It Could Happen Here Weekly 240

This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait and hold up. They changed all of that. Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's wrong. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast. Or wherever you get your podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING] Call the 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. Hello, everyone. And welcome to Good Happen here. My name is Danielle Curd. And I'm a researcher and analyst of AIRAB and Posting in Politics. Today I want to talk about football, soccer, whatever. And I'll just start by saying, obviously, FIFA is a terrible, terrible organization. And while there are many heartwarming events in this World Cup, the World Cup gets me. It gets a lot of us, despite everything. There have also been egregious incidents against players and referees and fans from the Global South. Take, for example, what happened to the Somali referee who wasn't allowed to come into the US to do his job. He was kept hours and hours in the airport before being unceremoniously returned to Somalia. Similarly, the head of the Palestine Football Association was denied a visa into the United States, not allowed to come to the World Cup on US soil. This is in spite of the fact that FIFA invited association heads from around the world to attend. And he did attend the opening game in Mexico City. Or one of the worst incidents, if you can call it that, the way that the Iranian team has been treated. They weren't allowed to stay in the US. Despite the games they were playing in this country, were constantly made to fly back to Mexico after every game. Clearly, they were put at a severe disadvantage because they weren't allowed to rest and recuperate like the other teams. And listen, I'm not going to say there's a conspiracy, but having not one but three goals discounted by VAR, eventually leading to their elimination from the tournament, just adds insult to injury. But like I said, of course, there are many heartwarming stories. For me as a Palestinian, it's been great to see how much Palestine keeps popping up. Despite the fact that the environment in the United States is much more hostile on this issue than Qatar, the last World Cup, people are still talking about Palestine and advocating for Palestine. Thousands of Bosnian supporters, for example, turned Toronto into a sea of blue as they marched toward the stadium for the Canada match, chanting free Palestine. And they did that in a number of places. Inglewood, Seattle, they also chanted Palestine within the stadiums in multiple games. At that Canada game, activists also on a Friday kick Israel out of FIFA banner. And it makes sense, really, when you understand the experience of Bosnians with Jedi side themselves, not too long ago. Similarly, Moroccan fans held Palestinian flags or warm Moroccan jerseys with the word Palestine on it and this showed up on TV. At the very opening match in Mexico City, pro-Palestine demonstrators gathered to form a giant human Palestinian flag. And South Korean fans brought Palestinian flags to the tournament, honoring a promise they made during their qualifying when their fans had chanted, "We'll take Palestine to the World Cup with us." In Gaza, Palestinians are watching the games too. Spain is the favorite team these days because of the government's position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And because of superstar player Lamin Yamal, who has been unapologetically pro-Palestine. Obviously, the genocide that has unfolded in Gaza and the war and killing that continues in the Middle East in both occupied territories and in Lebanon are part of the reason why this issue seems to be ever present. But it didn't start with the genocide. The story of Palestine at the World Cup is more layered than that. And the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was a good demonstration of why Palestine keeps popping up and what Palestine represents to fans, especially Arab ones then and everyone now. I know it might seem strange to be talking about this now a few years after the fact, but I've been thinking about it a lot, especially given everything that has unfolded since. And I think the World Cup moment is one of those events that gets more interesting, not less, as time passes. Back then, as it does now, it's showing us something important. Not just about Palestine, but about the limits of what governments can actually control when it comes to what their own people believe. So let's get into it. Palestine did not qualify for the 2022 World Cup. The Palestinian National Football Team was nowhere near an official capacity. And yet, Arabs from across the region and across the world began referring to Palestine then as the 33rd team because Palestine was everywhere at the 2022 World Cup. There were Palestinian flags draped over shoulders and stadiums, crowds erupted into the chance of Multini, the Palestinian anthem after Arab teams won. One Tunisian fan ran onto the pitchment match for the Palestinian flag. And when Morocco pulled off their historic upset against Spain, so it's the first African and Arab team to ever reach the semi-finals of the World Cup, Moroccan players ran to the crowd and held up the Palestinian flag. This was significant. Morocco had just signed the Abraham Accords with Israel only two years prior to this game. And their players didn't seem to care. Israeli journalists who traveled to Qatar to cover the tournament reported being coldly received, followed, and in some cases physically shut out of interviews by crowds of Arab fans. Some of these reporters were caught on camera claiming to be from other countries, like France or Switzerland, in order to get people to talk to them. Some of them massed their logos from their stations. Israeli media at the time expressed something between confusion and outrage. One reporter remarked, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he basically said that the hostility wasn't just coming from governments as they had assumed it was coming from ordinary people and the surprise them, but it shouldn't have. Now, none of this was purely spontaneous. That's the part of the story I find most interesting and the part that gets maybe the least attention. Months before the World Cup began, a Qatari activist group called Qatari Youth opposed to normalization, Q-A-Y-O-N, started planning. They were founded in 2011, and by 2022 led predominantly by Qatari women. They had been working for over a decade to push back against Qatari's slow-dift towards normalizing ties with Israel, which is something the Qatari government had been entertaining, largely under pressure from the United States and from its goals and neighbors. And in a country where over 80% of people opposed normalization with Israel, this organization, Qatari Youth, had a base. But they had to work carefully because you can't have un-sanctioned civil society organizations. There's all sorts of restrictions on independent activism, extremely severe end-level. But they saw the World Cup as a window, an opportunity to turn what already existed, which was deep, widespread, popular solidarity with Palestine, into something visible, coordinated, and impossible to ignore. So they got to work. They persuaded Qatari's national team captain to wear a Qafia patterned arm band before the opening match. And then there was this hashtag, "The captain's arm band is Palestinian," which started trending on Arabic Twitter. They reached out to Qatari influencers from prominent journalists who amplified the campaign across social media, and they called on local businesses to display signs that they were compliant with the boycott divestment sanctions movement. They also ran a kind of counterintelligence operation against Israeli media, because they were the ones that began identifying Israeli journalists and their logos on social media, flagging them so that Arab fans at the tournament knew who to avoid. And this is how those videos of Israeli broadcasters being turned away kept appearing online. They also organized fans to chant for Palestine at the 48th minute of every match. That's not random. That's a reference to 1948 and to the Nakhba, where close to a million Palestinians were expelled from their homes with the founding of the Israeli state. Key members of Qatari youth said the goal was to turn Arab fans from sympathizers into participants. And they were honest about something else too. This only worked because the ground was already ready. As they put it, the campaign would not have succeeded had it not been for people's own proactive support of the Palestinian cause. And that's worth sitting with for a moment. The organizing mattered, the strategy mattered, but the reason it spread so quickly so far is that there was already a fire there. Qatari youth just lit the match. Now, to understand why people were so upset, you have to understand the Abraham Accords. I've talked about it on this podcast before. The normalization agreements brokered by the Trump administration in 2020 between Israel and the UAE, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and later Sudan and Morocco. These deals were sold as historic breakthroughs as a new era of peace. And in terms of official diplomatic relations, they were breakthroughs. They were historic. But there was a problem. Nobody asked the people. And these accords didn't solve anything. Now, Arab public opinion surveys have consistently shown that the vast majority of Arabs oppose normalization with Israel, absent the resolution to the question of Palestinian statehood and the ongoing occupation. And in the most recent polling before the accords, it was something like 88% of Arabs across 13 countries that rejected normalization with Israel. And nearly two thirds of those cited the occupation of Palestinian land as their reason. Only 7% cited something like religious objections. The fear had always been that if you normalize relations with Israel without a resolution to the Israeli-pastening conflict, Israel would not have any reason to try and resolve the conflict or address the grievances of Palestinians. That Israel perhaps would become more aggressive if the guardrails were off. So what the aim. Remembrance actually did from the perspective of ordinary Arabs was deep in the sense that their governments wouldn't listen to them, were willing to sell them out, sell out the Palestinians, for economic and security arrangements, that disproportionately benefited ruling classes anyway, and the US is really security architecture. I've written about this academically, and what I found is a kind of paradox at the heart of these so-called peace deals. Peace initiatives that don't address the root causes of conflict don't actually create peace. They've created a different kind of violence, a structural violence, because they maintain the root causes of conflict, and they enable authoritarian practices by governments. Israel shares a lot of tools, surveillance technology, propaganda framework, security cooperation, both material and descriptive tools, and these have a way of turning up in the hands of governments for pressing their own citizens. I'm not saying the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain needed encouragement to repress their own citizens, but it's just another added layer, another way that the red lines shift, and new ways that these governments can attack their own citizens and their own activists. For example, Emirates activists involved in anti-normalization activities after the accords became targets of surveillance operations, and people who spoke out about the deals faced travel bins. In Bahrain, civil society organizations were newly restricted. The "peace" came with a repressive apparatus baked in, which is exactly why when thousands of Arabs gathered in Doha's public squares to watch the World Cup. The energy around Palestine wasn't just an emotional sentiment, and it wasn't a relic. It was fresh. It was the anger of people who had just watched their governments make deals they never asked for, and deals that were used to oppress them and not solve the Palestinian issue. There is a concept that academics and activists have used called sports normalization. The idea is that sports, because they're presented as a political, or maybe as entertainment as a space above politics. They could be used as a soft avenue for normalizing relationships that would be otherwise politically controversial. Israel has long pursued the strategy. The logic is, if Israel and Arab athletes compete together, then this image of coexistence replaces the political reality of occupation. You don't need any kind of solution or diplomatic agreement. You just need enough footage of an Israeli and Moroccan shaking hands on the pitch to make people feel like things are moving in a good direction. Qatar youth were very explicit about targeting this. They hosted panels on sports normalization. They released a statement pointing out that Western political boycotts of Russia extended the sporting events after the invasion of Ukraine, and nobody then complained that sports were being mixed up with politics. And to them, the inconsistency was glaring, that mixing sports with politics was apparently fine when it was about sanctioning Russia and admittedly, very appropriately, but somehow inappropriate when it came to Palestinian rights. And this double standard, I've encountered it constantly in my work. The insistence that the past immune cause is uniquely problematic, uniquely in need of being kept out of polite conversation or unreasonable, this insistence falls apart the moment you compare it to any other conflict where the West has chosen a side. Now the World Cup made that visible in real time. When the Palestinian flag showed up in a stadium in Doha, it wasn't just a symbol of solidarity. It was an argument. It said this issue is not resolved. We have not moved on. It doesn't matter what the Abraham Accord said or how many photo ops it's going to make any of this go away. Now I want to dwell for a minute on Morocco, full disclosure, that's the team I support. I hope they go as far as possible. But Morocco is an interesting case. And I think it illuminates something about the limits of top down normalization. Like I said, the Moroccan government signed the Abraham Accords. And the deal actually included US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, which Morocco has long occupied. It's self a case of a people's right to self determination being traded away in this diplomatic agreement situation. So it was a completely cynical arrangement all around. And yet when Morocco beat Spain and reached semi-finals, their players held up the Palestinian flag. When Morocco beat Portugal and the streets of Robot, then Casablanca erupted, the Palestinian flag was there too. And fans in Doha who had traveled from across North Africa and the Middle East were wearing Palestinian kefias chanting for Palestine. Now the Moroccan government's deal with Israel did not transfer to the Moroccan people. And this is the key insight from the World Cup, the one that I keep coming back to. That governments can sign papers, but they can't really sign on behalf of public sentiment. And these countries are not democratic. So any kind of push to do something like this seems like a betrayal to their own citizens. And they can't normalize what has not been normalized in the hearts and minds of their own citizens. There is a kind of arrogance in the Abraham Accords framework. The assumption is that if you get the right signatories, if you get the right photo up on the White House law and that the conflict can be ignored, at that the Palestinian cause can recede, but the World Cup was a direct refutation of that assumption. Now I've been thinking about all of this in the context of everything that has happened since the genocide in Gaza, the daily images, the death tolls, the wholesale destruction of Gaza's society and the ongoing question of what normalization means now. And whether any of those Abraham Accords frameworks can survive what the world has watched happen. Now I do think it will survive. These governments do not care about what happened in Gaza. But what it shows is that the fears around the Abraham Accords were completely founded. Ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would lead to an escalation in the violence. I think the World Cup moment was a preview back in 2022. It told us something about where popular Arab opinion actually was, not where governments claimed it was and not where Western media assumed it was, but where it actually was. And it showed us that organized strategic activism can channel that sentiment at something visible and politically costly for the forces of normalization. Now Kata Riyotha post-normalization was a small group and they were operating under real restrictions in a country that doesn't allow independent civil society. And they still managed to turn a global sporting event into one of the most visible expressions of Palestinian solidarity in years. And that matters. Not because a football tournament, a soccer tournament is going to solve anything. It doesn't. Palestinian families don't get their homes back because people flew a flag in a stadium. But movements build over time and through moments of visibility, through the accumulation of pressure, and through the refusal to let the issue disappear into a manufactured consensus that was never real to begin with. And today, in 2026, this is not specific to Arab publics. Even Western publics have seen their governments ignore genocide, have seen their rights recede as their government's ally to protect genocide in a variety of ways. Now, I'll end with something a little more personal. And I watched those World Cup crowds back in 2022 when I saw all these different Arabs, Moroccans and Tunisians and Saudis, people from countries that have varying and complicated relationships with this issue, all waving the Palestinian flag. I felt a kind of hope. And it's not naive. It's not the hope that this will be resolved soon or easily. But the hope that says, "Palestinians are not alone and the cause is not forgotten." And the silence that has been imposed on this question, attempted silence top down for so long, is not the consent it pretends to be. Governments can sign a courts, but they can't erase what people know, and they cannot sign away what people feel when they watch a team lose, and a flag goes up in a stadium. And thousands of people start chanting. Palestine keeps showing up, uninvited, at every table that tries to exclude it. And I think it will keep doing that. Thank you so much for listening. It could happen here. I'm Dan Alker. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's wrong. The issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered, "I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same van." Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. Before we start, I want to make something inescapably clear. I am not against human rights or the ideals they embody and aspire to. Human rights are in fact the flawed attempts at making the world a better place for all human beings, and it is exactly those flaws that I want to address here. Just having universal human rights does not mean any progress or any improvements in that regard are no longer necessary. To reach those, there needs to be in-depth conversations and critiques. I've deliberately chosen a provocative title to start this episode, if set title makes it through post-production, because I think the best way to have this conversation is if we temporarily strip any blind assumptions. There should not, for the time being, be a standard answer to just default back to. Let me say it again, the concepts and ideals of universal human rights are good and well-intended. This is not a plea against either of those. This is just to ensure that we can all engage with the flaws and the criticisms that are currently late at the feet above those human rights. Please don't hate me. Further, there will be some abstract concept and theories here, although my best to explain them in layman's terms, unfortunately the ivory tower of the university is still a thing, and I think this bit should be accessible to everyone, not just university educated people. if I'm being a bit reductive or unnew nuanced, it is to make it widely available. And with that, hello everyone. Welcome to this could happen here. I am Mick. I am joined by the lovely James Stout. I James, how are you doing? Hey, good, I'm excited about this. Yeah, we're going to go through a lot today. When I pitched this, I thought it would be just a fun 30-minute episode. And now we're at like 5,000 words and 10 pages of script. So yeah, these things can get away from me. Yes, exactly. And there's always the context. It's always context. You can just throw things out there. But I had to kill some darlings, unfortunately. But there we go. So to start off, we first have to explore a little bit about the history of human rights and how they came to be. When we are talking about rights, we are speaking of either a legal, a social or an ethical rule that is connected to legal systems, social conventions or ethical standpoints that are seen as a normal for a certain group at a certain time. Because they evolve, they change. These rights are often inscribed, codified, or written down in either legal documents or in the public consciousness. And what I mean by the latter is like, "Oh, my God, you're for the bus or the train." It's not something that's often written down in a legal code or something. It's just an unwritten rule that exists between the people. Yeah, convention. Most likely, if you're going to skip cues, you'll never be prosecuted or fined for that. People will probably think you're a bit of an asshole. So the universal declaration of human rights was signed in 1948 by the UN. Prior to this, the concept of human rights was largely found in the idea of natural rights. The very first historical notion of this that we know of was in the Zoroastrian religion in the Iran region, which thought that citizens have a fundamental right to enlightened leadership and that people had the right to rise up against those who are wicked. Similar ideas surrounding rights are also found in ancient Greek philosophy, like the Epicurian School of Thought and the Stoics. Later, it was also explicitly named by Roman philosophers, which they probably stole from the Greeks. Like Cicero and Cineca. That that Cicero once said that we are born for justice and that right is based not upon opinions, but upon nature. And I think this is important to Zubei not a bit. Romans were very, not very religious, but it was a religious society. They had tons of deities. But despite that, it's too nature that Cicero makes that claims. Yeah, as opposed to God or God's right. Exactly, there is something innate or something by virtue of being human that gives you those rights. Yeah, there was in the 17th century was the English philosopher John Locke, who discussed similar things, particularly that fundamental rights as he called them, such as life, liberty, and a state, a state meaning property in this case, are things that could not be handed over or transferred under the social contract. With social contracts, it's often meant that you, as an individual, have surrendered some of your rights and handed them over to the authority under which you fall or to which you are subject. Often this exchange translates to death the authority to which you hand it over will then protect your remaining rights. Yeah, usually this is trained as consensual as a voluntary deal you make or have made with, again, whichever authority happens to hold control over you. I also think we're noting that consent implies an active decision with knowledge and circumstances and the ability to consent. And this is just my own personal gripe where for people who prefer back to the social contract. It's like, I didn't agree to anything. I must have missed that meeting. But yeah, it relies on this thought experiment, right? Like they said, you're like, would someone in excerpt consent do why thing? This is what Hobbes does, right? Yes, like I guess Hobbes, Locke and Russo would be the people you'd want to read if you wanted to learn more about this. In Rejava, they have an explicit social contract, right? Which is like a document and people do get to consent on it. I guess I should say consult rather than consent, right? There was a long consultative process that was part of the formation of the most recent social contract in Rejava as opposed to like requiring universal consensus to be established. Once again, Rojava is leading it away. Yeah, he's sharing us all the way. But that's, that's right, to be unusual. Yeah, we will be touching a little bit on Hobbes and Russo. Okay, fun. But there's some of the lesser bit up, like the virtue of being born a heartily checks my boxes for active consent. But yeah, you know, I think there's some bureaucrat out there who will disagree with me on that. As you said, James, the idea of the social contract came from philosophers like Russo and Hobbes and our core to our contemporary understanding of like social and political theory and also foundational to like most liberal democracies. The idea is just following. First, there was like no state and no authority and everyone was in a state of nature where you when existence was harsh and brewed and short. Nasty brutish and short is the like, it's an exact word. It's a Hobbes quote against deployed a lot about people and things. Yes, ignoring the fact that Hobbes was an idiot. Yeah, and that life without the state is not nasty brutish and short. And we a lot of examples of this bit. No, but it's this retroactive justification because this is how things are now. So I am inventing a story to justify how we end up here. Yeah, Jim Scott, I guess kind of deals with this a little bit, right? In the art of not being governed when he's talking about the idea that those who exist without the state are behind those who exist within the state as opposed to just on a different pathway they've chosen to follow. Yeah, because like we need we need the authority and you need the social contract because otherwise humanity is just subject to its own worst impulses. Like a hunger games without the dystopian stuff inside it. Therefore, there is we need authority, which was created to keep this state of nature at bay and make or keep us civilized. And this also then ties in with like the monopoly on violence because that is one of the rights that you surrender under the social contract. And this gives into like specialized government forces in order to use the violence that is necessary to maintain order. Yeah, as a small side note, the whole state of nature thing is pretty much bullshit. On why that is is discussed at length in the dawn of everything by David Draper and David Wangro. But it would be way too much to also include here. Yeah, you'd have to listen to me all week. I do have an audiobook of the dawn of everything and it is it's a lot of audiobook. Like, yeah, it's such a massive book, just massive. Yeah, just as a small clarification before we move on, there are many more notable figures who've written about like natural rights, Francis Hutchins, a haggle and Thomas Spain. Actually, there are also many more who did that in the American context, like Thomas Jefferson, but everyone listening to this knows the American stuff way better than I do. So I'll just skip that. Including the parts where Jefferson was pretty selective on who counted as a human being and who didn't. Many such cases here. Many such cases. Unfortunately, it has not gone away as much as it should have. Yeah. So the biggest criticism that we have here to address against natural rights is that you can't roll from facts. It's something that you say is out there, but you can't prove it through science or through empirical research, through data collection. It's something that comes from tradition, authority or morality. There is no argument to be made that it exists in the same way as the coffee on my desk as I'm writing this. So put it very bluntly, natural rights being inherent or unalienable is just saying they exist because I say so. It has just as much weight as me claiming that I now own James's chickens, which I now do. It is a fact. Yes, to fight me for them. I'm not surrendering them and I'll play on chickens. Yes, you know where I live. You can you can you can fat acts them to me. Yeah. So what has happened is by putting these natural rights into law, we can make them like real or tangible in the sense that there is something you can point to. Like that thinks as it or this law says it transforms natural rights from something that is scientifically baseless into like a part of the social contract. And that should be upheld by whatever authority state or government you happen to be subject to. The creation of constitutions in democracy is like a very explicit attempt to make rights real. But as we all know, there are also not infallible. In the wake of the horrors of the Second World War, the international community drafted and voted on the universal declaration of human rights, which was a massive step at the time of the 58 member states at the time 48 voted in favor to did not participate and eight abstained from voting. For those of you who are paying attention, there are so little countries that voted on it because judges were less countries back then. And an exact number is very hard to find because all data sets and all definitions just differ. So this day, the universal declaration of human rights is still one of the most significant milestones of the 20th century. It has pretty neutral language in terms of culture, religion, or any particular political system. It also became a stepping stone for the international bill of human rights and several different treaties with all 193 UN member states as of now as signing at least one or more of those treaties. Yeah, I can't understate how massive that achievement is. Yeah. And before we were actually criticizing it, I do think it's right to recognize it. But it isn't perfect, which is why we're also going to kick against its shin bone for a while. So to the surprise of no one, human rights are flawed, but goods, they've also been used pretty disingenuously. And that is where I like to start. They have often been used as like a justification for war to obscure or hide other motivations. Like a thing of the Iraq war. No, not that one. The Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Saddam government publicly stated that they wanted to support the revolutionary government in Kuwait, that it was for our solidarity. They also cited that the current administration over there was incredibly unpopular and thus they had to invade for greater political and economic freedom for the Kuwaiti people. What was widely seen as like the actual motivations for what it'll resources and more regional control. Because of course, yeah. Russia is also used human rights as a reason for inflating. Yeah. You look very surprised that that shapes. Yeah, it's about to say the same thing like Russia loves to do this. Yes, they did it in 2008 with like when the invaded Georgia because they had to protect Russian citizens and peacekeepers. While it was mainly about like preventing NATO expansion in the newly independent Georgia. Same thing happened in 2014 when they first invaded Ukraine because Russian speakers had to be protected from Ukrainian fascists. There was also the Serbian forces in Bosnia and Kosovo where the Serbs were under threat. And India's campaign into East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh. Although in that later one, the motivation seemed a bit more muddled because it appears there's some genuine concern there for human rights or humanitarian aid. But again, muddled, yeah, limited time. And I think like it's always telling like where states decide it's important to go to war for human rights and what they don't write. Yeah, we're very selective when these rights need to be enforced or when there's violence needed for it to be enforced. Yeah, no one's rolling out to defend the human rights for a hinge of people in Myanmar, for example. No, exactly. And like I think you said this at some point, but like when in Myanmar, the revolution started, there was like an explicit appeal to like human rights. Yeah. And like a very well lucidated appeal to like R2P, right? The right to protect, I think I have to check. Responsibility to protect is what R2P stands for, not right, but responsibility. So it's a responsibility of a state to intervene in the internal affairs of another state if human rights are being abused in that state. It's the best of my understanding of it anyway. And this is as it speaks to me by many, many young people in Myanmar. I actually spoke to a young person in Myanmar who had orchestrated a great risk of their life, a massive R2P like floating sort of symbol that could be seen from the air, I guess, like explicitly to alert the world that our human rights are being violated. And we have human rights. So surely the people who guarantee those rights, question mark, will intervene to protect those rights. So like you saw signs explicitly calling on ASEAN, on the UN, on the European Union, on the United States. And like also people trying to make signs that were very funny, so that they would go viral in English because they wanted the world to see them and they figured if the world saw them, they'd be like, ah, human rights are being violated. And it took a lot of dead people for I think because that's a very entrenched view that many of us have, right, that we have these rights. We do, but rights that we matter into far as they someone is prepared to use force to protect them in this instance. And nobody was, apart from the people of Myanmar themselves, right. So they like rights based discourse still very, very common there. Now those rights are backed up by people who, you know, initially used a homemade and 3D printed firearms and now have like better firearms. But like the reason those people have those rights is because they fought for them. Not because the rights enforce themselves or any other state decided to enforce them. No, exactly. It is pretty revealing that when a people desperately in need for their rights to be upheld by some force or by some army or whatever and they're making explicit appeals to it. And the international community is a horse like nah, they get it close to their rights and there is. But they were unalienable. So yeah, great. They still technically had them sort of maybe, yeah, they should have bought a premium package. And also, yes, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yeah, I did not forget it was very much justified as a mission of liberation and freeing people from a dictator. Well, it was much, again, oil and influence. As it always is, which is why you will now have to listen to ads. So cool, so in media, I can get some much needed oil and influence. Nice. And we're back now loaded with patrodollars. It is time to dive deeper into the critiques. So someone whose work was incredibly influential in the realm of philosophy and ethics was Simon Feele. James, I think you may have heard of her. Yeah, she was with the Joruti column and the international group. She burned herself, frying eggs in a farmhouse that they liberated and had to go home. Yeah, she is a fascinating figure. Yeah, someone who just like forest gumps through like history of amazing things in that time period. Yes, it was like I have written this down in the script, but when she was eight or nine, she like refused to eat chocolate or something. It's solidarity with the soldiers overseas or the soldiers who were fighting in World War One. There's tons of like incredible stuff in there. Amazing. I didn't know that. Like she thought at the university, but then in 1934, she took a leave of absence from teaching to work anonymously in two different labor factories because she better wanted to understand the working class. A few years later, she would join the anarchist Joruti column, as you said, and fight in the Spanish Civil War, where she very badly wanted to fight despite her outspoken pacifism, but her comrades held her back because she was incredibly near sighted. They were like, yeah, we don't trust you with this machine gun, which fair. Yeah. And she died eventually at a very young age in 1943, due to her poor health. That is, while she was sick, she would only eat whatever she thought residents of Nazi occupied France would be able to eat and refuse to eat more. As her biographer, Richard Reese summed up as for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it, it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love. Well, that's bad as in my book. Yeah, yeah. It's a cool phrasing to his beautiful sentence. Yeah. Simone was very critical of the concept of rights, and she much preferred to speak of obligations. The letter she argued are much more fundamental than rights, because rights are only meaningful to the extent that others respect those rights. To her rights are relative and related to certain conditions, but obligations exist outside those conditions. On the surface, this may seem like the same criticism we had earlier that they only exist out there and only because I say so. But I think she moves further than that because she sees a system that has its foundation on these obligations, specifically what she calls the need for a soul. To her, these needs are the things that like we as human beings require to thrive, food, shelter, medicine, but also like equality, freedom of opinion, and security in the form of not having any persistent fears. There are many more in her book that I'm not going to delve, but to deeper in it because I think like to just this out there. This may seem like a very theoretical difference, but let me illustrate what I think is a very strong example of like rights versus obligations. I have stolen this metaphor from the philosophized despot caste. Okay. From the episode in which the host discusses the modern day concentration camp and Georgia Agamben. So all the credit to that host for this metaphor. So let's get back to those chickens that used to belong to James, but that I now own. Like it is my right in a legal and economic sense to sell these at a market, and it is my right to sell them for any price that I think they are worth. Just this is my right to very quick legal out of business because nobody wants to buy my $5,000 chickens. And now I'm going to be a bit provocative and just feel free to respond. Yeah. What if someone were to be forced into prostitution, either by coercion or violence. Okay. Why is that wrong? Why is that disgusting and apparent for many reasons? Is the reason for that because this person has a legal right to not be forced into prostitution or is there something else going on there? But there's a lot more going on there, right? Like it's a part because it's like disgusting to us as people that someone's supposed to do this without that consent and without consenting like actively to doing a thing that they're being forced to do against their will. Exactly. But it speaks to the nature of rights that your first instinct is not to say, "Oh, but that's against the law." Your first instinct is to say, "Oh, geez, that's fucked up. Yeah, that's wrong." And it is wrong because what you're doing is violating the agency, the autonomy, the dignity, the sense of belonging to themselves and their bodies. It is something that it is much more a gut feeling, something that exists out there rather than like pointing to a law 23 subsection to paragraph three, whatever, right. And we can put it in a more concrete example, like the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. In short, for those who are not familiar with either the Book of the Show, it's about a patriarchal totalitarian republic, very religious, where some women are forcibly assigned to powerful and high status men to bear children for them. Now, in this society, the sexual violence, the forced pregnancies, the births, they're entirely legal. The people doing it, and that's not just the men in those books, they are doing it within their rights. It is legal what they're doing. But also going to ask you as the listener, does that make it any less fucked up? Yeah. I guess we can argue the same thing in the Islamic state, right? There were people who were forced into slavery, sexually assaulted. Sexual violence was commonplace. It was at least accepted, not familiar with exactly the legal structures of the Islamic state with regard to that, but certainly it was widespread and not condemned. And like, that doesn't matter. It was still wrong. Yeah. It was still disgusting, right? Which is why people, including people in Kurdistan, decided to take up arms against it. And very rightfully so. Yeah. Yeah, like universal human rights were violated, that they have rights and that is the Islamic state and so much as that was a state which it was, were not. Yeah. And we'll get there because there's like a difference between a sort of having universal rights and having a sovereign that is going to respect them. Yeah. So yeah, sorry for that painful metaphor. I think that both of these make it clear, although maybe painfully clear, like legality is nothing to do with it, like the rights have nothing to do with it. It's your human response and your leg or the fact that you have a sense of decency that makes something like wrong or right. Yeah. So the right to not be preyed upon can be taken away as they're all right, but the sense of injustice of wrongness will not. There exists an obligation to the people in your community, regardless of which community or the size of it to not do horrific shit like that. And in the process, destroy part of someone's soul and being. The lack of any empirical data does not mean that there isn't something there. Even if it's just like a gut feeling or a sense of justice, well, and myself would say it's wrong because we have an obligation to others to respect them that by like just being born human, you have to have your agency and your autonomy and your dignity respected. But do you know what will destroy your soul and being? Is it the products and services that support this podcast? It definitely is, they already have. And we're back after the identity crushing stream of seducts and protests or whatever. So quickly recap what we said before the break, which is that you can say that there is something beyond rights as rights can conveniently be taken away when those in power think that is what they need to do. It is what the seam on veil would call the difference between being a subject and being an object. Being a subject or something in the sense that you can be subject to a queen through that lens being a subject means that you're only seen as something that is value rights in relation to the queen. Okay. There is a relational aspect here that defines what's over who you are. Being seen as an object here means that you exist like in and of yourself and that you are not defined because of the definition of something else. I think a good way to view this is to think of someone's child son or daughter and thinking of that same person as just themselves. In the first one, it's the relation that you emphasize in the latter, you just see them as a person regardless of like linear and initial relation. Yeah. I fear this next part could be rather complex, but I'll do my best to go into like layman's terms. It evolves on pretty complex philosophy about authors whom many people have read, but be you understand. Yeah. Myself included. I'm an idiot. I'm going to make it make sense and make it like clear and legible for everyone who hasn't read these authors and I probably wouldn't recommend reading them. So we're speaking of Hannah Arendt and George your Agamben. Both made some major critiques of human rights and these are in relation to each other to an extent. So to start off, they make distinctions and definitions on what it is to be human and what it is to be recognized as a human being. Arendt uses this terms Zoe and BIOS for this, like the Greek terms. Okay. Zoe is the idea and the concept of life in a purely biological sense as just a biological unit that breathes, that consumes, that defecates. Okay. Think of someone living alone in the mountains without anyone else nearby or any contact with other human beings, like biologically, yes, they are human, they're just no denying death. But in terms of BIOS, meaning a life that has meaning and that is political, it becomes less obvious that that person alone in the mountains, like can be recognized as human. Sure. Yeah. Like part of being human is being part of a community, right? Like we only are able to fully realize ourselves in the context of other people. Exactly. And that is what I'm getting at. We're not saying that this person that about this is thought of human being, but they're isolated and not part of a community. Mm-hmm. Think of like making meaningful moments together with like those dear to you. That is in a sense the meaning that the term BIOS kind of points to. Yeah. Living alone in the woods also means like there's no community or no sovereign power to hold someone accountable or to uphold their supposedly unalienable rights. As a little pointer between I'm going to use like state, power, sovereign or governments pretty much interchangeably because I don't want to repeat the same words, but or say power every two sentences, I think that would make for a boring listening. But just so you use the listener now that that is somewhat intentional. Yeah. So it is in the context of the man and the mountains that we should interpret so way and BIOS, not like as in literal black and white check boxes, but like as a nuanced lens to look through. And if we look through this lens, then the following pops up for someone to have BIOS. There needs to be a community. There needs to be a sovereign or as Ahana are end would say a political community that can be any group of people, any country, political identity or ideology that doesn't really matter for you to belong to a political community, which is ever one of those categories it is, but that is the most fundamental right according to Ahana are end and we'll get into why. She also calls it like the right to have rights, the right to belong to a political community that in turn cherish you and uphold those rights for you. The man in the woods has no one to do that for him. He lacks a certain political and legal recognition of his humanity that comes with like being part of community. Yeah. If you think of people on the move of migrants or of stateless people, then we can look at them as not having a political community. And in the context of BIOS, as Ahana puts it, there is also no political community to emphasize their humanity or uphold their human rights. Yeah, because there is no system or sovereign that can uphold them or enforce those ideas. Sometimes they're able to act collectively to protect each other, but that is a different thing. I guess you could call that obligation, that is their obligation to each other that they are fulfilling when they do that. As you say, that no powerful entity is obliged to protect their rights. You could look at the example of outdoor detention in the US, right? I remember once I was out feeling people in outdoor detention was with the prop actually also as a podcast on this network. And we ran into this guy, he had like a polo on, and I said, the fuck you doing, who the fuck is this? He had like nice shoes. And I was like, what's happening out here? Guy was from the office of the immigration detention on Buttsman because you have a bunch of rights in the US, right? That person came along and I had a clipboard and they did a bunch of stuff and it didn't matter, right? Those people, a bunch of those people's rights were being violated. I'm sure the person ticked a bunch of boxes and on there like which rights are being violated form, it didn't feed those people. We did, didn't keep them warm that night. We did, didn't build them a shelter, we did, right? Like it was us fulfilling our obligations to each other and not their theoretical rights under the state which mattered. Exactly. And just to point out like they're prior to that not necessarily part of your political community but you just feel that it is your obligation as a human being to like, I can help these people, I can feed them, I can keep them warm. Yeah, exactly like. And is it Locke who just asked not for him the bell tolls, it tolls for thee? Maybe not. Hemingway? That Hemingway wrote the book but it's based on, no, it's some. Man, shit. We got a Google this because otherwise that's not for him the bell tolls. John Dunn, so other John. I think about that a lot. It's something I would hear like occasionally referenced in the in reference to the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War. I mean, including by John McCain who wrote an obituary for the last American international brigadier to die, which is like one of the less shitty things John McCain did which he did to many shitty things, terrible things. But like inherent in that is the idea that like the bell here being the funerary bell rate that like I guess when humanity is devalued, my humanity is devalued and like I am not fully realized as a person if people are being stripped of their dignity in my presence in my community. So like those people are not part of my community, but like my community is being devalued because humanity is being devalued in my community. And the way I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen is by stepping in in order to protect those people to keep those people safe, to show those people that fundamentally human dignity is guaranteed by the humans and not by other states. - Yeah, very well said. So I have one last example here. If there's too many examples for the listener, I apologize, but I just want to make it clear. So I've done my best to find examples and explain them. - Yeah. - The Sentinelese people in the Bay of Bengal. I think most of you have heard of them. They're like an indigenous people that are isolated on a single island and they've had little to no contact with the mainland or air quotes modern world. - Yeah. - I think in 2018 or something, there was a missionary. - Yeah, every few years some bellend will try and go and give them the bible and they'll kill them or fire arrows at them or, yeah, those people. - Yeah. - Now, like I can't guarantee that this is, how what is going on because I haven't spoken to them. Obviously, but I'm guessing that they don't speak of human rights and we, the non-s Sentinelese people don't really speak of their right to healthcare, their right to freedom of opinion. My point is more that, like, unless there is contact with them and they become like a political community, there are no really not any human rights for them. The speak of do uphold. Like, in a sense, they don't have human rights because there is, yeah, no contact and nothing to uphold or enforce. At this point, James, this is where we are going to isolate ourselves on an island. Until it is time for, for part two. - Yeah, perfect. Looking forward to seeing you very soon again for our next Shinn kicking badass. - Mm-hmm, and I am fashioning a bow to defend us from Christian mission reason boats. - Yes. - Let us also throw like spears and arrows at the missionaries coming to our isolated island. - Yep. - That's all. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Didn't catch the latest role in the Martin unfiltered podcast. - Here's what you missed. - And the argument is, do you want to win? - It's real. - Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. - It's raw. - I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. - Roland Martin unfiltered. - I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. - Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same van. - Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. - 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. You better be hitting the ground, going to heart in the south now. - And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcast. - Or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - Hey everyone, welcome back to "It Could Happen Here." I am still Mick and I am still with James. If for some reason you haven't listened to the first part, I would strongly urge you to do that first because we're going to dive straight in here and I'm afraid you're going to miss a lot of context and a lot of explanation as to what's going on. So yes, our next Shin kicking badass is Georgia Arkham Ben. I mentioned it before. Some of you may have heard from him because around the COVID pandemic, his work became incredibly popular all of the sudden. He follows a similar philosophical path that Hannah Arendt already laid out. But he goes like a few steps further. I'm sorry to say that we have once again, some concepts to explore before we get to go deeper. Arkham Ben strongly uses the concept of a homo-sacer. It's a Latin term used during some time in the Roman Republic. It means sacred man or a cursed man. It is a person who is banned from society might be killed by anybody but must not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. So Arkham Ben sees this as someone who is exiled from society and also not recognized as someone fit or worthy of being used in religious rituals. Like in fact, the Roman state has declared that this person is just a biological life form. Okay, that's in essence what this boils down to. It upholds like the sovereign power over this person because it is like the Roman state that could enforce this or retract it. But for all intents and purposes, like the homo-sacer is like stripped of humanity from political community essentially rightless. And this is also like a really weird position because you're still sort of subject to the state without the state wanting anything to do with you. Yeah, almost like a very one directional relationship. And Arkham Ben in turn adept this concept of the homo-sacer into his state of exception. In his work of the same name, he lays out how in times of emergency, usually this is what like the German philosopher Karl Schmitt often referred to but Arkham Ben is taking it in a much cooler direction than Karl Schmitt ever did, okay. In times of emergency, where on a political level the decision is made to increase the legal power of the sovereign system, this increase can be an addition of new laws or the annulment of others. But the question of how legal this is, this increase in power is often a very, very gray area. Like martial laws is a good example. Like there is a real perceived or imaginary threat to the country or society. And thus whoever is in power invokes martial law and suddenly all bets are off because they can't be restricted by law in order to deal with that situation. Like many a dictator has like invoked martial law just so they could like crush down on everything. Yeah. I think there are so many places where I could think of where there's been like a state of exception or a state of emergency for decades, right? I mean, to an extent, since the United States passed the Patriot Act or like, you know, in the United States, we famously have the first 10 amendments because the constitution which were referred to as a bill of rights, right? Which enshrined many of the things that the state is supposed to do to us, unless you happen to be in the border enforcement zone or subject to some of these like sneak and peak warrants that the Patriot Act allows, right? Or other pieces of legislation as well, right? Like, yeah, there are many, many, many examples of this. Yeah, where Hannah Aranth has like, very distinct like disobey and the BIOS. And Arganben sort of sees like an in-between area where yeah, you become this homo-saser where like, you're not really the one, you're not really the other and in that gray area, just anything can happen. Yeah, I think that like, humans without rights concept is. Yeah, useful. Yeah, and they become so fluid in a bad way. Like, if I were to arrive at like LAX, if I make the wrong joke while I'm in the gray zone, then probably every one of my oral physicists will be searched for like drugs or other things. But once I step out of LAX, then like the LAPD can do that to me, right? Without a whole different bureaucratically legal animal that they'll have to deal with. Yeah, but like physically, I just took three steps. Yeah, it's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like, if you think of the rights that migrants or refugees have, right, like, they can be in the same space as someone that have completely different rights. Think about how the range of people are in the camps in Bangladesh, for example. Like, a Bangladeshi person could come there, that they would have very different experiences of the state and their rights, especially if they tried to walk out of there together. Or like Palestinians living in certain areas and the Palestinians will need to be able to identify themselves at each checkpoint where they will have to wait two hours and an Israeli person will just walk through it and wave to the guards. Yeah, they're the exception so they can be treated differently. Yeah, they literally have roads so they can't go on, right? Like yeah, a Palestinian and Israeli person is a good example, right? They could be holding hands walking together an entry checkpoint from the moment they entered to the moment they left. They would have completely diverged in experiences. Exactly. And the whole different set of like legal rights and legal protections. Yeah. Another example that I wrote down here was like the pandemics and the lockdowns because I know at least in the Netherlands when we had lockdowns, it was very unclear as to if it was constitutionally even allowed to do that and if the crisis was severe enough to justify those measures on a legal level. Right. Yeah. That's also a discussion here. Yes. I'm not an expert on the US so I can only use my own example here. At this point, this is where all the critiques sort of start to blend together and this is where I hope like it's going to make the most sense as Simon Fale already said like rights are conditional and require power to uphold them for you as a subject. What we run into now is that this distinction between being human as a biological unit or as a political one because the latter has access to rights. The former doesn't and as a consequence that person becomes this this homo saycer in a sense outside of society and the protections that that offers. You get all the downsides of being a subject but none of the benefits like the social contract sort of becomes refoked. Yeah. The tricky part is that our can also treat you differently based on like biological categories or political categories like prison labor is a very good example of this. Yeah. Under the 13th Amendment slave labor was made illegal except as a punishment. So as soon as power can give you a punishment some of your rights just dissipate. Yeah. Another one is healthcare like if you're a cis woman experiencing like a menopausal issues it's relatively easy to get like hormone treatments but if you're a trans woman it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult or downright illegal to get those very same hormones and that's also like this categorization in order to treat someone differently. So what I think I'm trying to say is that our can also navigate in such a way that even if you are part of a political community it can negate the rights and the human rights that should come with it by categorizing you differently. Like this is a gumbens like massive critique because rather than you getting human rights and getting them respected by power it makes you dependent on power to recognize and honor it. Yeah. In a way human rights become a liability instead of a protection because power, the sovereign, the state can still decide whether or not to recognize you as like biological or political. So one of the most like tangible and powerful examples of this not being recognized comes from our good friend James president Gregory Wookiee Bush and his seaside resort in Guantanamo Bay. I think I had that to correct. Under international law you're still entitled to have certain human rights when you are detained as a prisoner of war. Yeah. I'll be citing a little bit from the third Geneva convention in which this was like ratified. The status of POWs only applies in international armed conflict. POWs are usually members of armed forces or of one of the parties to a conflict who fall into the hands of the opposing party. The third Geneva convention also classifies other categories of people with the right to POW status or maybe treated as such. POWs must be treated humanly in all circumstances. They are protected against any act of violence as well as against intimidation, insults and public curiosity. International humanitarian law also defines the minimum acceptable conditions of detention covering such issues as accommodation, food, clothing, hygiene and medical care. You know where this is going. Yeah. Because Greg Walter Walker Bush circumvented this all by proclaiming that certain people were not prisoners of war but rather enemy combatants. Yeah. And that's such not subject to the protections of the Geneva convention. It's a bait and switch that is as smart as it is like diabolical because the power simply switches around the political community that applies to you. Yeah. And suddenly they can do whatever they want to you because you're just the biological unit. Yeah. Like it's a linguistic switcheroo. Yeah. And it shows how our rights are perceived in U.S. law to come from the state as a guarantor of them, right? Like because these people were quote unquote terrorists and they weren't fighting on behalf of a state. Therefore obligations to them and to the state that we're at war with don't exist. Yeah. And so they therefore they don't have rights because there is not a state to say hey you're violating them even though many, many Americans including in many, many court cases said hey you're violating their rights. And even when they were citizens of other countries like British people were in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah. From all over the world. Yeah. Also I think that that never has been a single conviction because of whatever the fuck happens in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah. They have their own special court. I don't know if they've convicted people there, but they definitely have a court there. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know about the convictions, but I remember teaching a sociology course and getting into Guantanamo Bay quite a lot but that was some time ago. I've had students who were who served at Guantanamo Bay. Oh fuck. And I think it's fair to say that like that the psychological damage that does to everybody involved should not be underestimated. Like it's it goes back to your idea of like we have an inherent gut feeling of right and wrong and participating in something that you know to be wrong isn't good for you. It's not it's not the same as being tortured and water-borded, but knowing that you are in a place I'd be clear I don't know anyone who has participated in any of that like a enhanced interrogation bullshit, but just being a fucking cook in a place where that happens is still damaging. I'm sure to you and your sense of being a person who believes in their obligation to others. Yeah. Like I would not I would not trust anyone who wouldn't be affected by that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like that person that person was not affected by that is like either a psychopath or like that inside. Yeah. I'm not going to be nuanced about that, but like this is like the core of like the entire critique against human rights because it is simply the state decides that you're the part of a political community or just cuts you off from it and suddenly we can play like Hotel California 24/7 and drive you insane. Yeah. Or a lack of sleep, too hot or too cold. It's it's so weird to have something that we are taught is like unalienable is actually just like the premium option, but you can't buy it like there is a power that has to say oh no this person has the premium package and you get to have human rights. Yeah. Like it is this right to have rights as Aaron said that makes it really weird because you're still dependent and unless recognized you're still just just an animal like this thing out there. It's yeah. So and this is why I thought it would be a good idea to have this discussion because I think we can look at pretty much any continent at the moment and see things that are like oh you can you can see this pattern everywhere. Yeah. It's very relevant to the United States right now right because like we got you know largely department of Homeland Security going out and doing stuff which is a relative of peoples rights both in US and international law terms and like there's been a response right by certain groups and I understand right if you have spent your whole life seeing like rights as guaranteed by the state and the state as a benevolent actor. That it's hard to make that mind switch. I do understand that but like it actually doesn't matter. It did and this is very hard for some people to graph judging by my replies on bsky.app. Yeah. That's actually illegal. It doesn't matter. Right. Like people just being like oh they can't do that while they're doing it it doesn't matter that they're violating like half the bill of rights in a two-minute period. That's still doing it. There is no accountability because the state doesn't hold itself accountable. So like when we need to think of a framework where like our assumptions can line up with reality. You come back to obligations because look at what what do you think is right and wrong to happen to people. Yeah. We'd meet that a lot with outdoor detention actually like when we were feeding people what like you'd be like hey just trying to get help from folks you know they're trying to be like hey you know we're not trying to feed these folks and help us out give us whatever like people will be asking friends in their community and then folks will be like well they they can't do that. If they're right to blah blah blah blah blah, you'd be like, "Cool, do you want to come tell him?" We'll see how it goes, I guess, but they are doing it, and we have an obligation to take care of them, and I think that people have become very comfortable outsourcing their obligation to the state without realizing that, therefore, they no longer get to decide who gets rights or when when you do that. Yeah, I think it's important to highlight this little switcheroo. If you think of the Palestine protests, they can't outright ban protests, because then you're very much violating the constitution, but if you say, "Oh no, but this is not because they're protesting, this is because it's anti-Semitic," and we need to protect these other people, like the acts that are happening on the ground have not really changed, but the way you can approach this from a legal and a political level, become a whole different ballgame, and I think that doesn't pertain to human rights as much as the example you mentioned, but it is, again, this fate and switch that keeps happening, yeah. And I'm sure everyone listening can think of times or examples of that, and it is not great, yeah, it's not great. Yeah, that is all I have. Unfortunately, I don't have any advice or anything about how to deal with this for you as the listener. Yeah, it doesn't help to tell if they're copped, they're violating your human rights, they won't listen. Yeah, I think it could be easy for people to assume that this is a hopeless thing, right? Like, because the rights of any matter, when the state decides they matter, therefore, they don't matter, but like, it can also be a hopeful thing, because maybe if we look at the example, I wrote about some of my book, right, of the CDs when they were in Schengl, and they run their mountain, right, and the Islamic State, I think it was ISIS at that time, not sure if it had declared itself the Islamic State yet, was surrounding them, and like very much coming to violate every single concept of rights and decency that one can imagine for a human being, right? And yeah, I'm interviewing a YEP-A-GAY, come on, we're about this in Rajabbo, and him saying, obviously, I'm translating here, it's another direct quotation, but we were very disappointed in the states of the world at that moment, and so we decided to go ourselves, and like, it was a very small number, right? Like, different accounts have had different numbers of, I think, entirely Kurdish, we can debate over if a ZD people are Kurdish or not, but like, it's not the place for that, is it? Or from the YPG who went to the mountain and eventually built corridor with their blood, with their bodies, right, to allow those people to come to Rajabbo. Now, unfortunately, those people, this is a very good example now, I think, about actually rights. So those people acted as guarantors of someone else's rights by fulfilling their obligation. Now, if we look at where the ZD people are, in some part, not everything called a ZD post, but many ZD people are still in refugee camps in Iraq, right? The conditions that they are in, we hear a lot about how bad conditions are for the people in the Islamic State prisons, or were, we do not hear as much about how bad conditions are for the ZD people, but they are bad, right? They have a right to a much better life. The states of the world are not fulfilling that right, they are not fulfilling their obligation to these people who did nothing, other than live the way they've lived for thousands of years. That way was considered to be heretical by the Islamic State, they were targeted for genocide, right? And would have been killed in much greater numbers, were it not for those people who were willing to fulfill their obligation to go and defend them. And then the states of the world have let them down again, and so, you know, try to find a future for themselves, so like, it's, we're very good at that. Yeah, yeah, this is the thing that we do. I may have a hopeful example. Nice. I told you, James, that I had a random person living in my house, yeah. And well, for you, the listeners, like, through the community, it became known to us that there was someone who had fled an unsafe home situation, legal adult, but I'm not entirely sure how much it should, should say, but it sounded very serious and we took it very seriously. And I had a spare room at that time. I did not know this person. I only have a first name. I never learned a second name or anything, never asked for an ID. I thought to myself, like, the world I want to live in is one where someone can feel safe in situations like that. So despite me being a pretty introverted person, like, it was like, okay, come live here because you need some place to get back on your feet. You need somewhere to be safe. And that is a way which you can like uphold your obligations to other people. So with, like, the safety, security without persistent fear, a roof over your heads, even just a place to cool down a bit and figure things out. And it would wreck my own political convictions to be able to help in such a situation and not do it because I find it a little uncomfortable to have a stranger living in my house. Also for the record, nothing was stolen, nothing weird or bad happened. This person just lived here for a week and moved on. Yeah. But that is a way in which you can also, in a small way, like, fulfill your obligation to other people and to live in accordance with your own convictions and your own moral and ideological compass. Yeah. I think that's a great example of how you can act according to your obligation, right? Yeah. And we can all do that in different ways, right? Different senses. It's one thing, like, I liked what you said a lot that, like, if the world you want to live in is one way, that person can feel safe and like, we only do that by building it ourselves. My perception of politics is that, like, we are wasting our time asking the state to build that world for us. And instead, we can build it, like, piece by piece along the way. And I know people like perceive anarchism to be like a chaotic and violent, but like most of the time when you're doing anarchism, you're making someone food or giving someone a blanket, like very nice, pleasant things to be doing. Like it makes me feel better that we can make a world where that happens through our individual actions. Yeah. Very nice. David Graber, a metaphor there for digging a well. Yeah. So like, like Mia likes to say, like put a trans girl on your couch, but that's also protecting you in rights. Yes. Yeah. I'm sorry. I just thought of it. But yeah, put someone on your couch who is in dire need of a safe place. Yeah. But be also safe yourself, clearly. I think that's all we have, James. This was depressing and then uplifting enough. Yeah. That's what we do here. Okay. Yeah. Well, take care, everyone. And until next time. Is the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? It's real. Those are the very people who I always say voted against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same back. 12 seats. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHot Radio app Apple Podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it continuing to happen here. I'm Robert Evans and today I've got a friend of the pod, Laura Jadid in the studio, well not literally in the studio, you know how things work with the internet, folks. And last weekend, Laura traveled to the great American state fair in our nation's beautiful capital of Washington, DC, where she witnessed a lovely celebration of America's 250th anniversary with no inclement weather. Whatsoever. Is that right, Laura? No, it was charming and beautiful and very professionally done and everyone had a lovely time. Awesome stuff. Laura, yeah. Let's start. Was this just kind of as soon as he said he was doing this, you were like, well, I have to be there. This is just simply not an option for me to miss. I mean, I definitely wanted to go. I actually was in town for a different. I was there for a religious, extremist conference, it was a whole different ball of wax. Of course, yeah. And I was like, you know, I've got several hours before I need to return home. Why don't I go have a nice time at a fair? I've been to a fair in a while. I should go to a fair. Yeah. So how was it? Walk us through like step by step kind of your experiences at this wonderful event celebrating 250 years as technically a country. Yes. Well, I would say the highlight other than the weather, which we'll get into was going into there are there's these little rooms where they've got booths for states and territories and departments of the government and random sponsors. And my favorite booth, I think, was probably the Department of Justice because it was completely empty. And my empty, I don't mean there wasn't anything. there. I mean that there was a card table, three folding chairs, a battered backdrop, and nothing else share. Yeah. Yeah. It was incredible. I'm perfect. It was so heavy handed. That's great. You know, I know people who use subtext and they're all cowards and there are no cowards in this administration. Yeah. Your photos of that were really funny. So I guess the layout is like it almost sounds like a trade show or something. We've got like these booths for each of the states and a bunch of government agencies and then like what all is going on. Yeah. It's like if a rent fair and a trade show had a baby and the baby had the worst aspects of both. It was incredible. Like you enter it and I will say this. So, you know, people, you've probably seen pictures. Everyone's, I think, seen pictures of what this thing looks like. Yeah. And the fourth of July was different and that there were a lot of people there because that's the day people came from all over the country to celebrate the fourth July and DC. So it was crowded. But everything else was somehow worse than it looks in the picture because like, you know, you can see the pictures of like the team who arch and you see how bad it looks. But there's nothing like walking towards it. And from a distance, it's like, Oh, that's an odd thing in the middle of a field. But it looks fine and then the closer you get the worse it looks and it's just this, this kind of slow dawning a horror of this like uncanny valley objects. There were the two long buildings that were just going by either side, basically for like the length of the Washington Mall, just little like tent slash trailer buildings with canvas staple to them. And the canvas had this illusion of columns and bar reliefs and stuff like that. And we've seen, you know, that's in pictures. But yeah, walking down the mall and seeing that optical illusion not shift with your perspective is just it's like being in a really badly rendered video game, but it's real and you're touching grass at the same time. And it's just the whole thing is so eerie and strange. Yeah. Yeah. So what can you tell me about like the audience? Like what's the vibe like on the ground when you when you show up at least for the first portion of this before the weather starts to change? Yeah. So I've been to a lot of right wing event. It's kind of what I do. But you know, I go to a lot of these and this was less maga forward. I'm not saying there were no trump hats or trump shirts, but they were, it was mostly just like Marica hell. Yeah. But everybody there was was very clearly Republican. When assumed everyone else was a Republican, the booth operators assumed everybody was a Republican. I'm pretty, pretty safe assumption. It was maga light. I'd say I mean, it was almost more horrifying in that way because it felt like it was kind of realizing their fantasy of like all real American supporting Trump. You know, these were all the real Americans out here celebrating Mary. It was regular folks who think Trump's doing a great job and aren't at all disgusted by this fair. So the vibes were kind of cheerfully rancid, I'd say cheerfully rancid. Yeah. What a great term to describe the country as a whole right now. Do you have any kind of like top faves like of the of the things you saw like on the ground? They're like, what's stuff really stuck out to you? Yeah. So initially before the weather went to hell and by focus changed, I decided because you know, there's been a lot of articles about how absolutely God awful and dumb and silly this series. Yeah. I decided to do something a little different. I was going to go to every single state and territory booth and rank them. And the variety in the state and territory booths, I found interesting. You know, you had Oregon. Actually, I gave out some like fake awards when I wrote about this on my substack and Oregon won the most fuck you award. It's close, but it was just this very small booth, two of the walls, blank white canvas kind of plasticky. And then there was just like a thing that's an Oregon, the beaver state. And there was kind of a little banner of some of the things that are in Oregon and a Columbia sports like bag just kind of clipped to it with like an, like just a, you know, a kitchen clip. I was like, yeah, all that, that wins this. Yeah. That's that's like Oregon, baby. It was great. It was great. And then you had like Puerto Rico, which was clearly sponsored by the businesses that want people to go to Puerto Rico for the tax breaks. And it was very luscious. There were big screens. And it was populated entirely by hot Puerto Rican guys who are teaching Middle America how to salsa and everyone enjoyed that very much. So, oh, yeah. That sounds good. Yeah. Georgia's was completely about poultry. AI generated entirely pictures of poultry sponsored by Purdue chicken. Uh-huh. That's what I think of when I think of Georgia. Of course poultry, obviously. Yeah. The infamous Georgia poultry's. Yes. And so it was like some states went all out. Some states kind of like you should visit our state. Some states were like, we sold this booth to a company. And then some states were like, this is a booth. We are here. Yeah. We're legally required. Yes. We have, we have fulfilled our requirement to have an object at this fair. Yeah. And then there were these like little flashes of normalcy. And this otherwise very abnormal event. Those were almost more disconcerting because it was like a glimpse of what might have been like the DC metro had a full scale subway car like three subway cars linked up, mock up railroad. And you go inside. It was like a museum of of the history of the metro and how it's helped DC and how it was built and fun facts about the metro. And it's like kind of a boring exhibit. But it was an apolitical celebration of a real achievement. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, naturally freedom 250 hits that behind one of the long low buildings and also a 24/7 Christian revival tent just to be sure nobody accidentally stumbled on anything that wasn't just weird as hell. Just to be sure there wasn't anything that like Americans broadly could enjoy. Exactly. We can't have that. We'd have to be here, but you don't have to put it out of the way to worry about it. Everything's got to be culture war oriented. Yeah. Yeah. So that was kind of the most normal. If I had to pick a most abnormal and it's tough. It's, it's a, that's a, that's a crowded field. Yeah. The Department of Education Booth was completely 100% banners by far right organizations. Awesome. Great. I love to see that. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, just just purely the most like racist homeschooling forward cut school funds vouchers. Yay. Like teach kids Vietnam didn't happen, gave people don't exist. Kind of bullshit. Great. A lot of turning point. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Very much America's a Christian nation. Yeah. Yeah. So, weirdly, I was surprised if you say it wasn't in there. One of the ones trigger you obviously, you know, the premier university for America. Prager you was in there. Also, a thing called Patriot Academy, which I wrote an article about them in 2022, not realizing they would be part of our education system at the time. But I went to their constitutional self defense course at the Wittington Center in New Mexico, where we learned how to shoot handguns and also about the biblical origins of our constitution. So that's good. Yeah. It seems like a good thing to teach kids. It seems like a really good program to implement, maybe, you know, in our school systems. Yeah. I, it's not, I'm not optimistic about the fact that that's the, the Department of Education's booth. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not optimal. Not, not great. Yeah. Any other like weird kind of culture war signifiers at the booths that are particularly noteworthy? I mean, so this has been discussed elsewhere, but it can't be mentioned enough. It feels like very emblematic of the time we're in. There was like a, I think it was the American, I don't think it was the innovator's hall. It was made America made an America hall. It was like a much larger building with a lot more exhibits. And right in the center of it, taking up the majority of the real estate, like the largest by far, just portraits after portrait, large oil paint portraits of the American flag, including a cross straight in the American flag because why not? And the artist whose name I guess is Scott Labido. Okay. There's a quote by him above his, his beautiful works of exactly one subject, which says, and I quote, I have flirted eye to eye with Mona Lisa in Paris. I have touched the thick, painful brush strokes of Van Gogh, and I gasped an awe at Michelangelo system chapel. Yes, still to this day. My favorite work of art is dot, dot, dot, the star spangled banner. Oh my God. I'm on this guy's website right now. And the first thing on the Scott Labido website is sign my petition to install a giant permanent flag at ground zero New York City. Go 160,000 signatures. Yeah, that really matters. Yeah. Yeah. No. And if there's one thing that ground zero needs, it's more American flag in the 9/11 museum. It's not very American. You would never know going down there about Patriots isn't at all. He also has a documentary about him that I think is just an ad streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple TV called the relentless Patriots. Oh God. Relentless is a fair adjective. Yeah. I thought I found the paintings very relentless personally. Yeah. His art is incredible stuff here. There's some very for over 30 years, America's artist Scott Labido and America's artist Scott Labido, every first letter in that is capitalized has respectfully painted thousands of renditions of old glory on schools, homes, firehouses, police stations, cars and canvases. Scott's past is rather colorful. Okay. So he's some sort of criminals. Yeah. Amazing shit. I really want to know that his colorful life prior to this point. Oh my God. I like to imagine it was some kind of like petty theft. And he's like, you know what? It would make me way more money. Yeah. It's just a fucking crude American flag drawings with Donald Trump in them or a fist in one of his works of art. Wow. Like like a BLM fist or just a fist. No, it's like a fist in a flag. And the fist is covered in like paint that's like flag colored. That makes sense. I'm on Facebook here. He's got a video of it. Let's wait for this fucking thing to start. But it looks like, yeah, he's unveiling a piece of art. I'm trying to click through to the unveiling because I don't care what this fucker has to say, but it looks like it's just a middle finger. Yeah, it's just a middle finger. Wow. And I think it's a four fingered hand. No, it's a fifth. There's a fifth. But it's just not a very well. It's not like a good like the proportions are really bad on this. Anyway, I'm sorry. We're taking away too much time on Scott LeBite. I will say if America had to have an artist right now, a poorly done middle finger, you can do worse. You can have a worse representation of poorly sculpted middle finger. Yes. Oh my god. Speaking of poorly sculpted middle fingers, maybe our advertisers sell that. I don't know. That's not my job. And I'm back with Lord be Laura let's continue what next you want to tell us about the great American state also set a state fair it's like the federal it's like the national fair so yeah like the states were there but kind of it stars yeah so I don't know I mean the fair was just it was it was pretty boring there was the Ferris wheel of the merry ground from the world fair was probably the funnest thing there that was from you know a time when America did things well but yeah no it was just kind of a lot of what I've just said that is until the rain started and I think that might be a decent place to go because yeah it seemed that despite this having been forecast for about a week they had made no plans whatsoever for what happened if it actually did rain at all sure if that sounds like the Trump administration yeah yeah god wouldn't let that happen no god loves America why would you let it rain absolutely not yeah so at a certain point in the fair my phone was dying I had um forgotten my charging brick at home and I decided to charge it at the Department of Justice booth since no one was using it just stuck in there and I you know plugged in my pay for the Department of Justice you know our tax dollar pay for that power yeah my tax dollars yes yeah and no one you know I so I occupy the Department of Justice plugged in my phone and about five minutes after that this announcement starts going out over the speakers on loop for like you know at least an hour and a half just you know due to inclement weather the fair has been quote temporarily postponed please make your way to the exits and then let you back in when the storm blows over and uh you know I waited an hour to get in like most people and it was very hot and they take in my nice pen away and I was kind of salty about that I didn't want to wait in line again and I'm like I have electricity here I have my backup pen they didn't find I have sour patch kids and I'm just gonna hang out so I did that for a while until the fair people found me and kicked me out and then when I went outside I found that I was not alone in this logic that a lot of fairgoers were like we'll just get right here instead of getting wet out there right because they were telling us you know we'll go shelter in your cars or in the surrounding buildings and you know we were encouraged not to bring cars because it's Washington DC and there were a lot of people and there's only so much parking so people didn't have cars and this is you know seven p.m. on a national holiday in the middle of DC so the buildings mostly weren't open either so you know rather than go be wet outside people decided to be wet inside and this went on for about an hour until the cops showed up and in a scene that I think would be recognizable to you as well a line of cops just kind of tumbling down the fair in motorcycles the big difference between this and any other protest was that the cops were nice and not screaming or deploying tear gas it just kind of hurted everyone out you know past the throngs of thousands already trying to get back in because there there was nowhere else for people to go except for a block traffic for blocks and blocks and blocks which is what they did in the rain it was yeah and so you've got a crowd of people who are both soaking wet and dehydrated which is a great combination and yeah people start dropping as people are want to do and so ambulances are coming through the crowd constantly and you know this line that we always hear about protests how they're you know they're blocking traffic and what if an emergency vehicle needed to come in well that was very much in play but for some reason that was okay in this case they just put on their sirens and went two miles per hour and and got through for what I want to say about an hour this was just everyone standing around waiting to get back in getting out of the way for ambulance there's everybody getting more and more tightly packed until the crowds are doing those like freaky lurches and and shoves that you know it's like we're on the verge of a stampede here because they planned this so well that I mean what else was going to happen they weren't going to go home it was temporarily postponed right right you want to come back yeah they said temporary yeah terrible idea right yes like don't go home yeah hang out here wait outside the gates and get soaking wet because this is safer than being inside the fair where you could like do things instead of just standing around and being angry yeah it's it's both saying like we want you to stay out where you will be in danger but also we want to put you into a situation where a lot of you have to move at once yes yes and and and it'll be upset and the security will be overwhelmed yeah yeah it was it was brilliant really really brilliant stuff and you know the storm continued to get worse it did not improve it just got more and more rainy and people were more and more determined to stay I mean there was a little bit of attrition but mostly you know and I fell in with a group that was more determined than most they were you know following the ambulances in because the ambulances were making space it was a good way to move up to just be completely anti social in this way eventually this group got far enough down the street that it seems like we were going to make it in and we kept moving a little bit and there were the chance of USA I believe God bless America was sung at one point but the progress slowed and then it stops and then music began to play just beyond us inside the fence and the crowd became a bit more agitated and God bless the USA started playing and that was a huge catastrophe because you know that means the speech is it up to start and we were going to miss Trump speaking which was a problem and then Trump started speaking and this was the moment that I think that the crowd just completely broke their will and spirits broke because the reverberation from the poorly placed speakers was such that you could not understand him it was kind of a nightmare world for me in a different way because you can hear Trump's cadence and voice but not his words it was just this like psychotic babble of nothing and just watching over us yeah reading transcripts of it even it was just like honestly it's like it's like ASMR yeah right like it's just he's he's creating at this point like a sound scape for them to kind of exist inside for a little while yeah yeah and then amplified by the fact that it was coming out as you know from several directions out of sync so truly incomprehensible just this weird Trumpian gibberish watching over this crowd and the boo that erupted when they realized they couldn't hear their leader speak oh man primal like that's funny it was great I was having the I mean I was soaking wet having the best time yeah you they're all in withdrawal yeah yeah it's like no and and so you know he speaks for a while and midnight passes and there have been no fireworks of the 4th of July the 250th anniversary of of the Declaration of Independence has now passed in DC with zero fireworks whatsoever but you know everyone was excited for 850,000 fireworks to go off which they eventually started to do at around you know 1215 completely obscured by the trees completely obscured yeah could not see them at all after all that waiting yeah I saw your pictures and stuff from it is like you can in like the top corner above a tree you can see little bits of an explosion peeking at just the worst fireworks show so frustrating oh my god so I'm walking out and they're playing journey you know of course stop believing like I have stopped believing yeah then Bon Jovi's living on a prayer I'm not really living on anything at this point the smoke is so thick even if we could have seen it was just the orange glow on the horizon it's just crackling of bombs it's just like awesome well we will conclude this story and your experience at the great American state fair but first here's one last ad break okay so how many times I'm curious would you estimate you heard Lee Greenwood's God bless the USA during your time there you know believe it or not just before Trump came out just the one which was just good that's not bad I'm surprised as well I assumed it would be playing nonstop but I guess that's like Trump's theme saw yeah yeah you they wanted to keep it like for him it's like a WF thing that's like would place him on stage or whatever exactly yeah you know I feel like this was a small rebellion because there was music playing inside of the state fair but what you had was like Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville is I'm like staring at the arch just I mean they played fortunate son which I guess isn't surprising not surprising not really proper but not really proper Katie Perry's firework played several times because I mean you know of course firework for the July so it wasn't really like a big patriotic music fest it was just kind of like hot music that was barely related and or a little sad it was yeah yeah odd odd well anything else about the event at all that you feel like is really worth getting into here at the at the end of our tale I mean the fact that there isn't I feel like isn't itself something like there it was so empty it was such an empty thing yeah everything was so sad so lazy so lazy and trashy and cheap the feeling I kept having was that it all felt AI generated yes even the stuff that like Hoodenabin like the arch looked like an AI generated image just stuck in the real world and like a lot of the booths I mean there was a lot of AI's aren't there but it just yeah everything all of your pictures I kept thinking it's like my friend is trapped in like an AI generated version of reality that's really lazy and exactly that is such a good way to put it it really did it was just like the esose of AI and fuse this place like yeah it's kind of like if you described I mean I feel like I'm comparing everything to the back rooms right now because I just watched it not a little obsessed but like what a back rooms vibes this person you just watched back rooms yeah and yet I mean it really was like if somebody described what a building was and then someone who'd never seen one before was like oh like this right like yeah sure like that yeah yeah yeah just no it was so soulless I mean you know whether or not you care for America I I personally know like I countries got a lot of problems I would like a lot of them to be better but you know I live here I'd like it to be nice and it was just kind of embarrassing it was sad that this this is really what we are right now we are just yeah this like soulless AI-esque phone in sad part is like that in part is not even the right word like radically far right bullshit it yeah yeah it's gross mm-hmm yeah yeah gross yeah it's like funny in a cosmic sense but mostly depressing to be honest yeah yeah I enjoyed my time there because I enjoyed depressing horrible things but I can't I can't say that like if I was giving a y'all review it feels right in this era of America to be like depressed and disappointed yeah yeah like the people and I probably self-doing this too like you know this isn't a representation of who we are like it is yeah this is a pretty good review yeah exactly who we are what do I got to find more or less yeah 4.5 stars nailed it yeah I say that a lot like whenever someone's like this isn't who we are being us I have and this feels like us to me yeah yeah periodically during like the riots in 2020 I post some footage and one of the commos to be like this isn't the America I grew up in it's like I don't know when I grew up in I mean it wasn't the one I grew up in but that's because I lived in areas where the police weren't so yeah it was always there I just wasn't visiting it you know yeah yeah yeah well Laura anything else plug-ables to plug at the end here oh yeah well you can you can check out I've got a newsletter at FirewalledMedia.com I am Warragedeed on basically every social media platform mostly active on Blue Sky right now but theoretically on all the other ones as well and yeah come check me out I am the only Warragedeed in the world so I'm very easy to find excellent all right well thank you Laura and thank you all for listening we'll be back at some point in the future well actually tomorrow you know how this works didn't catch the latest role in the Martin Unfiltered podcast here's what you missed and the argument is do you want to win if you don't win you have no power it's real those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing to receive it's raw I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men Roland Martin Unfiltered I went off I said this is exactly what I'm talking about y'all go scream at Chanel but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network 12 seats those are moving south so if you Democrats you don't wait to 2030 you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now and download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcast wherever you get your podcasts this is it happening this is it could happen here executive disorder that's right our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House the crumbling world and what it means for you i'm garrison davis tame joint by Mia Wang and Robert Evans this episode we're covering the week of July first to July 8th or some small things last week Ben Gavir the Israeli National Security Minister cancelled an upcoming trip to New York City for the UN police summit admits calls for him to be arrested for war crimes that's good that's good to see it's nice to see that he's he's feel scared even a little you know yes yeah the planned protest outside of the UN took place even though Ben Gavir did not travel to the city no one really knows if Mitch McConnell is actually still alive as he remains hospitalized after being admitted in mid-June for suffering cardiac arrest on on Tuesday a bunch of Republican senators said that they for sure talked to him for multiple minutes about all his favorite topics AI generated images and shit yeah yeah there's really no clear indication on what his current mental state is lower loomer has said that he's effectively brain dead not a reliable source either not at all but the audio from the nine one one call yeah indicates the receipt you are being performed so based purely on that what loomer says is very likely because when people at McConnell's age need CPR and are like at the time at which EMS arrives this is not an uncommon result like what what loomer suggested yeah we could see a historic weekend at Bernice even in American politics yeah if Republicans wouldn't hold on to the Senate seat without doing a special election honestly it'd be the best way to honor his memory like that's the appropriate way to honor Mitch McConnell's memory one last filibuster kind of breaking the law one last time to stack things in the GOP's deck I also want to note that friend of the show mirror lasine from trans news network did request comment about the status of McConnell from his office and has not received a reply we will let you know if if we get any kind of confirmation from their press staff that he is in fact alive and our colleague james stout who will have a special segment later on this episode also wanted us to note that San Diego has begun defunding and closing more than 30 public toilets today cool uh to that I will add uh in a not humble brag fashion that uh mom donny and the mta announced a new plan to expand bus roads uh great uh the save day anyway you can have either world people but not and not if you live in california actually no toilets or slightly faster buses the two choices of american politics yeah the two choices that that are presented to voters well okay i'm good i'm going to present a third choice which is i do want to talk briefly about something that's happening in france right now there is an attempt that has passed a lower house and is pending a vote from the upper house as we speak to pass a police immunity law i don't know what exactly the term to describe it is but it is a law that would automatically treat any police killing as justified until proven otherwise this is obviously an extremely dangerous bill it effectively allows the police to as long as there are no witnesses kill someone and not be investigated or removed for it so that is still technically making its way through the french parliament but very much looks like it could pass and is a stringly bleak cool yeah she's obviously this is a bill backed by the french far right that's also being backed by you know a bunch of the french quote unquote central right and yeah quite bad speaking of bad let's get on to our first main story this week as many of you know there's been a major update in the main senate race on monday a woman named jenny rassico came forward with an allegation that gram platner raped her in 2021 rassico told politico and cnn that she and platner had been seeing each other on and off for about two years and then one night in 2021 platner entered her home quote unquote heavily intoxicated despite rassico explicitly telling him not to come over once inside platner forced himself on her while she resisted and repeatedly told him to stop and then he raped her rassico told politico that platner did not remember what he did the next morning but shortly thereafter she kind of contact with him after telling him what happened that night was not consensual yeah i i guess this is what it took unfortunately i'm like i'm sorry this lady had to come forward and say this yeah but you know it does look like this has uh done the the job finally of ending this guy's career i mean i guess we'll see anything could happen still but i don't know what else to say her specific allegation is heavily corroborated in the reporting yeah a platico interviewed the woman's next boyfriend who in 2023 she told him about what happened with platner and also reviewed emails to a therapist discussing this actual assault politico published some private facebook messages between rassico and a friend of hers whom she warned against getting involved with platner and that was years before he ran for office uh read of some of those texts here quote he can be charming and funny and he's a decently intelligent person he's not all bad but i ended up in a bad situation with him and i will just very politely call him consensually careless at times she followed up by writing when drunk plus PTSD he lies also doesn't listen to you when drunk unquote and it's it's still remarkable honestly how much slack she was trying to cut him and that message like unnecessarily empathetic way of expressing that to someone else about a person who had done that to you yeah i don't know that's what struck me about that one of the most like devastating parts of this is that rassico told politico that she previously withheld this accusation because she agrees with platners political platform yeah quote one of the reasons i didn't come forward sooner was the huge moral conflict that i had which supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person. I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person." Yeah. After Resko made this allegation, which is Platner's first public allegation of rape or sexual assault, Lindsay Feifeld, the Republican operative who was that the center of the New York Times report on Platner last month told the Washington Post that Platner "sneakily removed condoms during sex." Jesus. Which is also a form of sexual assault. Yeah. In a video released on Monday, Platner denied the allegations and said, "We are taking time to reflect on the best path forward." Following the allegation, Platner lost high-profile endorsements, many of his volunteers and support from community organizations. The 30,000 member activist organization, Main People's Alliance, whom Platner was a member of, withdrew their endorsement and told him to step down. The Democrat nominee for Governor Hannah Pinnigree, who Platner supported as a ranked-choice candidate, released a statement calling for him to drop out of the race, quote, "For Maine, for the future of control of the U.S. Senate, and because no party should stand behind a candidate facing allegations of assault, Grand Platner should exit the race immediately." Democrats need a nominee who can beat Susan Collins in November. Grand Platner is no longer that candidate. Grand Platner tapped into something real. Voters hungry for change showed up with real passion and energy. That energy doesn't have to go away. It needs a new candidate to carry it forward. That last section by Hannah is part of what I was trying to express in my recent piece outlining the campaign's platform and on the ground strategy. I think looking back at his campaign, it really is worth trying to understand why it worked as well as it did. Up to this point, up to this allegation, this election has highlighted that there can be a considerable gap in the way certain candidates are talked about online and how they are viewed by the local organizations or the local electorate. Now, at least the organizations are breaking with Platner. We don't have a great idea yet of how voters see him post these allegations. But there was a series of focus groups that the bulwark ran in June with a group of Maine women who supported Platner but said that they would draw the line at an allegation of sexual assault. So my last episode was focusing on trying to explain how he won the primary and how his relationships with unions and local activist groups contributed to that campaign's success. And there's a reason that I waited till after the primary to discuss that platform in detail. And we had done some piecemeal reporting on some of his other scandals. But the information circulated on Blue Sky right now about Daniel Moroff, who was mentioned in the piece was not as publicly accessible when that episode was written. And I think a piece fully evaluating or relitigating all the personal issues with Platner or some of his staff would have needed to be a separate episode, which is why that piece starts off with mentioning all of them mean scandals before narrowing its focus on why he won the nomination. And focusing on why he won the nomination so handily like over 50 points against a democratic establishment candidate. I think it's really important to understand what's happening in American politics right now, right? Yeah. Platner got the most votes in state primary history. He did 83 town halls, a master over 15,000 volunteers, and just a like a semiotic analysis of Platner as a person doesn't tell us how his campaign attracted such historic support in Maine, right? Politics isn't just about vibes and symbols or even individual character, but rather structural forces. And there is a distinctness that the root of politics between symbols and like the real forces of society. Those forces can be aesthetically flexible and adapt a lot of different symbols for every grand Platner, right? I'm a bad guy who represented good politics in Maine. There are many more people who represent very bad politics who dress themselves up in a spotless like moral symbology. Look at right now, right? There's a lot of democratic like party figures who are taking a lap. People who have supported Andrew Cuomo and the Clintons who are saying like, aha, I told you so who couldn't have seen this coming? I mean, like that's grossed on its face because of the types of behavior they are very clearly okay with excusing to put forward their candidates, but also I think this this this reaction of like who couldn't see this coming, right? There's all these red flags. This also like fails to like understand how we got to this point like Platner wasn't chosen to be the nominee by online leftists, but rather the people of Maine. But there are contributing factors that led us to a very a very precarious situation including the lack of serious vetting by some of the consultants working on this campaign. Oh yeah. As well as Chuck Schumer's clearing the field of other democratic candidates which helped create this effectively one-on-one Mills v Platner matchup while other qualified candidates were pushed into the governor's race. And now some of those people might be going after the Senate nomination following the assumed dropout of Platner in these next few days. We do have to wonder and by the time people listen to this, there's a good chance I guess this this won't matter, but like what if he decides to just fuck the party, right? Like what if they don't sort all this out? It's not an impossible situation from where we're sitting right now. I don't think it's the likeliest, but it's not impossible from where we are right now. It's not impossible. That is an interesting kind of thing to think about. Yeah. Consultants like Morse Katz are urging him to drop out and there is a lot of reports coming out that are suggesting that he will. And to this point, a Platner has been a very effective conveyor of a working class centric platform. And his resilience as a candidate through his other well publicized personal issues have proven a real hunger for a new kind of politics. But by making himself the avatar of that movement in Maine, he's also severely compromised the movement. There's a lot of people who supported his campaign, despite his past, based on this idea that those past experiences led him to this working class politics. His campaign was predicated on that he was not the same person who made those like awful Reddit posts the decade ago. But the details in the recent sea of this rape allegations suggests that is not really the case. This allegation affirms a larger pattern of behavior, which is itself disqualifying and illuminates false and misleading statements. Platner has made two supporters, which further undermine his integrity reliability and the trust necessary for an electorate for unions and community organizations to put forward a candidate with faith that he will follow through on the working class platform that he adopted. This redemption story that the campaign ran with attracted a lot of supporters. Supporters who Platner assured that no new damaging allegations would be coming out against him. Then this not only betrays the trust of those supporters and his volunteers, but it also puts the viability of their shared working class politics at risk based on their association with him and especially this new accusation of rape. I think there's two things that are sort of important to keep in mind when thinking about this. One is that it's quite common for someone who is a rapist to also be extremely charismatic, to be a good communicator, to be very skilled at manipulating social situations and that none of the things that they can be good at make it okay for them to be a rapist. But also that's how a lot of the people who are able to do these kinds of things are able to maintain themselves and are able to survive. That's how a lot of like politicians who get into this place are able to just survive despite the fact that they have credible rape allegations. For example, that there are significant credible rape allegations against the president of the United States, a thing that has not stopped him from being elected twice. A conviction. Not just allegations. A conviction. That liable in civil court. Multiple allegations. The second issue here and there's something you're mentioning when you're talking about like the problem with him making himself the avatar of this sort of like move in the structural forces is that this is just to some extent one of the risks and one of the challenges you face when you're attempting to run a working class movement that is centered around a charismatic figure because there is always just a decent chance that like they've done something horrible like this is a problem with just like the structure of electoral democracy, right? Yeah. This is a structural problem with with the way that electoral democracy is about selecting your rulers and the fact that people who want to become rulers also just have a higher chance of being able to get away with shit like this. And that's something that that you have to manage to make sure that like your movements are not just one guy who can fuck the entire thing over by being a piece of shit. Yeah. And yeah. Rascal specifically talking about how she hesitated to come forward because she agrees with this with this politics with this movement. I mean, it's completely devastating. And like, this reminds me of, you know, the Cesar Chavez allegations, right? Like, The sexual assault is a problem across everything from, you know, like non-hierarchal anarchist organizing to the labor movement, to electoral campaigns. Not every rapist is going to have a Nazi tattoo. Bad politics. No, not everyone's going to have is going to have bad politics, right? Yeah. And like, relooking at the sort of many red flags this has, I think a lot of people saw that like something like this is a possibility, but a possibility is not an inevitability. Yeah. And for a lot of people, especially in Maine, right, the political platform and the community ties that a Platner established outweighed the many red flags of Platner as a person. He kind of pushed that to a very, a very far limit. Like farther than I've seen in a lot of electoral campaigns of how far he was able to maintain support. Yeah. Rather than that illustrating something uniquely special about Platner as a person that shows the depth of the desire to unseats, who's in Collins and the lack of trust in the democratic establishment. Now, this rape allegation is obviously completely discrediting by itself and also because of how it clearly illuminates this pattern of lying and dishonesty. I think that that compounds a lot of the issues that people have been talking about with Platner for a long time. And you know, like even something like the tattoo, right, even if he did not know what the tattoo was when he got it. Which I never believed, like, and we said that when at the time that that that was never a credible story, right? Fellow Marines in his group who also had the tattoo were in a view by Zito. They said they didn't know what it was. That's not what I'm talking about is he's he stated that he had not realized prior to it coming out that it is Nazi after he had said that he loved the movie Come and See, which here that image is in repeatedly. That was when I was like, well, he's a liar, right? Yes. We said we talked about this on air, by the way, just to be clear. Yes. And debating whether or not he is a Nazi overlooks the other very clear issues exemplified by the tattoo, like, you know, recklessness, poor judgment. And then considering these new allegations, you know, Platner's dishonesty, right, based on the conflicting reports of when he learned of the tattoos, Nazi associations. And I think that bolster is the fact that he has a pattern of lying and especially like lying to get into power multiple times. These past few months Platner has reassured senators, supporters and volunteers that no new allegations would be coming out against him, even while he was aware that Jenny Rasko was speaking without let's like the New York Times. Platner has until July 13th to drop out of the race to be removed from the ballot. And the party has until July 27th to select a new candidate to appear on the November ballot. There's a lot of conflicting reporting on when exactly Platner is going to drop out and why he has not yet. And I might do an update on this based on what will change in the next few hours the next day. But as of right now, there is seemingly a conflict or kind of like a power struggle between his campaign and the democratic party on deciding the transparency of the process to select the next candidate. There's been a few people from the governor's race, as I mentioned, who's thrown their hat in the ring, Trojaxson has filed paperwork. He was the only DSA endorsed candidate in the main governor's race, also endorsed by Sanders, Dr. Nurov Shah, a kind of more like moderate progressive announced his intention and as part of his announcement, he mentioned opposition to Israel. So he's kind of trying to move in the direction of Platner's politics, even though traditionally he has been more of a moderate liberal. We'll find out in the next few days if the platform and campaign style that was so successful can transfer to someone else, because I think this campaign has provided a very effective blueprint of in person engagement, town halls, leaning on local organizing connections and having those connections and organized labor help determine a platform, a platform that has stuff like Medicare for all tax the rich, no money for Israel, Supreme Court reform, destroying citizens United, but also stuff like investing in manufacturing, public utilities, building clean energy and strengthening labor organizing laws. Quick update here, a few hours after recording Platner released a lengthy 11 minute video maintaining these allegations are false and attacking the corporate media system and the quote unquote political establishment towards the end of the video. He announced the campaign is suspending operations and said he will withdraw from the race, though he has not yet officially dropped out of the race and reports indicate he will not do so until Monday, which is the deadline also on Wednesday night. We got a better look at what the replacement process is going to be. And instead of an open caucus, basically a mini primary, the main state Democrats have decided to go forward with a 600 person nominating convention with 500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees and 100 delegates from the state committee. This is not the most open or democratic option the state party could have gone forward with and could cause some real blowback from voters who will be unable to participate in choosing the nominee. Well, we should talk about, I guess the Ryan Grimm of it all, yeah, sure. So Ryan Grimm with Dropside news published earlier and breaking points as well. Yeah. And breaking points earlier today, this Wednesday, the eighth when we recorded that essentially the initial reports had not mentioned a couple of what they felt were relevant facts. One of which was that before texting him not to come over, she had texted about needing a massage on her glutes, which I don't see. Super relevant. No, I think the argument being made particularly by Dropside is that like, well, this was still a relevant detail that was not included. The other thing that wasn't that report that is more relevant is the fact that Politico had details about this assault way before they release them, right? Like way before it actually came out that may have been relevant to voters. I do think that's a fair critique. I don't agree with the relevance at all of her mentioning that she needed a massage. It's not an invitation to sex that doesn't like, I see that as entirely irrelevant. And I think that this is within a tradition of that particular journalist defending people that he likes from allegations that are credible. I don't particularly respect this decision. But it's relevant. No. It's a pretty gross move to take this moment and then try to inject any amount of doubt into what's happened and peddling this politely, I'll say, soft rape apology. That's it's disgusting. There's this very similar thing coming from the young Turks from Anne Kasparian and Chank. I'm happy that the majority report people turned on Graham like immediately apologized for defending him throughout these past few months and instead that they were wrong about him as a person. Yeah. And that, but what Grim did here and what the young Turks are doing is just completely despicable. Yeah. I think it's gross. repulsive. Yeah. I don't think there's any reason to bring that specific to tail up other than to try to inject out like you said. Yeah. I want to say just one thing about the way that consent works, which is that if you withdraw consent at any time no matter what happened before it is withdrawn, that's how it works. And if anyone, like regardless of what happened until that moment, you have to continue consenting. And if you stop consenting, the moment you stop consenting, like you have stopped consenting, it becomes assault. I just, I want to be extremely clear about that because people are trying to buddy the waters about this. And this is just an important thing for people to understand about the way that consent works. I think that would be even more relevant if she'd said come over and then said don't later. But like what she said was not even starting the. Yeah. No, it's not even that. But I just want to be clear about according to Grim's report, she did not even ask him for a massage. Yeah. It's his entire motivation to do this is so is so sus about like he's trying to say this is about like journalistic integrity and how political and seen and were dishonest with yeah. Raseko's, you know, claims and like that's that's it's completely absurd. I think anyone with half a brain cell can see what he's trying to do here and it's gross. I simply don't agree with that. Yeah. And I think the other thing that's kind of very bleak about this is that like there is more proof here than yeah, most people who are sexually assaulted are going to have right. And this is still the reaction that that it's getting from like fortunately not a very large number of people, but still people who have large populations. But still for the influential. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, like this is part of the reason why, you know, when this shit happens everywhere from like five person anarchist collectives up to like the DSA up to like the Democratic Party up to the like the president of the fucking United States. Why the shit plays out like this because this is just a structural factor of politics writ large is that you are going to have to deal with people who fucking do this and their fight to get away with it and people who try to run cover for them. Yeah. I think this is part of why I have an issue sometimes with folks when there's like a new allegation against like a conservative politician or like a right wing church figure or something and they're like, it's always these guys and it's like no, it's ever like pedophilia is all over the place. It exists in left wing organization. and right-wing organizations, and when you start being like, "Well, this is the thing the bad people do, "not the thing the good people do." Then you've created a place in which the people who do that have cover, like that's what you're doing when you're like, "No, bad people do that." So no one that I agree with would. - Yeah, like sexual violence and getting away with it, that's a structural force, right? Like that's something that is brought about by like large-scale structural forces that regard this to what people stated politics are, transcend those divides, and people do it anyways. - Well, let's go on a break, and then we will return with more news, 'cause more things happen this past week. - Yeah. (upbeat music) - All right, we're back, and you know, there's simply nothing to say, but it's time for a little musical interlude. ♪ Sorry, don't like it ♪ ♪ Rock 'n' to guess 'em all ♪ ♪ Rock 'n' to guess 'em all ♪ - Ah, oh God, that just hits every single time. - It's been too long. - Yeah, it really has, it really has. - It really has. - The time makes fools of us all. Mia, what's happening in tariffs today? - The tariffs have been in committee, which is why the tariff song has been in the box, but they are no longer in committee. So long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, which is to say February in a slightly different department, we talked about the possibility of Trump replacing the tariff sets of Supreme Court struck down by using a series of different sets of tariffs. One of the sets that we mentioned are tariffs imposed by using section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974. This allows the administration to carry out an investigation into unfair trade practices and then impose tariffs after the investigation has concluded. Now, the administration basically set one of these investigations in motion, effectively the moment the ruling was decided in February and on July 2nd, they returned with their conclusions, which low and behold found that 54 countries were failing to take appropriate measures to quote, "impose and effectively enforce a prohibition "on the importation of goods produced with forced labor." Now, these countries on top of Russia and China include traditional U.S. allies, like Israel, Japan, South Korea, and India. - I think you mean the Islamic Republic of Japan. I'm sorry, I just, I could not let that one escape me. - I missed that reference. Did the somewhat much of Trump today said the words, the Islamic Republic of Japan, whether I think he did not mean to say the Islamic Republic of Japan? - What country has taken fewer Islamic refugees than Japan? Like, I don't even understand how that could be like a conservative bug bear. - He says the Islamic Republic of Japan fired missiles at U.S. ships. - Okay, okay, he just misspoke, he misspoke. He was trying to say Ron, okay, we're good, we're good. It's just a normal senior moment from our president as he launches or continues a series of illegal attacks on foreign countries. - Just a normal senior moment from our wanker president. We're good, we're good, everything's fine. - Yes, incredible stuff happening here that are, yeah, our president cannot produce, actually, admittedly, this is not the first time in our lifetimes that our president has not been able to correctly name the country which he used to be. - Sure isn't, sure isn't. It's not even the second president that this has happened to in our lifetime. - No, I'm not certain it's the third. - No, we're like three out of four. - I'm pretty sure Bill Clinton could do it. So that's like three out of five. - But I'm not a hundred percent, he's a country boy. He probably fucked it up once. Now, he didn't bomb as many people when he was president, but we didn't bomb no people. - That's probably true. - Good God, good God. - Okay, sorry, my apologies. - It's okay, it's okay. - We're turning for this bleak interlude. So again, countries that the US are saying like are not enforcing this prohibition on the deportation of goods produced with forced labor. So these again include a bunch of traditional US allies like Japan, South Korea, India, and Israel, which is sort of interesting. It also says, quote, "The following six economies have failed to effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor. Canada, Ecuador, the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico, and Pakistan." So on this list, that is the entire EU, Canada, Mexico, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Turkey, which is a list of the world's largest economies. And then also, there's a few kind of oddball ones like Porsche Rilanka, which they really have something out for Sri Lanka. I don't know exactly why it keeps showing up on these terriflists, despite the fact that these poor people have been just suffering unbelievably devastating economic consequences for a very long time. Now, I am in the unfortunate position of having to agree with California's Attorney General. A thing I am not typically doing, but he did, in fact, say something which is true that this list of countries is in fact 99% of all US imports. So, okay. Now, we can obviously note here the hypocrisy of imposing tariffs for forced labor in a country whose constitution specifically allows forced labor for prisoners, and note that, you know, forced labor of various kinds from a danger servitude to debt-pionage to various kinds of slavery have been key elements to the development of capitalism from the beginning. But this is not about forced labor at all, as I think anyone who is even remotely paying attention will understand. So the terrif rates are nominally tied to setting up systems that ensure that goods produced with forced labor aren't being sent to the US, with countries who are like out of compliance with the US system would do that, getting a 12%, 12.5% terrif rate, and countries who are complying facing 10% terrif rates. That's at least the theory. The practice is not that, as the diplomat notes quote, the proposed terrif rates, however, cannot be explained by human rights concerns alone. Thailand Vietnam and the Philippines have not established import prohibition systems, meeting US standards, and face a 12.5% terrif. Malaysian Cambodia likewise lacks a systems but face a terrif of only 10%. So this is just a fairly naked attempt to re-impose the set of terrifs that Trump initially imposed in February in the wake of that Supreme Court decision. We talked about those in a different episode. They are up for a July 24 deadline. So it's pretty clear that this report is time to come out in a way to allow these terrifs, which are very, very similar to the ones that were already in place to go into effect. Now, it's worth noting that those terrifs had some bad court rulings. They're probably not going to last long enough to get like a good Supreme Court ruling on it before they come out of effect. So those ones probably won't be lifted by a court order just because there's not enough time. But there's a good chance that these terrifs are also not going to survive. But the California Attorney General is part of a very large group of state attorney generals, which features the attorney general of almost every state with a Democratic governor, which I'm not going to read the list out because it's a bunch of them. But they are, once again, suing the administration over these terrifs. So here we are again writing the terrif relic coaster. And yeah, we're back with the Trump administration trying to impose 10% to 12% terrifs on most of the economies in the world. Speaking of the Islamic Republic of not Japan, here is James Stout with a special segment. So what I want to talk about today is this lawsuit recently filed by the Iranian-American Legal Defense Fund, represented by public citizen, which has some incredible accusations about what the United States government has done to people who are Iranian National seeking asylum in the United States, specifically, they're alleging that the US government has disclosed confidential information on Iranian National seeking asylum in the USA to the Iranian government. I am going to reference a complaint and quote from it length quite a bit here because the accusations are crazy. Not crazy in that I think they're false. I don't think they're false. Crazy in that they are abhorrent and disgusting, especially when you consider that the United States government has consistently talked about the rights of people in Iran while all the time violating those same rights. So let's quote from that complaint. Quote, many of the asylum seekers are pro-democracy protesters, members of religious minorities such as evangelical Christians or members of the LGBTQ community who seek refuge in the United States because of the grave dangers they face in Iran. It's closing their confidential information to the Iranian government violates the asylum seekers' confidentiality rates, in dangers their family members and acquaintances who may still be residing in Iran and puts those who are subject to removal to Iran directly or through chain refinement by a third country's at risk persecution, torture, and death following their rival in Iran. If you're not familiar with chain refinement, it's sending someone to a third country that will then send them to the place of the USA. Can't or won't send them due to concerns of persecution or torture. So it's an end run around international law. It's barred by the 1951 refugee convention and the UN convention against torture, but the US has been doing it a lot under the Trump 2.0 regime. The course of my work, I have met Iranians from all of the groups described in this complaint as well as those who are ethnic minorities and country in addition to being parts of the groups described in this complaint. You can think of a group of young Iranian women, a man that's out of your gap, you know, I spent a good deal of time talking to really lovely folks, I have some man with them as well. Actually, you know, I think about it, you can hear them in my Darian series. I met some Iranian Christians in outdoor detention, a number of them, number one of them was having a heart problem, so it's been a deal of time trying to help her and go her medical attention. As I've covered before in this show, throughout the US and Israel's bombing campaign on Iran, Iran has kept killing its own citizens. In the last couple of weeks, it has engaged some of the armed Kurdish groups and there have been casualties on both sides. The process of the US government sharing these records with Iran, the suit alleges, began in March of 2025. It seems to have continued when the US was bombing Iran that year. It seems to have continued while Iran massacred thousands of its own citizens in January of this year, and it continued throughout the United States and Israel's current war on Iran. Indeed, a flight left for Iran on January the 25th of this year, as a dead from the pro-democracy protest were only recently in their graves. Iran doesn't have an embassy in the US, and these affairs go through the Iranian Interest section of the Pakistani Embassy. It was to that Iranian Interest section that the State Department reached out in March of 2025, according to the lawsuit. Quote, the March 2025 meeting produced an agreement between the United States government and the Iranian government under which ICE and Iranian government officials have begun holding monthly meetings to share the immigration files and information of Iranians in ICE custody. In addition, since the March 2025 meeting, US government officials have periodically mailed or hand-delivered immigration files of Iranians in ICE custody through the Iranian government. Then goes on to alleged ICE has provided officials from the Iranian Interest section with access to people that it has detained and worked with the Iranian government to pressure these people to waive their rights. This is going to be them signing quote unquote "voluntary deportation" people work where a very collision on voluntary when they're held against their will, and pressure to do it. That's what you'll hear it called quote "many of the Iranian detainees did not consent to meet with the Iranian Interest section officials but were required to do so by ICE. According to Iranian detainees who met with an Iranian Interest section official, the official had knowledge of their immigration cases, including the details of their asylum applications. These non-consensual meetings with the Interest section officials solidify the detainees belief that they have been identified to the very same repressive government that they had fled. The United States government allowed the Iranian government to select the Iranians deported to Iran according to this complaint. Some of those people were then interrogated by an intelligence section of the IRGC on their rifle in Iran. Some of these people had detailed on their application, as they must to make a good asylum application that they had participated in the 2022 Jun-Jun-Azadi movement, Women Life Freedom. There's a Kurdish slogan, a Kurdish freedom movement that was used by pro-democracy protestors in Iran after the murder of Juna'amini by Iranian police. This sparked a whole movement, I'm sure you can find a great deal of good writing on that movement. It was very well covered. I have met women who took part in that movement, as I said before, you can hear some of them in some of my podcasts. They tried with every fiber of their being to make Iran better. They saw their friends die to try and make Iran better, and then they fled, because it was made very clear to them that the state was willing to fill the streets with blood before it changed. Now those people are obviously afraid of telling the truth on their asylum applications, or even to their lawyers, especially while they're in detention. Because they now know that that information could be delivered directly into the hands of the Iranian government. They may have said in their applications I was part of this movement because I'm opposed to the government, and now that information is being delivered to the government. They came here to experience some of the freedoms that their friends died for, and instead they were hand-delivered to the regime that they had fled from. The U.S. did not ask for any protections or guarantees for their safety. At the very same time, the U.S.A. was using the rights of Iranian people as a pretext for its war in Iran. It did this as it was depriving people of those very same rights back here. This is disgusting. I will link to the complaint in the sources as you'd like to read it yourself. I'm going to keep an eye on this one. One amongst the horrors of the second Trump administration, this is just particularly apparent. We'll go on a break and then return for one more batch of news. We are back next up to shootings by ICE, which have both occurred just this last week. The half a year after the shooting of Renee Good, Robert. Video captured Wednesday morning in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, showed ICE attempting to arrest an undocumented immigrant from Mexico named Clemente Laura Hernandez. There's video of this incident. You can see a black car with flashing lights, an unmarked police car blocking a white SUV. They just kind of look like guys with guns in a moment, and one of them starts screaming that he's going to shatter the window and yelling at the driver. At that point, the driver pulls away in a panic. They hit the black unmarked car that had been blocking them. They speed off the fucking ICE points out they're going wrong way down a one way street. They hit another un-involved civilian vehicle and it's like, yeah, they were panicked because an unmarked car drove up and gunman ran out and started surrounding and screaming at them. It scared them. That's the kind of shit that happens in countries where the cartels are in charge of everything. If you pretend that like ICE is in any meaningful way different from a cartel or a gang. As of us recording this, this person has not been taken into custody. I hope they stay that way. Also earlier this week in Houston, Texas, Lorenzo Salgado Arajo, who was 52 years old, was driving in the east end when the same basic thing happened. Unmarked cars surround him. Guys with guns get out. He gets really scared and he drives off and he gets shot as he's driving away. ICE accused him of having weaponized the vehicle. He was taken to the hospital where he died. Salgado Arajo had no criminal record. He had been in the country for more than 30 years. He was in a car with several people including his brother. There's no evidence whatsoever of any kind of violence in his past. There's no evidence that he wanted to hurt anyone. There's no evidence that he was doing anything, but being terrified by unmarked armed men surrounding him. His son has come out and said that if he knew they were ICE, he certainly would have stopped and complied. He had no idea what was happening, which again seems very credible to me. There's already been a cavalcade of people coming out to demand an independent and impartial investigation into what happened, including US representative Sylvia Garcia, who's a Democrat from Texas, and obviously his son and Alejandro Salinas, Houston City Council manager, also called for an immediate impartial investigation. I don't know what good I think that's going to do like realistically. For one thing, no law enforcement entity can be trusted to conduct an independent and partial investigation of ICE period, especially right now. For another, there's literally no way to guarantee that they will be held to account even if the evidence, and I think it suggests that they were acting entirely wrongly and murdered a man. I don't believe anything is going to happen to this guy at this point. I guess I support the idea of an independent and impartial investigation. I just don't think that's going to get us anywhere yet. I think if we want an actual independent impartial investigation, it's going to have to happen after this administration regime is out of power. That's a thing that can be done, but it's going to just take a bunch of time until these people don't have control of all of the state security services. In the meantime, they're just going to keep doing the same shooting over and over again. There's been growing protests in Houston these past few days. This is some audio recorded Tuesday, published by Reuters. People are here to work. Families are dying. People are dying. But I do murder innocent Mexican people. They come to work. They come here to work. So what if they don't got papers? So what? Trump did this to us. What happened to taking the murderers out? What happened to taking the rapist out? What happened to taking the drug dealers down? Not innocent people? That's not what you said. President Trump, you didn't say that. Since then, the protests have only grown. On Wednesday evening, hundreds of people marched in Magnolia Park on the street where Lorenzo Salgado Orojo was shot by ice for our last segment. But let's talk about America 250. So this past weekend marked the 250th anniversary of the United States. And things went off without a hitch. I heard the great American State Fair was a lot of fun. That it was, it was totally packed. That no parts of any stages are nearly killed dancers as they were setting up the event that there was no severe weather events that disrupted it. I heard it was fun. And adding to the fun was President Trump, who spent much of the fourth and July weekend talking about the growing threat of communism and the need to pass the Save America Act following the Supreme Court's ruling in support of counting mail in ballots. In Trump's July 4th speech, commemorating the historic occasion of America's 250th birthday, the president said that to keep America great, we must pass the Save America Act. The troubled voter restriction bill that has failed to pass Congress, quote, all voters must provide a little thing called proof of citizenship. There will be no mail in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment or travel. And you won't have cheating on the elections anymore. It's very simple unquote. Speaker Johnson has indicated his plan to pass another version of the Save Act through reconciliation. The bill has repeatedly been installed in the Senate and that has bolstered a lot of Trump's frustrations these past few months now following the Supreme Court ruling. It appears that Republicans will take another crack at it. But Trump also spent much of the America 250 address railing against communism, quote, "America will never be a communist country. It's like a cancer. You got to cut it out and you got to cut it out fast." The communist system is the opposite of the American system and the communist system has never worked. Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear. It's a ugly head right back here in America, unquote. Real 1950s style reaction to seven social Democrats getting elected. But I think that the fact of how scared he is and other people, including on the Democratic party side, and there's been a wave of articles from the Atlantic, really scared of the more kind of social democratic, democratic socialist direction that the party's been going. Really frightened. In fact, I think like a few days ago, Trump even said the words of social Democrat, instead they're just communists. But the fact that Trump had to learn what social Democrat is is a really interesting indicator of where we are at as a country. On the eve of July 4th, Trump gave another speech at Mount Rushmore after speaking to the AI ghost of "Russfeld." During this Mount Rushmore speech, he spoke at length about how communism is a, quote, moral threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11. World War One is simply not a threat to our country. Not in any way, shape or form. Was our country surrendered any point in World War One? Obviously, some Americans were killed as a result of Germany attacking shipping, but in no way were we in danger. Yeah. And it's like, does he understand that Pearl Harbor was part of World War Two? Like, does he like get that? He was just shooting buzzwords off. I think that's all that was. Yeah. Incredible guy to control the largest nuclear weapons arsenal in human history. Trump also called communism the enemy of the Constitution, the enemy of July 4th, 1776, quote, on the eve of this 250th anniversary of American heritage, we resolve and swear for all to hear that the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly. President Trump also had this banger line, which is the only clip I actually want to play of this speech. Boy. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both as for those who pedal Marx's lies about our heritage, you tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they're doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen. Yeah. They're so true. It's just really stunning. Thinking about this is how the president of the United States is spending the 250th anniversary of the country that he thinks it is important to start bringing this stuff up. I just thought that was a little interesting tidbit that happened this weekend. Anyway, I think that is all we have for news this week. Okay. Well, I guess it's been, it hasn't been a short news week, but you know, we don't always have to talk for an hour and 20 minutes about the shit that's happening. You know, kind of know what's happening. No, this is just a 55 to one hour and three minutes with James Beckman. Yeah. Yeah. A short news week. Yeah. A short news week. All right. Go go with Christ, my friends. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media. Visit our website. Coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. People wake up and go, oh, dang, wait and hold up. Yes. It's real. It's wrong. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.