It Could Happen Here Weekly 249

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I'm Gemma Spek, host of the Psychology of your 20s podcast and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming from setting boundaries and navigating friendships, to understanding anxiety, confidence, relationships and attachment. Sometimes our biggest decisions without us even realizing it aren't driven by what we truly want but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 it could happen here. My name is Dan Alcurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics and today I'm joined by Hassan Muhammad Ali. Hassan is a journalist and socialist from Cairo who was among the organizers of the 2011 protest. He's been involved in the labor movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt for many years and holds a PhD in political science from the free university of Berlin. He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics, which I'll be linking in the show notes and is author of the new book counter revolution in Egypt CC's New Republic. Hassan, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. So let me start off by talking about the beginning of your book. At the beginning of your book you talk about your own abduction and torture by state security in 2000 and then you were an organizer as I said of the 2011 uprising. So how did living through this repression on a personal level. Shape the way that you studied the repression and what can a participant see that maybe an outside scholar might miss. There was like a long-running tradition in academia and in journalism, which fortunately it's being challenged over the past couple of decades at least. Where by this tradition tended to regard the scholar or the journalist as someone who's completely separate from whatever they are studying or reporting gone. There should be between codes neutral, between codes objective, any form of attachment or passion for any cause would be considered a conflict of interest more or less. But I mean a great chunk of my career and this is also expressed in this book. I've been trying to challenge that. I consider myself a scholar activist, not just a scholar. I was also an activist journalist, not just a journalist. And in that regards in answer to your question, my experience when it comes to state repression has definitely shaped not just my intellectual trajectory but my own personal life. I'm doing this interview with you from Berlin, not from my home in Cairo, which I had to leave in 2015 and you know can't go back as long as this regime exists. My repression which included the repeated arrests, torture, continuous threats to me and my family exclusion from jobs and I mean the list is too long. I have planted in me curiosity and also an existential reason to study who's impressing me actually. I mean we tend to talk about the state or the security apparatus and I was very much interested in putting faces and names to these kind of entities. Who's doing what when it comes to repression, who's doing the monitoring and who's doing the arrest, what's the profile of the officers who conduct these missions, where do they come from, what's their background, what's their life trajectories, how do they justify for themselves, their actions, what's their worldview. And in so many ways this curiosity has has took me on a very long journey to study this apparatus also with the declared aim of dismantling it one day when we are victorious in the coming revolution. Yeah so you really opened up kind of the black box of the security apparatus and disentangled I think the ways in which maybe outside scholars kind of gloss over or lumped different things together and everything you're saying really resonates with me as a Palestinian studying Palestine like this endless suspicion of your own perspective. I'm glad that as you said there has been a pushback from our region and from scholars and activists in other places but on this question of like actually doing the research you must have been challenging because this regime wants to obfuscate it wants to hide its doers so it must have been challenging to find sources how did you find that information what was your methodology for the book. That's a very good question from the outside Egypt looks like a very opaque country for very reasonable causes at the end of the day this is our press of regime it's allergic to the flow of information and freedom of expression in general. Egypt is not a researcher friendly country at all once you mentioned Egypt and academia people are always reminded with jury originally the Italian PhD scholar who was brutally tortured and murdered in Egypt we don't have freedom of information acts in Egypt that allows us access into the archives of of this security apparatus and the military and and the other institution. The other institutions that belong to that sector but you can always find your way if you decide to become innovative and I will just site a couple of examples first is that sometimes the best information you can get about an opaque military like the Egyptians is through their sponsors the Egyptian military is sponsored by the US. Even when it's of course becoming cecified in so many aspects but still there is a room freedom of information acts and other laws that allows you access. So if you go then after were done with the recording just go to the US State Department website check the FOIA section and go back to 2011 and check Hillary Clinton's emails that have been declassified right. Right the intelligence reports and these emails almost contain the scape generals meetings minutes where Hillary is like saying general Rouenie said this while the other general applied back saying no and this it's as if she is sitting you know I mean on the same meeting but anyways I mean they are her proxies and clients so she must get the information right away. So I managed to get tons of information through actually declassified US documents the second method which I also invested some time in just by the fact that the military are now in the front seat not in the back seat when it comes to ruling and I guess we'll touch more on this later. There are tons of mics that are shoved in front of. the mouths of the different generals and the different senior officials, as well as CC. And these guys don't have any filters. They haven't received the same sophisticated training, I guess, where militaries in Western, quote unquote, democracies have, where they are always in contact with the media. So the kind of garbage and so many secretive things that you actually can't believe that they are saying it's unbelievable. So just by browsing through their public statements, they are spelling the beans left and right. The last thing that I will say about the sources, I once heard the story in the beginning of the 2000s or late 1990s when I was still a student. And to be honest, I have no idea if the story was, I mean, did happen or it's just an urban myth. But when I heard it, it resonated with me and it stayed with me for years to come and inspired me. The story goes like as follows, following the peace treaty with Israel when the Egyptians and the Israelis were sitting discussing joint cooperation projects. So the Israelis would propose some agricultural project, for example, and then they would tell the Egyptians. And we think that Mr. Muhammad blah, blah, blah at this department at your agricultural ministry would be the most qualified to lead it. And then they would suggest others and they would keep on proposing names. And the Egyptians were shocked to find out that as the story goes, that the Musaad had the entire map of the Egyptian bureaucracy just by monitoring the obituaries. Because you know, obituaries, maybe the Westerners don't know this, but obituaries in the Arab world, you tend to put your entire family tree and brag about all the members of the family. This engineer and this doctor, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the entire family tree. And each one, you start posting their CVs and their achievements. So actually, when I heard this, it stuck with me that story. And I applied that same methodology on like trying to track down police officers who are involved in torture in the years like in the run up to the 2011 revolution. And I use the same technique in my research. So I managed to map, for example, the new administrative structure of the military intelligence through obituaries, through surfing through the obituaries and, you know, digging up names and departments and things like that. So yeah, I mean, there is always a way to maneuver. I like how the security apparatus becomes a family business and the military becomes a family business. And I also love the fact that we can use the structures of American empire to study its outposts. So yeah, that's that's a very clever on your part to weaponize those sources. Okay, so let's get into the argument of the book. Basically, there's this idea of a counter-revolution. I think maybe for like the layman also, I think, in some of the theoretical literature. But just generally speaking, the way that people think of counter-revolutions, we're thinking of a restoration of an old regime. But your main argument is that ZC didn't restore Mubarak's Egypt. Mubarak was the president prior to the 2011 uprising. But he built something fundamentally different. You call it a second republic. So what makes this order different? And why does that distinction matter for how the world should understand Egypt right now? This indeed was the main argument of the book. My book was a sort of an intervention in political debates that have been happening among the Egyptian dissident community. When I started this research, I'm talking here about the end of 2017. Because I mean, my book is, as you said earlier, it's my doctoral actually dissertation, which I I did here in Berlin. So at the time, there were still debates about whether this regime is a return to the Mubarak order or is it something new. Now, speaking to you in 2026, any 5-year-old in Egypt would definitely, you know, would know that this is something completely different. You don't need to do a PhD about. But at the time, there was still so much unclarity. And my argument was, a victorious counter-revolution does not restore the old order, simply because the old order has failed. And by failure here, Dana, I don't mean the kind of failure that you and I would think of that the old regime was not democratic enough. The old regime did not distribute wealth in an equal fashion. No, in the eyes of the counter-revolutionaries, the old regime failed because it failed to repress the revolution. So the kind of victorious regimes that come out of such a counter-revolution are usually regimes that try to avoid the mistakes of the past. So the generals, for example, who led the 2013 military coup, they regarded Mubarak as too lenient, as too weak. They completely detested the way that Hosni Mubarak between codes allowed those human rights NGOs to operate in the country. They couldn't believe that Hosni Mubarak allowed, again, between codes, people to denounce him in the press, for example. So this was not a restoration of the old Mubarak authoritarian formula. I mean, make no mistake. I'm not nostalgic to the Mubarak days. I don't see it as a viable model. But this was not a restoration of that old authoritarian formula. Instead, C.C. built a new regime, which by the way, he's the one who coined the phrase the new republic or the secondary public. And I know many people they like to ridicule, you know, the stern for very obvious reasons. But it's actually, it's quite accurate. He contrasts the first republic, which lasted from 1953. That's one year after the three officers coup when they abolished the monarchy and declared the republic till 2013. This is all of it. It included three successive regimes, no serves at that and Mubarak. C.C. lumped them all together in one block as the first republic. And actually, I'm arguing that he's right. Even when on the surface, they had different inclinations, different stated goals, different international alliances. But when it comes to the core of how the state machine was organized, actually, they didn't differ that much. And there was some logic in organizing the security apparatus, which completely changed after 2013. Let's get into that in particular. It's, it's the fact that I've done all that and onward, they pitted different parts of the security apparatus against each other. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a scholar of Egypt. But my understanding is that under Mubarak's regime, they really bolstered, for example, general intelligence and, you know, things like this. So always kind of historically fragmenting different parts of the security apparatus so that they are rivals. And of course, the dictator can be the arbiter. What you're saying is in the book, especially is that C.C. unifies them for the first time. And why is that unification the key to kind of understanding? Not only the type of repression, but the scale. And could it have happened without the 2011 revolution? There is vast amount of literature in political science that discuss this term. It's called the dominant perceived threat. And the arguments usually that revolves around this term is that when autocrats reach power, they usually have a dominant perceived threat. I mean, don't get me wrong. Any good autocrat, if they want to stay in power for a long time, they have to cheat themselves from all sorts of dangers. But there is always a dominant one. And according to that dominant one, they start structuring their security sector or security apparatus. So the argument also goes, and I mean, I support it, and I think it's correct and accurate, that if your dominant perceived threat is that of a military coup, then you tend to fragment your apparatus as you've just clarified. So you create multiple security institutions. And I mean security here in the functional sense, like, you know, the military would be a security institution. They will all have overlapping mandates, hardly any communication or في المرحبات لديهم. لديهم يحبون في المرحبات لديهم في المرحبات. و there isn't much horizontal channels of communication. لديهم only channels of communication are vertical. ل as you also clarified earlier, only the ruler would have the bird's eye view of what's happening beneath them. At the same time, you know, this ruler or this autocrat would definitely take precautions against riots, against foreign invasions, against, you know, what have you, but that if that dominant perceived threat was that of a military coup, they will do as we just explained. So during the first republic, I mean, how did the first republic start? In case your listeners do not know, in July 1952, an eclected group of nationalist army officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdom Nasir. They overthrew the British-backed king and they declared the republic a year later. This was a time that where coups were almost a fashionable thing to do, I mean, across the global south. These were the years of decolonization. At the time, like the militaries were still regarded in a favorable, actually, kind of, light by the nations that were still being formed. Many of them came from the anti-colonial fights. The military was regarded as a modernizing force, professional that can get the country to go forward and catch up with the West and break dependent sea ties. There was all of these kind of nostalgic romanticized visions of the military. So Egypt, in that case, was not really that unique. It was happening across our region and it was happening across the global south. So the immediate concern of these conspirators was a counter-coup. It makes sense. So this was the dominant perceived threat. And that's when the military intelligence colonel, the Kareya Mohiddin, who was dubbed Nasiris Berea in reference to Stalin's Berea, he organized this security setup, which continued with us all the way up until 2013, whereby he fragmented the security sector. So you had the military, you had the interior ministry, and it's secret police, which changed its name in several times, from what I'm talking about, to what I'm talking about, to then after the revolution, the Ottoman colony. And he created the general intelligence service in 1954. Or our Muhabarrat, as we call it. And by the way, it was modeled along the structure of the CIA from the start. They were very impressed, you know, with the CIA and actually they enjoyed good relations in order to fight communism. Because, you know, many people actually don't know the initially the three officers. They didn't really express any left-leaning sympathies, but they were kind of like pushed into it in the following years. So this was the security setup, not in their wildest dreams, did they ever imagine that a revolution could happen in Egypt. I mean, here, a proper like popular revolution. And this is because our rulers, even when they, you know, came in the post-colonial years, they still maintain this colonial look, whereby they despised their people. They saw the Egyptians as human beings without agency. They regarded the Egyptians as incapable of self-organizing. And that if they are let free or let loose, that they will bring the whole country together. So there always has to be some patriarchal kind of guardianship of the Egyptians. They expected a few riots to happen here and there, maybe some strikes here and there, but not in their wildest nightmares that they thought a revolution could happen. Comes 2011, and suddenly they are all shocked. And for two and a half years, they were panicking about the fact that, you know, the entire regime could have collapsed. So out of this trauma and paranoia, comes out the counter-revolutionary regime of Abdul Fattah's CC, where the dominant perceived threat now is that of a popular revolution. And this is not, I mean, my own analysis. I mean, again, CC does not miss a single occasion where he brings up 2011 and warns of 2011 and talks about, you know, the conspiracies to bring down the state. Even, you know, a few days ago before we record this podcast, he inaugurated the octagon. If the Americans have the pentagon, we have the octagon. And the octagon is not really to protect, you know, the head of the state and the head of the army and the senior brass. From, you know, for invasions, God forbid, it's CC said it. He said that, you know, we're not going to repeat another 2011, which brought the whole country to a standstill. So now we're moving the, the brain of the state, you know, somewhere safe. What ensued was the unification of the security apparatus for the first time since 1952. Don't get me wrong. I mean, they are still like three separate institutions. Friction is bound to happen between them and it does happen every now and then between them. They might have different views, but they are not in competition. They are coordinating. They are sharing information. They sometimes they even share the same structures. I mean, there are units within the Egyptian army now that officially has the police as part of it. Like unit, triple eight, for example, they coordinate and they do joint operations all throughout the Sinai counterinsurgency and in the oral terror between codes in the Nile Valley. And in so many ways, everyone now, they understand that the military is the apex ruler. It's on the top. But with it, its younger siblings, the Muhabarat and the interior ministry are in this kind of unholy alliance trying to protect the state from the conspiracies of the evil Egyptian people at the end of the day. Yeah, I have so many questions. I like I could talk to you forever, but shoot me. Well, I mean, one of the questions I popped up while you were talking about is because of the emergence from, you know, decolonization. And because of the wars with Israel, you know, because of all of the history that the military, the Egyptian military has in the country. I mean, I think it's common knowledge and public opinion would back it up to some degree that Egyptian public perception has been very pro-military and every ruler has come from a military background, as you mentioned. And and given that the Egyptian people have now been named the dominant threat. Do you think that that is changing public perception of the military apparatus? Let me first just go back to, I mean, even before 2011, whether Egyptians regarded the military favorably or not. There is definitely, I mean, this factor, which exists almost in every country and your, your in America, so you understand this too. The military is always a core pillar of whatever nationalism or whatever nationalist ideology and patriotic ideology that exists in any country. And in the case of Egypt, the military, especially, you know, its role in the 1973 war against Israel, which is always depicted in our school curriculums and in our movies and, you know, whatever culture production as a smashing victory against the Israelis, which is not, you know, I mean, completely accurate to be fair. So there is definitely this glorification, but here is the thing, you know, those who tell me that, you know, Egyptians love the military and they regard this favorably. I always tell them, you know, when it's conscription time, do you find everyone just running to the conscription centers because they can't really wait, you know, for the moment they put on the uniform and they get humiliated, you know, in some military factory or in some desert camp. Or do people try to find whatever excuses and fabricate whatever medical, you know, reasons in order to and buy their way out of the military, you know, I honestly, like from my humble knowledge and from what I saw all throughout my life in Egypt, it's a nightmare, everyone tries to buy their way out from the military. Now when the military intervened in the revolution, I'll go back also a little bit, maybe the military was not running traffic, maybe the military was not doing the actual daily policing before 2011. So most of the hatred was directed against the police because they are the ones that, you know, that you see on a daily basis, who interact with you on a daily basis. The military, it is true that they were in their camps, but their tentacles were all over society. They had their own social clubs as an Egyptian man, like until a certain age I can't leave the country except with their permission. They have their own economic and business ventures. They have their own special status. So yeah, you don't see the brass daily, but they are always there somehow, but remotely. After 2011, I mean, they first deployed nationally on the streets following the collapse of the police. And in my book, I actually do go in details to clarify that not everyone welcomed their deployment initially, and with their own acknowledgment, I got statements from the military that talked about confrontations with the people as soon as they were deployed. But at the same time, there wasn't any other choice at the time in front of the people, except trying to win over the conscripts and win over the military. During the military, at the time after a very bloody war of attrition with the police over the previous days would have been suicide. So the famous chant, ilgeeshwshabiidwahda or the people in the army are one hand. That came out in that context of us trying to win over the conscripts. An appeal. Exactly. So I know that this slogan then later got, you know, co-opted by the military and by the counter-revolution to mean something else, but initially that's what it meant. So did the military keep its clout throughout the revolution? I belong to the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists, which is a revolutionary leftist organization in the country. We were the only ones to issue an anti-military statement on the 1st of February, during the 18 days, no other political organization issued any anti-military statements. And the 1st of February here was kind of like prophetic even, like this was one day before the Battle of the Camel that was enabled partially also by the military at the time. And initially we were on isolated minority, most of the public were against us. But then as the revolution progressed and people started to get disillusioned about the role of SCAF, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces, they started to remember oh, it was the Egyptian RS who were warning us from the early on about this. And several confrontations exploded when it comes to SCAF in the streets, whether it's the Mohammed Mahmoud uprising in November or the Occupy Cabinet clashes in December 2011. So the thing of the military like it goes back and forth, back and forth up and down, I cannot say that it's something constant. With 2013, there were sections of Egyptian society who supported Damascus and supported the army's intervention. But also there were victims of that intervention. And I think as CC lost cloud as he proceeded, because he's now running the country and governing it solely by coercion, no consent, people can see in front of them how the military turned into a monster that's basically taking over everything in the country. Does that mean when another revolution breaks out that everyone will be anti-military from the start? I don't think so. If there isn't a clear alternative that's telling the people that another solution is possible, other than the military, I think they will play the same game of like getting rid of the regime and retreating for few steps, but keeping things as they are. And they are, you know, unfortunately in some ways in a strengthened position, as you said, because they learned the lesson of the possibility of popular mobilization. I mean, they've moved the capital. There's the octagon, like everything you've mentioned. And I think it's so apt the way that you describe the regime acting like a colonial occupier, than a national government, because it does, as you mentioned, have this view of its own people as underdeveloped and unworthy of having their own political agency. So for Egyptians today in Egypt, what does daily life look like under this, you know, unfortunately, for aggressive system? Unfortunately, it's a very miserable situation when CC rose to power and took office officially in 2014 as a president. Egypt's foreign debt was roughly $41 billion. Today, it's over $163 billion. And this year's government budget, we're talking about 63% at least of the government budget, will go for the debt service 63%. Let me repeat that again, 63% of the government budget is not going to go for education, it's not going to go for health, it's not going to go for whatever. It's going just to pay the interest on the debt. So this means also the following. It means that there is austerity measures on steroids to the extent that people are sharing their memories of the 2000s and 1990s as the good old days. And again, these were the days of the height of our neoliberal transition, which is part of why we had the revolution in the first place. But the situation now, the economic situation is that bad, that even the austerity of the 1990s and the 2000s, they sound like heaven today. Secondly, when it comes to political repression, the political repression also compared to CC, Mubarak is a human rights activist, he's a human rights defender, you know, compared to what we're seeing today. The unification of the repressive apparatus in Egypt only led to heightened lethal and cultural violence, the regime, and this might sound or alien, but the regime was boosting in the public media that were building the biggest prison on earth and they are listing this as part of their achievements. So how does life look like today? You have three or four generations of Egyptians from, let's say, 2013 up until today, who graduated from university, without ever taking part in a protest, without ever taking part in a political debate, without ever drafting a statement or distributing a leaflet, without ever taking part in a string of union election, without ever taking part in a parliamentary electoral campaign in their neighborhoods, CC has desertified the political scene in Egypt. He dismantled most of the political organizations in the country. Even apolitical charities, any entity that's independent from the state got taken over or dismantled by the state apparatus. So you have really a draconian kind of regime that we've never witnessed in our modern history. Even under no sir, I mean, no sir usually is always like referred to as the reference when it comes to military dictatorships and what have you, but it's not true. Yeah, I mean, he was a dictator, of course, but he feared the military, he feared a coup. So he had to create a vast array of political institutions in order to counter the military's power and these political institutions were a vehicle for Egyptians, though with limits, of course, but to mobilize, to conduct, to discuss, to organize, and there was some space, some kind of political education, which is now nonexistent. As I'm talking to you now, the Egyptian national team has returned to Egypt, our football national team, and they have done really a great achievement at the World Cup, which it never happened in our history. The government announced that they are preparing like a mass popular welcome for the national team, El Alamein, nothing Cairo. So they arrived at the Libyan border, at our border with Libya, like all the way in the desert, to be received by the state officials and later they will meet CC. And, you know, like a few hundred people showed up in the desert in that scrotching sun heat to wait for them, because this regime is so crowd-phobic, so people-phobic that they wouldn't even dream that they would have this welcome in Cairo, where their yield crowds are. It is, to that extent, our Football League, for example, which has all who's been famous and popular in the Arab world and let alone Egypt is being played without fans. It stayed for years and the stadiums were empty and then they now allowed only 5,000 people to show up. The capacity of the Cairo Stadium for example is 120,000 and I used to attend matches where it was full. Now they only allow like you know 5,000 fans for each one because they are so crowd phobic. This is the reality we're living under but I'm also arguing at the end of the book that this is not a sustainable model. Yeah and then carcerated population but as you said at the end of the book you're saying there are cracks in the regime's internal unity and I think you also mentioned the parliamentary crisis. So what do you think are the seeds of another 2011? What would resistance look like this time? What would it need to look like this time? Because I mean you and I both agree that coercion alone cannot sustain these types of regimes. You were saying earlier that they have learned their lessons which you know on the surface this might be true but I would argue that they have probably learned the wrong lessons because there are counter-revolutions across history that yeah was violent, was a repressive you know and there was bloodshed but at the same time these counter-revolutions also since they were far-sighted they tried to address some of the problems that led to the outbreak of the revolution in the first place. Not because they are Democrats but they just want to diffuse you know any potential problems. Now let's look at Egypt and actually the Arab Spring in general not just Egypt. There are tons of reasons why the Egyptian and the Arab revolutions broke out in 2011 but I can in a reduction as a way you know I can simplify them into two main problems. One is the issue of political repression and police brutality. The other one is the social question or the unequal distribution of wealth. These were the two main structural problems that provided the objective conditions to have an uprising in Egypt and actually the Arab world I mean I can generalize here. Again knowing that each country had its own specificities Syria had its own you know I mean conditions and problems Tunisia had its own blah blah blah but you know these two were the common denominator and the main motor force for these revolutions. Now let's look at Egypt. The counter-revolution yes I mean it killed the revolution it repressed the revolutionaries but they provide answers to these two problems no. Any child in Egypt you know could answer this you don't need a PhD scholar to tell you that actually political repression is even much much much worse today. Secondly when it comes to the distribution of wealth it's even as much the economic condition is it's unbelievable at this point. So as long as these two structural problems continue with us there will always be the objective conditions for another reward. What's missing here is the subjective conditions which means is Hussam and Dana and X and Y and Z and Muhammad and you know Michael and are we organized? Are we trying to put out new ideas? Are we trying to mobilize even under repression you know in these campaigns here and there? That's what's missing. That repression was extremely effective in terms of dismantling the different political organizations and the independent unions in the country but part of also why the repression was effective was the fact that there was full blank check backing from the regional and the global allies of the regime. The UAE and Saudi Arabia and specific in the region and globally you had the US and more importantly the EU. I would actually be arguing that it's the EU that's much more complicit in enabling the CC regime more than America which goes you know against the historical trajectory of that regime. So the regime was confident. The regime could ask you know the Gulf allies and the West as long as he was fighting the revolution as long as he was dismantling the Islamists and as long as he's he's killing this boogeyman called the January 2011 revolution until CC woke up by 2021 with COVID and the war in Ukraine to find out that first our debt has spiraled out of control and that the Gulf were not really that keen on keeping you know these bailouts to continue. There were even like some leaked reports that Hamid bin Zayed of the UAE complaining that CC thinks is some ATM. I don't know if it's true or not but you know it signaled a different mood and there was even a famous statement by CC which then was taken down from most of the news websites at the time but I had screenshoted it and I listened to that speech where he was complaining saying something along the line of some of our Arab brothers they think that Egypt is incapable of progress and blah blah blah and he was like lamenting you know I mean the situation and that's when you know the regime started to act in a very unconfident way released some political prisoners called for a national dialogue which I mean it never really materialized into anything important but it was just a signal that they were scared. They were scared because the economic situation was bad and because that if any form of revolts take place whether it's local or whether it's on the national level they don't have that civil society in the Gramschen sense that can act as a buffer to protect them. Hosni Mubarak was an autocrat it's true but Hosni Mubarak was presiding over very vibrant civil society and it's that civil society that actually saved the state from a full fledged revolution in January 2011 there was the Muslim brotherhood that you can try to negotiate with in exchange for you know suspending the career and will give you you know a share of the cake there used to be like left wing political parties that you can try to negotiate with and promise you know some parliamentary seats in exchange for diffusing industrial militancy there was this there was that there was this there was that this is what enabled Hosni Mubarak to rule Egypt for three decades but it is exactly that authoritarian formula that CC and the generals regarded as the main reason for 2011 so what we have now is the state presiding over society without any buffers it's the military that's micro managing the society on daily basis it's the police that's micro managing society on a daily basis it's the Mubarak who are also doing the same and there is division of labor between them they will remain united as long as things are going really well but once you hit the wall once a crisis erupts whether you are a political organization whether you are the state whether you are a group of friends that's when people you know start looking at one another and exchange blames or propose very diverse ideas some will think we should go left others will say we should go right and that's when cracks start to happen I'm not implying that you know that divisions are now deep but you can start seeing few cracks here and there and in the background you started to see also an incremental rise in industrial actions over the past few years it's not like the 2006 till 2011 strike wave which you know once erupted in the highlights spread by the domino effect all over you know the country it's very incremental has its own problems but it's it's it's rising and it's that social movement which I I always bet on for the future a lot to think about and a lot of historical events come to mind so as you were talking I was thinking about the bread and to foda but like you mentioned there's not some sort of buffer to absorb in today's Egypt another thing I was thinking about as we were talking the entire time was this sci fi collection Egypt 100 about what Egypt looks like a hundred years after 2011 I'm going to put that in the show notes if people are interested because it imagines what like moving the capital and doing all these things like what will that mean for Egyptians in a hundred years it's a little dystopian but you are leaving me more hopeful then sci fi leaves me thank you - Thank you so much for coming on and I really appreciate your time. - Thank you then, it's always a pleasure to speak to you. - Take care everybody. (upbeat music) - Hey everyone, it's the Jonas Brothers with the "Hey Jonas" podcast. We've been catching up with some great friends, Paul Rod, Michael Blay, Seth Meyers, Nile Horan, Jake Shane, and making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters, like Alex National. - She likes to control everyone and tell everyone to go. - Okay, well control is a harsh word. I would say that's a harsh word. I am more outspoken. Growing up a lot of the times because she was so quiet, I would speak for like the both of us. Now I'm working on like, thinking a mom is really needed and I'm thinking before I speak. - And Joey King. - You know if your like, mom is yelling at your sibling and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just like won't let that slide. It's like, you only can yell at your sibling. I'm like, you can't do that here. - That is not a lie. - You don't want to talk about her like that. - I just want to talk about her like that. - Plus we've been taking your calls, listening to your voice mails and giving advice. - Or at least trying to. - So if you've got catching up to do, now's the perfect time. Listen to "Hey Jonas" on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. - When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. - I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. - I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. - You just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, "Shut up, don't say anything." - Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. - I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me. - I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. - They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - If your bookshelf and your for-you-page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. - I'm going to have to look up this story, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. - From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. 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I don't know, have you guys heard of foe journaling? - Yeah, it's reading, it's called reading. - So you're, so we don't like to use that word anymore. - Okay, a panel of New Yorker cartoonists. - Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? - No! - I've been dying too. - I'm so sorry, I'm seeing a reading of Sudako in the Thousand Paper Cranes by Audrement Donalds at the Wonderland bookstore, 14. - That's crazy, I went to the Wonderland bookstore yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Doctor 30. - No way! - This is the last bookstore though, Kim Katrol is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. - A panel of Eurovision participants. - And we do a little Halloween sometimes. - Does the Pope dress up? - He, he winks on Halloween. - He gets right up next to the microphone. - I hear he'll get the elbows here, the eyelashes hit each other. - You never seen it least so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. - Listen to artists on artists on artists on the iHeard Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. On Monday, August 27th, I so rested, right-wing provocateur Milo Guillénopoulos at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. And within just a day Milo was deported to the UK. In a statement from August 28th, the Department of Homeland Security referred to Milo as a "a legal alien from the United Kingdom" and said that he "legally entered the country on May 14, 2019, through New York City, New York. He chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation's laws. Yenapolis was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on July 22nd, after failing to show up for his immigration hearing. So according to DHS, Milo Yenapolis both overstayed Avisa and did not show up to immigration court hearings. And so, in absentia, a judge ordered his removal. We'll get more into that later this episode, and we'll also get into some of Milo's background in a bit. But, safe to say that the former rising star of the alt-right currently has more enemies than friends on the political right and in the mega world. His deportation has been met with some amusement among the online left, but even more so among the online right. In fact, multiple fall-right influencers have claimed credit for Milo's deportation. Most notably and plausibly, one of Milo's old friends turned enemies, Laura Lumer. After reports of Milo's arrest broke online, Lumer posted on X the everything app, quote, "Breaking. A legal alien Milo Yenapolis has been detained by ICE. I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo is in the US illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Trader Green. Recently, Candace Owens invited this illegal alien into her home. When Milo called for me to be assassinated, I reported him to ICE and the FBI. I told you all that Milo wasn't a legal alien. He was detained in Louisiana by ICE. Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace. Today is a great day for America." The next day, Lumer said that DHS told her that Milo was, quote, "never allowed to come back to the United States ever again." Now, I'm not doing this episode to dunk on Milo Yenapolis and cheer on that he has been deported. This mechanism of deportation should not exist in the country, whether it's used against poor working class immigrants from Haiti, or the most annoying right-wing fascist that you can imagine. Milo still has access to millions and millions of dollars of wealth. He will be completely fine. The same cannot be said of the majority of immigrants who are deported by ICE. But this situation does represent a very interesting moment in right-wing politics. I never thought the Leopards would eat my face, et cetera, et cetera. Milo played a not insignificant role in getting Trump elected back in 2016, and I was suffering some consequences from the world that he helped bring into being. And before I continue, I want to make one other note. I'm trying to be really careful in how I cover this story, because Milo himself is a professional attention seeker. It is not completely impossible that whether he knew he had a final order of removal or not – he claims he didn't – but usually an in-abstantial ruling only comes after the court knows the person is receiving notices to appear in court and is choosing not to. But regardless of whether he knew that he could be deported, Milo will certainly try to use this moment for political and personal benefit. A few days after being deported, Milo made his first public appearance on Pierce Morgan's show, and I will play a few clips from this appearance. But let's keep in mind that Milo has his own career interests at the center of nearly everything he does in the public eye. That said, here are Milo's very first comments after being deported. I don't think I've ever been afraid before, like I was the last week. Maybe I've lived in a specially closeted and costeted life, but I think for the first time I know what it feels like to be really, really terrified. What were you terrified of? Well, I'd like to get to some of the claims that were made by Homin in a moment, but I didn't really – I didn't really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality as an America. The manner in which they arrest you, they put your manacles, your hands, your feet, chaining together – I mean, everybody is arrested as an MS-13 gang member, and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television. So right off. Off the bat, he is lying and trying to garner sympathy. He absolutely did know about the physical institutional brutality of deportation. While he is certainly correct that he has lived a sheltered, privileged life, he has also watched those videos of the US government deporting or renditioning hundreds of people to sea caught. And in this interview, he references MS-13 gang members, even though most of the people sent to sea caught had no criminal convictions and no due process. And back then, Milo just didn't care about that and only cares about due process now for himself after facing a tiny shred of the pain and suffering thousands of people less fortunate than him have been subjected to. Um, you know, I was put from, from, from, you know, detention facility to a correction facility, um, you know, every three hours they were, they were sort of trying to keep ahead of my lawyers so I couldn't, uh, you know, so whatever, um, but, but no one would tell me anything, um, it was, it, I mean, I know it's designed to be like that, but it's, it was, sure, it was humiliating and it was disorientating or rest of it. It was physically degrading. It was, it was frightening. It was frightening. I don't think I've ever been frightened like that before. Yeah, that sounds like a sucks dude, but the thing is later on in this very interview, Milo says he's still not opposed to ice as an organization or deportations in general. But rather, the problem is is that we're just not deporting the right people. It's on January the 2nd, 2025, uh, you posted punishing Somalis indiscriminately as a group and the port of them all is the only way this administration swayed the voters. It is serious and up to the job. And then again, in, uh, May 25, there's one concrete thing we must insist on as administration delivering. It matters a lot more than debts measured in, in measuring money with a deport millions and millions of people without that nothing else matters in September, 2025, total legal immunity for ice agents when they're on duty at 21st September, 2025, justice system should be just ice. So there you are aggressively promoting ice being very aggressive and demanding that millions of people be deported. People say, Milo, you've been hoisted by your own battard. And I don't have a word to say. You got me. Um, I'm very, uh, look, um, I mean, I don't know what you're talking to do. Deport millions of people. Well, not really. It just happened to include you. You're not doing it lawfully. And, um, I think you did, you did say about Somalis, they should be deported indiscriminately as a group. Well, I'll have to say exaggerate. Deporting them all. Obviously exaggerating. I would say the place is supposed to be deporting criminals. So first it's you got me. Then it's no see they're not actually doing it lawfully. And later on, Milo, plainly states that ice is supposed to be deporting criminals. Just in the past year, Milo has made multiple posts on X, the everything app calling for 10,000 deportations a day has warned that if the Trump administration doesn't get real fast about left-wing terror and deporting millions of illegals, Americans will adopt vigilante justice in June of 2025. Milo called for ice checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections government buildings with quote, on the spot deportation for anyone who can't prove they're in the US legally. He is justified and celebrated DHS executing anti-ice protesters and has talked about getting horny while watching ice raids quote, what is the etiquette if you are going about your business and find yourself observing an ice raid? I want to show a little respect and decency. Are you allowed to masturbate where you stand in the street or should you find some kind of awning or motor vehicle on quote? Let's back up for a second, who is Milo Ianopoulos for those lucky enough to not be in the know? Milo is a right-wing provocateur in the truest sense of the term. His engagement with politics is based on provoking people. One of Milo's protégés, who lives in New York, has described their own life as a form of performance art, and I think Milo sees his life in a very similar way. I'm not going to go over his whole history from the past 10, 20 years, because that would take up multiple filling episodes and I just don't think it matters all that much. But here's the broad strokes for context. Milo Ianopoulos is a British far-right political commentator. In 2014, he started working for Breitbart. He was a major participant in Gamergate, and in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, he became one of the first big figures in the then-emerging alt-right. Milo was an early mega-adopter. Starting in the summer of 2016, he began promoting a series of events called Twinks for Trump. Twinks for Trump is a so-called art exhibition featuring scantily-clad photos of boys or young men wearing make America great again hats. Milo's canceled 2017 autobiography titled Dangerous, which was canceled by Simon Aschuster, discusses the Twinks for Trump art exhibit, which struggled to open after the gallery venue pulled out. To quote Milo, "I bathed in freezing cold pig's blood for 45 minutes, surrounded by images of innocent Americans slain by terrorists and illegal aliens. Now there was a genuinely subversive piece of art, gay men celebrating the orange antichrist. Could you imagine if Madonna or Paris Hilton released a video with a bunch of underage boys in mega-hats? No of course you can't, because the only people pushing the envelope in art these days are Republicans." Keep that underage boys comment in mind, it's a surprise tool that will help us later. So in this era of the mid-2010s, Milo was a pretty big figure, big enough to earn a major book deal. But as I said, his book deal fell through. Because in 2017, Milo suffered a major falloff after some pro pedophilia comments he made in 2016 went viral ahead of a speaking gig at CPAC 2017. In this frenzy around Milo's comments defending pedophilia, CPAC canceled Milo's speaking slot. His autobiography was pulled by Simon and Schuster, and he resigned from Breitbart. After stepping down from Breitbart, Milo addressed public calls for him to be deported based on the assumption that his work visa was tied to his job at Breitbart, something Milo denied. In February 2017 was a big month for Milo Yenopoulos, because right before things started going downhill for him, he was also supposed to give a speech at UC Berkeley after being invited to campus by the college Republicans as a part of his "dangerous faggot tour" where he goes to various universities and tries to make college students upset. Over 1,500 people showed up to UC Berkeley to protest his speaking event, including about 150 people who the school referred to in a statement as "masked agitators". These would be "black block and tifa style protesters". Based on the size and intensity of the protest, the police canceled Milo's speaking event two hours before he was scheduled to speak. Project protesters smashed windows, set off fireworks, lit fires, threw rocks at police and used Molotov cocktails in and around campus. This event was one of the first times that I can like consciously remember and tifa as a concept of people like talking about like and tifa. It was in the aftermath of this UC Berkeley event. This was a pretty big deal. The day after this protest, President Donald Trump tweeted, quote, "If UC Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of you, no federal funds, question mark." This protest was a big turning point for left wing street demos during this period and intensified what would become a nationwide conflict between right wing agitators proclaiming their right to free speech and so-called anti-fascists seeking to counter and disrupt far-right events and de-platform figures like Milo. Around 2017, Milo started becoming more of a side show figure in the rapidly changing alt-right, far-right world. Later in 2017, he married his husband in Hawaii and the world carried on without Milo taking up as much oxygen, which made it all the more not really surprising but annoying that in 2021 Milo attempted to emerge from a relevancy to proclaim that he was no longer gay, that he had embraced Catholicism and is now, quote, "ex-gay" and, quote, "demoted his husband to housemate." state. You should remember this for later. Now, one of Milo's openly stated goals regarding this, what I'm going to call an exegase stunt, was to reintroduce conversion therapy as a political project. To quote Milo, "Given my new spiritual preoccupations, over the next decade, I would like to help rehabilitate what the media calls conversion therapy." And unfortunately, he may have been more successful in this endeavor than what one may have assumed back in 2021. Conversion therapy laws have since been loosened, and forms of conversion therapy are now actively promoted by the federal government for trans youth. In 2022, Milo interned for Marjorie Taylor Greene, and maybe did some ghost writing for her at least according to a lower loomer. Also, that year, Milo started working for Kanye West, along with Nick Fuentes, and we all know how that turned out. "I am hate of Hitler, command of the Third Reich." Oh, and little known fact, Milo began working for Kanye again this year, after resigning in 2024, because of Kanye's decision to launch an adult entertainment division of the Yeezy brand. During this 2022-24 time period, Milo was burning whatever bridges that had been already totally combusted, among the online right. In 2023, Milo accused Lord Loomer of sexually assaulting one of her employees after Loomer criticized Marjorie Taylor Greene on Twitter. Loomer and Marjorie Taylor Greene have beefed for years. Loomer has said that Greene saw her as like a rival to the queen of the mega throne, and has claimed that Greene was responsible for Trump not hiring Loomer in 2023. So more recently, Loomer, who is strongly pro-Israel, has attacked Marjorie Taylor Greene for her opinions on Gaza and Israel. But Milo and Loomer had been friends or at least friendly since at least 2018, and in 2020, Milo worked on Loomer's first unsuccessful congressional campaign. They suffered a pretty severe falling out around when Milo started working for Marjorie Taylor Greene, severe enough to possibly lead to his deportation. And since then, Milo has not done himself any favors. After Trump took office, again, Milo has been reigniting old conflicts between himself and the mega hard-line influencers who defend any and all of Trump's actions. For years, Milo has claimed to have blackmail on a bunch of right-wing influencers. A few years ago, Milo accused Benny Johnson of secretly being gay. Johnson promised to sue Milo in response, which he never did, and now says he couldn't do because Milo was running from ice. In response to Milo posting that President Trump has lost his way, on March 16, 2026, Loomer wrote, "Why hasn't the Trump administration deported Milo? He's allegedly living in Los Angeles on an expired visa. He's calling for regime change in the US and posts Holocaust denial as an immigrant. It's time for him to be deported. He didn't campaign for Trump. Milo is a foreigner." From what I can find, this post by Loomer is the first time she accused Milo of being in the country illegally and called for his deportation. Next month, in April, Loomer said that, "Sources told her that Milo was facing deportation proceedings. And after Milo was deported last month, Loomer told reporter Will Sommer that she reported Milo to DHS years ago." Sanders' borders are Tom Homan on CNN, being asked whether "Lorra Loomer put ice on Milo's trail. On Piers Morgan, Milo insisted that he did not overstay a visa, quote, "But even if I had, things are supposed to happen in a particular order." Everything that happened was very off, unquote. Milo says he was swarmed by 15 ice agents after he got off the plane in Louisiana and said that two ice agents recognized him and said, "Yeah, I'm not doing this and this is not what I got into this for," and quote, unquote, "walked off the job." Milo also told Piers Morgan that when he got to Houston, ice agents were getting calls from Washington every 20 minutes to inquire about Milo's whereabouts. Well, people on the left have come forward, interestingly, who don't even like you, and to say that this is a disturbing infringement potentially of your first amendment rights to free speech, that you're being punished for your views of Donald Trump and the Trump administration, and so on, and that Laura Luma, who is extremely devoted to President Trump and in his ear all the time, has used your association with Candace Owings and with Marjorie Telegreen and others, has decided to basically shut you up by sending you back to the UK. I don't know how we can come to any other conclusion. This is not how immigration systems are supposed to work, and there are seven, eight, nine things that are supposed to happen that do for everybody else that didn't, in my case, because they were so anxious to just throw me on a plane, because they know how much more difficult it gets once you know, once you're out. But, you know, I have very good lawyers and they do not believe this will stand at all. On CNN, Tom Homan denied that the Trump administration chose to make an example of Yanopolis by deporting him to send a message. We don't deport people based on political affiliation. Again, as soon as we get an order removed, our goal is removing as quick as possible, regardless of who they are. He overstayed his visa. I believe his visit visa, but I'm sure, but he overstayed the visa. He was ordered to appear in immigration court. He didn't show up. The judge ordered him deported. So, once I skipped the order deportation from a federal judge, their jobs executed that order, and that's what they did. On Pierce Morgan's show, Milo pushed back on Homan's and DHS's claims about his visa and legal status. Milo insists that he never overstayed a visa and did not know he had a final removal order. The thing that astonishes me, I have to say, is to see the various bits of the American government, all the machinery of the government, kind of lining up to lie in the manner that Tom Homan just did. I mean, I want to be completely clear with you. And with your viewers, like, I manage, I don't really do, you know, the right wing provocateur thing anymore. I manage lawyers for a living. You know, I'm pretty organized and together person when I'm, you know, when I'm not being silly on Twitter. And I'm married to an American. There's no reason I would take a risk like this. I didn't need to overstay a visa. There were dozens of companies who could have sponsored me. And I married to an American. Milo later said that he first entered the US legally under an '01 visa years ago. That's a temporary work visa for quote, individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement. Milo told Pierce that he's actually had a few of these '01 visas. And the last one he had expired in 2019. But before that happened in 2017, Milo married an American citizen and got a green card filed for an adjustment of status, basically to switch tracks from a visa to a green card. And that's what I did went to the interviews. And that's what I had. And you got a green card? Yes. But when, so if you have a green card on what basis have they thrown you out of the country? They sent notices to an address. They knew I didn't live at anymore. Two addresses ago in Florida, almost 10 years ago, in order to get an in absentia hearing, which is basically they show up with a judge. They tell the judge you didn't show up. You didn't respond to the notices. And they asked the judge to give them, you know, an order. That's what happens. So Milo claims that notices regarding his immigration status and court summons were purposefully sent to an address that the government knew he didn't live at. So that he wouldn't show up to court so that they could get a judge to agree to deport him. He's arguing that all of this was politically motivated because he has enemies close to the administration and was essentially set up. Milo also told Pierce that quote unquote they had previously canceled his work permit without telling him and claimed that the ice agents who detained him said that they quote unquote deliberately excluded Milo's lawyer from the immigration court process. Milo did claim that he had given his new address to immigration authorities, but that they only mailed these hearing notices to his old address in Florida. And what of his green card is your green card still valid? No, because they cancel it without telling me that I don't know. But what period of time could it have been canceled? Well, it must have been canceled sometime the last year. I assume you presumably have you traveled to and from America. I happen not to have done the last year, but one was the last time you entered America probably two years ago. So Milo also says his green card was quote unquote canceled within the last year without him knowing it. Revoking green cards is a very serious civil rights issue. This is something we have spoken on this show about the Trump administration's efforts to revoke green cards. cards from protesters speaking out about the genocide in Palestine. The issue of green card refocation is a serious one. Though Milo admits that the last time he entered the country with his green card was two years ago. And this is interesting. Milo says he only had a two-year green card that he had been renewing every two years. How long is the green card available? We can either get it for two or ten years. What did you have it for? So I had two years and I was renewing on a two-year basis. Had that elapsed? No, no, I had no. No, I had no. So at least according to Milo, the world's most trustworthy man, his green card had not expired by the time of his deportation. It is certainly theoretically possible that Milo just did not renew his green card in time, had issues renewing his green card, or his card was revoked in relation to issues with his marriage, which is how he obtained the two-year green card in the first place. More on that in a sec. But during this interview, Milo did confirm to peers that he is still married to a man, despite coming out as quote ex gay five years ago. Well, I'm married to an American. I've got a dependence. I've got cats. I've got, you know, I've got employees. I have a life there, I've been there for ten years. You know, or everything is there. You're married to an American woman. No, man. I don't know. I don't, I don't. I mean, you're a gay man and you're married to a gay man. I, yes, I don't, I don't, I don't do the sex stuff anymore, but yes. Okay, listen, I'm only asking because I just want to know what family you have left America. Yeah, but where is your, where is your spouse living in the same, in the same house and the other, the other end of the, of the corridor in which state is this? This is in California in California in LA. Yes, right. What Milo doesn't say in this interview is that he's actually in the middle of a really ugly divorce and that might actually be one of the main factors leading to his deportation. A few days after Milo is deported, some less than reputable news outlets reported that Milo's ex-husband, though they're still technically married, threatened to get him deported in 2025, called him an illegal immigrant, and said that he would call the quote "ice hotline" according to court documents from their divorce. And so last week, I spent about a hundred dollars of company money requesting over a dozen documents from the LA Superior Court, totaling hundreds of pages to find out what was actually going on with this divorce and if it could relate to Milo's deportation. I read through hundreds of pages of court declarations, motions, requests, and evidence exhibits. Emails between Milo and his husband indicate that their relationship was falling apart around 2022. Milo told the court that his husband started withholding sexual activity and denying physical affection that same year, which was shortly after Milo publicly announced he was no longer gay. In one of those emails about their relationship from 2022, Milo asked his husband for help with a new residency application. By 2024, Milo's husband seemingly had enough and began the process of separating. I'm going to read an alleged text exchange between Milo and his husband submitted to the court by Milo's husband. Quote, you cannot keep me captive and disenfranchised because you decided not to be gay. You cannot abuse me or your power over me anymore. Milo, shut up stupid cunt, just get out. Husband, I've petitioned the court for a legal separation. Milo, great news. Now that you violated our deal and can no longer assist with my immigration affairs, you will be evicted from this house in seven days. Start packing. Unquote. Another series of texts submitted by Milo from Milo's husband reads quote, "Go fuck yourself Milo LOL. You can have the cats. I've been staying around tolerating your abuse because I feel sorry for you, but enough is enough." In 2025, they started pursuing a divorce. And about a year ago, the husband got a temporary restraining order against Milo. And again, this is not something Milo said on Pierce Morgan's show, but Milo himself has admitted in court documents that he has run into issues renewing his green card because of a lack of cooperation from his husband or ex-husband stemming from their ongoing divorce. For whatever reason, Milo seemingly never applied for naturalization or a 10-year green card after getting married, and continued to only do those two-year renewals. And if someone with a two-year green card gets divorced, they have to fill out a special waiver form, and USCIS needs to confirm that the marriage was actually a real marriage and not just a way to obtain residency. This is to prevent immigration fraud. Now I will read a text allegedly sent by Milo to his husband, submitted to court. "I will pay you $100,000 in four installments in exchange for completing my green card process. You can have $25,000 upon agreement, $50,000 at interview, and $25,000 when the status is awarded. After that, I want nothing more to do with you." Milo has claimed that some of the text messages submitted to court were fabricated, though he has not directly challenged the legitimacy of this particular message in the court documents that I have reviewed. In a declaration in response to a motion for a domestic violence restraining order filed October 20, 2025, Milo claimed that his ex-husband secretly sent himself messages from one of Milo's devices. To quote the motion, "Actively endangering Yenopoulos's status in the country, his husband has forged messages in which he poses as Yenopoulos and admits green card fraud." The specific message which Yenopoulos claims was falsified was sent in February of 2025. It reads, quote, "Fuck you, stupid worthless n-word. I hope you rot in hell with your monkey ancestors. I was only using you for a green card in the first place, but since you filed for divorce, I no longer have need of you. And if you tell the court about this, I will fucking end your life. You are worthless leech with no purpose in my life. Your threats of reporting me for not paying taxes are nothing. No one believes n-words, stupid cunt. You should know what my friends are capable of by now, so I suggest you think twice about going to the police. You eat when I choose to let you eat. Your car is in repossession and will stay that way for as long as I want it to. Enjoy poverty or shut your mouth and do what I say when I tell you. In the meantime, get fucked. Your little petition to the court means nothing to me. I've gotten myself out of way worse against people with much more value than you'll ever have. Now for the last time, get fucked and enjoy poverty. As long as we're still married, I own you. Remember that and start acting the part. Or next time it'll be your face I kick in, not your door. What makes you think a judge will believe you over me. No one believes the black man. Too bad you didn't take photos of your bruises, huh? Not even man enough to hit me back. Get fucked, John. Do your worst file divorce. See if I give a fuck. White always beats black. You're the one with a master's degree in criminology. You should know this already. Unquote. So that is the message sent from Milo's account to his husband that Milo claims is fake. It does contain some phrases which are mirrored in other text messages sent by Milo. In his court declaration, Milo does like armchair forensic text analysis to try to prove that this message is actually fake while also just not addressing the other messages submitted to the court alluding to this same general situation. Milo's motion reads quote, for years his husband has explicitly threatened the enopolis with deportation from the country, calling him an illegal immigrant. He is not. He has informed enopolis he would call the quote ice hotline. Knowing that enopolis's green card status is dependent upon their continued marriage and has in the past refused to appear at mandated USCIS appointments, delaying enopolis's application process until his latest set of financial demands is met. Enopolis has endured years of extortion on these grounds, purchasing sports cars for his husband and making huge cash gifts to him in an effort to save their marriage, but also, of course, with these threats unavoidably in the back of his mind. Unquote. And just that last statement by Milo could itself put his legal status into question because their Milo is admitting in a sense that he has paid huge cash gifts to his ex to get him to co-op with immigration proceedings. In this same declaration, seemingly written by Milo, it's signed that way, even though Milo has lawyers, he spends a considerable amount of time on the N word and accusations from his ex that he's used the N word many times as a form of abusive language. Milo writes that the quote "N word" is a kind of sick preoccupation of his husbands, and that his husband "Displace selective moral outrage about certain words and phrases, choosing to receive them as hateful and vective when it suits his purposes." Ianopolis is British and has no particular attachment to the N word epithet. Like most Europeans, he finds its outsized presence in American life, puzzling and absurd. And he enjoys expressing amusement at the hold it has over Americans of all backgrounds. In the course of his work for yay, formerly Kanye West, Ianopolis was issued with a physical N word pass by the star who was tickled by the sound of the word in Ianopolis's English accent. And Milo submitted evidence to the court regarding his N word passed. He shared articles in the evidence exhibits proving that this N word pass is a real thing that was given to him by Kanye West. Not sure how this is supposed to help with his divorce proceedings. But there's another document filed by Milo from late October, a motion to suspend spousal support to his husband. And in this document, Milo writes that he quote "now realizes that their relationship has been over for many years." Throughout their divorce, there's been a lot of conflict over how much Milo should be legally required to financially support his husband $5,800 or $15,000 a month. In October of last year, Milo claimed that he had given his ex payments and gifts totaling over $600,000 in 2025 alone. Part of this may include almost $40,000 a month in rent paid a year in advance. Milo's ex-husband has claimed that Milo earns between $35,000 to $60,000 a month from his work with quote-unquote hip-hop moguls. In this October motion regarding spousal support, Milo wrote that demands for payments from his ex were quote "manipulative and accompanied by threats, including threats to Ianopolis's immigration status, as well as half a dozen malicious calls to the LAPD." Milo also claims in this motion that his husband threatened him by saying he's opening a criminal case in the UK regarding the quote-unquote "frogulent papers" Milo filed. In evaluating all these different claims and text messages, it's hard to say what exactly is true, false, or exaggerated, because it's two angry exes accusing each other of stuff in an expensive divorce. But the contents of at least three text messages could amount to immigration fraud. Whether those texts are authenticated or not, the fact that they are in a court record certainly would not help Milo's case. And if his ex-husband is willing to say that Milo used him for a green card, whether that is a true statement or not is similarly not great for Milo in the eyes of DHS. Even just the presence of widely publicized articles where Milo claims he's no longer gay and that he's demoted his husband to housemate, just three or four years after getting married, could be hard to explain to DHS if he's under scrutiny for possible immigration fraud. That accompanied by text messages promising $100,000 in exchange for completing a green card process, and Milo accusing his husband of "violating their deal" and that he can no longer assist with immigration affairs could create trouble for Milo in his appeal following his deportation, which yes, Milo is pursuing, and through that we may get more information regarding the exact sequence of events that led to him being deported to the UK. These divorce documents demonstrate Milo was well aware of issues regarding his green card renewal, and he was certainly aware of lower loomers calls for him to be deported. And Milo may have just decided to use this situation as an opportunity for one more career pivot, or he just never thought that someone like him would actually be deported. Even if his status was questionable for a brief or maybe not so brief amount of time, he could have had it in his head that his politics or his social status would make him special and immune to enforcement, which of course is reserved for dangerous violent criminals, which for whatever reason, he himself would never fit into said category. As opposed to someone like say Alon Omar, who last year Milo accused of committing "the most brazen and shameless public immigration fraud in American history" and called on Tom Homan to have her arrested and deported. This post was just months before Milo told the LA Superior Court that his own ex-husband has accused him of immigration fraud. Hey everyone, it's the Jonas Brothers with the "Hey Jonas" podcast. We've been catching up with some great friends Paul Rod, Michael Bubley, Seth Meyers, Nile Horan, Jake Shane, and making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters, like Alex National. She likes to control everyone. Okay, well control is a harsh word. I am more outspoken, growing up a lot of the times because she was so quiet. I would speak for like the both of us. Now I'm working on like thinking a mom is really nice, not thinking before I speak. And Joey King. You know if your like mom is yelling at your sibling and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just like won't let that slide. It's like you only can yell at your sibling. That is not what I want. Talk about her like that. Plus, we've been taking your calls, listening to your voice mails and giving advice, or at least trying to. So if you've got catching up to do, now's the perfect time. Listen to "Hey Jonas" on the iHeartReadyWap, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, "Shut up, don't say anything." Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive, listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartReadyWap, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. I'm going to have to look up this story, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartReadyWap, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, a panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? No! I've been dying too. I'm so sorry, I'm seeing a reading of Sadako in the Thousand Paper Cranes by Audrement Donald at the Wonderland Book Store. That's crazy, I went to the Wonderland Book Store yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Doc 30. No way! I have to come to the last bookstore though, Kim Katrol is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. A panel of Eurovision participants. He winks on a low end. I hear he'll get almost here, the eyelashes hit each other. Listen to artists on artists on artists on the iHeard Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the death of Empire and its nightmare afterlife. I'm your host, Mia Wong. We are living to the end of something. An epoch, an age, a way of life, a democracy. We have covered this end to a series of prisms from the peer and total dissent of the presidency into a form of autocratic rule by fiat to the destruction of even the most basic state capacity, virology, meteorology that now largely forgotten time that he funded the nuke police, the death of American science and the wounds dealt with the education system, ISIS full on ethnic cleansing of a significant portion of the American population. This is the end of America as it has existed since the end of WWII. But it is also the death of the Pax Americana. And today we're going to be looking not just at the death of what was in America. We're going to be looking at what it means in terms of the American Empire. We're going to be looking at the Pax Americana, the modern era of American Hegemony. We're going to be looking at what it was. It's deep and profound ties and origins in the U.S. Navy and how the remnants of that era and the empire that had been so carefully and bloodily constructed over the course of centuries was shattered by the Trump administration's attempt to do an even more over-at-form imperialism. The era of American Hegemony is over. And before we continue into the endless waking night there, let us look at what it was. Now, I have been talking about the death of American Hegemony for a while now, originally in the context of the apoccal disaster of the American war with Iran. And recently we've seen one of the most embarrassing and humiliating incidents and evidences of failure of the old American system, which is the declaration and then subsequent walking back, immediate walking back, it failure to launch of what was called economic d-day. So for people who have forgotten what economic d-day was because I don't blame you, this was such a fiasco, economic d-day was supposed to be this enormous campaign of secondary sanctions against anyone trading with Iran spread over a number of sectors. This was designed to cripple what remained of the Iranian economy. And there was a giant press blitz about it. Again, they were calling it economic d-day. And now, multiple weeks later, we have a couple of sanctions. If a few sanctions that they apply at the time, we now have some sanctions against some Iranian airlines and essentially gets a Turkish bank. Now, again, originally when this was described, this was described as a sort of American total economic war. The US would completely isolate Iran from all of its trading partners. However, in order to do this, you would have to actually go after China. And the Trump administration has obviously had trade disputes with China, but the kind of sanctions they would need to levy in order to actually completely isolate Iran or something that the US is simply not willing to pursue because, get this, the US and China make an enormous amount of money both from trading with each other. Now, what's interesting here is that this kind of devastating economic campaign, this is something that the United States used to be able to do. Now, obviously, wouldn't have been able to do it easily. But this kind of sort of, in theory, right coalition built large-scale sanctioned package to completely economically isolated country. This is what the American Empire has always been best at. And the fact that the US can't do it now signals a fundamental transformation in death of what the old American Empire was. Now, to do the tie-in to the Navy here, because the Navy is a crucial part of the story, and about what, you know, the sort of Pax Americana was, just to explain this very simply, right, a huge portion of whatever the Pax Americana was, was the ability of the American Navy and its sort of supremacy over most of the world's oceans. Its ability to maintain open safe and stable trade routes for global capital, and to sort of ineligently pivot to this sort of naval apparatus. We can notice that D-Day was also an exercise in American naval power that is sort of astounding. I mean, the ability to do force rejection on the other side of the world on that scale is sort of mind-boggling for most of human history. And it's a demonstration of the way in which American hegemony was built by the Navy. Now, obviously, the US originally is a land empire in ways that are very easily sort of naturalized and forgotten, right? The United States is a settler colony. It was built on a series of genocidal exterminations and land seizures from the indigenous people who had been here before over the course of centuries and centuries to continue with you this day. So there is on the one hand, right, this in some ways very conventional settler colonial land empire. But there's also always been a significant naval component to the United States because of, you know, how settlers got to the colony and then also because of the economic ties that those settlers maintained with Europe and the ways that trade networks developed, you know, the US has always, to some extent, been a naval-oriented power as it's sort of establishing, as it sort of did its genocides across the Constance North America. But for our purposes, there's an important departure in the history of the American empire and how it functions in the mid to late 1800s. And it particularly intensifies around this guy. He was just kind of a random Navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mayhan who writes this book called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. It's this book basically arguing that if you're going to be a great empire, you need to have sea power, right? You need to be able to sort of like maintain control over the world's oceans. He releases this in 1890. A lot of what this turns into is this attempt, you know, in the sort of reorientation of the American Navy around pushing into the Pacific. Now, obviously the Navy had always been a tool of American imperialism. It is what the US used to enforce its rule over Latin America. And this is even before this sort of late era that we're talking about, even before the 1890s, right? When you're looking at sort of, you know, American interventions in Latin America, a lot of that is being done through the US Navy. But Mayhan is responsible, is kind of too strong of a word, but he's an influential theorist of this push, you know, west into the Pacific, right? It's the 1890s is this era of, oh, well, we've done manifest destiny. We've like conquered this fucking brutal genocidal empire from coast to coast. And there's this question of where we're going next. And where we're going next turns out to be, okay, we need to be able to sort of refuel ships across the Pacific. So we need to see control of these islands that will allow us to have like cold refueling stations so we can continue using move with project naval power through the Pacific. This turns into a, like the Spanish American war, which is, you know, not a war that is fought in Spain. It is a war that is fought in Cuba and in the Philippines and at sea. And it also leaves the creation of what's called the White Fleet by Theodore Roosevelt, which is, I can plant a lot on this show about how just there is no such thing as subtlety anymore. And it's true that there is not subtlety now. There was also not subtlety back then when he read a story, goes off about it, everyone goes, oh, it was called the White Fleet because the holes of the ship were white. And it's like, yeah, okay, like, yes, technically speaking, that is true. But every single one of these just unhinged racists who are involved in this entire project, like everyone knows what it means to have a fleet called the White Fleet, right? You know, this is the fleece that is used to sort of like, it was called opening Japan, but like, you know, it's used to just force Japan to open itself, sort of Western traders and Western imperialism. As a result of this, you also see eventually sort of the various stages of like conquest and annexation of Hawaii. What you're seeing is, in effect, the American empire Entering its name. sea era. Its sea era is the era in which its international ambitions really, really expand. Now obviously the US has been doing naval interventions on the other side of the world. I think that basically since the moment it was founded, there's obviously the very famous war with the Barbaries states that the US has like right after it's founded. But this period marks this sort of transformation of the US into something that's, it's not quite accurate to call it like true global force projection, but that's kind of what happens over the course of World War I and then World War II. This gets us into talking about the sort of Pax Americana itself, right? Because if you're familiar with the term, it comes from this period of sort of Roman history that was called like the Pax Romano where you have this kind of relatively unchallenged Roman empire ruling as sort of a regional and global hegemon and that it was able to you know enforce some kind of degree of peace. Obviously like we say peace right and obviously anyone who has like lived through this period is well aware that like no, obviously this is not like an enormously peaceful time. It is I guess technically less war than like World Wars one and two, but you know and this is this is true of the like the Pax Romano too is it this isn't like actual peace. It's just a time in which there is an empire that is large enough that there aren't really as many sort of hot wars. But what's sort of called the Pax Americana starts after World War II and this is important for a number of reasons. One is the effect of World War II on the rest of the world, right? The US has a significant portion of the entire world's manufacturing economy after the end of the war. It's one of a very small number of like intact industrial belts that exist in the world after after the war and also would work to shatters. It overturns the old sort of world powered system in which the French and British empires and also you know to the by this point like the sort of burgeoning German empire Nazi empire and the Japanese fascist empire had sort of been dividing up the world. But it's it's it's this real sort of death now specifically for our purposes for the British who go from being the kind of naval power that the US is modeling itself after, right? Does this naval empire with the ability to project force anywhere that's able to rule over vast swaths of territory because it completely controls the seas or controls enough of the season. It has control of sort of like naval and trade lines. But like that fleet like the British Navy gets just annihilated in World War II and the British Empire just doesn't have the resources to maintain itself and through also a bunch of anti-colonial rebellions it begins to tear itself apart. You know in force force of capitalism to function and for it to function efficiently. You need someone who has the naval power to control the seas and you need this because this is how trade operates, right? And this is going to become especially true as as this period goes on in ways we will talk about in a moment. So at the end of World War II the US is sort of the driving force in a lot of ways behind. I mean obviously the allied powers are involved in various ways in the establishing of the United Nations. But the US becomes kind of the seat of like the world's sort of global economic and institutional apparatus, right? The IMF of the World Bank, you know I mean like the United Nations meets in New York, right? And and this is maybe the most important thing for our purposes right now. The US becomes the world's reserve currency. And it also becomes the currency in which you buy oil, which is also just an incredibly important advantage. And this is the basis of the American Empire and one of the things that makes it so powerful is that you know this is what's called seniorage privilege, right? Which is that like everything is being operated. The whole world economy is being operated in US dollars. It is the world reserve currency. You can buy almost anything with it. And what that means for the US is like a every time the US prints a dollar bill, right? It's however much it costs to like make a bill and then like $100 exists now. And then B and this is also extremely important, the US can't run out of dollars in the same way that you know other countries we've talked about this before in other episodes in the same way that other countries can run out of American dollars which causes massive sort of economic crises. The US doesn't have that problem, right? Like obviously you have to do like inflation management, but you can't just like run out of dollars in a way that like anyone else in the world can. And this is also the currency where you know US government bonds become the currency at the rest of the world's reserve banks put their money in. So this means that the entire rest of the world by by like by purchasing these bonds, right? Is effectively just like subsidizing anything the US government wants to do, you know government bonds are government debt, right? And most of the government debt it turns out is war debt because the what the US wants to do over this period and again, calling it the Paxing Americana. But like the thing the US ramps up government spending to do is fight horrifying imperialist wars in Korea and Vietnam. But these are like bankrupt for large extent by these sort of large scale bond purchases. But that is the deal of sort of the the Paxing Americana which is that the US has this enormous military, it will quote unquote protect you from communism that that is a twin pronged thing. On the one hand, right, you have and this is this is why I've been talking so much about the world of the US Navy. You have the US Navy maintaining open shipping lines around the world. And then on the other hand, you have the US shall we say three letter agencies and also the military and also still the Navy, you know doing interventions and doing genocides in a whole bunch of countries in order to like keep the communist out of power. But the deal is you buy into the American protection bracket, right? The US will put a shit ton of military bases in your country. You will buy American bonds. You let the dollar be the world reserve currency and in exchange for this, you're supposed to get again, secure trade lines and the capitalist class gets to like maintain its control of the means of production and the workers do not get to have that stuff. Now, the importance of these shipping lanes are exacerbated by the other sort of wing of what you would call this I don't know, it's maybe a little bit to, well, I don't think it's too after to say this is also sort of another wing of American anti-communism and you know, just like the war on the global working class in general, which is the expansion intensification of what's called containerization, which is, you know, based on shipping containers, right? It's the process that begins what's called offshoring where dealing with this sort of declining global profits and the rising power of the working class in a number of countries, the global capitalist economy spearheaded by the United States figure out that using these giant shipping and logistics lines and using these shipping containers, they can shift their manufacturing off to more impoverished countries and countries in which it's easier to just machine gun workers. And this allows companies to reduce wages and have a firmer grasp on the control of the means of production by again, just machine gunning workers if they try to go on strike. But in order to be able to suddenly make your cars not in the United States, but somewhere else, say for example, Mexico or China, you need to be able to do this massive set of shipping things, right? Because also you're now working in these extremely long supply chains that like stretch all over the world and are bringing parts to a bunch of different places and they're being assembled a different place and they're being assembled in another place. In order to sort of pit the workers of every single one of these places against each other. And then pit those workers who are working on it against the workers, you know, a lot of you have work. This is what's known as the spatial fix, by the way, it certainly was popularized by Marxist Geographer David Harvey. I think it's older than him or his work, but I am blanking right now on exactly where it's from. Yeah, but the product of the spatial fix is that the capitalist class is able to keep making money. The international workers movements is sort of gutted and then has its spine ripped out. And you have this sort of like the end of history era. And even at this point, right, for a lot of countries around the world, this deal is worth it because this deal is like, shut the fuck up and let the US sort of big things in its favor. It's obviously going to have a bunch of carveouts in all these massive free trade deals that advantage it. It's going to be running an empire. You're going to be complicit in this empire. It's going to force you to go do its imperialist stuff. But it's worth it because you, the capitalist class of your country, get to keep making money. But again, all of this was based on the American ability to maintain trade and control of the world shipping lanes. This was something that had been uncontested, right? I guess you could argue like Somali pirates or whatever. But yeah, the US's ability to maintain global shipping isn't even a thing that until Trump decided to invade Iran that anyone was thinking about really being contested. Obviously, you can look at Chinese expansion in the South China Sea or whatever. But that's not threatening the ability to move oil around the world. But the problem here for this empire is that it was taken over by people who don't understand how it works. Trump doesn't really understand. Trump doesn't understand any of this at all, which is why it just never really seemed to have occurred to any of the people around them that they wouldn't be able to take control of the trade of for news and American policy towards the straight of for news other than that period where they said they were annexing it has kind of just been to pretend that it's open and also screaming about it not being open at the same time. But this, this event, this loss of control of one of the most vital shipping lanes in the entire world, which the American empire had been able to maintain and keep open even though one of its mortal enemies like border is it, right? You have been able to keep the shipping lanes open not by actually necessarily applying military power, but by threatening it. And this is also the important thing about the American empire is that American military power always works best when you're threatening it and not when you're actually deploying it because once you actually have to like deploy the US army to a place and fight a war, that usually turns into a shit. I mean, you know, you look at the modern American history of wars and it's like, okay, well, you know, you have like the absolute nightmares and Vietnam and in a rocket, Afghanistan and these, these sort of like, you know, I actually like deploying the American military tends not to work out particularly well for for the American empire. But the threat of it and the threat of the ability to just, you know, to kill an unbelievable number of people to inflict this damage is enough to cause other countries to fall in line. One of the sort of neo-Wong promises if it could happen here is that if you're listening to this show, you will know what the plaza Accords are and you will know what the reverse plaza Accords are. So the plaza Accords are this, this thing in the 1980s with the US, you know, the US manufacturing economy is tanking. And the US basically ghosts the negotiating table and just says like, fuck it, your American military protectorates. And the you here is Japan and West Germany, which are these rising industrial powerhouses, right? And the US goes, fuck you, you're going to nuke your own manufacturing economies by increasing the value of your currency so that the US can have a manufacturing economy. And Japan and Germany are forced to do it. You know, they're not like explicit about this, right? But that's the underlying tension of what's happening here. This is the American empire functioning in the taxi maricana as it was designed to function where yeah, you have the Japanese economy, which in this period is like threatening to overtake the American economy is a large economy in the world. And the US is able to just kneecap it because it's like, no, we control the seas. We have a million military bases there. We can just dictate your economic policy. Like and this is like Ronald Reagan, right? Like we're not talking about like the most subtle technocratic like manager of empire, right? This is like a senile actor just become president. And he's able to do this. But Trump is not, right? You know, Trump sees the raw power of the American empire and goes, Oh, right. The point is to use it, right? Like the thing that makes you a man, the thing that makes you a nation is just deploying this shit and killing and trying to kill everyone who opposes you. And this has led to him ending the basis of American global hegemony, which is like for the first time, like since World War two, it's like, yeah, no, the US just like can't maintain the global shipping supply, right? And you know, and you can look at the other sort of major challenge to this and OPEC, right? Where OPEC is, to some extent, doing this attempt to like prevent the flow of goods through the capitalist economy. But OPEC is trying to do it directly from the production and not through the distribution and, and the US responds to this and the attempts by a bunch of other countries to form, we're called mini packs to form like OPEC's for like copper instead of oil to form these like mini cartels for all of the sort of like world's primary commodities. And the US takes this enormously seriously. This is the G eight. So originally the G seven was founded specifically to head off this threat and to defeat it, right? So the US has always taken these kind of threats enormously seriously. But even OPEC was threatening the production of like primary commodities, right? It was threatening oil, it was threatening oil from the production side, not from the distribution. And now it's like, no, the US is like losing control of the distribution side for no actual like strategic reason. And I obviously like I don't I don't want it to sound like I'm angry that the US Empire is failing. I am in fact quite glad that the US Empire is failing. Although obviously, you know, the way that it's going out in his death spasm is going to be absolutely hideous, right? The death of of rule by a single giant empire, if it's not actually replaced by the end of empire more generally tends to become a bunch of different empires fighting. And you know, a bunch of empires fighting and also one empire rule are both bad outcomes that we checks notes do not like. Obviously, but it is astonishing the extent to which an incredibly sophisticated and old empire has just been torn apart in a year for no reason. And now we have to sort of grapple with what it means that this older form of empire has died and that we're having this sort of new, more fascist form of empire rise and fight its horrifying wars. And the actual meaning of this is not just the pure examination of history. What this all means is something that is going to be created by people like you and people like me and how we rise or fail to rise to the moment the death of empires created. Hey, everyone. It's the Jonas Brothers with the Hey Jonas podcast. We've been catching up with some great friends Paul Rod Michael Blay, Seth Meyers, Nile Horan, Jake Shane, and making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters, like Alex National. She likes to control everyone in time. I am more outspoken. Now I'm working on like thinking of mom. I'm not thinking before I speak. And Joey King. You know, if you're like mom is yelling at your sibling and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just like won't let that slide. It's like the only you can yell at your sibling. That is not what I talk about her like that. I talk about her like that. Plus we've been taking your calls, listening to your voice mails and giving advice or at least trying to. So if you've got catching up to do now is the perfect time. Listen to Hey Jonas on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm gonna have to look up the story. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest popcorn. culture moments, nothing is off the table. Listen to pro society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Hi, this is Kylie Breikman. - Angel Jaretana. - Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonnell. - The improvised character comedy podcast were each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. I don't know, I think I sort of foe journaling. - Okay. - A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. - Have you guys done Terry Gross' Peloton class? - No! - I'm so sorry. I'm seeing a reading of Sadako in the thousand paper cranes by Audrey McDonald's at the Wonderland bookstore, 14. - That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland bookstore yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Dark 30. - No way. - Patrick of the last bookstore, though. Kim Catrol is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. - He winks on Halloween. - It's right up next to the microphone. - I hear you get the elbows here, the eyelashes hate each other. - You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. - Listen to artists on artists on artists, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - This is, it could happen here, executive disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis, today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Sophie Lichterman. - Yeah. - This episode we're covering the week of September 2nd to September 9th. Welcome. - Before we start, I have a tiny correction, massive correction, depending on who you are. Many people have reached out, at least half of the people who live in Florida, listen to this podcast, to let me know that there are, in fact, crocodiles in Florida. Many of them live near some kind of large power plant. - Yes. - I didn't know about this. That is because in my life, I have avoided Florida. You know, apart from when I was eight and went to see the animals that they keep in a little prison there. But yeah, thank you for letting me know. I'm excited to learn more about your crocodiles. Maybe I'll come visit them one day. - I actually showed this chomph the oligarchy poster to a friend who's from Florida after we recorded. And they confirmed it is indeed a crocodile, even though alligators are much more common. They're like, it probably should have been an alligator. But I spent like five minutes looking at like, comparisons of crocodile photos and alligator photos. I was like, I think it's maybe a crocodile, but I don't know for sure. 'Cause it's kind of like a crunchy, kind of low poly image. But crocodile confirmed. - People Florida, it turns out really fucking love that crocodile. - They're pretty cool. They're pretty scary. - Yeah, congratulations on having a crocodile. I went bass fishing Florida once. Let's see, don't do that. Incredibly dull. Let's talk about the news. - Let's talk about the news. I hope everyone had a good fake labor day. - I worked. - Also worked. - Well, there you go. - I went camping. - Well, on Monday, labor day, Mayor Mamdani signed an executive order creating the Office of Worker Power, which will be led by labor organizer Tony Pearlstein, who recently served as the organizing director of the UAW, it's the United Auto Workers. This quote unquote first in the nation, office aims to use city resources to help workers organize themselves, connect them with contacts, unionize and build power. And this is inspired by the emergency workplace organizing committee, which is a joint initiative by DSA and the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers. - Hi, you walk. - Conceptually really interested to see how this turns out. - Yes, and you can go to the website to nyc.gov/workerpower to learn more. Similar to the rental ripoff hearings earlier this year to address the concerns of tenants, the Office of Worker Power will be holding public hearings on worker issues, which will then drive policy going forward. But there's way more than just these hearings as a part of this office. And I'm excited to see how this develops in the next few months. Sounds good, let's see if it can be executed in a very helpful way. - In other news, according to a new legal opinion by the DOJ, states must report any undocumented immigrants that they know of to DHS in order to receive federal welfare funds to assist low income families. To quote from this opinion quote, when a state chooses to participate in the temporary assistance for needy families and the supplemental security income programs, all agencies within that state, not only those that administer benefits, must report individuals known to be not lawfully present in the United States to the Department of Homeland Security. Unquote, it's a new interpretation of law revising an earlier opinion from 1998. - Yeah, I haven't listed to this. I was gonna look into this. I thought about doing a whole episode on where we're at with public charge and generally with, so I think I might kind of hold off. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I will say that generally, the states wouldn't have, they have consciously not kept list of undocumented people as sanctuary states, right? Which is largely who this will be targeting. So it's not as if the absence from one list does not necessarily mean you're undocumented and creating a list of undocumented people would be a very unwise move. So like, I don't know what this means practically, right? Like, if it's saying you have to, if you have a list of undocumented people, you have to turn over to get tant, and they can just be like, we don't have it. Like cool, but I do need to spend a bit more time really up on this in the in combination with the public charge stuff I spoke about a couple of weeks ago. It's just a code to me the states would probably know who would dream us, right? So they would have that available to them. - It is expected that this will face some challenges that this new opinion from the DOJ will face challenges in court, but this did come out last week finally for me. One of the staffers who was fired after posting that Ron DeSantis' "Fashwave" video in 2023, which we did a whole thing on. - Oh yeah. (laughing) - It had a son and a rat. It had all the stuff. - All the things. - That staffer now works at the State Department as Mark Rubio's chief speech writer and Deputy Director of the agency's policy planning office according to you reporting from the New York Times. - Oh my. - Yeah. - That's cool and bad. - Yeah, I'm recalling this sort of like language of like the left as this like, you know, gross, diseased like anti-civilizational force that was used in like Mark Rubio's like a left wing terrorism address at that conference a few weeks ago. - Yeah. - Thinking about who, who his chief speech writer is, it does help contextualize some of the words that Mark Rubio and others were saying. - Right. - All right, moving on, starting out a Russian drone translated Romanian airspace on Tuesday. They've been like, I don't really know how to describe this other than like drone trolling. There were two Spanish jets at the station there that scrambled to like intercept the drone, but they're continuation of drone trolling states like within the EU and NATO. Like this is a serious thing, right? Like these are serious and ongoing provocations. - Yeah. - Secondly, the Bama Flatilla. So the Bama Flatilla, if you remember, was reduced to six ships on its way to resupply the embattled hunter garrison in Myanmar. It lost five of those six ships on the way back. (laughing) Now the Flatilla is just a boat. - Incredible. - Yeah, I think it illustrates how like unconventional warfare or guerrilla warfare has changed in the last 10 years, right, that like the upper-erawadi river now is dominated by the resistance with FPV drones. Like that is what's taking it. And there are also like just straight up standing on the bank and shooting them with cargo stubs, but it's the FPV drones that have changed the way that the state can move. In this case, rivers are very important in Myanmar and this is just an illustration of how much harder it is for the state to use those rivers. Next, a D.C. circuit court has ruled that the IRS's choice to share the information of thousands of taxpayers with DHS violates the law. It also said that arguments to the contrary were, quote, weak source, and the court also suggested that they could be civil and criminal consequences for IRS staff who keep doing this. The United Kingdom, France, and Canada this week announced sanctions on some of the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. This is part of a new approach that we spoke about some time ago on ED, right, like where they are claiming that there will be consequences for some of Israel's more flagrant violations of international law, obviously not all of them. And like this alone, it's not going to be the thing that stops Israel. just doing what the fuck it wants, including what would have been nice like 50 years ago. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like some point in early in the middle of the last century would have been a great time to start doing shit. This is an interesting one that I thought kind of initially, I thought maybe this fitted into the state-sponsored attacks on European countries, but a number of rocket attacks on German infrastructure have occurred in the last 10 days. And infrastructure for these rocket attacks have been found by German police who arrested a man yesterday. So they're claiming the actions are like a single person, perhaps someone from like the ecological movement, as opposed to like a state incursion. This is still very new. So I'm going to keep an eye on this, especially given some of the attacks on like energy infrastructure that were mentioned by the state department when they were most recently detonating organizations, SDGTOs. There has been a degree of militant environmentalist action in Germany, specifically the past few years. It's like the only left-wing movement that's like kind of alive there. That's a little unfair, but yeah. Finally, the White House has posted a picture of New Mexico or a map of New Mexico a part of it, but Mexico has crossed out and America has written instead. This is very silly. I'm going to come back to this a little bit in my section because it's weirdly candid or related. It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, I don't quite know what they're going for here. Like it's not. I guess it is. All of New Mexico. Hey. Our Supreme ruler is a toddler. I've just noticed this map of New Mexico. Like it has the bordering United States. States, but it does not appear to acknowledge that Mexico exists. Great. Great. Yeah. Great sensation. Yeah. In a related news, television shows, South Park has changed their name to South America. Like what, really? In a yes, their newest season will be called South America. She's supposed to. She's supposed to. Because just as I'm sure it's a whole thing with mocking Trump. They've always been a satirical show, but they've gone very hard into Trumpist that tire the past few years. I don't know. A lot of it's really funny, personally. But I don't know. Finally, we've deployed South Park against the enemy. They're doomed now. Some of the most ideological committed libertarians out there. So speaking of surging fascism in very bleak ways, there are recent German state elections in the state of Saxony, on hold. Now, on the one hand, this is not a very well-populated state. However, comma, the neo-Nazi party, the alternative for Germany has come in first in this election with technically submajority of 45% of the vote. But this is the first time that a fairly overtly neo-Nazi party has been the largest party in a German election since the Nazis were in power. This is extremely alarming. The AFD is the most far right of the European far right parties. They're anywhere close to power. They are further right even than looking like Maria Le Pen's party in France. They are fairly openly talking about kinds of mass deportations that on the one hand are happening right now in the United States. But journalists repeatedly infiltrating their meetings. The stuff we're talking about publicly is the kind of stuff that ICE is doing in the United States. The stuff we're talking about in private and not even that in private is removing all immigrants and Jews from the country. So this is extremely alarming. It's unclear exactly if AFD can form a government. It kind of doesn't look like it. However, there is a small chance that the breakaway, I don't even want to call them left. Germany has another kind of like what I would call like a quote unquote left wing fascist party called BSW that was a break away from their left party. That is a like what if we went fascist on social issues, but also did a welfare state party. And if those guys, you know, tolerate an AFD government, they could put them in power. The problem is in order to form a non-AFD government, you need every single other party to work together. So it's a catastrophe. And the ruling CDU, the Christian Democratic Union, which is also like an increasingly right wing party, lost an enormous amount of support and is unable to form a government. So AFD is just three seats away from forming a majority on their own in the state parliament. Yeah. And BSW could put them over the line. So not great results in the regional election in Germany, if you terrifying care about people. Yeah. Also like notable, I think, because we had seen this tendency towards like a Trump endorsement is like the death now of electoral success. This is obviously not been the case here. Trump truth about AFD, calling them a populist party today. Well, yeah. And I think it's also worth mentioning that part of the danger here is the almost unique dysfunction of the German left, which has had its green party basically discredited by pedophile scandals that we talked about, or that Robert talked about behind the bastards, dire linka, their left party is a complete disaster and has been basically sentenced inception as a weird merger of like East German communists and West German social movements. Even their autonomous theme is a wreck because there's a bunch of like altars ionists who will do things like push people in front of train tracks for like not supporting Israel. So yeah, the like one of the things that is a contributor to the rise of the AFD and their continued rise is the almost unique like catastrophe that is the German left. There are obviously good people. They're fighting the good fight, but it's a bleak situation. Also bleak is the amount of sports betting and other life betting apps ads increased sponsorship fuckery that's been happening and in our faces, particularly in the last week. I just want to talk about a few of them like former Los Angeles Laker and now active Philadelphia 76er and and man I used to admire as hold the team this, but I used to have what I call my LeBarbie, which was a LeBron James Kendall. I had to put in the basement. I couldn't look at him. Wait, is this the guy from Space Jam 2? That's the guy from Space Jam 2. Exactly. But not Space Jam 1. That's very important. Oh god. Okay. Now I understand. Very, very different. No, no, no, the guy from Space Jam 1 made gambling his own problem. He didn't make it anybody else's problem. Very different. All the goats are involved with gambling in some way or another. But LeBron James is now one of the new faces of the prediction market platform Holly market. He teased on X the everything app and a ad that was about 14 seconds with him like walking into polymarket HQ and then put out a further ad that like showed him with a bunch of other very famous athletes and celebrities like I think back it was like Derek Geter, director Spike Lee, Spike Lee brother come on. You got to do better than this. Yeah, that sucks. A number of like current and both former athletes Eli Manning across the board and her sports business girl calm quote, the terms of his deal with polymarket have not been discussed, but MBA rules restrict players, financial arts and companies that offer league related way during or similar products, including limits on ownership stakes. However, back in February, also very famous MBA player, Yannis into the Kupo, who is now on the Miami Heat. Wild bof season in the MBA posted, we all on Kalshi now. And he posted this like this black and white image, everyone is online. The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own. Today I'm joining Kalshi as a shareholder. We all on Kalshi now. Yannis into the Kupo. I think that it is really a bad to have active athletes as the face of sports betting. Even if LeBron is talking not about basketball, you still when you think LeBron James, you think basketball. So it's still having an impact there. I wish this out was the only part of the story that I was going to talk about. But as someone with a uniquely knowledgeable mind when it comes to bad people ads and podcasting, I have to talk about someone who, you know, has is if you could guess by the name of her podcast, not great takes all the time. Amanda Hersh, the host of the popular and it is very popular. I mean, very, very, very popular, probably not with our audience, but very popular podcast, not skinny, but not fat. That's what the podcast called Jesus Christ. Appologized on Sunday. And this is per the cut. And I went and tracked down some of the things that they mentioned this. Appologized on Sunday after facing backlash for posted a polymarket ag pegged to the Lindsey Clancy trial. Hersh shared a statement calling the ad in sensitive wrong and out of character for her. But the The original ad was posted. shortly after the judge presiding of the fancy case declared a Miss trial, and in this video, she shared that 36% of traders thought that Clancy, who was on trial for strangling her three children, would be convicted of murder. Hersh all are added that she had been so glued to this case, and it was on the edge of her seat waiting for the verdict. According to a screenshot, the ad was captioned, quote, the judge declared a Miss trial in the Lindsey Cancer trial. On @polymarket, it was predicted that the verdict would be not guilty. Are you surprised? #polymarketpartner. What the fuck? She simply did it and apologized. But what in the actual fuck are we cooked? That was my first thought. I read this article from the cut and I kind of sat in silence for a good amount of time. Like, what are we doing here? What are we doing? What are we doing here? Like, she didn't add about betting on a trial where multiple children were killed. Like, how despicable are we as humans that that's even an option? Like, why are we betting on that? Why is that something people can bet on? That should not be okay. And then if that wasn't, you know, bad enough, I got the whiplash of waking up this morning after staying up far too late watching the US open to see that actor Sidney Sweeney, who's dating a horrible ex-manager and famous Zionist Scooter Braun, I just want to add that context. Quote, this is from Friday. Sidney Sweeney stripped down for a steamy new ad for Novig. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but that's how I'm gonna pronounce it. The latest sports trading app, a prediction market for fans of football, baseball, soccer, tennis, and more. The euphoria star goes nude in the ad. That's not the problem. Be as naked as you want and poses with a variety of sports equipment like footballs, basketballs, a hockey net, and other athletic gear. She also joins Novig, bad name, as a strategic partner and equity holder. Quote, the campaign was all about embracing a fun idea since Sweeney and a statement. The concept is simple. Cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports. The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor, and playful edge. It ruined my morning. It's out of control, something must be done. I'm kind of hoping, and I posted this on Blue Sky. I'm like, I'm kind of hoping it's like that one time in the Super Bowl, where a bunch of really famous people got in trouble for doing like crypto scam ads and I'm kind of hoping that's what happens here, but I don't have a lot of faith, especially under this administration that that will be the case. Yeah, the last thing I was saying, this is I guess anecdotal and I don't know if it's statistically significant, but I think it is interesting. I have been seeing a move from kind of like mid-sized, like independent people who do sports stuff away from and sort of getting pissed off at sports betting and pushing away from it. And this has been people who had taken money from these companies before and have looked at what this has done and it just been like, oh my god. So I'm hoping that maybe in the long run we're seeing sports where this was born become a place where people like lower down on the totem pole start to push against it in a way that can eventually do something, but right now it's it's so bleak. It's bleak and it's just in our faces. And speaking of things that are bleak in our faces, it's time for our capitalism. Here's some ads. Nice. All right, we're back. And we are now going to discuss two of America's longest standing foes. Of course, I'm talking about Iran and Canada. No particular order, but we're going to start with Iran because it's not the alphabetical one, I guess. So the U.S. Iran conflict has really been significantly escalating again this last week. The United States has sunk a tanker. The Houthis have been launching into much as the conflict and obviously the Houthis and either the United States know Iran, but conflict in the region. The Houthis launched its drone barrage on Saudi cities and Iran has responded by threatening boats all over the region. So if we start with that Houthi drone attack, 73 civilians were injured as the infrastructure, including oil refineries, other civilian targets were hit by these Houthi long-range drones. In response, of course, Saudis have attacked the Houthis. And it appears that we're likely to see a return of full-scale maneuver warfare in Yemen, right, with Saudi support. Just to clarify, the Houthis joint structure against positions in Saudi Arabia? Yes, correct. So they're not against positions of the Yemeni state, they're against positions of the Saudi state. That's like a low blow to the Saudi. I don't know how to say it. If you go after the Saudi's oil refineries, they're going to be pissed. That's a way to trigger a response. The United States has also been going after oil infrastructure and transport this week. Notably, they sunk motor tanker Kylo this weekend, along with striking two other tankers over the weekend. Audio from one of the attacks, which CNN, I couldn't find the actual audio anywhere, but CNN has a transcript of it. So I'm just going to read out that transcript from this is from US aircraft on an emergency frequency to mariners on those vessels. Motor tanker Stark 1. This is the United States military aircraft. I am preparing to fire at your stern. You have 10 minutes to clear the crew from the stern of your ship over in a later exchange. Ship is warned. This is your final warning. Get into your lifeboats and abandon the ship immediately. So I do like this, this vessel, the motor tanker Kylo that went down. It does appear that people had gone into their lifeboats and evacuated that boat. Right. Like I think there was some misunderstanding there on the part of some, like I saw people, like I think it's just assuming that they'd kind of struck it out the blue. But the way they generally do this is that they they warn the people on the emergency frequency, which they did again on Tuesday when they hit five boats in a single day. So sent-com published footage of this generally, it's like black and white thermal footage. We see a couple of different like methodologies here. We see strikes in the sterns of the vessels in some cases. And in other cases, absolutely massive explosions and multiple munitions slamming into ships. One of these was near Carg Island. Now the United States says it's doing this retaliation for a run firing ballistic missiles at a US ship. Interestingly, not all of the missiles Iran has used recently have been anti-ship missiles. They've been using some of those castle breaker missiles that we spoke about last week as well. Don't know if that's because they're trying without maneuverable warhead, just like a different way of trying to get past defenses or what they're going for there. Or maybe it does suggest that Iran is running into supply issues of its own. But either way, it does rather undermine the claims of the United States to have destroyed Iran's ability to fire ballistic missiles because they are farming a shit ton of ballistic missiles right now. Iran today has once again, we're recording on Wednesday for those listening on Friday. It's fired at missiles at United States destroyers, facilities and commercial vessels, including one in Iraqi waters. Over the weekend, we learned that a man had to rescue 16 mariners after one of the strikes last week. And Iran has also attacked Jordan again. What we've seen this time is interesting. They're using cluster munition equipped medium range ballistic missiles. And they are burning through this supply of Patriot interceptors, right. We've seen like so much reporting on the US running low on missiles and specifically interceptors, right. And so some of this appears to just be forcing the United States to burn up more and more interceptors over Jordan. Iran also this week captured a large displacement and real underwater drone. So these had not been confirmed by the US military to be operating in their region. And so the capture is kind of significant. I don't think this is likely a weaponized drone. I'm guessing it is used for like reconnaissance work, right. Andrial lists a bunch of functions on its website, things like ISR, also like anti-mine operations. After a run, published photos of this clearly showed the Andrial drone. Sinccom made a comment saying, quote, an underwater drone operated by US forces malfunctioned more than a day ago. It was surveying regional waters in support of ongoing operations. The defective drone was an older model that neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified journal radio equipment. US operations in area waters continue. Like you could collect sensitive data with a notebook and a pen. The age of the age of the drone doesn't matter. I'm not an underwater drone guy. I do know underwater drone people. This to me looks very similar to the model that is currently listed on Andrial's website. And it is it is significant, right, that Iran has been able to capture this. Like if nothing else, it'll give them sort of a propaganda victory in it. Iran loves a propaganda victory. Yeah. I'm returning after recording this. Let everyone know that Palmer Lucky has tweeted, "A touching memorial to the drone." It reads as follows. Everyone watching around state-run TV news program probably noticed they picked up an Andrial Drive LD. Our mass produce a tritable Submarine. This particular vehicle has been swimming in Centcom for months, successfully operating in support of American forces for thousands of hours. It was explicitly designed to operate an environment too dangerous for humans, where capture is an expected possibility. I can't get into the details, but it provides a significant value for months before capture. Rest in peace, little buddy. And then he has included a picture of the drone and a picture of an IRGC post of the drone, where they know that they have captured it. Finally, the United States military has begun turning off his advise senators that it's turning off advertising trackers on a range of devices. Righteous is claiming an exclusive on this. I don't know if they're suggesting that, like, I would hope they're suggesting that the turning off that they have confirmed that these are being turned off is an exclusive, because we and others reported months ago that Iran was using ad tech to target US military personnel, right? This is the nature of modern warfare, right? Like, the surveillance done on us by capitalism is even more pervasive than the surveillance done on us by the state. It makes sense, therefore, that states are going to these companies and purchasing that data. Look, why would you not? Yeah. It's so much cheaper for them to do that than to run their own intelligence operations, or like recruit someone in the US military or whatever. So this use of ad tech is not particularly new. We are finding out about it because Ron Wyden, who's the Oregon senator, has been pushing for months to get the military to say they've done something about this. And they finally disclosed in a letter that they are turning off some about advertising tracking stuff on their devices. But I think it's a really good illustration of how like pervasive surveillance of capitalism is so much more powerful than even like Iran is a state that does love to be spying on people. And they still are nowhere near as effective with this as we are at giving away our own data on our Instagram clicks. Oil has hit one hundred American dollars of barrel as a result of all this fuckery, which is a perfect time for us to talk about our other enemy, which also has its own strategic oil reserve Canada. So speaking of our other war are just absolutely baffling trade war with Canada for no reason whatsoever other than someone showed Trump a graph of the countries that the US trades with the most and Mexico and Canada were at the top because they are right next to us and we've integrated our economies with them since we're both British colonies is continuing. Now as we have talked about in the show extensively, Trump illegally invoked the almost certainly defunct smootholy tariff act to impose a 50% sanction rate on a swath of Canadian exports though again, this does not include key sectors of the auto industry or energy imports. Canada threatened retaliatory tariffs on 20 million dollars of US goods. Now on Tuesday, as we are recording this, those tariffs went into effect. These are a range of tariffs. I'm going to do one kind of important one in one extremely silly one as we talked about this before. So as we've mentioned last time we talked about this part of the reason these negotiations collapsed was the US wanted to be able to set Canada's steel tariff rates to split them in line with other countries tariff rates. Canada has responded to this by increasing its tariff rate on American steel from 25% to 50%. There's also tariffs on cheese in what seems to be a very specific measure to piss off Wisconsin. They do this sometimes right? When they do these tariffs, they do them on symbolic goods like I think the EU tariff bourbon for a while. Yeah. Well, what's interesting is that the reporting on this has said that oh, there aren't symbolic tariff items that Canada did in like 2018. And no, if you read the tariffs, why else are you opposing a tariff on cheese? Now, as we mentioned earlier, in the middle of the negotiations collapsing and now as these tariffs went into effect, Trump has tried to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, a thing which Google and other sort of bootlicking companies have bowed to, I guess. And also again, as we mentioned earlier, Trump is posting memes about changing to Mexico to new America. A fun aside on that map thing. I found out after we recorded last week that the company that I used to work for, that owned how stuff works now owns map quest. Oh, great. Incredible. The based map service. Because like, I don't know if everybody knows, knows this entire thing, but they're the ones that said that they would refuse to change the map, which like great. But like some personal Sophie history is like before cool zone, it was like I heart before I heard I worked at how stuff works. And before how stuff works, the company was owned by a company called system one and then system one sold how stuff works to I heart. And then we started cool zone. So there's like this weird thing where and then all of a sudden, and I'm reading it. And I was like, I still talk to a couple of people that work there because they're lovely. And I was like, why the fuck does this company own map quest? And so that's just a fun aside. Yeah. Well, I mean, there is something real here and that in these kind of just weird symbolic power moves, you're getting to see which companies are sort of purely just falling in line with the administration because it profitable on which companies are not because they're trying to cash in on the other side. There's probably probably some genuine principle there too because this is absolutely ridiculous. The reason I bring up Ontario is that Trump has also been specifically feuding with Ontario because Ontario's premier Doug Ford has been very, very vocal in resistance to American tariffs. Doug Ford, welcome to the resistance. Oh, God, Doug. She's Christ. One of the one of the worst guys in Canadian politics. I hate all of this. So in response to what Trump claims is discrimination against American trade, which like again, I can't emphasize enough like this is happening because you imposed a percent of it. It's all nonsense. Trump is now threatening to put a ban on using US government purchasing power to buy planes from Canadian airplane manufacturer Bombadier, unless those planes are built in the US. Yeah. Now, Bombadier already has a bunch of plants in the US and this is pissing off. So Trump's congressional allies who have this company's plants in their state. It is not clear to me that Trump understands exactly what Raky stepping on here by having the US fuck with a specifically a Canadian aircraft manufacturer where this is the site of one of the most humiliating chapters of the history of Canada as a branch plant economy and the destruction of the Arvo arrow, which was a really quite good late fifties Canadian jet fighter that was created by this Canadian manufacturer named Arvo, which was supposed to be produced in this effort to have Canada become its own kind of like semi independent military power in the ability to have a Canadian fighter jet that would be used by the Canadian Air Force and then sold to the rest of the world. And then the Canadian government under pressure from the United States scrapped the entire project destroyed all the planes and physically destroyed all the manufacturing capacity. And this is one of sort of the peak moments of the US just going absolutely not. You are not allowed to sell. You're not allowed to develop your own fighter technology, like you are a like a pseudo colony of the US. And this is the kind of you know pressure that can and has always been leveraged by the United States against Canada. But obviously I personally want to talk about this because we're getting a peak into the imperialist nature of both of these settler colonies in that we are talking about sort of Canadian independence from the United States in the context of a fight over who gets to sell jet fighters to the rest of the world. Yeah. And like you are Canada what the fuck do you need an Air Force for like why are you like manufacturing fire just the answer is to bomb a rock. But you know this is I just I just wanted to have this as a reminder that a Trump is stepping on very old rakes in Canadian politics that he doesn't even seem to understand exist and then be also like as as as much as it is like obviously trivially true that the US is acting as aggressors here and that the US is you know run by an unbelief what we hide is right wing imperialist government like Canada is also a slightly less like brutal settler state. So you know what we're not dealing with great nationalisms here. Now technically speaking and this is something that if you get to like page nine of the reporting on this you will you will get to the part where like the news mentions that these tariffs on both sides are on something like five and six percent of Canadian and American imports. They are to some extent more symbolic than anything else. Although it is worth noting that Trump's threat to you know like stop stop the import and also like stop US government from purchasing things with Canadian companies is this fairly significant escalation. There's two things that are important here. One Trump is once again wielding the hideously illegal powers of the defunct smooth holy tariff act which he could also use at any other country. point if he wants to. And the other thing is that negotiations have broken down completely and are unlikely to reach a deal, especially as Trump pivots to China in a veered mirror of the Obama administration's pivot to Asia in the run up to his upcoming September bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping. Now, I want to close. I'm mentioning the US Justice Department is attempting to prosecute Chinese electronics manufacturer Huawei. I assume this is just a way of trying to put pressure on the US government. And nominally, this is about Chinese sanctions violation and also technology theft things that Huawei is like doing, but hasn't really been cared about until now. It's sort of unclear what's going to happen with these investigation. It's also weird that this is an investigation purely against the corporation and none of its employees, which is odd in baffling and why the announcement of this seems like a sort of negotiating play, so we can also expect there'll be some kind of weird sanctioned stuff with China over the next couple of weeks as we go into this meeting with Xi Jinping. And that's our trade war that we're fighting for some reason as we fight another actual war. Yeah, it's six bucks, six bucks for a gallon of gas here now. Oh boy. Yeah. Love to live in the consequences of our rulers actions. Yeah, it's great. Do you know what else is the consequences of our rulers actions? Yeah. It's the products and services that support this podcast. What do you got? So although we are dealing with, you know, six dollar gas, a pointless war, a pointless trade war, there is one thing the Trump government can still do without a problem. And that's post. Oh yeah, they'd be posting. They can keep on posting. In terms of symbolic actions, the actions that some administration have in the real world have not diminished their ability to take symbolic action online. Since Trump took office in 2025, the White House social media accounts have been used for some pretty heinous stuff. I often think of the ASMR style edits of people being deported from 2025. The one I'm haunted by when I mentioned briefly is the one where they synced up a bunch of hits from football players. And at the, at the point of the hit, they synced it up to various drone and missile strikes killing people. Yep. Haunted by that. The social media strategy of the second Trump administration has nearly fully embraced this kind of like internet brain rot fascism with, you know, edits. Right? I previously mentioned the DeSantis staffer who was fired after posting that fast way of edit is now, now works for the state department. And this, this sort of like edit culture is one of the main ways the White House accounts have been posting online. But as we've mentioned earlier, this episode, the White House accounts also get used for a lot of just really stupid stuff. New Mexico turning into New America, right? Attempts that trolling that kind of just portray just how hollow their politics really are. As Trump has just completely failed to economically deliver, has murdered children in a pointless war, the public has loudly rejected his inhumane and deadly nativist immigration policies. And he's fractured his own right wing base by continuing to unequivocally support Israel, start a neo-con style war, waste billions of dollars and kill 18 US service members. With this total level of failure, the politics of Trump administration are forced to fall back on punishing their enemies just pure cruelty to satisfy some of their, you know, most bloodthirsty supporters. And trolling the lips. And in particular, I want to focus on the latter here. How this politics as trolling reveals how empty their political project really is. A few days ago, the White House posted a short AI video of Donald Trump using the Green Lantern power ring to construct the border wall to manifest American manufacturing to some in military jets, helicopters and naval vessels. I don't know what it is. This is time to the release of the HBO Green Lantern TV show. Yeah, that's the link right there. Okay. I refuse to watch this. They can't make me. I've seen it. You don't need to. Jesus wept. Just yesterday they also released this legend of Zelda video to match the ocarina of time. Announcement from Nintendo. But that's to side, a side point. And there's actually a bunch of this kind of cringy reddit stuff that's tied to the release of various pop culture shows and games. Earlier this summer, the White House posted what is almost certainly an AI-generated version of the Rick and Morty opening theme with Trump and JD Vance in place of Rick and Morty. CBP agent arrests like a literal alien and Chuck Schumer's a robot. Whatever. They're so boring and just like middle school humor like grow up Mr. President, like ew. Every Wednesday before we do this, I very briefly scroll the president of the United States true social feed. It's fucking it's just right now there's like a bunch of super cut of AI stuff yeah about Iran where he does not look like himself and a video of him saying communism will never come to America or with musically pretty good pay for the rights for that's wild. You should instead not do that and be on my feed, which is just Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, memes. He's upcoming documentary. Every meme is good. I got to be honest, every single meme hits. Garrison continue. Sorry. Anyway, a month after the White House shared this Rick and Morty video, they also posted an X-Men 97 style video featuring the presidential cabinet, captioned to me, my mega patriots. For like a week in July, the White House just kept posting AI hydraulic press videos. What is an AI-generated video of a hydraulic press crushing various mega slogans like no tax on tips. Why would you? That seems like good question, Jay. That's, you know, okay, fascinating. Yeah, okay. During the World Cup, they tried to make one of those like AI Lego videos, but maybe the worst one of these that I've seen was posted on July 4 titled POV. America entered its 2000s era, which is like a 25 second, wow 2000s nostalgia edit. They've used Mr. Brightside here. They, they was, they was Mr. Brightside. It features clips of like music videos, video games, and children's cartoons from this era. It's slightly got Shrek, Simon Cowell, Britney Spears. It's like a remember when you were a kid and everything was awesome type stuff. Like that's, that's, that's what they're trying to. And everyone was white. This is exclusively white people, I think. There's a lot of content on the White House account. That's just trying to like pander to Gen Z by tapping into this early 2000s nostalgia and launder Trump and his policies as like epic based awesome sauce by Hey, look, here's the Clone Wars 2008 show. Here's a clip of whatever bullshit children's cartoon at the time that's popular in Gen Z memes right now. That fucking sucked. It was, it was fucking 9/11 the war on terror. I could treat it in the 2000s. Yeah, exactly. Like what are we doing? Well, I think most of the kids that they're trying to appeal to don't really remember much of the 2000s, but they have this sort of like displaced nostalgia about things from their childhood, right? For being a child. Yeah. Like, you know, when the war in Iran started back in March, the White House posted a video of an operation epic theory video game on the Nintendo Wii, which was actually just cutting between Wii Sports clips and real footage of people being blown up. Yeah. Both the White House and Ice have previously used Pokemon, imagery and music and social media posts, leading the Pokemon company international to rebuke the use of their brand. Though, besides the occasional musical artists, companies like Pokemon have seemingly avoided or failed to take legal action to protect their trademark property and brand, which leads us to why I'm talking about all of this today. On September 3rd, the White House launched Arcade.gov. Five pixel art arcade games where you can build the wall, deport immigrants, fill a Trump bank account and remove pre-packaged food from kids school lunches. After the site went online, the White House posted a series of videos riffing on the GameCube Xbox 360 and PS3 comic animations. This is some of the most reddit occupied government stuff we've we've ever seen. These games are really just bad copies, like bad bad copies of other games, like Flappy Bird, Snake and Tetris with a fascist coat of low quality pixel art. Yeah. Wow. In the Tetris rip off, you have to build the wall to quote, protect the border from the coming horde as an endless quote zombie border siege, sends green aliens and zombies advancing toward the wall. Mechanically, this game makes no sense. The point of Tetris is to clear rows of blocks, not build a wall, and also upon release, this game was just completely broken. broken, the blocks didn't clear after you completed a row, inevitably, the screen just fills up with blocks to the top and it forces you into game over. And it's like they've removed that one from the once I, uh, this is, this'll come up later. Now, even, even more confusingly, the game over screen is labeled border breached. So once you build the wall to the top, you lose the game and the border is breached. Right. From, from, from your lips to God's ears. Yeah. I will say that. Maybe, maybe there's a metaphor in here somewhere. So while this failed Tetris clone displays the kind of garbage quality of their incompetent troll the lips. Prevocation, the rip off of the arcade game snake openly demonstrates their racist cruelty, even more so than the Tetris one. Frankly, in Rio run, you play as a pixelized version of Tom Homan patrolling along the Rio grand, rounding up immigrants who have crossed the river immigrants who are almost exclusively a darker pixel shade than Tom Homan, who will then follow Homan in a line wearing matching orange jumpsuits. At the end of the game, your score is labeled as the number of immigrants deported. This is obviously gross, empty posturing troll the lips, et cetera. In another game, you sort through a conveyor belt of food for school lunches, removing unhealthy items and sending healthy food like beef, tallow to children. As a reminder, we are in the midst of a food safety crisis with a record high number of food recalls last month, following massive staffing cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA and the Department of Agriculture just last year. And as a result of those cuts, the FDA was forced to suspend some food safety quality checks. For more on that check out James Stout's episode on cyclospora on his weekly podcast, natural causes. That's right. Great interviews. Great journalism. Bad government. Yay. Yeah, that is one of our themes over there. Oh, yeah. So based on, you know, all the different brands or properties or references I mentioned, to date, only one company has come out strongly against the Trump administration for stealing their stuff. In this case, stealing their game. Pretty soon after R.K. Gov went live, the Tetris company publicly announced it was "not involved in the creation of Build the Wall" and said, "at Tetris, we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. We take hop your infringement very seriously." And a few days later, the Build the Wall Tetris clone was taken down from the White House website. Victory for communist Tetris. But, you know, it's, we've talked a lot about this stuff this episode, you know, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, lakes, who knows, maybe renaming a state in honor of America. These little arcade games, these annoying social media posts, these are all lazily constructed symbolic representations of Trump's political goals created or AI generated in hopes of pissing off liberals and satisfying the sickos by letting them in the case these games literally act out the desires of mega in the midst of their political failure. It's sort of school lunches in the midst of a food safety crisis in the midst of total, total economic failure on the part of the Trump administration. And to me, the most interesting example of this tendency to like substitute real politics, like delivering real politics, actually improving people's lives with this sort of punishing your enemies and pissing off liberals comes also from this last week on Sunday Trump posted an AI generate design for a United States space force service dress uniform. Oh, God. I will trough this one into into the chat here. Let me see. I've seen it. All right, all right, all right, send it to me. I want to see it. It also has dropped us right. Yeah. It's a long gray tunic style jacket with a black belt sitting high on the waist and knee high, black shiny boots. It looks like something made for an evil space fascist sci-fi military. Yeah. It's giving low budget bad guy. Right. Yeah. Exactly. And well, well, well, some very small text near the top of the AI image reads quote, inspired by the discipline and functionality of the starship trooper uniform, modernized for the guardians of this space domain, unquote, between this starship trooper uniform and the Marines playing hell divers to music during their 250th anniversary celebration, bogeyard is rolling over in a one-to-one map of his grave. They've got the ego and everything here. It's it's pretty astonishing. Yeah, like because you think an American's going for a gray uniform, they're going to be doing confederacy shit. But no, this is just like, yeah, like 90s low budget. Like I'm pretty sure I've seen like a puppet, like animation, bad guy. He looks like fucking Joe Tracy is what he looks like. And the book starship troopers is a largely pro war exploration of militarism using a science fiction setting in contrast to the film adaptation by Paul Vernehoeven, which criticizes and satirizes what the book was exploring in earnest in Vernehoeven's film. The officer uniforms are inspired by real military uniforms of the 20th century. This AI image posted by Trump seems to be more based on the galactic empire in Star Wars, whose design was pulling from both the imperial British and German Nazi uniforms. Someone more annoying than me could do a whole simulacrum simulation essay about this fucking space force uniform. But this is a good example of how the Trump administration is obsessed with creating these little simulacrums in the case of arcade.gov, propagating a science and symbols to create this illusion of actuality. And as Trump often does scribbling on a map and voila, the territory is now like America. It should probably note the space force already has a dress uniform and it doesn't look like this. Yes. No, this is this is the new version that may or may not ever actually exist. But the image is what's important. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That's the point. The point is not the change. It's the appearance of change. Well, this has all been fun. And let's close by talking about 9/11 because 9/11 is this Friday, which means the center right media is being super duper normal as usual. Late last month, Barry Weiss personally intervened to create the CBS headline Michigan Democrat Abdul L Sayyid's deleted tweets on September 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks on quote, and one of the deleted tweets in question reads quote, "Today, I mourn the 3000 live 6000 injuries and infrastructural devastation in New York City perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I'll mourn the 1 million lives, millions of injuries and infrastructural devastation in three countries perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country of somewhat brave but completely defensible statement. Yeah. The post from CBS promoting this little article of theirs read quote, as the nation prepares to mark 25 years since September 11, 2001, Abdul L Sayyid, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack. And now today, September 9, the day of recording an attack at against a dual lawsuit has been released with like a minute of 9/11 footage and I will play a little bit of the ending here. 25 years ago, America was attacked, not for something we did, but for who we are. The attackers tried to divide us with hatred. It had the opposite effect. We united with courage and with resolve. But the hatred behind 9/11 did not disappear. America deserved 9/11, dude. I hate America so much. And dual L Sayyid gives comfort to that hatred. And if that's a chiroin or a subtitle, hurt people, hurt people, it's a quote from Abdul. Okay. They're getting really, really weird about Hassan. Yes. So this ad has about 30 seconds and 9/11 footage and then also has some footage of Hassan Piker. Just months, mentions of Hassan Piker were very close in total, depending on the count around like 400 mentions on Fox News last month, but it nearly matching the number of mentions of trans or transgender. So Hassan and transgender at about, about equal levels of focus on Fox news now. I think I've tells you all the things. Well, all right, Hassan, get, get that up to 100%. I believe in you. You can do it. Be useful. Hey, take one for the team. I was about to say, come on step up. My guy. This ad is pretty, pretty wild. We saw ads like this when Mamdani was running in New York last year. There's also been articles focused on clips from Elb Dualseeds podcast from years ago. I'll play a clip here 9/11 scarred our country in profound ways. But what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people. When we talk about 9/11, we often fail to center them. Again, completely defensible, completely accurate and true statement that is being turned into political controversy. Yeah, these are completely normal by those on the right, who certainly have no other reason to specifically attack Abdul al-Sahid. Yeah, fascinating choice to appear in an event with someone that much taller than you. Like the high disparities profound. James is referencing photos of a son fighter and Abdul standing next to each other. Yes, there is a considerable high difference. It looks like they're on a podium, but I don't think they are. Speaking of New York City, following months of propaganda from the New York Post, earlier this week, ABC ran the headline, quote, "Mayor Mamdani's has held a 10 to 9/11 ceremony despite growing criticism." Unquote, like insane. An insane headline to run, like, completely absurd. Journalist Peter Stern in New York has talked about how there's about at most like five percent of like 9/11 survivor victim families who have been spreading this petition to ban Mamdani and vastly more 9/11 families have released a counter petition in support of the mayor. This is a controversy that the New York Post and others have been stoking for quite a while in the lead up to 9/11. But this ABC headline, talking with the story, is completely absurd. There's another story that came out today in Variety, which they've edited since publishing, because the first version just did not address the blatant Islamophobic motivations in a lot of the attacks against Mamdani. And the vanity fair piece also has this crazy quote from Bruce Blakeman, the Republican running for governor of New York, talking of Mamdani, quote, "he's not welcome there because he has yet to say anything in opposition to the global antifada." Unquote, the whole vanity fair piece is similar to this ABC article just completely gross. There's no reason to cover it in the way that they are. Imagine the actual like media crisis, the frenzy that would happen if the mayor of New York City, if the Muslim mayor of New York City chose to not attend the 9/11 service. That would be crazy. They would light up. This is a perfectly concocted political controversy. They get to it either way. Mamdani would of course never not attend that. That makes no sense. But the right and the center media gets to kind of position themselves and talk about the controversy about him attending, even though it's like, what is he, what's he to do? Not attend. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Mamdani released about 170,000 pages of records city officials have kept from the public regarding air quality at ground zero following the 9/11 attack. These reports show that city officials at the time knew that the air was toxic and hazardous and get lied to the public by saying it was safe. The mayor said quote, now close to 25 years later, more people have died from 9/11 related illness than were killed on the day itself. These documents are now searchable on a new portal and they include the recently discovered quote unquote harding memo, which was sent to the then deputy mayor Robert Harding. This memo was titled quote, "legislate of alternatives to limit the city's liability relating to September 11th, 2001." Mamdani said these records quote, show what the city knew about the toxic air around ground zero when they knew it and how they acted to limit liability. John Stuart was also at this press conference announcing the release of these documents and he has been a long time advocate of transparency for 9/11 related illnesses and supporting the first responders and their families who have died or gotten sick in relation to 9/11 health complications. I'll play a short clip from him before we close this episode. The city began covering their ass three weeks in in a memo. The memo is entitled "legislate of alternatives to the fiscal responsibility for 9/11." And what we all knew who live in downtown Manhattan is that there was poison in the air and on the ground and in the window sills and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes and it stayed there for months. Everyone knew and now it's very clear that the city knew as well and rather than take the steps to ameliorate the damage that that would cause to its citizens and to the people that were down there they instead covered it up to get back to business as usual but unfortunately after 9/11 business will never be usual again. If you'd like to email us you can do so it's cool zone tips at Proton.me if you want it to be encrypted send it from a Proton address put a transcript on your couch. We reported the news. Hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone media from more podcast from Cool Zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions thanks for listening. 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