOJ announced that the FBI and law enforcement had prevented a mass casualty attack attempting to kill government officials with five arrests in multiple states over that weekend. Early reports framed the alleged plot as a sophisticated multi-step plan involving explosives, drones, and snipers. Vice President J.D. Vance addressed the alleged terror plot on Fox and Friends Tuesday morning saying, quote, "So much of the far left rhetoric is driving itself towards violence. Let's take a listen." This is a very, very dark stuff. This is what happens when people turn the rhetoric up so loud that disagreeing with somebody is a cause for violence. That's the place that we've come to, unfortunately. I think a lot of my democratic colleagues in Washington have got to look themselves in the mirror and say, why is so much of this political violence coming from our side of the spectrum? Maybe they can do something different. - His eyes are getting like, deeper set. Like he looks waxier and waxier as the day is gone. Maybe he's just using a thicker eyeliner. Or maybe he's moved to eyeshadow. - That's possible. - That is, which is the sensible move. - Yeah. - You start off with eyeliner, it doesn't look good. And then you realize what I should really be doing is eyeshadow. - Imagine tears streaking down his face and his eye-- - Midwest evil. - Oh! - Midwest evil, J-D-Fan. - I should have ran up my spine. - So according to the vice president, this alleged terror plot was coming from the Democrat side of politics. And simply the result of them turning up political rhetoric. Fox News reported that upwards of 23 people were involved in this plot. Five of whom are currently in custody. With the details of the plan being uncovered on the encrypted messaging app signal. Fox News claimed the thwarted attack was targeting capitalism, billionaires, and APAC. J-D-Vance also mentioned how the administration is going after the terrorist funding networks facilitating this kind of violence. - We're trying to look at the underground networks that drive towards the this violence. 23 people do not get to the point where they're going to commit a mass terror incident in Washington DC without some serious funding, without some serious coordination. And we've actually been trying to go with those networks of coordination because this is a, this is a terrorist plot. That's not a few guys doing crazy stuff. That is a coordinated plan terrorist plot. Thank God we thwarted it, but we got to do more of that stuff. According to the charges announced by the DOJ, Tyson proper 19 years old of Ohio, Brian Rau, 24 of California, Michael Thomas, 32 of California, Daniel S. Gridge, 32 of Missouri, and Abraham Alvarez, 31 of Nebraska, all conspired to plan and execute a mass casualty event targeting politicians and other, quote unquote, high value targets at the UFC Freedom to 50 event. The co-conspirators allegedly plan to use drones to drop unspecified explosives on the north side of the UFC arena, forcing event attendees to evacuate south, where other co-conspirators would be set up with sniper rifles to fire on the fleeing crowd. It's sort of a real shame that the, the Iowa interactive guys aren't making another hitman game for a minute. A lot of this is like very hitman, very, yeah, very agent 47's type stuff. And as we get more into the plan, it's going to get a increasingly video gamey. Yeah, yeah. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, quote, the FBI, our law enforcement partners, and our US attorneys, it did what they do every day to make America safe through quick response and vigilance in investigating, disrupting, and dismantling this alleged plan before it could be carried out. FBI director Catcher Patel said, quote, thanks to the rapid action in this FBI, our partners and the DOJ in a multi state operation. Multiple individuals are now in custody and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold. While the results represented the best of investigative work, it was also nothing of the ordinary for this law enforcement team. We are built to detect, respond to and bring to justice those who threaten the lives of American citizens, unquote. And he said all that without blinking those big white eyes of his. I think this was mostly in the form of a tweet. So it sounds like the FBI did a darn fine job preventing this terrorist attack, except what happened here was not the result of the FBI's excellent investigative prowess. They did not just stumble across this attack because of their, you know, diligent, diligent efforts to disrupt terrorist planning. Law enforcement only learned about this potential attack because on June 10th, the mother of one of the co conspirators called local law enforcement in Ohio, concerned about her son's recent firearm purchases and contact with individuals online. Officers went to their family home and spoke with 19 year old Tyson proper and his family. According to the Criminal Complaint, a family member told officers that proper had quote recently met random people online and quit his job in preparation to conduct, quote unquote, missions and quote unquote recon with these individuals. As soon as that upcoming weekend, proper allegedly spent about $3,000 of his graduation money to buy, quote, camping gear, food, ballistic plates, a new shotgun, a rifle, lots of ammunition, extra magazines and plate carriers, unquote. The family turned all this equipment over to the police voluntarily. After local enforcement interviewed proper and his family, Tyson proper was transported to Dublin Springs mental health center. I think this is quite notable is that they did not take him into custody, but was transferred to a mental hospital. In the DOJ announcement, they refer to this as a medical facility, but in court documents, they specify it's a mental health facility. And the Criminal Complaint says quote, law enforcement submitted an application for an emergency admission based on his homicidal ideations detailing that proper had been thinking about joining the military or police force with the goal of being able to kill people on quote. I like that it's always like these guys, no matter what what political ideology they have at one point, they're like, maybe I should just fucking join the military. Maybe I should just join the police. I just really want to fucking shoot people. It's like, I want to cause I want like a duty. Yeah. That's what I kind of more like floaty mindset. I think there's more of a factor here than like any specific political ideology in a sense. And we'll get into that once we once we talk about the way that this group envisioned itself, like the role that it had on starting a second American revolution. But there's very little like defined ideology happening with these individuals. And for someone like proper, there's a large degree of delusional thinking at play here. Yeah, it's it's guys who want to do missions. Yeah, exactly. Like no one to do missions and recon. It's very it's it's it's very it's like aesthetically based on like the military and this like idea like tactics and what we'll get into this sort of like, you know, military fetishism later on as well. But yeah, it's it's very much like very, very video gamey, very much like I want to plan like a mission to do in real life, like what we play in video games. That is that is that's the sort of feeling across reading about their plan because their plan is relatively complicated. And there's no way that they could have pulled a plan like this off like this, this type of plan would be hard for a nation stage to be able to do successfully. There's there's no way that like five guys from like across the United States with like a, you know, nerdy focus and like tactical kit would be able to like do this about like halfway through planning. They would have given up an all gone gay probably. What would it mean? What do you mean gone gay? Well, they would have turned it. I was just thinking like, you know, really quitting your job. This guy puts his job to meet his online friends, you know, go hang out with them in the woods. That's like 50, 50, 50, 50, like they either try to plan a mass terror attack or they like all end up like pissing and stuff. You know, I mean, yeah, I can't, having a gay camp out in the woods is the more positive path for people like this. Yes. Because that's really all they need is just a group of friends to go camping with. Well, I do, I do like how Vance and them are talking about it. They're like, we got these guys who are definitely going to try and shoot up you at our UFC event. They were going to successfully do it if we didn't stop them. And it's like, if you look at the kid, it's like a mentally ill teenager. Yeah. And as we will also get into, you know, far from this like left wing anti capitalist motivation, which JD Vance and Fox News are promoting, that is not at all what was going on here. So the day after Tyson proper was admitted to the mental health facility, the sheriff's office contacted the FBI after searching proper phone, investigators found signal chance detailing a planned attack with maps highlighting potential sniper locations and drone launch points according to the criminal complaint. Tyson proper's family saw him researching and mapping locations around Washington DC. And when asked what he was doing, he said that he intended to conduct quote unquote, recon and quote unquote, hit and run missions for missions. Awesome, dude. That's fantastic. I'm going to do GTA five online, like heist, like prerequisite missions before we go blow up this this UFC event. So on June 11th, the FBI searched proper's home and found a journal that the criminal complaint says contained a list of approximately 46 names, including celebrities and politicians, as well as pages, quote, in which proper wrote that the government sought to control people and to sacrifice children and others to a demonic figure. Unquote. Awesome. We're going. It's getting better. It's getting better. So yes, this is obviously evidence of like delusional thinking. Like this is not this is not someone who's doing well. And this is also not your typical rhetoric from a democratic politician, considering the claims made by JD Vance. This is not this is not regular democratic politician rhetoric. The proper's family told the FBI that he recently began to interact with a group of people online who quote, represented themselves as X military and that may share some Christian based ideology unquote. The family believed that these people online were using religion to manipulate proper and that they quote expressed ultra religious and anti government sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water and communities and other government actions on quote. So rather than a sort of general like left wing anti capitalist or rhetoric from democratic politicians motivating this attack. This is very general kind of libertarian esque anti government sentiments. And this as we will discuss the script do not consider itself on the right or the left, but saw themselves as American patriots more than anything else. And they were upset about government corruption and had this anti establishment kind of leaning that was pushing them to plan very complicated and far fetched attacks against the establishment and corrupt politicians. This is very average guy who sells cars ideology. Yes, oftentimes when people like read through these sorts of core documents, they'll be like, they had an incoherent ideology and they're like, it's not really incoherent, right? They're responding to real things in the world. Like, everyone knows we're all being fucked over. Government did misshandle the Epstein files. There is a lot of corruption, right? And it does exist on both sides of the political spectrum. So like, they're responding to real things, but there's not an avenue that it's being channeled in a helpful or useful direction. So it gets dispersed through these very larpy, like idealistic, violent avenues where you get a group of people who don't really know what to do, but are seeing these problems in the world. And then what they end up doing is larping themselves into federal custody by typing on signal about their dreams to shoot politicians. Spending their college money on guns. Yeah. Now, the criminal complaint in Ohio for Tyson Proper also specifies that family members highlighted concerning statements he'd made in recent months on social media. Quote, such as making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti-Semitic comments on Facebook. Unquote. Wow. Left wing. Well, they are, they are national socialists after all. A true, true. We will return to discuss Tyson Proper and the alleged attack on UFC 200 after this outbreak. Okay, we are back. On June 11th, the FBI interviewed Proper at the mental hospital, where he admitted to planning an attack on the Freedom 250 event at the White House. The FBI ran their own search of Proper's phone, and on the encrypted messaging app Simplex, found messages identifying possible targets. The criminal complaint alleges that in mid-May, Proper identified a senator from Tennessee and wrote, quote, "She's taken money from the pro-Israel lobby and supports them," unquote. A few weeks later, Proper sent pictures of four members of Congress, apparently taken from the Track A PAC website, writing, quote, "These are the people we're going to focus on." Proper allegedly told police that members of this group that were planning the attack were primarily recruited through TikTok, where members shared photos and videos of tactical kits and physical training via TikTok direct messages. Once the recruit had proven himself on TikTok, they were then let into a, quote, unquote, "vetted signal chat. So glad this isn't happening on my video app of choice, Instagram reels. I really don't want to start restricting that." The TikTok aspect is super interesting, because there's elements of this that's similar to the accelerationist, like Nazi terrorism of, you know, 2016 to 2020. These people are not explicitly Nazis, even if there's an aspect of anti-Semitism, kind of directing this violence. But this is anti-Semitism that is largely focused on the role that Israel has in influencing the US government and the Israel lobby and politicians taking money from Israel. That's where most of the anti-Semitic aspect comes from. And then in Proper's case, he is posting about Hitler on Facebook. But this is not driven by, like, neo-Nazi-style anti-Semitic ideology. Like these guys aren't posting about saun and rats or Germany or race science. At least that's not what's outlined in the court documents. So some of this does feel downstream from the accelerationist Nazis, like the base in Adam Waffen and their target selection that we'll get into in a sec, kind of also is similar to this. But they're not primarily organizing this on, like, telegram. This is guys posting, like, shooting videos and tactical kit on TikTok. And that's how they meet each other is through TikTok, sharing videos of their, you know, plate carrier and doing shooting drills. And then they start, you know, talking and they start planning these sorts of operations as they call them. And then they move to signal to plan these things more in depth. Now, Proper's phone contained a large signal chat with approximately 19 individuals, along with smaller chats consisting of four to five people that were divided based on role assignments and locations. In these chats, the group discussed exit escape and evasion resources for the freedom to 50 attack, including the location of potential safe houses. One of the signal chats was titled hunters, which the complaint says, quote, contained detailed instructions for caring about the attack and plans to safely escape. Proper showed the FBI the TikTok profiles of other co-conspirators. And based on this, investigate us, we're able to identify someone in California and someone in Missouri. The guy in Missouri, Daniel Eskridge had the username Fulcrum Resist on TikTok. And they were able to identify him because he followed himself from another account with his legal name. And the account with his legal name, Largest reposted the tactical videos from at Fulcrum Resist. Like reposting your own videos would be like, I don't know, this guy looks pretty sick. I was like, I was pretty dope. Have you guys seen this guy shooting? Oh my god, I bet he's going to do something crazy one day. This guy has a wife and five kids. Oh my god. She is like, I think it's like 32 years old. He lives in a rural property about an hour north of Kansas City. And he's he's kind of the most interesting guy in this whole deal for me. The FBI was also able to identify co-conspirators based on information in the simple x messages given to them by proper. Now, one of these simple x group chats was called Vanguard of the old Republic. Yes. This was the main name that this group used to refer to themselves was Vanguard of the Old Republic. And there was another simple x chat that was called Vanguard of the Old Republic. parenthesis ops stage one, which was there, which was like a, which was like an, you know, an in op planning chat. Awesome. That's so dope. I'm going to read some messages from fulcrum that is Daniel S. Gridge of Missouri. Key wrote that the Vanguard of the Old Republic should intend to quote recruit operators into this group and start making teams to complete tasks and objectives to push our lines forward. So good. Quote, the definition of a Vanguard is the leading group in an advancing army or the foremost pioneers in any field movement or industry. That is what we strive to be. This chat here will be insulated for the most part from each team's detailed plan. So we won't post exact details in this chat. This will be the main chat for everyone as we grow and we will have specific ops chats. Our goal is in a general sense to quote, restore the old republic. Our constitutional republic has been stolen by corporations, politicians and foreign actors. They have usurped power from the people and concentrated it at the top to the point that we now live in late stage, quote unquote democracy. When I say restore the old republic, I'm not talking about all the flaws that we had in the past times, but merely talking about the fact that in a constitutional republic, the people truly hold the power and that's what we intend to restore. To get there, this country needs more fuel on the fire to show our fellow Americans at the time has come to stand up and reclaim that power. May 22nd, 2026. Oh my God, people who are on like the the Star Wars wiki forum like way too much like. I'm on the what is it? Wookie PD. Yeah, wookie PD of mod. Another co-conspirator named Michael Thomas of California wrote, quote, "To be clear, I intend to escalate this group and I don't want to take six business years to do it." Unquote. Six business years. He's making it sound more professional. That's good. So much of this is like larpy, right? They're using all these like, you know, this sort of like tier one operator term, which we'll get into in a second, like, you know, missions. They wanted to sound professional, six business years. This is serious. The same as a regular year. It's not it. But Thomas also wrote that everyone in the group should quote, consider yourselves an enemy of the state and discuss imagining executions. Another co-conspirator named Brian Rao of California wrote about the need for quote unquote gorilla style warfare and quote unquote rate attacks with quote skilled operators to work like ghosts to conduct infiltration missions. Unquote. Yes. Very hitman. Very age of 47. Right. Right. These are frankly just like totally, totally delusional. The criminal complaint says that Thomas and Rao met at least once in the last month in Southern California to quote practice marksmanship and tactics. Michael Thomas of California described different tiers of operators within the vanguard of the old republic and that this is larger taking from like military terms quote. Tier one operators may be asked to put themselves in harm's way break the law and potentially go into hiding. Tier two would consist of getaway drivers drone operators and direct support may still be asked to seriously break the law. Tier three may be a runner or part of the underground railroad indirect support recruitment supply logistics tech still actively contributing but most likely safe from legal issues. Tier 4. social media influencers, protestors, funders, press, followers. Nobody is being asked too much or taking any risks. Tier one status is not something to take lightly. You'll be sacrificing for your country and carrying a brunt of the weight. We will try to break them out of jail if we need to, unquote. Oh my God, dude. This is kind of them at their larpiest is like when they're talking about like four different tiers of operators and it's like you and like at, you know, at the most like 19 of your internet buddies. Yeah. And kind of at the least kind of you and your five closest friends talking about how you want to like wage insurgent warfare against the government. They're structuring their discord server. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's what's happening. Just not on discord, but on simplex and signal. Like a lot of people like know guys like this, right? These are guys in their 20s or 30s who played a lot of like tactical military video games who have this sort of like military tactical fetishism. And they're looking for like an outlet for this combined with this anti establishment sentiment that is based on very real things happening out in the world, but it has nowhere to be directed. So they just do this larp and eventually wind up in federal custody and get charged with conspiracy to commit murder on the White House grounds. Fulcrum, Daniel S. Courage of Missouri, wrote quote, "So right now in the historical timeline, I believe we are at the trigger event point, meaning to set this off, we need an event or events that cause people to realize the revolution has officially begun," unquote. So this is what the group intended to do. They intended to execute attacks that served as trigger events to cause this sort of mass like upswell of support for a second American revolution. They didn't call it a civil war. They called it a second American revolution. And that is how they envision themselves as being the operators that will do trigger events to put this all into motion. It's kind of similar to like the booge blue boy type stuff from, you know, five, six years ago. This group allegedly talked about attacking power grids with a fleet of drones to hit specific transformers and discuss assassinating several U.S. senators, House representatives and prominent business executives. So this sort of target selection, very similar to like the base in Adam Woffin and like, you know, neo-Nazi acceleration is terrorism from around like the, you know, 2016 to 2022 type era. The group did debate how they should choose assassination targets with Fulcrum writing, quote, "We need to make sure it's someone that can't be easily turned into a right versus left thing. We want someone both sides would celebrate. Would cheer and support us for taking out both sides would celebrate us shooting up this one guy like this one guy's weird America birthday event. Like what? What did I mean, I think what they're pulling on from here is stuff like the Luigi Mangioni incident. Yeah. They're trying to identify like I find this for part to be very interesting because a lot of these guys do have this sort of like Christian nationalist or like Christian like libertarian. It's kind of unclear, but they definitely have this like Christian element to their motivation. They see themselves as patriots, but they do not explicitly associate themselves with like the right or the left, right? Yeah. They see themselves as like outside politics. But I find this aspect to be rather interesting when they're trying to specifically find targets that will allow for both people on the right and left to like cheer them on or like join in on like a second American revolution. This does push them towards a talking a lot about like APAC backed politicians and unnamed prominent business executives. Their names are redacted in the criminal complaint, but I'm sure that's, you know, it's black rockets. Well, you know, it could be people like Jeff Bezos or like Elon Musk it doesn't, it's not totally clear, but I'm assuming that's the sort of range in which they're discussing. Fogrum texted quote, so the goal here is to get at least three trigger event ops fully planned and manned and to the best of our ability to have them executed on the same day or in rapid succession so that our message is undeniably clear to our illegitimate government and our fellow Americans that we are waging war. We don't need to wait for resistance infrastructure, supply lines and all these other things. That's what every other group in this movement is working on. I'm sure one of them will be able to get it right, but they can't do that without mass support and they won't get mass support as long as people think all anyone is doing is holding signs and chanting. All we need is three small groups of fully committed operators with a fully fleshed out and perfectly formulated plaid and all real world on the ground until they will need for each op to be successful. Once we've decided on what three events would provide the most impact and bring in the most support, we will create special chats for those ops specifically so that only the people on those ops know the details. Unquiet. All of this planning just for one 19 year old, I got to invite my mentally ill 19 year old buddy into this group chat so his mom can get really worried. That's how a lot of this stuff goes and like I don't want to, I don't want to diminish the possible harm that a group like this could cause. I think something that Robert pointed out last week when discussing this on executive disorder is like, this group could have easily spawned like one or two like mass shooters, right? They could have acted on a plan that was way too difficult to pull off that caused a lot of collateral damage. Right? This group could have done something very bad. This group could have set a plan into motion that ended up killing or wounding a bunch of people or driven people towards other sorts of violent acts, right? Because they're encouraging each other to buy weapons, buy kit, do all these things, right? So there was a potential for real harm here. Was the UFC Freedom 250 event ever in serious harm from these people? Absolutely not. There was no way they were able to pull off their plan as we will soon discuss. But first, let's go on another ad break. Okay. We are back. I have one more encrypted message from from Fulcrum or Daniel S. Critch of Missouri. Exciting. Quote, I can't speak for everyone in saying we're tired of not making should happen and tired of being ruled over by treasonous pedophilic criminal politicians and foreign agents. The Fulcrum wrote that what they're doing is not only our birthright, but also our duty as Americans. It's about time. The elites in the government are reminded of why they should fear the people, especially the American people. Unquote. So S. Critch wrote that the American people is the largest standing army in the world with a hundred and seven million gun owners. He also believed that half of the military would join their cause and not follow quote unquote unlawful orders after the second American revolution kicks off. And that following a successful trigger event operation, potentially 3% of the US population would stand with their group, writing that just like America's forefathers, quote, what we do here will reverberate around the world and echo throughout history, long live the Republic. Unquote. God. So that's the most we know about the group formation and the sort of drivers that they themselves are discussing. Let's close by by getting back into the UFC Freedom 250 attack plan because the more that I learned about this plan, the more I became clear that this would just simply never happen. This is not a feasible operation. It would be hard for a special ops military team to pull this off at this location, let alone five of your TikTok friends to pull this off. Like the plan to target freedom to 50 really only kicked off a week before the event was scheduled to take place. Well, there's your issue, guys. If you had a little, maybe a month's heads up, you know, maybe you could have gotten something going on June 7th, fulcrum, message to the event guard of the older public about using the White House UFC event to take out quote unquote high valued targets. In his message, he mentioned communication with quote unquote other groups and said that the UFC attack would require cooperation from everyone and that they would need to quote put a hold on the other ops that were currently being planned. Quote, we need five teams of three, each team consisting of one sniper, one tier one operator as support slash lookout and one drone operator unquote. As a part of the planning, they need to pick five locations ideal for quote precise sniper shots and for the drone pilot to operate from fulcrum wrote quote once each team is mission ready, the green light will be given and the drone rigged with explosives will fly and they will initiate the attack unquote. So after the explosives detonate, the attention will be quote on the skies and not the rooftop snipers, who will then eliminate quote unquote high value targets. Oh, also, I feel like the skies and rooftop targets are remarkably close to each other. I'm feeling if you're looking up, you might see on the roof. I don't know. No, even the idea that you can get a sniper on a rooftop anywhere close to the White House without getting your head blown off is like insane, right? There's just no way that's going to happen. You're not going to be able to get a sniper on a roof within a sightline of the White House. Following the attempted assassination on Donald Trump in Butler, I can see why people might think it's easier to set up a sniper location than one might expect. The White House is like the most defended place in the country, like especially at an event like this where there's even more security, I just don't see how this is in any way feasible. The group believed that there would be a protest outside of the event and that this would help allow, quote unquote, extraction teams to evacuate the, quote unquote, operators to a location out of state after a successful completion of mission objectives. Fulcrum wrote, quote, if we're successful, this could be the first battle of the second American revolution. Who is willing to be able to drop everything and be one of these 10 operators and who is confident and capable of flying drones? June 7th, 10, 28 PM, 19 year old, raise your hand. They please come to bed. No, no, honey. I've been, I've been activated. I got to go. My friend, I got, you know those friends have been hanging out in the woods with. I got to go. They need me. So even if this group got enough, quote unquote, operators to pull up this mission, which is highly questionable, if not impossible, they simply did not have the funds, the materials or the resources to carry out an attack like this, let alone the skill or logistical capacity. Fulcrum texted the group, quote, we also need to come up with $1,300 to ASAP. We need to come up with $1,300. You can't just pull it, this guy has three kids and a wife and he can't pull five kids and he can't pull like, we have, oh, true, true, yeah, but you're going to, you're going to die. Like he's going to, he knows he's going to die. He's larping, like he's going to get out, but he knows he's going to die and he can't be like, I will go and I'll sell some bullshit and I'll get like $1,300. We got a fund. Do you think a credit card, yeah, anyone have a credit card, quote, $1,300 gets us the drones and the charges. We should all pitch in and we need it to ASAP. What kind of drones are they getting? Is this Amazon, like you look up drone on there, what, I'm just picturing like the drones that you see getting flown around like at the park by a family that just bought it, just carrying a grenade. Exactly. Thomas of California replied, quote, I'm flat broke. I can't pay in manpower though. I bet you could come up with $100 in a week somehow. Maybe just hold a sign by the freeway saying, quote, fund the freedom fighters. Oh, God, that's awesome, dude. So I'm able to pay for bombs. The group talked about trying to build drones and discussed breaking into military facilities to steal the explosives needed for their attack plan. Does anybody know how to build this? Oh, shit. We might have to redo the whole or or we can break into some of the most protected facilities in America. I think that might be the better choice. To be fair, some of those military facilities are not as protected than what you might think. That's fair. The criminal complaint reads, quote, a number of the groups stated he knew how to build drones connected via fiber object cable and capable of carrying explosive charges, but did not have access to the materials needed for explosive charges. That number suggested that they, quote, may need to hit a military industrial complex facility for the things we need, unquote, fulcrum or escridge, responded 10 for. I'm liking the sound of this. Awesome. What? You're texting people 10 for what are you doing? What are we doing? The complaint alleges that the group continue to discuss the, quote, benefits and the detriment of obtaining a, quote, unquote, cook for explosive charges versus stealing military ordinance from a manufacturing plant, unquote, they were looking at a few locations in Kansas and zeroed in on the Kansas Army ammunition plant, though they never actually stole explosives from this plant, but they started to talk about it and their conversations are in the charging documents. Awesome. So again, this is, this is all happening days before this attack is supposed to kick off. And a part of the plan is for a day or two before UFC freedom to 50, the group was to meet up in Fredericksburg, Virginia to like go over plans again in person and like, you know, practice and prepare. So they needed to get guys in Fredericksburg around the 12th or the 13th. One of the members who was interviewed by the FBI confirmed that the group was communicating online about attacking the event, but claimed that the attack plan was canceled on June 12th. And of course Tyson proper was placed in the mental health facility on June 10th. So somewhere between June 10th and June 12th, the group called off their plans. It is notable, however, that at least one of the co-conspirators did attempt to drive to Washington, DC when Brian Brown was interviewed by the FBI, he admitted that he tried to drive to Washington, DC to protest UFC freedom to 50, but denied any involvement in this conspiracy. And he told the FBI that his vehicle malfunctioned and had to return home. One of the most interesting parts in the criminal complaint is this FBI agent writing about how when he was interviewing Rao, Rao discussed how someone could hypothetically use drones armed with explosives to bomb buildings near the White House, which would cause a mass panic with limited deaths at UFC freedom to 50. And mentioned this as an example of how to use drones to enact political change in a more targeted way, rather than indiscriminate killing, the FBI agent wrote, "Based on this exchange, I believe Rao was privy to the operational details of the plan." So, Brian Rao just talked about the plan, just like as a hypothetical two-in-FBI agent, while the FBI was searching his vehicle, after admitting he tried to drive to DC to protest the event, but was not involved in any criminal conspiracy. That's like being, you know, you just got caught, your spouse has found all of your secret messages or whatever to your grinder lover. And while they're going through your phone, you're like, "I mean, what if somebody was hypothetically going to do that?" Like, it wouldn't be that bad because it's with a man and not a woman, so it's like we love each other completely different ways, but that's just like me, you know, that's not real, that's not like, it wouldn't be anything real. Just like hypothetically, you'd be cool with that, right? You'd be cool with that? The FBI was not cool with that, especially considering that when executing a federal search warrant of Rouse vehicle and home, they seized an AR-15 style rifle, a Glock 19 handgun, a tactical belt, an ammo canful of bullets, a two-way radio, an infrared laser target pointer, and a rifle magazine. Brian Rouse family members told law enforcement that Rouse had alluded to traveling to DC, and according to the California criminal complaint, Rouse told his family that, quote, "one day they would wake up and he would be gone," and that he intended to travel to Washington DC, where a quote unquote, "something big would happen." Similar to Proper's family, Brian Rouse family suspected that he may be intending to commit an act of violence based on a, quote, "increased time spent shooting weapons and a noticeable change in behavior, including increased anxiety, irritation, and seclusion," unquote. He had spent a lot of time in the shed with a gun in his mouth. Family also told law enforcement that Rouse had been spending a lot of time online with a new group of friends, with his family also telling law enforcement that they considered reporting him to the police after he left on his way to DC, but did not because he returned home so quickly. Rouse told the FBI he had vehicle trouble. On June 13, law enforcement officials executed a federal search warrant of Daniel S. Courage, or Fulcrum's residence, and agents seized rifles, a shotgun, a pistol, and other tactical gear that matched photos S. Courage posted online. That same day, FBI searched the home of Michael Thomas in California, where they seized a hunting rifle and air 15-style rifle, 30 round extended magazines, with approximately 180 rounds of ammunition, as well as a pistol. While Michael Thomas was being interviewed, to quote the criminal complaint, "he stated that he saw himself as the planner and advisor for the group, and while he was not willing to take action himself, wanted to guide and instruct others on how to carry out attacks." Thomas expressed frustration that some members of the group seemed "non-committal" and his excuses as to why they could not take action. Thomas said that the aim of this and subsequent attacks was to create enough chaos to bring about the overthrow of the US government, which he believed was being, quote, "run by an elite group of individuals who sacrifice and consume infants, who who are also deeply involved with Jeffrey Epstein and are now protected by President Donald Trump. Thomas places some of the responsibility of his corruption of the U.S. government with Jewish people and blames them and Israel for the current war with Iran, unquote. So yeah, that is what did not happen at UFC Freedom 250. - Nothing will ever happen. (laughing) - Now, JD Vance did go back on Fox News Tuesday night on Fox News is the five and said, quote, it turns out the plot was like not that advanced. They weren't in town. They had not really done that much planning, unquote. So slightly backtracking his previous assertions. - We got to find who's funding these guys. These guys who can't pull out 1,300 bucks from like between the- - Between five people. - Yeah, but what is going on? Like, no, wasn't it like 19 or something in the signal chat? - In the biggest signal chat related to the group, there was 19 people. So far, only five have been arrested. More have been interviewed, right? 'Cause the FBI mentioned interviewing someone in West Virginia who said that the attack plan was canceled. As of recording this guy's not been arrested in charge, we don't know his name. So they definitely are talking with other people were related to this like network. - Well, they know he was a tier four operator. He wasn't the law can't touch him. - No, yeah, famously how conspiracy charges work. - Yeah, yeah. - The last thing I want to mention is the fifth guy that was arrested, right? 'Cause there was five people arrested initially and that is Abraham Alvarez. He was known as, quote unquote, shepherd online. - Call duty, of course, classic. - And the DOJ claims that he was responsible for planning, organizing, and directing the planned attack. Alvarez allegedly picked out the drone launch points and sniper locations and claimed to have one drone and was trying to get others. He also selected a safe zone meetup location in Nebraska for after the attack. Alvarez also claimed to be, quote unquote, cooking explosives. But court documents never specify that drones or explosives were seized during any of the searches. So we don't know if he actually had a drone or actually had explosives. It seems unlikely because of the whole plan of needing to steal explosives from this military facility in Kansas. But he may have been trying to make explosives. But at this point, it's kind of unclear. Now, before any of the details of any of the alleged attackers was released, a Fox News contributor said that considering President Biden led in, quote unquote, millions of unveited people into the country, quote, it would be a very dangerous delusion to believe that these terrorist organizations and countries did not use that open border to bring people inside, unquote. And as we've already discussed, this was not the operation of a foreign terrorist organization or people that were brought into the country. These are Americans. These are American patriots self-ascribed. But on Thursday, June 18th, the DHS announced, quote, alleged ringleader of UFC terrorist plot is a Mexican illegal alien, unquote. With acting assistant secretary Lauren Biss writing, this illegal alien from Mexico should have never been allowed in our country. He was the ringleader of a failed terror attack targeting UFC free of 250 at the White House. The current legal status of Abraham Alvera's is kind of unclear. But he was not brought into the country under Biden's open borders. He entered the country as a child on a B2 visitor visa that expired in December of 2021. He's been in this country nearly his whole life. And under Obama, he was granted deferred action for childhood arrivals or DACA in 2014, suspending possible deportation. So while it looks like he currently may not have legal status, this was not an illegal alien who snuck across the border from Mexico. This guy was brought to the United States as a child and has lived here for over 25 years, over 27 years. So I do think that is worth noting, but I'm sure going forward, the Trump administration will be running with this idea that this illegal alien from Mexico planned the UFC freedom to 50 terrorist attack. And the actual context of how Alvera's entered the country is important, not that it will matter to Fox News or the Trump administration. But I do think it is worth specifying. And of course, there was upwards of 19 other people involved in this. And the four others that I've spent most the episode talking about are all U.S. foreign citizens. Anyway, yeah, that's what that's what did not happen at UFC freedom to 50 and let things, I suppose, continue to continue to not happen. It could, it could not happen here. It will continue not happening. So Bailey, new poster, where can people find you online? Oh God, I'm on blue sky as new poster too. Very smart pick. Yes, I'm also on the other app. X, as new poster too. But I've not very, not very well, very woke of you. I'm also on Instagram as post-litical bling because that account has not been suspended three different times. And then on Twitch, as I think on Twitch, as new poster too, as well. Excellent. There's four little options for you. Yes, good luck in your streaming endeavors. Oh God. All right, that does it for us here that could happen here. See you on the other side. Bye-bye. Hi, this is Kylie Breikman, Angel Jaretana. Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the artists on artists on artists on artists podcast. The improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is foe journal. I don't know, have you guys heard of foe journaling? Yeah, it's reading. It's called reading. So we don't like to use that word anymore. OK. A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? No. I've been dying too. I'm so sorry. I'm seeing a reading of Sudako in the Thousand Paper Cranes by Audrement Donalds at the Wonderland bookstore, 14. That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland bookstore yesterday, and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Dark 30. No way. You have to come to the last bookstore, though. Kim Katrol is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. A panel of Eurovision participants. I hear you get the elbows here. The eyelashes hit each other. You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to artists on artists on artists on artists. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up, comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcasts. The True Crime Comedy Podcast, all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on incredible guests like Conan O'Brien, Iowa Debris, Lamor and Morris, and Nicole Buyer. Ooh, I scammed them. What? And the scams run the gamut. I'm talking about scams from the 1800s all the way up to today. I also warn you and keep you safe against scammers. Call your grandparents. Tell your parents to stop clicking on links, please. If there's a scam, I'm here to protect you. And I'm also here to laugh with you. 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Unlike the quarter-life crisis, which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion and growth of something. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves, nobody else can take that from you. So this self-care September, don't just take care of yourself, get to know yourself as well. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHot Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Britt Coleman, and I'm Trevor Sikima. If you ever watched a game and wondered what really made the difference beyond the final score, that's exactly why we created NFL Pro. Bro, it got a man wide open. Put down, stay up. Every week, we use exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content to break down the biggest stories, matchups, and moments from around the league. We go beyond the box score to uncover the numbers, the tendencies, and details that help explain what actually happened on the field. Fires it out and deflect the barkley to beat one man, spins past another, bleeps over with fur. And don't worry, this isn't just a show for stats experts. We use advanced analytics to help tell the story behind the game, turning the numbers into insights that every fan can understand and enjoy. So whether you're a casual fan, fan learning more about football or a hardcore fan who can't get enough analysis. Our goal is to help you see the game in a whole new way. If you've ever wanted to know why a playwork, how a matchup was won, or what most fans missed on Sunday, NFL Pro delivers insights you simply can't get anywhere else. Listen to NFL Pro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and this is it could happen here. I wanted to talk today a little bit about Belfast and about what happened there earlier this month, the racist riots in which mobs of bigots ran through the city forcing people out of their homes for not being white destroying businesses, terrorizing people. It was horrific and if you spend any time watching live streams or videos or just the coverage I'm sure you felt as frightened both for those people directly and just for the future as many of us. And in the wake of something like that, it can all be hard to know like what to do and what would I do if this were happening in my community, right? Like what is the proper response, especially if there isn't, you know, an immediate response in the moment that meets, you know, the rage of one of these nights and actually is able to stop it, you know, if these bigots are able to go through and attack and harm people, how do you both respond to that and help the people who have been hurt? And how do you deal with the fact that that could be a very dangerous situation? You know, especially if you've still got these mobs of people out there who are willing to hurt the folks that you're trying to protect and anyone potentially trying to protect them. Well, obviously the people who live in Belfast are dealing with that problem immediately. And so the best place to go if I wanted to know what that was like was to someone who's been living through it. Unfortunately, I found the posts on Blue Sky of Lee Hurley. He's a Belfast based writer. He's the owner of dailycanon.com Lee also runs the trans agenda, which records and documents anti-trans media coverage in UK papers. You can subscribe at transagenda.info. I reached out to Lee after saying some posts that Lee had made about what he had witnessed in terms of the local response to people trying to organize to help folks who had been attacked and brutalized and Lee wrote an essay for us and and read it and thankfully was good enough to do both of those things. So this is, you know, some direct firsthand reporting both on what it was like to live in Belfast while that was going on and what it's been like to watch the community spring into action to try and make right some of the wrongs that we're done. So with that further ado, here's Lee. Last week, Belfast hit the headlines worldwide. In usual Belfast fashion, it wasn't for anything good. On Monday, it's a June 2026, a man was attacked and stabbed in North Belfast by a refugee. It was a vicious attack caught on camera that resulted in the victim losing an eye and being placed in the medically induced coma. At the time of recording, the victim remains in hospital. The next day, the city exploded and rats took place across Belfast, vars raged and people were forced to flee from their homes. Today, I want to talk to you about what happened, what really happened, not the attack and not the rats themselves, but what went on in the hours and the days after that. Beyond the brick throwing and the burning and the fear, because something good did happen and I think it's important that the world knows about that. You need to know that Belfast isn't all bad, it isn't what you saw in the TV. That while the horror happened on the streets, the rest of the city said enough. We mobilised. This is the story of the real community of Belfast. Belfast is a beautiful city, rich in culture, history, world-renowned for its food and, if you would believe it, it's welcome in nature. Ask anyone who's visited for recommendations about what to do in the city and you'll like to hear them read about the Titanic Museum, a Game of Thrones tour, or the stunning architecture. They'll tell you how nice everybody they met was. You'll be told about some wonderful restaurant they visited and the amazing tribe music section they stumbled upon in some Quint Back Street pub. They'll tell you they want to go back. One of our most popular tourist activities is the tour of the Keysites, the pet key roads in our civil war. Taxi drivers will take you to the places where blood was shed, bombs exploded, and those left behind still visit the morning. The tours aren't even not expensive. Here in Belfast we've made a small industry out of the darkest parts of our country's history, the troubles. Although the days of bombs and murders and army control straights are spoken off in past tense by those tour guides, the beliefs, culture and division that feel the fighting are still just as strongly held in many communities throughout the city, as they were on the day that peace agreement was signed nearly 30 years ago. Belfast is a beautiful city, but it's a city that requires context to be fully understood and some would already be fully appreciated. Like almost all wars, the troubles centered around identity and access to resources. On one side, the nicetists or Catholics who identify with and wish the country to be united at Ireland. On the other, loyalists or provostants who want those nine to remain part of the UK. The division goes deeper than nine is much more complicated, but it's a bit like the left-right divide of democrats and republicans in the US, knowing what science someone falls on can usually tell you a lot about their other beliefs and more morals. Even international politics gets divvied up here to one side of the other, well support is real, nice to support Palestine. Of course it's not that simple, not all promises and tactics hold the same viewpoints, but from the steep brevity and generalizing, and this is of course a very short and brief explanation of what is actually a very complex history that spans hundreds of years. We simply don't have the time to win the at all with any more depth than that. It's not the focus of this podcast anyway. But even that oversimplified summary should help you save the contextual ends through its bellfast and what happened must be viewed. And it is within this context where tribalism and nationality and identity are so important that whole haisiness gets advertised there by painting their curbslooms in the colours of the British or Irish flag. Jump mural celebrating those murderers and the murdered alike are painted on the sides of haisers where hatefully other continues and were resources are fiercely protected and fought over that this story takes place. Tenton has been bubbling up about migration for the last several years in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Just last summer we saw rats in nearby Balaminan and Belfast, after an alleged sexual assault took place with the accused perpetrators being two teenage boys from Romania. Haisers and businesses were smized up and burnt if their routers believed with any connection whatsoever to an immigrant. You know what they were and the were the heels from. I remember driving through Botanic a vibrant multicultural area of Belfast we give a few minutes away from and seeing business after business destroyed, the hookah bar, the international supermarket cafes, several months later the charges against those two teenage boys were quietly dropped due to significant evidential developments. Like everything else here, altitude to immigration and reiss in general has a pretty clear split between our two main communities. Throughout the oilest areas you will find graffiti and signs stabled on the lampposts, foreigners not welcome here, no Muslims allowed, stop the boats. A lot of the time these vitriolic message aren't even spelled correctly. Education is just one of the many areas neglected here that nobody ever riots over. That's not to say there's no such thing as a reissist nationalist, there are assholes everywhere in Belfast is of course no different than that front. When this most recent horrific attack took place in a city where immigrants legal, illegal refugee asylum-seeker doesn't actually matter in fact because you don't have to be a migrant to be targeted, you just have to be non-white. Whether all that he treated is capable for every problem, where reissist riots have become something of a summer tradition, everyone knew what was coming, with an R social media was full of AI-generated posters telling people to take to the straight protest immigrants. When they said protest we all knew they meant riot. And so the city shut down, for three days shops, schools, community centers, swimming groups, public transport and businesses were held hostage to reissism, some places opened for a few hours in the mornings before having to close again. The buses were running, the buses were off, half the city worked from home, fake protest posters popped up on social media, every day life and routine was thrown into disarray and chaos. But it was when the sun went dying that the actual horror happened. From the comfort of our homes where the blinds dying, many of us had scurred, scrolling social media trying to find out what was happening. But a helicopter footage streamed live on YouTube, we watched our city get destroyed, we texted each other and made phone calls and even kept posted online trying to find some levity or light in the situation. For others those days changed their lives forever, they watched the cars get burnt out and along with the metal and the tires tomorrow's school run and transport went up and smoke. Sand from the last film we tripped to the beach still in the footballs, a fear of recording and a left in the passenger seat gone, all of it gone, whole homes gone. Whether physically set on fire or threatened through the letterboxes or driven out by a fear many of us will never have to know. The true number of people who fled their homes since the 8th of June is hard to gauge. Some have gone to stay where relatives are friends across the city, some have moved to completely new places, waiting to feel safe enough to try again. Many have left the country altogether and who can blame them. That is our loss. They say in times of trouble look for the helpers, but here in Delphast you wouldn't have seen too many at first glance. That's for the same reason you didn't see people rise up and take on the riders face to face, fear. Fear of personal reprisal from the lowest part of military organizations, Fear of alerting the riders and making the situation even worse for those who are trying to help fear is endemic here, but there were helpers, hundreds in fact, but our helpers moved quietly and in the shadows, which fostered violence for our people across spelt fights began taking action almost immediately. As every day life began to return to normal and schools and shops cautiously reopened, strangers became small heroes, families were moved from their homes and their darkness and children taken to and from school, the elderly and second pregnant accompanied the hospital and doctor appointments, in church halls and community centers, supermarket-sized food banks sprung up from nothing, money was raised from all over the world, whether with need somebody met it, then they returned and asked who they could help next, in those moments the real Belfast was seen. On Thursday afternoon, 48 hours after it all started, my fiance arrived home from work, let's call her L, I couldn't sit and do nothing anymore, so here's what has happened and she said, she'd already contacted the church in a range use of their hall, she contacted people she knew through her community work to get word out, I posted about it on Blase Guy not mentioning anything about where it would be located, I'd affairs would be targeted and someone asked if there was a fundraiser, there wasn't, there hadn't been anything just few years ago, not thinking it would get much attention, I threw up a link to my paypal and said I'd pass the money on if anyone wanted to donate, thought it was getting flooding in from all over the world, particularly from Minnesota. Saturday came and we were up at 6 a.m., they had the wholesalers having rupt in another friend to help with her car, by 9 a.m. we were at the church with two car rules of food and essentials, not knowing if it would just be the three of us standing there all day with a little of food, none of us had ever done this before, although well has experienced working with immigrants and asylum seekers in other areas, we couldn't have been more wrong, through the networks held informed over the previous 48 hours, an organization started sending us addresses of people who needed food, volunteers kept arriving, people flowed in with donations of food and money and essentials, by the afternoon people were dropping stuff in, taking photos of our board that showed items we were low in and then going shopping to get those items specifically, hundreds of food parcels were packed up, lead ones for a family of five went to call across the hall 'cause they all coordinated everything that needed to go out, one of the edges of the children, do they need now peace, came or apply without feel, everybody just pets in with whatever was needed to be done, others dealt with people who came in themselves and need to help drivers sent from other small charities arrived to collect parcels for people they were helping, I find myself managing the stock, running to the shop and the wholesalers time and time again to fill up the items we couldn't keep up with, basics like oil and sugar or flour, rice, pasta, soap, sanitary products. Now peace, the list was endless, as was the number of people, we were trying to help. For three days people who had never met before stood side by side sorting food parcels, strangers to strangers into their car and into their homes, as this definitely allowed was desperately driven by a lot of white people, I've lost kind of the amount of people I've met over the last week, but I know it's more than I was usually meeting here, to be fair I'm not actually that social, but it was still a lot of people, I don't think I got the names of half of the ones I worked alongside in that pop up food bank that my partner seemed a magic out of thin air using the relationship she'd built up through her job, but it didn't matter. There wasn't time for small talk, it was more hello, thank you for helping pass me some cooking oil place, are we out of the old one to gain? That's not to say there was no bonding, when you share an intense experience like that under the weight of emotions we were working with, there's a connection built, there was a sense of community that I've never experienced before and given the circumstances, I sincerely hope to never experience again, but that seems unlikely, and that search hole where we ran the food bank, nobody needed to be told what to do, there was no induction or even delegation of roles, for three days people turned up and they find themselves something to do, and I don't know if it was surprising because it shouldn't, but there were many migrants and refugees who turned up to help themselves, one woman came because she was in need of food for herself, and she asked if she could take some extra to meet me as brothers, but then two hours we had 30 contains of home cooked halal curry to deliver the homes, thanks to her work, I'm not sure I've ever been able to truly define what love or selflessness or solidarity mean, but I'm pretty sure that's what it looks like, this was not work being done by professional charities or organizations, that's not to say they weren't doing anything far from it, but I want to take a moment to press upon you that this was everyday people figuring it out together, many of whom had never done anything like this before, what's our purpose was created, full number of shirt and Google Doc databases thrown together, across the city volunteers together on the part, there's anyone how close for a baby, then someone drive a lady to an appointment tomorrow at 10 a.m. Resources were sure to cross me shift donation centers, if one center had run out of diapers, another was sharing their supply, volunteers drove from centers to shops, homes, trying to find what was required, it was beautiful chaos, and it worked, nobody had to be there, almost all the volunteers that arrived three word of mouth, I don't think I saw one single social media poster advert calling out for help, apart from the one I posted it on our last day, help just came, like me, many of the volunteers felt compelled to do something, setting it home beyond the locked door and watching, he had to fill the city via live stream, just wasn't cutting it anymore, one volunteer told me that when the violence erupted, this simply couldn't get the affected people I'd ever had, it took Friday afternoon off work to deliver food and essential supplies, the families who were too afraid to leave their homes, more than anything she said she wanted to show the people of Belfast Kerr and the newcomers to our city are welcome, at a time when fear and uncertainty was affecting so many families, it felt important to her to offer practical support and remind people that they were not alone, the work people have been doing and are still doing is not without risk, a smoke or a fear, there's a dark rumour that Northern Ireland has the best knee surgeons in the world due to the power of mild risk fear of a policeman's style of knee capping where they place a gun in the back of your knee and put the trigger below and like the front, if you live in a community run by the powers and you piss them off, you're among a null about it, it might be a brick through your window graffiti on your door or a visit from the local police to tell you they would strongly advise you leave the premises and find someone else to live, for many community volunteers this was a case of heart overmind, they were driving in the oil of strongholds that have been rattling just hours before to deliver food to the very people that had been targeted, but their compassion for those sitting hungry tired and scared, outweighed the fear they felt for their own safety, many of the volunteers who helped, will never tell their neighbours what they did, they may never tell anyone about it, drivers arrive back to the hall with stories of families sitting in the dark with no electric in the later, with mothers hiding in the back room by the door with their babies in their arms, ready to run into the flaming bottle come through the window, if you've wandered for a moment what kept a smog of energy, now you know. Some volunteers spunk into action from the first moment and some are still going, there are still people from ethnic minorities in great need, I cannot imagine the fear they're still living in, but why was it left of the people to take action, I've heard that question last several times during the last week, it's hard to know, many people are rightly wondering whether government was in all this, where are our politicians, yes some get on their podiums from time to time to condemn the violence, but it wasn't for the community on the grind and the wonderful generous people who donated money, all of those people that we helped would still be sitting there hungry tired and scared even more than they are now, I know that here on the grind we're putting together a contingency plan so that we're ready to spring in the action should this happen once more, and we've done that without any of the resources of the disposal of the government, albeit in our own small way, so why after so many summers of this happening do we know nothing of any government plan, if there was any sort of plan, surely we would be seeing it in action by now, the sad reality is this is likely going to happen again, probably this very summer, we have a lot of problems and very little solution, how do we guarantee hyzen that safe in a city that's littered with it, how do we say to people we're giving you a food parcel with a week's worth of food, but next week you're going to have to sort it out yourself and go to the shop, next week you're going to have to walk past your neighbor's smashed windows and the graffiti sand Muslims out, next week you're going to have to walk past the house of that loyalist who insists on calling the slurs every time he sees you, even as I'm recording this there are new calls for so-called protest, though the next few days, there's a rumor a non-white man was arrested trying to break into someone's house, I'm not being coy by saying no, that's the best level of reassess and we're currently operating with care, and an incident like that is enough to set this all off again, for the rest of this summer, I use on both sides of the immigration argument, we'll skim over news articles, searching for a reass or nice melody to be mentioned, I cannot imagine how it feels to be a member of an ethnic minority and be on Tenderhooks, hoping and praying someone of color does not commit a crime, he may be forgiven for thinking that we have absolutely no other crimes, a current on a daily basis, spicy none committed by white people, of course we do, they're the majority, we have one of the highest rates of violence against women and girls in the whole of Europe, just 2020, 30 women have been violently killed by a man, a local man, did they riot them, I'll give you two guesses, our community action was not enough, that's the sad reality, what does some toilet rule and a few vegetables matter when someone's car has been burnt out, how does a bag of rice come and see if you're having to leave your home, it just doesn't, then maybe it will bring a small bit of hope, when we decided We were going to do something to help. That's all we started with, hope. And now a week later, after thousands of plans worth of food, electric vudges, phones, SIM cards, blankets, and pajamas have passed in and out of our doors into the homes and emergency accommodation across Belfast. It's all we're left with, hope that we helped, hope that we would ever have to do it again. As one recipient of financial help put it, the real value is not in the amount. It's the kindness, humanity, and compassion behind it. At the very start of this podcast, I told you, Belfast is a beautiful city, rich in culture and history. But at the bottom of the wonderful words of that recipient, I think it's also a city rich in kindness, humanity, and compassion. It is a city that is shown that calm, not well, come together when it really matters. Even if you can't always see it, not the real face of Belfast. I want to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who I met but never got the names off. The people I'd never have met and I hope I don't have to meet again. Thank you to everyone who donated from across the world. That support meant everything to us and allowed us to help those who needed the most. And I also want to say thank you to the people here in Belfast and Northern Ireland. They've been the most affected by these rats, to the immigrants, the refugees, and the asylum seekers. Thank you for coming here, for having a lot of community, and for becoming our community. We are the real community of Belfast and we are nothing without you. (upbeat music) I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcasts. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I'm talking about scams from the 1800s, all the way up to today. Call your grandparents, tell your parents to stop clicking on links, please. So if you like fun, if you like comedy, and you like learning and protecting yourself from criminals, start listening to scam goddess on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. ♪ Scam goddess ♪ - Hi, this is Kylie Breikman, Angel Jaretana. - Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald. - And we're the hosts of the artists on artists on artists on artists podcast. - The improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. - Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. - What I try to do is vote journal. I don't know, I think I sort of vote journaling. - Yeah, it's reading, it's called reading. - So you're, so we don't like to use that word anymore. - Okay. - A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. - Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? - No! - I've been dying too. - I'm so sorry, I'm seeing a reading of Sudako in the Thousand Paper Cranes by Audrement Donalds at the Wonderland bookstore, 14th. - That's crazy, I went to the Wonderland bookstore yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Dark 30. - No way. - You have to come to the last bookstore though. Kim Catrol is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. - A panel of Eurovision participants. - And we do a little Halloween sometimes. - Does the pope dress up? - He, he winks on Halloween. - It's right up next to the microphone. - You can, I hear you get the elbows here. The eyelashes hate each other. - You've never seen Italy so quiet. As when the pope gets up to wink on Halloween. - Listen to artists on artists on artists on artists. - On the I heard radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Self-care September is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk, it can be an everything shower, it can be putting your phone on, do not disturb, but sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff. And understanding your patterns, your boundaries, finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Jenna Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast. And each week we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s, from relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are. - I'm Britt Coleman, and I'm Trevor Sikama. - Bro, it's got a man wide open! Touchdown, stay locked! - Every week we use exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content to break down the biggest stories, matchups, and moments from around the league. - Fires it out, but flat to barkly, who beats one man, spins past another, leaps over and throws. - And don't worry, this isn't just a show for stats experts. So whether you're a casual fan, learning more about football or a hardcore fan who can't get enough analysis, our goal is to help you see the game in a whole new way. - If you've ever wanted to know why a playwork, how a matchup was won, or what most fans missed on Sunday, NFL Pro delivers insights you simply can't get anywhere else. (upbeat music) - Welcome to Ikadappin here, a podcast that is often about being trans in America and living under a regime that is actively hostile to our mere existence. I'm your host, Mia Wong. And today we're going to take a somewhat broad view and look at what it means to be trans in America from a class standpoint. Now, I think if you are trans, you are at least broadly speaking, not a capitalist in the sense of, you do not own the means of production, you are not the bourgeoisie. There are so few of us at all who can be said to own the means of production. We are almost entirely as a class, like some kind of worker or another. But there is a lot of specificity to the specific trans experience of class and where we fit into the broader American class structure that I want to talk about today. And I want to simultaneously get people an actual understanding in one place of just kind of the outskirts of how bad it is. But then also talk about how good it is, isn't maybe the right term, but want to give people a sense of what this class position means for our place and ability to fight back. Because that is also a critically important part of not just being trans, but a critically important part of every leftist and liberation movements in the US for the past decade has been, and longer than that decade, two decades has been us. And obviously there have been a lot of trans people who are involved in a bunch of shit before then, but the extent to which trans people have been involved and have been central to every social movement you've ever heard of in the modern era is exceptional. And I want to talk about why that is. I want to start talking about why that is by looking at some of the data that we have on what it's like to be trans in the US. And this is one of the things that's very difficult when you're writing about trans people, because we all have our experience of transness. - And what he's trying to get trans healthcare, I think is aware that there is so much research that has just not been done about us. This is medical research on the effects of specific, hormone regimens and like what kinds of medicines do we do to help and what the effects are. A lot of the information that you do get from doctors is based on really, really old studies that aren't applicable to what actually exists. And this is also true when you're trying to look at economic data where there just aren't that many studies of what it's like for trans people in the US. And the ones that do exist, and there are people who have done some, they're very reliant on data sets that are not specifically designed to be of trans people. And that's a problem because a lot of what you end up with and the reason why like there are some things that I've read that are just not gonna be in this episode is that they are very reliant on things like, okay, we know this person has gender markers have changed or their names have changed. have changed. And that's fine. Kind of if you want to sort of get a sense of what's going on, but like the percentage of trans people, the sort of demographics of trans people who have officially changed their gender markers is not reflective of trans people in general. So we're going to be using a lot of data in this from what's called the US Trans Survey. So USTS is run by advocates for trans equality and God fucking bless them. These people are doing the transgender's work. It's an invaluable resource. I don't know of a better sort of repository of information about trans people that has been collected. So these surveys are run fairly. And frequently there was one in 2015 and one in 2022. But in the 2022 one, they got 92,000 trans and non-binary respondents, which is unbelievable. That is a staggering sample size. But the information they got from it is in a lot of ways extremely bleak. I mean, you know, you can look at the positive stuff, which is that yeah, people who transitioned to say that yeah, their lives are happier now they're transitions. Like they like transitioning. It's good. It's I don't know. Do the thing. It will make you happier. However, karma, the economic numbers, Jesus Christ. Oh boy. Oh boy. Now, as I've said, right, the people who work on the US Trans Survey, they do astonishing work. But as with all trans people, they're doing astonishing work with not that many resources and it takes them a long time to put their studies together. So again, the information that we're using is from 2022. So this means a couple of things. One, this is dream, the Biden administration, right? A regime that is significantly less hostile to trans people than this current one, even though there was a bunch of bad shit going on then. Some of it done by the Biden administration. Dear God, is Trump administration significantly, significantly more hostile trans people. So the conditions that we're seeing now are going to be worse than the ones that we have data for. So all of the numbers I'm about to tell you about, you know, poverty rates and unemployment and homelessness, it's gotten worse. The second thing is when the US Trans Survey rights reports, I mean, they released recently. Yeah, they released in June, health and wellbeing, a report of the 2022 US transgender survey. It is 110 pages long. So they do very, very good and detailed work. However, what that means is that we still, for example, don't have like a granular economic report and we don't have just the full report that they write on this stuff. And we also don't have really the sort of granular reports that they have from the 2015 numbers on the experience of trans people of different races. So those are sort of what I would say are the limits going into this that we have. However, what we do have from the early insights report is just horrifying. So one of the sort of defining conditions of being trans is dispossession. And you can look at dispossession in a whole bunch of different ways. You can look at, for example, the poverty rate, the poverty rate from the US Trans Survey among trans people is 34%. The American poverty rate is 12%. So that's almost three times higher than the general population's poverty rate. And 34% is really bad, right? Even looking at other demographics and other poverty rates, that's really, really, really bad. The trans unemployment rate is, I think, in some ways, even worse, the US trans unemployment rate is 18%. The US unemployment rate in general in 2022 was 3.6%. So let's try to get an understanding of what it means. Unemployment rate is a weird number. There are some people, it doesn't count in terms of people who have stopped looking for work, right? But to put this into perspective, during the peak of the lockdowns in 2020, the unemployment rate in the US was 14%. And that was the highest it's been in Asia's. For trans people, it's 18%. So if you are trans in America, right? Trying to find a job, it is worse than it was for everyone during the lockdowns. 18% unemployment is like 1937, early 1938, great depression levels of unemployment. It's almost 1 in 5 people. And again, these are the numbers from 2022, during the Biden administration, when the situation was better for trans people, we don't have more recent numbers for the US at sort of any kind of scale. And even back then, four years ago, when things were better for us and the economy in general was running a little bit better, it was, again, 1938, great depression levels for just a regular trans person, right? This has a really, really broad array of facts, right? In terms of, you know, just the experience of the world that you have if you are trans, because you are fundamentally living in a different world than an economic world than cis people do. Like again, the cis people's unemployment rate 2022 was like 3.6%, and yours is 18. You are living through the great depression and they are living through a normal economy. And that means that just fundamentally from a class position, you have a different experience of reality than they do. You are living in something that is not the same as theirs. I also want to talk about homeless list numbers because, you know, queer homelessness has always been really, really bad for reasons that kind of obvious reasons that we'll get into here. But it's also related to, for example, the unemployment rate and the poverty rate because, you know, having an apartment or just any place to stay is expensive. We got a report recently that was a joint effort between advocates for trans equality and the national alliance to end homelessness who did a report using the USTS data. And they talked about how 30% of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lifetime. For Americans, it's about 4% for Americans at large, right? Just Americans in general is about 4%. So that is a homelessness rate of 8 times the rate of the general population. And again, that is the 2022 numbers, which are now worse. And this is something that I think is borne out by, if you are around any, like, I mean, not even working class trans people. If you're just around trans people in general, you have met people who have been homeless, right? Like you're just constantly around people who have been homeless. And this is one of, I think, the defining elements of of what being a trans worker is is that the level of precarity is so great. And the odds that through some kind of employment discrimination or just some bullshit happening with your employer or just like, I don't know, the employer is doing layoffs. It is so, so easy to move back and forth between having an apartment and being on the street in a way that to some extent, the general American population has, but again, the rate for the general population, if they've been homeless in their lifetime is 4% and for trans people is 30%. And this rate, this, this 30% rate of people who've, of trans people who've experienced homelessness and also, by the way, a lot of the people who have experienced this have experienced in more than once. And you know, there's a lot of just people who are trans who are homeless, right? The fuck now. This is why I say, like, put a trans girl in your couch at the end of every executive disorder because there aren't like widespread solutions to this right now. It's something that we have to figure out for ourselves. And we just don't have the resources to do it. Now, this discrimination is intensified both in the housing market, right, by just general anti-transition discrimination, by poverty. And this is this also sort of a cyclical process, right? Like, part of what's difficult about me writing this is that I, like, I haven't been homeless and I haven't been a sex worker, which means that I'm missing experiences that a lot of trans workers have. What I can't say about it is like, obviously, being homeless makes it harder to get even just an apartment afterwards because it has a whole bunch of negative effects on a whole bunch of shit, including, for example, like, like, you know, obviously is like, fucks with your credit score. It fucks with just like, oh, do you have like previous landlord references that you can use? There's a whole bunch of different sort of spiraling effects of this. There's, you know, obviously, there's health effects. There's safety effects. So what you're facing is on the one hand, you are squeezed out through discrimination at the workplace, through the fact that also in this, this is another fairly common thing. Trans people may significantly less money than cis people do just on the dollar. It's way, way worse. So you have lower income when you get a job, you have less access to jobs. And you also just have housing market discrimination. And also trans people have weaker access to family support networks that function in a way to subsidize social reproduction for cis people. A lot of trans people's families and parents don't accept them. And they just get kicked out. Or if they are able to access resources from them, it's under conditions of extreme violence. And that has a massive effect on on homelessness, right? Like a whole bunch of homelessness is caused by crew youth getting kicked out of their houses. And because you also don't have places you can go back to, right? You don't have the kind of like familial safety net that a lot of cis people have access to, and you're less likely to have access to it, this intensifies the rate of homelessness and it intensifies the consequences of it and how difficult it is to get out. All right, we are going to go to ads and then we are going to come back and talk about some more bleak shit, but also this is not just the things follow-up podcast. This is also the put it back together, but in a better way podcast. We are back. Now there's another factor, something that's becoming increasingly a factor of trans life that has existed obviously for a long time, but has been enormously exacerbated by the current regime and that is the trans refugee population. There is in the US a massive trans refugee population, you know, what you would call I guess internally displaced people, the movement advancement project or map to the study in 2024 2025 looking at trans people who moved from one state to another because of the anti-trans legislation, right, and they found, and this is just between November and June of 2025, they found that 9% of all trans people had moved in just that eight months span, right? That's 9% of trans people had just in this span between November 2024 and June 2025, right? That's in that span, 9% of the trans population moved. That's over 1% of the total trans population moving per month to a different state, specifically because of anti-trans legislation, right? That's really bad. If you look at sort of the general population of trans people in the US, that's 400,000 people in just that eight month span. That's the entire population of Cleveland, Ohio, and then 35,000 more people, right? I mean, that's like obviously it's not like the complete metropolitan, it's like the actual city of Cleveland, right? But like, again, that's in the span of eight months, we moved the entire city of Cleveland. And it's definitely gotten, like almost certainly has, like there have been more people who have moved, you know, since June 2025 because the anti-trans discrimination and trans crackdowns from the state have only gotten worse. This is a refugee crisis, right? And the things that they're fleeing from are also things that are just, you know, conditions of what, of what being trans is in the US, right? Which they're fleeing restrictions on healthcare access from the national level, from the state level, also, as we talked about, like from religious hospitals, who can also just like even if even if you're in a so-called blue state could just be like, fuck you, eat shit, we're not going to give you healthcare, they're fleeing bathroom bills, they're fleeing, don't say gay bands, they're fleeing also just an increase in social violence, right? Because the thing that this, that this all legitimizes, right, that anti-trans rhetoric legitimizes, the anti-trans seat action legitimizes is just getting assaulted for being trans. A thing that has always happened, but is now happening more than it did before. And yeah, that not being, you know, assaulted, and this happens at work, this happens, like coming back from work, this happens in other places too, is also, you know, a part of the condition of your labor. When you combine the fact that trans people were already, and I want to point this out, right? The homelessness rates, you know, the 18% rate of unemployment, the 30% rate of experiencing homelessness in their lifetime, right? Was before the refugee crisis, like really, really intensified into what we're seeing now, right? It was not as bad in 2022 as it is right now, when again, like we were seeing for a period of eight months, we were seeing over a percent of the population per month, the trans population per month moving, all of the unemployment numbers and the poverty numbers and the homelessness numbers, those were all pre to sort of real intensification after the election of the mass migration and refugee sort of status of trans people. And this has had an effect on trans people's class position, right? What this has created in the places that trans people are fleeing to, and this is places like Portland, this is places like New York, like LA, there's a lot of sort of like regional centers too, where I'm obviously Chicago is like the other sort of big one, but you know, like places like Mezzula, right, for people who don't know what Mezzula, Mezzula, Mezzula is a city with like a pretty large university population in Montana that has a fairly large trans population because it collects trans people from a whole bunch of the region around it, and there's also a bunch of people who go there for college and realize that they're trans. But what this has done, right, is it's forced a bunch of people to move, leave their homes, which is expensive, right? And then you have to find jobs in these new places. And it's already really difficult to find jobs in the places that you were. And so, you know, what you're facing just in general, right, is you're facing this trade off between, can you survive in the place that you are with the life that you have, or do you need to pick up and go to another place where it's less illegal for you to be yourself. And what this has created is this sort of mass underclass of trans workers that is especially large in places with large refugee populations. These workers are of any subgroup that like trans people are in, the trans people in that group are the most marginalized, and the most just absolutely fucked of everyone in that group, right? You know, you can look at like the violence rates for black trans women, particularly is appalling, right? And there's a lot of disabled trans people and among disabled people who already have it really, really bad in the US, right? Like you look at those able trans people and it's it's even fucking harder, that's especially an issue with, you know, something that's been affecting a whole bunch of people, which is the Medicaid work requirements, which have been just unbelievably harmful to a whole bunch of disabled trans people who suddenly are being forced to work who just can't, right? And what this has created is this incredibly, incredibly precarious class of workers all over the spectrum of the working class, right? There are a lot of trans people, an unbelievable number of trans people working service jobs. Like the lower end and shittier the service job, the more likely you are to find trans people there. There's always been a lot of trans sex work because a lot of times that's the thing you can do, right? And this is sex work across the entire spectrum of what sex work is, of sort of like greater and lesser degrees of risk. This also is the thing that contributes to the criminalization of trans people because there's a bunch of criminalization of sex workers in ways that gets trans people targeted by the police and subject even more police violence and they are already, which they are also subject to extraordinary amounts of police violence. I don't know. Every trans person has seen some shit. But I'm not just saying this to be like the trans class position is bad, but what this has done is create this class of trans workers that moves between parts of the class that don't have contact with each other very much. There's a whole bunch of movement between being housed and being unhoused in a way that is at a significantly broader scale than it is for the rest of the population. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of trans workers who are able to unify around being trans and have contact with each other and do organized with each other and to fight alongside each other from different parts of the working class that don't often particularly get along. In particular, in terms of service workers and unhoused people, there is a really systemic effort by the states and by the rights and even by the government party too to pit these groups against each other. But also with trans people, it's like, well, I don't know, there's also an extent to which, yeah, if you're a trans person, you are X number of days away from being that person on the street. This has created a fairly unique class position of unbelievable precarity, state and forced precarity. It's obviously not the only class position in the US of legally mandated precarity. You can look at undocumented workers who have even more genocidal shit happening against them right now in terms of just like, yeah, no, yeah, there's just ice rounding people up. But what has been produced here is this incredibly precarious class of like down the removal workers. And it's also worth noting that like to some extent, this is a deliberate strategy of the right. Like this, this is what the right ones, you know, if you look at like the rise of neoliberalism, you look at Reagan, you look at thatcher, right? One of the big things that they are about in this era is control over gender and control over social reproduction. This is one of the things, you know, if you look at how these people come to power, they come to power on the. back of very, very right wing social movements, right? That are, you know, in the US, it's like the, you know, the sort of like the rise of the evangelicals who one of their big things, right? One of the things that they're interested in is suppressing queer people specifically, right? But you can, you can look at this in other contexts too, where, you know, you, you can look at China in the 1980s as the beginning of sort of the reform period is starting when you start to see the return of capitalism to China. In 1980, you get the one child policy. I'm occurring on a little bit of a tangent here, but something I don't think is really acknowledged in the way that people think and talk about China, which is that the one child policy was not a thing from the Maoist period. This was the reformers, right? Deng Xiaoping is in power when this goes into effect, right? And it's, and when it's like written into the constitution, like this is Deng Xiaoping, this is, this is, you know, the sort of pro-capitalist reform movements that is imposing the one child policy on people in the US, you also have like restrictions on abortion are sort of part and parcel of the right to attempt to expand capitalism because control over the family, control over, you know, social reproduction, the production of new workers and the ability for people to continue to be workers for the capitalist system, that's something that is important to them, right? And the, the maintenance of right-wing gender roles is something that is important for them is to be able to reproduce their ideology and also reproduce capital in general. And so they came after us. But on the other hand, right, you know, as much as we have been targeted by the right, trans people have also, as I sort of talked about a bit at the beginning of this episode, been overrepresented in just every left-assulsion movement for the past like two decades, right? Everything from like union organizing to mutual aid to like who shows up in the street to protest to like blocks from like occupy to the uprising, right? There are trans people in all of these social movements in extremely key roles. And the only real way for this not to happen is to when trans people are specifically driven out of these movements and that happens a lot, right? Like that's also like one of the things that you experience being a trans like worker is that, you know, people who are transphobic in the left will run you out of the shit that you're doing. Usually, I say usually because sometimes they are, you are explicitly push off of being trans. Usually there's like some other excuse that's found to do this. But, you know, even with how much, you know, like persecution to trans people there've been in the social movements, so like trans people still show up for it, right? You know, they take just sort of a random example, right? Friend of the show, Vicki Osterwile, was the facilitator of the first occupy meeting in New York, right, we're just, we're just always there. We have always been there. We've been there everywhere. We will continue to be there in all of these movements in the anti-ice movements in, I say movements because like this is true in like the 2018 anti-ice movement is true in the current anti-ice movements. It was true in the student encampment of 2024. And there's a reason for this. And the reason for this to a large extent is that very precarity, right? If you were going to be trans, especially now, you have no choice but to fight if you want to exist, if you want to have access to your healthcare, if you want to be upgraded to the status of mere proletarians, if you want your life to just merely, merely be the life of a cis worker, which is significantly less fucked than your life is, you have to fight. And this is something that has also spread to some extent by sort of trans culture, I would say broadly, but also just like the kind of social groups that form. And also it's spread, and this is particularly something you see in unions a lot, right? We've talked a lot in the show about trans people being overrepresented in unions. And it's like, well, we're overrepresented in unions because we're workers, right? And this is in some sense the potential of what the right has brought, right? Which is that they have created this extremely large population of trans service workers and trans refugees who have nothing to lose, but their chains and a world to win. Slightly elsewhere in the manifesto like Marx writes, what the bourgeoisie produce above all are its own grave diggers. And if you look out at the world in 2026, right, you can see the graves being dug. The question is who is going to be buried there? The capitalist class would very much like it to be us. I, for one thing, don't want to fucking be buried in a mass grave. And if we're going to put something in that grave, better it be the class system itself. And that's a world worth fighting for, a world where there are no grave diggers, where there are no mass graves, where the state and the landlord don't throw you on the street in the night, where you can live in your community and not be run out, where you have your healthcare and you are able to be the person that you want to be. And that world is winnable. All that is left is to fight for it. (upbeat music) - Hi, this is Kylie Breikman, Angela Jaretana. - What I try to do is faux journal. I don't know, I think I sort of faux journaling. - Okay. - No! I'm so sorry, I'm seeing a reading of Sadako in the Thousand Paper Cranes by Auderman Donald at the Wonderland Bookstore, 14. - No way! - Patrick, the last bookstore though, Kim Katrol is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday! - He gets right up next to the microphone. - I hear you get the elbows here, the eyelashes hit each other. - You've never seen Italy so quiet, as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. - Listen to artists on artists on artists, on the iHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator and host of Scam Goddess Podcast, the True Crime Comedy Podcast, all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. 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Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - I'm Britt Coleman and I'm Trevor Sikama. - Bro, it got a man wide open. - Every week, we use exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content to break down the biggest stories, matchups, and moments from around the league. - Fires it out but flat to barkly to Pete's one man, spends past another, bleeps over with fur. - So whether you're a casual fan learning more about football or a hardcore fan who can't get enough analysis, our goal is to help you see the game in a whole new way. - If you've ever wanted to know why a playwork, how a match-up was won or what my- Those fans missed on Sunday, NFL Pro delivers insights you simply can't get anywhere else. Listen to NFL Pro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I show about things falling apart and putting them back together. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode is on probably the most controversial midterm election happening this year, the U.S. Senate race in Maine. Where the new Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, is running to end the 30 year reign of Republican Senator Susan Collins, who brands herself as a moderate, independent leaning Republican, but is consistently backed, trumps on popular policies while holding onto power. Things Susan Collins would be a key part of taking the Senate away from the Republicans. Much of the media coverage and discussion of this election has focused on the scandals, relating to Graham Platner's personal life, with very little on the real relations of his campaign, the political platform he's running on, the relations between him and organized labor unions and working class manors. Congress campaign has attracted overwhelming support from voters in Maine. Despite the series of well reported personal controversies, the Nazi link tattoo he got as a Marine, old offensive Reddit posts, marital issues, relationship issues, and an ex-girlfriend who worked at the Heritage Foundation, accusing him of "disturbing behavior" after he got out of the military. Mainstream outlets have covered those at length. This episode I'm going to narrowly focus on the relations of Graham Platner's campaign. I'll start by going over his campaign platform, then his ties to labor unions and community organizing, and finally, how those ties set up his campaign for massive success in the Democratic primary. Platner calls himself a "new-deal" Democrat, and, like Bernie Sanders, believes we need a "political revolution" in this country. He wants to shake up the Supreme Court, increase the federal minimum wage, and ban billionaires from buying elections. His platform is also designed to address the concerns of working class manors, like declining manufacturing, decaying infrastructure, closing hospitals, and spiking energy costs. Platner supports universal healthcare, and ultimately wants to pass a Medicare-for-all-type system, while pointing to how the country could build on the VA model, saying, quote, "The level of healthcare I've received with Maine's excellent VA system should be available to all," unquote. We all know that going up against for-profit healthcare will be a hard battle to win. His platform contains a list of policies that will start to break up healthcare monopolies and crack down on "farm a corruption," like banning insurance companies and private equity from buying medical practices and hospitals and banning prescription drug advertising. Platner says he wants to expand Medicare and Medicaid's power to negotiate drug prices, allow the import of low-cost prescription drugs from other markets, and ban stock buybacks and impose a cap on executive compensation for pharmaceutical companies that receive public funds. His platform calls to direct federal funds to reopen recently closed hospitals, birthing units and clinics, establish a national public drug manufacturing sector, make Medicare telehealth coverage permanent, reverse doge cuts to the VA, national legislation, mandating a safe level of nurse-to-patient ratios to counter chronic hospital understaffing, and to open a new medical school at university Maine. A large part of Grand Platner's policy platform is focused on protecting democracy by keeping money out of elections. Quote, "Democracy cannot function when wealth buys power. Since Citizens United, Unlimited Dark Money has flooded American politics, giving billionaires and special interests enormous influence." Platner wants to overturn Citizens United, either through a constitutional amendment or a different Supreme Court, more on that later. He also campaigns on banning congressional stock trading and advocates that former members of Congress should be banned from congressional lobbying. Quote, "Public service should never become a pathway to private affluence." Platner supports mandating congressional term limits, two for the Senate and six for the House, and at a minimum returning to the talking filibuster. His platform also includes congressional representation for everyone in the country, Quote, "including in places like Washington, D.C." As for the Supreme Court, Platner wants to pack the court and end lifetime appointments with staggered, time-limited terms. He's also in favor of impeaching justices on the Supreme Court by "holding the court through the same ethics standards we hold all other federal judges." Platner supports passing a constitutional amendment to "prohibit partisan gerrymandering and require independent redistricting commissions to draw fair maps," which he says would keep elected officials more accountable and make voters voices stronger. To combat anti-labor legislation like the Taft Hartley Act, Platner wants to strengthen our "right to organize" by passing the "protecting the right to organize" act, which would crack down on union busting by issuing significant penalties and override right to work laws. Platner also supports creating a union job requirement for all jobs funded by federal dollars. In interviews, Platner's advocated for something akin to FDRs proposed "economic bill of rights," in order to democratize our economy, we need to provide, as rights, things like housing, healthcare, education, and collective bargaining." He also wants to pass the equal rights amendment to protect against sex discrimination, while addressing how communities of color, LGBTQ Americans and immigrants have had the legal protections that were meant to guarantee them equal rights, "turned against them instead of working in their defense." We need a 21st century constitution that restores the original purpose of these guarantees, equal rights under the law, protected for every person in this country, unquote. His policy platform includes passing federal LGBTQ anti-discrimination legislation, and calls out Democrats for "pedaling soft bigotry to pander to Trump voters." One of Platner's most in-depth policy pages is for his billionaire tax plan, which he says represents, quote, "the bare minimum of what I believe we should expect a Democratic Congress under our next president to pass." Platner believes that income taxes alone, quote, "cannot address the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, only a tax on wealth can do so." He promotes a 5-6% annual tax on wealth over $1 billion, as well as taxing capital gains the same as wages, quadrupling taxes on stock buybacks and taxing excessive CEO pay to pressure corporations to reinvest profits back into their workers through higher wages, better benefits and long-term security. On the campaign trail, he's talked with voters about removing the $167,000 a year income tax cap on social security payments, so that the ultra-rich contribute to the same payroll tax rate as the rest of us. He also wants to restore the enhanced child tax credit. Platner's tax plan doesn't just include raising taxes on the rich, but closing loopholes make corporations use to avoid paying taxes altogether. Quote, "By closing corporate loopholes, we ensure that the giants who profit off our shared infrastructure, courts, and educated workforce finally pay their way in that we can sustain investments into schools, safety, and services every community depends on." One way to stop corporate tax dodging is by ending worker misclassification, that is hiring workers as "contractors" to deprive workers of labor protections and healthcare while using this misclassification to dodge payroll taxes. Instead of foreign policy dominated by trade agreements that exploits workers and promotes endless war, Platner's platform calls for a new era of American "economic diplomacy" that takes on billionaires who "defund" the societies that made their fortunes possible simply by shuffling money into an offshore account. He advocates a "global billionaire minimum tax" to "insure that extreme wealth is finally reinvested in the public good regardless of where it is parked." This is based on a proposal by the EU's internal tax observatory. To accomplish this, Platner says we would need to overhaul global economic institutions, use our leverage as a trading partner and use international economic diplomacy to target concentrated wealth and coordinate taxes and sanctions on ultra-wealthy individuals, "rather than relying on broad trade sanctions that harm ordinary people." He also wants to close an inheritance tax loophole by stopping billionaires from passing down their wealth to their heirs tax-free through buying appreciating assets, borrowing against those assets and then passing down the assets after they die while avoiding any taxes on the increased asset value. Platner says time for those gains to be taxed too. The tax plan also includes ways to lower taxes for working in middle class Americans. Quote, "If we tax millionaires and billionaires at fair levels, we can provide a quote-unquote cost of living exemption from sexual income tax up to a reasonable threshold for working and middle class Americans. If we stop multinational monopolies from dodging their taxes, we can cut taxes on the small businesses and self-employed individuals who are struggling to survive. The federal government could adopt a property tax fairness credit similar to mains that ensures low and middle income families do not pay more than 4% of their income in property taxes by providing a refundable credit, including a fair calculation of rent attributable to property taxes, so that renters are treated equitably, unquote. Something we've previously reported on is Platner's opposition to what he calls "regressive gas and diesel taxes". Relying on fossil fuels to fund basic infrastructure does not make sense if we want to reduce fossil fuels used in transportation. Instead, public goods should be financed by progressive general revenues as outlined in my end billionaire welfare tax plan, unquote. Platner notes that an extra $275 billion has supplemented the tax-based highway trust fund since 2008. Platner also supports Rokanas' big oil windfall profits bill that would implement a per barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current oil price in the price per barrel last year, and he promotes a national electricity rate freeze by, quote, "providing direct low-cost energy infrastructure financing to any state that freezes or lowers electricity rates for four years, funded by the windfall profits tax and repurposed federal fossil fuel subsidies." This platform states that the most effective national security project would be a huge build out of domestic clean energy production. Rather than relying on private equity to invest in new clean energy, Platner supports a national energy infrastructure fund that would issue debt backed by the federal government and, quote, "partner with state lending authorities to provide cheap capital directly to utilities, rural electric cooperatives, public energy authorities, and other developers of low-risk clean energy projects." Platner believes this fund could cut Wall Street speculators out of the equation, help build at scale with union jobs, lower costs, and pass savings onto ratepayers. He also wants the Department of Energy to use the Defense Production Act to revive domestic manufacturing, to procure and stockpile critical clean energy technologies. His platform also includes creating a strategic fuel reserve for farmers and fisheries, a national whole-home repair program to assist in weatherization, electrification, and heat pumps to lower household bills by partnering with public housing authorities, county programs, and local trade unions, as well as reinvesting the money funneled to big defense contractors back into shipbuilding. On the campaign trail, Platner talks a lot about being a veteran, and the various ways that's informed his politics. He's promised to, quote, "never send Americans into a pointless war." And just all the issue of a president effectively being able to declare wars, but it's not called them wars. Platner is called on Congress to reclaim its war powers, and other authorities over the executive, quote, "we must pass a new war powers act. The same must go for ending the executive's intrusion on congressional powers of the purse, taxation, and other legislative prerogatives." We'll talk more about Graham Platner's campaign platform and ties to organized labor after this ad break. Welcome back to it could happen here. Democratic nominee for US Senate Graham Platner was interviewed by the New York Times and said that since the end of the Second World War, American foreign policy, our wars and interventions haven't been good for workers or American families. Quote, "they often are very good for corporate interests, defense contractors, and people in places of political power who want to use war as a mechanism of protecting their political power." Platner told the Times that he has a complicated relationship with the military where he's still proud of being a Marine, but is ashamed of what's happened in the Middle East and says that the policies and systems orchestrating those wars are, quote, unquote, flawed from the top down and that he considers himself and you war. But it doesn't matter if you try your best inside of a flawed policy and a flawed system, it's flawed from the top down. It's bound to fail. It's bound to bring an immense amount of violence upon people who in no way, shape or form are deserving of it because, I mean, we destroyed a wreck and we destroyed Afghanistan and all the suffering, all the killing, all the dying, all the displacement, all of it was we brought that, we the United States did that and then that I'm ashamed of. The anger that I feel is for the people that sent me who are frankly still the same people who are sending people off right now to go but be in harm's way so we can start and have the stupid war with Iran. Platner has been clear that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and that the US has aided in the genocide of Palestinians. Quote, it is the moral question of our time and we failed as a nation. Platner believes that Israel should not receive any US tax dollars and has proudly opposed APEC, though he has voiced support for sending aid to Ukraine. Platner calls abolishing ICE the "moderate position" and that he supports APEC citizenship, strong border security and a "end to the mass deportation machine". His policy platform says that "many multinational corporations have no interest in immigration reform" because "they want illegal workers with no rights who they can pay slave wages and abuse at will". In response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which Susan Collins assisted in by voting for Brett Kavanaugh, Platner wants to codify abortion rights and protect privacy rights. His platform states, quote, "the Constitution should make clear that Americans have a fundamental right to privacy, including personal medical decisions, control over one's own body, and freedom from unjust surveillance. In an age of mass data collection and artificial intelligence, this protection is more important than ever." Platner certainly leans pro-gun. He's taught leftist armed self-defense classes and owns AR-15s. He doesn't support an assault weapons ban, but did back a referendum to create a red flag law in the state of Maine. Other miscellaneous campaign planks include more funding for the post office, passing the Postal Banking Act, developing a federal childcare policy for kids under six, defending Medicare access for people with disabilities, strengthening the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, opposing any federal support for private school vouchers, reviving federal support for housing, something like the VA Home Loan Program for more Americans, banning hedge funds from buying homes through legislation like the end hedge fund control of American Homes Act, and legalizing cannabis and clemency for people caught up in the war on drugs. That is a long list of policy schools and prospective legislation that would be no easy task to enact. Some would mean a fundamental transformation in American politics and the world economy. Platner knows that not everything in his platform can be passed overnight, but says that Democrats need a strategic vision to fight for. Telling the Maine Monitor quote, "I'll be the first one to say that me being in the Senate as the junior senator for Maine is not going to get us Medicare for all. There is this sort of establishment pushback where people are often like, well, you're not going to be able to do that immediately. Like, well, no shit. That's what power building is. That's what a long-term plan is." In interviews, Platner often talks about his quote-unquote theory of power and how the Democratic Party has quote, "never been able to articulate what it's trying to do. Like, what's the end goal? It never really articulates a clear set of policies to get us there and then never seems to want to wield power to make those policies a reality," unquote. Platner told The New York Times that Democratic Party leadership has failed the moment that the party needs new leadership and that Chuck Schumer should be replaced. Of course, candidates can say anything to get elected. We've all seen politicians run on populist platforms, only to then serve lobbyists, corporate interests, and themselves once in office. Trump himself first ran as a populist outsider, despite being a billionaire. Senator John Federman also comes to mind. Though the only thing that really made Harvard graduate John Federman and quote-unquote outsider was that he wore a hoodie and head-stupid facial hair. Prior to his Senate campaign, he served as mayor of Braddock for 13 years and lieutenant governor for four. Federman also claims that suffering a stroke, quote-unquote, "liberated him" from quote-unquote "progressivism." All this to say, John Federman and Graham Platner's [BLANK_AUDIO] respective backgrounds are quite different. But obviously, words and promises aren't enough. To measure a candidate's worth, one must look deeper at the ties to local communities and organizations that might inform a candidate's political platform and facilitate their ability to run for office. To quote Graham Platner, "We need to build political power through getting people like me into the U.S. Senate, into Congress." And we also need to do it while building organizational power outside of this system. There's never been a moment in American history where we've gotten good things just because the institutions or people in power decided to do it. They need to be pressed. I mean, this is honestly why the country has killed the labor movement. We did it on purpose. We did it because the labor movement is the foundation of power that can actually like push back against this system, unquote. Graham Platner is only running for Senate because last summer, the AFL CIO, along with other local labor unions, were looking to put up a candidate to run against Susan Collins on a working-class platform. In July 2025, candidate Scouts showed up outside Platner's door asking him to run for Senate. Platner says he and his wife told him to "fluck off." Scouts, including Progressive Strategist Daniel Moroth, had learned about Platner from a video he was in a few years ago about community organizing against a corporate Norwegian cement farm that was trying to move in to their bay. My daily grind is coming out in the morning, cleaning equipment and tying knots and fixing rope and fixing line and fixing boats and cleaning oysters and listening to podcasts. My name is Graham Platner and I live in Sullivan, Maine, the owner of Frenchman Bay, Oyster Company, born and raised here in Sullivan. I grew up three houses down from the house I currently live in. Bangor Daily News reported that in July, Platner spoke with Jason Shedlock, the president of the main state building and construction trades council, via Zoom, to "talk about the potential run while working on his oyster boat." After a week after first knocking on his door, the campaign scouts shut up again. But this time, with a detailed plan and the connections to get a campaign up and running, Union's support helped provide resources to shoot a launch video, facilitate small dollar fundraising, and get Platner's name in local papers. He had never run for office before, but did serve as the harbor master and chair of the planning board for the town of Sullivan. In terms of Platner's own working class or middle class background, Platner's father was a lawyer in rural Maine, and his mom was a small business owner who currently owns a local restaurant. As a kid, his family got a financial aid package for a fancy private school in Connecticut, but Platner got himself kicked out after three months and then went back to Maine. After exiting the military, he worked as a bartender, well going to university in DC, dropped out, then worked as a private military contractor for six months at the embassy in Afghanistan. While there, Platner says he got deeply disillusioned with government corruption and the military industrial complex, quit, moved back to Maine, started working at a friend's oyster farm, and got into local organizing. In a less reported on a Reddit post made by Graham Platner, he credited late political commentator Michael Brooks with moving him towards left-wing working class politics around 2019 to 2020. Platner also made a Reddit post about being an anti-fascist. The Senate campaign launched in mid-August, and in just nine days it raised $1 million, with an average donation of $33, 98% of the donations were under $100. During its first week, the campaign was attracting 300 volunteers per day. Already soon, the campaign attracted the attention of Bernie Sanders, who comes September, invited Platner to speak on his upcoming fight oligarchy tour, and has continued to campaign with and back Platner. Meanwhile, Governor Janet Mills was recruited by Chuck Schumer to beat Platner in the Democratic primary. From early on in the race, Platner had received backing from local labor unions. And the main AFL CIO, Platner has received endorsements from ironworkers, local 7, National nurses united, main state nurses association, American postal workers, local 458, the National Postal Mail Handlers, local 301, the electrical workers union, local 2327, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, main state council of building and construction trades, North Atlantic states regional council of carpenters, carpenters, local 349 and 352, painters and allied trades DC 35, Massachusetts and Northern New England laborers district council, mill rights, local 1121 laborers, international union of North America, local 327668 and 976, teamsters, local 340 and the united auto workers, who represents nearly two thousand workers in Maine, including Marine Draftsman at the Bath Iron Works, non-profit employees, workers at the Portland Museum of Art and graduate employees across the University of Maine system. In their endorsement, UAW Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla said, quote, "Grand Platner has emerged as a voice for the people of Maine fed up with the corrupting influence of the oligarchy and money in our politics. More importantly, he's building a mass movement that will not only power his campaign, but will be ready to take on the challenges facing working families in Maine and across the country once in office. Our members are ready to hit the ground running with Graham's campaign and take back the power for Maine's working class." Platner has said he wanted this campaign to be an extension of the local community organizing that he and his wife were already engaged in, telling the Maine Monitor that campaign is a, quote, "organizing strategy first and electoral strategy second." For the past few years, Platner's organized with a mutual aid and community activist group called Arcadia Action and was named in local news coverage for organizing a protest after Trump was reelected. The protest focused on, quote, "the preservation of constitutional rights, support for Ukraine, protecting transgender mayors." Platner was also an active member of the Penobskit County chapter of the Maine's People's Alliance, the largest, quote, "progressive community action organization in the state," which claims to have more than 32,000 members. As a member of the Maine People's Alliance, Platner traveled to Washington DC a couple years ago for a march to protest access to health care, and since then has been doing grassroots community organizing in Hanukk County, according to the organization. The member led board of directors of Maine People's Alliance, voted unanimously to endorse Graham Platner. To quote the announcement, Maine People's Alliance, board co-chair Gina Morin, they then said, quote, "Listening to Platner during interviews and town halls, it is clear that he addresses the critical issues affecting our country and specifically Maine." He speaks directly to the reality that the top 1% are hoarding wealth, while the middle class and the poor are left to go without. He's also addressed the need to fix the same issues that we have been working on for years, such as health care, affordability, housing crisis, and immigrant rights. His activism drove him to seek this office out of frustration. His values and dedication are what align him with the Maine People's Alliance, unquote. The organization said back in February that Platner has been, quote, "active and vocal in resisting ISIS presence here in Maine and has been calling on our members of Congress to do more to protect everyone in Maine and across the country from ISIS violent racist tactics." Maine People's Alliance, board member Sean Donnelly, said, quote, "Gram names the oligarchy and corporate greed as the true enemies of progress in Washington, and he understands the only way to defeat them is through grassroots organizing. His personal story of finding purpose through his community and activism has the power to inspire many who may feel angry, disconnected, or hopeless about politics. Graham is a talented leader whose values, vision, and strategy are aligned with the mission of the Maine People's Alliance," unquote. Following the primary, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund endorsed Platner over Susan Collins, who was one of the deciding votes in sending Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and last week, the Maine Service Employees Association, which represents more than 13,000 active and retired public service workers in the state, formally endorsed Graham Platner. So why are these endorsements and community ties important? These relations are what a working-class campaign's political platform emerges from, and this community voting block is a mechanism to hold working-class candidates accountable to their constituents. Platner has told New York Times that he's a, quote, "Firm believer that organized people is the only actual place of power to conflict with organized money." And in our society, money is very organized, unquote. The echo to this sentiment at a campaign rally covered by more perfect union. Politics is about power. And in this society, power is either organized money or it's organized people. And the money is organized that always has been and it always will be until we organize enough people to pull it back. In May, Plattener told John Stewart that getting someone like him elected, quote, needs to be in tandem with a fully organized, broad based coalition here in the state of Maine that can put pressure on members of our delegation, if need be, because it's not going to be enough to just rely on the systems unquote. Two days before the primary election, Plattener spoke at a town hall about building a Senate office that prioritizes a relationship with labor unions rather than the owners of the industries that labor works in. A Senate office where a worker, labor organizer or civil rights representative should get more face-to-face time with a senator than any lobbyist. I very much believe that we need to connect that kind of local organizing work directly to a Senate office in DC. So something like I used to have been an organizer with Maine people's alliance before. And I firmly believe that we need closer coordination between community organizations, environmental organizations, frankly, all of the organizing groups around Maine with institutional power. I do think that that's history tends to show that you're most successful when outside organizing is working in tandem with institutional power. That tends to be when we get the most significant wins. I'll come back to discuss how the Plattener campaign was actually run after this ad break. Welcome back to what could happen here. This past April, one of Plattener's former high school classmates turned journalist named Josh Keith, wrote an article for the Maine Monitor about why Plattener's campaign has been so successful in Maine. The Plattener told his former classmate that the campaign is being run like a community organizing project. Quote, this kind of campaign and kind of politics with an organizing focus. This doesn't work if you just run TV ads. My background is in organizing and I want to take that on the road as a candidate. And the only way it ever works is by going out and engaging with people directly. You got to like not sleep, unquote. Direct person to person engagement has been the hallmark of Plattener's campaign strategy. Here age is certainly playing a factor in the race. Plattener is 41. Bennett Mills is 78 and Susan Collins is 73. Plattener's younger age is not just compelling to voters who want a younger generation of candidates, but it also impacts how he can campaign. Plattener is effectively campaigning full time, making three to six campaign appearances a day while his business partner handles the oyster farm. From late September to the early June primary, his campaign held 83 town hall events across the state, pulling in hundreds of people per event and filling out community venues. In comparison, Susan Collins has not held a single public town hall meeting in over 25 years. Janet Mills didn't even release a policy platform until April. Plattener told the more perfect union, quote, people want to hear about the future, people want to hear about your policies. And people also want access to you so they can figure out if you're full of shit or not, unquote, considering the smaller size of Maine, come the November election. There's a good chance Plattener will spoken face to face with nearly every voter in the state. At these town halls, he often talks about power, how working class power won the new deal. And how since the 70s corporate interests have been undermining that power using money to influence policy. At an event in Fryberg, Maine, Plattener said, quote, we are the richest society in the history of humanity. We can have universal healthcare. We can have universal child care. We can have universal education going from kindergarten all the way through higher education. We can have a tax code that pulls back the wealth that was stolen from the working class of this country for the past 50 years. What we need to do is from the ground up, build power the old fashioned way. This comes from organizing, unquote. Plattener's campaign has helped with other local electoral and legislative efforts and the Maine monitor reported that Plattener's events often serve as locations for, quote, food donation drop offs. He is frequently introduced by a local activist who gets to talk about their work, unquote. Plattener told the Maine monitor quote, we really have to fundamentally understand that no one is coming to save us. And the only way to build that power on your own is here in the real world, face to face with your neighbors, building trust in relationships again, unquote. Plattener's also said that building that kind of outside power is also how to find more people to run for office and gather the resources needed to get them elected to take power in an interview with John Stewart. Plattener said that because the US Senate is in many ways a uniquely undemocratic institution, quote, set up to be a specific bulwark against working class people to protect the elites. That actually makes it a quote unquote unique place of power if candidates with strong ties to working class communities can occupy those seats. Following their historic loss in 2024, the democratic party establishment has been in a uniquely weak position opening up the opportunity to address the issues that have led the party into national relevancy. Grant Plattener lays blame on the Democrats abandoning the working class. And that doesn't just mean white construction workers, but the actual multi cultural multi racial working class wage workers and those who cannot live off their investments. For the past 40 years, the party is abandoned organized labor and begun catering to upper middle class professionals and has become a party of the elites and IV leagues. In the United States, there are a lot of people who don't vote based on in ideology they hold, but in response to what's happening in their communities, hospitals closing jobs disappearing, groceries and utility is getting more expensive. Why would they vote for a party that says everything is fine? The economy is technically doing great. The democratic establishment has wagered that voters would rather protect the system rather than change it. And in 2024, that wager was proven wrong. People want change, even if that change is being promised by a billionaire charlatan whose real interest is in serving the upper class and tech companies. But for as many people who decided to vote for Trump, there were many others who saw through the charade, but were so disillusioned by party politics that they chose not to vote at all. Sanders campaign has made itself not just about taking on Trump or even Susan Collins, but a part of a larger seismic shift. The working class reasserting its power and taking back the democratic party. To quote the main monitor, quote, "unlike a Janet Mills, he's not trying to convince voters he will stand up to Trump. He's trying to start a movement to build a world without the despair and resentment that he believes allows Trump's brand of politics to flourish." Later at that event in the town of Freiburg, Platner told the crowd, quote, "People when their lives begin to deteriorate are going to look for folks to blame. And if we don't have an actual answer, then hatred and xenophobia and racism and homophobia and transphobia, all of them will fill the vacuum. This means we have to go out in our community and we have to wear our hearts on our sleeves." Main has semi-open primaries, meaning that unenrolled voters can vote in a party primary. In the lead of the primary, Platner's campaign did a series of videos where he gets coffee with Republican leaning voters and they talk about how their interests are more aligned compared to the interests of Trump, the billionaire class, and Susan Collins. Platner himself has said that his rise in Maine says more about the appetite for a new kind of politics rather than him specifically as a candidate. But from the perspective of some voters, the slow drip of scandals and controversies might actually bolster Platner's image as an anti-establishment candidate. For example, these people interviewed by CNN and MS now. "Are you considering holding your breath and voting for him?" "I got until Tuesday, but I'm pretty sure I'll vote for him. I don't take a lot of this crap as anybody else's business." For some Democrats, they're willing to look past the interpersonal stories. - Well, I'm not really interested in the guys you know I'm interested in his vision and what he has to say and I love what he has to say so yeah it's been definitely difficult because everybody is piling on this guy does he have a problem at past yes but I would rather have a redemption story than somebody telling you how wonderful they are how much research they do and yet they still make the wrong decision for the people of me on election day June 9th Platner won 71.9% of the vote with 154,000 and 58 votes Governor Janet Mills who stopped campaigning a month or a half prior but remained on the ballot 141,000 votes or 19.3% Grand Platner won more primary votes than any other Democratic Senate candidate in the history of Maine as he walked onto the stage for his victory speech drop kick Murphy's cover of which side are you on blared in the background Platner promised quote I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator now the national pundits the political establishment they keep looking for that one story that one headline that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by but in trying so hard to understand me they failed to understand that this is not about me at all this is a movement about us about the far too many working far too hard and struggling far too much at the hands of the ruling class at a town hall just a few days before the primary Platner spoke about the need to rebuild our old alliances with labor unions community organizations and civil rights groups quote the only thing that's ever beat fascism is a broad based working class coalition fascism is what we are up against I think a lot of the folks at the national level misunderstand the reason they keep getting everything wrong they think this is a race about me but it isn't this is a race about us this is a race about the future of politics in Maine this is a race about building power the old fashioned way from the ground up going out into our communities and having hard conversations putting in time and energy that many of us do not have we've got to do it anyway so what I'm asking to do if you don't want to volunteer on this campaign that's fine join a labor union go help out at the local food pantry go help out at a food bank it doesn't matter what you do what you got to do something because the moment we're in right now it's going to require all of us unquote there were 215,000 votes in the democratic primary Platner's campaign had 15,000 volunteers these volunteers went up against and beat the democratic establishment and now they face the GOP establishment this shift in the politics of the democratic party is not isolated to Maine democratic socialists just one in Washington DC and following the election of Zora mom Donnie nine more DSA candidates just won the democratic primary in New York including three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives but Maine occupies a unique place in American politics the stereotypical purple state unceding Susan Collins would prove that real working class politics don't just win liberal cities but can take down what Bernie Sanders would call the oligarchy as an old saying as Maine goes so goes the nation if you want to stop if you want to stop war with Iran and end the forever wars if you want to give workers the raise they deserve seniors the security they worked for you want to bring back Roe v Wade as Maine goes so goes the nation if you want to stop a Trump family slush fund their ballroom their deals with Saudi princes and tech oligarchs if you want to stop the corruption as Maine goes so goes the nation if we want a dismantle ice win back the Senate check Donald Trump's power and take back hours as Maine goes so goes the nation together we will defeat Susan Collins Graham Platner is slightly ahead in the polls above Susan Collins but the race is still quite close in 2020 when Collins was facing a challenger she too was behind in the polls but still pulled off a victory that doesn't for me at it could happen here see you on the other side hi this is highly breakman angel jaretana jermick olhane passionate McDonald and we're the hosts of the artists on artists on artists on artists podcast the improvised character comedy podcast were each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft join us for a panel of wellness influencers what i try to do is faux journal i don't know i think i sort of faux journaling yeah it's reading it's called reading so you're so we don't like to use that word anymore okay a panel of new yorker cartoonists have you guys done Terry grosses peloton class no i've been dying too i'm so sorry i'm i'm seeing a a reading of sedaco in the thousand thousand paper cranes by Adrienne Donald at the wonderland bookstore 14 that's crazy i went to the wonderland bookstore yesterday and i heard nor jones do a reading of zero dark thirty no way i have to come to the 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I'm Garrison Davis, today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. Hey. This episode, we are covering the week of June 17th to June 24th. Yeah. Should we start off with some little things? Yeah. Let's start out with some small things. Mm-hmm. So, I guess to begin with, a federal judge, Sparkle Supner, and actually, who we've heard about before in the show, has bucked the Trump administration from quote, "hazardly assembling a list of citizens. It will be used to purge photo rolls." Great. Yeah. I'm glad they can't do that haphazardly. Yeah. Given the timing right leg before the midterms, hopefully that means that this isn't going to happen in a way that will impact the midterms. The state department has announced it's going to begin revoking passports, people with outstanding child support of more than $2,500 United States dollars. They can contact and embassy to get a temporary passport to come back to the U.S., but they'll only have the full passport restored, I guess, if they pay their outstanding child support debt. Okay. Yeah. I'm wondering what got this to their ears. How big a problem is this? I'm not against this. I'm just wondering why they moved to do this. I saw it on the Twitter feed of the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, and I don't know how possible this would be to go after with public records to know which particular embassies are revoking passports of which particular people, if you see what I mean. Yeah. I think in general, revoking passports is a bad thing to do. Yeah. I think this isn't the way to go after the child support. You are a piece of shit if you're not playing paying your child support, but I think generally the possibility of someone being left like stateless, that's not how we get to a better world here. I'm just wondering why they're doing this. Like this has to be, they have to be targeting somebody with this. Like I don't believe this is about the problem of like there being a lot of people who are getting out of child support by fleeing the country. Like I don't believe that's the motivation here, and I'm kind of curious what it is. I couldn't tell you for sure, but the fact that I saw it is on the Nigeria Embassy website. I mean, I can look right now and see what other embassies posted it, I guess. Here we go. U.S. Embassy in Spain, I don't see it on their page. For example. Interesting. Okay. It'd be interesting to follow. Yes. I think I came across half an hour before we recorded this. No, it's not really. A judge has quashed a subpoena aimed at Governor Waltz and Mayor Frey along with other state politicians in Minneapolis writing, quote, "This course of events in and of itself establishes beyond a reasonable dispute that the subpoenas were part of a broader campaign to coerce state and local officials in Minnesota to assist the Trump administration in its enforcement of immigration laws, and of course this campaign played out against a backdrop of the Trump administration's well-established history of using criminal investigations to retaliate against and pressure the president's political and personal adversaries." Very clearly, if a thing the Trump administration has done with the DOJ, right, but it's good to see it called out, I guess. Sure. U.S.C.A.S. is looking to increase fees for existing permanent residents to naturalize. I become U.S.C.A.S.C.A.S.C.A.S. as well as removing fee waivers for low-income migrants. This will be a barrier to people, right? And that is why it's happening. Yep. A rep and a Paulina Luna used Claude AI to amend legislation. She's deleted her tweet, but I actually posted a link to her tweet on Blue Sky, and it still contains like the cashed text of the tweet if you want to get read it. She immediately responded by throwing her staff under the bus, complaining that it was not uncommon for staff to use Claude-fucking-amend national legislation. People just don't like to do their job, do you? My god. Yeah, I don't know how for hundreds of years people wrote legislation without asking fucking Claude. She left the. it had Claude responded in text of the bill that's had. Great. You did great stuff. Yeah. Claude is very popular in Washington, D.C. Like specific Claude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's widely agreed to be the best of the chat box. Thinking persons chatbot, yeah. Yeah. The thinking man's chatbot. There is like a weird Pizzoro universe where you get like the Mark Fisher Claude outputs that writes tons of legislation that gets suddenly passed. Yeah. Where the U.S. Center is a very odd, odd time, because like kept using this chatbot that really liked like a certain certain writing from the. Certain shit that people were reading online in 2001. Yeah. Certain biases baked in. Yeah. Yeah. I'm having this nightmare image. I'm having this nightmare image of people doing like prompt injection attacks specifically to like get Claude to like auto spit out certain lines of regulation. Yeah. Yeah. So just inserting trans rights into like appropriations bill. Claude amending prescription drug laws to allow me specifically to purchase a lot of it over the counter. Yeah. I can see a lot of good places to go here. Yeah. The Evans Amendment. I just get to call. Yeah. Yeah. It could actually be delivered. You don't even have to purchase it. Yeah. They put it in a trash bag for me. Yeah. They drop it with a drone. Talking of inserting shit into bills. Let's talk about Mike Lee, the only person worse for a planet than the sport of golf. Mike Lee mentioned two weeks in a row. Are we on three? I'm mentioning Mike Lee until he stops with this shit. Let me tell you. A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced legislation to block the back door sale of public lands through the reconciliation process. They might as well have called this to fuck you, Mike Lee, stop doing this bill. Mike is like it is exclusively one the person who is doing this and it is Mike Lee. The bill equivalent of spritzing a single guy on the nose with a bottle of water. Yeah. Stop it. Get out of here. Yeah. He's been slapped down. It's interesting to see. Like, you know, see less bipartisanship than he used to, but no one likes Mike Lee in this shit. Apart from people in Utah who inexplicably elected him, there's nothing people in Utah hate more than the beautiful land in which they inhabit. Yeah. Not being able to mind and graze it as much as they like. The Atlantic is reporting that PXS has pressured General Donahue into stepping down since Donahue will leave his job next week. Yeah. I guess I mean, Robert, I'm sure you're familiar as well. Donahue is a massive figure. He's very famously like the last US military official to leave Afghanistan during the withdrawal. He's a pretty major guy and was widely considered to be kind of one of the folks you'd think would be sort of bulletproof outside of the fact that he was involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan famously like. And I think most people assumed that because it was in a very like stereotypically heroic way and because this guy had such a reputation within like special operations that he would be protected, but this is kind of further example of the brain drain that's been hitting all of the guys who know how to do stuff. Yeah. And the Department of Defense. Yeah. It is quite remarkable when you look at a list of the people who have been purged, like you know, quote unquote retired, right? Like in terms of US military leadership capacity, it has been significantly diminished. Yeah. By PXF. I just want to put a note in here for later on. Hopefully, hopefully this never becomes relevant, but I really, really do not like that in a two year span. There has been a significant purge of both the senior leadership of the American and Chinese militaries. Yeah. Really do not like that. Just just putting this note in the record that like, yeah, very, very similar. You mean all the guys who like know each other? Yeah. You can say, no, I don't think that means that I know this guy. He would do, wouldn't do that for this reason. Like everyone like that on both sides is gone and that maybe is how traditionally disasters happen. Yeah. I don't like this. Just putting a note in. It's actually like saying what you want about, I mean, say many different things about like the fucking militaries of both China and the United States. But it's really good actually when you have like a professional officer cadre that's insulated from politics and also like kind of socially know the guys in the other countries at the higher levels because they've like spoken like that's actually really useful in de-escalation of conflict. Exactly. Yeah. It gives it informal de-escalation mechanism. And when that disappears, it can lead to problems. Yeah. And when you're promoting like like people of the Hexath fucking tendency, especially, right? A surprising number of disasters have been averted and not just because military officials but because like people in two countries who were like high up in the government like just kind of had to hang out with each other at events. And one was able to like call the other and be like, hey, Joe, like you guys aren't doing this. Are you? Because my people are fucking flipping out. And those relationships are really load bearing in the us all not dying in a time at fire thing. So, you know, there seems to be some kind of count of fact. I didn't know. There's just a lie going around ex.com that like Donnie Hugh, Donnie Hugh's last soldier to leave at Afghanistan as Robert said and like they were being shot at and there were like junior enlisted folks. Why? Being shot at. That wasn't happening. The last 13 US troops who died in Afghanistan were not shot by the Taliban. They were killed in an Islamic state suicide bombing. Again, because the Taliban was cooperating with our withdrawal. They were not like the Taliban was not fighting shooting at the US as we were leaving because they wanted us to do what we were doing. Yeah. They got the outside outcome without having to do that. - If you're the Taliban and the war is almost over, and you know, one thing about the US is the Taliban, which is like if we just suddenly kill a bunch of their guys, maybe they don't leave. - Yeah, I know, they will return to do a fucking murdering people's free. Like, I don't know, once again, right? Like, the things that have happened in the last five years seem to not exist in the mind of people who use X.com to get their news never existed for them. - I guess, finally, some good news. From Mark Waipdf, who destroyed a top madot and my 17 helicopter using FPV drones yesterday. - Oh, wow. - Yeah, not the first time it's happened in Myanmar. I constantly see when a drone is used in Ukraine in a sort of relatively novel way, people saying this is the first time it has happened, and almost always it has already happened in Myanmar. Not always, like, there were some autonomous drones that killed people in Ukraine a couple of years ago that I'm not aware of existing in Myanmar, but like, Orientalism definitely plays a role in people's ignorance when it comes to, like, military firsts happening in the spring revolution. But yeah, in this instance, they seemed to hit it with multiple FPV drones taking out its landing gear than its engines. - I do have one short story here that I've tried to avoid covering 'cause I really don't think it's that important. - Yeah. - But much like the LG just keeps creeping back into the headlines. So last month, President Trump got super obsessed with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, spent 14 million dollars in a no-contract bid to get rid of the algae. Trump used his own pool guys, and they drained the reflection pool. - That'd be shit. - They painted the bottom, quote unquote, "American flag blue," and then filled that thing up again. - Brilliant marketing decision by whoever named that paint, by the way. - Yeah. - Yeah, somehow the algae returned. And in an even worse state, turning the entirety of the blue reflecting water green. So in response, they started dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the algae. Now hydrogen peroxide, also a paint thinner, and stripped of the American flag blue paint started peeling off the bottom of the pool, making the situation worse. Now, here's where things get really interesting. This is the only reason why we're covering this. Because last weekend, Trump began making the completely unsubstantiated claims that the algae-filled blue paint fiasco was the result of quote unquote radical left lunatics who vandalized the pool. - Yeah. - The National Guard in the Park Police have since then been arresting people for standing near the reflecting pool. On Tuesday night, President Trump truth, quote, "six people have been arrested, and seven people have been cited for the damage they did to our country's now beautiful reflecting pool." The 350-foot gash made by a very sharp knife or razors is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350-foot length. It was purposefully and criminally done, and someone had to work very hard, probably in the dark of the night, to create such a situation, unquote. No evidence this has happened, obviously. People have been watching the pool non-stop. No one's been seen. - In the National Guard. - Waiting in there with a knife, cutting the floor. - Now, Garyson, Garyson, Garyson, you're not understanding what the president's saying. One man didn't wait in there with a knife. A team of hundreds each made a single slash. That's the kind of discipline and def is capable of. You don't know how to stand in the dark of the night. - And then, of course, in the dark of the night, they were black. - There's outlets like the Washington Post just reported on Trump's claims without noting that this is just a lie. - Just a piece. - Not a sense, yeah. - But as the president has said, six people have been arrested, one of whom for sticking his hand in the pool and touching one of the floating pieces of blue paint. - Yeah. - Trump has said they will need to drain the pool again to make further repairs ahead of the 4th of July, 250th celebration. - If you read the actual report that was made by, I think it was the parts department or whatever, like analyzing what had happened in the reflecting pool, they did notice some things that were described as cuts, but concluded they had nothing to do with the paint itself. Like, if you actually read the report, like what he's talking about is not, like what his own people said. He just saw cuts in the report and ignored that it was like, but these were somewhere else and not relevant to the paint peeling and just went with it. Like, that's the root of all this. - The thing with the story is like, yeah, on the one hand, it is very funny that the pool, the pool green, but also the fact that Trump can just lie about this stuff and then also a bunch of people get arrested. - Yeah. - Is really bad. It is in fact really bad that you can be arrested for putting your hands at a pool. - Yeah. - That's very bad. I just, just on a fundamental level, not a sign of a society that is functioning or healthy or at all. - Not doing well. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, no great, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Good look for us. On the USA, it's 250 years birthday. - Yeah. - It was deeply authoritarian society. - Speaking of, let's discuss probably the worst piece of news this week, which is the sentencing in the Prairie land case, where the Trump administration brought terrorism charges against with the alleges and Antifa Cell, who attended a protest outside of an ice detention facility last 4th of July. Benjamin Song was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Song was convicted of attempted murder for shooting toward a police officer who was pointing a handgun at fleeing protesters. Marcella Raida was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Zachary Evans, Autumn Hill, Savannah Baton, Elizabeth Soto, and Megan Morris were sentenced to 50 years in prison after being convicted of providing, quote unquote, material support to terrorists. Now, some of these people weren't even involved in planning the protest, but just new others who were. One of the people in this case wasn't even at the protest. Daniel Sanchez de Zostrada, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison, did not attend the protest, but was convicted of concealing documents for moving a box of personal items and anarchist scenes from one house to another. That got him sentenced to 30 years in prison. One of the judges, Judge O'Connor, who was not the judge for the trial, said that the maximum sentences are to quote, send a message to anyone who shares similar ideologies. Yeah, these are brutal sentences. Right, like these are sort of things that you see in the potential liability, but in my experience, I haven't seen many people get maximum sentences. Like I'm familiar with guys who are convicted of providing material support to the Islamic State, for instance, who did not get sentences anywhere in the assuration. No, this is absolutely insane. At least it's unprecedented, very clearly politically motivated as the judge openly said during sentencing. Yeah, deliberately admitted it was, yeah. Like the Adam Laufengai, who planned to attack power grids a few years ago, was just sentenced to 20. This is absurd. Like it was a song sentence of a hundred years is pretty insane itself. For you, even for being convicted of attempted murder, but all of these material support charges and concealing documents at 30 to 70 years is like here. It's outrageous. It's a very clear attempt to have a chilling effect, right? That's the goal here, the goal with the prosecutions and Minneapolis as well, like it's all the same. Part of the same strategy. Yeah. No, using conspiracy charges to rope in people to this larger case, arguing that this conspiracy is evidenced through reading zines, through wearing certain clothes at a protest, not being put out of Konkur and Tifa. And then they don't need to actually argue that every single person did a specific violent crime, but justice association with each other can lead to a conviction. And we are seeing this, you know, copied in Minnesota, where just like one or two people are charged with doing violence, like, you know, kicking a vehicle. But what links the 15 defendants together in Minnesota are these conspiracy charges? Yeah. The thing that it reminds me the most of is just, is, is Haymarket, where, you know, in a very similar way, you have an attempt to not even necessarily go after the people who did the thing. You have an attempt to put the ideology on trial. I mean, the judge explicitly says this, right? This is not a trial that is happening because something happened. This is specifically an attempt to send a message. Yeah. Yeah. The sentence message ended like stop resistance to everything the trial administration has been doing, particularly to try to, to try to like, bring down a level of resistance to ice and border patrols, like raids and actions, going forward. The defendants will absolutely need support for what's going to be a lengthy appeals process. Yeah. The worst case scenario is going to require building a mass movement to push for pardoning anti-ice protesters, including the Prairie Line defendants in a post-Trump government, of a complicating factor in this case is that some of these defendants are also facing state charges, which a federal pardon would not cover in Texas. Yeah. But rallying behind these people is of the, like, upmost urgency, same as all the anti-ice protesters around the country who are facing repression. Yeah. I do want to note that like our previous coverage apparel, I think my previous coverage, focused on how the government used these specific charges, how they use specific testimony and flimsy evidence to successfully argue a conviction. Well, also mentioning that some of the mistakes that the public defenders made during that case, missing deadlines to file motions, not calling witnesses, right? There is unique aspects of this case, and I think knowing what those are is important. When I was printing together that episode, a lot of the coverage I saw, talked about how fucked up the situation is, and it really is, right? But I think it's also important to actually know how the state is able to do this, like how they're able to argue this in very specific ways, to understand some of the unique aspects of this case, and to know what the state and jurors consider relevant evidence, saying certain things in group chats, but also just being at a protest with someone else wearing possibly matching clothing, right? Understanding those specifics I think is also important, but going forward supporting these defendants, regardless of the conviction is of the utmost urgency. We will link to the support committee with a career-line defendants and the donation link to help with legal costs and other expenses, resulting from the state repression. Yeah, I'm sure these people will have a lengthy and challenging appeal process ahead of them, like they will need significant legal support. Yeah, I figured I'd get out of prison, and if we look at previous movements in the US, like Biden, Pardon, Leonard Peltier, after decades, right? Yep, of him being a prison link, like most of the rest of his life was spent in jail, and we can come to contrast that to how Trump pardoned the J-6s very rapidly. No, 100%, yeah. Specifically in a post-J-6 pardon world, and considering the popular resistance to ICE, I think it's imperative that we go forward with the specific intention of even if the appeals fail, an anti-ice movement needs to include these people in their advocacy and getting them partens in the future. Yeah, yeah. And I think it is also just worth saying that, you know, I think there's an extent to which this repression would have happened regardless, but part of the reason why this is happening, part of the reason why the judge is saying the stuff, part of the reason why they find the need to try to do a chilling effect and, you know, use fear and terror to stop anything else, you know, to stop any of the resistance, is that the resistance is working, right? That doesn't mean that people aren't getting hurt and unbelievably sort of hideous ways. It doesn't mean that deportations are continuing, but they have not been able to do the things that they wanted to do. No, this is defensive lashing out, yeah. Yeah, you know, there is an extent to which they're doing this because they're losing and they know it, and they have something has to happen in order to change the balance of how this whole sort of conflict between ice and people's communities has been unfolding. And this is one of the things they're trying to do to do that. Yeah, and more broadly, they're just trying to chill anything that could become part of successful resistance. Like, they understand that anything that's public to the administration that looks bad can make them look bad. Like, that's why they're lashing out at the fucking reflecting pool tool. Like, the goal is to just, like, to instill a sort of instinctive fear of doing anything that could make the administration look bad. They're trying to, like, force their own sort of, like, less majestic situation out through just, like, arresting people whenever they embarrass the regime. Yeah. And specifically trying to criminalize common protest tactics and picking specific cases, like, you know, Prairie Land and, like, the 15 defendants in Minneapolis. And rather than actually focusing the majority of the case on alleged crimes, instead focusing on Antifa as this scary specter, right? It's anarchism, violent militancy, where just discussions or aesthetics of militancy is really what the case is like resting on. And convincing a jury that these people are a scary group of outside agitators, but by solidifying a conviction that actually criminalizes what are legal protest tactics. Like, this is the scary front-up of the case in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities, is that most of that document is covering legal, like, ice watch, rapid response networks, right, legal actions. But they're trying to criminalize people's coordination to do that legal action by focusing on a group. That the government thinks is specifically, you know, militant or has certain political beliefs. Yeah, I would say that the Minneapolis indictment is not the Prairie Land indictment. Like, that it's a very different thing. Totally. Yeah, we made an episode and that people go back and listen to it, but like, I think people, I understand the fear that people are feeling, but like, I want you to know that this isn't every case going forward, right? For this is a case that they have had success and they've extracted like a really horrific burden. Most of the cases they bought in Minnesota have been thrown out. The details and evidence of these cases are very, very different. Yeah. We're talking the comparison because the strategy from the DOJ is similar, even if the specific details and evidence in these cases do what, why they differ. And regardless of those differences, I think both the defendants in both cases should receive the same amount of support. Yeah. Like I mentioned, links for the support committee and the donation link will be at the very top of the description below. Let's go on a break and return for more news. (upbeat music) We are back when we're talking about Iran. We saw like a lot of back and forth over the weekend about the MOU about threatening the Iranian delegation, about them not signing it. The MOU of Versailles didn't work out. The MOU of Versailles, we have an MOU in place, right? At the time of writing, this rest on a very fragile piece in Lebanon. And I want to read something from Ben Gavir about Lebanon. He's a national security minister in Israel. Yeah, last time we spoke about him, he was physically assaulting people from the flotilla, I think. I'm just going to read this out. For every tier of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn. With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF and this commitment takes questions over every other consideration. I told the Prime Minister, even in a private meeting, for every tier of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with a ping pong. In the Middle East, you don't win with measure of responses or restraint. You need to go berserk to obliterate, to crush the terror. That's just a genocide post, like there's. Insanely a genocidal. Yeah, super genocidal. Like he might have all just say like what I want is a genocide. The genocide is what I want. In other historically documented genocides, it is relatively rare to have the person just being like, we're doing a genocide over here. This is a genocide and seems like a good time for it. Like it is historically somewhat remarkable to just be honest. Yes, we want to wipe them all out actually. If anyone wonders if this is a genocide or not, absolutely. Like you will not find a clearer statement of genocidal intent than this. And so the Iran peace deal being contingent on Israel, at least finding peace in Lebanon. Right now, they're occupying southern Lebanon. It doesn't look like they're leaving. It's contingent on this government, which includes someone who is openly genocidal. They're finding a peace deal with Lebanon, which I mean, what kind of peace, what kind of compromise can you come to with that person? Like Israel continues to be the force that continues to destabilize the region and cause more death and suffering. Let's move back to America. The Senate did pass a war power's resolution this week. It came through from the House. A resolution here, it expresses the will of Congress. It's slightly different from a piece of legislation. It is a setback for Trump, right? Like it's not nothing, especially because some Republicans supported it. Rand Paul, Lisa Makowski, Susan Collins, and Bill Cassidy, of course, John Fetteman, cross the other way, because he is the market Republican. He just has a blue badge next to him. So in 2019, probably the most analogous kind of recent example, Trump vetoed a resolution concerning US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Right? And he's likely to ignore this. History understands we know that we didn't stop supporting the Saudis, right? And he is very unlikely to change his policy about this, but he is clearly very upset about it. And this is important because Trump has a record as we go into the midterms of attempting to destroy the careers of any Republican who he considers to have spoken out against him, right? Or Congress would have to approve it within 60 days, sometimes for national security reasons, it could be extended by the executive branch to 90 days. What the White House is arguing here is that the April cease fire means that that clock has stopped and that the war power's resolution, therefore, pertains to a war that no longer exists. And if they start again, it will be a completely different, separate and unrelated thing and that clock would start again from zero. Yeah, that's kind of magical thinking, but that's what they're going with, right? Just before we recorded, it was reported that Trump had a lunch, like a closed door lunch with GOP senators, which resulted in him getting into a screaming match with some of those senators, including Cassidy. Clearly, the piece deal the 14 points that we that we spoke about last time have been extremely unpopular with the Republicans, right? Because Trump eventually caved on like Iran's coming out of this strategically in a better position than it went into this. And now, obviously, the US has done massive damage to Iranian infrastructure to kill people, right? And in terms of actually their military capacity, we we it seems to be a much less degraded than we initially thought. It looks like this continues to be one of the areas where Trump is bleeding, GOP support. And so it is interesting to keep track of this. Let's move on to talk about immigration now. So the DC District Court had a ruling this week in order to government to facilitate the return of a man, Mr. Martinez, and Dino, that they had deported to Honduras. The quote from the opinion, I'm going to quote kind of extensively here, I have removed like when you get these opinions right, they will have intact citations for other court cases and ever moved those for reading clarity. Quote, after being arrested detained in Montana by immigration authorities and moved between at least six detention centers in different states across the country, he seemingly disappeared. He was not permitted to contact his attorneys for more than 10 days, and neither immigration and customs enforcement nor customs and border protection would tell his attorneys where he was or in which agency's custody despite repeated requests. Not until his attorneys filed this lawsuit, initially seeking only a temporary restraining order, directing defendants to tell them where and in whose custody plaintiff was located. Did the government disclose that he had been removed to Honduras the same day, purportedly because he had voluntarily agreed to that departure? So this guy was kept without contact to his lawyer who was trying to contact him and who he was asking to talk to for 10 days. He disputes in this case that he voluntarily agreed to depart because he was deprived of access to his legal team because he wasn't able to understand the documents he was asked to sign. I can say from humorous interviews, I've conducted with people who have been in detention that there was a great deal of pressure to sign those documents and are there all the time, right? Like in the middle of the night when you can't sleep and it's freezing fucking cold, that document is right there in the wall for you to sign. The court ordered the government to quote ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to Honduras and they cited that but a gogar fee of us is known, right? So they're using that as like a precedent here. That doesn't mean that he gets to come home and he's not going to be pursued by immigration, right? That means that they have to process him and not hide him away from his lawyer for 10 days because effectively what they did was hit this murder from his lawyers for more than a week and then forced him to sign a document he couldn't meaningfully consent to. Some background here, he enters his 14 year old without family members. I don't like the term unaccompanied minor because I've spent time with migrants traveling to the US and there are often children who are traveling without their family but they're still accompanied by somebody or somebody who's just decided to take care of them but that will be the legal term here, right? He was granted SIJ's special immigrant juvenile status and then when he got back to Honduras, he contacted his lawyer filed an affidavit stating that the paperwork he signed when he was detained was not explained to him and he was quote told the only option he had detention was to sign for the paperwork. He quote asked to speak with his attorneys for days between nine days between March 31, April 9th and his quote requests were ignored or denied and he quote told immigration officials he was afraid to return to Honduras and wanted an interview or a hearing with the judge. These requests were also quote ignored or denied. He also says he felt terribly mistreated due to poor food and no access to showers. He also gave a different timeline of deportation than that which the government presented in his case suggesting that he may not have entered the country at the time the government said he was out of their custody which is important, right? Because the government saying we don't have him anymore. His timeline when they landed how long they sat on the tarmac when they translated the border there is different from the one that the government provided. It's good to see this case, right? But he will still face an uphill battle. I also want to talk very briefly about Blanche versus Lau. This is a ruling that returning green card holders are now considered or can be considered applicants for admission which means they can be placed on immigration parole when entering the country. The case here pretends to Mr Lau who returned in 2012 and was placed on parole while facing charges related to trademark counterfeiting. I do want to go back and reference that date again 2012. This is something that happened when Barack Obama was president. Barack Obama loved to deport people. Anybody who's telling you that it's in the case is lying to you. Mr Lau later pled guilty and therefore was swiftly praised in removal proceedings because the government argued he was inadmissible. So when you are paroled you're not technically admitted. You are paroled pending admission. Therefore, if you're found to be inadmissible it is quicker to begin that removal. So this is where the Supreme Court had to decide, right? Jim really green card holders are considered to have already been admitted when they are returning, right? This ruling there will have serious consequences for LPR's legal permit residents, green card holders, right? This pertains to crimes involving moral-terpetude. I spoke about these a great deal and I don't think we already have the space or time to go into them here but we're just going to say that it is a broad and nebulous category because quote from the Supreme Court opinion here, nothing in the I&A required the board officer to have a clear and convincing evidence that Lau had committed a crime involving moral-terpetude before deeming him an applicant for admission. So Mr Lau had not been convicted of that crime, right? He had been charred with that crime. Mr Lau is still contesting whether this particular crime does involve moral-terpetude it seems. But nonetheless this is a significant thing that green card holders legal permit residents need to be aware of. That's it for James Reed to bunch a court documents this week. I'll link to all the court docs in the thing if you guys want to get deep in the. So in other extremely bleak news, we're moving to the climate front where we are seeing a whole bunch of heatwaves across the world. I want to start in India and Pakistan. So India has been dealing with very very serious heatwave for a lot of parts of May in June. Temperatures just in parts of New Delhi have hit 123 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a nightmare. Yeah, that's really bad. Yeah. Yeah. In New Delhi it's consistently been over 100 degrees. We're also talking about over 100 degrees in one of the most humid and worst AQI places on Earth. That's just hell. Yeah. That's hell. Yeah. Yeah. And as we're going to get you in a second in places where people don't have access to air conditioning and especially the more rural and the more like the further out you get your dealing with people where you don't have good access to electricity and electricity grids tend to fail on the heat, especially when it is this hot and also this humid just that we know of the direct reporting from the Indian health ministry is reporting 100 dead from the heat. It's probably much larger than that. One of the very consistent things when you were reporting on this and the BBC for example, we'll talk to researchers is that yeah, the deaths are probably way higher, but there's real problems with how heat related deaths are categorized because the thing that kills you is the heat, but you're dying from like another sort of like health factor you had going on. So we're probably not going to know what the magnitude of this was for a pretty long time. Things have been bad enough that almost half of the states in India have either and it depends a lot on the region, but a lot of these places have just straight up shut down their schools or have revised the schedules for their schools and effectively just started the summer break early because it is too hot to send kids to classroom. Sometimes there's been sort of like Zoom school all sort of stuff people are probably familiar from from like the lockdowns, but yeah, the BBC did a report from Bando, which is a district in Uttar Pradesh, where there was a full week in May, where it was between 116 and 118 degrees, which is just a nightmare. And the other extremely dangerous part, and this is also true with the other places we want to be talking about, but is particularly has been true in a lot of places in India is that it's not really cooling at night. And that, as we've discussed on this show before in a whole bunch of different segments, but it's worth repeating every single time it is hot, that's one of the ways that things get very, very dangerous because when there aren't periods, you can cool off at night. That is like that is part of the way that that he stroking deaths from heat injury are exacerbated and intensified. Now, there's also a heat wave going on across Europe. Yeah. A lot of heat waves to go around here. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So both the UK and France are seeing their hottest weather on record, France, all their hottest day on record, and their hottest night on record, which is extremely bad. 40 people have died in France, this means it's the beginning of June, just from surroundings, from people trying to escape the heat. My God. Yeah. Which is really, yeah. That's brutal. Yeah. And there's also been record temperatures in places in Spain. You're seeing temperatures that should not be happening. Not just at sea level, but up in the mountains, you're seeing temperatures that are astounding and temperatures that, you know, the architecture of these places and their electrical grids and just like, do you have air conditioning? Right. Like, a lot of the places with these U.S. Striking are not places that they've necessarily hit before and they're not designed to handle this kind of heat. Yeah, I mean, people have familiar, most of our houses in Europe built differently from houses in the U.S. and they're not particularly designed, like especially as you get into Spain, like some of the design was shade in mind, but not with like a temperature conservation insulation. And so it's specifically air conditioning, air conditioning is much, much less common than it is in the United States. Yep. Yeah. It's also worth noting that like, one of the things that's intensifying this in a lot of places in India, but this is true. The more into the developing world you are, like, the more fucked you are in a lot of ways about this, but like, you're also dealing with a lot of places where just the trees have been cut down for industrial and sort of mining purposes. And that also was increasing temperatures. And I want to close by just saying that right, we're seeing the hottest temperatures on record. And this is what's happening under 1.4 degrees of global warming, right? Like, the versions of this where we're supposed to be stabilizing are, you know, the sort of supposed to be the sort of habitable zone, right? The case scenarios where we like quote unquote deal with climate change are like two degrees of warming, 2.5 degrees of warming. It's already this bad. It is just going to get worse. And this is one of the just persistent kind of quiet crises that is happening in the back up of everything else, which is that yeah, the way that we're powering all of our industries is causing the world to burn. Yeah, complicated further by like austerity measures and make it harder for people to fund cooling their homes in Europe, right? And the things that you might need to buy or do to keep your house cool. Margaret and I made an episode a while ago about heat waves. So you're looking for some resources. You might be able to find some there. Yeah. Let's go and break. And then we will return for a few more news stories. Hopefully not all of them depressing. Don't worry, I've got a happy one. We're back. And as promised, I have some less depressing stuff to talk to you all about. Oh, sorry. No, I messed up. We're going to talk about the deaths of millions. So if you can recall back to the first months of the Trump administration in like February 3rd, 2025, this is a little bit after Musk started his, you know, the early stages of his work with Doge. He tweeted, quote, we spent the weekend feeding USA to the wood shipper. I think we all remember that that great moment. And this has been widely criticized. And there are numerous articles, studies, and reports that have come out and made the case that the cuts to USA that Doge made have resulted in a tremendous amount of human death and suffering. Musk has consistently denied this earlier this week. He quoted a fan who had written, if cutting USA killed a child, a single child, it would be covered by the media like the biggest story in history. Musk added exactly in his quote tweet. Now, there actually have been several stories that specify individual children that have died because of cuts to USA. And we'll be talking about some of them. Oh, yeah. But I want to quote from a recent article by Matt Novak and Gismoto. The trillionaire oligarch even insisted that USA does the one that's killed people, retweeting a conspiracy theory from Rand Paul that Anthony Fauci was to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic, because federal funds were being used to conduct gain a function research. USA money killed millions must grow Tuesday. Admittedly, US intelligence agencies now endorse the idea that COVID-19 escaped from a lab. But that only happened after President Trump took office for a second time before Trump took control and tell agencies were largely skeptical of the idea. So you're already seeing like the dimensions of sort of the spin here to the all of the many deaths as a result of and this, this, this will come down to not just, you know, the USA cuts, but anytime this is pointed out is the counterfactual will be well, but you know, actually these, these, these groups were killing way more people because of and then insert this insane conspiracy theory, right? We've reached the point where they're now load bearing. Right. Yeah. Both for like the personal like mental health of the richest man in the world and for the federal government itself, like the conspiracy theories aren't just a thing that are being signposted to get votes. They're a load bearing part of the ideology because otherwise everything's a failure, right? Good stuff. Glad we're here. So nobacks article noted and as I opened the episode by mentioning, a ton of people have done the important work of documenting just how many human beings have been killed as a result of them cuts that Elon Musk was integral in pushing. We'll talk more about that later, but I want to give one example from Washington Post article published in September of 2025 that does specify a single child that was killed as a result of these cuts here. Quote fever ravaged the body of five year old Susie Kenyabi as she sweated and shivered on a thin mattress in a two room clinic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pigtailed girl who liked pretty dresses was battling malaria and desperately needed medication that could save her life. That medication already purchased by a US taxpayer funded program was tantalizingly close a little more than seven miles away, but it hadn't reached the clinic where Susie was being treated because President Donald Trump's suspension of foreign aid had thrown supply chains into chaos. The injection Susie needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation. USAID and other records show only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air. Less than a week after her symptoms began, Susie was dead. Congolese government data shows that in Susie's province deaths caused my malaria nearly tripled in the first half of this year. So keep that in mind during this next bet that's just one of many stories we may I think I will cover this at some point on BTV in more detail, but a couple of days ago, you know, the same week that we're recording this episode, Rokana, a Democrat from California went on the IHIP news podcast, which I am not familiar with, but is apparently a sister podcast to what the Hill calls the notable I've had it podcast. I don't know who any of these people are, but whatever. Kind of was asked like what will your party do if the Democrats win the midterms? Here's what the Hill says happened next. I do believe that once we take power, there has to be accountability. There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk. Conno told Welch, you know, they're celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires, but they don't talk about the four and a half million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling the US agency for international development, USA. Conno added, he needs to answer for that. He needs to be suspended. He needs to face investigation. He needs to answer for what he did with the Department of Government efficiency. Conno's comments were quickly exerted from the podcast itself and shared all around the internet until they reached Musk and he made a comment of his own on the website that he owns. The standard applied by Doge was very simple and easy, provided contact information for the recipients of AIDS that we can confirm it's not fraudulent, the tech trillionaire said in one of the posts. The reality is that money was being sent to corrupt politicians under the guise of aid. Liars and stock inside traders like Rho the Robert should be in prison. Musk went on to claim that it's time to sue this liar. It would be great if he sued them. Like, that would be a fantastic out. I'm great. I'd be fine with that. It looks like the direction Rho wants to go as much dammer because everything and every one of US politics is annoying. Conno responded to this by challenging Elon Musk to a televised debate and I don't fuck off. Not going to say what I think. I'm frustrated. Anyway, instead of going into that, I want to talk about where the number rose cited came from because that is worth discussing as claimed four and a half million children who might die as a result of US aid cuts. On January 1st of 2025, the UCA Fielding School of Public Health carried out research that found that over the prior 20 years, US aid funding had helped save 91 million lives. Obviously, that same study also concluded that the massive cuts to US aid under Trump would imperil that work and they calculated that the cuts would cause 14 million additional deaths around the world by 2030, including the deaths of more than four and a half million children under five. If you look back to Rho's phrasing, I think he actually did a reasonably good job of like citing this information because what Rho said was they don't talk about the four and a half million children around the world who he possibly sends to death by dismantling USA. That's a reasonably accurate way to sum that up. I'll give Rho some points there, although I'll take a couple of points away because this phrasing does somewhat admit that these are predicted future deaths. He's not like not saying that, but he could have been a little clearer here. I might also say, because I think you could argue that he undercounted the severity of what that study says because the study just notes that four and a half million children under five could die as a result of these cuts, which suggests way more than four and a half million total children deaths. There are a lot of children who are over five. Most children are probably over five years old. I do want to quote from UCLA studies again here just to clarify where their data came from. The London based journal The Lancet analyzed data from 133 countries. The work combined two approaches, a retrospective evaluation covering the year's 2001 to 2021 and forecasting models projecting impacts through 2030 based on reductions to the budget of USA. US citizens contribute about 17 cents per day to USA. About $64 per year. I think most people would support continued USA funding if they knew just how effective such a small contribution can be to saving millions of lives. Said Dr. James Machinco and I agree with that. Those are the kind of numbers that we should be putting out, which is like, yeah, this is how little money it costs per US tax repair to save this huge number of of lives around the world. It's worth digging into some of the more specific reporting we've seen on the consequences of these USA cuts because the reporting that row was citing is just predicting future possible deaths. Yeah, but there's documentation as I cited earlier about the people that Elon Musk and Doge have already helped to kill or write or who have the cuts that they have championed have led to these people's deaths would be the most accurate way of saying that and celebrate it like yeah, and celebrate it. Great. They have. Yeah. So well, again, I'll probably do a whole BTB and all this stuff later, but I wanted to discuss one more story, which was published earlier this year in the New York Times. The title that article was in Afghanistan, a trail of hunger and death behind USA cuts. Trump last year very suddenly cut USA to Afghanistan, you know, even after our 2021 pull out from the country, we had continued to send a significant amount about a billion dollars worth of eight a year, which was more than a third of all of the aid flowing into Afghanistan. So given the status of that country, you can see how load bearing that is to their like, you know, infrastructure of health. Yeah. Cutting that has caused the worst child starvation crisis in 25 years in Afghanistan. And this catastrophe has been exacerbated by the closing of 450 health centers as a result of these cuts. Here's a selection from that Times article. The isolated province of Daikundi has lost many of its health clinics to the USA cuts. The clinic in Nalej, surrounded by parched fields of almond and mulberry trees, was a lifeline for 850 families. The villager say its closure has hurt children the most. Sakiya, three months old, has been vomiting since birth, and her condition is deteriorating, said her mother, Sharifa Khawari. For weeks, she hoped her husband would bring back enough money from the coal mine where he worked to finance a taxi ride to the nearest clinic. But he said his pay was barely enough to put food on the table. The loss of the clinic erased years of monitoring that had saved children's lives. When I was giving birth, we were losing babies, said Nick Bach, Ms. Khawari's mother-in-law. One would hope that younger mothers these days wouldn't face that. And another tragedy contained that article. "In 2024, the United States funded over half of Afghanistan's nutrition and agricultural programs. Food insecurity has skyrocketed since last year's cuts. More than 17 million Afghans, 40% of the population, now face acute levels of hunger, 2 million more than last year. Seven provinces face critical food insecurity, the final stage before famine. According to the integrated food security phase classification, a group of international organizations that the United Nations and aid agencies rely on the monitor global hunger, none were at this level a year ago. Mount nutrition is also hitting cities, affecting the most vulnerable. The very young, sick, and elderly first is it does elsewhere. Muhammad Ali, nine months old, was one of a dozen toddlers, waylady, and adosing in a Kabul nutrition ward on a recent morning. He was two week to ingest milk that his mother, her husband's mere income as a housekeeper means they often eat only once a day. And there's millions of stories like this already. And just a hit, I mean, the number of deaths already as a result of these cuts is hideous and undeniable. And one of the the counters you'll see when they get brought up to musk and his faunting fans is that like, oh, the money was just going to corrupt dictators and local rulers and like, no, the damage that we're already seeing shows that it wasn't there was aid in place that was catching some people. And it's not catching them now. And the human consequences of this have been atrocious. And that's, that's just inarguable. Yeah. Anyway, that's all I got for today. And I remember that time, receiving calls and then messages from people looking, they, they're, they're me see aspirin on the Thai Burmese border about one of the only clinics where people could deliver their babies closing down. And people literally going to the clinic, finding it locked, like, inaccessible to them and delivering their babies on the street outside. And like, and this is within maybe days hours after the, their USA after after Elon Musk tweeted about how he didn't go to a party because he was too busy axing this shit. Like, yeah, I've seen USAD all over the world. And again, undoubtedly, not every penny that goes into that goes directly to like buying food because that's not how that shit works, right? People have to administer this. People have to get things done. Sometimes the way you get things done is through things that we would consider corruption. I don't particularly care as long as it results in the person who needs food, getting food or who needs medicine, getting medicine. And like, there are, of course, other ways to achieve the end. And I think we should pursue them. But like, this is one of the worst things that the Trump administration has done. One of the cruelest and most evil things that the United States has done in a very long time. And like, USAID often crowded out other agencies, right? So they're so that like local networks, local NGOs, other NGOs couldn't exist in that space. And then bait and switching like this is particularly evil. For our last main story, something that is arguably, arguably less depressing on Tuesday night. We saw the first real test of Zorn Mamdani and New York City DSA's political power. All three of the Mamdani endorsed candidates won the Congressional Democratic primary and nine out of 10 insurgent candidates on the DSA slate won their races for Congress State Assembly and State Senate. These insurgent candidates are non-income as people challenging seats. Now, as for the Mamdani slate, former city control or Brad lander beat incumbent congressman Dan Goldman was 65.8% of the vote in district 10, which is Parkslope to a lower Manhattan. Dan Goldman is an establishment Democrat who's supported by APAC. He got famous for Trump's first impeachment hearings. Oh, how well that went. Brad lander opposes APAC has long called Israel's actions in Gaza genocide. But also describes himself as a quote-unquote liberal Zionist, the one that would vote against offensive weapons sales to Israel. When campaigning with Mamdani and Palestinian activists, Mosin Moddery, who's been targeted by the Trump administration, Brad lander said, quote, as a proud Jewish New Yorker, I will join you in that fight to end occupation and apartheid and genocide on quote. Landers victory here is a pretty significant upset. He was projected to win. He was doing good in the polls, but unseeding Goldman is not a small feat. The second congressional race I want to talk about is in Bushwick, Greenpoint and Williamsburg. And this was technically an empty seat, but the outgoing congresswoman through her backing behind progressive Antonio Renoso, the Brooklyn bureau president. Mamdani and the DSA backed Claire Valdez, a state assembly member and a union organizer. There was a huge organizing push for Claire in the weeks leading up to the election. There's a massive ground game from DSA, 300,000 doors knocked. Meanwhile, a dark money super pack dropped up to a million dollars in the last week of the election to blast pro Renoso ads. And Renoso had backing up a bunch of unions and the working families party more kind of like typical progressive democratic establishment organizations in New York. This is the quote, unquote, like a commie corridor. This is like a kind of one of the further left districts in the country. And Renoso is a progressive figure, but Claire was absolutely running to his left and had support from the UAW as well as the DSA and come election day. Claire won with 56.1% of the vote while Renoso earned 35.8%. But the biggest upset of the night was in the 13th district, Upper Manhattan and parts of the West Bronx, community organizer, Daria Lisa of the Lysha VA, beat the chair of the Congressional Hispanic conquist, Adriano Espayat. Espayat has been a powerhouse in New York City politics for 30 years. He's deeply tied to the New York City Democratic political establishment. And this was the closest race. Avila Javier won with 49.4% of the vote to Espayat's 45.9%. Avila Javier has been very active in pro Palestinian organizing in New York City, including the Columbia encampments, pro Espayat attack ads against her highlighted a tweet. She wrote a few years ago reading, quote, unquote, fuck Kamala Harris, APAC pumped $150,000 into a pro Espayat super PAC, which spent almost $3 million to help reelect him. And in total, Espayat received over 7 million from the real estate Wall Street pro Israel lobby and from GOP donors, as well as a collection of super PACs in the lead up to this primary things were getting pretty ugly in response to a campaign speech where Mamdani quoted Jesus translation of Gramsci, quote, the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters before discussing how APAC and super PACs are using dark money to hide the identity of donors while blanketing the airways in bad faith attacks. In response to this speech, New Jersey Democratic House rep, Josh Gottheimer responded, monsters, dark money, a hidden hand, turning us against each other, swap APAC for Jews, and it's the oldest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in the books unquote. If you make up a bunch of shit, and it means a different thing. Yeah, if you swap this word for this word, if you change what this is, yeah, if he said something completely different, it would have a different meaning. But Mamdani has faced multiple questions about this in the past few days. And I think he has answered them fairly well. But yeah, people trying to insinuate that dark money is like an anti-Semitic term when it just refers to like an actual process of hiding the identity of donors to a super PAC. Yeah. And the term people who've been using for 20 years. It's a real term. It's a real term. There's a book called Dark White. It's a term people have been using for forever. It's completely absurd. But things got way worse in this. While campaigning, Daria Liza was harassed by people yelling, quote unquote, "ju-hater." And someone following her around screaming, "She's Haitian." Jesus. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Racial animus continued to be weaponized in the district 13 election. AC and your advisor to Representative S. Bayot, who is then on leave, went on a Spanish language podcast to say that Mamdani wanted to change the racial demographics of Washington Heights, Northern Manhattan, by making it, quote, "no longer a bastion of the Dominican community," unquote. But instead, a quote unquote, bastion of the Haitian Muslim community allied to him. Oh, boy. Anti-hation, uh, bigotry specifically among Americans is a real and vicious thing, right? We've made a whole podcast about this couple of weeks ago. But I did wonder when they, when they stood someone was shouting, "She's Haitian." Yeah. That was what was happening there. Yes. And that was definitely weaponized by campaign advisors and volunteers going into this race. Yeah. Darialese herself is a child of Dominican immigrants. She's Afro Latina. But this advisor's invocation of this great replacement theory style attack is an extremely disgusting play. Yeah. It's, it's, it exists in the discourse in Dominican Republic to be clear. Like, it's not, they didn't, they didn't whip that one out thin air. But, uh, politicians from the Dominican Republic echoed this rhetoric on X, the everything app in specific reference to this district 13 election. Come election day, espionts, canvassers screamed at Darialese voters and volunteers. Quote, Dominicans only go to Cuba if you want communism. Shut up. Get educated. We don't want Islam here either. We're Christians here. Unquote. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Very ugly weaponization of racial nationalism. Yeah. Yeah. Now, this did not work. Darialese, uh, one in what is a massive upset and her Palestinian activism was a big part of her campaign and proof that anti-Israel politics do have a strong place in the Democratic Party moving forward. And to do that, you have to unseat these A-packed backed candidates. Yeah. This was a really big night for New York City DSA. And this election has cemented that New York City DSA is possibly the strongest political machine in the city, at least in terms of elections, right? And if you want to look at political power more broadly, it's like the New York City DSA and like the NYPD right now. They're like strong dueling factions and part of Zoran Mamdani's mayorship is a manifestation of those contradictions. But also based on this sweep of DSA candidates going against establishment, Deborah Cratt and Cummins, people are also reconsidering Zoran and the DSA's decision to curb Councilman Cheyose's primary challenge against Hakeem Jeffries. Yeah. Who knows how that would have gone? Possibly, she could have tapped into this incredible momentum and beaten house minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. That could have certainly been possible. DSA was also pretty thinly stretched this election. They had a lot of stuff going on and it's possible that a primary of this scale would have prohibited their ability to win some of these other elections. We don't know. I don't think it's super useful to retroactively speculate so much. But this sweep is useful information going forward that supports the idea that there is a real hunger to unseat these establishment democratic figures. And that has been proven Tuesday night in New York City. It's the it's the polar opposite of what we've seen in California, right? Which is like the Democratic Party doubling down it without as many successful left primary challenges. Yeah. And I mean, New York City DSA is like a uniquely highly organized like faction in the city. Like the fact that it was able to outorganize the working families party is is significant. Yeah. And to to to to a pretty to a pretty extensive degree. Yeah. In Bushwick, the comic corridor, green point, Williamsburg. There's still space for those to run on the working family party and run a spoiler. But we'll see how it goes. Yeah. And I mean, if specifically if Dariel is a gets into Congress, which it is almost certain that she will based on how this night went, she could very likely be the farthest left Congress member in the history of the country, or at least in the past like 50 years, like significantly to the left of of of AOC. And like the campaign itself was with significantly to the left of AOC's campaign. Yeah. Anyway, that is that is what happened in New York Tuesday night. Cool. I guess last we should talk about a couple of mass shootings. Yeah. That have unfortunately occurred in the last week. Two mass shootings that I wanted to talk about. One happened just the day before we are recording this. So on June 23rd of 2026 in Montreal. 25 year old Seth Hatfield of Lethbridge, Virginia, allegedly started shooting from a hotel window in the Kudne borough of Montreal. Footage posted to social media shows the shooter firing at police on street level before being shot and killed himself. Two other people were killed during this incident, a police officer and a civilian. There's a manifesto. It's about 104 pages that is out. I have not gotten to read the whole thing yet. But early reporting on it suggests it's a lot of in-sell type rhetoric, a lot of discussion about how it's unfair that women are hypergamous and going for all this like tiny number of attractive guys. And so this huge now, it's very normal like in-sell stuff. He like lists out the different like classes of targets that he thinks are okay. One thing that does kind of make this interesting is he's grafting this like weird kind of like reactionary anti-capitalism to the in-sell them, which has been done before. This is not like the first time I've seen this. We're also mixing in. The West is preventing me from getting my girlfriend. Right. Yeah. Mixing in some anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and also mixing in like at least some like kind of left wing and right wing signifying. Really like there's some calls to you know ending capitalism that can seem kind of socialist but then a lot of really reactionary anti-immigrant stuff in there too. He's also really angry at pickup artists. The shooting took place outside of the head office of Aelo which is the parent company of PornHub and he was also really angry about PornHub. A big chunk of the manifest was apparently him justifying like attacking executives of specific companies including like the people who put out pornography. This is not like super weird stuff unfortunately but yeah it is very sad. It's not the first time this has happened in Canada. There have been in 2018. There was a van attack in Toronto that killed 10 that was kind of an in-cell linked attack. There was a 2020 machete attack and then of course there was the a coal polytechnic attack which was a couple of decades ago at this point which is considered to be in some case. Some people would argue like the first of the in-cell kind of like public like mass attacks. Yeah. And then also this week there was a mass shooting in Chico, California. We don't know a whole lot about this one yet but I did want to know that it's happened. Law enforcement officials have said that the shooter was wearing clothing like that of the Columbine killer Eric Kerris and it seems to have been like a Columbine or someone who was like interested in mass shootings as a fan and was carrying out this almost as an active fandom. Again this is the kind of scene we've think we've seen yeah unfortunately like well over a hundred times in the past. So it's very sad. We'll probably talk a little more about Chico in the future. There's just not a ton of information out but I didn't want people to not be aware of it. Most countries sucks. Yeah well the news. Yeah I've done a great time in America. Well to quote Zorong's quote of Giac Miss Translating, Gramsci. You know what the world is dying if the new one struggles to be born now is the time of monsters. No no no I disagree. I think now is the time of the mon stars, the antagonists from the classic film space jam. This is their year. Go Nick. Yep. Put a trans girl in your couch. We reported the news. 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. From 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 where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. 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