It Could Happen Here Weekly 239

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I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life. Until the messages started. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Call Zone 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 going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. Hey everyone, it's me, James. I wanted to flag before you start listening to this that if you're listening with the advertisements, which you probably are, about six minutes in, there is a mistake. I'm sure it was just like a misspeaking, but a unionist, of course, in the Irish context, is someone who wants the union of what is today Northern Ireland with the United Kingdom to continue. It is not someone who wants the union of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland in an independent Ireland. It is not someone who wants the union of Northern Ireland in an independent Irish Republic void of any British rule. I wanted to flag that that we can maybe draw a difference between loyalists and unionists, but the important thing here is that the unionist in the Irish context is not a Republican. Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Ali Ayoub, who's a UK-based researcher and journalist with an academic background in memory studies and a particular focus at the moment on the far right. Also the host of the Fire in These Times podcast. It's an excellent podcast. I've been a guest on that one before. Ali, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Thank you for having me. Nice to be talking. And we are talking today about, I guess, the kind of explosion. Explosions are a word, I think, actually, because it's more like with the iceberg when you only see the tip of it, you know. The more visible acts of bigotry that we saw in Belfast a couple of weeks back and the response throughout the UK. And I guess also the discourse around it online, which, you know, a lot of online discourse is generated by Americans in America, it ends up being divorced from context because of that. Yeah. So I guess to begin with, right, like, I know I'm personally intimately familiar with the English far right, but let's maybe distinguish a little bit between the far right in Northern Ireland and the far right in England. And I'm saying England consciously here, not the UK. I'm wondering if I should pause here to define. In terms for people. Do you think most people have an operating analysis? I guess we can at least say the four, the whole four nations in one nation kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. So I'll just break it down. Like Britishness is a national identity. If we talk about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, we're talking about England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. There are four nations within that, right? If you want to know what a nation is, you can read Bennett. Anderson, but I like Linda Colley's analysis of Britishness, which suggests that it is Englishness exported. Like the Britishness is essentially an English colonial project that co-ops elites in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and bites people within those countries against each other. So given, given that, and I've already recommended two academic books, which we'll find five minutes in, perhaps you could explain this, this, this distinction between like Northern Ireland and England as, as, as it pertains to the far right. So there are some. Similarities in the sense that a lot of this is, is, uh, transnational these days. Anyway, a lot of it is online based. Uh, there are also a lot of reports of, uh, England based far right agitators, like, you know, most notoriously told Tommy Robinson and whatnot, kind of almost visiting Northern Ireland and leaving overnight. They're just kind of dipping their toes in a sense. So there are, there are similarities there and the dominance of England cannot be overlooked because it's, it's still kind of like the, the powerhouse or the capital of the UK. Yeah. Isn't just has this oversight oversized influence. Right. But also pretty important differences, Northern Ireland, I don't know how much we're going to get into the entire history of it, but has had a different trajectory in terms of the far right. Then, then, then England, uh, there is the added sectarian element. There is the added pro whether you're pro Ireland as an Republic of Ireland, or whether you're pro United Kingdom, uh, in, in UK and Ireland terms, this means a loyalist is someone who wants to remain in the UK and a unionist is someone. Who wants to, uh, what for Ireland to be, uh, the unified, basically it can be confusing because union and United Kingdom and whatever. Yeah. So there is that sectarian element, uh, historically the UK has one of the UK as in British government. One of the ways it has faced what it sees as this nationalist threat by nationality. I mean like Irish nationalist threat, uh, which of course has grounds as well in Northern Ireland, particularly, but not exclusively among, uh, Catholic communities. It has. It has essentially armed and de facto armed these paramilitary groups that are today kind of a de facto mafia. Like for me as a Lebanese, the similarities with how sectarian elites operate in Lebanon, uh, they have carved out parts of the, what is essentially the state there in parts of, in different areas. They even to some extent even provide services, you know, stuff like that. Again, not that dissimilar, I would say, I would argue from how one might picture like a mafia and so a lot of the violence. That we're seeing today, uh, enacted against like people of color is the same sort of rationale that was enacted against, uh, just like Catholic working classes, uh, not that long ago. And in many ways, that same kind of supremacist ideology has just been kind of transferred from one community against another one to another one. But it doesn't mean that it's completely gone from the sort of like anti Irish and anti Catholic sentiments either. They would definitely do it. Those things you don't see in England, you know, I mean, not, it's just not as prominent though, like different dynamics here. I guess, like, uh, especially if you're watching from the outside, right, it can be easy to miss that because like, yes, in England, every year in November, we, uh, symbolically burn a Catholic in effigy, right? I say we, uh, the English as a tradition, but like the, the, the anti-Catholic sentiment is not as present as, as it is in North. It's, it's completely different fish. You know, you talked about like where we want to get into history and I do, because I think that that's really important, right? Especially if we understand Britain as a beginning of the English. Colonial project and especially Ireland, I guess if we understand just to stick with conceptual clarity, the British Isles and, and especially the beginning of, of that colonial project in Ireland and to an extent in Scotland, then I think it helps with an analysis of this. And I think something you'd mentioned, which I really liked the idea of is when we talk about sectarianism as like a fixed point, we ignore how we got to sectarianization, right? And I think you're obviously very familiar with the British and the Lebanese context. Something I used to talk about with my grandmother, actually, who spent a good amount of time in Lebanon that overlaps with these things, but perhaps you could explain that to people, because I think it's very easy to come at, especially the history of Ireland qua island with an S as like a preset sectarian kind of situation. And that's not really the case. Like a process occurred to get us to where we are. Oh yeah. I mean, kind of a simple way of explaining it, at least that's how I do when I, when I speak to like relatives, you know? Is that no one is born, like sure they could be born into a Catholic or a Protestant family, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they therefore feel a certain way towards a member of that other community. Yeah. Uh, that is a process. And so sectarianization is something that is, uh, crucially active. It is ongoing. Like it never stops. It cannot stop because it, it can otherwise like, again, using that simple and simple example of like, you have a baby that's born into a Catholic family and a baby. It's born into a Protestant family. If you don't put them in a certain context that includes this thing that you call sectarianism, they won't necessarily develop like hostile feelings towards the other baby. You see what I mean? When they grow up, kind of like a simplified way of putting it, but sectarianization, whether in Lebanon, whether in Northern Ireland, whether in, in Bosnia, whether, and then it gets complicated and you have added nuances whenever you add a different context, of course. Yeah. But it's something that is active as in like, there are ruling elites that have a certain specific interest. in maintaining the status quo in a certain way or in some cases worsening the status quo and so on it is directly intersected with things like capitalism like like the other types of supremacy you cannot have uh in a sectarian society if you if you have like a very strong let's say welfare state where everyone is given the basics where everyone has access to everything and you don't have these these inequalities and there are lots of case studies and you know studies i mean of the the worst inequality gets the more likely you are to get like these sectarian tensions so it doesn't come out of nowhere the people aren't just born like that it's not just something that people are born with they are raised in a certain society they are sectarianized to view members of a different community in a certain way and also most importantly resources are allocated before one is born are often based on where you live so the regionalism to it as well but also like in the case of northern ireland and in case of lebanon for that matter based on sects and so on yeah your understanding of lebanon perhaps like gives you an interesting perspective to like analyze this right because there's some somewhat more formalized to an extent it's not that it's not formalized in ireland very much is like division of resources allocation of state power even that is sectarian so like do you think that helps you analyze northern ireland it does because like it's one of the things i always bring up because it takes everyone by surprise when i talk about sectarianism in lebanon which is that the average person isn't necessarily sectarian and the sense that the average person doesn't necessarily think in sectarian terms certainly not like their primary identity in fact it's a poll i keep on mentioning i can send it to you if you want but whenever you've had these pan-arab polls like across the region of uh the question would be something along the lines of like do you primarily see yourself as being let's say muslim christian druze etc. or as as your nation as your national identity yeah and the lebanese and the palestinians are often the ones that say they're more likely to say like first lebanese or palestinian and then christian muslim etc yeah and with palestinians can maybe more well-known story like there is a cause and so uh that cause has become the primary identity before even one is a muslim one is a christian or so on yeah in lebanon it it takes people by surprise because lebanon those who know anything about it is like well that's the sectarian place that's where you have the the president has to be christian the maronite the prime minister has to be sunni muslim and the speaker of parliament has to be shia muslim which is true but it doesn't necessarily mean that they they're like the individual who's the president wakes up uh today and says i'm going to act on behalf of maronites yeah it doesn't work it's much messier than that uh and most importantly my personal beliefs in lebanon like i was raised in a christian maronite family but if i was an atheist or whatever it just does not matter as far as the state is concerned because my legal status citizen is one that is a maronite yeah and so it affects how i vote it affects how i do certain things whether certain services i have access to in certain that and then it's like region specific and in northern ireland that's kind of the thing that you see like of course there is a process by which certain communities are already separated in the sense of like you you grew up in a majority catholic area or you grew up in a protestant majority area yeah and in some cases you may depending where you live for example parts of belfast you may not know a protestant and or a catholic i mean either up until a certain age right before you you know you're 16 you go to college or whatever it might be yeah and those of course reinforce certain certain tendencies but most importantly you might be a you know you grow up in a protestant family maybe middle class and whatnot but you don't share the politics of your neighborhoods it doesn't necessarily then translate into that affecting the politics of the the whole because there's something that's already in build there that's difficult because it's entrenched now yeah and so it's both something that's entrenched something that's uh difficult to change and also something that can't stop at the same time it has to be both yeah I think it's a very good analysis like uh I guess like another example people cite for like uh I guess the way these things can can so rapidly be become entrenched and and like they can dis disappear but it can become less important like if we look at the example of Rwanda which is obviously a long way away from both those places but being who to to to your trois frustrates me a lot the analysis of the Rwandan genocide overlooks the twa people but that's another topic right but they uh suffered some of the worst ravages of the genocide that was such a fixed identity that became this alien identity right and even if individuals were not buying into that increasingly opposed identities so those identities were what would affect the outcomes of their lives and very clearly in 1994 right yeah and that is now less the case because in part the key to maintaining state power became decreasing those tensions or exporting those tensions in the case of Rwanda to the Congo right and we can talk about how we got there because it wasn't a great process yeah it isn't a great process but uh but it's it's it's a good analysis point for people I guess we've spoken about how these identities are so enshrined um and how they're codified now because it's not the case like you said that everyone believes in this and what we've seen since what happened in Belfast is that the vast majority of people in the UK reject this right the vast majority of people that's the other thing I do want to harp on like when people say oh this is Northern Irish groups in Belfast or whatever it's a relatively small portion even a relatively small portion of Protestants even a relatively small portion of people who have strong loyalist feelings not all of those people are bigots you know it is a small relatively small group as you say that is now somewhat links transnational hate networks but the bulk of people think that that is absolutely repugnant right so should we talk a little bit about the backlash because I know you attended a massive protest right when and also like half a dozen a dozen fascists showed up to be like uh escorted out of town again yeah uh so the backslash to the the Belfast ones what happened in Belfast may I can give some context yeah yeah so there was an attack by this uh Sudanese person uh against this white person yeah and the reason I'm framing it in those terms is because that's how it was portrayed in the media in the sense that yeah the the attackers ethnicity and national origins and whatnot has been front and center of that coverage and that's not it's not like a small detail in the story it's why it's been linked to the the Southampton uh murder that happened in December and the case like the person the attacker was uh sentenced a few weeks ago not long before the Belfast program happened yeah the reason these two are linked are is media framing one was in Southampton was one in Belfast there's no connection between those two other than the attacker had a specific skin color and the victim had a specific skin color that's basically it yeah attacks have happened in between between December and in June I think that description and have been kind of left out of the discourse of that of that framing yeah and so it's uh contributed to this perception that is now again I wouldn't say it's the majority of the population but it's like it's this higher percentage of the population that now at least think that there's some problem with immigration and criminality and that is something that doesn't is not borne out by the facts whatsoever but it's still a dominant perception it is you you tune in to BBC question time on a weekly basis it's almost certainly going to be front and center of the conversation and I put conversation maybe in quotation here it's more like rage baiting and whatever yeah so what happened in Belfast is as I said this a Sudanese person attacked this white person uh initially the media was uh reporting that a Somali person attacked a white person so again it tells you how these things is in inherently racial they immediately went what they what they thought was the most likely demographic yeah in response to that attack despite the fact that the family of the victim explicitly asked people not to politicize this and that they rejected the politics of hate yeah the same after the Southampton one for that matter it made no difference to these far right uh well fascists and agitators and so on and they basically went on a program throughout parts of Belfast and some I think 20 plus people were rendered homeless including like kids and so on anyone who's a person in color in Belfast including a bunch of people who have written about it since reported feeling unsafe that day and you know and arguably probably to this day as well it hasn't been that long yeah some people didn't go to work some people went back home early some people asked their white colleagues to either you know take their kids to school or uh you know walk with them home you know stuff like that yeah all of that because they felt unsafe and the reason why they felt unsafe this was very obvious that those people who were engaging in these in these programs were looking for people of color the response to that is you had this kind of a pretty big uh reaction from a good chunk of the of the population in a bunch of different uh City including where I live in Brighton in the South of England Belfast itself also had like a pretty huge mobilization we saw one in I believe Sheffield and I believe one in Liverpool as well yeah in Glasgow as well where usually it would be a fairly small number of of fascists and far-right activists agitators in in Brighton I think it was like 200 of them versus some four or five thousand of on the other side yeah I'm fairly certain I can't say this 100 certain but I'm fairly certain there were more police officers in the world like far-right people there yeah and uh Belfast as well there was a huge uh reaction there was even like a a pretty huge fundraiser by this collective of uh women people of color in that are based in Belfast called the Anaka uh women's Collective that as of now they were aiming to raise a thousand pounds and they've raised 253 000 pounds as of as of today oh wow nice to help those who were displaced and those who lost their homes and so on yeah uh and it was even condemned that like at the national level like belfast the dominant party is actually not like it's shane fane which is not a loyalist party so they're the people who did this act are very much in in the minority in terms of even like popular sentiment in northern ireland but even specifically in belfast yeah this didn't stop the ongoing kind of tensions between maybe we can get into that on the far right in the uk and not only included but especially the uk more broadly between reform which as of now is the dominant party on the far right yeah and this new party that came out of reform called restore uk yeah they are fighting with one another now elon musk has backed the rupert lowe the restore uk guy yeah you see things that that farage is too woke you know a lot of different things are happening it's a fucking insane it is quite insane yeah yeah nigel farage people aren't familiar like long time bloviating shithead fixture of the uk far right yeah many funny clips of nigel farage being made to look like a tool let's talk about this this tension right because we do have this like and this has been a constant on the on the uk far right for a long time like i remember the bnp which was getting on for 20 years ago yeah but like essentially you will have a electoral party that stakes out a position on the right and then a movement slash party that seeks electoral legitimacy will outflank them to the right and they will stake that position and have electoral success and then someone will outflank them to the right that is the process through which british politics has moved to the right from my entire life but uh let's talk about restore and reform and then maybe explain the two categories for people that are not familiar reform is led by nigel farage who's maybe the better known one he's the one that was like a close trump associate for a while and he was even friends with elon musk until they had like a falling out um he used to head this party called ukip the uk independence party which was very pivotal in in the brexit vote nigel farage is definitely an interesting figure for all the wrong reasons in british politics because he started off being pretty small uh like a small fish not a lot of uh support in the polls not a lot of people knew him but he had one thing he did have was like a disproportionate media appearance he would be featured constantly on various shows bbc question time is the one i just mentioned yeah even when he was not like now he's a member of parliament but he for the longest time he was a member of the european parliament he wasn't a member of parliament in the uk yeah and his entire thing was uk independence uh as in what they call independence as in leaving the eu because the uk obviously was already independent yeah and uh the way they framed this is anti-immigration and racism essentially uh at one point even they weren't even focusing on like as they currently are on like you know people from africa or people from from afghanistan or whatever their hatred was focused on romanians and poles and and other members from eastern europe or central europe yeah well i'm saying this because when henry novak was killed and henry novak was uh polish british yeah they all they all pretended to suddenly include polish people in the white category but that's a very much a recent convenient thing because just a few years ago they were absolutely not doing that yeah out of reform uk a lot of reform MPs uh and counselors are ex-stories or ex-conservatives so reform has been taking a lot of the conservative votes and even conservative personalities including most of their high-ranking members out of that came out this new relative new party called restore which some people would say is further to the right than reform what i would the way i would describe it is that they're both vying for the far right position in the uk and reform is trying to position itself as the more uh professional the more kind of like you know with the new tories kind of thing and the tories fail but we will be better than them yeah where's restore is just like directly like we were just deported millions of brown people and black people back to where they came from and whatever like very just straight uh the closest thing to the bnp really uh historically speaking yeah they don't have a a uh huge percentage from last i checked was like three percent restore uk but and this is like gets back to the to the to the media problem in this country again uh the bbc started one of their coverages of the belfast programs with a quote by Rupert Lowe who is like again maybe in terms of parties the sixth or the seventh or the eighth in the uk currently yeah but they have this disproportionate media presence because their position keeps on being framed as like the the default position as if everyone has some concerns about and put some concerns in quotations yeah about foreigners or immigrants or or what have you you know yeah and they like anchor the debate on the right there like the the bbc or anyone else is running out like let's have a debate about the humanity of people who weren't born in the United Kingdom or people who are white in the United Kingdom they anchor that debate on their terms they get to define the terms exactly yeah I think Nick Griffin like would be a place where I could like see this this particular tendency starting right like the uh the the sort of new I guess Nick Griffin comes out the National Front so it's really a continuous just for people who aren't familiar like yeah hate groups from the 80s to hate groups in the 2000s is Nick Griffin to yes yes to here I think you're right they are the new analog for that like there's a reason the BNP sounds a British National Party but uh like British Nazi party isn't a uh a accident there if you look at how these guys like to dress up but like that's how we get here I guess it is a real problem in the British media right like I know Americans are very familiar with the Charlie Kirk stick and the debate me stick but like Britain has been doing that perhaps for even longer yeah I remember Nick Griffin attending the Oxford Union in 2000 I mean 2007 2008 and I remember big protests at that time like Britain has been doing this for a while and like most people when when it's this hate is so evident if it wasn't Belfast in it as it has been in many other places right reject it yeah it's not it's not the mainstream British dance no the hate is somewhat different in the UK that's the other thing that we should mention I guess like you know like you say that it's not entirely racialized in the Polish people are othered from Britishness othered from whiteness unless it is useful for them yes so like I guess what did you see when you participated in this Brighton March because what we don't have in the UK as much right like labor is pretty at least like we haven't we haven't had the similar thing on the left uh so let's say like explain how people are going about rejecting this making which is largely an extra parliamentary process it is it is largely an extra parliamentary process Brighton historically has had a different trajectory than other parts of the UK yeah Britain's quite unique it was the only a Green MP for example was from Brighton uh now it's exchanged with the Green MP kind of taking a lot of the the votes from the left because of Labor's right word shift in the past a few years I mean Labor has always been arguably a right-wing project anyway yeah but in the past few years especially on the storm where it has been the past couple of years as well today is when he officially resigned so this was also like a momentous day yeah Brighton has had this kind of long history of anti-fascism a lot of it has been cultural and so it came out of his music scene and and all of that yeah uh and it has meant like as someone who's like I am a migrant I am also a person of color and I live in the UK it was pretty nice to see a mostly because Brighton is mostly white yeah like a mostly white city really come out in force against these people who a lot of them I should say were not even from Brighton because that's not unusual these days um like they were Boston quite literally in some places yeah but they want to come to where they feel like the migrants are or the liberals yeah yeah yeah yeah and uh people like there were different groups that marched the Green Party was among them but largely it was just like a bunch of unions among like student groups local anti-fascist collectives even some religious groups or like multi-faith Alliance stuff and and all of these things which Brighton is pretty good at I would say overall yeah and there were these different uh Marches that end up ended up kind of joining as is you know typical in these types of Marches they had like the the Palestine one the feminist one the you know the lgbtq1 and so on they were kind of joined uh in the next to the station the Brighton station where the fascists were yeah were meeting up essentially uh as I said there were more cops than then I'm fairly certain of this there were more cops than than like fascists that were there in Belfast it was different because it was the most direct reaction to what happened just a few days prior yeah and this was like largely organic in the sense that the Brighton one was like we were planning for this for some time because the fascists had announced it long before even the Belfast program it just happened to occur after the Belfast program but it was already announced before yeah all that really happened was that they people were already organizing and then a bunch of fascists did a program in Belfast and that motivated even more people in Brighton to come out in Brighton if that makes sense yeah and we saw similar Dynamics in Glasgow and some of the dynamics and I believe as I said Sheffield and Liverpool and other places like in smaller numbers yeah it's important to say that like with the exception of when they did the whole unite the kingdom rally uh like last year which was the biggest of its kind and it was the biggest of its kind for like different reasons there was even like a murder uh there was of course the Charlie Kirk murder just like a few days prior so it's kind of like it was a perfect storm that brought them all out at the same time yeah that's very very uncommon average protest uh that they they manage to pull is is in the lower hundreds usually at most it's like in the lower thousands yeah whereas like you know on a every other month or whatnot you have a massive pro-palestine protest in london that has like 200 300 400 000 people yeah and that's putting aside pride and that's putting aside all of those other things that happen yeah so they never managed to have enough people on the streets at least not yet the danger in some sense is that the response to those uh far-right marches and in some cases the pogroms shows how rightward the what you might think of like centrist politics has gotten in the uk like the default is very right-wing yeah like the overton window has moved way to the right in the uk exactly even though it doesn't necessarily make sense in the sense that like when you poll people you have a difference between when you ask them what are like what are the top five problems whatever of like what the uk is going through and then immigration is usually in the top five but then like what are the top five things the top 10 things that you are personally struggling with and immigration is usually never you know never in those top 10 yeah and so there is a disconnect there that's why i emphasize so much on the media framing and the the centrality of the types of framing that we're using and the types of framing that we're using and the types of we're seeing has have been seen for some time like in the run-up to the to the brexit vote and since brexit like which you know it's going to be 10 years now fuck yeah yeah literally i think in a few days it's going to be 10 years since brexit yeah yeah the tabloidization i don't know how you call it of the the the media in the uk where basically everything is tabloid yeah has not helped to to put it mildly i started one of my the article i wrote recently which is i i i just randomly took a newspaper on the bus uh the mirror which is not even particularly right-wing compared to the daily mail for example or whatever yeah but there was a short story a very like small short story and it was about like a drunken asylum seeker vandalizes a memorial or something like that and the headline was asylum seeker vandalizes memorial whatever it is yeah and then the first sentence was a drunk all caps all capital letters and the story was just a drunk guy who damaged some property yeah his his legal status and origins was is literally irrelevant to the story right it's a guy who's drunk who did something yeah which is not that uncommon in the uk unfortunately yeah yeah that's one of our national pastimes exactly if any i i joke like if anything it just shows that the guy was is well integrated into british culture yeah yeah exactly yeah he's become british but they the editor of that paper and that specific they decided that adding asylum seeker made this a more sexy story for readers and so on and that's a very common thing oh yeah as soon as you add asylum seeker or migrant seeker it's a very common thing oh yeah as soon as you add asylum seeker or migrant seeker or migrant or refugee or whatever to these headlines that can drive engagement up on social media it can attract eyeballs more because it's rage baiting and it's become such a big problem yeah it is like a largely a media problem and i think like that's a really important place to talk about there's this idea again that like this came from elon musk right and that like undoubtedly elon musk has amplified the very far right in the uk oh sure undoubtedly the fact that so many journalists spend a lot of time on the internet and they're like oh my god this is a so many journalists spend so much time on his website oh yeah changes their perspective of where the debate is at especially when like uh you know not to be too uh too much a dick about it but like a lot of a lot of journalists don't go outside and talk to normal people very much yeah my folks are both in agriculture right like when i'm home i'm talking to people who work in that world too and like it's just not a you sometimes people say i saw x on the tv i saw y on the tv but like uh you're just not running into many people who are working in that world people who are seeking asylum causing problems nor is it a major issue in their life and when there are migrants in their lives they're people who they cherish right they're members of their community yeah that doesn't get reflected in the media debate but like this is a longer issue than elon musk buying twitter in the uk oh yeah oh yeah it's a big fucking problem and it's one i think we can't fix like trying to diversify people's media diet is a challenge like as you say in the uk like just the way we consume media is different right like you think about like when my dad's driving and he's listening to radio too all the time right like you know they will have they will have these debates there like it's different media consumption media diet than people in the us and i wonder like yeah even if there were just like if there were good outlets that you prefer to read like especially for people who are not from the uk to understand the debate in just more rational anchored in reality terms like it doesn't even have to be a like a a left source like it's just if they're not distorting most people's lived experience that's relatively unusual in the uk yeah yeah there's a fascinating program on the bbc that weirdly enough given that i do media studies i actually did not know about until relatively recently but it's called news news watch i sent you a clip yeah um a few days ago and it just it is what it is it it it is it's kind of this program within the bbc but clearly editorially independent of the bbc that does critical media coverage and they pointed out yeah that after the belfast program a lot of they got a lot of comments about the bbc and they pointed out that after the belfast program the bbc was covering the the bbc was covering the the belfast hired slash program whatever yeah uh and including the fact that again again initially people thought they were saying that's a somali person when it wasn't even the case yeah but immediately racialized in these terms and so on and one of the people that came on said that like you know there was an attack in bolton the day which is outside manchester just the day after the belfast program against an imam's house like a a guy just firebombed his house his kids were inside locking they were unharmed but they could have easily died yeah then made the news but it's not and even there was even an attack in peace haven which is not far from where i live in october 2025 against the mosque there there were two worshipers inside that could have also died luckily they were okay and again it's not that it doesn't make the news it gets reported on but like it that's it it doesn't then get debated ad nauseum it doesn't get it doesn't become this huge sensational thing that like politicians are asked to to opine about or whatever it's just a thing happened that's sad let's move on whereas if it's a a one in just all you need is a single story of a non-white person attacking a white person and it's like in a particularly uh good times in terms of like i don't know whatever is happening on twitter or whatever but again not just that it's only that yeah but it's become this huge amplifier then you're more likely to see what you know what what we've been seeing really that's why i insist on the media framing it's not the only thing i mean you cannot talk about even if the media was bad but if like everyone was comfortable and didn't struggle with these income inequalities and precarity and whatnot then the media wouldn't be as big of a it's salience wouldn't be as relevant but it's those two things at the same time that is kind of this perfect storm right now yeah like people like it's hard times for people exactly and like the hard times are a breeding ground for hate yes and i think like yeah that's something we all have to work against especially in the british context but also like that's coming here it's hard times here too yeah the hatred is always going to find like fertile in those difficult times even that framing right like i was thinking about this the other day like um talking to a colleague in the uk like all the time the quote-unquote migrant crisis is used as a framing in european politics and that's something the us right learned from and they created a crisis here right yeah it's not a fucking crisis there is plenty of space in the uk for more people and like these people are like members of our communities and a benefit to all of us the uk should be talking about the bigotry crisis the racism crisis we have a pogrom belfast we have someone attacking an imam's house we have constant constant macro and microaggressions for people yeah like including on our state-funded media yeah and like that that is the framing i'd like to see it's not a framing you're going to see from the people who are perpetuating it because it's a profitable strategy to whip up hate like this yeah i mentioned this if like i had a post a few days ago of like this country also has an aging population crisis it has a job crisis a lot of those jobs because it's structured the economy is structured in a way that certain jobs are very difficult for locals to do like uh nursing nursing homes and stuff like that uh largely because pay is so bad yeah and you have at the same time the media kind of and lots of politicians focusing on this very made-up migration like migrant crisis as you said uh whereas this country is actually structured in a way that certain jobs are very difficult for locals to do like nursing homes and stuff like that uh largely because pay is so bad yeah and you have at the same time the media kind of increase in migration since the 2004 there's been an increase in migrants i mean i'm one of them has not actually brought more crime to the uk the data is pretty clear on that it's like the crimes has actually been steadily declining in the past couple of decades in this country including in london the most diverse city in the uk by far yeah all right there's just no there's no core and i know i'm saying this and you know obviously for the like listeners of this i'm kind of like preaching to the choir here yeah but just it's just bears repeating that like this is generally entirely made up like there is actually no correlation between these two between like just an increase of people from a certain skin color or whatever and then the the prevalence of crime and so there's no correlation between those two and when we talk about one of the big things that the far right here as in the us and as in a good chunk of the world it's all about you know save our women and and girls essentially is how they frame it like constantly pretty huge percentage of the far right people have uh for example two years ago in belfast something like a ridiculously high amount of those who are arrested were and were later released were since re-arrested uh due to like like domestic abuse allegations and sexual harassment and stuff like that. Yeah, many such cases. They're not framed as like a civilizational crisis for women and girls because they are the default. They are the white guys. They don't get spoken of in the same way as the rest of the population in this country. So in that sense, maybe it's a more familiar problem for American listeners. In that sense, you have these similarities there. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good analogy to draw. I wonder then as we wrap up, like you wrote an excellent article on this, which we will link in the show notes. Do you have anything else you want to share with people or resources you'd suggest? Like it's a little less easy to feel so isolated in the UK, right? But just like a smaller polity, like you can normally find people. But just people who are, if people are willing to support, if people are looking to find like-minded folks. Yeah, in the UK, I would say, I mean, I guess this is better. I'm a bit everywhere the same thing, but it's going to depend on like where you live. Yes. Like, you know, I have other people listening. If they happen to be in Brighton, feel free to reach out to me. I like meeting people. But like you have these different collectives that are like usually very locally based. I mentioned the Anarcha Collective, the women's collective in Belfast, for example. If folks want to support them, they can still do so. Maybe I could put it this way. I mean, I moved here 10 years ago and then I left to do my PhD in Switzerland. And then me and my partner and kid, we moved back here a couple of years ago. There are lots of reasons not to be here. Lots of good reasons not to want to be here and want to be elsewhere. Yeah. But there are also pretty good reasons to be here for me personally, which is that there are lots of different networks, communities that are have been kind of built for decades now, in some cases that one can can join, one can help. Again, it's going to be very much like depending on where you live, London is not going to be the same as Manchester, as Belfast, as Glasgow and so on and so forth. Yeah. But like, that's one of the good things about it. The other thing you mentioned in terms of reading and I write for this website, the one that you're going to link shadow mag without the W in the end. Yeah. And at the end of every article, they have recommendations usually of like what people can do. And usually it has to do with either like you read further, but it could also be like support to this collective or like, you know, follow this person or whatever. Like just very, very small things. Like, yeah, by no means are we are we claiming to fix everything through that? But like, that's just small things that people can actually feel more connected. Maybe if they if they actually live here and that they don't feel connected to different communities or if they're abroad and they want to support this, could also be like an easy way to do so. Yeah, there's, I think that's a great piece of advice. Like it is very local, which is good. Like the response to austerity has been people taking care of their community. And then like, that is how we get through this. Yeah. Same as though, yeah, the poverty, the government is deciding that everyone has to live in. Like it's the same shit and it's the same response. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Well, thank you very much for your time today. That was really good. I think insightful. I hope it helped people. Where can people find you if they'd like to follow you and your work? In Brighton, obviously. Yeah, if you're in Brighton, reach out. I do post on Blue Sky from time to time. It's just at you, but you'll find me there. And other than that, I have the podcast, The Far East Times. It's been inactive for the past month, but I'm going to start again soon. And I have a newsletter called Hauntologies that I try and keep active as well, in which I talk about some of the stuff we talked about here, but sometimes more Lebanon stuff and Palestine stuff, where I'm from and, but also a lot of Western, like UK and US stuff and so on. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's great to have those conversations connected. Like, the struggle's not as distinct as people think. Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Well, thank you so much. That was great. Thank you. Mornings at my house would be impossible without Airtasker. Two kids can't find their shoes and the sink decides it's leaking. So, I post on Airtasker to get help with the to-do list. Next thing I know, the sink's fixed and a tasker installs a robot litter box my cat hates. Which means I'm spending less time juggling chores and back to juggling my kids. Airtasker. Get anything done. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target. Warning. One, two, three, four. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Five, six, who is it? It's Callie and Elliot. Lingo Kids. Lingo Kids. Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice. But will it be heard? I'm Nancy Grace. On Crime Stories, we go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us at Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts. Hope you join us. I'll see you there, friend. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast coming to you from what they are calling the fakest economy of all time. I am your host, Mia Wong. And with me to discuss really, truly a stock market that is like a microcosm of all of the unhinged things that are going on in the economy is a friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil, who has done. In many, many, many, many things, writers and organizers, recent author, current author. I'm just an author now, I think. I have two books, so I'm just an author. Yeah, two books makes you an author. That's right. Hi, how's it going? How's it going, Mia? How are you doing today, this beautiful June day? Awful. Absolutely terrible. The whole world is on fire, both metaphorically and literally. You tried to learn about the economy again, didn't you? This is what happens. You should never look. Don't turn over that rock. Huge mistake. Yeah. I am learning about financial instruments that are so deranged, they make the stuff the 2008 financial collapse was based on look normal and stable. Yeah. We're doing great here. Having promised a story about the economy is fake. I want to do first what I am calling a bonus horror. Ooh. I love a bonus. This bonus horror. Now, I think you are one of the people who is most uniquely qualified to address this bonus horror. As someone who has recently. written a book called The Extended Universe, How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World that is about the evils of intellectual property, and also has written about riots and also has written about the transgender. I want to hear your thoughts on, oh boy, oh boy, a DMCA takedown notice filed by the Stonewall Inn LLC against a t-shirt shop that was being run by the Canadian. a trans comics writer, Sophie LaBelle, for shirts that said Stonewall was a riot. So, Vicky, what do you think about the phenomenon of trademarking a riot? Happy Pride, first of all, I think. I think it's really important that we celebrate June this year in all the right ways. Yeah, I mean, you know, trademarking a riot, that seems good. Like, you trademark a historical event, copywriting a historical era, you know, patenting human genome. These are all good things. Frankly, I think it's outrageous that anything should be the common property of a community, history, and humanity. So, I just think it's great when people draw fences around the word Stonewall, for example, which, you know, sure, it functions, you know, as a stand-in for an entire historical era, for a crucial moment, and indeed for a riot. But what about the people who own the Stonewall Inn? Yeah. Did you ever think about them and their interests? I don't think you did. It's like one of those, like, things where it's like, well, you couldn't have had Stonewall without the police. And it's like, mm, mm. Yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's the Pontius Pilate that is the good guy in the Jesus story theory, right? Yeah. You know, like, well, if it weren't for the Roman centurions, you know, who would have sacrificed Jesus? Yeah, no, it's bad. I mean, I would love to have a hot take, but I feel like, or even a lukewarm one, but that one's really. That's just a happy, happy pride. Love a business gay, you know? I just love a business gay. The feeling I saw seeing that, the only feeling I've had like that recently was discovering that the NCAA was, like, selling the biometrics data of their athletes to sports gambling companies so the sports gambling companies could set lines. Seems right. Which is like, can I emphasize this enough? This is a thing that, like, scouts for professional teams have a hard time getting access to, like, the actual, like, heights and weights. I don't know. This is, this is maybe the worst, maybe the worst economy that we've had. If you're talking about, like, sort of some sort of high-tech surveillance apparatus that's largely used to prop up a casino, I mean, you might be talking about the NCAA, but you might also be talking about the stock market. Yeah. And, oh boy, today we are going on what I am colloquially referring to as the Cosby rollercoaster. Yay. Let's go. Oh, boy. So Cosby, for people who don't know, is, like, the main Korean stock index. in the way that like, I mean, we kind of have multiple, I don't know. The NASDAQ or the S&P 500. Yeah, it's like that, basically. It's an index. It's the main major index of major Korean stocks. Yeah. And people, longtime listeners of the show may remember that we have talked a bit about what's called the Magnificent Seven, which are the seven American tech stocks that make up an absolutely unhinged percentage of these stock listings, right? So the reason I want to talk about KOSPI, the South Korean one, is because in a lot of ways, it's like the entire economy in a microcosm. Because, you know, whereas the U.S. has like seven tech stocks that are like a huge percentage of the market, KOSPI, over half of the fucking index is two companies. Yeah. Samsung and SK Hyatt, which are. That's that good. That's that good economy. Yeah. And yeah, that's how you know your economy is good and normal. When it's two fucking companies, both of which is like valuations have been spiking massively specifically because of chip production and specifically because of chip production for, I guess I have to say the words AI instead of just doing a long and elaborate bit where I simply just call it matrix multiplication over and over again. Yeah. Graphics cards. They're doing it because graphics cards are so valuable. That's what that's what this is all about. Yeah. This is now like half of the main index of like one of the most advanced industrial economies in human history. Right. Is fucking making graphics cards for chatbots. South Korea is what, the 13th, the 12th or 13th largest in the entire world. Yeah. Two companies, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's good. It's good. And, you know, there was a while back executive disorder where I was like spending a decent amount of time tracking KOSPI going up and down because it has lost 10% of its value multiple times this year. That's unhinged. That does not happen. Yeah. Right. Like outside of like the Great Recession, right? It's like that kind of shit. That's a really rare thing to happen. This this used to happen in the 19th century all the time. Right. So like what we're looking at in Korea and indeed in the US is like stock markets that like what used to be before the Great Depression, before Black Friday and the invention of the SEC to make sure that this wouldn't happen every day. And I think like one of the things that I mean, maybe you're going to get to this. I don't want to jump on top of your thing. But I think the thing that. That is really wild about what's going on with the KOSPI is also, I think, again, to connect it to sort of the gambling thing is that in the last month, two months, I don't remember exactly when this happened. Korean stocks got added to like Robin Hood, right? It got added to like US retail trading. Now, like retail trading, like used to technically be possible before these like apps and before Reddit, you know, our WallStreetBets or whatever. But it was hard. You had to have you had to have an agent. You had to like do a thing. And then day trading in the 90s made it a little easier. For like middle class people to do. But now, like you can do it instantly anywhere. And, you know, if you remember, I mean, I know you remember me, but if the folks at home remember like the game stock stuff like that cult during the NFT era, you know, the meme stock, the meme, it was called meme stocks and how like sort of, you know, this one Reddit subreddit could like make a stock, you know, quadruple its price overnight or go ten times overnight. Right. The thing is, what's happening is that the Korean retail market has also exploded. So not only are you getting U.S. investors, right, like day traders, just like going on really weird tips and like pouring millions and millions of U.S. dollars. Right. Because like, yeah, you know, if it used to be hard to trade on the U.S. stock exchange, trading in a foreign stock was basically impossible. Yeah. You just couldn't do it again. You technically could, but you had to have a lot of money and a lot of connections. Yeah. You got to actually be someone who worked in finance. Yes. Like, you know, like you had to be effectively a professional. Exactly. Where it's like, you know, to like return to the gambling analogy, which is increasingly less and less of an analogy, it's like the equivalence of like, it was technically possible to be one of those guys who like played online poker. Right. Right. It was equivalent to that where it's like, OK, you can dedicate your entire life to this one incredibly niche thing. Exactly. But so the opening up and the deregulation of this trade has this is sort of maybe can be a little hard to grasp, but like so. So the Korean economy is massive, but compared to the U.S. economy, it's nothing. Right. So when all of the money from when a ton of retail money from the U.S. in coordinated fashion, you know, coordinate online on Reddit or whatever, Discord servers can flood into the Korean markets, it can make a huge change. Imagine an even smaller, imagine a smaller market. Right. Like imagine something that's not worth very much. And you get the exchange rate in there and you're not getting hit on exchange rate fees. You can really swing the market. Foreigners could swing the market really easily. Right. By speculating. Which, again, used to be a thing that finance operatives did, but it was really risky and it was like a really dodgy thing to do. But these retail investors don't really care because it's gambling. It's just a gambling app. Right. They're gambling on stocks. Yep. But now there's it has become a huge thing in Korea as well. There was just a documentary, I think it was released like yesterday on like Bloomberg about how intense retail buying. So everyone in Korea has like sort of stock mania. Right. Like in the documentary, there's like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like a woman at a grocery checkout, like she's working and she's like checking her stock prices and she's like scanning stuff, you know, and like, it's not about lower class people shouldn't have access. It's about this means that all the money is being funneled. The reason Korea is important, as most of you probably know, is because it's where all of the chips are made. It is where processors have to be made. It's the only place on Earth where they can really they're in Taiwan where they can be made. And because of the huge AI boom, right, the huge amount of money that's being made by a company circulating between three different companies, right, back and forth forever that every piece AI supply chain, right, so like the the, you know, each mineral that goes into it, the people who make a particular like plastic clip that's really hard to make that like fits into the data center, like all of these companies get identified by, you know, deranged gamblers, you know, and they say like this company and in the Korean stock market, so in the U.S. stock market, there's like tickers, you know, like three letters in the Korean stock market, just like a number. Right. So in the KOSPI, so they're like, guys, 4201 is this company I'm telling you, it makes, you know, the it makes the sort of fiber cables that go in a data center. Right. And if that takes off on finance, Twitter or in, you know, Wall Street bets or whatever, they can just swing these companies. And of course, so so you've got these U.S. and European investors throwing all their money in. So then Korean people are like, we got to get in on this because it's all booming. And all of these are just are just really random companies that make really, really obscure. They're basically what would have been penny stocks back in the day. Yeah. Right. And they're getting traded at wild volumes. And it's it's good. It's good because it's real money that really reflects the value of the Korean economy. And it's not just a bunch of people losing their shirts in a series of complex scams. Yeah. There's obviously this sort of like groundswell mania of this sort of like it's just a gambling boom. Right. But on the institutional level. Yeah. They are also doing things that are. I was saying this to Vicky before. But before I started this, like these might be the most deranged financial instruments I have ever seen. And like I have spent a significant amount of my life studying the 2008 financial collapse and these make those instruments look normal. Yeah. You described one to me and I literally was stunned in silence because I didn't believe that the thing you had just described was real. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. When we come back from these ads. OK, we are back. I have been promising you the worst financial idea I have ever seen. Right. So like what we've been talking about thus far has been, you know, like the entire economy now is someone who thinks they got they got a tip on the horses and is putting their life savings in on like fucking. I mean, I don't know what what's a horse name like secretary. I don't know. Yeah. Sweet Monday. That one. Yeah. I don't know. I can't do the rain. Yeah. Yeah. So but like, here's the thing, right? That is comparatively not that risky in the sense that when you put the money on the horses, right, there's kind of a limit to how much you can lose. Yeah, totally. If you're putting the money in, you can only lose that much money. Now, if the stuff that the regular people doing or again, like putting it all on red or just like fucking I got a tip on the horses, what the institutional people are doing, I can only describe this shit as like some of this is also designed to be bought by retail investors, which is just unbelievably insane. Like I can only describe this as the equivalent of it's the market equivalent of Russian roulette. OK, so on June 22nd, Cosby did. The thing that it does semi normally, which is, again, lose 10 percent and trigger the circuit breakers. They trigger the circuit breakers like again, like today, we were recording this on June 26th. A thing that, again, is not supposed to happen in normal markets like that's panic shit. But on Monday, it triggered because Korea's like national, like financial watchdog, like the guy who ran it was like, OK, maybe maybe it was a mistake for regulators to have approved. This thing called leverage ETFs on a single stock. OK. OK, so to understand how bonkers this is, like that, that's all gibberish, right? And for once, this isn't even a case where the financial people are packaging something simple with a gibberish name. This is ridiculous. So ETFs are exchange traded funds, and it's supposed to be a mechanism where like, OK, there's just one thing you can buy. But that one like security, this is like the physical thing you're buying has like a bunch of stocks in it, right? So you could say, like, I want to buy all the peanut farmers in America, right? OK, there's five publicly listed peanut companies. They make an ETF. It's the peanut ETF. You buy it, you know, and then you just buy that and you ride the whole all five of them together instead of just one. Yeah, the place you might have heard of this is there were a bunch of like supposedly like green ETFs that were supposed to be like, these are the things you can invest in to save the environment. And obviously, a lot of that was scams. But also, it's one of those things that was bad while it was happening. And I and you miss it when it's gone. Because it was replaced by what I can only describe as what if we did an ETF on destroying the economy? But again, so the purpose of these things, right, is that they're supposed to allow you to have one instrument to hold positions on multiple companies, right? It's a basket of companies. Yes. Now, now, it lasts about seven years, right? This is a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm sure people maybe had like done something like this before that. But this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Somebody had the. The absolutely horrible idea of what if you had an ETF that was just one stock? Well, but me, that doesn't make any sense. They're all the same thing. Yeah, right. And I look at this. I was like, what the fuck are you talking about that? Like, what, what, what, what the fuck is it? What the fuck is a single stock ETF? Like, that's that's like, that's literally it's nonsensical, right? Just buy the stock. Yeah, right. You buy the stock or you buy a future like on the stock, right? If you're betting the stocks and go up and down, you buy like futures, right? Like this, the only way I don't know, I think Vicky kind of came up with the best way to describe this that I've heard, which is like it's it's like getting a parlay on a stock. Yeah. So one of the very formative moments of me, a childhood, right, was reading this book by Corey Doctorow, a friend of the show called For the Win, which is about a bunch of gold miners in a video game unionizing. There's like a plot, right? But then in between the plot, there will just be a chapter that is Corey Doctorow. So explaining to you how the 2008 financial collapse happens. And one of the things that he knows that has stuck with me my entire life and I think is genuinely a really important lesson is that if someone comes up to you and the thing that they say is, hey, you can buy this thing, right? You know, or you can you can place a bet. You can buy a financial instrument. And the way that it works is if multiple things happen, you know, like like several things that are different happen. Right. So, for example. It's like if LeBron scores 32 and Wembley has three blocks and I beat the point spread by five. Right. Yeah. Right. Then you get paid out 100 million dollars or whatever. Right. That's and that's sort of extreme example. But that's a parlay. It's a sports. Yeah, that's a that's a sports parlay. Every single time someone is doing that is a scam. One hundred percent. It is a scam. If you put your money into this, you are lighting it the fuck on fire. Yeah. Now, this is effectively what's going on with with these with these leverage. ETFs, right? They're taking like a shit ton of positions at the same time. It's the thing that allows you to like have a bunch of different positions at one time on the same stock. This is an asset so dangerous that like if you look up any definition of these things, literally that all all of the sites will tell you do not hold this thing for longer than one day. Yeah. Because if you hold this asset for longer than one day, you will lose all of your money. Like Investopedia, for example, like it just explains this right where they're like. Like, hey, this fucking asset, you can be betting on a stock to go up. Right. Because of the way it happened, you can lose money. Yep. On the stock you are betting to go up going up because it's this like fucking unhinged set of parlays. It's all these conditionals on it. So like, yeah, it has to go up within a certain time window or it has to bounce. Right. Has to go down, then up or something like that. Right. It's a bunch of weird conditions. Yeah. And you can lose more money on this than you put in. How does that which is insane because you have to. You have to pay out all of the options that you take in. Right. Of course. So you can lose more money than you put in. Oh, my God. This is durate. They found a form of gambling that is actually worse than putting all of your life savings on red. Oh, yeah. Because at least if you put all your life savings on red, you can only lose all of your life savings. You can lose your family's life savings on this shit. Like, they can like. Famously, it's always good to go into debt to your bookie. This is famously. It's famously good to get credit from your from your sports gambler. That's a famous a famous narrative thing. That's good to do. Yeah. And again, to get a sense of how unhinged this market is right now, the regulators saying we probably shouldn't have approved people making these for a bunch of the biggest Korean tech stocks cause the market to tank by 10 percent. Yeah. Just saying, like, exactly. There's a lot of different angles on this that we could we could go into. Sorry. So is it OK if I switch to like some U.S. stuff as an example? For example, amazing. So, yeah, folks, we're pretty it became pretty clear that Trump. Trump was playing the price of oil, right? Mondays, you'd be like, we're retaliating against Iran. Fridays, you'd be like, peace is here, right? There's just like a really open trade that he was just making. And it worked because it worked right as a classic, like, like, well, the investors do it. So it works. The price goes up and down. You can play it. That was how war policy has been dictated for most of 2026, which is great and awesome and really good. But so the thing about the stuff is that like financial people insist. That AI is relatively safe because there's actual capital spending, right? Money is being spent, they say, on data centers. And, you know, Ed Zitron, who I know is part of the network, has done a lot of reporting on the money is not actually being spent. Oh, it doesn't actually. But it's bullshit. But so, yes, exactly. So so it's all bullshit. These are these bullshit companies. But like one of the things that we're starting to see happen and that Trump really innovated, but that everyone's favorite Nazi, the trillionaire Elon Musk, although he's not a trillionaire. He's not a trillionaire anymore unless he moved out of his space expositions, I think. He managed to do a pump and dump with his own company. Elon Musk did a crypto rug pull at the scale of the world economy. OK, which like, you know, in a way, like, you know, I'm not going to hand it to you. You don't have to hand it to him. But it's truly one of the craziest scams that like in plain sight that's ever happened. And part of the way this worked. I want to talk about this because it's not just about him being a creepy scammer. It's about. The way that this is all being supported by the finance industry, like which is what you're talking about with these instruments. Yeah. So you've got these like really nasty instruments that they're developing to rinse Korean grocers of their, you know, their of their money, whatever. But you've also got like what what happened with the SpaceX IPO is that when something gets listed on the Nasdaq, the S&P, when it gets added to these indexes, everyone holding an index fund has to buy those stocks. So it means that like really safe stuff like. You know, a 401k and you're just like, I just put the 401k in the S&P 500, right? It's just the stock market. I'm buying the whole stock market. Yep. Lying those up. No problem. So when the SpaceX IPO happened, it listed at 160. So one of the 160 was 169.69. I don't remember the exact number. I think there was it. I didn't have a mean price. I don't even remember. When it listed, that was 10 days ago, 15 days ago. The IPO happened. Yeah. Something like when that when that went public. All of the institutional funds had to buy a proportional amount of SpaceX. Right. So they had to buy it because that's just how it works. And that's that's reasonable. That is actually like regulated. It's a reasonable thing. So what happened was this. The price retailers drove it way up. Right. Elon still has, you know, with using Twitter managed to get a bunch of retail investors. This is going to go straight to the moon, whatever, whatever. So for five days, it goes up to like 190, 200. I think it crosses 200 at one point. Right. And now it is down to 150. So it is 10% down from where it was 10 days ago. Why is it 10% down? Because SpaceX is a valueless company compared to what they're valuating it at. Yeah. SpaceX is 15 government contracts in a trench coat. Yeah. Like it's just not it's not a company that like has any path to profitability. It also doesn't have a path to Mars. But what that means is that institutional investors created and regulators created a situation where Elon and his buddies pump and dumped. As you said, they got the price way up. They moved out of their position. And now those funds lost their 10% invest stake in SpaceX. And there's no reason to anticipate that stock going back up. Yep. It's just like there's just no reason for it. It's overvalued as it is. Right. So this is how like people who aren't doing retail investing, people who are not, you know, people who are like, I don't trust the stock market. Yeah. So this is this is the California pension fund. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah. And like, obviously, like Trump did that with the Trump coin. Like we're like basically like what the lesson learned from the Trump coin. And the crypto and the NFT explosion. And by the way, Bitcoin is down almost 100% on the year. It's been under 60,000 for months. Bitcoin is collapsing as a safe, the safe haven asset. If you were heavily invested in Bitcoin, you're ruined right now. If you held for a year. Anyway, what they learned from cryptos and NFTs is, oh, we can just do that in the stock market, too. Right. Yeah. We can just do it. We can just we can just play the entire stock market like this, you know, and we can blame it on, you know, I started by talking about the retail investors. And that's real. That is driving the volatility, and that's if you're a professional or you're in an industry force you can just skim the cash off now the reason that they need to skim the cash as fast as possible right now is because two years ago i think i came on here to talk about the commercial did we talk about commercial real estate like the commercial real estate bubble on the show oh i don't remember i don't remember if we actually talked about the show or just just you know we just texted about it whatever cackled about it privately so basically the private banking sector or sorry the shadow banking which is now called private capital private financing like that sector was facing a collapse two years ago in 2023 as all of their office buildings came to do basically there was this massive expansion commercial real estate and the pandemic combined with a cooling economy like they was in trouble all of that money has now gone into the ai boom so they they staved off this collapse that was supposed to happen in 2023 2024 there was even a word for it which was like the maturity wall right like all these things were going to hit this maturity wall like everyone was ready for it so now those companies are starting to go down right the the private equity and the thing about private equity is that it's what if a bank had no regulation yeah so private equity has burned all of their money into the ai boom but it's not just them if we look at like the huge layoffs in video game companies that are going on right now right yep like all tech investors are taking all of their money out of everything and putting it in ai yeah right they're going all in on ai that's why they're so insistent on doing it moving forward they're going all in on ai that's why they're so insistent on doing it moving forward they're going all in on ai that's why they're so insistent on doing it doing it movies can't get made like i talked to i've you know for my book that i wrote i've talked to a bunch of movie producers i have relationships with them they just can't get funding these are people with huge movies right big small producers there's nothing is getting green lit there is just no capital for anything yeah except ai the entire economy has put all of its resources yep into llms yep nothing else is getting made the data centers aren't being built and then they do elaborate ways to ruin korea by gambling on it yeah incredible economy it's astounding it's like it's like the the entire it's like every rich person on earth has collectively taken all of humanity's chips and put it on tulip bulbs yeah you know i compare this to the 19th century because this is before the sec what used to happen joint stock companies used to guys just used to go around a town right you know before you during the era of the television industry and you know telegram yeah this is the railroads were the most famous example of this for the 1860s and the 1870s post-civil war there were like five or six railroad stock crashes people would just sell you listen we're going to make this rail line it's going to be awesome okay rails are the future it's so high tech you know get get it on the ground floor and then there would be massive economic collapses and you know that wild insecurity was driven by a lot of what we would call now retail investment right a lot of what the 20th century did what the sec did was try to make sure that didn't happen because when everyone puts all of their money into a sort of speculative asset like say ai data centers because shrimp jesus when everyone was like wait a second these aren't very valuable the money just is gone so part of the reason why everything feels so weird is that like in order for the entire economic system to function there's two giant collective delusions right that everyone has to maintain at the same time or everything collapses one is that the is that the ai boom is inevitable and it's going to make money yeah and the second one and this is also directly tied to south korea is that the war on iran is going to end it's going to end soon yep because if both of these things are not true and they're not true neither is not true like i there's no no they're both complete lies but everything falls apart immediately and south korea you know the other reason why south korea was was having these like just 10 like 10 of the market get like gets annihilated in a few minutes is that this would happen every time it became clear that no the war isn't ending like every time trump's fake like peace deal fell like latest fake peace deal fell apart the market would collapse but the problem is in order for all these people to keep making money everyone has to continue to collectively believe that no it's going to end yeah and so you're just in this perpetual cycle right we're like south korea is one of the countries in the world that is the most exposed to the effects of this war that's not like actively being bombed like this is like like in terms of massive industrial economies right like obviously like east asia yeah like like the rest of like east and south asia particularly is getting by all of this as we talked about elsewhere on this show but south korea is the core industrial center yeah that's the most fucked by this specifically because they because they rely heavily on industrial gas and just regular like regular fossil fuels that come to that come to the strait of hormuz which is not open has never been opened will not be reopened yeah i heard there was a great deal i heard that actually it's going to be open don't worry it's going to be fine listen netanyahu's a reasonable man you know trump is a reason these are reasonable people it's going to go fine it's all going to reopen soon yeah ben gevier only only holds a minor uh post in the israeli government hold on i am googling this live god damn it god damn it oh wow checks notes he is the minister of national security oh no so of course you know we talk about the economy and obviously the horror in lebanon and palestine is the real like you know is the is the most horrible and iran is the most horrible thing going on right now but these cascading effects are also horrible yeah if we've learned one thing the last 10 years it's it's that it can always get worse for everyone oh yeah so we have to have this moment where like everyone is gambling on south korean chip manufacturers right yep and sub manufacturers on the basis that they will be totally necessary to the production of chips that are being sold to companies that can't use them that are a depreciating asset that get become valueless these extremely expensive chips lose all their value within five years they are going to install those chips into buildings that don't exist yet that are that and they're going to put billions of dollars worth of these chips again the chips have been made the chips do exist largely although there's still a lot of speculation the chips exist they're sitting in a warehouse at some point someone is going to put them into a warehouse that itself is being speculated on by the same companies yes who are buying future compute yeah on it is a different financial instrument and they're going to build it and then when they do build it there's going to be so much demand for ai because people love to use it and it's really made the economy so efficient it is like truly and also and also one final point about this right yeah and also that the people who use it and who become power users of it aren't going to request more tokens no then actually make the money because more people using it is actually bad for them because if those people use tokens they're selling the tokens below cost right yeah it's good um so basically this is a really strong thing for the economy and it's obviously it's obscene and it's funny and it's it's truly terrifying but i think the thing that i think i really want to like underline to me i know you know you know you would say the same is that this is our money yeah this is money that we produced by working our whole lives we have worked so hard for so long and we produced so much surplus value and we pretty know that's that's the nature of the situation and that money is being lit on fire sometimes quite literally right like in coal fire plants and gas plants it is destroying the planet it is doing so in the name of keeping this bubble alive long enough for all of the big people who are being rinsed who got rinsed by investing in office buildings to get out with their cash and leave with the bag so that as we face the total political and economic collapse as well as ecological disaster there are people with enough money that they stole this is one it's it's like one last job at the level of like global delusion yeah and it's all built on this like myth making about ai but it's also built on all of these structures and it's also built on like the collapse of the global economic system through war and stuff in short it's good but this is our money this is our money we made this money they're lighting it on fire so that they can get an invent a bad investment they made 10 years ago back all the bad investments they've made since 2009 they're trying to cash out on that as fast as possible right now and as long as they can keep pumping the stock market they can keep taking that money out and they have a chance to make it and some of them will be ruined but this isn't going to be like the 30s i don't think we're going to see a lot of them jumping out of skyscrapers tragically like because i think i think honestly we're going to see a lot of them jump out of the skyscrapers and we're going to see a lot of them jump out of the skyscrapers tragically like because i think i think honestly most of them are going to get out and we're going to be the ones holding the bag and we're the ones who produce that money that they're lighting on fire and this is what they want to do with us and with the world and the world that we live in and i'm so glad that we have no way to stop them i think that's good personally yeah you know the the optimistic view on this and again i've been saying this already trust approval rating is 30 percent and the bomb hasn't even gone off yet right like big economy hasn't blown up well and low-key the demand destruction for natural gas and oil is so intense that the economy the global energy market is greening faster it's greening finally for the first time since we started doing this yeah is greening at a pace fast enough to potentially stop some of the worst effects of climate change so so unfortunately the problem is at the same time we're also all all of our new economic growth is entirely in like fucking gas turbines they're never gonna run it's like it's you know it's fine it's fine those are never gonna run well no they've they have definitely poisoned a shit ton of people oh absolutely yes absolutely no no no yeah no doubt yeah but but i also think that like you know like i to some extent like part of the strategy here right if if you look at sort of like what venture capital is doing this their plan is like okay yeah we can we can navigate the complete destruction of the global economy and the subsequent political like calamities and the subsequent political fallout and the collapse of like nation states by you know create creating our own sort of fascist corporate autocracies totally but they don't have to be right about that like they just don't they're not right have you seen how bad these guys are elon musk can't even make a friend you think this guy can run a corporate state city state like come on when that money stops having its value they're not ready for the whirlwind they're reaping i said there's nothing we can do about that there's nothing that we can do about it with the levers of power that exist right now formally but there's actually a lot we can do about it and they're going to learn a lot of reasons why previous capitalists built the sec built the welfare state yeah why they did things and that's going to be one of the last things they learn inshallah yeah last time they did something like this that was frankly less stupid because i cannot believe i'm saying this at least there were houses i can't believe i'm saying this right but like the last time they did this they set off a wave of world revolutions they barely survived and like yeah revived the international left in a way they had been basically moribund yep for extremely long periods of time outside of like very small regions and now this you know this the sort of like the the sort of sleeping giant that they unleashed has been awake for like a decade and a half and they're like what if we did this shit again yeah but worse i mean i don't see what could go wrong for them i think i'm gonna say it again happy pride um let's make this one the last birthday america ever has 250 is more than enough don't you think they had their time our time is coming soon it could happen here summer me let's host people outside more reality the patio furniture is still in the box the ac just started making a weird noise and the pool flamingo still needs to be inflated so i open air tasker post the task set my budget and pick a tasker to help suddenly the furniture's assembled the ac's fixed and the flamingo's floating which means i am too go to airtasker.com or download the app airtasker get anything done what if your soda actually did something for you introducing skypop protein soda skypop protein soda has 10 grams of protein in it so it's a great way to get rid of your complete protein zero sugar and real delicious soda taste skypop protein soda reach for the sky get your skypop protein soda now at target or kroger mom are we there yet 10 more minutes only 10 minutes can you drive slower what's up with them today lingo kids that app we downloaded last week they love it the games this funny baby bot character kids we're almost there no with more than 4 000 interactive games songs and shows little ones can't get enough of lingo kids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids why didn't we download this sooner everything kids love download it for free every case has a story every victim has a voice but will it be heard i'm nancy grace on crime stories we go beyond headlines to examine evidence challenge the story we're fed and pursue justice for victims and their families please join us at crime stories with nancy grace on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts hope you join us i'll see you there friend imagine over a hundred thousand strikers shutting down the city of london for an entire month the makings of not only a general strike but also a social revolution such was the case in 1888 when the dock workers in the port of london made their voices heard and shook the city to its core hello and welcome to it could happen here i'm andrew sage andrew is on youtube and i'm joined once again by james i have to be back with you andrew likewise likewise and have you heard of the great london dock strike of 1889 have i went to school in a time when like they still taught a bit of a lesson to be able to have a bit of an exchange about it then yeah but i'm interested to know more yeah i first learned about it through erico malatesta he wrote briefly about it in one of his pamphlets one of his many pamphlets yeah but i found further information and cross verification through a bunch of different articles that i'll link in the show notes and reference throughout now before we get to the strike itself we have to look to the conditions that brought it about and we have to look to the conditions that brought it about and we have to look to the the port of london like ports around the world in that time had terrible working conditions and terrible pay alongside it but despite being the fulcrum of london economy the so-called unskilled workforce that made it run was left destitute in part due to the inconsistent nature of the work itself according to libcom's article a lot of trade was seasonal you had sugar coming in from the caribbean timber from the north and tea and spices from the east this was in a time when you know the sun never set on the british empire yeah and back then trade was also a lot more vulnerable to weather conditions so the flow of commerce wasn't the most predictable and since ports were not very mechanized either it took a lot of labor to load and unload ships but there wasn't a consistent demand for that labor week to week you know some weeks you would have hundreds of ships to load and unload and other weeks you would have mere dozens so dock companies could get away with having a casual call-on and contract system basically they'd have a large pool of men hanging around waiting for labor most of them would only get taken on for a day or just a few hours and whether you even got work that day or not was based on luck and female you know you could spend all day outside the dock waiting to get called on and end up being sent home with no pay so it created a very desperate competitive environment as men would basically have to push and shove each other to get a chance at being picked for work for the day these are conditions where the workers are clearly poised against each other as is often the case under capitalism but around that time about a year before the strike we're talking about according to an article by beverly cook for london museum the so-called unskilled and impoverished young women working at a match factory in the bow quarter of london went on strike and won better working conditions and pay which may have even inspired dock workers boldness however what really kicked off the great strike was a dispute over the bonuses workers would normally get for working faster and more efficiently one of the big dock companies the east and west india dock company decided to cut their bonus and led by a man named ben tillett on the 14th of august 1889 the dock workers began walking out and convincing their fellow workers to do the same this era of labor history is always super fascinating to me like there's so much at stake right for labor in this time period people's lives were genuinely miserable right like working class existence in this time period like you can read um i think angles was writing about slightly earlier than this but like angles has uh some stuff about the conditions for working class people in manchester but also like your your bosses and the cops can just kill you you're on strike you know like there's uh there's the stakes are so high and not that this cops can't and don't kill people now i guess but the desire to unionize was so natural right like it wasn't coming from people like knowing of generations of like we do now right like when we when we form our unions now even if we um we know we unionize let's say starbucks is a place that's unionizing not we can think of the generations of union workers who have come before us and the struggles and and the gains that they've had but these folks i mean they had to an extent the people's charter and these other things right like uh i know we've spoken about luddites before and the idea of understanding luddism as collective bargaining through riot but like still these people who really like built the modern labor movement in the 19th century they paved the way with their blood for for all of us for to an extent right and i think it's that's always like really impressive to me that people were prepared to like step into that fight yeah yeah i mean we take it for granted that we have a legacy to draw upon today but you know somebody had to be the first some group of workers had to be the first to you know come together and stand up in those industrial conditions in those urban conditions i'm sure there's a history of workers standing up prior to the industrial revolution you know you would have collective bargaining even back in antiquity but the miserableness of the conditions really pushed them to take a stand and even though the work itself was made so competitive they still recognize their common cause i'm sure that before that strike they might have had some petty rivalries some petty grudges amongst each other like oh that guy keeps taking my job like it's like three days straight now i haven't gotten any work because he keeps on shoving me aside and but they put all that aside for the strike their union was unofficial at the time but that union would go on to form a strike committee to put forward their demands which were an increase in wages an overtime wage work time minimums an end to the contract system and a limit on the call-ons which would be fixed to specific times of day and the recognition of their union their strike would soon be joined by the amalgamated stevedores union which were basically a higher status kind of dock worker and even more critical to the function of the docks so their support lended legitimacy to the strike the stevedores would issue a request to other workers in london particularly connected to shipwork to stand in solidarity to dock workers and their demands and to donate contributions to support the strikers which is of course critical to any long-term strike action so across workshops and factories other workers joined in the cause rope makers carmen lighter men among them by the 27th of august an estimated 130 000 men were on strike to quote one newspaper article from the time dockmen lighter men bargemen cement workers carmen iron workers and even factory girls are coming out if it goes on a few days longer all london will be on holiday the great machine by which five millions of people are fed and clothed will come to a dead stop and what is to be the end of it all the proverbial small spark has kindled a great fire which threatens to envelop the whole metropolis end quote and according to beverly cook after two weeks of the dockers striking 10 000 tailors in east london also went on strike now these were mostly jewish immigrants working in the clothing industry's sweatshop conditions scattered across around 500 cramped workshops of mostly 10 workers or less a piece across white chapel the tailors demanded fixed 12-hour working days a mandatory one-hour break outside of the workshop increased wages and a ban on the staff and workers to take home their work they mostly spread the word of their strike through informational posters they weren't necessarily too connected to the dock worker strike at first they had their own demands and it seems to have been a coincidence of fate that they both rose up around the same time perhaps one encouraged by the other you now during the strike as malatesta put it quote they strove to feed a population women and children included of upwards of half a million people to raise subscriptions collections across the city to keep up with fast correspondence by letter and telegram to organize meetings demonstrations and talks to keep an eye out put pen to people and stay alert lest the bosses successfully trick english or foreign poor into black legging to monitor all the docks and people who are going to work and how many all of this stunningly well done by unsolicited volunteers there was one noteworthy incident a shipload of ice arrived and a rumor was rife that this ice was meant for the hospitals the strikers raced in such numbers to help unload it without a care for whether they would be paid for the job or not the sick and especially the patients in the hospitals were not to suffer on account of the strike end quote i hadn't heard that before that's the end of the it's quite touching like this is especially part of the discourse in the uk at the moment right like when uh when medical workers go on strike like this always gets trotted out like by the right wing press that like oh well they've just chosen to make their patients suffer or whatever when in fact like the procedures and planning that medical workers go through before they go on strike to ensure that like people don't die because they went on strike are many and uh and complex right but like it's interesting to see that even back then people were like as they were working out the best ways to to take collective action they were trying to also not harm other working people yeah i mean also the extent of the strike and the extent of the suffering is really determined by the extent to which the bosses are holding out right yeah yeah exactly so if you want to blame anybody you have to blame the bosses not the workers yeah absolutely it's within the power of employers to not have their employees have to go on strike in order to be treated with dignity and respect however they consistently choose not to yeah exactly and i think what the workers demonstrate and strikes like that and strikes in this in this time period as well it's just their capacity to analyze the situation to organize themselves to respond effectively to problems that arise you know malice has described mass meetings and pickets daily processions to rally support they even worked on persuading scabs to join them or according to some news reports they were intimidating those scabs yeah but there was another quote from that article i wanted to read it he said sir during this week i have witnessed the most open intimidation practiced by the men on strike howling crowds going from dock to dock and warehouse to warehouse stopping businesses and threatening vengeance and all who do not comply with their demands until now there are thousands who are out who had no desire to strike but were compelled to do so those who dare to work for their wages are being brutally maltreated and threatened with worse if they dare attempt to work in defiance the strikers wishes i saw several men severely injured today on tower hill the blood being made to fly in all directions by gangs of strikers what are the authorities for not to protect peaceable citizens in earning an honest living signed a lover of freedom this was sent into the times on the 24th of august 1889 and to me it kind of sounds like a a doc boss writing in yeah right trying to sound like oh an innocent bystander yeah violence is not a thing that is absent in the labor movement but again like to your point earlier often the discourse does not talk about the violence which is done by forcing people to live in poverty and labor in inhumane conditions exactly exactly that's where the real violence lies to be fair there were a couple instances of charges of assault and intimidation but the strikes were mostly peaceful yeah you know they were exercised a lot of courage and discipline and restraint yeah they really showed that that these working class people were not impossible to organize or absurdly dangerous they had a capacity for order and collective organization that could just as easily prefigure a free society as it merely is directed towards negotiation with the powers that be another aspect of their resistance that i took note of was the fact that a rent strike also took place you know you often hear nowadays when you try and talk to people about you know organizing a strike organizing a general strike whatever or just like a strike in the industry from people i've spoken to you often hear that oh i have bills to pay i have rent to make i have you know this and that too in these violent and poor conditions at risk of their lives the families of strikers just chose not to pay rent for the duration of the strike that's right yeah all of them collectively yeah a rent strike and they also would have been gathering donations and such in all of this time as the strike is going on to sustain you know their their keep in other ways their other basic needs yeah but in the end they're not going to pay rent to sustain their their keep in other ways unfortunately the donations do not look like there would be enough to stave off starvation you know despite food tickets being distributed to cover food needs after the direct food distribution couldn't keep up there still wasn't enough to cover for the swelling mass of strikers and their families and yet the strikers still held on and rationed what they had even as the bosses waited and waited for them to give up you know the bosses were literally counting on the starvation of the workers to break the strike so they wouldn't have to give into the demands yeah and it really got to a point in the beginning of september where it looked like the strike might not be able to go on and then a miracle of international solidarity came through the brisbane wharf laborers union in australia sent money from citizens of all classes across australia to support the strikers the strikers got a first installment of 150 pounds which I found out is worth $17,000. pounds today jeez and the dock workers received over 30 000 pounds in total or over 3.4 million pounds today to sustain their strike long term and secure their victory obviously with a win four like that they'll be able to sustain the efforts and even though the tailors strike was mostly separate from what the dock strikers were doing the dock strikers made sure that the tailors got funds to support themselves amounting to about 100 pounds or 11 000 pounds today nice i mean can you imagine that kind of solidarity today where that that swell of resources can be poured in to support fellow workers in their efforts yeah fellow workers who you had so much less communication with than we do today right like it's not like they could it's not like they logged on to uh yeah like twitter and were like oh yeah well these people are on strike and let's talk to them and okay we should support them like uh yeah at a time when people had less communication they still managed to have more solidarity and we see like people have raised millions of dollars for instance to feed people in palestine right like yeah solidarity still exists for sure but specifically in the labor movement it is hard to come by often and even when you do see solidarity in the labor movement it tends to be restricted to the borders of the nation you might see the occasional solidarity strike within the country but how often do you see strikes crossing those those borders yeah yeah exactly yeah like if if dock workers in london were to strike today oh you know what are the chances the dock workers in australia or dock workers in the u.s would support them yeah like even living as i do like at an international border like you know issues of international solidarity will come up in union discussions like there might be times where we might take a collection or something for unions to the south of what is the border now in between u.s and mexico right but the idea that you could raise that much money and that like your solidarity could be so profound that like that is the thing that let these people get through yeah i think that's very hard to imagine that happening now which is a shame it's just so fascinating to me how like you know we have this period of the industrial revolution right where labor becomes even more exploitative right more surplus value accrues to the people who own the means of production to like be crudely marxist about it i guess and the working class which is the people creating the value but not receiving the benefits from it has to decide how to respond to that and around the world they're like fuck this like we're not having that and like the whole world is like fuck this like we're not having that and like the whole world is like fuck this like we're not having that and like the whole genesis of labor organizing international solidarity like it existed before as you said of course it did but like the sort of formal structures that we have today arrives pretty quickly alongside that increased level of labor exploitation there's a moment from then till maybe the 19 teens i mean maybe till the great depression like where it really seems like that the class between capital and labor is like a uh really an equal and fierce fight you know now like it almost seems like by comparison with sort of labor organizing tends to ask more nicely and be a bit less like a bit less radical and a bit less international compared to to how it was back then yeah i guess not all of it there is still very radical labor organizing of course i don't want to like overlook that but it's just uh this is a particularly remarkable time yeah it's not as prominent yeah or perhaps it's it's you less uh just less apparent less recognizable less amplified if it does exist it could stand to be amplified more right this was a time when bosses were really worried like it as as influenced by the lover of freedom writing it's a newspaper they were very concerned with this right like they uh they weren't sure how long i guess they could pull this shit off like how long they could make it last where they could exploit people this much exactly and you kind of see them biding their time today right because these battles were fought but the war wasn't won you know the class war is yet to be won right or i suppose if you want to be particularly cynical about it you could say that it has been won and the capitalists are the one inside yeah but you'll notice that where we have won concessions where workers have won concessions in the past the capitalists merely buy their time and wait for an opportunity to roll back those concessions yeah without a doubt and so we could continue to exist in this kind of cycle of fighting and stopping short of total victory by accepting concessions just for the fight to have to restart again years down the line or we could you know reach the finish line as it were yeah the uh the kinder gentler capitalism that we were supposed to build through collective action hasn't really delivered and all it's done is resulted in capitalism moving to places where it can more readily exploit labor i was having this this discussion with a colleague right like an older colleague they had been industrial union person like their whole lives and they were saying that like in this era of like neoliberal globalization the greatest failure of united states unions was to fail to internationalize like when borders dropped to capital but not people right in the late 20th century and money and jobs started moving from the united states to a lot of cases to mexico right and unions could have responded by saying we will go to mexico and we will organize our siblings in the working class in mexico not the mexican people can't organize themselves and don't have a very long and proud tradition of a working class organizing they do but like those unions that had the resources from years of struggle in the u.s by and large didn't go to south and central america and say we are here with you like we are not going to allow them to exploit you in the way that they once exploited us and they didn't do that right and so i think it's a really good question and i think it's a really good question right they kind of double down on protectionism you see it now with unions under trump a lot as well you know talking about tariffs and things if they will protect jobs like they're sort of choosing the nation state over the working class when they do that and that's bitten them in the ass before but they still continue to keep doing it yeah the nation state one of the greatest psyops yeah yeah of all time yeah so just getting back to 1889 for a moment yeah yeah the workers after receiving that that windfall managed to hold on for just a bit longer and entered negotiations with their bosses through a committee initiated by the lord mayor of london whose city was obviously quite paralyzed over the past month and they were able to hold on for just a bit longer the strikers also received the support of the irish catholic archbishop cardinal manning who shared that irish catholic background with a lot of the workers a lot of the dark workers and what i found i guess interesting reading that was that according to the catholic encyclopedia's entry on cardinal henry edward manning his involvement in the dark workers negotiations kind of foreshadowed an encyclical that was issued by the the pope at the time two years later which directly addressed the conditions of the workers and set out a church policy that supported the right of labor to form unions while of course rejecting socialism and affirming private property rights so one step forward two steps back yeah and i found it interesting that that encyclical was issued around the time that you know as many would have heard the pope of today has issued a new encyclical that was issued around the time that you know as many would have heard the pope of today has issued a new encyclical on the subject of ai in part in relation to labor yeah so by the end of the committee negotiations the dark workers had all their demands met and the strike was agreed to be over on the 16th september 1889 the tailors also secured their victory and after the strike the dark workers formed an official new general laborers union and the strike inspired thousands of unskilled workers to also organize themselves according to libcom union membership overall grew from 750 000 in 1888 to 1.5 million in 1892 to over 2 million in 1899 and this growth would be a swell of numbers for the existing unions as well as the establishment of new unions now if we look at the strike through maltester's eyes i think he provides a very useful analysis in about a strike written in 1889 likely right after the strike itself when malatesta was in london while he recognized that dark workers had won the battle he like i is questioning why they didn't go ahead and win the war you know he questioned why a movement powerful enough to bring one of the world's largest ports to a standstill didn't go any further the docks have been running because workers by the thousands collectively made them run and when those workers withdrew their labor an entire section of the economy crowned a halt so for malatesta the first lesson of a strike and their value for evolution was that they reveal where the power actually comes from every day life under capitalism and the state tends to hide that fact. You know, they make it seem like societies organized by governments, investors, managers, owners. But a strike makes it very clear that the people who do the work are the people who make society function. People who may have felt isolated would begin acting together, holding meetings, organizing relief, feeding hundreds of thousands, managing communications, in the process, gaining practical experience and self-organization, demonstrating the potential to organize the city itself, by themselves, for themselves. In other words, they're developing new powers which would shape their new drives and establish a new consciousness. So strikes are schools of struggle, but as Malatesta points out, they're limited. They reveal workers' power, but they don't use that power to transform society. The dock strike won higher wages and better conditions, but the basic structure of society was untouched. The dock bosses were still bosses and the workers were still workers. And the state was still the state, protecting property and maintaining the existing order. And this was Malatesta's critique of the labor movement. They got stuck on winning concessions instead of shaking up the system. And we see through history that employers regroup and economic conditions change and the previous gains would come under pressure. So one battle being won does not mean the class war has been won. Literally a few decades later, another strike took place in the port of London by dock workers. In 1926, as recounted in Callum Kant and Matthew Lee's article on the making of London's general strike, the Yackman, dock workers, transport workers, and other laborers joined coal miners in a nationwide strike after mine owners sought wage cuts and longer hours. In that strike, dock workers once again effectively shut down key parts of the city's economy. But during this strike, state repression was especially severe. The government deployed police, volunteers, and emergency powers to keep services running and break picket lines. Violent clashes occurred around the docks where workers tried to prevent strike breakers and the movement of goods. Also, the leadership of the trade union's congress, TUC, was quite conservative in response to this worker action. While rank-and-file workers demonstrated strong solidarity and willingness to continue the struggle, union leaders ultimately called off the strike after nine days without securing major guarantees for the strikers. It was a major betrayal of the movement and demonstrated the weakness of traditional unionism structurally and ideologically. You see the signs of unions basically being part of the system in the end, as we see today. And you see the potential of workers, as always, to act autonomously. So strikes like these leave me with questions. You know, can a strike develop beyond a negotiation over wages and conditions, into a broader challenge to who controls society? Can the solidarity built during the strike survive after the immediate dispute ends? Can workers begin to see themselves not just as employees with demands, but as people capable of managing social life themselves? Can we assail the legal order and the property protection that stand in the way of our survival? And in all of these questions, what I'm getting at is, how would you turn a general strike into a social revolution? There are still gaps to be bridged between labour struggles and the grander ambitions of such a revolution. And labour conditions have certainly changed for many. You know, I don't want to put forward the position that we just need to recreate the rugged industrial unionism of the past. But we still have power in our refusal to work. That hasn't changed. And if we leverage that alongside organisations within and outside of the workplace to support our struggles, to build and fight, to propose and oppose, and push for the vision of a world beyond workers and bosses, not merely pushing demands to bosses, maybe we can accomplish the social revolution that Malatesta sought more than a century ago. Bigger strikes, stronger unions, are not the answer. There may be steps toward workers using solidarity, confidence, and organisational capacity to take direct control of all aspects of social life. As always, all power to all the people. Peace. Moving day's going great. Until the couch won't fit through the door. Tilted! It is tilted! So I post a task on Airtasker, set my budget, and choose a local tasker to help. Suddenly, the couch is inside the new place, the TV's mounted, and my drone has been retrieved from my neighbour's tree. Big tasks, small tasks, even the weird ones. Airtasker. Get anything done. With 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and 45 calories, Skypop Protein Soda offers four delicious flavours with big taste and real benefits. It's light, refreshing, and ready for wherever your day takes you. It's anytime protein that helps you reach higher. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Mom, are we there yet? 10 more minutes. Only 10 minutes? Can you drive slower? What's up with them today? Lingo Kids. That app we downloaded last week? They love it. The games, this funny baby bot character. Kids, we're almost there. No! With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs, and shows little ones can't get enough of, Lingo Kids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids. Why didn't we download this sooner? Lingo Kids! Download it for free. I'm Nancy Grace. On Crime Stories, we go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story, we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Hope you join us. This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Whoa! This is the Supreme Court edition. That's right. This episode, we're covering Supreme Court rulings from June 24th to July 1st, and a few other news items that happened in that duration. And let's start with some of those smaller, miscellaneous news items before getting to the long series of Supreme Court rulings, which this episode will focus on. Yeah. So, starting with court stuff, I guess. It appears to me, as the Department of Defense is planning to involuntarily activate reserve lawyers to serve as immigration judges, according to an article in Bloomberg Law, for some context, to voluntary activation, you can still opt for that. It's to do with the nature of their contracts as reservists, like how that time adds up to their military retirement and stuff. But in this case, it seems that it is also planning on activating people who have not indicated that they are interested in doing this. Secondly, a horrific pair of shallow earthquakes, rated at 7.2 and 7.5 on the Richter Trail, struck Venezuela last week, destroying whole high-rise buildings. La Guaira and Caracas were particularly hard hit. I actually saw a video of the street where I used to live with people who are very clearly dead lying in the road, which sucks. Days later, people are still trapped under the rubble. The death toll is already in the thousands, with over 5,000 missing. It will be very hard for us to get an accurate death toll out of the Venezuelan government. Among the missing are more than 1,000,000 Venezuelans, and more than 1,000,000 Venezuelans. More than 100 recently deported Venezuelans who were sent by the USA back to Venezuela. They were staying in a hotel, and that hotel collapsed. This week, the Iraqi military also raided politicians inside the Green Zone, seized a bunch of cash, and cited an ongoing anti-corruption effort. The Department of Justice Antitrust Division, together with 17 state attorney generals, has filed a civil suit against a number of egg producers for their alleged unlawful manipulation of egg prices. This was really, really interesting. I read through some of the court docs here, and this is definitely worth a closer look at some point. This is something I'd like to cover in the future, actually. People are like, you know, the cost of eggs has become a meme or whatever, but this is just straight up oligopoly behavior. They are colluding to increase the price of something, and this became a political issue. This was one of Trump's main campaign items. Yeah. Yeah. They knew that as they continued to collude to do this, right? I think it does bear discussing within the context of the way that we obtain our food in this country and the people who have control over the things that a lot of people feel like they need to get through every day, right? Like, I think this isn't the sort of silly throwaway thing that some people think it is. Definitely. According to an ethics disclosure released last Tuesday, President Trump has made more than $1.5 billion in tax cuts to the U.S. economy and the U.S. economy itself. And that's a lot more than $1.4 billion from his crypto businesses last year, making over $600 million from Trump-branded meme companies, and $500 million in income from his crypto platform World Liberty Financial, which also partnered with the UFC Freedom 250 event to pay the fighters in crypto on the World Liberty Financial platform. The peanut farm comes to mind considering $1.4 billion in Trump-branded meme coins. It's kind of hard to write these corruption stories. I was looking into one recently about some federal contracting and something that would have destroyed a presidency 10 years ago is a 12-hour news story now. Not even sometimes. This is something that J.D. Vance was just talking about openly last week. Vance joked about this, yeah. It was that, quote, I think Nixon's historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy, unquote. The Colorado Supreme Court has blocked three redistricting ballot measures that would help Democrats pick up House seats in the state. Also in Colorado, the DSA has continued its winning streak with 29-year-old Democratic president Donald Trump. The DSA has continued its winning streak with 29-year-old Democratic president Donald Trump. The DSA has continued its winning streak with 29-year-old Democratic socialist Milot Kiros, who won the primary in the first congressional district, beating the 30-year-long incumbent by 10 points. This incumbent has been serving as the House rep longer than this Democratic socialist challenger has been alive. The first district in Colorado as well, like they will go Democrat. Oh, yeah. Barring like centrist Dems running a spoiler, which is always a thing they could do. This person will go to Congress. Joining the now growing kind of informal Democratic socialist caucus there. Yeah. Mayor Zoran Mamdani has announced more details about the $15 million allocated to help trans youth access gender-affirming care. The city is launching a text-slash-call line to help connect people with care and services and a direct care access fund for providers of youth gender-affirming care to, quote, help ensure New Yorkers can continue to access medically necessary care, unquote. That's from the mayor's office. Currently, New York City clinics like Callen-Lorde, Planned Parenthood, and the H&H City Municipal Hospital System all provide care to trans youth. But the fight continues to restore youth care services at NYU Langoon and Mount Sinai. Also speaking of Mamdani, the mayor's newly appointed rent guidelines board approved a first-ever two-year rent freeze for rent-stabilized units in the city. Let's now get to the Supreme Court. Starting with two shorter summaries, and not shorter because they're less important, just because we have a lot to cover, and we'll probably cover these stories more in depth in the future. In a six-to-three ruling, the conservative Supreme Court justices struck down a law limiting how much money political parties can spend on campaigns in coordination with candidates, citing the First Amendment. This order overruled the court's 5-4 decision back in 2001, which upheld, essentially, campaign finance limits. Essentially, this will allow political parties to spend vastly more money while utilizing candidates' low advertising rates that are not awarded to super PACs. This will also make it harder to do campaign finance reform or super PAC reform based on this interpretation of the First Amendment, meaning that court reform might be what is necessary to change something like this in the future. In another 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld state bans on trans girls participating in girls' school sports. Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, finding that the Constitution and Title IX allows for school sports to be separated by sex, and that the quote-unquote sex in Title IX cannot possibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex, because that was the quote-unquote ordinary meaning of the word when Title IX passed in the 70s. And quote-unquote, biological sex is related to sex assigned at birth in this ruling. Do they actually say that? They do tie biological sex to sex assigned at birth, yeah. So they're not proposing like a chromosomality definition? Not in my reading of the ruling that I see chromosomes. Because they also cited the IOC definition, right? Which is a distinct thing from sex assigned at birth. The IOC definition considers chromosomality and then also androgen sensitivity. So like, we're, I guess, approaching a situation where we're not able to be eligible for the Olympics, but not eligible for high school sports. I haven't read the entirety of this decision. I need to, but I've read three other ones yesterday. In the second paragraph, it states that biological sex is quote, sex assigned at birth. Okay. So yeah, we are approaching like a disparate situation with IOC understandings of sex, which is not, I guess, a particularly new thing. Like we had Maria Jose Martinez Patino was qualified from, she would have been an Olympic athlete in the, in the, in the eighties based on like a, a, a misunderstanding of how chromosomality works, I guess. You'd have to have the person who would, who would split that difference, right? For like a national organizing body to then decide how they would deal with that person competing. Nonetheless, it's fucking sucks for, uh, yeah, for lots of young people. Yeah. I mean, and biological sex, even as a categories itself, like constructed, this has actually no concrete basis in biology. Yeah. Justice Sotomayor, agreed that the state bands don't violate title nine, though on a narrower basis than the conservative majority, but the three liberal judges dissented under the 14th amendment's equal protection clause. Now, like importantly, the ruling itself does not mandate a ban, right? That the court's not saying that schools must ban trans athletes, but rather that title nine claims cannot be used to oppose bands on trans athletes for participating in school sports. A narrow, limited ruling. It's kind of like the least bad out of all of the potential bad outcomes. The court declined to rule on whether states that have trans inclusive rules for school sports are themselves in violation of title nine and declined to rule on the degree to which trans people in general have protections under the equal protection clause. Uh, Clarence Thomas's concurrence, very, very ugly, just like flatly like transphobic way more so than Kavanaugh's majority, opinion. I could read it, but it's just like, it's just ugly stuff. Like it's, it's, it's just a bigot. And it doesn't add anything to like the legal opinion. He just like took the chance to show he was a bigot. Yeah. Like I said, we will definitely cover this in more detail in the near future, but that requires some like careful focus and reporting. Yeah. So I want to start, I guess, with temporary protected status TPS, right? So the case in front of the Supreme court to remove the TPS of Syrian and Haitian nationals. I think we need to begin by addressing a lot of the misinformation and misunderstanding here. Uh, TPS is a renewable non-permanent status with no pathway to permanency. It can last between six and 18 months and it's renewed currently by the DHS secretary, right? That power passed to them when DHS began overseeing immigration. It was created in 1990 and at its core, it's supposed to be a way of protecting people who are in the falls that this is country of citizenship. If you are in the U S when they declare a TPS, you can apply, get granted a work permit. The longest that will last is 18 months and two months before it runs out. DHS has to determine if they will reauthorize it or not. So some folks for instance from El Salvador have been in the U S for decades on TPS that they have no permanency. They have no sense of stability. It is very hard for them to like make progress. In many areas, it would be easy for citizens or even permanent residents or visa holders, right? Because of that lack of, of the ability to plan to become citizens. So they wanted to pass to permanency. Like there are a couple of ways to do that, but they might have to risk leaving and coming back on another status, which many of them are not willing to do. I wrote about the Venezuelan TPS in my first outing gap series. So people want to hear an immigration lawyer. It's an immigration lawyer from one of the cases we're going to talk about explaining that than they can. The TPS as ruled by Sanchez versus Mayorkas is not the same as lawful admission to the country, right? People have frequently been claiming. I've seen that the Haitian TPS pertain to the 2010 earthquake. This is not correct. This was in the courts in the first Trump administration would be the simplest way of saying it. The current TPS pertains to the 2021 killing of Juvenal Moise and the subsequent violence thereafter, right? So it came about under the Biden administration. If people want more context at the time I was writing op-eds for NBC, and I will include one that I wrote in the show notes. At the time of the announcement in 2021, they were exceptionally clear that they did not want Moise and people coming to the US. Like genuinely some of the most repugnant language I've seen from the executive branch outside of this administration. In one instance, Mayorkas said, those who attempt to travel to the United States after this announcement will not be eligible for TPS and may be repatriated. There were some more explicit and in my mind uglier statements. Again, I've catalogued those in previous writing so you can read it. This case pertained to whether an administration could terminate a TPS without going through interagency review, something court records show they didn't do in case of the Haitian TPS. The court heard that argument and effectively said that the courts could not challenge the failure of DHS to do that. They didn't say that Nome followed the law or followed the procedures that she should have followed to cancel this TPS. They said that whether she did or did not do that cannot be challenged in court. One of the other challenges here was that the Haiti decision was motivated by race. The court addressed this and I'm just going to quote from the opinion here. Political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago and the statements cited by the mild respondents especially those concerning Haiti and Haitian immigrants to this country exemplify this development. But whatever one may think of the cited statements they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti's TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people. Ironically both Doe and Mayotte respondents identify a strong race neutral explanation of these official statements. The present administration's general stance on immigration and its obvious antipathy towards past administration's TPS policies. So what they're saying there is that this wasn't based on race. They hate all immigrants right or they hate everyone on TPS. I do want to point out that it was not so very long ago that the president spoke about Haitian people eating dogs. Here is Mark Wayne Mullen answering a question about this. The temporary protective status is over. They have to go home. Now they don't have to go to the country that they came from. If they're not feeling safe they can go someplace else but they cannot stay here. Your TPS temporary protective status is over. So we will help assist you in leaving if you would like. We'll buy you an airline ticket. We'll give you $2,600 to re-establish yourself someplace else if you don't want to go back to the country you came from. But you have to leave. If you don't want to go back to the country you came from you have to leave. If you don't want to leave and we're going to assist you in doing so and if you choose not to then we'll pick you up and force you to leave. That was yesterday. Here's him answering a question about TPS today. So today's Wednesday for those listening later. Are you going to be going after Haitians living in the country, Syrians living in the country? What's the path forward? Well I hate when it's phrased going after individuals. The fact is TPS for certain individuals under the court ruling they no longer have status. TPS was temporary. It was never meant to be permanent status. You had an opportunity while you were here to possibly try to change your status. Now that the court ruling has went out you no longer have that option. You have to go back to a country that either take you or back to the country you came from and if you deport yourself which we will give you $2,600 plus a plane ticket to go home you have the opportunity at that point to fill out it legally for a visa or another way to come back in this country. But you have to enter you have to come in through or immigrate to a country that doesn't have immigration systems and follow their laws not illegally. But if we have to arrest you and deport you that option of coming back in this country is off the table. So we would encourage everybody that that fell under any TPS that is no longer temporary protected status for you your time is expired. So previously this self-deportation had barred people from coming back. I need to check exactly what program he's talking about there because maybe it's something that I haven't come across right. But what he's suggesting is that if you're going to come back to a country that doesn't have immigration systems you have to fill out a visa or another way to come back in this country. So what he's suggesting there is that people could leave to a third country they would have to find a third country that would accept them that that is less and less likely to happen in this global climate. This is very bad especially the people like we know in Syria there has been intercommunal violence ever since the end of the civil war right and then the installation of the Syrian transitional government. It is still not a safe place. Haiti remains a place where people especially people who are going back with a visa or another way to come back in this country a bunch of cash from the United States are likely to be targeted. This is really bad. TPS is an important program. It did not give people permanency. It could have been much better but not having it is much worse. Talking of things that are much worse I want to move on to Mullen versus Alotrolado. People will be familiar with AOL if they've listened to my previous work. I've interviewed a lot of people from AOL over the years. This case pertains to asylum and United States law regarding asylum. The law says anyone who is in or arrives in the USA may apply for asylum. Of course CBP can inspect people seeking admission to the USA. In practice what this means is that asylum have metered. This process of physically preventing people entering the USA so that they cannot then arrive in the USA and apply for asylum is called metering. There have been various types of metering over the years. The Ninth Circuit had previously held that when someone encounters US border officials they may apply for asylum. In practice the difference here is between entering a port of entry versus having to have passed through a port of entry or around a port of entry. Port of entry is the thing with the like I'm thinking of the San Ysidro one but like the big revolving doors right where the CBP people stand where the blue CBP blue shirt CBP stand. CBP has previously said that they did this for capacity reasons but those capacity claims have been contradicted by reports of their own Office of the Inspector General. Effectively the Supreme Court has blessed the practice of metering asylum applications by saying that people have to have arrived in the USA versus arriving at the border. This is being portrayed as a very very straightforward decision. Let me read from the opinion here. An alien standing in Mexico does not arrive in the United States by attempting and failing to set foot in the country. An alien quote arrives in the United States only when he crosses the border. The INA it's the Immigration Naturalization Act. Thus neither entitles an alien standing in Mexico to apply for asylum nor requires an immigration officer to inspect him. They later said metering does not permanently bar any alien from arriving and applying for asylum despite the fact that many migrants have died and will die or suffer tremendous harm due to the practice. They go on to say last respond argument that the government might someday prevent all potential arriving asylum applicants from reaching the point where they could find an application addresses a hypothetical future policy not the rescinded metering policy at issue which merely delayed entry to improve conditions at certain points of entry. Let's listen now to this clip of Stephen Miller. So America's doors are closed fully to asylum seekers. That's not a hypothetical future policy that Stephen Miller said. Yeah, that's absurd. That's very clearly what was going to happen. You're being deliberately naive. It's obscene to say that that's a hypothetical. It's not. Like you're just like flatly laying out the mechanism in which all asylum seekers can be denied the chance to even ask for asylum by just magically saying, no, you're actually not talking to us when you're talking to us at the border. Yeah. And like, I want to address this like standing in Mexico claim, right? Because they're standing at the port of entry. So this building, quote unquote, in Mexico is paid for by the United States. It contains armed United States personnel, right? Are we therefore invading Mexico? Like, have we therefore seized Mexican territory? Like, just because you have not definitionally crossed the border, it is misleading to say that you're standing in Mexico, right? The port of entry is clearly a liminal space. It's not like you're in fucking Chiapas shouting on a megaphone, hey, can I have asylum? This framing is oversimplifying, to put it mildly. What this means is that we have created a de facto incentive to enter the United States between ports of entry. People who do so will have arrived in the United States. This is what happened under the Biden administration, right? With CBP1, where they effectively use CBP1 as a metering tool. The metering tool, because they and the Trump administration have both defended Title 42, was completely insufficient to keep up with the backlog of asylum. And so people entered between ports of entry, right? Thousands of them. I reported on this a very great deal at the time. There have been many other forms of metering. The Obama administration did metering. That's when this case began. CBP1, the migrant protection protocols, many others, right? In every single incidence where there has been metering, we have seen that people entered between ports of entry. We have seen escalations in border deaths. With wall construction continuing, we have seen escalations in border deaths. Many of the places where people previously entered are now closed. We will see more people entering along more risky routes, and that will lead to more deaths. There is no doubt in my mind that this decision will kill people. Also, the people who do remain in Mexico will, in many cases, not be safe there. The amount of migrants I know personally, like people who I talk to once a week, once a month, who came through the Darien Gap when I was there, who came through the Darien Gap when I was there, who came through the Darien Gap when I was there, who we traveled together, and then they attempted to apply for CBP1 and were robbed and were sexually assaulted, kidnapped, killed while they were in Mexico, is more than I can count off the top of my head. This will have disastrous human rights consequences. All right, we're back. And we are back to talk about birthright citizenship trump versus barbara in this decision the court held that quote children born in the united states to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are quote subject to the jurisdiction of the united states and our citizens are birthed under the 14 amendment citizenship clause the court was a bit split on how they got here with a 6-3 majority holding that trump's attempt to remove citizenship by executive order was illegal and a 5-4 majority agreeing that it was unconstitutional actually i spoke about this just before we get onto this with robert and sophie in november of 2024 talking about like uh things such administration might do here we are here is the relevant part of the 14th amendment for people who aren't familiar quote all persons born or naturalized in the united states and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the united states and of the state wherein they reside the majority opinion uh somewhat based in jus soli i think that's how you say it i haven't done it jus soli jus soli yeah i did latin i mean the good news is with latin is nobody really knows how it was said yeah sure the bad news is that people still have strongly held opinions um well there's ecclesiastical latin and whatnot but like when you if you take classical latin there's not a pronunciation test in school yeah but jus soli is is fine when i did my gcse exams i didn't do a latin oral like i did for french the idea here is anyone born here is a citizen unless they are not subject to jurisdiction of the usa that qualifier has generally applied to all citizens of the united states and subject to the jurisdiction of the united states that really apply to diplomats and their children that is the main group because someone is here in an undocumented fashion they are still subject to jurisdiction of the usa as can be fairly obviously understood from like a plain text understanding of that phrase i think let's hear mike johnson i guess mike johnson was in oppressor when this decision came down and uh someone got to tell him oh dear what they rule here we go children born in the united states parents unlawfully or temporarily present are subject to the jurisdiction of the united states and are citizens at birth under the 14th amendment citizenship clause what's your reaction to that well this is real time i need to read the opinion okay but uh obviously that's i mean you could say that's a textualist originalist view uh however i i do think that um this has been grossly abused in recent years he's so pissed he's so pissed his his little growl yeah he's so mad and the joy in that reporter's voice as he realizes he's getting number one i get to be the person to read the opinion out to the to fucking mike johnson and number two i get to ask mike johnson for a response which is beautiful i'm so happy for them yeah and as he said right like a plain text understanding of this is all you really need a textualist understanding for sure very clear yeah like so there was discussion of the one kim art case which ruled that uh quoting here a child born in the united states of parents of chinese descent who at the time of his birth are subjects of the emperor of china but have a permanent domicile and residents in the united states and are there carrying on business and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the emperor of china becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the united states with virtue of the first clause of the 14th amendment of the constitution it's the first clause of the 14th amendment that i read earlier right it is important to understand the context of this case this is the first clause of the 14th amendment of the constitution it is important to understand the context of this case this one kim art case happened in the context of an assault on birthright citizenship and especially on asian migrants right this is the era of the chinese exclusion act for example the decision in the one case was that the 14th amendment was declaratory of the common law understanding of citizenship decision holds that quote aliens who travel to united states for quote business or pleasure receive no quote exemption from the jurisdiction of the country the case has some very narrow exemption from the jurisdiction of the country exceptions uh for quote children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers or born on foreign public ships or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory and children members of indian tribes it's not till 1924 that we get the indian citizenship act right i thought they might have gone harder on that than they did uh but they did not much of the dissent focused on that use of the word domicile and whether that was in the usa but as the majority argued citing precedent and english common law which is the basis for the law we have now in the united states right quote there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view sources from 1766 to 1868 defined quote allegiance by birth just as a british did as the tie or duty owed by one who is born within the dominions and under the protection of a particular sovereign and quote sources after the ratification of the 14th amendment do not put in doubt the understanding of the citizenship clause at the time of and after its ratification certainly the us has not used this domicile test for other things right it doesn't use a domicile test for instance when it taxes its citizens extraterritorially it is not the basis by the way for children of citizens becoming a citizen uh that is based on a law passed by congress that's not based in this constitutional amendment right it is worth noting that the way trump's executive order which was what was struck down here was written it would have included people who are domiciled here based on any understanding of the term domicile that i think is genuine like his was written not even in this sort of uh more focused way focusing on what they perceive to be a weakness in that in that wong decision so who was the floater from the 6-3 to the 5-4 the floater was kavanagh he opined that quote congress could consistent with the 14th amendment amend the law otherwise i'm i'm saying the law here he gives a citation for the law right otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country but congress has not yet done so the law in question as the nationality act of 1940 it says quote the following shall be nationals and citizens of the united states at birth a person born in the united states and subject to the jurisdiction thereof and then uh another clause further down a person unknown of unknown parentage founder of the united states were under the age of five years until shown prior to his attaining the age of 21 years not to have been born in the united states he argues that congress clearly did not want to make more exceptions than existed in the one kimmock case and that they would have done if they did but he says it is possible to re-examine the constitution in modern context and look at the jurisdiction part again and have additional exemptions that would pass constitutional muster if congress chose to change the law it seems like what he's doing here is like by disagreeing with the sort of constitutional interpretation he is like giving the trump administration a sort of framework to pursue this in the future if they want to he's signposting it yeah yeah and like whether or not they're going to be able to do that that will succeed is another question yeah he's kind of showing them a sort of path yes he is yeah he's saying if you want to do this you could do it like this in my opinion yeah they are currently having some issues uh with getting all their representatives in the house on the same page on shit and uh midterms are coming up a lot of the opposition to this was focused on the speeches that like pertain to the authors of the 14th amendment and the process of passing the fourth amendment it's quite remarkable how like what a fundamental lack of understanding about how the constitution works this shows right the when the constitution is amended we do not incorporate all of the vibes of the guy who wrote the text we incorporate the words it is those words that are ratified by the states not the person who wrote them we do not endorse that this person's opinions are now constitutional the united states has a codified constitution it is the words that are codified in that document that matter that's the end of james explaining constitutions uh gorsuch however to your point garrison about like kavanaugh pointing in a direction gorsuch seems to be of the other opinion here he says that undocumented people living in the united states are incontrovertibly citizens or the children born to undocumented people living in the united states quote what matters isn't whether a child's parents are citizens what matters whether they and by law their child at birth have made this place their home and as us domiciled within the united states thus he's saying that non-residents children could in his mind be excluded but that anyone who is residing in the united states could be excluded the united states cannot be excluded uh so he's kind of kind of halfway in between on that but it seems like his uh his take would not align with kavanaugh's kind of signposted way there i mean yeah it's on one hand not great well it's you know good but not great that in some interpretations this is like a 5-4 ruling even though the constitution is you know in a plain text reading very clear uh this is also a very weird ruling because it's 5-4 but also in some ways 6-3 and also in some ways it's a very weird ruling because it's a very weird ruling because also with gorsuch it's kind of like 7-1-1 seven and a half yeah yeah like oh neil i think once they get to a point where they're writing a dissent or a concurrence and they know where they're at i think that's how it works right they write the dissent after they've decided i'm pretty sure yeah then gorsuch can fucking get like have a go on a sick one have his fun yeah exactly like uh he can nerd out on this shit well that's why he's my favorite supreme court justice not in terms of i i don't i don't agree with him the most i don't think he's the best person i don't know he's right the most often but he's always the most entertaining like he's always the most interesting guy to see like how did you arrive there neil how is this your stance on things it's every time it it's it's fun as hell yeah he is like a box of chocolates you never know what you're gonna get with neil gorsuch but yeah that is that is where we're at i guess with three major cases pertaining to uh citizenship and immigration yeah a mixed bag i guess this ruling is certainly a blow to the trump administration mm-hmm another blow to the trump administration is the ruling on mail-in voting where the supreme court ruled 5-4 in favor of counting valid mail-in votes that arrive after election day glad we got a 5-4 in favor of counting people's votes yes on the election day glad that that's at least still a 5-4 this case focused on a mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked on or before election day and arrive within five days after election day a district court previously ruled in favor of the law but the fifth circuit reversed the ruling finding that votes must be received by election day but for the supreme court justice amy coney barrett wrote the majority opinion finding that quote the election day statutes require the electorate's choice to be made on election day that occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote as it is in mississippi but the election day statutes do not set a deadline for valid receipt so they do not prevent mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward unquote alito thomas and gorsuch dissented with kavanaugh joining their dissent in part much of this case rested on what quote-unquote election day means in federal law the republican party who is the plaintiffs in this case among a few others like the mississippi republicans the republican party the nationally and also in part the libertarian party but mostly the republican party tried to argue that because federal statutes use the term quote-unquote election to mean that ballots are both cast and received and by setting a day for an election then that also sets a deadline for votes to be received but as already stated the majority found that quote nothing in the federal election day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day unquote amy coney barrett notes that quote although the election day statutes refer to a particular day for the election plaintiffs do not contend that everything must occur on that day for instance they do not object to early voting or dispute that officials may count votes and certify a winner after election day unquote now in this case the republicans aren't even directly challenging absentee voting as a general practice but their argument to restrict the counting of some absentee ballots quote-unquote relies heavily on historical practice precedent and policy from the mid-1800s because that's around when the first two federal election statutes were enacted basically during the civil war states that authorized absentee voting did impose strict election day deadlines for ballot receipt the opinion notes quote but plaintiffs admit they cannot precisely tie this historical practice to the text of the election day statutes unquote so to quote barrett the republicans theory here is quote because we are governed by 19th century election day laws we are also governed by 19th century voting practices carried to its logical conclusion this theory would call into question the way modern elections work unquote she goes on to know how this would jeopardize everything from voter qualification to early voting to how we count votes despite the republicans focus on this like 19th century election day practices because that's around when the first two election statutes were enacted on a federal level the republicans also ignore that right after the third federal statutes were enacted the republicans also ignore that right after the third federal statute was passed in 1914 mail-in voting rose in popularity because of the first world war and some states started counting absentee ballots that were received after election day so their argument both doesn't actually refer to real federal statutes but also is not consistent ultimately barrett writes that the quote-unquote defining element of a quote-unquote election is the electorate's act of choosing a candidate and that an election day just sets the deadline for making that choice quote the electorate's choice is made when voting is complete not when ballots are received unquote per federal statute the deadline to vote is election day but the deadline for when ballots must be received is up to state law like what this case focuses on is the mississippi state law on when ballots can be received that's a state issue finally the republican plaintiffs tried to argue that requiring ballots be received on election day or by election day helps protect election integrity and increases voter confidence in election results however barrett notes quote policy arguments are properly directed to legislatures not courts the question today is not whether requiring ballots to be received by election day is a good or bad idea the question is whether the idea has made its way into the u.s code unquote so regardless of whether republicans think this is a good idea or not as barrett says that would be a question for the legislature and not one that can be decided on in federal court because it has no basis in federal law so the birthright citizenship and the mail-in voting ruling are the two that hamper the executive's power or go against the agenda of the trump administration but there was a few other rulings that also relate to executive power which mia wong will cover in this special segment so let's talk the executive branch federal agencies and presidential power now in addition to the other rulings that we're talking about here we also got an absolutely wild pairing of rulings in trump versus slaughter and trump versus cook which were both written by chief justice john roberts and wish establish together we're going to talk about the executive branch federal agencies and presidential power now in addition to the other rulings that we're talking about here we also got an the rather astounding legal principle that the president has complete power over the jobs of the heads of independent executive branch agencies except the ones that chief justice john roberts likes personally now i understand that that is a provocative statement and i'm going to ask you to withhold judgment until we get to the end of the second ruling because oh boy it's a doozy and i am fairly confident you will agree with this opinion by the end so let's talk trump versus slaughter so trump versus slaughter is a case in which the supreme court slaughtered a 91 year old president that was set in a case called humphrey's executor of the united states in order to allow president trump to fire the heads of a broad swath of independent agencies irrespective of congress's specific instructions regarding how those heads could be fired so trump versus slaughter began after trump fired federal trade commissioner trump versus slaughter is a case in which the supreme court slaughtered a 91 year old president that was set in a case called humphrey's executor of the united states in order to allow president trump to fire the heads of a broad swath of independent agencies irrespective of congress's specific instructions regarding how those heads could be fired so trump versus slaughter began after trump fired federal trade commissioner the ftc rebecca kelly slaughter without cause i'm gonna quote from npr here as as they point out quote since its creation of the federal trade commission ftc in 1914 congress has held that commissioners can only be fired for quote inefficiency negligence of duty or malfeasance in office and quote slaughter was presented with no such reason for her removal only told her quote continued service on the ftc was inconsistent with the trump administration's priorities now there is an obvious legal precedent here precedent that i described earlier because fdr tried to do literally this exact same thing in the 1930s he tried to fire an ftc commissioner for political reasons and the 1930s supreme court ruled in humphrey's executor versus the united states that in again this exact same scenario the president trying to fire an ftc commissioner for political reasons and the 1930s supreme court that this was in fact illegal because the ftc is an independent agency whose functions are you know outside of the executive and thus the president does not have the power to simply remove their heads at will now this 1930s decision right is a decision from the notoriously right-wing hughes court facing a central left president so in the 1930s it was important that the state be able to operate independently of fdr to prevent fdr from giving too many concessions to workers now in 2026 the state was able to operate independently of fdr to prevent fdr from giving too many concessions to workers the also fanatically right-wing roberts court saw a fascist in power and decided no actually the ftc is an agency that does executive functions and thus is under the control of the president because of the unitary executive theory which is you know a theory that the president should have complete control over everything in the executive branch even agencies that were explicitly designed by congress to be independent and that this theory is good now because a right-wing president is using it this ruling allows trump to wield unprecedented power over the american state many of these bodies you know specifically we should talk about the ftc here right the ftc has a cap of the number of members of the commission that can be from one party trump can now simply ignore this congressional mandate by just firing all the democrats and leaving only republicans as mpr reported here's justice sonia sotomayor and her dissent quote the court gives the president a power unknown even to the english crown against which the founders revolted elevating him above his once co-equal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the law be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws Now, notably, the court also ruled that this unitary executive doctrine, right, this doctrine that the president has the right to fire the heads of independent executive agencies and federal agencies, that this power does not apply to the Federal Reserve, and thus Trump cannot fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook because of some extremely nebulous logic about the Federal Reserve being the successor to the First and Second National Bank of the U.S., which establishes, and I quote, our nation's tradition of central banking protected from political interference. Now, in what way, quote, our nation's tradition of central banking protected from political interference differs even conceivably from our longstanding tradition of protecting the FTC from political interference, other than that, you know, John Roberts likes banks and the First and Second National Bank are older than the FTC. And, by the way, never mind here that Roberts himself admits that Andrew Jackson literally vetoed the Second National Bank out of existence, which reads making his arguments about the history of protecting central banking from political interference read like a bad joke. I genuinely cannot understand how the FTC is supposed to be different as an independent federal agency than the Federal Reserve. It's also worth noting that the First and Second National Bank were not modern central banks. They don't do the modern central bank stuff. Oh, God. Here is from a source that would know what the Federal Reserve does because it's the Federal Reserve. It's part of a thing that they wrote in their 100 anniversary history project, quote, and again, I can't emphasize this enough. This is the Federal Reserve itself from their 100 year anniversary history project, quote, unlike modern banks, the Bank of America did not set monetary policy as we know it today. They did not regulate or act as a lender of last resort for other financial institutions, and it did not hold their reserves. What the fuck are we doing here? It is also incredibly jarring to read Roberts go from talking about how the president has total authority to choose his subordinates in Trump versus Slaughter to him going, well, we can't let Trump have at will employment of like the heads of the people who work for him, technically of the Federal Reserve. It's absolute legal gibberish that only makes sense when you take into account what is actually going on here. Trump versus Cook was a 5-4 decision with Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the liberals in going, Jesus fucking Christ almighty, we cannot give control of the single most important financial institution on earth directly to Donald Trump. Now, Mia, why are you saying this as if it's fact and not speculation? And to be clear, this is technically speculation, but I'm going to read this from Kavanaugh's concurrence. It serves as an explanation of why he joined Roberts and the liberals in agreeing that the president does not have the power to remove a Federal Reserve board member without cause when he, and this is notable also, did also agree with Roberts when Roberts, in the other case, said that he can remove an FTC board member without cause. Now, here's Kavanaugh, quote, I agree with the court, moreover, that we should not leave open the question whether the Federal Reserve can remain an independent state. in the wake of slaughter. After slaughter, there is a clear choice. Either the Federal Reserve may remain independent, with the governors removable for cause, not at will, or it may not. Leaving that question open would create significant uncertainty about whether the court might soon eliminate the Federal Reserve's independence and thereby expose the Federal Reserve to political influence and jeopardize the efficiency of U.S. monetary policy. Even temporary uncertainty about the status of the Federal Reserve would create significant uncertainty, including confusion about whether the president could immediately remove multiple governors at once, as well as turmoil in the U.S. and world economies. I would not go down that road. I would not risk destabilizing the U.S. economy just so that we can further mull over an issue that, in various permutations, we have been thinking about for many years. As the course opinion explains, the government agrees the Federal Reserve occupies a unique role in the U.S. government and maintains critical responsibility for the U.S. economy. The U.S. government has a unique role in the U.S. economy. The U.S. government and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U.S. and world economies. So there you have it, folks. As long as the president does not fuck with the money, this court holds that the president can wield executive power to fire the heads of independent federal regulatory agencies. We will be right back to cover a few more rulings after this ad break. And we're back. So it's time for, I guess, the less, certainly the least, like, upsetting portion of the Supreme Court rulings this go-around, which is two different rulings that involve gun rights. And particularly, at least in one case, I think a very common-sense ruling, one is a lot more controversial, although I do think, broadly speaking, it's still a better ruling than not. So on June 25th, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government should not fire the heads of The Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii law that required people carrying firearms legally to get permission before bringing their gun into any private property open to the public. This law had passed in 2023 in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2022-63 Bruin decision. Now, if you don't remember, Bruin ruled that firearm regulations must be consistent with the historic tradition of gun regulation in order to have any kind of constitutional standing. Because Bruin sliced the heart out of a lot of prior gun control legislation, particularly state-level legislation, and particularly, like, bans on concealed carry, right? One of the big things Bruin did is that it was basically impossible to get a concealed carry license in a number of states prior to Bruin. And after Bruin, states could no longer kind of arbitrarily make it basically impossible to get a concealed carry license, which is why you saw a bunch of states, including Hawaii, rush to pass a bunch of new laws. And these are generally referred to as vampire rules, because if you remember, your lore, vampires aren't allowed to, like, enter your domicile unless you give them permission. So basically, you're treating, like, legally carried concealed firearms as a vampire. That's kind of, like, why it got the term. As Hawaii's legislature said when they passed this 2023 law, the legislature enacted this default rule in light of ample evidence that property owners in Hawaii do not want people to carry guns onto their property without express consent. Now, in their coverage, USA Today noted that the legislature argued their law, was rooted in older Hawaiian legal precedent. Quote, Unfortunately, the liars defending this Hawaiian law to the Supreme Court also cited less pleasant precedent, bringing up the black codes and other laws meant to stop black citizens from carrying guns, to argue that the U.S. has an established tradition of restrictive firearm laws. Neil Gorsuch, in particular, took exception to this. This law, and similar laws, passed in 2018. California, New York, Maryland, and New Jersey have all, presumably, been declared unconstitutional as a result of this ruling. They were already stayed here in California, so I'm guessing they just weren't. Yes. They stayed it pending this, I think, so it just will die now. Yeah, exactly. Gun rights advocates, like the Firearms Policy Coalition, cheered the result. The court explained that these laws did not merely regulate where licensed people could carry. Instead, they severely burdened the ordinary exercise of the right to bear arms by forcing peaceful people to seek permission before entering the stores, restaurants, and restaurants gas stations, pharmacies, and other businesses they visit every day. That burden the court held is incompatible with the Second Amendment's protection of the right to carry firearms for self-defense as Americans go about their daily lives. So, yeah, you can feel about that one however you want. I think that's kind of, like, broadly reasonable, honestly, in my opinion. Arguably a much bigger deal was the Supreme Court ruling last Thursday to change the way the federal government regulates casual drug use and firearms ownership. For a very long time, it's been illegal to buy and own firearms. It's been illegal to own guns while doing illegal narcotics, even marijuana with a medical prescription. This came out of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which itself was passed after Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy Jr. were assassinated. It banned any person who was, quote, an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance from owning a gun. So when you buy a firearm the normal way up until right about now, you would fill out a form called a 4473. And on it, you have to state that you're not a. marijuana user or the user of any other illegal drug, and that you acknowledge even if marijuana is legal in your state and you have a prescription, you're still not allowed to buy or own a gun if you use it, right? That, like, you have to acknowledge on the form, I know that my state's laws don't matter here. And it's always been, you know, even outside of this, very unclear just how far this prescription goes, right? Like, if you're a gun owner who doesn't do drugs regularly, but one night someone offers you a hit from a joint while you're already drunk or, like, a bump, and you take a hit and you take it, have you then broken the law? If you go to buy a gun the next month or the next year, is that still illegal? And this has always been a gray area, more often than not, because the whole law restricting gun owners from using drugs has always been unconstitutional bullshit, and the ATF preferred not to talk about it in too much detail. Now that era seems to be coming to an end. In a rare unanimous ruling, the court sided with a Texas man, Ali Hamani, who had his home raided by the feds in August of 2022. Due to a robbery, the court decided to put him in jail. Paranoia. I think a lot of people know this is how this case got started, but they, like, just, because the name is on it. Ali Hamani thought he and his family, and they're Muslim, thought he and his family were like involved with the Iranian government or spies of some sort. And so they searched his home for the New York Times. When agents searched the home, Mr. Hamani told them that he had a handgun locked in a safe inside the house. He also told them that he used marijuana about every other day, pointing them to about 60 grams of marijuana in the house. In addition, agents also found cocaine in his parents' closet. Quite a house. Six months later, Mr. Hamani was charged with one count of possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of a controlled substance based on his marijuana use. Now, all of this made for a decidedly weird Supreme Court case. Hamani's lawyers pointed out that there had never been any evidence that his family was connected to Iran or terrorism, but that the prosecution brought up the word terrorism repeatedly when talking about Hamani and his family. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Shocking to hear that. When Hamani appealed and the case wound up at the Supreme Court, the Trump administration actually had its lawyers defend the law because law enforcement relies heavily on this to be able to tack on extra charges to people they dislike. Hunter Biden. Yeah, Hunter Biden. Meanwhile, the ACLU and the NRA wound up submitting briefs on the other side of the issue. The ruling was narrow. The court declared that the government's use of the law was overbroad and that recreational drug users should not be assumed to be addicts who pose a danger to the public. So the law wasn't declared unconstitutional, but its application was. And the precedent that this sets would seem to necessitate changes to 4473 and to the way law enforcement works. I do want to quote before we end here the last bit of the ruling from Neil Gorsuch. Quote, Because he possessed a gun, despite this prohibition, the government insists it may imprison him for up to 15 years to disarm him for life. According to the government, none of this turns on how much marijuana Mr. Hamani uses or what effect it has on him. It makes no difference either if he keeps a firearm only in his home for self-defense, never misuses a gun while intoxicated, never poses a danger to himself or others as a result of his marijuana use. The only thing the government. must show, it says, is that an individual like Mr. Hamani regularly uses any amount of a controlled substance. To square that expansive theory with the Second Amendment, the government invites us to draw an analogy between its present regulation and historical laws addressing habitual drunkards. Those laws, the government contends, demonstrate a tradition of firearm regulation consistent with its effort to disarm any regular user of any controlled substance without any further showing. But the government's analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider. The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people. It did so for different reasons and operated in different ways. And faced with all these shortcomings in the government's submission, we cannot say it has carried its conceded burden of showing its prosecution of Mr. Hamani complies with the Second Amendment. Yeah. Nice. Pretty good ruling. Yeah. Like you say, like this is one of those things that is like exists in large part to allow cops to fuck with people. Yeah. And prosecutors to put people in prison for longer when they when they've been convicted or charged with something else. Right. Or to put a massive potential sentence on them. So they plead guilty. Like it doesn't make you safer. And I have always argued, you know, whatever you think about it, the Second Amendment is a civil right. And if the government could take away your access to a civil right and imprison you, if you ever put the wrong thing in your body, then you just don't have civil rights. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the same is true, I think, of this vampire rule to an extent. Like if the government can speak on your behalf and say that's not OK about guns, can they do it about other things, too? Right. Exactly. Like I know there was a First Amendment challenge briefly. In California, I guess that didn't succeed or that's not what they went with in the Supreme Court. They went with the Second Amendment challenge. But I thought that was interesting. Yeah. Let's close with one more case, one more Supreme Court ruling that could have some really, really big impacts on digital privacy and surveillance going forward. In a 6-3 ruling, Supreme Court found that police gaining access to location data through what's called a geofence does constitute a, quote unquote, search under the Fourth Amendment. A geofence is when investigators ask a tech company for location data on all cell phones or cell phone users in a certain geographical range, usually during a certain time frame. The goal is to identify what phones and by extension who was present when a crime was committed. To quote Justice Kagan, writing for the majority, quote, an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone location. And police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information, even though for only a limited time and from a third party tech company, unquote. The fact that this qualifies as a search is important because that means that it's subject to certain restrictions as laid out in the Constitution. This case in particular, the one that Supreme Court was ruling on, revolves around a bank robbery in 2019, where the suspect was. seen on his phone before the robbery. Police asked Google to hand over location data for all cell phones or other devices in a 150 meter radius around the bank within an hour of the robbery. This location data would show users coordinates every two minutes. 19 anonymous users were first identified. Police then narrowed that down to nine users whose movements in and out of the geofence were tracked within a longer two hour period. That was before police then requested personally identifying information on three of the three users, which they then used to arrest the suspect. The suspect asked that the evidence obtained be thrown out on a Fourth Amendment violation, arguing that the warrant authorizing the location data search was invalid. He eventually pled guilty to the whole bank robbery thing. But the Fourth Amendment claim made its way through the district court, appeals courts, and up to the Supreme Court. The district court did agree that the search violated the Fourth Amendment, but it didn't block the location data from being permitted as evidence because they found the officers acted in quote unquote good faith. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals initially ruled 2-1 that the geofence did not qualify as a search, so a warrant wasn't even needed. One judge dissented from this, arguing that the warrant issued was quote, so lacking in particularity and probable cause that it was invalid. And this could be important later. But the full Fourth Circuit panel re-heard the case again and came out evenly divided, 7-7. Half ruling that the geofence warrant violated the law, but most justices still found that the exclusionary rules good faith exemption applied in this case. Which leads us to the Supreme Court. Monday's ruling only covers the Fourth Amendment aspect of the case, not the good faith exemption. And the Fourth Amendment question itself is split into two issues. Did the police conduct a search under the Fourth Amendment by acquiring location data from Google? And second, did the police conduct a search under the Fourth Amendment by acquiring location data from Google? And third, did the multi-step geofence warrant that was issued in that case, did that make the search reasonable? The Supreme Court found that it was a search, quote, because an individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy in his cell phone location data, unquote. But the court did not answer that second question, whether this was reasonable, whether this search was reasonable because of the warrant. Justice Kagan wrote, quote, we leave it to the Court of Appeals, the further question, whether given the warrant, issued the search here was reasonable, meaning that each of its steps was properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause, unquote. For reference, the Fourth Amendment protects against the, quote, unquote, unreasonable search and seizures of persons, houses, papers, and effects, and requires that warrants may only be issued upon probable cause and must particularly describe, quote, the place to be searched and the persons or things to, be seized, unquote. So to issue a search warrant, a judge must determine there's a, quote, unquote, fair probability, this is according to the Supreme Court, that evidence of the crime would be found and that the search is of an appropriate scope, to quote the opinion, quote, that it is carefully tailored to its justifications and will not take on the character of the wide-ranging exploratory searches the framers intended to prohibit. That wide-ranging, long-ranging search is the only way to do that. So the third aspect is the exact issue with geofence warrants. They cast a dragnet on everyone in a certain area at a certain time. So while in the bank robbery case, a judge did issue a geofence warrant, it was an uncommon multi-step warrant that was co-developed with Google that gave officers a large degree of discretion on how to narrow down suspects from a wide pool while obtaining additional and increasingly personal, personal information throughout the execution of that warrant. This new ruling by the Supreme Court is largely based on this 2018 case, Carpenter v. United States, which found that accessing cell phone location history based on cell site towers qualifies as a Fourth Amendment search, quote, unquote, given individuals reasonable expectations of privacy. Kagan wrote that this case is very similar to the Carpenter case, except that the location of the cell site towers and location data as collected by Google is actually far more detailed and more fine-tuned than what you can get from cell phone location records. But the government tried to argue that geofencing does not count as a search because of the short time window the location data is pulled from. The court struck this down, ruling that the Fourth Amendment doesn't kick in only once an intrusion, quote, unquote, goes too far and applies regardless of the, quote, unquote, quantity of the information the government obtains. The other argument the government put up was that because the suspect, quote unquote, voluntarily gave this location data to Google, he, quote, lost the legitimate expectation of privacy, unquote. You see stuff like this argued very, very often, right? This is something that comes up a lot, is that we're giving these tech companies all of this data anyway, so how can we reasonably expect it to be private? This is the third-party doctrine, which was originally for bank records and cell phone numbers. But the third-party doctrine was not applied to Carpenter v. United States, so Justice Kagan wrote that for the very same reasons it should not be applied here to location history collected by tech companies. And I'm going to read a kind of long quote to close this out, because I think what Kagan writes, here, could have some really big impacts on how we understand digital privacy going forward. Quote, cell phone location information is not truly, quote unquote, shared as one normally understands the term, because cell phones and the services they provide are such pervasive and insistent part of daily life, indispensable to participation in modern society, that a person can hardly help but generate a trail of location data. In no meaningful sense does that mean a person voluntarily. exposes to any third party a comprehensive dossier of his movements. The government's app-by-app, feature-by-feature method of granting Fourth Amendment protections misapprehends the very nature of modern cell phone use. Pretty much everything a person does on a smartphone requires some kind of opt-in. The point of carrying smartphones is to use what is on them, as Carpenter said, to use the apps and services they provide. That is what has become a preventive measure of protection. The government's app-by-app feature-by-feature method of granting services is to use what is on them, as Carpenter said, to use the apps and services they provide. Even quote unquote indispensable part of daily life. And so that is what Carpenter insulated from the third party doctrine. Kagan adds, police officers invade a cell phone user's reasonable expectation of privacy when they access location history, unquote. And this paragraph by Kagan also frequently quotes from the Carpenter ruling, combining her own analysis with the analysis in that case, just to be clear. So the actual question. The question of both reasonableness and if there's a good faith exemption for this specific warrant in the bank robbery case will be determined by the appeals court going forward. That is something that we will absolutely keep an eye on. And I'll be talking to someone from the EFF about this case next week for a regular It Could Happen Here episode as well. I believe that is all for us. For our special Supreme Court edition of Executive Disorder. That's right. You can email coolzontips at proton.me if you have any story tips for us. We reported the news. Go away now. We're done. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website at coolzone.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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